Intro To Python

From the external glance Python is a server side scripting language like Perl, PHP. Let’s talk about this, so what is a server side scripting language and what are other scripting languages that are currently on the job other than this server side scripting languages? Well server side means that the code you write (scripting) executes on the server side (web server) rather than client side (browser). Examples for client side scripting languages are JavaScript, VB script. The specialty of python is the flexibility, lightweight, high-level and, well it can be use as an OOP (Object Oriented Programming) language. Some may refer Python as a scripting language some may refer it as a programming language anyway the context of the whole idea is still the same. Now at the inner state Python has a collectable adoption within the industry, in the early 1990 that was Guido van Rossum created the language, since then is has been grown steadily and the concentration has increased remarkably in past few years. Python is used extensively for system administration tasks (it is, for example, a vital component of several Linux distributions), but it is also used to teach programming to complete beginners. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) use Python both for development and as a scripting language in several of its systems. Industrial Light & Magic uses Python in its production of special effects for large-budget feature films. Yahoo! uses it (among other things) to manage its discussion groups. Google has used it to implement many components of its web crawler and search engine. Python is being used in such diverse areas as computer games and bioinformatics. Google’s latest innovation, the Google Wave’s server is also implemented using Python called Pygowave.

What Is Django And What’s It Origin?

We can simply describe that Django is a web framework that 100% built using Python. That’s it, it’s really a framework that built for convenience and to reduce the time consuming efforts. Out of the box Django is very conceptive and robust basically the environment, so the developers only have to focus on how they going to implement a certain web application using Django, main considerations that affects a web application. Let’s see how Django is invented (the origin), Django grew organically from real-world applications written by a Web-development team in Lawrence, Kansas, USA. It was born in the fall of 2003, when the Web programmers at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper, Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison, began using Python to build applications The World Online team, responsible for the production and maintenance of several local news sites, thrived in a development environment dictated by journalism deadlines. For the sites including LJWorld.com, Lawrence.com, and KUsports.com journalists (and management) demanded that features be added and entire applications be built on an intensely fast schedule, often with only days or hours notice. Thus, Simon and Adrian developed a timesaving Web-development framework out of necessity it was the only way they could build maintainable applications under the extreme deadlines. So if we look at the context of this situation, they invent this framework in order to simplify and to speed the development process of their web applications, that underline concept is the hall way to Django’s success within the industry.

Django’s Current States And Capabilities

Now, several years later, Django is a well-established open source project with tens of thousands of users and contributors spread across the planet. Two of the original World Online developers (the “Benevolent Dictators for Life,” Adrian and Jacob) still provide central guidance for the framework’s growth, but it’s much more of a collaborative team effort. This history is relevant because it helps explain two key things. The first is Django’s “sweet spot.” Because Django was born in a news environment, it offers several features that are particularly well suited for ecommerce site like Amazon.com, Craigslist, and The Washington Post that offer dynamic, database-driven information. Don’t let that turn you off, though, although Django is particularly good for developing those sorts of sites, that doesn’t preclude it from being an effective tool for building any sort of dynamic Web site. (There’s a difference between being particularly effective at something and being ineffective at other things.).Let’s take a look at Django’s most conceptual capabilities.

Based On Model View Controller (MVC) Design Pattern

Although Django is based on MVC design pattern the way it uses the naming for the pattern is bit different

• Models (Model) – abstract the used data by defining classes for them and storing them on a relational database
• Views (View) – take the job of the controllers in MVC and basically define, what the user get to see. Functions (functions that changes according to the model) not classes here.
• Template (Controller) – Define how the users see the view.

Division Of Easiness And Maintainability (Applications And Projects)

Give developer a more modularize way of manipulating the web application’s parts

• Application – this is the point where you store actual functionality. For example a discussion forum would be an application; a weblog would be an application.
• Project – A project is for example your whole web site (entire outcome). Here you store your central configuration and general templates and images.

Applications are a simple way to share common functionality between various projects.

Easy Start

• Python (Django can work above the version 2.5)
• A text editor

This is all what you need to start developing with Django frame work, because it ships with a light weight development server (NOT suitable for production environment) to play around with it.

Yet Flexible

• Fast CGI (Common Gate way interface) – Common Gateway Interface, a specification for transferring information between a World Wide Web server and a CGI program. A CGI program is any program designed to accept and return data that conforms to the CGI specification. The program could be written in any programming language, including C, Perl, Java, or Visual Basic. Django itself support better processing metrology to up holds a fast CGI surrounding.
• mod_python – is an Apache module that embeds the Python interpreter within the server.
• mod_wsgi – is a simple Apache module implementation which can use to host any Python application which supports the Python WSGI interface.

Supports Most Common Database Engines

• SQLit
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Oracle

Main Features Resides On Developers Perspective

• A good collection of contributed applications
• Administration interface
• Authentication system
• Comments system
• Template language focused in inheritance.
• Simple form processing.
• Lots of fun stuff.

Summery

As you can see Django is a more convenient and easy to handle web framework purely built using Python, once you have mastered Django it will simply speed up your application development process and enhance the usability of your application through easy maintainability. Django can be used to develop small-scale corporate web application to expandable ecommerce web applications (this is just a surface markup which means Django can be use to develop further more complex web applications, don’t judge it from the outside view). So Django is currently available as an open source product (under BSD license) all developers, architects and fun makers are invited to use it and experience emphasize power of it.

• The latest official version is 1.1.1 – can download form here
• Documentation can be found in the following link (for installation instructions and sample applications.)
• Support + Community can be found here (also there’s a good ticketing system and IRC channel)

References

• Holovaty, A. (2009). The Definitive Guide to Django (Second edition). Apress.
• Home page. (2010). Retrieved from Django project: http://www.djangoproject.com/
• TERM/C/CGI.html. (2010). Retrieved from webopedia: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/CGI.html

Bit Of History

After ten year it is in a major position to talk about of it earlier releases, namely referred as J2EE (pronounced J-two-ey). First version of J2EE is the version 1.2 developed by Sun, was released in 1999 as an umbrella specification containing ten Java Specification Requests (JSRs). At that time people were talking about CORBA, so J2EE 1.2 was created with distributed systems in mind. Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) were introduced with support for remote stateful and stateless service objects, and optional support for persistent objects (entity beans). They were built on a transactional and distributed component model using RMI-IIOP (Remote Method Invocation–Internet Inter-ORB Protocol) as the underlying protocol. The web tier had servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSPs), and JMS was used for sending messages.

JAVA Enterprise Edition 6

What’s New On Java EE 6

The specification for the Java EE 6 was finalized on December 2009, bringing new features and constrains to the world of enterprise development. The most garrulous feature is profile based approach for development of web applications; mainly there are two profile types, Web Profile for development of light weight typical web applications at this stage some of the middle tire technologies such as EJB/persistence are limited and completely not applicable for the sake of ease of development and to lighter up the development/deployment process. The second profile or the Java EE 6 standard implementation is for large scale enterprise and distributed web application/solutions. Also the specification expert team has brought the ease of development form the previous version of Java EE (5.0) with the combination of plug-ability. Let’s look at the new features as a quick overview.

• Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS) 1.1
• Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1 (EJB 3.1 Lite for web profile)
• Java Servlet 3.0
• JavaServer Pages 2.2/Expression Language 2.2
• JavaServer Faces 2.0
• Java EE Connector Architecture 1.6
• Bean Validation 1.0
• Dependency Injection for Java 1.0

This is just a quick overview you can get the full detailed feature list and the related specifications from here.

Glassfish v3

Along with Java EE 6 the topic Glassfish should be combined because it’s the first application server that released in relatively to the Java EE 6 and it’s one of two supporting application servers for the Java EE 6 platform, the other application server is called TMAX JEUS 7. As per technical experts the Glassfish development team had to rebuild the Glassfish v3 form the scratch to support Java EE 6 profile based architecture and other major capabilities like EJB 3 Lite. Glassfish has served many customers in the past and present, so this version of Glassfish will probably get the attention from the industry. Also the SUN corporate services and technical support is there for anytime to help the developers and the customers with their problems.

Summery

When a company develops a Java application and needs to add enterprise features such as transaction management, security, concurrency, or messaging, Java EE is an attractive choice. It is standard, components are deployed to different a container, which gives you many services, and it works with various protocols. Java EE 6 follows the path of its previous version by adding ease of use to the web tier. This version of the platform is lighter (thanks to pruning, profiles, and EJB Lite), easier to use (no need for interfaces on EJBs or annotations on the web tier), richer (it includes new specifications and new features), and more portable (it includes Standardized embedded EJB container and allows for JNDI names).

Reference

• Goncalves, A. (2009). Beginning JavaTM EE 6 Platform with GlassFishTM 3: From Novice to Professional. Apress.
• Java EE 6 Technologies. (2010, February). Retrieved February 2010, from Sun.com: http://java.sun.com/javaee/technologies/

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

]]> http://notesofgenius.com/google-buzz/feed/ 0 http://notesofgenius.com/dropbox-share-and-backup-files/ http://notesofgenius.com/dropbox-share-and-backup-files/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:17:58 +0000 Malinda Alahakoon http://notesofgenius.com/?p=256 Dropbox is an online file backup and sharing system which is providing similar functionality as a SVN server, but with very simple and user-friendly design. So that even a General user can use this software and he don’t even have to bother that there is a file backing up system running on his PC. All the activities will be handles by the Dropbox behind the screen. Furthermore this can be used as a tool to share your files with your friends in a highly secured way. In addition to that it provides a service to share your files publicly and share them as an online photo gallery.

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 it 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 is 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 we 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 was 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.

There are two types of clouds available: Public cloud and Private cloud. A public cloud can be accessed by anyone on the internet but the private cloud is accessible only for the limited number of users. When creating the private cloud using public cloud resources, it is called virtual private cloud.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

This type of service allows thousands of users to access a single application through the browser or some kind of front end portal using multi-tenant architecture where a single instance of software runs on a server, serving thousands of customers. It’s a profitable system for customers, where there’s no need for investing in servers and software licenses. In the service providers’ point of view, its just one application to maintain, so maintenance costs are very low. SaaS is commonly used on HR applications. But, it can be anything from web based email services to inventory control systems.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

This is a variation of a SaaS. It provides a development environment for developers to create applications on the platform over the internet using development tools hosted on the service provider’s platform. Usage of this service is not totally convenient to developers, as the development tools are limited to vendor’s architecture. But they can achieve  predictability and pre-integration.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

This type of services provides virtual server instances with a unique IP address and storage. Users can access the server using the service provider’s API to start, stop and configure the server. In the enterprise, cloud computing allows a company to pay for only as much capacity as is needed, yet purchase more capacity whenever required.

Web Services In The Cloud

Rather than delivering the whole application, this system offer web services APIs to developers to develop services over the internet. They’re available as discrete business services to the total APIs offered by Google Maps, ADP Payroll Process, the US Postal Service and Bloomberg.

Managed Service Providers (MSP)

A managed service is an application exposed to IT rather than to end-users. These service providers provide infrastructure management services such as network-based services, applications and equipment to enterprises on subscription basis. In addition to these services, the MSP can manage and integrate a range of enterprise networks associated activities including Web hosting, Virtual Private Network (VPN), unified messaging, video networking etc.

Commerce Services Platform

Commerce Services Platform enables service providers and software companies to become solution providers, as this is a hybrid of SaaS and MSP. They’re most common in trading environments, such as expense management systems, that allow users to order travel or secretarial services from a common platform that then coordinates the service delivery and pricing within the specification set by the user.

Internet Integration

The integration of cloud-based services is in its early days. OpSource, which mainly concerns itself with serving as SaaS providers, recently introduced the OpSource Services Bus, which employs in-the-cloud integration technology from a little startup called Boomi. SaaS provider Workday recently acquired another player in this space, CapeClear, an ESB (enterprise service bus) provider that was edging toward b-to-b integration.

Future Of Cloud Computing

In future, for the security purposes, the large enterprises can be building their own private clouds and the cloud computing service providers will support information security as well. The enterprises will become part time cloud-computing vendors and you need only the browser as a development tool. Game Servers will be the most interesting cloud computing in future.

References

• (n.d). Retrieved on 2010, January from infoworld.com: http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/what-cloud-computing-really-means-031?page=0,0
• (n.d). Retrieved on 2010, January  from techtarget.com: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid201_gci1287881,00.html
• (n.d). Retrieved on 2010, January from zenmediastudios.com: http://www.zenmediastudios.com/_uploads/2009/09/cloud-computing.jpg

Specification and Features

Its operating system is similar to iPhone’s operating system and has custom designed A4, Apple 1GHz Processor. It has 1024 x 768 resolutions, 9.7 inch LED touch screen, 1.5 pounds weight, 0.5 inch thin and it has around 10 hours of battery life as well. iPad has the fasters built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi connection, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and 7.2 Mbps 3G data speed. There are particularly designed games and apps available for iPad and an iWork suite which contains word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software especially for business use also announced. The starting price will be around $499 (16 GB). If you want to use AT&T connectivity, which is Apple recommended, another $130 will be added to the price. Apple’s iBook the virtual bookshop is one of the main features in iPad. You can turn pages with a single tap in the right-hand margin.

In addition, you can have a bunch of photo album in your iPad, and when it’s charging state, you can use it as a digital photo frame. Moreover, its high-resolution screen makes it perfect for watching any kind of video such as HD movies, TV shows and music videos. It has a unique YouTube app where you can easily navigate videos and organize videos. With the iPod application, you can browse, organize and listen to music with the powerful built-in speaker. The iTune store lets you to browse, buy music, TV shows or you can buy or rent movies with thousands of collections or you can sync with your Mac or PC to share the contents through iTune. There are around 140,000 applications available for iPad and you can easily browse, buy and download them from App Store.

The Google powered helps you to navigate with high-resolution satellite images where you can use your current location as well as you can get the directions. To taking notes, iPad has an onscreen keyboard and in landscape view, you can see your list of notes and the current one will shown win a red circle. From the Home Screen, you can have access to everything in your iPad in a tap and you can move apps around the screen in any order you want. Finally, the Spotlight Search allows you to search across iPad and its built-in apps.

Lack Of Functionalities

Even though iPad has the entire above-mentioned feature, it has failed some functionality as well. Due to lack of multitasking that means that you cannot listen to music while editing a photo. It’s a major issue in iPad. It does not have a camera. Even the iPod nano has a camera, so a business product without a web cam or at least a normal cam. So no video chatting, no photo snaps. It does not include a USB port, so file transfer between other devices will be difficult and inconvenient. Users have to depend on a USB adapter. Most of the users never accept this. iPad doesn’t support Flash. Which means you cannot view Flash embedded sites and applications. The main arguments against Flash running on the iPad are that it’s a resource hog and a security risk, but the lack of Flash support is nonetheless a hindrance for users. While the iPad’s display has been praised as crisp and sharp, its screen — LED-backlit with In-Plane Switching (IPS) — has its downsides. The iPad’s screen is not as power efficient as OLED devices, which don’t drain batteries as quickly. Moreover, LED screen tends to be harder on the eyes than the e-ink screens used on eReaders such as the Kindle. Apple has its own App Store for iPad and it has a lot of restriction on apps like no porn, nothing that infringes on the Apple trademark etc. The Free Software Foundation has already criticized the product, saying iPad is bad for freedom.

People have to think is it worth to buy this product for $500? Moreover, user has to depend on the iStore.  We can expect more features and bug fixed updates in future. However, for now its people have to decide do they really want to replace their current device to iPad.

References

• (n.d). Retrieved on January 2010 from huffingtonpost.com: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/29/apple-ipad-review-photos_n_441770.html?slidenumber=Dpqk1VkFkhM%3D&&&&&&&&&
• (n.d). Retrieved on January 2010 from apple.com: http://www.apple.com/ipad/
• (n.d). Retrieved on January 2010 from sindhtoday.net: http://www.sindhtoday.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/apple-ipad_tablet.jpg

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.

History

The Blu-ray Disc Association developed Blu-ray disc. The first Blu-ray disc prototype was unveiled at the CEATEC exhibition as DVR Blue in October 2000. On February 19, 2002, the project was officially announced as “Blu-ray”. On October 4, 2004 the 20^th Century Fox joined hands with BDA’s Board of Directors. The first BD-ROM players were shipped in mid-June 2006. The first movie released in Blu-ray is 2003’s Charlie’s Angels:Full Throttle. This release used the standard DVDs MPEG-2 compression method.

The Technology

Laser and Optics

To read and write data the Blu-ray disc uses a blue or violet laser, which is operating at a wavelength of 405nm. The diodes are InGaN (Indium Gallium Nitride) lasers that produce 405 nm photons directly, that is, without frequency doubling or other nonlinear optical mechanisms. Conventional DVDs and CDs use red and near-infrared lasers, at 650 nm and 780 nm, respectively. The blue-violet laser’s shorter wavelength makes it possible to store more information on a 12 cm CD/DVD-size disc. The minimum “spot size” on which a laser can be focused is limited by diffraction, and depends on the wavelength of the light and the numerical aperture of the lens used to focus it. By decreasing the wavelength, increasing the numerical aperture from 0.60 to 0.85, and making the cover layer thinner to avoid unwanted optical effects, the laser beam can be focused to a smaller spot. This allows more information to be stored in the same area. For Blu-ray Disc, the spot size is 580 nm. Blu-ray Discs feature improvements in data encoding that further increase the capacity.

Hard-coating

To avoid the scratches, the Blu-ray disc has scratch-protection coating names Durabis.

Blu-ray with Java

The Java platform for Blu-ray players is called BD-J, which is based on JavaME Personal Basis Profile (PBP) v 1.1. It contains the additional APIs such as JavaTV and special Blu-ray API. In addition, it is based on a subset of JavaSE 1.4.2, so it uses the standard JVM. This includes Vector graphics, network support and file system access etc. The network connectivity is mandatory for Blu-ray profile 2 with support of TCP/IP and HTTP. For security, the secure connection contains the Java Socket Extension. A Blu-ray play can contain flash disks, a hard-disc or a USB port for extra memory. The file system classes allow accessing the file systems.

The BD-J platform uses AWT for its Graphical User Interface (GUI) with support of a remote control navigation. The Java Media Framework (JMF) is used for playback of the content on the disc. With the Java sandbox security, the user only allowed to access the disc publisher allowed servers. The main reason for incorporating Java in Blu-ray players it to get better possibilities when creating menus, in contrast to DVD players which use a simple MPEG based technology. Another basic feature is the possibility to add interactivity while playing the movie.

The Blu-ray Profiles

Each Blu-ray player must adhere to a specific profile. This specifies such things as the memory requirement. All profile with video requires a full BD-J implementation. This is a short summary of the current profiles:

• 1.0 – This is the profile that is used today. It requires that the player has at least 64 KB persistent memory.
• 1.1 – This becomes mandatory on all players that are manufactured after November 2007. The memory requirement is increased to 256 MB. The players must have a secondary video decoder and a secondary audio decoder. The secondary video decoder is used for picture in picture, whereas the secondary audio could be used for audio commentary etc.
• 2.0 – This is called BD-Live and this requires the player to have network connectivity. The memory requirements are set to at least 1 GB. The memory is not limited to built-in memory, but could also be an external memory, such as an USB memory stick.
• 3.0 – This is an audio only profile. This does not require BD-J.

The Blu-ray with Java platform can bring a new revolution in the field of movie publishing. We can expect our favorite movies with a very good quality in near future.

References

• (n.d). Retrieved on January 2010 from blog.jayway.com: http://blog.jayway.com/2009/12/11/blu-ray-and-java/
• (n.d). Retrieved on January 2010 from kombo.com: http://ps3.kombo.com/images/content/news/blurb_blu_ray_logo_20100106.png

Development

The film Avatar had been in development since 1994 bye James Cameron, who wrote an 80-page script for the film in two weeks. Cameron has stated that “every single science fiction book I read as a kid”. He announced about filming the Avatar after completing the Titanic. From January to April 2006, Cameron worked on the script with Dr. Paul Former, who developed the Na’vi language and culture. The budget for the film is $237 million, with $150 million for promotion. Most of the live action scenes were shot in Wellington, New Zealand on sets constructed by a massive team of 150 contractors.

The Technology

Performance Capture

Cameron first introduced the motion capture technology in Total Recall, with the first CGI human movements. But this had some limitations, in particular the actor of the character being portrayed. Moreover, the actor’s expressions cannot capture with this technology. CGI is traditionally done by placing reflective markers all over an actor’s face and body, which are then interpreted by computer technology to create digitized expressions for CG characters. Cameron and his team developed a new image-based facial performance capture technology, requiring the actor to wear special headgear rig equipped with a camera, which is placed inches from their face to capture and digitalize every muscle contraction or expression.

Animation

The digital animations have done by the Weta Digital in New Zealand, which has owned by Peter Jackson. They’ve transferred basic renderings into photo-real images, using lighting, shading and rendering. The realism was extended to each leaf, tree, plant and rock, which were rendered in WETA computers. In addition, a team of artists designed the props and weapons for the Na’vi and humans. These digital designs have taken to complete over one year of time.

Stereoscopic 3D Fusion Camera

The production partner Vince Pace and James Cameron developed this camera system. This camera was used to bridge up the gaps between the scenes and artistically formed an untraceable connectivity between the live action and the computer-generated scenes.

Virtual Camera/Simul-Cam Technology

The combination of the Virtual Camera and the Simul-Cam gave the best features of the 3D and the CGI technologies for Avatar. The Virtual Camera simulated a camera that was fed CG images by supercomputer surrounding the volume. This allowed amplification of each small adjustment on the virtual production stage, from camera movement to actor interaction. The simul-cam fed, in integrated real-time, CG characters and environments into the live action Fusion 3D camera eyepiece, allowing the director to direct virtual scenes on Pandora the same way he would a live-action scene.

The Software Used In The Making Of Avatar

There are many companies and their software product has involved in the development of the film Avatar. The company list has given below.

• Industrial Light and Magic, USA (most of the character design, modeling and effects)
• Weta Digital, New Zealand (most of the character design, modeling and effects)
• Stan Winston Studios (most of the props, including the AMP suit)
• Framestore, UK (Sully’s arrival at Hell’s Gate and two other shots)
• Hybride, Canada
• Prime Focus, USA – Frantic Films is mentioned for the same thing but not officially credited – (design and compositing of the control room screens, HUDs, etc)
• Look Effects, USA (compositing)
• Hydraulx, USA
• Giant Studios, USA (motion capture)
• Blur, USA (space shots of ISV Venture Star)
• Pixel Liberation Front, USA (screens and HUD design)
• Lola VFX, USA (digital cosmetic)

The Main Software Used Has Given Below

• Autodesk Maya
• Pixar Renderman for Maya
• Autodesk SoftImage XSI
• Luxology Modo (model desing)
• Autodesk 3ds max (space shots, control room screens and HUD renderings)
• Autodesk MotionBuilder (for real time 3d visualisatons)
• The Foundry Nuke Compositor (image compositing)
• Autodesk Smoke (color correction)
• Autodesk Combustion (compositing)
• AVID (video editing)
• Adobe After Effects (compositing, real-time visualizations)
• PF Track (motion tracking, background replacement)
• Adobe Illustrator (HUD and screens layout)
• Adobe Photoshop (concept art, textures)
• Adobe Premiere (proofing, rough composition with AE)
• Many tools developed in-house
• Plug-ins for each platform

Avatar made a big revolution in the 3D and Sci-Fi films. Moreover, the film was a big success.

References

• (n.d). Retrieved on 2010, January from scriptphd.com: http://www.scriptphd.com/?p=1257
• (n.d). Retrieved on 2010, January from twin-pixels.com: http://www.twin-pixels.com/software-used-making-of-avatar/
• (n.d). Retrieved on 2010, January from scienceprog.com: http://www.scienceprog.com/technologies-used-in-avatar-movie/
• (n.d). Retrieved on 2010, January from twin-pixels.com: http://www.twin-pixels.com/wp-content/uploads/4054882656_1b4c62a3cb.jpg

Engine and Power Supply

It has an Engine Power of 111 kW (149 hp) electric motor and 1.4 L 4-cylinder for powering 53 kW (71 hp) generator. For up to the first 64 km (40miles) the Volt will be powered by electricity, which is charged in lithium-ion batteries that charged from an electrical power outlet. After 64 km, a small 4-cylinder gasoline internal combustion engine creates electricity on-board using a 53 kW (71 hp) generator to extend the Volt’s range to more than 300 miles (483 km). The electrical power from the generator is sent to either the electric motor or the batteries, depending on the state of charge (SOC) of the battery pack and the power demanded at the wheels.

The Model

The Chevrolet Volt has four doors with a rear lift gate and can be seated for four passengers. In addition, the top speed has also been increased from the electronically 134 km/h to 160 km/h. The battery pack size has also been reduced from 300L to 100L. The design model first revealed to the public on September 16, 2008. The lithium-ion battery technology in which the cathode contains the lithium has a large impact in determining the success of the car.

Efficient Fuel Consuming

If the batteries are fully charged, without any other fuel supplies, the Volt can travel less than 64 km trips using only the stored electricity in lithium-ion batteries. Once the Volt’s battery has discharged to the estimated 30% lower State of Charge (SoC) limit, the engine starts and supplies power to the electric motor to continue driving the car and maintain the battery charge at 30%.

The Smart Phone Application For The Chevy Volt

General Motors has unveiled an application, which has successfully developed by the OnStar for Chevrolet Volt drivers that will let them remotely control the whole car in their Blackberry, iPhone or Motorola Droid in the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on 05^th of January 2010.

Drivers can communicate with their Volt using the OnStar’s Mobile Application with the real-time data connection to perform number of tasks. The OnStar application has offered a wide range of interaction and control, which has never offered on any electric vehicle before. The features including:

• Display charge status
• Schedule time for charge or notify to charge
• Display battery charge level in percentage
• Notify via text messages to drivers to plug in their vehicle when the battery level is low
• Status reports
• Warming up or cooling the vehicle before getting in
• Showing miles per gallon, EV miles and miles driven for last trip and lifetime

The president of the OnStar Walt Dorfstatter has stated  that “The Chevrolet Volt ushers in a new era of automotive technology and calls for a new level of connectivity and control, Nearly 6 million vehicles on the road today use OnStar to stay connected, and our new Smartphone app will make that even easier for Volt drivers.”

OnStar servers are the intermediary between the OnStar application and the Volt. The application has the communication facility with the OnStar servers. Because of the OnStar’s real-time data connection, it helps drivers maximize the environmental benefits owning a Volt. Using the power from the grid, the driver can remotely start the Volt to pre-condition the interior temperature. It saves the battery charge for long driving.

Volt drivers can also view and manage vehicle systems and commands from the vehicle, the Internet or through a monthly OnStar Vehicle Diagnostic e-mail. Traditional OnStar features such as door lock, unlock and remote horn and lights-typically accessible only through a call to an OnStar center-will be available via the application.

Currently the application works on the Apple iPhone, Motorola Droid and Blackberry Storm, and General Motors says it also will be available on a mobile browser for other Smartphones. The demo application can be downloaded from iTunes store for Apple iPhone and for Motorola Droid and Blackberry Storm the application available at OnStarMobileDemo.com. Initial sales of the Chevy Volt, scheduled for production in late 2010 and the price have estimated to $40,000.

References

• (n.d). Retrieved January 2010 from hybridcars.com: http://www.hybridcars.com/news/gm-unveils-chevy-volt-smartphone-application-26402.html
• (n.d). Retrieved January 2010 from egmcartech.com: http://www.egmcartech.com/2010/01/06/chevrolet-volt-smartphone-app-lets-you-control-things-from-your-iphone-storm-dorid/
• (n.d). Retrieved January 2010 from wired.com: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/autopia/2010/01/volt_smartphone_app.jpg
• (n.d). Retrieved January 2010 from wired.com: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/01/chevrolet-volt-gets-an-iphone-app/

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

• 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.

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

When working on complex operations with a large set of data using a table-based database system, it   needs more resources and time consuming and it is actually an incredible piece of software but it might not be the best tool for every stored procedures. NoSQL is easy to use database system, its performance is fast, and it is a portable without any limitations other than the memory and the processor speed.  It uses key, value pair to store data so, if you want to keep your data in a persistent state and have access to them, then this would be an ideal database system. The object databases are been based on client-centric architecture rather than server-centric architecture and the queries are performed on the client. In addition, without bound to server hardware limitation, the data can be partition and scaled easily. However, if you have to work with around 10 gigabyte of data table that must be update each second from various clients, you cannot rely on the NoSQL since it lacks of performance on very big tables. At the same time some NoSQL databases do not even support a basic feature like automatic partitioning, but they provide reliability features like distribution, replication, snapshot, record-level version history, and MVC. Those are the reasons people like NoSQL most.

It is closely integrated and an extension of the UNIX environment. When using NoSQL, a database is just a regular UNIX ASCII file and you can use, move and maintain it as any other files that you have access. In addition, it does not need a fixed schema or data type, it does not have the ‘JOIN’ query, and ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) properties are not important here. Moreover, queries are relatively simple than relational database system. Moreover, when using the table-based database system, there will be problems regarding the versions, but in this NoSQL database, you do not have to care about which version you are developing and which version the clients have.

There are some well know companies use the NoSQL databases as their storage and retrieval database system. Facebook’s Cassandara, LinkedIn’s Project Voldemort, Google’s BigTable and Amazon’s Dynamo are some of them. Chordless, CouchDB, Db4o, GT.M, Hbase, Hypertable, Memcachedb, Mnesia, MongoDB and Redis are some popular open source NoSQL projects.

Nowadays, the web community is more developed than it was. Therefore, it needs more technology with high performance rather than the traditional way of RDBMS to store and retrieve data. To meet the requirements of many ecommerce applications it needs an object database such as NoSQL where you can work with your own preferred language. If you have problems related to the scalability like reaching the limit of the write capacity of a single database server, amount of data is greater than a single server can hold or your page loading is being slow as well as structure related problems like tables with lots of columns and a little of them are actually used, and have a lot of join queries to deal with or your schema have a large number of many to many join tables you can think about to change to NoSQL.

References

• (n.d.). Retrieved January 2010, from Ycombinator.com: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859468
• (n.d.). Retrieved January 2010, from Odbms.org: http://www.odbms.org/blog/
• (n.d.). Retrieved January 2010, from Eflorenzano.com: http://www.eflorenzano.com/blog/post/my-thoughts-nosql/
• (n.d.). Retrieved January 2010, from Buytaert.net: http://buytaert.net/nosql-and-sql
• (n.d.). Retrieved January 2010, from Carsonified.com: http://carsonified.com/blog/dev/should-you-go-beyond-relational-databases/
• (n.d.). Retrieved from http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_j6mB7TMmJJY/SxKcnXYD5GI/AAAAAAAAAX0/5uC0_Uo1fU8/s1600/p1.png