Hydrogen Fuel cell

How It Works

Hydrogen fuel cell is a mechanism to convert hydrogen fuel in to electricity. It uses Hydrogen and Oxygen as input and generates electricity as the output. Most importantly the by product of this reaction is Water (H2O). This mechanism generates electricity using non-fossil fuel with much lesser environmental impact because this is not emitting harmful gases or significant noise. Unlike traditional power cells, hydrogen fuel cell is not a closed system. It generates electricity as long as there is a hydrogen and Oxygen supply.

Advantages and Applications

The next question about hydrogen fuel cell is it efficient? Can it be used to practical applications? As a perfect answer for above questions there are few successful prototypes which are power by Hydrogen fuel cell. That prototype contains house hold electricity generation, automobiles and even advanced military applications like submarines. The greater advantage of Hydrogen fuel cell is there is no moving part it or any fuel burning like in traditional internal combustion engine. Therefore it’s having much lesser energy wastage and highly improved reliability. Due to these advantages several market giants like Toyota, Chrysler and Mercedes-benz are investing huge amount of money on research on Hydrogen fuel cell power automobiles and there are various working prototypes also been introduced as a result. Furthermore some cities already have Hydrogen filling stations and Hydrogen fuel cell powered public transportation.

Future of Hydrogen Fuel Cell

Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. This advanced usage of Hydrogen as a fuel to generate electricity will become the main source of power in human civilization in near future. In addition to that this fuel will provide electricity as same as fossil fuel and with much lesser environmental impact. When it comes to the automobiles there will be much lesser engine vibrations and noise which lead to even comfortable driving experience.

Nuclear Power

How It Works

Nuclear power generation is control the nuclear reaction by preventing it lead to an explosion and use its heat to generate electricity. There are two types of nuclear reaction that can be used which are nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. The most common type that can be found in current application is nuclear fission. It generates power by slitting Uranium 235. Nuclear fusion generates power using Hydrogen isotopes same as the way which sun generate its heat. There is no proper mechanism to control nuclear fusion yet. Therefore its practical usages are limited.

Advantages and Disadvantages

The main application of nuclear power is fusion and its fuel is Uranium. Most of the developed countries use this technology to generate electricity. The process can be controlled using reactors. The power generate process is safe, yet in the case of malfunction the consequence can be severe. Furthermore it generates radioactive by products which is very costly to dispose. This technology cannot be used to power up automobiles or air craft due to radioactive fuel used.

The nuclear fusion is still in lab testing level and the reaction is totally modelled by scientists. It generates massive amount of energy with very lesser amount of fuel. But the main problem faced is there are no stable hydrogen isotopes to continue the fusion reaction in a controlled manner. Once it started it will continue to a explosion till the reaction completes. However there are no radioactive fuel used, due to that once the researches manage to stabilise the reaction it can be used to power up automobiles as well as domestic off grid power generation. Furthermore in this case fuel can be included in the automobile in its production and that will be sufficient for its whole life time.

Future of Nuclear Power

Even in Nuclear fission it uses non renewable fuel which is radioactive metal like Uranium. In order to use nuclear power as a long term energy source, the winner is nuclear fusion. Even at this moment many scientists are working to stabilize the reaction and billions of dollars are invested on it. The success of that research will lead to renewable source of pure energy. The fuel which will be use to those reactors will be Hydrogen isotopes which are very common all over the universe.

Sustainable Energy

Considering environmental factors most of the countries are trying to transform natural energy to electricity with very much lesser environmental impact. The most prominent sources used are wing, solar and tidal power. The solar power is widely used in many tropical countries. Those solar panels are available for domestic deployment as well. Due to that is becoming a secondary source of power in tropical countries already. In addition to generation electricity it can be used to heat water and for cooking purposes as well. When it comes to wind power it is widely used in countries which has plan land with lesser geographical details where they can find continues flow of wind throughout the year. There are so many researches done in order to design an efficient wind turbine and it gave successful results. Compared to others tidal wave power generation is in primitive stage yet developing. According to the current situation those sustainable energy can be used a secondary spruces of energy with above mentioned hydrogen fuel cell and nuclear power.

Conclusion

The above facts giving the answer to the big question ‘Can human civilization continues to have comfortable living conditions without fossil fuel?’ and the answer is YES. Future automobiles will be powered by Hydrogen fuel cell and it will give even comfortable driving experience to passengers with much lesser environment impact. In far future the automobiles will be powered by nuclear fusion reactors and passengers won’t even have to worry about the fuel since it’s filled in production and that would be sufficient for its life time. Main grid power will be generated by nuclear fusion and various sustainable sources including solar and wind. Furthermore there will be off grid domestic power generators contain Hydrogen fuel cell or nuclear fusion reactors and those will be portable as well. All the above energy sources are renewable and having minimum environment impact. Therefore mankind will be able to continue a even better comfortable life in a world without fossil fuel.

References

• eportfolio. (2010). Retrieved August, 2010, from www.eportfolio.lagcc.cuny.edu: http://www.eportfolio.lagcc.cuny.edu/scholars/doc_fa08/eP_Fa08/Farhana.Khonkodar/images/hydrogen-fuel-cell.jpg

Getting started

In order to use Google Webmaster tools you have to have a Google account. If you have one you can visit Google Web Master Central and Sign in to Google web master tools. Once you sign in it will take you to Google Web master tools home. In there you can add your web site by simply clicking the ‘Add a site’ button and enter the URL. Once you add the site it will appear in the list below. And as the next step you have to verify the ownership of the web site. It provides various ways to do it including META tag, HTML file of DNS record. Simply follow the steps and you might take a look at the example there, finally click verify. Till you very ownership you won’t be able to access any further information about the web site. Now from the Web master tools home you can access the tools for web site by clicking it name in the list. In addition using the list you can add remove owners of the web site and at the top messages sent by Google Web master tools will be displays. These messages might contain details about security threats.

Features

Dashboard

When you click on the name of the web site out of the list it will take you to the Dashboard. It will contain the summary of all the details about your website. That will include Search queries, incoming links, crawl errors, keywords detected and site map status. By clicking on more links in each section you can go to a details view. Furthermore you can add these gadgets to iGoogle home page as well.

Site Configuration

Site configuration is one of the most important sections in Web master tools. As the first section it will allow you to add a site map of your web site. It will make it easy for Google to crawl in to the pages. Once you add a site map it will take some time to access it and after that it will display number of pages indexed and various other details. In the section crawler access you can see the status of robot.txt in your hosting space which you can use to restrict Google bot by accessing some part of the web site. There is a feature to text your pages against the current robot.txt and where various Google bots can access it. Furthermore it provides facility to generate new robot.txt according to your special requirement and remove unwanted indexed URLs. Site link section will display auto generated links which may appear in the search result, just below the main link. Change of address section provides facility to change the domain name of your web site in proper way. Finally the settings section allows you to set geographical target, select preferred domain and set a custom crawl rate if its required.

Your Site on the Web

This section displays information gathered by Google bot over a period of time. Search queries display the number of search queries which your site was on, click through rate and many other useful information to optimize your pages even better for search engines. Links to your site displays number of incoming links you have for your web site and its pages. It provides details about number of links, anchor text and originated pages. Keywords section displays keywords in your web site according to its significance. Internal link section provide information about the links between pages in your web site while subscribe state displays number of users subscribed to your RSS feeds using a Google product.

Diagnostic

Diagnostic is a very important section for web masters to identify the errors and security threats to the web site. The first section ‘Malware’ will display if there are any illegal activities in your web site may without knowing. If such a case this information will be important to remove the malware and make your site safer again. If there are such threats a message also will be generated and it will be displayed web master tools home. Crawl errors section displays any identified errors in your web site by Google bot. By correcting those you can expect a better crawling efficiency in your web site. Crawl status displays a chart about the number of pages crawled per day, bandwidth used etc. This information can be used to fine tune your hosting environment properties. HTML suggestions section gives ideas to further improve SEO factors in your web site including Title, URL and duplicate content etc.

Labs

This section contains relatively new features to Google Web master Tools which are still in experimental stage. Fetch as Google bot gives idea how the Google bot see your page. Normally what we see is Browsers interpretation of the HTML code. But What Google bot sees is raw HTML code. Using this you can identify how it is and fine tune it to gain better search engine appearance. Side wiki is a newly introduced feature which mainly comes with Google Tool bar which provide platform to write comment about the web pages by users. Those wiki notes would be a highly accurate factor to measure the quality of the web page. In here it provides facility to enter the page owner’s wiki note about the main page of the web site. Recently Google has improved the ranking algorithm to identify most useful pages to its users. During that process ‘Performance’ of the web page also considered as a quality factor. In this section ‘Site performance’ you can figure out the performance level of your web site and improve it accordingly.

Further Usage

The idea behind this tool is Google want to index more pages as possible. They don’t want to index lesser pages or omit any pages from index. At the same time they need to deliver the most useful pages to their users and that’s why they continuously improve the algorithm with various quality factors. All the web masters can use Google web master tools and identify the weaknesses in their website and help to make the World Wide Web a better place by improving those. In addition if you have Videos in your web pages you can prepare a video site map and submit it to Google web master tool. If that be the case your pages will be listed in Video search results. You can identify the popular search queries to your web site and improve the click through rate by fine tuning titles, description etc. Finally you can use the information given by this tool to come up with innovative ideas and take the competitive advantage in World Wide Web.

Background

Tech World

The tech world is the place where geeky people live. They talk about JAVA, Algorithms, SQL etc. They are well capable of produce any kind of business application in any range. They have solid knowledge about information technology applications and their architecture. In most of the cases they are more comfortable with machines than people.

Business World

Business world is where thinkers live. They have great imagination. Talk in simple English. They want to implement a business idea and they have it in mind. They are very good with people and know how to control them to implement his ideas. Most of the cases they have general knowledge about technology and information system architecture. Due to that in the case of ICT implementation they won’t be able to express what they really need.

Business Analyst

It’s clear that there is a huge gap between business world and tech world. But the collaboration of those two worlds is essential for modern businesses. That’s where Business Analyst come to the picture. He has solid knowledge about technological applications, at the same time he has wide knowledge about various Business and its requirements. He can identify the problem, specify it and make it visible to both tech world and business world in a common format. Furthermore he can be a bridge between two worlds to enable active communication and better understanding in order to perform tasks together.

Knowledge

Business or IT Graduate

As The primary requirement the Business Analyst must have a degree in Business or IT. As long as he is going to make a communication bridge between Business world and Tech world it is essential to be an expert in one knowledge area first. If you planning your carrier as Business Analyst you can choose your subjects in Degree program accordingly. If you are following ICT program you can choose related Management subjects like ICT Project Management. If you are following Business degree you can choose related ICT subjects like Management Information Systems.

Business Analysis BOK

Business Analysis Body of Knowledge is the dominant framework introduced to the process of business Analysis. It contains few knowledge areas which explain the process of Business Analysis.

• Enterprise Analysis: This knowledge area is about how to analyze organizational context, understand its structure, policies and other boundaries for the proposed system.
• Requirement analysis: This knowledge area is about how to capture the exact requirement of the proposed system.
• Solution Assessment and Validation: All the above two knowledge areas would come to this before proceed to the next step in order to asses and validate the information captured.
• Elicitation: This process will be applicable in all the main knowledge areas and it’s about how to elicitate the requirement correctly.
• Requirement management and Communication: This knowledge area is about how to manage the captured requirement and maintain active communication.
• Business Analysis Planning and monitoring: In order to carry out the whole process there has to be a plan and monitoring mechanism and this knowledge area is about that.
• Underlying competencies: Analysis process is not always about knowledge. In order to perform that there has to be a various competencies possessed by the professional and this knowledge area is provide support to improve those.

Modeling Tools and Techniques

In order to make the requirement visible to all the stakeholder there are various representation of requirements. There are various tools and techniques developed to serve that purpose. Business Analyst must have good knowledge about those tools and techniques. There are various PC application are developed to model and specify requirement using above mentioned tools and techniques and business analyst should have good knowledge about those as well.

Skills and Competencies

Interpersonal Skills

The most important skills that Business Analyst must have are interpersonal skills. He should be able to get on with any one from any background. Furthermore he must have the ability to understand the untold Business requirement and make it visible to Business world as well as tech world.

Communication

Communication is his greatest tool and it has to be very sharp. In order to communicate effectively business analyst must have updated technological and business understanding, otherwise the credibility will be low of information which will communicated. Furthermore communication doesn’t end in speech and documents. To perform an effective analysis process business analyst should be able to read the body language properly. That will be a great advantage to understand the people and give what exactly fit for him.

Gather Wisdom from Many Sources

Business Analyst will have to deal with various set of business people. In order to get in to their world and understand what they need business analyst must have knowledge about that context. This is an active learning process of capturing wisdom from many sources which is highly essential for a successful business Analyst.

Problem Solving Ability

After the elicitation of requirement the Business Analyst will have to propose a solution supported with solid logical background. In here Main task to identify the main problem and figure out where to get the solution. Then develop active communication between the person who has the problem and who can implement the solution for him. During this process the business analyst will have to carry out many tasks simultaneously and he has to be well capable of that.

Pending Problems in Projects

According to the statistics 2008 is the worst year of project completion for decades. The frailer rate was 68% and the main reason behind that was poor requirement analysis which is the duty of Business Analyst. Furthermore 45% of the features in developed systems are never used and huge amount of money was wasted to develop those. Due to those facts this is a challenging time for all Business Analysts to focus more on those areas and never let those errors happen again.

Evolution of Business Analyst

Due to the evolving complex business requirement the duty of Business Analyst is becoming even challenging. Most of the modern business demands agile development when it comes to information systems. Most of the case the requirement is frequently changing and Business Analyst have to put extra effort to keep the project boundaries within the limits of Cost and time. In order to become successful in this competitive environment Business Analyst will have to be sharp and flexible. Completion of the project mainly would depend on Business Analyst and it’s proven since 50% of the projects frailer are due to poor requirement analysis according to statistics.

Technology

The Technology behind Google Analytics is simple yet powerful. It gives the webmaster to a JavaScript code to place it in the every page of the web site. Once it place it loads with every page. It can gather user information and many other parameters and send them to Google analytics. Then it will generate complete analytical report out of the raw data gathered from your web site. In order to send web page and user data it is using various technologies including UTM tags. However this process will consume some amount of data and processing power of your web server than normal load of web page since it has to do some extra work behind the screen.

Getting Started

Register

The First step of using Google analytics is registering your Google account with it. If you don’t have Google account you have to create one first. Visit Google analytics while you logged in to Google Account. There will be a noticeable blue button with text ‘Access Analytics’. If you are using Google analytics for the first time it will ask you further information about you and your web site including web site URL and Account name. You can proceed after you fill the information in those forms and it will take you to the section ‘tracking code’.

Tracking Code

Tracking code is a JavaScript which is used to send the page and visitor details to Google Analytics. When you proceed after filling your data Google Analytics will give you the tracking code as a part of registration process. It has to be place in every page of your web site. When you are placing it most preferred way it to place just above you close the Body tag. If you place it at the top of body tag it might slow down the loading and rendering of your web page. After you place the code at the end of every page you are done with configuration and your site will be tracked by Google Analytics. You can always access Google Analytics and it will show the list of your web site. You can access a specific report from the drop down menu at the top or by clicking view report in the table displayed in the body of page.

Features

Dashboard

Once you access the report of a registered web site it will take you to the Dashboard. Its giving basic details of your web site including visits, unique visits, countries visitors came from, traffic sources and most visited pages. At the top there is a graph and the content of the graph can be changed by the drop down menu at the top left corner by selecting various details you want to analyse including visits, page views and average time on site. At the right side corner you can choose the time duration for the Graph. In addition there is a important feature which is Grouping. Most of the cases the traffic graphs are full of spikes etc. Using that you won’t be able to get a clear idea about the traffic trends. But if you group them by ‘weekly traffic’ or ‘Monthly traffic’ you might be able to get better idea and for that you can use this ‘Group By’ feature provided. Map overlay displays a heat map of the visiting countries while traffic sources display a pie chart. Each section has a link to ‘View report’ which will take you to the sub section with details information about specific area. Furthermore you can drag and reorganize the sections in the dashboard as you want.

Intelligence

This is relatively new feature introduced to Google Analytics which creates automatic alerts whenever something important happen in your web sites traffic. Due to that you don’t have to do all the analysis by yourself manually. Furthermore you can group Alerts by week or Month as you want. When an automated alert is created it will give you some information about what is special about that incident. By clicking on the alert you can go to the specific traffic details and see it yourself. You can select the alert sensitivity to filter out them according to significance. Other than Automatic alerts you can create your own custom alerts based on your own requirement. In that case you will be able to get an E mail notification once it occurs so you don’t have to visit Google Analytics Frequently. This feature has made the web masters life even easy by doing large part of work by itself, and those alerts could be used to strategic decision making process very effectively.

Visitors

From the left side menu you can access visitors section which will display information about the visitors of your website. This will be important information to measure the quality of your website and take decision for future content. In provides map overlay to identify visitors originating country, new vs. returning visitors and visitor’s languages. Most importantly it give you details about visitor trending and loyalty based on the factors time spent on the website, depth of visit and length of visit. In addition to that it give you details about visitors browser capabilities and network properties which might be able to further optimize your web pages to give the user a better browsing experience.

Traffic Source

Next section in the left menu is Traffic sources which is really important. It gives you details about where the traffic came from including referrals, search engines and direct traffic. In each section it displays a graph for related information. Furthermore you can breakdown the higher-level traffic sources to specific sources. This might be useful to identify the most active traffic sources and stimulate that trend while you improve the less active traffic sources. In addition there is a section to display information about your AdWords campaigns and other traffic generated from promotional campaigns.

Content

The next section is Content which gives you information about each and individual page in your web site and its traffic trends. Using this section you will be able to identify Top content, landing pages and exit pages. Site overlay is one of the interesting features in here which shows you the click on your web site using its own web interface. In navigation summery section you can analyse the patterns of visits and how did they navigate through the site structure. Furthermore it gives you information about top landing pages, top exit pages and entrance keywords. This information can be used to further optimize your web site and its structure. Most importantly you can measure the AdSense performance in here as long as you have connected your AdSense account to Google Analytics. Unlike in Google AdSense report here you can see clicks generated from each page of your web site along with the revenue generated.

Disadvantages

Though Google Analytics provides highly advance set of features to web masters to analyse web traffic there are significant disadvantages too. Most significant factor is accuracy. Sometimes visitor leaves the page before the JavaScript loads. If that be the case that page view won’t be counted. If you compare your server log it will show you greater number of visits than in Google Analytics. And as long as there is a JavaScript loading in every page it can be performance hit at the same time resource consuming. This will resulting in increased page load time and increased server resource consuming including processing power and bandwidth. Due to above reasons you have to use it very carefully. If you feel like the effect is significant you can always use the server log to measure your web traffic, but it won’t be user-friendly as Google Analytics.

Background

IP Address and Domain Names

In the very early stage of web technologies the IP address of the web server was used to look up for a web page. That mechanism was not so user friendly and difficult to promote a specific brand name online. As a Solution for that the domain name service came in to action where users can type domain name and there is a middle man to map that name in to an IP address. This was user-friendly and businesses could use their brand name online very easily.

Search Engines

Even with domain name there was no way to find a specific content in the web using keyword and search engines solved that problem. Even though you don’t know a domain name you can go to a search engine and type a keyword and find a specific content as you want. In order to provide those facilities search engines are using robots or spiders to index entire World Wide Web. In addition to identify the important pages there are various ‘voting’ mechanism like Google page rank which based on back links.

Stumble-Upon

What will happen in the case you don’t know enough about the subject to type a keyword and search content? But still you know the outline of the subject area which you want to read about. That’s where Stumble-Upon comes to action. It keeps an index of user submitted pages and their information. Users can stumble across the web using stumble-upon tool bar based on given interests and stumble-upon will deliver pages randomly according to your interest. Same as in search engines Stumble-upon also using voting mechanism but its directly getting the vote from users. Due to that the accuracy of the vote considered to be higher than ‘back links’. The number of votes will be a factor to decide the visibility of a specific page to other users.

Getting Started

Register Account

The first step to use stumble-upon is creating an account. However you can stumble by just clicking stumble button in the main page, but in that case you won’t be able to use most of the advance features. Due to that it’s recommended to register before starts stumbling. You can access the registration page by clicking the link in hear of main page. It takes you to a simple registration form, you have to fill it and click sign up. You can prove that you are a human using captcha or facebook login. Then it will take you to a window where you can enter your interests. Tick then as you want and hit stumble. Then it will display a toolbar at the top of browser window and some web page according to your interest. By clicking the stumble button in the toolbar you can go to next web page.

Install Stumble-Upon Toolbar

The toolbar mentioned above is not yet installed in your browser, so there can be some malfunctioning. In order to avoid those you can install it locally as a plug in for your browser. When you go to main page of Stumble-upon it will display a link to get the add-on according to your browser.  If you are a Firefox user you will be able to get complete set of tool in your toolbar as a Firefox plug-in. Even for other browsers there are add-ons which can be downloaded and installed. However the Firefox plug-in provides most wide and accurate set of features. As long as you have the toolbar you can always click on the Stumble button there and start stumbling, submit the current page to stumble, vote for current page and share it with your friends. In addition it can give access to your saved interest, change them and stumble only in one interest too.

Web Interface

As long as you have a registered account in Stumble-upon you can control it using the web interface. Once you login you can see a settings button in the header. By clicking that you can access preferences including profile information, theme, Manage interests and profile picture. It provides facility to import your Facebook profile image to stumble-upon. Finally it creates a public profile URL for you like http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/YourUserName/. Your profile page displays your favorites and your friend’s network. You can invite your friends to Stumble-Upon or you can subscribe other stumbles too.

Start Stumbling

Now you have fully configured stumble-upon account. Click the stumble button in toolbar and stumble across the web pages according to your interests, Submit interesting pages to stumble-upon and vote of interesting pages saying ‘I like it’ using toolbar or may be writing a review. Optimize the list of topics to have a better stumbling experience. In the case you need to shout out about a page use sharing options in toolbar including Twitter and Facebook. Furthermore you can keep a track of your likes and stumbles through the web interface. If you see an interesting user you can subscribe to him and get updates. If you have your own web page, submit it to Stumble-upon saying ‘I like it’ in toolbar, so you will be able to present the page to many other stumblers. To improve that you can add a stumble-upon button in to your web page too.

Profile Authority

When you are stumbling it delivers the pages according to an algorithm. The basic factor is ‘Likes’ to increase the visibility of the page. However each like won’t be treated as same, but there will be a weight for the vote according to the profile authority of voted stumblers. It will be decided according to the below facts.

• Discoveries you have made and their popularity
• Subscribers you have and their popularity.
• Vote you have given to other pages and their popularity.
• Number of reviews you have written.

If you are a high authority Stumbler your vote will be having a high value than others and voted pages will be having an improved visibility to other Stumblers. However stumble-upon having a paid advertising program as well. Using that you can promote your page to stmblers as a Sponsored page.

User Experience

Stumble-upon is totally different experience to surfers. You can simple stumble across the web according to your personal interest without giving any specific goal. This can be really addictive as long as it identifies your likeness and deliver pages accordingly. Most importantly it identifies the values of the page based on users’ direct vote which is highly accurate. Due to that it can deliver highly target high quality content to the users. You can use stumble-upon as a new way of learning and getting news randomly. When you become a good stumbler and have many likes it will deliver even precise content for you. Join stumble-upon now and feel this new experience.

Getting Started

Install

Google Toolbar is proving highly user-friendly installation process which is totally automated. Visit this URL using your Firefox browser to install the Google Toolbar. In order to install you have to have Firefox 2+ version and Windows XP Service pack 2+ version. Click the button ‘Install Google Toolbar’ to proceed with the installation process. In the next page click ‘Agree and Install’. As a security measure Firefox blocks third party installation script. Due to that you might have to ‘Allow’ the installation explicitly. In the next pop-up window click install and then Firefox will do the rest for you. Finally click ‘Restart Firefox’ to make the Google toolbar activated.

Configure

After you restart Firefox Google tool bar will be displayed just below the bookmark toolbar with default configuration. To get the maximum result out of the plug-in you can do some configurations. In order to do that, you can click on the ‘Adjust Google Toolbar Options’ button in the right side of the Toolbar. In the ‘Google Toolbar Options’ window you can do various changes. Most importantly you can select from where your search suggestions should come from in search tab. In the same tab you can select Gmail as your default search engine if you like. In the tab ‘Tools’ you can select what you need to appear on the toolbar according to your requirement. Google PageRank and Google bookmarks would be a good selection in here. In the sharing tab you can select the social networks where you share content while you can add quick access buttons in the next tab ‘Buttons’. The tab ‘Layout’ is giving you an option how Google toolbar should appear in Firefox. In here ‘replace Firefox search box’ would be a appropriate selection. Next tab is very important why there you can add your personal information to work with the AutoFill functionality.

Features

Search

You can sign in to Google by clicking the ‘Sign in’ button at the right side of the Google Tool bar. They you can access your configured semantic search by typing your desired keyword in the search box at the right side of the Firefox main tool bar (Assuming you selected the option ’Replace Firefox search box’). When you are typing keywords it will give you suggestions according to the geographical target you gave in the configurations. In addition to that it will give you your frequently search results from your web history and Google personalized suggestions for you according to your search interests. You can clear your search history by clicking ‘Clear Search history’ in the dropdown menu in search box. In the case you need to change the default search engine you can click the drop down button next to search box and select desired search engine out of that list. Once you enter the search query the result will appear in the Firefox tab. The list of keywords entered will be displayed on the toolbar and by clicking on them you can highlight them one by one. There is a toggle highlighting button to highlight all the keywords in the page.

Tools

In the left side of the tool bar there are set of buttons which will help you to access important web resources with just one click. You can always configure the behaviour of those buttons by accessing ‘Google toolbar options’ or directly by clicking ‘Add Buttons and Widgets’. The icon of Gmail will show you whether you have any new emails if you are logged in to Google. Using the share button you can submit the currently browsing content to your Social network or Social Bookmarking site. The list of social network can be edited by clicking ‘settings’ at the end of dropdown menu. The next button is SideWiki. It’s an interesting feature introduced by Google where users can writer wiki entries about the currently browsing page and every one will be able to read those. This will be helpful to get a idea about the quality of the page. Additionally there is a space to display ‘Google PageRank’ of the currently browsing page which is a also a page content quality rank.

Google Bookmarks

Google Bookmark is a very easy way to manage your Bookmarks and access them from anywhere in the globe. Previously there was no way to add a Google bookmark without accessing its web interface. But with Google toolbar you can bookmark currently browsing page with just one click on the button ‘Bookmark this page’ and as long as you are logged in to your Google account. By clicking the dropdown button ‘Bookmark’ you can access all your bookmarks. In the same dropdown menu you can access and manage your bookmarks in Google bookmarks web interface by clicking ‘Manage all’. In addition to that it provides facility to bookmark all the tabs with one click. If you feel like your bookmarks are not updated try clicking ‘Refresh’

Google Translate

Google translate is a exceptional web based service provided by Google. You can enter a phrase to the web interface and get it translated to various languages with one click. In order to make the process even easier Google toolbar has a translation component which can translate the currently browsing page with one click right on the same page. In order to proceed with this you can click on ‘Translate button’ and it will give dropdown message. Once you click translate in there you can select the desired language and get the page translated within few seconds. You can go back to original by clicking the button ‘Show original’. This is one of the most important and interesting feature in Google Toolbar.

AutoFill

While you browsing web there are so many data entry forms to fill specially in registrations. You can fill those forms with one click using this feature AutoFill. In order to do that you have to enter your personal details in the form in AutoFill section Google Toolbar Options. In addition you can find this from the dropdown menu in AutoFill button. In the case you need to manage different sets of information you can use profiles for that. Most importantly you can save your credit card details also in here. In order to provide security to your financial details you can add a password for that.

Additional Notes

Google toolbar is providing wonderful combination of features and facilities in order to give a wonderful browsing experience to the user. However there is no official release of Google toolbar for Google developed browser Chrome. Google chrome is the fastest browser and lots of internet users are waiting to use Google toolbar on Chrome. Let’s have a hope that Google will develop their Toolbar for Chrome as well. The Google toolbar having frequent updates and they will be notified to the user by Firefox. The updating process is totally automated and it only requires user’s conformation. Install Google toolbar now and have a nice browsing experience.

General Behaviors Of Current Transportation Mechanism

Significant percentages of all the transportation systems are depending on 2 dimensional movements. Only exclusion is air craft which can move on all 3 dimensions. All the vehicles which are using the traditional infrastructure ‘road’ can only move on 2 dimensional surfaces. However when they are climbing hills there can be a 3 dimensional movement, but it’s only because of underlying infrastructure. The next common behavior is the entire transportation systems ‘pushing’ or ‘pulling’ the things that need to be transported to the desired direction. In other words they apply a one or two dimensional force to the object that has to be transported. As long as the object is three dimensional the applied force will be transmitted to its next dimension within the object. When you are sitting in a car you can feel the seat pushing you from back when it’s accelerating.  Things get worse when it comes to greater level of acceleration.

Limitations

According to the common behavior of current transportation systems there are main two limitations. First and the most important thing is less expandability. Due to the growing demand of transportation the New York City will have to dedicate its entire surface to roads. This problem demands a easily expandable transportation system most importantly to the third dimension. Then the air space can be utilized to cater the growing demand of transportation in future. The next limitation is comfortability. As mentioned above with the acceleration under a two dimensional energy force that will be transmitted within the object in order to move it. This will become a serious issue when it comes to the greater acceleration levels. Even now the astronauts have to take special steps to deal with these problems as long as space craft has grater acceleration. The world need a better transportation mechanism which is three dimensionally expandable and which can apply force to entire object at the same time.

Use Gravitational Fields

The energy field based transportation system will provide a appropriate solution for the above major problems in current transportation mechanism. It appears to be the Gravitational field will be the solution for this because it can move any known object. The most significant advantage of using gravitational field is it can be easily expanded to the third dimension to utilize the air space. Furthermore the any object will be able to transport using this even without container. As the next advantage gravitational field applies to each and individual practical in the object that has to be transported. Due to that there won’t be a power transmission inside the object like in current transportation mechanism. This will be useful to achieve greater acceleration even without giving and traveling sensation to the passenger.

Ex: Imagine a Box that contains a passenger which is a falling in the earth from outer space. The box hides the external environment from the passenger. In this scenario gravitational field is the force which is moving both the box and passenger. Most importantly it applies energy to each cell in passenger’s body and each atom in the box. So there won’t be any power transmission within the travelling objects. In other words passenger won’t feel that he is travelling which can be the ultimate comfortability. But in reality he is accelerating approximately 10 meter per second.

Normally the gravitational field pulls all the objects around in to the center of object which generates the gravitational field. (This is the general explanation and this will be different if you consider time-space model) because of that entire objects around are landed on the surface. If there is a way to control the direction of gravitational field, it will open another dimension of transportation.

Ex: Imagine the gravitational field has shifted by 90 degreed near the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.  If that be the case the tower will become the center of gravitational field so the passengers would be able to walk in to the top floor of the building.

Challenges

The major challenge to use Gravitational fields for transpiration is the lack of knowledge and research about it. Human civilization has lots of knowledge about other energy fields including magnetic and even human energy fields. But there are limited knowledge object we have about Gravitational fields. As far as we know it can’t be generated without a matter. When there is a collection of matter there will be force in to the center of collection. In order to control it shift it and use it as a transportation mechanism there are lots of underlying research has to be done. The major challenge for the research is prepare lab facility to carry out experiments. The only nearly good enough places would be a lab in a Space station where the effect of Gravitational field of planets is insignificant. In addition to that to gravitational field is a very weak energy field compared to other known energy fields. There has to be a huge amount of matter to generate noticeable gravitational field. However at this position there is no way to generate, destroy or manipulate gravitational fields using any technique.

Historical facts sometimes provide evidence of ancient air craft across the worlds in many civilizations. It appears to be some of them are working based on some kind of energy fields, possibly gravitational fields. Due to that digging deep with those historical facts might give hints to manipulate gravitational fields for future transportation. The invention of this kind of technology won’t be limited to general transportation but inter-planet transportation too.

References

• JorgeP. (2009, April). Anti Gravity Display Globe. Retrieved June 2010, from eggheaven.com: http://www.eggheaven.com/img/upl/2/52-floating-globe.jpg

Android OS

History

The development of Android OS was started by Android Inc in 2005. Then the company was taken over by Google after that by Open Handset Alliance. The core of the Android OS is a modified version of Linux Kernel and it provide platform to develop it using JAVA Programming language. The first announcement of Android Distribution was made on 5^th November of 2007. At this moment there are so many industry giants working in Android project including Google, HTC, Intel, LG, Samsung, Nvidia and Sony Ericson.

Features

The most attractive feature in Android OS is its GUI. It provides highly comprehensive extensible GUI to the user with Open GL based 3D graphics. It supports all the modern wireless connectivity technologies. When it comes to the storage the developer can use relational database in the mobile device like in a personal computer with the aid of SQLite. When it comes to the multimedia it provides encoding to all the common media formats. The multi point touch screen enhances the user experience along with advance voice recognitions system. Most importantly it supports JAVA programming languages with multitasking. The SDK is released to developers for free. Therefore users can install freely available millions of applications on it.

The ‘Tablet’ Trend

The ‘Tablet’ trend was initially started with laptop computers couple of years ago. Those laptop devices provide 180 degrees rotatable LCD display with multipoint touch screen. Therefore it could be used as a traditional laptop computer as well as a tablet PC when the screen it rotated. The well known manufactures for these devices were HP and Samsung. After that the laptops and tablet devices were going on different specialized paths. Most of the tablet devices introduced after that was having a single-block design with large multi point touch screen. The trend of tablet devices was further stimulated with the mobile Gaming industry. The traditional mobile phone screen was way too smaller to play games and Laptop is not enough portable for that. The tablet devices gave a perfect solution for this problem with the improvement of 3D rendering hardware infrastructure in them. Furthermore people don’t like to read a book on a Computer screen. It never gave the real sensation of reading a real paper book. With the trend of Tablet devices the era of E book reborn with new energy since the readers could have almost a ‘real book’ like device to read e books. With the arrival of Apple iPad the tablet trend was a day to day hot topic among every one.

Features Of Android Tablets

Acer Prototype

One of the most noticeable prototypes has been demonstrated by Acer. The article about this was made online by Shufflegazine. According to that the device 7 inches display with 2GB memory. Most importantly as seen in the photographs of demonstration it’s equipped with a real physical keyboard. This will be good news for many people who don’t like to use on screen touch keyboard.

Samsung Galaxy Tab

According to another unofficial sources Samsung also about to release a Tablet PC. The market of the device appears to be ‘Samsung Galaxy Tab’. Furthermore it will be having high resolution 7 inches TFT display and front facing camera.

Dell Mini 5

There is an official report about another Android powered tablet device which is ‘Dell Mini 5’. It’s having 5 inches display with multi point touch sensor. The wireless connective will be provided through SIM card, so it appears to be supporting all the modern wireless technologies. In addition to that its having Wi-Fi connectivity as well.  The Android OS versions used for this prototype is 1.6. Most importantly when it comes to image capturing, the device is equipped with 2 cameras, One 5 MP camera on rear panel and front VGA camera for video calling.

Archos 5 Android Internet Table

Archos 5 Android Internet Tablet is already available tablet device in market. It’s available in 2 versions which is having 16GB and 32GB. The processor is 430MHz ARM Cortex-A8 and display size is 5 inches. This is having highly portable design and having great multimedia capabilities including 720p high definitions video playback. Additionally it is having built in GPS receiver as well.

The Android mobile OS provide a versatile platform for all the above Tablet devices to deliver those exceptional features to the user. In near future there will be even greater devices with further improved hardware capabilities. Most importantly there will be improved 3D graphic and it will support advance gamming on Android Tables. Furthermore due to the JAVA programming language support there will be even wider free and open source application range. Most importantly the Android OS uses an advance mechanism to run JAVA applications without the support of traditional JVM, so it will save the devices battery life.

Competitors

The most significant competitor to the Android OS is Apple mobile OS which comes with iPhone and iPad. It was gaining its popularity due to the highly improved user interfaces and great multimedia capabilities. Furthermore in Apple app store there are more than 200, 000 of applications available to download.  Even with all these Android OS can gain the advantage due to few reasons. The main reason is its free and open source. Due to that there will be millions of applications available written using JAVA programming language. Apparently the GUI in Android OS is almost good as Apple interface. In this moment Apple seems to be the market dominant tablet device OS. But in near future Android OS will take that place due to its limitless capabilities of free and open source development.

Next Chapter

All the open source development gets mature with the time. So the next chapter of Android mobile OS is pretty unpredictable. It’s already having the entire comprehensive featured required for a Tablet devices as well as any mobile device. Furthermore it has special mechanism to reduce the power consumption when it’s running third party JAVA applications. The next expected development would be the performance improvement and it will be a continuous process. Since most of the mobile devices have limited hardware resources, this will be a curtail factor for the success of Tablet OS. Other than that the next most important factor would be wireless security. Even in current versions Android OS provides advance encryptions and secured protocols to transfer data. Since the devices are always connected to various wireless networks this may need to be further improved. The gaming support of the OS is another expected development in future versions. The revolution of Android powered Tabled devices is upon us. The next surprise of Android OS is not so far as it seems.

References

• Android, C. (2010, February). Dell Mini 5 Android Tablet gets FCC approved. Retrieved June 2010, from canadianandroid.com: http://www.canadianandroid.com/b/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/dell-internet-tablet-slate-announced-6.jpg
• Edgar, J. A. (2009, November). Archos 5 Android Internet Tablet: First Impressions. Retrieved June 2010, from phandroid.com: http://phandroid.com/2009/11/11/archos-5-android-internet-tablet-first-impressions/
• Hannaford, K. (2010, June). Leaked Photo of Samsung Galaxy Tab Shows 7-Inch Android Tablet. Retrieved June 2010, from gizmodo.com: http://gizmodo.com/5554446/leaked-photo-of-samsung-galaxy-tab-shows-7+inch-android-tablet
• Nystedt, M. (2010, May). Acer CEO shows off 7-inch Android tablet. Retrieved June 2010, from www.shufflegazine.com: http://www.shufflegazine.com/2010/05/27/acer-ceo-shows-of-7-inch-android-tablet/
• Perez, A. (2010, January). Dell Announces Android Powered Tablet. Retrieved June 2010, from phandroid.com: http://phandroid.com/2010/01/08/dell-announces-android-powered-tablet/

The code name ‘Natal’ is a Brazilian city which showing Microsoft naming culture. The project coordinator Alex Kipman was from Brazil and it his choice to use this name. The first announcement of project natal was made on June 1st, 2009 by Microsoft at Los Angeles Convention Center. There was various promotional videos was launched and they got huge numbers of hits in YouTube. The commercial release of the produced to the market is unofficially schedules on October 2010 and the expected price would be around USD 150.

Technology

The Natal sensor contains three sensors which are RGB camera, Infrared depth sensor and multi array microphone. The RGB camera will be used to capture the 2D image and motions in front of the sensor along with the color details of it.  The IR depth sensor will be used to capture the distance variations from the sensor to the users. The multi array microphone will be used to capture the voice and the direction of it. Combining all the above factors the Natal sensor can determine the full body motion of the user. In order to do that there must be complex image and voice processing algorithms. The full body motions will be digitally transfer in to controlling signals and will be send to the Game console Xbox.

However there are various arguments about the practicality of this technology. Theoretically the above process is justifiable. But in the real gaming environment, especially in multiplayer games things can go wrong easily with the multiple movement. Furthermore some demonstrations in promotional videos seem not real and practical including the speed, response time and feedback. Many people believe that it’s not the real functionality, but a promotional staged act. As an answer to these arguments the Microsoft has released live demo of Project Natal which can be found on YouTube.

Applications

Gaming Controller

The primary application of project natal is as a Gaming controller. This extends the boundaries of gaming in to new dimension. With the Natal sensor the gamer can interact with the Gaming environment as he is actually living inside that. As long as it captures the full body motions without any gadget attached in to the body, the games will be free to express his self with the body motions and voice commands very precisely. Probably this will help Microsoft it increase their sales exponentially and expand their gaming empire.

Artificial Intelligence Application Interfacing

The development of artificial intelligent application is facing huge challenge that there are no proper input devices to interact with them. No matter how much the researchers develop the software, to make it ‘looks like human’ there has to be next generation input device which can understand human voice and activities. Project Natal provides perfect solution for these applications interfacing. There is a popular video found on YouTube which demonstrate this AI interfacing with Natal sensor for the Character ‘Milo’.

3D Graphic Designing

Project Natal will provide good support for 3D graphic designing industry. The current challenge is to model the Object correctly. The traditional controllers including keyboard and mouse don’t provide much support for that. Even when it comes to Laser scanning the process is complex and takes lots of time. The natal sensor will provide accurate interface for the artists to design 3D models without touching any controller, simply by their body motions.

When it comes to the motions capturing project natal can provide perfect solutions there as well. This is one of the major challenges faced by the film industry to capture the accurate human emotions and put it in to a 3D model. In addition to that the sensor can capture the voice too. This kind of emotion capturing process would provide a relaxed environment to the actor to give his best performance without getting attached to so many sensors.

Automated Customer Relation Management

This might sound like a crazy idea but the natal sensor could be used to automated and improved customer relationship management. At the door step of a costume store they can place a natal sensor and connect it to a computer which is having huge Plasma screen in front of that. Once the customer step in the natal sensor can capture that and automatically suggest some costumes which are suitable with an aid of AI character like ‘Milo’. Furthermore it can generate a 3D image of customer and show a demonstration of suggested costume as well. If technology manages to implement this, it will be the next generation of customer relations.

Military Applications

Another possible application of Natal sensor is to control advance military applications. The modern unmanned military aircrafts are controlled by Joystick from a ground base. However with the improvement of other implications, it’s asking for better and advanced controller where the project Natal might give a solution. In addition to that this can be used to control unmanned war robots. Finally let’s hope no one will ever use these things against Humans, but some kind of Alien invasion may be.

Future Development

Apparently the technology in project natal in something no one ever dreamed of. But still there can be improvements to be made. The most important factor would be the accuracy. That matters a lot in gaming environment to deliver an extraordinary gaming experience to the user. The usability of hardware seems good since you can easily place it on top of your TV.  The next most important factor would be the identification of multiple movements, especially in multiplayer environments. Though it started as a gaming controller, there is a huge possibility to use it for many other applications as mentioned above. Let’s have a curious mind about this path breaking hardware by Microsoft.

References

• Hruschak, P. (2009, June). E3 2009: Microsoft wants to make you the controller with Project Natal. Retrieved May 2010, from gamertell.com: http://www.gamertell.com/gaming/comment/e3-2009-microsoft-wants-to-make-you-the-controller-with-project-natal/

Getting Started

Installation

If you don’t have MySQL server installed, download it from here and install it. If you have WAMP server installed its already contain MySQL server. Once you make sure that MySQL server is installed and properly configured you can proceed with the installation of MySQL workbench. Download the setup file from here and simply follow the steps in installation process. In addition to that you can uninstall if you have any previous versions of MySQL GUI tool since MySQL workbench going to provide same and better service than those. Finally you can start MySQL workbench and open its main user interface.

Configuration

As the first step you should connect MySQL workbench with MySQL server. In order to do that follow the path Main menu -> Database -> Manage Connections. In there you can start new connection and provide the required parameters including Hostname, port, username and password of your installed MySQL server. Finally test connection, if its giving message “Connect parameters are correct” you are done. If not you have to check whether the parameters are correct and matching with MySQL server configuration.

Features

Graphical Data Modeling

This is one of the most important features in MySQL Workbench which was not there in previous versions of MySQL GUI tools. In order to start a new Entity relationship diagram you should go to the section “EER Diagrams” in the main GUI. There you can add diagram and start designing. Same as all the other tools you can add an entity, relationships, choose cardinality etc. The highlighted features in this tool are once you add an entity it automatically adds the primary key named as ID + entity name. You can easily develop relationships and foreign key management is automated. Most importantly if you add a Many to many relationship it will automatically adds an associate table to simplify the relationship. Once you double click the entity you can enter its specification. There you can easily add columns with data types, assign indexes, assign foreign key actions on update and on delete etc. In addition to these general features it provides advance features including role management and Partitioning to improve the performance of the databases. Finally you can create the physical data base by following the path Database -> Forward engineer. Once you do that, it will automatically create the physical database as you designed in ERD.

Reverse Engineering

This is providing feature to reverse engineer currently existing database and get the ERD out of that which is a very useful feature. In order to do that you must follow the path Database -> reverser engineer. In there you can select currently deployed data bases. You can select one of them and get the ERD out of it. Most importantly you can alter the design and recreate the data base using this tool.

Other Features

In addition to above features it provides MySQL instance control, scrip executing and various other MySQL operations. One of the most highlighted features here is Plug-in support. There are various Plug-ins provided to extend the features of MySQL workbench. In addition to that as always there is a good supporting community to back up this software, provide solutions, share knowledge and further development.

Disadvantages

Though this is very sophisticated GUI tool for MySQL databases there are some minor disadvantages as well. Mainly compared to other Database designing tools including Visual Paradigm, MySQL work bench provides limited facilities to design ERDs. The way it creates relationship is not that user friendly and the designer has made many clicks to get it done. In addition to that there is no way to reverse engineer a SQL script. If the developer can only reverse engineer a live database. Finally some times it’s giving a error on close in windows 7.

Releases

The current stable release of MySQL workbench is 5.1.18. In addition to that there is beta releases, latest one is  5.2.20 beta 10. According to their change log you may notice they are in very active development process in order to release a new stable version.  All the releases are free and provides cross platform compatibility.

I think this is the GUI tools which all the SQL developers were waiting to use. It provides solutions to almost all the problems which were there is previous GUI tools. Most importantly it saves lots of time and money in the database design and development. Actually this great tool completes the MySQL server like never before.

References

• Handelman, M. (2009, September). MySQL Workbench Functions On Snow Leopard. Retrieved May 2010, from infosecurity.us: https://infosecurity.us/?p=10916

Current Social Networks

Facebook

Facebook is at the top in when it comes to the popularity of social networks. It’s providing all the common features of any social network including personal profile, multimedia sharing etc. In addition to that Facebook API provides facility to develop 3^rd party application which can share facebook member details. This is the one of critical success factor of the facebook. In addition to that it provides highly performance tuned streamlined interfaces with a chatting module. In past few years facebook was doing so many developments and so many new applications were introduced. It leads facebook to highly sophisticate at the same time highly complex social network. However traffic ranking was continuously increasing for facebook.

Twitter

Compared to other popular social networks Twitter is new. But it gained exponential popularity due to its highly simple functionality. The major feature is members can write a message which contain maximum 140 characters and other member who follow can read it in their main page. In addition to that your message will be added to twitter main time line if your profile is not protected and the entire world can see it. Due to this simple functionality so many user were attracted to twitter and it was showing nearly 300% member base growth in past few years. And it won’t collect your personal data like facebook and other social networks. So there are lesser chances of privacy issues to occur. These days most of the online marketers using Twitter to promote their products and services to large crowd.

Ning

Ning is a special kind of social network concept. It allows its members to create their own social network on Ning platform. And they have made it so user friendly, so any non-technical use and create their own social network within few minutes. They also providing major functionality for the social networks and users can easily configure them by drag and drop development interface. At this moment Ning supports large amount of social networks on their platform. According to Alexa ranking it’s gaining its popularity in a decent rate along with the number of social networks on it.

There are so many other social networks including MySpace, Hi5, Flicker which is specially designed to share images, Orkut which is prowled by Google and LinkedIn.

Features

Networking

The most common feature in any social network is Friends network. It allows you to create your own profile and add your personal data in to that. After that you ne send request to other member, the one who confirm it will become your friends. Your selected private data will be shared with all the members and other may shared with your friends. It provides features to communicate with members through text messages and various other ways. Multimedia sharing is one of the popular features. There you can upload image or video and your friends can

Micro Blogging

This was a pretty old feature in social network. It was there in almost all the social networks including hi5 and Facebook with different names. But Twitter took only that feature and creates a new social network with lead to huge success and popularity. It allows you to write a message with limited length and share it with your friends.

Applications

So many social networks provide API which can be used to develop 3^rd party application which can be interact with it. Facebook is showing major success in there with Facebook API. In the Facebook there is millions of application developed and so many users are addicted to them. In Addition to that Twitter is also providing highly sophisticated API to control Twitter using 3^rd party application. However this has its negative effects, why so many people develop robots to spam and do other harmful things in the social networks using their APIs.

Future Of Social Networks

Privacy And Security

These days’ main concern in all the social networks is Privacy and security. In past few years there was so many incidents reported about the breach of privacy in social networks and sometimes they led to huge disasters as well. If you take a look at those incidents most of the time it about “Not using” provided security and privacy features. Due to that all the social networks providing highly simplified privacy and security controls. More creatively some social networks don’t collect member’s private details as far as they can. In future social networks will provide more sophisticated privacy features and users will be able to control each and every parameter as they want. And the privacy groups will be well defined like they have in Facebook now as Friends, Friends of Friends and Public. In the other hand when you increase privacy it will be difficult to share things freely. In order to solve such a problems social networks will provide clearly defined public data and more comprehensive searching to connect with each other. There may be search which shows a relationship between you and another member who is not your friend in a tree structure like graphical representation, but still you can see his personal details.

Simplicity

Twitter became success it selects only one feature which is micro blogging. At the same time Flicker is a huge success it select only image sharing. This is the future trend in social networking. People need them to be simple and highly user friendly rather than full of complex features. And most of the social networks provide mobile interface where users can control it over the phone or its browser. This further increases the interaction and simplicity of the social networks. In near future there may be dedicated mobile devices which can be used with Social networks.

More Personal Details

With the improvement of the security and simplicity of social networks people will share more and more probate information with them. Even now Google Latitude provides a facility to update your location via mobile phones GPS unit. And social networks already have your email, its password and large part of your personality details. In future if they manage to get your DNA structure online? There won’t be any privacy and it can simply re create you not just with physical features but with personality features as well.

There will be continuous and increasing impact on human civilization by online social networks. They can be positive or possibly negative according to current observation.

Getting Started

Before you proceed you have to prepare the development environment. First you have to setup the tool required and identify the skills required to the process.

Tools

You will be using the latest version of Mozilla Firefox browser and YSlow add-on installed on it. Before you install YSlow you have to install Firebug add-on on Firefox. YSlow is an add-on for Firefox developed by Yahoo which can be used to identify the performance level of the web pages.

Knowledge And Skills

In order to optimize the performance of your page you have to have basic knowledge of HTML, JAVAScrip and CSS. But in this process you don’t have to alter any code which already written, yet you will have to re-structure them.

Analyze

As the first step you have to identify the current state of your web site. For that open your web page in Firefox and click the YSlow icon at the right bottom of the browser window. It will pop up another window and there you can click the “Grade” button. (Choose rule sets according to your web site) Once you click, it will display the performance grade of your web site along with the overall performance score. Furthermore down the window, it will display grade for each sub-section. In addition to that there will be another tab displaying the size of each component of your web page and another tab for statistics including caching state and HTTP requests. This will give you a basic over all idea about the current state of your web site and where the performance hits are. After that you can solve the identified problems one by one.

Below section will explain the step by step process of optimizing a web page.

Performance Optimization Process

Optimize Page Content

Page content plays a big role when it comes to the performance. Pages with smaller file size will have the maximum performance. Therefore your main goal should be to make it smaller as possible. Any web page will have two main contents, which are hypermedia and text including HTML CSS and JS.

Hypermedia: Basic rule is reducing the size as much as possible. Especially for images you can reduce the resolution and use a compression like JPEG. Avoid using HTML sizing for images. If you need to optimize the performance in a greater scale you can use image Sprite. It will minimize the HTTP request for the external images.

HTML/CSS/JS: In the development time of the web page the HTML codes must be highly readable. Therefore developers keep spaces, comments, line breaks and indentation to increase the readability. But when it comes to the run time they will be a performance hit because it will increase the file size. In order to reduce the size those unnecessary characters should be removed. For that there are various HTML compressors out there. If you need to compress many HTML files at a time, you can use HTML Compress 5.5 PC application. In addition to that there are various online HTML compressors as well. You will observe, after the compression HTML, CSS and JS files are formed in to one single line or very fewer lines in the source code. At the same time you will be able to observe this will reduce the file size by around 10%. This process generally called as minifying the code.

Optimize External CSS/JS

If you have so many external JS and CSS files linked to the web page they need to pack in one single file for each type. This will reduce number of HTTP request for the external resources. Pack all the JS to one file and add the link in the bottom of the web page. Do the same for CSS and link them at the top of web page.

Now you have reduced the size of Hypermedia, HTML, CSS and JS. In addition to that you have minimized the amount of external HTTP requests as well.

Compression

After minimizing the size of hypermedia, HTML, CSS and JS codes by restructuring them, you can enforce compression to further reduce the size of them. This can be enabled by your web server. Once you enable the compression (in most cases its GZip) web server will compress the page before seeding it to the user over HTTP. GZip compression can reduce the file size in greater ratio, more than 75%. This will improve the performance of web page drastically and will be help full to utilize the bandwidth of the web server as well.

Before Compression

After Compression

By pasting below code in . htaccess file you can enable GZip in your web server.

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

If you don’t have access to .htaccess file you can use this code in every .php page header.

<?php if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], ‘gzip’)) ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”); else ob_start(); ?>

Caching

Finally you can enable caching support from your web server. Once you enable caching your browser will store most of the common content in your web page locally. Due to that browser can load that content without calling the web Server and this will save the bandwidth and reduce the HTTP request drastically.

You can control the caching by pasting below code in the .htaccess file in your web server.

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript A2592000
ExpiresByType text/css A2592000
ExpiresByType image/gif A604800
ExpiresByType image/png A604800
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A604800
ExpiresByType image/ico A604800
</IfModule>

Now you have completed the process of optimizing your web page. You may run the YSlow test again and feel the improvement of the performance.

Tip: WordPress users can use wpCompressor and wp-minify plug-ins to enforce GZip compression and reduce external CSS and JS calls without much effort.

References

• How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression. (2007, April). Retrieved April 2010, from betterexplained.com: http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-optimize-your-site-with-gzip-compression/

Getting Started

Add to Gmail

To add Google buzz in to your Gmail account you can follow this link. And there may be an introduction page for Google Buzz when you open G mail. By clicking “Try Buzz in G mail” you can activate Buzz. Once you finish that step there will be a new section in your G mail account named Buzz. There you can see the status updates of your Friends and you can update your status as well.

Configuration

Once you click on the Buzz section in your G mail it will open Buzz main interface. At the top there is a Text box to enter your Status update and publish it. Next to that there is a link to update your Google Profile which is tightly coupled with your Buzz account. Then next link there is very important, using that you can import your status in other applications. Once you click on that it will give you some suggestions where you update your status including twitter, G talk, YouTube, Picasa, Flicker and all the other sites you follow using Google Friend Connect. You can add sites to buzz and the status you update in those sites will be added to Buzz time line. Next link will display the list of your followers. If you wish to follow or un-follow people, there are text links to do those in front of each contact. Just below the text editor, there are link to following people and find people. Using find people link you can include more people in your buzz time line. In each buzz there is a link to comment on it, mark it as “like” and Email the one who buzzed.

Functionalities

Same as Twitter you can update your contacts by a status message using Buzz. But in Buzz you can share hypermedia. Once you share a link with some images or Videos, Buzz will identify them automatically and add them below the Buzz Text. And you can do the same with RSS feed as well. Simply buzz is a combination of Status updates, photos, videos and RSS feeds. And it uses your Gmail friend list, so you don’t have to worry about creating new contacts for Buzz. The facility of connecting other sites to Buzz makes it easier to follow them right inside of your Gmail box. Especially in Twitter we may miss our friend’s Tweets, because there are mixed with so many other Tweets. In here you can clearly indentify that there are new updates.

The best and unique feature here is you can comment on Status. Here buzz is one step ahead from Twitter. And once someone posts a comment on your Buzz, it will generate an Email, so you won’t miss any of the comment. In the case you need to send an Email explicitly to someone about your comment you can use very popular @ and the desired ones Email address.

Buzz works with your Smart phone and in there you can connect it with Google Latitude. Using that you can see your friend shared location through Buzz and update yours automatically.

What’s Next

Google are dominating all the Cyberspace in an exponential rate. Practically according to the current situation there can’t be a cyberspace without Google. But the main Internet concept they couldn’t dominate is Social networking. The most popular Social network is Facebook and twitter is also competing with its new concept which is micro blogging. Through Google Buzz and many of their products like Google Friend connect, they are trying to dominate Social networking concept.

But so far Google didn’t show decent result in this subject. Even with the Buzz I cannot indentify a strong hook to get the market away from the Facebook and Twitter to Google Buzz. It’s true that there are some interesting features like commenting and Location sharing. But still it doesn’t giving the classic feeling like in Facebook with so many Hypermedia and total online life sharing. And Google Buzz is not giving the awesomely simple user experience like in twitter.

The main point is, behind the screen Google is weaving a web to launch massive social networking product though they are still behind compared to other products in market. Google buzz may be an introductory and experimental product. I feel like there are so many things yet to come. All we can do is waiting and watch what the Google going to do.

References

• Google Buzz: Gmail status update and content sharing has us bam-Buzz-elled. (2010, February). Retrieved February 2010, from Cnet: http://www.cnet.co.uk/i/c/blg/cat/software/google/buzz.jpg

Getting Started

Before you start the Dropbox service you have to install the PC software which is provided by them. You can follow this link to download it. Once you download and install the Dropbox software it will create a folder name “My Dropbox” in you’re my documents folder. Before you start using the service you must create a Dropbox account and it’s a part of the installation process. Then all you have to do is move your important files to “My Dropbox” folder. All the files there will be copied to your Dropbox account space. Furthermore all the changes you will make to the files inside the “My Dropbox” folder will be updated to your Dropbox account space. Those files will be saved in your Dropbox space in the case you need a backup. The total process is automated and you don’t have to bother. You can treat the “My Dropbox” folder as any other local folder in your computer.

There are two pre created folders inside you’re my Dropbox folder. You can use these folders to share your files easily. When you put a file in the Public folder, it will create a URL for the specific file. So that can be share with any one even outside the Dropbox. Once you put your some images in the Photos folder, it will create a online photo album. You can create your own folder in side and that will be the name of the Album.

Options For Users

PC Software

Dropbox PC software provides the file backup and sharing service on a personal computer. Once you install it on your PC it will create folder locally and synchronize it with the web copy of files. To indicate the Dropbox is running there will be an icon in system tray and that icon will display the state of the system. From that icon you can access preferences and in there you can do changes to the application including My Dropbox folder location.When you go and right click on a folder My Dropbox there will be a sub menu related to Dropbox functions including sharing and show delete files. And by double clicking on the system tray icon you can open you’re my Dropbox folder.

Mobile Software

There is a free iPhone application provided to interact with Dropbox. In there is doesn’t keep a local copy of files but give a listing. By clicking on a file you can open it. In addition to that, like in the PC application there is the facility to share a folder and the content of the folder will be automatically synchronized with the web copy of files.There are some special features in iPhone Dropbox application. In there you can take a picture or record a video and put it directly in a Dropbox folder. After that you can share it with your friends. For that you can use Public and Photos folders as well.

Web Interface

The web interface provided is having most updated and comprehensive features. In there you can manage the web copy of the files. It’s given the facility to upload, download, create new folder and share files inside that. Furthermore there is an option to download a whole folder as a ZIP file.At the top navigation bar there are links to display recent activities and shared item status. If you click on the show deleted files it will display the files you deleted recently and yet you can undelete. This is a really a important feature. Using this you can recover a file you delete from your PC which was in you My Dropbox folder. You can see the undelete link in the drop down menu in the specific deleted file or folder.

Portable Version

There is a portable version of Dropbox and its provided by the Dropbox community. Using that software you can have a copy of My Dropbox folder in your portable data storage device, like your USB pen drive. You can download Dropbox Portable here. When you start it for the first time closely follow the instruction given by the installation process. Once you successfully set it up in your USB drive, you can have a copy of Dropbox files in there which is synchronized with the web copy.

Features

Backup Space and Synchronizing

Dropbox Is going you 2GB of space and you can upgrade it up to 5GB by introducing new people. You will get extra 250MB per head up to 5GB. If you need further space you can purchase it. And the My Dropbox folder will be automatically synchronized to the web folder as a background process. It’s looking for changes that the user going to do for files and once you do some changes it updates it in the web folder. In this process latest edited version will always get the priority. For a general user, he doesn’t have to bother about anything, but work in My Dropbox folder like in any other local folder. It appears to be Dropbox is using some compression to transfer files over the internet and it will save your bandwidth. When you move files in your local folder, it won’t be re uploaded to save bandwidth. In addition to that like in any other SVN server you can recover the previous versions of the files (Sub versioning) and undelete the recently deleted files.

Sharing and Security

And Dropbox provide advance collaboration features. You can share a folder with a give a person and all the parties who share it can have a copy of file and Dropbox will synchronize it. In addition to that there are predefined folders to share files easily named Photos and Public. Using that you can have online photo albums and public links to your online files. And it uses SSL to transfer files and advance encryption when they save it in the web folder to ensure maximum security.

Technology

Dropbox follow few steps when it synchronizes files.

• Upload all the files in the local folder to the web folder.
• Make an index of all the files and save it locally and in web folder as well.
• Continuously compare the file index in web folder and local folder.
• Use compression and encryption to save bandwidth and ensure security.
• If there are any changes in index update the latest edited files in all the copies.
• Save copy of deleted files and previous versions in the web folder for recovery purpose.

This technology seems simple but the outcome is outstanding. This is the general functionality in the entire SVN servers, but Dropbox has made it easy to all the general users.

Future Of Dropbox

I have identified some problems in Dropbox system. The main drawback is there is no way to put folders which are on different location on the hard drive in to the Dropbox. In that case I have to move all of them to the My Dropbox folder. Its better if the user can add folders to Dropbox which are in different location in Hard drive by right click on them and “Add to dropbox”.  And in the PC software there is no way to accept the Sharing invitation. For that user must go to web interface of follow the link in the mail notification. When someone shares a folder, there is no way to limit the privileges. All the shared parties can make changes to the files in the folder. I wish if there is a feature to control sharing and editing privileges. In addition to that there is no way to restrict accessing an album in the photos folders. Basically any one can access it. There must be a way to share an online photo album with specific person or group. And it’s better to introduce a compression to transfer files or improve the current compression. I hope Dropbox development team will be concern about above issue in their future development.

Access

To locate Google Book Search you can go to main navigation bar in Google home page. After you get a search result you can change it to a book search too. After all you can Google for Book search too.

Layout

Bookshelf

This is a newly added feature in to Google Book Search. In there you can bookmark and organize the books you reading. For that there is a link named “My Library” at the top right corner of the main page. There you can categorize books in to various category including Favorites, Reading now, To read, Have read and, Reviewed. There is a button to create a new book shelf as well. Using that you can have multiple book shelves and it help you to organize your books in a better way.

Browse Subjects

This section located at the left column of the page. This helps users to narrow down their search in to a specific category.

My Library

This is a Graphical representation of your book shelves. You can locate this at the top of main content are of the home page.

Categories

There are various categories in the main content are and this will help user to optimize and get the exact result of the book search. You can click on the arrows displayed at the sides to view more books in each category.

Usage

You can enter a Key word in a search box and hit Search Books button to initiate a book search. The search result will contain Book which having the key word in its content. You can control the view of the search result in the left column option. In there you can choose the way you want to see books and what kind of previews you looking for.

Once you click on a specific book it will take you to the page which contains all the details about the book. In there you will be able to see a preview of the book if it’s allowed. In addition to that you can see rating and reviews about the book. At the left columns there will be a links to online book stores to buy a hard copy of this book.

Right below the thumbnail image of the book there will be a drop down menu to add this to your book shelf. Once you add the book will be displayed in your Book shelf view at the main page.

Advantages

In the case someone need to find about a specific content in a Book, he has to dig in to the book and read everything to find it. Sometimes index may helps, but still it will take lots of time to find the right book. With Google book search you can find the exact book and the exact page which having your desired content. Sometimes you may be able to read the book online or may be a part of it. If you really want to have a hard copy you can buy it too. In normal situation we cannot find a given word or content inside a paper book without reading everything. Google book search will make the life easier for research student, professors and many more.

Technology

The technology behind the Google book search is very simple, yet smart. As the first step the developers should scan the books and store them as a text format most probably PDF. For that they may use Optical character recognition. After that they can search a given keyword inside the PDF file. In the web page using JAVAScrip it highlights the area of the search content to make it easier for the user. According to the preview access user will be able to read the book online as well.

Google Book Search API

You can add your own Book search in your web site. For that Google Code provides all the instruction and technology. Click Here to read more about Google Book search API. Using this you can embed a book preview to your web site or add a custom search.

References

• (n.d.). Retrieved January 2010, from Newyorker.com: http://www.newyorker.com/images/2007/02/05/p465/070205_r15903_p465.jpg

Getting Started

Access

You can access Google calendar at the main navigation bar at the top of Google home page. This may be located under the more links in there. To operate you will require a Google account. If you are already a Gmail user you can use the same account. If you are totally new to Google services when you try to access Google calendar you will be prompted to create a new account.

Layout

Once you access Google calendar at the left had side you can see few link and month view of a calendar. In addition to that there will be a form to switch between calendars of you have many. In the main body of the web page there will be time slots. You can select different time slots using the tabs displayed at the top right. At the upper top right corner you can locate the link to access Settings.

Configure

Before you use the Google calendar you should configure it according to your requirement. For that you should go to settings page. You can access setting using the link at the top right corner of the web page.

General

In here you can control the general behavior of the calendar. It’s important to select the country and the time zone correctly. In addition to that you control select time format, date format and many more parameters.

Calendars

In here you can create many instances of Google calendar. This will be useful when you sharing calendars with many different groups.

Mobile Setup

This is the most interesting and important feature in the Google Calendar. In here you can configure your mobile phone with Google Calendar. After that you can receive SMS notification for the events you are going add. Once you add your mobile phone number in here it will send a verification SMS with a code. There is a text field to enter verification code. Once you enter that you are ready to receive SMS notification for free.

Labs

In the labs section there are many components and add-ons develop my 3^rd parties to improve the service of Google calendar. These components may contain bugs, so use with due care.

Start using Google Calendar

Create Event

There are many ways to create event in Google calendar. The easiest way is click on a specific time slot. In the pop-up a window you can add further details and add event. Or you can click on the “Create event” link at the left top corner of the page. There is another interesting way to add event which is “Quick add”. Once you click the quick add link at the left top corner of the page you can simple type the details of event in simple English. It will automatically add the event to your calendar.

Reminder

When you create an event there is a option panel. There you can add a reminder to the event. Te reminder can be E mail, pop up or SMS. The option of SMS would only appear only if you have configured your phone with this.

Guests

There is another option panel to add guest to the event you are going to create. When you add a guest you can select the privileges given to him. You can add guests from your Gmail contact list too.

More About Google Calendar

Google calendar is a real live example to prove the power of rich internet applications. Previously we used calendar comes with mail client applications to manage our events or may be some other installed event management software. With this powerful web application we can do all the above work by simply looking up a URL in the web browser. The main problem with this kind of rich internet applications is you cannot do anything when there is no internet connection. But Google developers have come up with a smart solution for this with Google Gear. If you have installed Google Gear on your PC you can click on the Offline link at the top right corner. Then it will store important data locally on your PC to run Google Calendar even when there is no internet connection. You can Sync your data periodically. In addition to that Google calendar supports variety of mobile devices including iPhone and Nokia S60.

Next possible development in Google calendar will be integration with G mail. Normally we use calendar software with our mail client. But so far I didn’t notice such a feature with Google calendar. Furthermore Google developers can integrate this will Google Docs as well.

This web application will help you to manage your all the events in your busy life.

References

• (n.d.). Retrieved January 2010, from Onewebhosting.com: http://onewebhosting.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/google_calendar.gif

We can make our own DVD rips by our self. This will be really useful to compress and back up huge move collections.

Process Of Compressing DVD

• Extract and separate Video and Audio Track in DVD
• Index The Video File
• Compress The Audio file probably to MP3 format.
• Process the video index, mainly resize, color filters and remove grains.
• Configure the Codec specially compression matrix, min and max quantizer, iFrame interval etc
• Compress the Video.
• Include synchronized and compressed video and audio in media container, mainly AVI.

This process may seem complex for a general user. But there are some fully automated tools to compress DVDs with just few clicks.

Getting Started

Software

• DVD Decrypter: This is the software we are going to use to copy DVD to hard drive.
• AutoGK: This is a package containing many open source software which requires for each phase in video compression and playback.

Hard Drive Space

The DVD compression process requires a huge amount of disk space. Due to that it’s better if you can have more than 10GB of space free for this.

Copy DVD To Hard Drive

The 1st step is copy the DVD in to Hard Drive of your PC. When you copy it, use file mode in DVD Decrypter (Mode >> File). And remove all protection in DVD before copy. (Tools >> Settings >> File Mode >> Options). Then select destination and hit decrypt. The DVD will be copied in to your hard drive in given location without any protection.

Compress With AutoGK

Select Input And Output Files

The step one in AutoGK is selecting the DVD source and selects a destination for compressed file. Select the DVD files from the location you saved them using DVD Decrypter as the input file. You have to select the .ifo file related to main movie. Probably there will be many .ifo files, the .ifo file having related most number of .vob files must be the one for movie. Then select the output file. Give a Hard drive location which is having more than 10GB for this.

Select Audio Track And Subtitle Tracks

DVDs contain various Audio tracks and Subtitle tracks. When we compress the DVD we can select them as appropriate. When it comes to Audio tracks we must select AC3 track. If not the audio compression won’t work properly. You can select subtitle tracks as you need.

Select Output Size

When you select the output size you must be very careful. If it’s a movie having play time less than 2.20h you can go for 700MB. If the play time is more than 2.20h, it’s recommended to go for a 1400MB output size. If you have a special requirement you can go for custom size. If you’ll go for target quality, the output file won’t be standalone player compatible. In other words you won’t be able to play it in a domestic DivX certified DVD player.

Advance Parameters

If it’s a 700mb output in the resolution, go for fixed width between 672 – 640 and CBR Mp3 – 128 kbps. If you going to rip to 1400mb file make the resolution fixed width 720 which is original size of the DVD and Original Audio track.

Expert Tips

To determine Audio bit rate and resolution you can use the factor bits per pixel. To calculate bits per pixel you can use this excel sheet. If bit per pixel value for the specific case will be greater than 0.15, output file will be almost good as DVD quality. Try out different value for resolution and audio bit rate.

Start Encoding

Now it’s all done. Now hit add Job, then start. Now all you have to does is waiting till it gets converted. It may take long time and that would depend on the processing power of your computer.

Playback

For the play back video you can use DivX codec and your favorite media player. If you need to see subtitles, the software “DirectVOBSub” is already there in your PC since it comes with AutoGK.

• Google Products
  • G Mail
  • Calender
  • Reader
  • Maps
• Yahoo Mail
• Facebook (Partially)

Normally a traditional web 2.0 web site refresh on every dynamic change. But rich internet application never refreshes the whole page. Look G mail, once you go in there, read e mail, compose or edit settings. It refreshes only the necessary section of the web page. So in there user can’t see a “Flicker” on every change on the web page. This is the main goal of creating rich internet applications. Furthermore it utilizes the bandwidth and provides smooth browsing experience to their user. In other words, user doesn’t feel that he is browsing. It acts like normal software installed locally on the PC.

To develop rich internet applications the base line technology is “JAVA Script”. When a JAVA script calls the web server to get some data from the database to update the web page dynamically, we call it AJAX (Asynchronous JAVA Script and XML). Traditional web 2.0 web page is “Synchronous” means it waits till the server response comes and can make only one response at a time. In AJAX its “Asynchronous” means only a part of the web site wait till the server response comes and many server response can be made at the same time. Whole page never waits till a server response comes. (Never refresh as whole). To make the developers life even easier there are some AJAX frameworks.

• GWT – Google web Toolkit
• Adoby Flex
• IceFaces

Using above framework the developer can make the web site is a agile manner. If someone chooses to write AJAX come manually, it will take very long time though he has the total ultimate control. The above mentioned frameworks provide IDE integration with “Drag and Drop” tools which saves lots of time.

This trend is walking toward a new era of software development. In near future there won’t be setup.exes. Instead of that there will be online software, like G mail for all the day to day needs. Furthermore this will end (almost) software piracy. All the users who need to use the software must pay the subscription fee. No installation, no cracks. And I think current speed of internet is good enough to run rich internet application. But the reliability should be improved. The last thing I need to see is, I can’t type a document because there is no internet. Smart developers will come up with smart solutions for this as well. There are already some offline versions for some Rich internet application which solve the problem up to some level. Let’s look forward.

The problem in the previous system were

• Direct changeover
• Consequences in system failure
• No Driving fun

Let see if we will decentralize controlling, how it will solve all these problems. In this concept all the vehicles will be intelligent agents. Like every other human who are driving a vehicle sitting behind the wheel. In addition to that the cars can communicate with each other. In previous system all the decisions would be taken by the central controlling point. In here they will be taken by the cars themselves.

Ex: Car B is following car A. Car A going to turn left after 1 KM. Previous centralized system, that information will be uploaded to central server and it will make the car B aware. In this decentralized system car A will directly talk to car B and say “Hey dude! I’m going to turn left after 1KM” so based on that information car B can take steps.

Sounds cool ah! But still there can be a central server to update cars about general conditions of the roads including traffic and maintenance. And just assume, only your car is having this system. No problem, it can use its camera, radar etc and drive alone thinking all the other cars are driven by humans. With the increasing number of this kind of intelligent cars, system will come to live step by step. No need of direct change over. In the case of central server failure it won’t affect the system badly. Still cars can drive communicating each others.

That’s how this decentralized system is going to solve the problem of changeover and how it will react to a system failure. But how this is going to solve the problem of “Driving fun”?

There is a simple solution. “Manual override!”. If driver want to drive by himself, he would be able to override the system manually and continue driving. In that case all the other cars around will be notified that this car is manually overridden. So other cars can take appropriate security steps, because a human is behind the wheel. To make this even better, there can be some busy city areas where manual overriding is prohibited. In permitted areas drivers can have fun.

This sounds like an awesome system, but when it comes to implementation, there are many technical challenges. Still there is no good enough intelligent system to drive a car on a real road. Communication between cars wouldn’t be much harder. It’s just matter of introducing common protocol. Once we come up with a good intelligent system to drive a car, we are almost done.

(Special Thank : Shyam Mehraaj Reyal)

References

• (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.mjnet.us/recen_t_projects_files/traffic_control_center_long_island_city_queens__traffic_moni.jpg

Once you install Tweetdeck you can add your entire online social network accounts in to that. In the main interface you can have many columns. Each column display selected updates from given community network. When you press the Settings button at the top right corner in the main interface you can access general settings and control the general behavior of the software.

Tip: Set Minimize button should and Close button should to Hide to notification area. When you set this TweetDeck will be always there in system tray though close it. If you really want to close right click on the system tray icon and exit.

Next section is about Twitter. It configures how many Twitter API request should send by the TweetDeck. This better to be below 100% or you will reach API requests limit means no updates after that. In Notification area you can select the notification style, enable or disable them and Sound if you need. But the sound can be annoying some times, choose it as appropriate. In the Colors/Fonts, I recommend you to choose international font if you going to use some external Unicode fonts. In the account section you can add user accounts you have as many as you need.

After this configuration done you can select what are the things you need to be displayed on the main window. For that you can click on Add column button at the left top corner. In there you can select different update streams in all your accounts in all networks. In Addition to that you can update status, comment of photos, tweet and many more in this application. When you take your mouse over a Profile picture of someone it will display various things you can do including reply, write on wall etc. The most beautiful and my favorite feature in this is you can update your status in Facebook and at the same time in Twitter as well. If you have many accounts you can do the same with just one click. This saves lot of time for me. And Tweetdeck having advance and very user-friendly imageviewer.

Download the application and have fun. There is a special version of TweetDeck for iPhone as well.  Share your comment about new stuff you discover in there.

References

• (n.d.). Retrieved from http://rgptechblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/TweetDeck-v0.32-1024×607.png

To access Google Trends you can use the main navigation bar in the Google home page. There click the more link and then click even more. It will open a page with many other Google services. There you can find a link to Google Trends. If not, simply you can Google for Google trends. Once you open Google trends, there will be a Search box almost same as Google search engine. You can enter your keyword and hit the Search trends button.

We will use the keyword “Barak Obama“.

Once you hit the button, in the browser screen it will display a chart at the top. And in the special points of the chart will be labeled and explanation will be there in the right side. Look at the peak labeled as C. The explanation for that is “CME Group Congratulates President-elect Barak Obama”. At the bottom of the page it display search volume index for regions and for different languages. Finally you can save all the above data in your local computer as a CSV file from the link at the bottom of the page. In addition to this you can narrow down your research for a given regions or time frame.

In addition to that there is a separate section for web traffic monitoring which you can access in top navigation bar. In there you can see a chart of unique visitors for a given web site. By the way Alexa.com is giving better service if you need to monitor web sites traffic.

In the main page of Google trends, there is a space for Hot Trends. It shows current hot trends in Google which can be really important. By clicking more trends you can access the full list of hot trends. Furthermore you can subscribe to RSS feeds about hot trends or add it as an iGoogle gadget. So you can be updated about them real time. This is really an important tool for internet marketers to identify Google search trends which is a large part of the whole internet searches. According to that they can take strategic decisions and plan their future business promotion procedure.

Just think, if everyone on the road will perfectly follow the road rules, In that case there won’t be any traffic. But humans are controlling vehicles and we are not that perfect. So is there any perfect one to control traffic. Yes, a computer. I actually saw this in the movie “Minority report”. This is a Centralized Traffic Control System. All the vehicles are connected to a centralized server and it control everything on the road. And the best part is the server knows positions of each and every vehicle, so it can move two vehicles nearby on the same track with the speed 120 Kmph, maintaining very narrow distance between them. And the same thing can be applicable to ‘n’ number of vehicles. On top of all, just assume the vehicle in front of you going to turn left in next junction. In general situation the driver on signal light in left and indicate that. But in this kind of system, the central server knows that the vehicle going to turn left and it can control other vehicles behind that accordingly. This sounds like a dream, but not impossible. We already have GPS and maps on our vehicles. All we have to do is update those details and get driving instruction from the server and execute them.

Once this kind of system will come to action, there won’t be a Steering wheel in vehicles. That space also will be allocated for passengers. The passenger will have to enter the destination once he gets in to the vehicle and those details will go to the central server. The server will give the vehicle a rout considering all the factors including other vehicle routs etc. Finally vehicle will reach the destination without human involvement. And it’s so difficult to find a parking space in modern busy cities and it’s a real pain to many people. But one day with this kind of system, once you go to office, you can tell your car to go home and come back when you going to finish the shift.

This will be a bad news for auto lovers. So sad that manual driving is no longer permitted. And you can’t drive over speed, break the law and have some fun. No more manual shifting, drifting, drag, street racing or anything. This is going to be kind a boring yes.

One possible problem in this kind of system is servers are always going down. Under any conditions we can’t guaranty 100% up time. What will happen if the central server (Probably the Server Cluster) will go down? Yes we can design the system to stop all the vehicles, but can we afford that delay?  On top of all, what will happen in the case of bug or defect in the system? The possible damage will be massive and probably cost many human lives. And how far can we expand this system? When it comes to implementation we have to go for a direct changer over. Is it possible? The engineers will have to find solutions for all those problems before this kind of system comes to live.

References

• (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/images/article/full/2007/10/FAA_630x.jpg