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.

Features Highlight

Controls

The display is relatively large than a normal personal or a music phone. It makes the content and enhances the image and video display features. In addition it is much developed with the 262 color scheme to deliver much colorful content. Keypad consists of two parts. The controller keypad is a much strengthen and attractive one. The number pad is relatively soft, but can look fine with the background light. It is much similar to a Nokia keypad. Motion Sensitivity is one of the well highlighted and attractive features available on the Sony Ericsson C905. It let the user feel much comfortable by reducing the number of times he has to press the buttons for switching between landscape and portrait. Users can enjoy the games without pressing the keypad at all. The ‘Need for Speed Pro Street’ is supported by the motion sensor option. With the implementation of the Horizontal menu it has given more space to the user. It contained a navigation wheel in the early versions of the Sony Ericsson and the accuracy was less than the new rectangular navigation menu. A common complain that had with the previous editions of the Navigation Menus was that the lack of water resistance. That can be reduced with this type of a navigation menu. The long living battery and the power consumption techniques increase the efficiency of the usage of the phone. There are power saving facilities available for the usage. Power can be saved by several ways. Brightness control, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi saving are the best ones among them. Number of Bluetooth accessible devices is being restricted to one with the power saving functionality.

Cyber-shot 8.1 Mega Pixel Camera

8.1 Mega Pixel camera can be named as the most valuable option of the phone. It is the first time this kind of quality camera came with a personal phone. In addition there are options available to reduce the size as well. The 8.1 Mega Pixel image is higher than 2 Megabytes and it allows the zooming without any distortion for a long. The Xenon Flash Light with 3-LED video light gives a better light for the images. The night mood images are much better than the Blackberry Curve 8900 and the LG KU990. The flash light can lighten for more than 10 meters and give a better quality picture. Face detection and Smile Shutter options also available with the latest software version for Sony Ericsson C905. The phone might have been very much perfect if there was a front camera. Therefore the 3G calls are also need to get the support of the main camera. It is said that this phone is the phone with most advanced zooming capabilities. It supports up to 16X digital zoom while giving QVGA video recording with 30 frames per second. The lens protection is also enhanced with the mechanical lens cover that has a slider and push back cover in it.

Walkman Headset And The Music Player

The Sony Ericsson C905 Walkman Media Player 3.0 is attractive and optimized than the any previous editions of the Sony Ericsson phones and it can add playlists of the Windows Media Player that runs on the computer from Bluetooth. The flash interface looks gorgeous and the Stereo Widening option gives a better quality audio output. There are number of equalizing techniques available. Base, Mega Base, Full Treble and voice are them. Super Base is the best quality equalizer among them. Other than the Walkman (‘W’ series) phones are provided with a normal stereo headset. But, the Sony Ericsson C905 phone comes with a Walkman headset although it is not a walkman phone. It also includes a FM Radio as in several other versions and the Play Now 5.0 application.

GPS Navigation

Global Positioning System has been a promising implementation for the mobile phones in the recent past. Enabling GPS and Google maps has made the phone much useful for consumers. The ‘Wayfinder Navigator 7’ is an application provided for the tracking purposes. It helps the users to manage journeys, calculate distance and several other features.

Bluetooth And Wi-Fi

Bluetooth is a common option in the mobile phones over a time. Sony Ericsson C905 is not only providing the general factors that are available. The remote controller application connects several devices such like computers and projectors using Bluetooth. Wi-Fi is the latest trend for the mobile phones. Though it has being for the mobile devices such as laptops, notebooks from a long time, mobile phones were facilitated very recently. The latest update for the Sony Ericsson C905 gives the Apple iSync support which was only supported by MAC OS before.

Competition With Other Models

LG KU990 is a much cheaper and recently introduced phone that can gives some features like this. It has a 5 Mega Pixel Camera with the Xenon Flash that gives bright and good looking images. In addition its video frame rate is four times greater than the video frame rate of the Sony Ericsson C905. The LG KM900 Arena is also an upcoming model to give a good competition to this model. It has the dual display function in it. LG KM900 model is slim and also provides the touch screen availability. Therefore the next Sony Ericsson ‘C’ model will have to give a good competition to lead the market. It is a well known fact that the mobile phone is not just a phone today. It is a combination of several other features as well. Those other feature implementation should be well done more than it is now. Sony Ericsson can give a good competition to the business level mobile phones as well. Most of the Sony Ericsson ‘C’ series users wait for a good implementation that could compete with the iPhone in the near future.

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.

Advantages of Using LINQ

There are four main advantages of LINQ. They are,

The availability of strong typed queries: The classes are auto generated according to the relations in relational databases. The language is very much easy to understand as in SQL.

The automatic join functioning in foreign keys: In normal SQL, the user has to join the tables if it is necessary. In LINQ, it provides the ability to join each function automatically when there is a foreign key reference.

The code size: There are many occasions that the users have to write long sentences for getting a SQL query. LINQ provides relatively short codes in such advanced occasions. It reduces the complexity of the code and makes it much easy for the program to read.

Code equality: One of the most advantages in using LINQ is that its availability over any .NET platform language such as C#.net, VB.NET and F#.NET.

LINQ to Objects and XML

The local query execution engine in LINQ can be used for the purpose of querying memory in collections. It allows IEnumerable collections to be queried locally while defining it in the sequence pattern. The currently available LINQ to Objects does not allow complex queries, but the simple and linear queries. The XML document is converted to the XElement objects through the LINQ to XML provider. The XElement objects are queried then against the local search engine.

LINQ to SQL

Both SQL Server Databases and SQL Server Compact Databases can use the LINQ to SQL provider. When the database is available in a remotely located SQL server, LINQ converts its queries to the SQL queries and then it is sent to the SQL server for the processing. LINQ is used as encapsulated data objects as the SQL server stores data as relational data. Those two should map each other with the support of LINQ to SQL mapping framework. There the classes being made according to the name of the database table. All or a part of the columns of the table are being taken as the data members. SQL defined attributes are used for the purpose of relating the other relational model attributes.

What LINQ Can Do More Than SQL?

Structured Query Language is designed for the purposes of querying data, updating, deleting or inserting from a database. What LINQ can do when compared to the SQL is very much. The users can call to several data sources not only a database, by using LINQ. It can take a single enumeration by calling to a database as well as a file system. Most important advantage of LINQ is the reduction of the code length. When executing a large query the length of SQL code is very much larger when comparing to the Method Based Query in LINQ.

LINQ to DataSet

The DataSets must be populated before using them. The way how data is loaded is not that important in this case. Two methods can be used for the purpose of loading data. The data can be retrieved directly from a database or the users can take the advantage of DLinq to query the database and then load the data that comes as the result into a DataSet. Either, you can use DataAdapter to querry data from the databases. Querying data is possible after loading them. There is an enumerate querried through the LINQ. The different between a normal enumeration and an enumeration that get from a LINQ query is that the LINQ querry gets an Enumeration of a DataRow object rather than getting a data set of a custom type. The DataSets can be devided into two main parts as typed and untyped. Typed DataSet declares the corresponding data type such as bool, int, date or etc.

TableAdapters are also can be used in case of querying. The TableAdapter is an adapter that is configured early and encapsulates the connection information, and the queries also predefined and exposed as methods that can be used for filling an already created table or creating a new table and working on it to fill.

There are number of custom operations can be made for the purpose of enabling LINQ queries over the DataSet.

Security Matters in LINQ

There are several matters both positive and negative that users have to concern when using LINQ. The security concerns vary from the reason and the place where the code is used.

LINQ to SQL

SQL injection attacks have been a very much popular threat than SQL always had with it. One of the recommended techniques that is said to use is that writing the code using parameters. LINQ is always used as parameter manner. That threat is reduced for certain extend.

LINQ to XML

Extensible Markup Language is used for the purpose of transporting data. So the security is very much concerned in this matter. According to the Microsoft releases it is not yet advised to use LINQ in places where security is concerned a lot. This application is not much for the server-side applications other than the programming convenience. If it is very much need to use LINQ to XML for such advanced scenarios, the only acceptable way is creating an instance of an xmlReader class that can filter out the XML DOS attacks.

When Not to Use LINQ

LINQ is a good implementation that could help lot of areas in a very convenient manner. In most of the LINQ make things much easy than the others. But using LINQ for small SQL queries might not be suitable at all. In addition when working with LINQ to XML, one of the major concerns should be avoiding the Denial of Service attacks.

References

• Bussman, T. (2009, 04 03). Why use Linq instead of SQL? Retrieved 06 16, 2010, from Entrance Software: http://www.entrancesoftware.com/blog/post/Why-use-Linq-instead-of-SQL.aspx
• Mirceat. (2008, 03 12). LINQ Framework Design Guidelines. Retrieved 06 16, 2010, from MSDN BLOGS: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mirceat/archive/2008/03/13/linq-framework-design-guidelines.aspx

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

Software Contents For The Packages

There are several applications that would be available in every edition of Microsoft Office. They are;

• Microsoft Access 2010
• Microsoft Excel 2010
• Microsoft Word 2010
• Microsoft OneNote 2010
• Microsoft Outlook 2010
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2010
• Microsoft Publisher 2010
• Microsoft Office Communicator 2010

In addition to them, Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 and Microsoft InfoPath 2010 will be available only in Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus edition.

New Features In Microsoft Office 2010

64-bit And 32-bit

Microsoft Office 2010 will be available for the Operating systems came after the Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3. A 64-bit Office 2010 version will be there for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows 7 operating systems. Meanwhile Windows XP Professional edition will not be supported for Microsoft Office 2010.

Office Mobile 2010 And Web Applications

Mobile 2010 will replace the currently available mobile applications that are used to read word, excel and other documents. This will required to have Windows mobile 6.5. There are several updates being done to the Mobile 2010. The new SharePoint Workspace will give the ability to view and edit the document content in offline mood. Microsoft Office 2010 provides the facility to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote online. This gives the user to work in remote machines as well.

Embedded Videos In PowerPoint 2010

PowerPoint 2010 provides a new facility to add the videos embedded inside the presentations. This will encourage the users to give much effective videos to the public without using flash. In addition, PowerPoint will have more techniques to edit the images and videos. Adding fades, reflection will give a much better output.

Office 2010 MAC Edition

Microsoft will release the Office MAC edition in 2011. It will be a 32-bit application and there will be no beta versions according to the statements. This will be a great encourage to the Apple users to bend their necks more to the Windows side for their personal and office purposes.

Appearance

The main eye catching change in the appearance is that applying the ‘Ribbon’ menu system to the every tool in the Microsoft Office 2010. It was not available in Microsoft Office 2007 for some tools such like Outlook 2007 and OneNote 2007. In addition, the big circular Office button has been replaced with a small rectangular Office button.

Open Office vs. Microsoft Office

Open Office is the most popular open source office package that is available in multi language and multi platforms. Sun Microsystems introduced Open Office with the for data interchange in Open Document Format (.ODF). It came very much popular due to the free availability among the users as a promising software package. It also allows the users to save and edit the files in the Microsoft Office formats as well. The Oracle Corporation does a large part of development of this software package.

The latest release of the Open Office is OpenOffice.org 3.0. The Open Office statistics shows that more than 98 million downloads were done by the people all around the world. It is an outstanding performance at the moment. But the number of Open Office users has reduced due to the several reasons. They are;

• The attractive interfaces of Microsoft Office
• New tools availability
• Attractive and in-built fonts
• Cracks and patches availability for the Microsoft Office

Challenges And Threats

There are several challenges that Microsoft has to face and they are already facing. Several countries used to ban some Microsoft Office products due to several issues. Security is one of the most considerable factors. Microsoft has solved several security issues by the results they got in the beta testing. File block, Office file validation and protected view are some of steps taken to assure the security of Microsoft Office 2010. The universities also used to encourage the students to use open source software rather than using the Microsoft Office because of it is proprietary software.

Microsoft Word Banned in USA

Microsoft has been banned to sell Microsoft Word in USA once due to an appeal from a company named i4i. This order was released by a judge of Texas court. This was regarding to an XML format used by the Microsoft Word. ‘i4i’ is a Canadian firm who had the patent for their XML plug-in has appealed that they own the XML plug-in which were used by the Microsoft Word 2007 and Word 2003.

What’s Next?

Microsoft Office has always provided a set of promising tools to the world that can be used for day to day life. There will be a good trend for accounting software and a diary software in the future. As far as the world has tended towards the digital world, the diary book will not remain in the future. There will be a good trend to a digital personal or a business diary in the office. Accounting is another important thing that should be removed from paper based books. Several accounting software exists in the world. Microsoft can provide an excellent tool for personal and business accounting. Microsoft has taken a huge step to develop a mobile application of Microsoft Office 2010 that could be carried with the mobile phone. An inbuilt personal tracking application would be a great implementation for future releases. That might be useful to add a ‘Geo tag’ for the documents.

References

• Cashmore, P. (n.d.). Judge: Microsoft Banned from Selling Word in the US. Retrieved 06 11, 2010, from Mashable: http://mashable.com/2009/08/12/word-patent/
• Protalinski, E. (2009, 12 01). Office 2010 confirmed for June 2010 release. Retrieved 06 11, 2010, from arstechnica: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/12/office-2010-confirmed-for-june-2010-release-1.ars

Version History

• Creative Suite 1 – September 2003
• Creative Suite 2 – April 2005
• Macromedia Studio MX - May 2002
• Macromedia Studio MX Plus - February 2003
• Macromedia Studio MX 2004 – September 2003
• Macromedia Studio MX 2008 – September 2005
• Creative Suite 3 – March 2007
• Creative Suite 4 – October 2008

Editions And Software

Adobe Creative Suite 5 comes in 4 editions. Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium and Design Standard are designed for the professional multimedia printing and designing purposes.  Among them, Premium Edition contains more software than Standard edition. Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web Premium Edition contains the multimedia applications that can be used for web designing and other web development purposes. Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium edition contains the applications that can be used to design rich quality production for movies, cartoons, DVDs, Blu-Rays. Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection contains all the software that comes with the Creative Suite 5 pack.

What’s New In CS5

Adobe Dreamweaver CS5

A set of HTML5 tools comes with the Dreamweaver CS5. It also provides the support for CSS3. There are several other new in-built features also comes with the Dreamweaver CS5. Multi screen preview, which enables the designer or the developer to view the site in three different ways are the one of the most attractive features among them. Media query reports and HTML5 tag library for code hinting are also very much significant features. Live view rendering for CSS3 gives a fresh experience for the developers. Live video updates support both video and audio formats.

Adobe Illustrator CS5

The stroke width can be resized with the new width tool. The special feature in this is that it can be used to resize a specific part of that stroke without changing the whole stroke if the designer tools is not an alter brush tool. The designers can save those strokes and use in the future. The art and paint brushes can be adjusted as it wants to be. Vector images are not that natural in its appearance usually. Bristle Brush can be used to apply much natural effects for the vector images. Attractive web graphics can be done with the text anti aliasing feature in the Illustrator CS5.

Adobe Photoshop CS5

Most highlighted features in Photoshop CS5 are the 3D tools available in it. Adobe Repousse, the 3D extrusion tool gives the ability to convert the 2D images and arts into 3D objects. Depths, scale, bend and shear properties also available with the new Photoshop CS5 edition. A special 3D tools also available for 3D materials. The HDR Pro function gives a great facility for the users to remove the ghost. Ghost means the carbon copy images that are being made due to the slow frame rate of the camera.

Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5

Adobe Flash Catalyst is a tool developed for the people who draw their artworks with tools like Photoshop and Illustrator to transform them into interfaces. It includes more than 250 new tools for users to make their work done simply and smartly. It is a good tool to manage the content without writing codes. This tool is specially developed for the novices who need to provide interactive graphics. The Catalyst projects can be edited with the Flash builder and the used coding language is MXML.

Adobe InDesign CS5

Adobe CS5 InDesign CS5 can be used not only for the printable format of the documents. It can be used for e publishing and apple apps usage as well. This can be a great challenge for the leading multimedia application developer in the world for apple related programs.

Adobe After Effects CS5

There are 4 main new features available with the Adobe After Effects CS5. Rendering high-resolution images, HDR memory intensive feature and easier to use floating-point colors, less re-rendering and virtually elimination of low-memory errors. In addition to those availabilities, the faster functioning is a very much highlighted option in the After Effects CS5 edition.

System Requirements

Windows

• Intel Core 2 or AMD Phenom II processor with the support for 64-bit Operating Systems
• An Operating System later than Windows Vista
• RAM more than 2GB, 4GB for optimum performances
• More than 10GB hard disk space
• Mulicore Intel Processor
• Operating System Released after Mac OS X 10.5.7
• More than 4GB RAM recommended
• More than 10GB hard disk space

MAC OS

• Multi-core Intel Processor
• Operating System Released after Mac OS X 10.5.7
• More than 4GB RAM recommended
• More than 10GB hard disk space

Final Cut Studio vs. Adobe Creative Suite 5

Final Cut Studio is the main competitor from the Apple Inc for the Adobe Systems. The Final Cut Studio consists of 6 new tools that can be used to do the multimedia editing for Apple Products. According to the experts view, those tool are so far minor than the Adobe Creative Suite tools. There are more than 100 new tools available with the latest release of Final Cut Studio. Final Cut Pro 7, Motion 4, Sound Track Pro 3, Color 1.5, and Compressor 3.5 are the tools for the Final Cut Studio.

Future Development

There will be a very much better future for the Adobe Products as they display a rapid growth of development. The next implementation would be an HTML code generator in Photoshop. The whole structure of the webpage will be coded with HTML as the designer designs it with boxes and other shapes. This will reduce the design time of the web pages. The next best implementation will be the internal server including in the Adobe Dreamweaver. It is a common factor in other IDEs such as Netbeans and Visual Studio. Most of the Dreamweaver users question why they do not provide an in-built server. The edition based release would be a great marketing strategy and its already been implemented up to some extent. Because of that the people don’t have much strong financial background also will be able to afford a scale down version of these exceptional software for a start. At the same time it will reduce the software piracy as well.

History

CSS1

CSS1 is the first edition of Cascading Style Sheets which were introduced in 1996. It came with the support for several properties. Introduction of unique ‘id’ for each property and introduction of classes to properties that should have the same styles attributes were the most important things there were.  Margin, border, padding and positioning also powered by style sheets although they could be done by using the HTML elements. Spacing between lines and rows of tables are also easily done using the stylesheets. The W3C stated the importance of using CSS instead of having the html as the giving the ability to optimization and making it easy for the designers to design and settle down the design easily.

CSS2

CSS2 was published in 1998. Positioning of index with several property values such like fixed, absolute, relative and indexing were the commonly highlighted ones among them. Bidirectional texts and some other new front properties such as shadows were introduced by this edition of CSS. Two updates and features came in to fix the errors in CSS 2. CSS 2.1 was the last 2^nd generation edition of CSS.

CSS3

CSS3 is the latest edition of the CSS Stylesheets. There are several new functionalities have been provided through CSS3. Functions such like opacity, Text-overflow, media queries and box shadows are some of the much attractive introductions.

What’s New In CSS3?

Rounded Corners

As there are much new features, the simplest and easily useable one is that the rounded corners. The previous CSS2 stylesheets did not allowed users to make this available in one step. They had to add four circular images for the four edges of the div and make the border rounder. The “-moz-border-radius” and “-webkit-border-radius” properties enable the users to be those borders round. Male the border image availability is another great introduction as it lets the user to add custom and decorated images for the borders.

Background Decoration

The background decoration is available with the possibility of customizing it. ‘background-origin’ and ‘background-clip’ gives a customized display for the content background. It has also enabled to have multiple backgrounds to the same content through the CSS3 styles. In addition, there is a new feature which is called background-image-size to resize the size of the background image of the divs.

Colors

There is a huge variety of colors available with the new CSS edition. HSL, HSLA and RGBA are the new color schemes. The new ‘A’ value stands for the opacity. With this value, the divs can make transparent and give a much attractive look to the appearance. In early editions, the transparency was obtained by adding a .png or .gif image as the background.

Text Effects

Most of the occasions when it is need to add customized text effects such like the shadow; the designers used graphics made using the Photoshop like software. With the latest edition of the CSS, it can be done without adding a weighted image to the content. The ‘text-shadow’ property comes with making them possible and providing a better image than the CSS. Text overflow control has made it easy to give good boundaries to the content while having the two values which are ‘ellipsis’ and ‘clip’. ‘Word wrap can be used to mark the boundaries of a particular text area while giving the options to mark the boundaries even by the number of letters or words.

Attribute Matching

Attribute matching made the styles available for some tags which are named with some starting part of a string. For example, the ids’ which are named as ‘sosa’ and ‘sopa’ can be easily applied with styles by making the tag name starting value as ‘so’. The outline property can be used to make an outline for the content. In earlydays, it was done by having two separate divs and applying the border to the outer one in which the width and height values greater than the inner one.

Box Model

Box model is a new property which was introduced with the CSS3 edition. With this, it can be easily assigned with customized div appearance. There should be two inner divs and a single outer div with the width of each inner div being 50%.

Web Fonts

A new collection of web fonts was introduced with the CSS3 edition. The multi column layout view also can be applied to the content as it can be used to provide multi column paragraphs. Media boxes are also a new implementation that could help to give a good view to the end user.

Suggestions For Future Development

One of the most expected further implementations are that the ‘Math’ functions of the CSS. It can be used in a vast area if it was introduced with mathematic functions. Aural Stysheets also expected to released but the W3C has not made a clear statement about that. There will be a set of properties for creating charts in the near future. Although CSS can be used now also to draw these charts, it is expected to be more convenient way in the near future. Image processing functions will be a good implementation to future. The page size could be removed from a large capacity. Though W3C has introduced universal standard for CSS, different browser engines have slight variation of interpretation. This can be identified as a major drawback of CSS standards. Due to this developer still have to think about using CSS in some special development scenarios. Furthermore in future releases CSS might contain advanced image processing techniques too. When thinking about far future CSS might be able to control HTML tags beyond 2D layout. Even at this moment there are some demonstration of 3D image gallery made using CSS3 with the aid of HTML5. They will be even improved most importantly to work on any browser platform.

References

• 7 Awesome CSS3 Techniques You Can Start Using Right Now. (n.d.). Retrieved 06 07, 2010, from Mashable: http://mashable.com/2010/06/04/awesome-css3-techniques/
• Cross-browser CSS3 border-radius (rounded corners). (2010, January). Retrieved June 2010, from dimox.net: http://dimox.net/wp-images/css-border-radius.jpg
• CSS3 Modules. (n.d.). Retrieved 06 08, 2010, from CSS: http://www.css3.info/modules/

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/

Bitmap Graphics

A bit map is a map of bits. The bits are stored in well organized arrays where the array elements are called as pixels. Bitmaps are also named as the Raster Artworks. Possibility of making very smooth color gradations makes it easy to apply photographic or artistic effects. Graphic Interchange Format (.GIF), Joint Photographers Expert Group (.JPG, .JPEG), Tagged Image File Format (.TIFF, .TIF), Encapsulated Postscript (.EPS) are some of the famous Bitmap graphic file formats.

Graphic Interchange Format

It was introduced in 1987 and has become a very popular graphic file format since it supports a wider area of the worldwide web. This format can be used to create the animations as well. With available 256 different colors, it supports 8 bits per a pixel. Images with continuous colors will not be well viewed by this format.

Joint Photographers Expert Group

It is a widely used bitmap graphic format that uses lossy compression. The compression ratio is 10:1 and there is a little quality reduction also.

Tagged Image File Format

TIFF formats are very often used in Apple Macintosh computers. This format can use both lossy and lossless compression techniques. The TIFF format is the standard for document management systems and document imaging.

Encapsulated Postscript

EPS can be used as a postscript document that contains additional information about the file formats. In addition this can be used to have a preview on a document containing information.

Bitmap Graphic software

• Adobe Photoshop
• Corel Paint
• Paint Shop Pro

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Bitmap Graphics

The main advantage of a bitmap is that it can be accessed sooner through the internet when you have the proper size. The accuracy is very high when displaying image information including the shadings and the other complex and smooth places. Another advantage is that it can be used as a universal format. Most of the Bitmap graphics are not proprietary.

There are many disadvantages of using the bitmap images when it comes to professional level. The main disadvantage is that it cannot get the original quality when resizing. The best solution to overcome this is to cut the image in the size which it is needed to use.

Vector Graphics

Lines and curves are the basics of Vector Graphics. The Vectors are defined by the mathematical drawings and calculations. Illustrator (.AI), Encapsulated PostScript (.EPS), PostScript (.PS), Windows Meta File (.WMF) and Flash Movie (.FLA, .SWF) are some of very popular file formats.Vector images do not have the issue of reducing the quality when zoom the images. The mathematical functions that describe the images can resize the images without getting blurred.

Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator Artworks are proprietary file format of Adobe Systems. There is much software that supports Adobe Illustrator file formats. This AI formats supports both PDF and EPS formats.

Windows Meta File

It can be used in Microsoft Windows systems as a graphics file format. As WMF was a 16-bit file format, the new 32-bit Enhanced Meta File format was introduced to support the windows versions after Windows 3.0. Enhanced Metafile Plus extension and compressed formats such as Compressed Windows Meta File and Compressed Windows Enhanced Meta file formats were announced with the Windows XP released.

Flash Movie

This is also a format developed by Adobe Systems with the intention of making the video streaming available over the internet. The SWF format was released first in 2002, with the Flash player version 6. The latest formats of flash movies are much different compared to the previous versions. There are two main video formats named .f4v and .f4p and two audio formats named .f4a and .f4b.

Vector Graphic Software

• Abobe Illustrator
• Corel Draw
• Macromedia Freehand
• Macromedia Flash
• Resizing is better in vectors than the bitmaps
• Vector graphics usually require fewer amounts of data than the bitmaps.
• Vector graphics are easy to edit than the bitmap graphics.

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Using Vectors

There are some disadvantages over using the vector graphics. The images with complex curves are hard to reproduce. It can be harder to write the code for a particular image. The vector images come relatively slower. The other disadvantage is that the most of the vector formats are proprietary.

When To Use Vector And Bitmap

Vector will be the best option for images with text, many colored graphic objects. Due to its algorithmic functions, it will not be hard to give a quality image. Bitmaps are the best choice for complicated images with shadows and many shades, 3D effects, textures and photographs. The main thing is to consider when choosing a bitmap image is that to choose the same size that is need to be applied on the corresponding place.

Converting Two Types

Bitmaps to Vectors: The edges of the objects are located in a bitmap image and the resulting shapes are converted into vector objects.

Vectors to Bitmaps: There are two main issues when converting vectors to bitmaps. The first step is rasterization. Determining the color of each pixel can be not that perfect. Vectors being the mathematical functions of lines and curves cannot make a perfect contact with the each pixel of the image.

References

• (2009). Retrieved May 2010, from www.eznetu.com: http://www.eznetu.com/Graphics/graphic_types/images/bitmap-vector-diagram2.jpg
• Harris, A. (n.d.). Vector Graphics. Retrieved 05 31, 2010, from http://wally.cs.iupui.edu/n351/vector/Vector_Graphics.html

Color

It is the frequency of a light wave within the bandwidth located in the electromagnetic spectrum where human eye can catch it. The range of frequencies which are higher than the maximum of the above bandwidth is called as the ultraviolet region while the lower frequencies are in the infrared region. Every visible color in the spectrum is a combination of the three basic colors which are Red, Green and Blue.

Color Depth And Color Pallets

In general, a picture is a collection of pixels where each pixel has a unique color. The number of colors that a pixel can have is defined as the color depth. The color depth is equal to two to the power of number of bits that image have. For example an 8bit color image can have 256 colors to represent a one pixel and a 16bit color image can have 65536 colors to represent a single pixel. A color pallet is a mathematical table that defines the available color of a pixel. They are also called as the Color Look Up Tables. Most common pallets are of 1, 4,5,16 and 24 in bit depths.

Web safe colors are the colors that are being shared by the Windows and Mac operating system pallets. There is a combination of color codes ‘00’, ’33’, ‘66’, ‘99’, ‘CC’, ‘FF’ for each color in the web safe color palette. Each color is defined with three pairs of numbers.

Color Models

Color Model is the way to specify colors in the terms of computer. RGB, SGB, HSL, CMYK, CIE are some of them. It represents color in a mathematical system.

RGB is the most famous color model from all. It contains Red, Green and Blue which are the primary colors of light. The 24-bit RGB color system represents each color by providing 8-bits for each color. Therefore there are 256 shades of each red, green and blue color.

HSB is a combination of Hue, Saturation and Brightness. Every color has 3numbers from each representation. Hue is a value between 0 to 360 degrees. The next number saturation is a percentage value between 0 and 100. The last one is brightness that can have a value between 0 and 100. HSL is the replacement of lightness for the brightness in HSB. Lightness means the black color availability of the color.

HSI color model includes a parameter for the intensity. The distance unit percentage from the center of the HSI color pyramid is defined as the Saturation. Intensity defines the distance up axis from black which will be ‘0’ or ‘1’.

CMYK color model is a collection of Cyan Magenta Yellow and black and it is the color model used in printers as well. Cyan is the while light without red. Magenta is while light without green. Yellow is white light without blue. But this model is less applicable in multimedia production. They are the primary colors of pigments that are used to make the other colors in practical.

Analogous And Complementary Colors

Analogous Colors are defined as any close three colors on a 12 colored color wheel. The nature is the best example for a practical place where the Analogous combination can be found. There is lot of varieties of greens that are closer to each other in the jungles as well. They are very much pleasant to the eye because of the less change in it. Also it has less attraction in it due to the low color change n it. Split Analogous colors are the colors that are located once after a once in the color wheel.

Complementary Colors are any two colors that are located one against one. They are very hard to pick up on human eyes and it shows things highlighted. Places where to find quick attraction can be colored with complementary colors. Although these combinations are not that cool for eyes, it will not be a good implementation for the pictures that should keep the eye for a long time. Split-complementary color scheme are the ones that have one hue but located in each one’s opposition.

Color Theory Applications

There are so many applications of color theory can be found in the day today life. Graphic designing is the most famous one among them. Several artworks have become famous due to the proper application of the color theory. Color theories are highly applied for the advertising purposes. There are so many products that has become much famous and so many that has become less popular due to the color selections for the advertising. A company logo is the trademark of a company. It will be a key factor in the business purposes. Normally the Analogous color patterns are applied to the logo designs because of it provides the majesty of that company. Advertising is very much different from the logo designing and the complementary colors are applied to get more consumer attraction for the sales purposes. Video games are also applied the color theory with several intentions such like changing the player’s mind during the play, highlighting and hiding several operations for the player and so many other tricks that could attract the player to play the game. World Wide Web is another famous application of the color theory that gives dynamic content to the site visitors by using several techniques. Cascading Style Sheets are often used to provide the content to the user in a very much attractive manner. Interior designers concern very much on the color theory to match the suitable colors for the building according to the place.

Color theory is not that famous as most of the other theories used for any other works. But it is one of the rapidly used theories in the world and this can be applicable for most of purposes and activities.

References

• Color Models: HSB, RGB, CYMK and LAB. (n.d.). Retrieved 05 27, 2010, from WOWAREA: http://www.wowarea.com/english/help/color.htm

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/

Content Management Systems

A content management system is a tool that can be used to separate the content from presentation. In general, a Content Management System follows three steps. There are designing the end user template, adding the content as text or html to the database and displaying the results to the end user. Increased functionality, being easy to do large-scale changes in a very easy manner and no need of HTML knowledge are the some of the advantages of Content Management Systems. It will be a great option to use a CMS for large, often updating, multiple contributors required and dynamic content included websites.

History Overview

The name Joomla came from the Arabic word jumla which means all together. This was a legalization of the early Content Management System which was known as Mambo. It was trademarked by Miro International Private Limited. Joomla has a very short span of history as a Content Management System. It was first released in the August 2005. Thereafter, day by day it has improved its functionalities and become stronger than the other once.

How It Works

The content is the key in a Content Management System. Therefore the content is displayed with three types. A section is the basic among them which groups a group of content. A set of sections are categorized as a category. Articles hold content like images, text and other content. There is a Media Manager to manage the images like things. Contact is a place to store forms. The user can change colors and the graphics using the website template. In addition, the users are able to use plug-in that will add automated content to the user’s content. The site owner has the full permission to the content and the owner can check them by just adding ‘/Administrator’ to the homepage URL. It contains many more other features like User Manager, Language Manager, Banner Manager, Polls, Search, Web link Management, Syndication and Newsfeed Management, Menu Manager, Template Manager, Integrated help system and web services to provide a top class output to the Joomla consumers.

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Joomla

It is said that Joomla is the most recommended Content Management System for a website that contains large content. It can be described as a fully fledged CMS. The deep levels of navigation make the content well managed and improve the efficiency of the website. The main advantage of Joomla is the free and open source availability.

There are so many disadvantages as well. It has a bigger learning curve when it is compared to other CMS like WordPress. Joomla is not the best option for small sites. It is not at all good with Search Engine Optimization. JavaScript and CSS can get bulky due to the slow loading time and the layout changing is also not that easy when compared to other famous CMSs. Some costly plug-ins for Joomla comes freely with the Content Management Systems like WordPress.

Competitors

There are number of Content Management Systems available in the today’s world. Durphal and WordPress are the most famous ones among them. WordPress is much lighter than the Joomla and it can be a good option for the websites with small content. Durphal is much powerful and flexible when compared to the Joomla. But the numbers of Joomla users are greater than Durphal. The main reason is that it is the easiest CMS to handle websites with large content. In a nutshell, WordPress is the best for the end users, Durphal is the best option for the web developers and Joomla will be the best web designing CMS.

How To Make Joomla More Efficient

One of the major concerns over the other Content Management Systems with Joomla is that the high complexity of operating for the end user. It will be a better implementation if it is possible to reduce the complexity for certain extend. Blogs are the world’s fastest growing type of web pages. Among the Content Management Systems, WordPress is the most popular for blogging. The reason is that it can be updated frequently in an easy manner. It can be great if it is possible to provide two editions of the Joomla CMS. One will be for the high end users and the other one will be for the normal users. The reason is that the normal users can be provided some easy and lightweight tools with them. Most of the good software has several editions. Microsoft products have become that much popular due to the user availability in their own choice. This edition based development is not that often seen in the Open source products. Providing it can do much better for everyone. Another major issue in Joomla is the weaknesses that it has. There are so many security threats and vulnerabilities in it.  Therefore the content can be damaged or hacked during the processes of developing.

Consumer Response

There is a rapid growth in the Joomla community since it was released. The latest builtwith statistics shows that it has achieved the third place from the Content Management Systems. In addition, it has had a +0.18% movement from the 4.6% total CMS used websites. Another factor provided to prove the consumer response is that the number of comments and posts appear on the walls of the social networks. With the Video component and the Joomla web services the users and the new trend has attracted to this community.

References

• CMS Usage Statistics. (2010, 05 18). Retrieved 05 27, 2010, from CMS Usage Statistics: http://trends.builtwith.com/cms
• Joomla-Advantages and Disadvantages. (2009, 09 28). Retrieved 05 27, 2010, from slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/tradocaj/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-joomla

History

Steve Mann is the father of SixthSense who made a wearable computer in 1990. The SixthSense technology was first implemented as the neckworn projector+ camera system. He was a media lab student at that time. There after it was used and implemented by an Indian who is the man has become very famous in the recent Pranav Mistry. There will be a long future rather than the short period of history for the SixthSense technology.

Development

Software

Pranav Mistry says the SixthSense software will be open source. As far as this seems to be a little set of items, there will not be user interfaces or much advanced programs for the users. There will be much harder and secured coding inside the device to make sure the security of the software. It will be interesting to know the new language for coding for a sixthsense device.

Hardware

In order to control the SixthSense, it requires some advance hardware as it appears to be. In some of the public presentations, the presenter was wearing some controlling devices including color markers, Camera and projector. When the product come to the real market there has to be lot of improvement for these hardware. They has to be compact and easily controllable. How ever the hardware integration of SixthSense technology is quite innovative since they have manage to develop camera and pen like day to day objects.

Applications

In Pranav Mistry’s demonstration, he showed several applications that can be made using the SixthSense technology. It would be a great achievement for the Information Technology as well. Since it is the beginning of the SixthSense applications, there will be lot of tough problems ahead the SixthSense application developers.

Motion Capture

The innovative camera is something that got applauds of the crowd in the demonstration. Four rubber rings in the four fingers two in each can be used do draw a rectangular. It will be the area covered by the photograph. Then the photos can be taken to any interface for editing, managing the galleries and sharing. This is much controversial. There is an inbuilt storage device where the data can be stored. When using a surface, the whole data is taken into that surface and stored in the device after the editing. The data can be hacked during the editing period. That is a serious issue in this camera application. And also the capturing device being so small like 4 rubber rings can be used to capture the photos of any location.

There are so many new applications to be developed in the near future. A remote controller for media devices can be implemented to be worked with fingers using this technology. Except having the remote controller to send fast forward, rewind or next or previous options, a SixthSense device can be used. The current process of sending fast-forward or rewind with advanced options. For example, using 2 fingers to send 5 seconds, 3 fingers to send 10 seconds likewise it can be done.

Many games can be made using this technology. A car race using an imaginary steering wheel will be an attractive application. The player will have to drive the vehicle as a real one using his arms. The SixthSense tool kit will be a good replacement for the XBOX game kit and it will not be much expensive as it is said.

3D Drawing

A pencil that enables users to draw in 3D is good innovation. It will be a good tool for the beginners to the 3D modeling world. Also it will help a lot for the engineers as well. Another implementation is the physical Google map. It provides the all data that is provided by the Google. The map available on a surface and when you keep something in it, it detects the place where the options available. Dragging and dropping hardcopies to the computer will be a good and efficient replacement for the scanner. This is much more advanced because this can take 3D objects as it appears.

Future Development

It seems to be that there can be a good future for SixthSense technology applications. There are several things that designers must pay their attention. The digital cameras came into the market with a promising call. But it did not provide the real quality for the photographers at a reasonable price. Therefore most of the professional photographers still use the analog cameras. Nano technology came into the world, but the general consumers do not use that technology so far. The reason is the extremely high price. SixthSense devices are very much different from the computers, this will be a new topic for the hackers and the other people also. First thing is to provide the security for the SixthSense applications and devices. Lot of good technologies came and died due to the security threats. There are some weaknesses that can reduce the accuracy of the data. Some of them were the on palm phone keypad. It allows the user to dial a number of the phone using the keypad available on the palm. As far as the palms are different, there will be some problems regarding some issues such like the sensitivity, and several other facts. Also 3^rd party attacks can be possible.

In addition to that Microsoft is developing a controlling environment whore the user doesn’t even have to touch the controller device named ‘Project Natal’. This will be a significant market competitor to the SixthSense technology since it still required some hardware involvement with the user.

References

• TED. (2009, 11). Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology. Retrieved 05 22, 2010, from TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

History

This IDE has made its birth on year 1997 with two editions called Visual Studio Professional Edition and Visual Studio Enterprise Edition. Visual Studio 6.0 was the next release of this IDE and it was released in 1998. The highlighted thing in this edition was that they have removed support for some languages and focused on the .NET platform. In year 2002, Microsoft released their next edition named as Visual Studio .NET. Compile and Execute method was introduced in this version. With the support for mobile devices, Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2003 came into the operation. This edition did not become that much popular but, it provided a huge facility for the enterprise level architects. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is developed with providing support for the .NET framework 2.0. It was released in October 2005. Visual Studio 2008 was released in November 2008. It became the most popular Visual Studio IDE as the .NET developers’ population became over 4 million. Lot of new features ware attached to this version and it was based on the available Microsoft OS for the moment which was Vista. Update availability in regular periods made this IDE looks better than any others. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, which was the latest release, includes number of new features in it.

What Is New In Microsoft Visual Studio 2010?

Visual Studio 2010 is developed targeting the .NET framework 4.0. The applications were targeting the Windows 7 operating system. This has come up with so many promising features compared to the previous versions of the Visual Studio. It is much personalized IDE compared to the others. The developers will not have to waste their time on the IDE. It provides multi monitor support and a new editor that could makes things much easier and reliable for the developer. Availability of plenty of platforms gives the programmers an opportunity to select the most suitable one at the time. The Application Lifecycle Management Tools make the team works much easier than it was before. Testing and debugging tools are much better than the Visual Studio 2008. Another feature that is newly available in Visual Studio 2010 is that it supports F# language. It is a highly recommended language by Microsoft Research Center for the Parallel I/O programming, Parallel CPU programming and algorithm development.Lab management is one of the innovative features available in Visual Studio 2010. In the developing environments, the developers take much time on setting up and tear down processes. This time wastage is minimized by the Lab Management feature available in Visual Studio 2010.

Editions Of Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is available in four editions in the market.

2010 Professional: The 2010 Professional edition comes for the basic development tasks while making it available for the individual use. Creation, debugging and deployment of applications are simplified through this edition.

2010 Premium: This is recommended for both individuals and teams with the complete toolset for quality application development.

2010 Ultimate: With the addition support for cloud computing and parallel computing, Visual Studio 2010 ultimate comes for the team works for the quality application development.

Test Professional 2010: Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is for the quality assurance and proof reading teams for test planning and manual test execution.

Advantages Of Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft Visual Studio comes with several new and improved features to support the development processes. Among them, there are two mainly highlighted features available are Enabling New Trends and riding towards Next Generation Platforms.Visual Studio 2010 users are facilitated with Windows Azure Tools for building debugging and deploying the services and applications for the cloud. The Live Developer Portal provides the facility to send them to the cloud. Native C++ libraries and Visual Studio IDE Support for Parallel Development provides facility of running the same code across several processors. The new tools enable making MVC websites. In addition, Visual Studio 2010 provides tools for SharePoint development.

Bugs, Errors And Suggestions

There were several bugs and errors reported in the Beta version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. The Microsoft Site for reporting bugs, Microsoft Connect states that there are 5463 reported bugs have been reported so far for the .NET Visual Studio. In addition, there are 2361 suggestions made by the Visual Studio users.Some of the users suggest that there should be built in support for IronRuby. Implementing a common interface for arithmetic in generics is another well voted suggestion. Also there is a request for allowing unloads assemblies. It is said that data contract static checking is not available in Professional Edition. Users request that feature for that edition also. Microsoft has provided a solution for the request for new templates from the customers as the available templates are old ones. In addition they have promised for removing bugs through the updates.

Further Implementations

Microsoft has not declared any further activity about the Visual Studio 2010. Experts and several viewers guess that Microsoft will look towards promoting their newly provided language F#. It will be a good Parallel programming language that could provide excellent features in the future. A research has shown that 30% of the time of software development is being used for setting up the project and tearing down it. Microsoft’s next aim will be improving the Lab Management features in the Visual Studio to another extend. Creating an Open source programming bridge like previously available JIT will be another option that Visual Studio Project team will be looking for. JIT was concluded subsequently the Sun Microsystems opposed. At last everyone is waiting for a much advanced, Robotic Studio plug-in in it. It will be a great advantage for the individual users who like to find everything under one roof. Then it would become a rich IDE such like Netbeans which provides facility to all Standard, Enterprise and Micro editions.

References

• F# @ Microsoft Research. (n.d.). Retrieved 05 20, 2010, from Microsoft Research: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/fsharp/
• Joybhatt. (2009, 10 11). VISUAL STUDIO 2010 FEATURES AND ADVANTAGES . Retrieved 05 20, 2010, from JOY’S WEBLOG: http://blogs.msdn.com/joy/archive/2009/10/11/visual-studio-2010-features-and-advantages.aspx
• Microsoft Visual Studio. (n.d.). Retrieved 5 20, 2010, from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products
• Somasegar. (2010, 04 11). Announcing availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. Retrieved 05 20, 2010, from Somasegar’s Web Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2010/04/11/announcing-visual-studio-2010-and-net-framework-4.aspx
• Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management. (2008, 12 22). Retrieved 05 20, 2010, from MAOR’S BLOG: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/maordavid/archive/2008/12/22/visual-studio-2010-lab-management.aspx

Lossless Compression Algorithms

There will be no data loss in this type of compression as it is defined by the name. Both original data and the compressed data are the same in this compression. The algorithms for the compression and decompression are exact inverse of each other in the Lossless Compression. The main mechanism in this compression is removing the redundant data in the compression and adding them in the decompression.

Advantages: The original format of the data remains even it is compressed.

Disadvantages: Reduction of the size of the data is a small. Sometimes the size can increase instead of decrease.

Run-length Encoding

Run-length encoding can be named as the simplest method of encoding. Any combination of symbols can be compressed by this encoding technique. The concept of this algorithm is removing continuous sequence of symbols using another shorten symbol which represent it. Practically what is does is to replace the number of occurrences with the numeric value and the symbol itself. For example, a text like ‘AAAACBBBBB’ is replace by ‘A04C01B05’. This method is very much efficient when there are only two symbols.

Huffman Coding

This is a little bit complicated than the previous one. First, the frequency of each appearing character is taken. Then the characters that have least frequencies being taken to give values ‘1’ for the higher one and ‘0’ for the lower one and there wise it is continued. Then the each available character is represented by a separated code included with 1s and 0s.

Lempel Ziv Encoding

This system does the encoding as two processes. They are indexing and compressing a string of symbols. When there is a set of characters, first step is to check whether an index have the minimum available character combination that appears. If available then put the index number in the string. If not, it will be added to the index. This compression technique is more effective as it has a two way compression method.

Lossless Compression File Formats

Audio

• Waveform audio format (WAV)
• Free Lossless Audio Codec  (FLAC)
• Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC)
• ATRAC Advanced Lossless
• Audio Lossless Coding
• MPEG-4 SLS
• Direct Stream Transfer (DST)
• DTS-HD Master Audio
• Meridian Lossless Packing (MLP)
• Monkey’s Audio APE
• RealPlayer – RealAudio Lossless
• Shorten – SHN,TTA – True Audio Lossless
• WMA Lossless

Graphics

• Adaptive Binary Optimization (ABO)
• JPEG XR
• Progressive Graphics File (PGF)
• Portable Network Graphics (PNG)
• Tagged Image File Format (TIFF)

Video

• Animation codec
• CorePNG, Dirac
• FFV1
• JPEG 2000
• Huffyuv
• Lagarith
• MSU Lossless Video Codec
• SheerVideo

Lossy Compression Algorithms

It is the compression technique which will lose data in the original source while trying to keep the visible quality at the almost same amount. The compression ratio will be very high. Most probably the ratio will be a value near 10. It reduces non sensitive information to the human eyes and the compressed media will not be the media that was available before compression.

Advantages: Can reduce the file size more than in the Lossless Compression

Disadvantages: The original file cannot be taken after the decompression

Mathematical And Wavelet Transformation

In this process, images are converted to the mathematical functions. Discreet Cosine Transformation uses series of cosine functions to approximate image.  This technique is used with JPEG, MPEG1 and MPEG 2 formats. A wavelet function is used to approximate the image. This can be used with the JPEG 2000 and MPEG 4 formats.

JPEG Encoding

In this encoding, an image is represented by a two dimensional array of pixels. A Grayscale picture of 307*200 pixels is represented by 2,457,600 bits and a color picture is represented by 7,372,800 bits. Due to the number of calculations to be had in a JPEG format of a grayscale picture, it is divided into blocks of 8*8 pixels. The number of the units’ id equal to the number of mathematical equations of each picture. The whole idea of JPEG is to change the picture into a linear set of numbers that reveals the redundancies. In addition to those techniques, MPEG is also a Lossy Compression technique. It is a way to encode the moving images and audio included in it. It supports many video formats from mobile phone to HD TV.

H.261, H.263, H.264

H.261 is designed for video telephony and video conferencing applications. It was developed in 1988-1990. Data rate is a multiplication of a 64 kb/s. H.263 is a video coding technique for low bit rate communication. In addition, a 30% of bit saving can be done by this technique when it is compared to the MPEG-1. H.264 is a joint project of ITU-Ts Video Experts Group and the ISO/IEC MPEG group. All those three methods use different methods of reducing redundant data. There for the output differs from bit rate, quality and latency.

Future Trends Of Compression

cvements as they are being proposed. One of the available problems is the way how to handle the errors in a data loss of a data packet. Wavelet transform techniques will be a good further implementation for the next generation. Wavelet coding has two main advantages. The first one is that the video construction is achieved in a fully embedded style. Two processes of encoding and decoding can be stopped at a defined bit rate. The desired spatial resolution and the required frame rate can encode the stream. Vector quantization makes use of the correlation and the repeats between the pixels located near or between the frequency bands.

References

• (2002). MultimediaElements. In J. G. Shuman, Multimedia In Action. Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd.

It has a lot of advantages. The best thing is that it gives us an accurate idea about a position of some object or a person. That feature of the Global Positioning System can be used for so many applications and already done by several people. Another advantage of this Global Positioning System is that it gives us whole details about the location with a lot of details such Altitude etc.

Technology

The Global Positioning System is a system which has a group of satellites in earth orbit that transmit precise signals, it allows GPS receivers to calculate and display accurate information about the location, time and speed to the person who is using the application. The GPS receiver is designed to calculate the location of the receiver based on the singles received using Mathematical formulas.

The way how Global Positioning System works is simple. Each satellite transmits a unique signature as the signal. That signature consists of the position of each satellite. When there is a need of calculating a place, at least four satellites transmit signals to the object and calculate the time taken to receive that signal back. With the time and the speed of the signal, the distance is measured. At least a GPS unit needs to have four channels To be able to lock onto four signals. Most of the units have 12 channels. Calculations were made for the orbits necessary for each of the 31 satellites. As the orbit has 360 degrees in it, at least 6 satellites are visible to any place on the earth.GPS can be used in any type of weather and they are used on land, air, and in water.

Applications

There are so many devices made with the implementation of Global Positioning System. Google Earth is the most famous application that uses the signals received by the GPS receivers. It enables public also to access the maps which tell the users about the locations all around the world.3DEM is freely available software that will create 3D terrain scenes and flyby animations and export GIS terrain data files using any of the following freely available terrain data as a source.People use Global Positioning System for several uses. A research published on a magazine states that the percentage of uses for each several requirement is as follows.

• Car navigation 37%
• Hand held 26%
• Tracking 10%
• GIS 8%
• Survey 7%
• Manufacturing 7%
• Vessel Voyage 2%
• Military Related 1%

United States and European countries show a rapid growth in using GPS for the car navigations and the number of GPS equipped mobile phone usage. Those facts prove that the Global Positioning System helps many people in many other ways.

Navigators

Navigation applications are the most famous GPS applications. The latest releases of those applications allow users to have much advanced features and facilities.

DeLorme Street Atlas 2010: This is software that enables users to do things like trip planning, GPS navigation and mapping. This was much harder to learn how to work with it with the software. It is said that the latest edition has removed that complexity and made it easy for the users to use.

Gramin nRoute: This is free software that enables laptop users to make their work easy with the GPS maps. However, users must already have a MapSource product running on your computer for nRoute to work.In addition to those Microsoft AutoRoute and Streets and Tips are some of the other famous applications.

Tracking

A tracking applications are not that much popular as the navigation applications. But, so many people take uses of them. It enables users to find a location of any object that is tagged with a system.

Top Grossing Apps on iTunes: iPhone users can have this facility through the iTune store. This made the iPhone look much smart in its words.

LOCiMOBILE Apps for tracking people: This enables iPhone users to track people in a particular place at a particular time.

GPS Tracking Lite v2.0 is taking the nation by storm: GPS Tracking v2.0 by Locimobile is their biggest update to date application and it includes much advanced features than the others.

Auto pilot Applications

An auto pilot application is software that enables a vehicle to travel automated with the GPS map. These have been tested and made so many applications where the accuracy is also high.

Future of GPS Applications

There can be several further implementations also as this GPS has become widely available. This can be used to provide a solution for the deforestation.  The green plant density of a certain area can be calculated or estimated. With a comparison and analyze, the deforestation rate can be calculate and can ask the officials to pay their attention on those areas.

Cultivation also can be helped with this Global Positioning System. The empty lands can be explored and let the people to cultivate on those areas is something that can help the people to improve their production and the right place for the right product will be available through this system.

The functioning of the currently available GPS is at a very low level. This can be developed with advanced features that could be able to find the areas where marijuana cultivated likewise. The cameras should be much more sensitive to identify such objects. The research things will be easy if that kind of facility can be established. The application developers will have much advanced API for their development that can give a greater outcome.

Other Satiate Grids

IRNSS

It is named as Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System which will be released by 2014 as it was approved by the government in 2006. This will be fully control of the Indian government. This will be totally base on India.

QZSS

Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS) is to be developed by Japan for their GPS coverage.

References

• Forssell, P. B. (2009). The dabgers of GPS/GNSS. Coordinates , 6-10.
• Hlavac, M. (2007, October 11). List of laptop GPS navigation software programs and review. Retrieved May 16, 2010, from laptop gps world: http://www.laptopgpsworld.com/37-list-laptop-gps-navigation-software-programs-reviews

Current Camera Of iPhone

The current version of the iPhone has a 3.0 Megapixels camera in it. With the Auto focus and Tap to focus options, it gives better performances to the user. The video recording performances are also better. It gives a quality video output with 30 frames per second.

Image Management In iPhone

Although the other phones have better quality cameras, they do not provide a better image management system like in iPhone. The iPhone image management system provides facility to manage image galleries according to the subject and may other filtering factors. The competition in the world market today does not looking for the better product, It always needs the best. iPhone provides iTunes to share images from MAC or photoshop album on the PC. Through this synchronization, iPhone became more user friendly for the people who love it.

Next iPhone

The Apple Inc. wishes to release their next version of the iPhone in this June.  Although they tried to hide the specifications and technological stuffs from public, some things were exposed to the public recently. According to that information, people can think of an 80GB device with iPhone 4G phone.

Next iPhone’s Camera

The next iPhone will be equipied with a 5Megapixel camera and that make it a shining sophisticated mobile device in 2010 WWDC event where they plan to release it on next June. The device will have a larger lens than the previous versions and a LED flash light will be there to add light in night or indoor moods. The most important thing is that the internal hardware will be ‘Apple’ specific. The Omnivison’s CMOS image sensors will provide a high accuracy and the quality output.

Camera Applications

BestCamera

The iPhone is looking to make their features from better to best. There is software that allows users to name BestCamera to allow users to do whatever they like to do with images. The next iPhone users are waiting for something new and improved other than what they have seen so far. The user friendly image gallery is one of the most attractive facts that anyone like to see. The user can scroll through the touch screen and add the image effect he needs from the number of available effects. The next iPhone may include more effects and more interactive options. It is said that Adobe Photoshop is the best and easiest software to manage and edit pictures for general users. A person who has used the BestCamera software might think twice before making that statement. The image editing and managing can be easily done through this software. The users expect much better BestCamera software to manage images better than ever.

Snapture

This software gives user a special feature to rotate the phone but not to get the image rotated. Snapture allows the user to take images by tapping anywhere of the screen. In most of the cameras user has to click on a specific button to get a shot. But with this software it makes easy to the user. The volume level zoom control while taking images is another special facility provided by this software. Snapture Premium allows the quick view enhancement. The user can take several snapshots at the same time and check each and every image with just one click. It enables the possibility to delete the rest of images while keeping the one the user wants with. It allows a special feature of making the images of several color modes available in a strip in the left side.

Camera Genius

This enables user to have a non-optical zoom. This gives a clear image without any distortion in it. Sound capture facility enables capturing the images in the place where can get the maximum sound. Different types of guides and timer facilities give user an interactive and special ability to enjoy photography.

Colorsplash

This is a great image management application which was introduced with editing the colors of images. The user can add or edit colors of an image with just a one click.

Future Of iPhone’s Camera And Applications

There are several types of application for the iPhone with various unbelievable features. Although it has come up with several types of sophisticated apps, there will be better in near future. A noise sensor zoom facility will be something new that people can expect. Think of a party, the camera will be auto zoomed to the place where people dancing and singing. Most of the iPhone users are not that good at photography. So the users will be able to take much accurate images with this facility. A run time stop caption will be another great invention. The camera can be improved with the large number of frames per second in it. But think of an application that counts the position in 2 several times and allowing the median to guess the final image. This will be a great invention for any kind of a camera. But for the iPhone users, this will be something special.

No Camera iPhones?

Having a camera is good for someone. But, it may be a reason for someone to not to use an iPhone. Think of people who are working in security zones. So Apple may think of introducing a phone without a camera in the future. Think of a person who works in google, that person will not be able to use the iPhone because of its camera.

References

• Inc., A. (2010). iPhone. Retrieved 05 10, 2010, from Apple Inc.: http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html
• Mokey, N. (2010, 01 26). Best iPhone Apps. Retrieved 05 11, 2010, from Digital Trends: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/the-best-iphone-apps/

History

Flat File System

A Flat File is a database that stores the data in a plain text file. Each line of the file stores a single value. Each field is separated by delimiters such as commas or tabs. Although it can have multiple tables, it cannot have multiple relations as the Relational Databases have.

Relational Databases

The main advantage of Relational Database over the Flat File System is that the proper organization of data that has. A relational database also defines the relationships between those tables. In the relational databases, queries are used to fetch data with the help of the indexes. The relational database technology makes the databases efficient, lighter and faster. Some of the advantages of the relational databases are;

• Bringing tables together using relations
• Provides a structure query language (SQL) to define and manipulate data.
• Security

Object Relational Model: It is also a relational data model but with object orientation in it. It reduces the gap between the conceptual data modeling techniques and object-relational mapping.

Object-Oriented Database

An Object Oriented database is a combination of objects in a persistent storage which holds information. It is quite similar to the object oriented languages. It can be named as the fifth-generation database technology that was began to develop in mid 80’s.  The real world entities are represented like an object in the Object Oriented Data Model.

Multidimensional Database

It is a database system that can be used to utilize the advantages of the databases. It is usually structured to optimize online analytical processing and data warehouse applications. The multidimensional database can receive data from a variety of relational databases and structure the information into categories and sections that can be accessed in number of different ways.

Sub Modules

Engine

There are several tasks done by the DBMS. It accepts various logical requests from various other DBMS sub systems. Then convert those requests into their physical equivalent and actually access the database and data dictionary as they exist on a storage device.

Data definition and manipulation

In Structured query languages, they have four different operations mainly to operate data. They are Select (Retrieve data from a table/tables), insert (insert data to the tables), update (update a certain field of a column) and delete (delete rows). In addition to them there are several other commands for creating, dropping databases, etc…

Administration

The database administration means the maintaining the functionalities and managing the DBMS. There are 3 main types of Administration. They are

• Operation Administration
• Development Administration
• Application Administration

There comes several tools for the database administration and they are called as native tools.

Other services

Security: The security of data is the most important thing. A DBMS allows to let several users to access the database up to several extends. In addition to that the DBMS allows setting passwords. In addition to that the DBMS allows setting passwords. Encrypting the data is another security feature provided by the advanced DBMS.

Disaster recovery: Database Management Systems allows its users to maintain backups. It makes easy to recover when there is a crash of data. In addition to that most of the DBMS provide role back to a previous state in order to undo transactions in a given period..

Indexing: Indexing makes the operations such as insert and update easy. The data is ordered randomly and the way how it was ordered is described by the logic Indexing speed up manipulation of data since it keep a summary of mata date and it make the SQL engine to access the required data without searching whole database.However indexing doesn’t seep duo the data manipulation in the case the query is conditional, like ‘select name from student where age<10’.  In such a scenario SQL engine must go through whole table regardless of the indexed data.

Advantages of Using A DBMS

• Application programs are independent of data representation and data storage details.
• Data is stored and accessed efficiently including the support of very large files and index structures.
• Centralize administration of data shared among many users.
• Let users feel the data is accessed only by him at that time.

Selecting DBMS

Selecting an appropriate DBMS is an important decision in any software application. An inappropriate application in DBMS will result system instability and lower performance. In the software development context is similar to below cases it’s recommended to not to use a DBMS.

• Single-user applications PC applications.
• Non mission critical systems.
• Non security critical systems.
• If the application handles low volume of data
• In low resource environments. (Ex: Mobile Devices)

Current Database Management Systems

There are several Database Management Systems have been introduced as it became much popular. Some of the most popular databases are MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Dataphore etc, and they have their own unique features. Considering them software developers can use them for their projects.

Oracle

• Oracle has many advanced functions such as Real Cluster, Flush back recovery etc.
• Oracle DBA and developer cost higher to hire and train. Oracle price is higher and charge you 22% support/maintains every year.
• For very complicated store procedure, Oracle runs faster.
• Oracle runs on many platforms. SQL Server only runs on Windows.
• If you have a big database needs running on powerful Unix or IBM server, with complicated application. Oracle is a good choice.

MySQL

• Mysql replication works well for backup services and scaling out purposes are available.
• In Mysql master-slave replication model, changes only flow from master to slaves.

MSSQL

• T-SQL (Transaction SQL) enhancements
• CLR (Common Language Runtime)

Future Trends

Although the Database Management Systems have been very much developed, there are some areas yet to be developed. The areas like integrating structured and unstructured data, virtual access of data, and simplifying data management through greater automation and intelligence can be developed more than now they are. A research site estimates that more than 90% of all business data in enterprises is unstructured, but only 5% of unstructured data is stored in databases. The DBMS will address this challenge by supporting all kinds of data and content in its native form with much tighter integration, while sustaining high performance in the future as the experts expect.  In the next few years, DBMS technology and middleware will also evolve to support information fabric, virtual access to heterogeneous data.In addition to those, there will be a growth in e-Commerce and enterprise portals. Demand for commodity front-end database servers will increase and the market for the open source DBMS will be much higher than now.Mobile database suites will be a very good trend in the future and it will enable to access the databases located in the mobile phones.

References

• IBIBO masters. (2007, November 07). What is flatfile system. Retrieved May 07, 2010, from IBIBO: http://sawaal.ibibo.com/computers-and-technology/what-flat-file-system-198192.html
• Fundamentals of Database. In e. &. navathe, Fundamentals of Database,4th Eddition. Pearson Education, Inc.
• Yuhanna, N. (2005, September 29). The Future Of DBMS Technology. Retrieved May 07, 2010, from www.forrester.com: http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/future_of_dbms_technology/q/id/37181/t/2
• insidetech.monster.com. (2009). Retrieved May 2010, from Get a Database Administrator Job: http://insidetech.monster.com/nfs/insidetech/attachment_images/0002/0929/database-250-2_crop380w.jpg

On-Page Optimizing

What Are Keywords?

Keywords are queries you type in when you search on any search engine. In general, people call a collection of words also as “keyword” instead of telling ‘keywords’. When doing the on page keyword optimization, the developers have to consider mainly on 3 factors. They are:

Keyword Density: Too much keyword usage in your site make the search engine feels you as a spammer.  The less amount of usage let the search engine ignore your site. So it is recommended to use at least three times and not more than 5 percent of the content text on your page.

Keyword Variation: The developer can use several variations of the keywords such as plurals, misspellings or changing the order of the available keywords. Misspellings may make the page look not that professional. But it works as an optimization technique.

Keyword Similarity: Providing similar keywords such like ‘single’ for ‘one’ is a good optimization technique that can catch search engine’s eye on your site.

Domain

There is no doubt that keyword rich domain names perform much better in the search engine rankings than the domains without keywords in the domain. The difference cannot be seen that much as each site has its own way of doing optimizing. If you compare one site having keyword in its domain and other not having keyword in domain, you will definitely find a difference after a few months you have host the site.

URL

Having a URL that includes the keyword alone does not help, but it helps when other sites link to another. A lot of people link to others by their URL, thus the anchor text will use the keyword.

Title Tags

Many developers use their site name as the title of the page. It is true that it displays that in the title bar of the browser. But, it is a very easy and efficient way to present keywords rather than displaying site name. Optimized title tags give several advantages on applying SEO to the sites.

• The phrase you were looking for and the title tag both are same. So search results will be highlighted.
• Increase rankings on search engines.
• Helps engines distinguish between pages that might look similar.

Meta Tags

Using Meta-tags are very common thing that developers use. For example;

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Self Storage,self storage containers,business storage,mobile storage,storage centre,storage facility” />

<meta name=”description” content=”this is article about search engine optimizing in Notes Of genius ” />

Header Tags

The header tags only do not catch the user’s attention on the page. It is a great way to let the search engines know what is the subject of your page is. If there is a need to control the size of those tags, you can easily use CSS for that. It is a bad practice that some developers use CSS to control font size other than using the header tags. Any webpage should include single H1 tag and the hierarchy of H2 and H3 tags.

Bold, Italic And Oblique Tags

The same scenario which I described earlier applies to the Bold, Italic and Oblique tags also as they let the search engine have much more attention on them. If the keywords of the websites are shown in using those tags, it will be a great way to do the optimization.

Remove Duplicate Content

In some cases, the duplicate content may cause pages to be filtered at the time of serving of results by search engines. It cannot be guaranteed that this page will be shown and this page will not. Sometimes the content will be removed from the index also.

Off-Page Optimizing

As it says in the name, Off-Page SEO techniques are not applied inside the particular website. Developers can apply them in some other websites.  Some of the most popular techniques are listed as follows.

Create Back Links

There are a number of ways to get create back links.Submiting articles to article directories (such as ezinearticles), and adding the site’s URL to web directories, pay per click and social sites will be effective.

Social Bookmarking

This is much inexpensive than having advertisements, because most of the Social sites provide free service of letting people to have links. Even they charge, the fare is reasonable. Search engines travel around the websites through the links available. Google Robot is the link traveler of the Google search engine. When providing the links to the sites even in advertisements or some other publications, it is good to look to use keywords as the available anchor text.

What Is Google Page Rank

The Page Rank is patented process of Google. This is a good method that overcame the early days search engine ranking that were based only on the content and the Meta tags of the page. Google gives every page a numerical value between 1- 10. This numerical value is called the Google Page Rank of that site and that is updated once in a 3 months. After seeing the accuracy of Google, other search engines also added a page ranking mechanism to their search algorithm.

How To Get Page Ranking In To The website?

The best and easiest way to get the page ranking to a website is to get a link from a highly ranked page. For example getting a link from a page with the rank of 5 can make your site rank as 4 if the site is trusted and if it has less amounts of links like that. It is not that worth getting links from low ranking pages. A page can be ranked 0 if it is punished by Google.

Nofollow Flags

In some of the pages like Facebook and MySpace they have added nofollow flags. After adding a nofollow flag, those back link won’t add any page rank for the target page, in other words it’s not a ‘vote’.

Search Engine Optimization Tools

There are several SEO tools that can be used to optimize the web site easily. There are categorized on each task as follows.

Keyword Discovery

There are several keyword discovery tools that tell us on what topic do people mostly search on the web. You can find them mostly free.

• Google Adwords.
• Trellian Keyword Discovery
• AdCenter keyword Group Detection

Keyword Volume

It shows how many people monthly search for that keyword.

• Google Adwords External Tool
• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

Backlink Tracker

They help to find how many links available for the site from the other sites and how many links available in your site.

• Site Explorer
• Digitalpoint’s Keyword Ranking

Benefits

There are number of benefits of applying SEO to the websites. It can be commercial or social. Most important thing is that designers do not need to pay continuously.

• Perspective
• Targeted Traffic
• Increase Visibility
• High ROI
• Long Term Positioning
• Cost-Effective

Summary

Search engine techniques do not remain same for months. They changes. Some of the very basic techniques of optimizing are listed below. Mostly the Search Engine Optimizers’ task is to build the traffic and give a higher rank to the web site.  Sometimes what they do is not acceptable as good by the search engines. Then the search engines make changes in their algorithms or their techniques. Therefore this is like a battle between search engines and the Optimizers. So the most important thing is to be updated.

References

• Google Optimization. (n.d.). Retrieved 04 03, 2010, from SEO Chat: http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/
• SEO for beginers. (n.d.). Retrieved from TIZAG: http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/
• SEO Questions and Answers. (n.d.). Retrieved 05 03, 2010, from SEO Forums: http://seoforums.org/seo-questions-answers/
• Edgware SEO Company | MiddleSex SEO Company. (2009, December). Retrieved May 2010, from seoarena.wordpress.com: http://seoarena.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/search-engine-optimization.jpg

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.

Technical Specification

• Screen resolution will be 800 x 480(WVGA)
• Following hardware buttons are required for WP7: Start, Back, Bing integrated Search button, Camera and Power button. Some vendor devices can have more buttons than these five. But, these are required.
• Capacitive multi-touch with support for minimum of four contact points.
• A Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU with DirectX 9 graphics support and the platform is flexible enough to expand in future, according to Microsoft.
• 256MB of RAM
• Currently 8GB of internal Flash storage, but no support for microSD cards.
• WiFi support
• AGPS
• Accelerometer
• FM Radio
• 5 MP camera with flash

The ‘Metro’ interface is a type-and-motion heavy interface based on primary colors and lots of minimal, negative space, and this will be a familiar interface for Zune HD users. It has large, bold text that trails off the screen, menus which move dimensionally in and out instead of just side to side, and the sense that you are panning over long, single pages of information, rather than a set of separate panels. The clean, sharp ‘tiles’ which dominate the home screen, completely lacking in any real world-inspired bevels, drop shadows, curves of textures,  dialer, and alphabetical search grid, which looks like they’ve been built out of separate parts from Tempest. There are two themes basically boil down to light text on a black screen and it is the default theme of the OS and dark text on white screen, and you can pick your choice of four accent colors: red, orange, blue and green.

The phone unlock screen includes time, date, upcoming calendar events, number of unread messages, and number of missed calls. When the screen unlocked, it shows the user-configurable and movable ‘tiles’. The tiles can be linked to an application, a specific contact or a website, a photo gallery, playlist. But you can link anything with these tiles. It has an automatic tile sorting system as the user’s favorite list.

Multitasking And Notifications

The Windows Phone 7 series can process only the Microsoft’s core apps in the background. Third party applications cannot run in the background, and it supports push notifications enabling third party apps to send updates to the home screen even when another application is running. As a reason, Microsoft’s says, it eats a lot of battery life.

Page States

The OS support for page states, which is similar to cookies on websites. It is a light weight package that can easily be kept in memory to preserve the look and feel, and data of an app while discarding the memory heavy UI elements. When the app is needed again after the user navigate away from the screen, it reconstructs to its previous state and this process is called ‘dehydration’ and ‘rehydration’.

Hubs Strategy

Windows Phone 7’s Hub strategy is a unique feature for the platform. From the People Hub, you can manage your various mail accounts and social networks in a single view. You can set status updates and check mails in single place, rather than changing applications. The Picture Hub helps you to access your locally stored photos or cloud based social network picture galleries, upload pictures and comment on them. They offer photo editing functionalities as well. The Game Hub is integrated with Xbox Live, where you can use your avatar in there, and Xbox Live games and achievements, Spotlight feeds, and the ability to browse gamer profiles. The Zune HD is your Music + Video Hub in the Windows Phone 7. You can download new music over WiFi and 3G. You can rent or purchase videos as well. Microsoft is working with Pandora to integrate with the hub, utilizing the Zune player to tap into Pandora’s streaming services.

It has its built in Internet Explorer browser, but it’s not fast as mobile safari.

The business people always love Microsoft Windows mobile, as it has many stunning features, and it has a great support for office tools. Windows Phone 7 has great features with multimedia support and the users will love this lot more than before. In near future, we can expect some wonderful add-ons and application for the new product. Most of the games are developed with XNA support and lot of silverlight features has added to it.

References

• Microsoft-7.JPG. (2010, April). Retrieved from sanamalik.com: http://sanamalik.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Microsoft-7.JPG
• Windows phone 7 series the complete guide. (2010, April). Retrieved from engadget.com: http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/18/windows-phone-7-series-the-complete-guide/

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/

New Features in OS 4.0

Multitasking

iPhone’s multitasking solution allow several third party apps to run in the background while the user working with another application. It is handled with a simple task switcher by double click the home button. When click the home button, it will show a list of currently running applications. You have to select the application and it will switch to it. The system gives preferences to running tasks and less preferences to others as needed. It allows the user to pause some applications, while enabling some special service to allow some types of tasks such as answering calls or playing music on the background. Apple has listed seven kinds of services that will give the user the kind of multitasking without choking the system

Background Audio: This can be done apps like Pandora, where user can listen to music while doing another task.

Voice over IP – VoIP: Before multitasking implemented, VoIP applications were limited as they were not active all the time to receive incoming calls

Background Location: There are two kinds of applications—turn-by-turn direction GPS applications like TomTom would run this service in the background to tracks where you are, while you are working on another app, and social networking application like Loopt.

Push notifications: This was already a background task, but it has been expanded in OS 4.0.

Local notifications: These notifications are generated by the iPhone applications and can be sent between the applications. If something important happened in background, a notification will popup whatever the app you are using at the time. This is an effective way of keep tracking between the applications.

Task completion: This will allow applications to finish the tasks started before switching to another application. It pops up an alert when the app task is done, even when you are using some other apps

Fast app switching: This will allow currently running applications to available instantly rather than start them up each time. All the application can now be frozen in full, so when you reopen them, they are restored exactly to the previous state.

iBook

The iBook, which was only available for Apple’s iPad, is now available for iPhone, now you can take your books with you wherever you go as oppose to iPad. iBook now available for iPod Touch as well. Currently it is only available in United States only as it has some complexity of geographic distribution deals with publishers.

iAd

iAd, Apple’s newest interactive advertisement platform. According to Jobs, it offers ‘interaction and emotions’ which is middle of where web ads and TV ads to the app users. Those ads are going to be served without leaving the current app you are working on, and then you can close the ad at any time and return to the app where you left it. It offers variety of interactive options like sounds and video clips and games within the advertisement. According to Jobs, one ad every three minutes would lead to 1 billion ad impression per day over Apple’s 100 million devices. Apple will host the ads and developers will receive 60% of iAd revenue. The iAd is based on HTML5.

New Mail App

Unified inbox with multiple email exchange accounts with fast inbox switching with a few taps. It allows users to open attachments using specific applications. Organized by thread and groups together messages by date.

Application Folders

For better organizing, OS 4.0 has a folder feature. Now, user can create folders according to App Store category, and users can rename it as well.

Game Center

Apple’s going to start a centralized gaming service such as Xbox Live to connect players online and the scores can be viewed anyone on the network. This service will be available by the end of this year.

Bluetooth Keyboard Support

This is another feature taken from the iPad. Now, iPhone 4.0 support Bluetooth Keyboard.

Custom Backgrounds

Now you can choose different backgrounds for your iPhone 4 and not just for the lockscreen

Enterprise Features

• Better data protection: Encrypted emails and PIN coded attachments
• Mobile device management: Lets IT managers to deploy iPhone and manage them remotely
• Wireless app distribution. Companies can push out custom apps over the air instead of relying on iTunes sync.
• Support for multiple exchange accounts
• Support for Exchange server 2010
• SSL VPN support from Juniper and Cisco

Disadvantages

There are many hardware compatibility issues when migrating to iPhone OS 4.0. You cannot have multitasking features in your iPhone 3G and if you want to have that experience, you have to buy a new iPhone with OS 4.0. Even in 3GS model, it does not have a front camera yet, so you cannot take video calls nor do video chat though it is a multimedia phone. These features are mandatory and people are expecting them on upcoming editions. iPhone OS 4.0 does not support Java. There are number of free Java applications available all over the net but you cannot use them. They have HTML5 as an alternative for Flash. This might be a good idea but you cannot watch flash videos or browse flash sites. Only few sites support HTML5 Currently such as YouTube.

Competitors

While Apple is trying to implement the multitasking, the windows mobile has implemented it years ago. From the services and enterprise level, Windows mobile is in a leading level around the globe. There are no free things in Apple, if you want a book, you have to buy it from iBook, and for music, you need pay and download it from iTunes. But in windows mobile, there are large number of sites and lot of applications available for free. People love Apple, because of its multimedia features, and it has a great support for gaming. But the future of the Apple’s stability is depends on what are the enterprise level services it offers, how much it supports for free and open source software, and how much its applications support world wide. Most of its features limited to United States. Even though it has many wonderful features, not everyone can get benefit out of them.

After all, there is a question mark in my mind. Will iPhone OS 4.0 be able beat its competitors even with these upgrades?

References

• (2010, April). Retrieved April 2010, from media.techworld.com: http://media.techworld.com/cmsdata/products/3219758/iPhone%20OS%204.jpg
• Iiphone OS 40 All The New Features. (2010, April). Retrieved April 2010, from Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/5512635/iphone-os-40-all-the-new-features
• iPhone OS 4.0: Multitasking arrives (live blog). (2010, April). Retrieved April 2010, from Cnet: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20001876-37.html
• New iphone os 4 features. (2010, April). Retrieved April 2010, from The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/08/new-iphone-os-4-features_n_530401.html#s79663

OpenID identity is actually not a username and password system. Technically, they are URLs. Something likes this,

• http://claimid.com/username
• http://username.myopenid.com
• http://me.yahoo.com/username

You have to give your credentials to the OpenID provider website, and the provider is responsible to notify the other sites that you are who you claim to be. After you have claimed the authentication and authorization, you can use the website as a registered logged in user. Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect are some examples of OpenID. The main difference in the OpenID is a single company does not control it. There are number of companies you can choose to obtain an OpenID.

To use the OpenID credentials, the website should have the OpenID login feature, and if you can find the OpenID logo somewhere on the webpage, you can use your OpenID to login. This form then connects with the OpenID client library.

Behind The Scene

There are two parties involved in an OpenID transaction, Consumer and Provider. A Consumer (also called a Relying Party) is an OpenID enabled web site. A Provider plays the role as a registrar. It allows users to create and manage OpenID URLs and accounts, and authenticates the user to Consumers. This is an open source framwork service, and anyone can be a Consumer or a Provider without any cost of licensing fees. You can find a large number of web applications allow users to log in using the OpenID credentials and number of sites have become the service Providers all over the web.

When a user tries to log into a Consumer site using OpenID, the Consumer site contacts the Provider to verify the user’s credentials. The user may be redirected to the Provider and asked to sign in using Provider password. When its done successfully, the user will automatically redirected to the Consumer site with granted access as a registered user.

Getting Started With OpenID

To use OpenID, you should have an OpenID account with one of the many providers on the web. If you have an account with Google, Yahoo, AOL, LiveJernal, Blogger, Flickr, MySpace or any other common big name OpenID  providers, then you already have an OpenID. If you want, you can have an OpenID account with some dedicated OpenID providers, such as MyOpenID or ClaimID. This is called as ‘home base’. Even if you choose any of the services, you’ll get a unique URL that you can use around the web.

Getting Used To OpenID

The main confusion of using OpenID is, it is not a normal username and password but it is usually a URL something looks like this: http://username.providername.com.

To log into an OpenID enabled Consumer site

• Find the OpenID logo somewhere on the web page
• Paste your OpenID URL in the provided text field and press Enter
• You’ll be asked to sign into you account back at your ‘home base’. You have to provide the username and the password to the ‘home base’ account.
• At last, you will have to provide some of your basic details like your name and profile picture.

That is all. No need to register, no need to confirm.

Benefit Of OpenID For Different Level Of Internet Users

General Internet User

• Convenient online experience: Do not have to memorize a number of username and password for different sites
• Security: If you could find a secure OpenID provider, the phishing attack surface is reduced.

E-Commerce And OpenID Consumers.

• Being an OpenID consumer, they can give a simple user registration to the users. This will give a major attractiveness for website.
• With the user’s approval, the OpenID let know more about the visitors to the consumers to target their market
• Can be prevent from identity theft, as the login information can be retrieved from OpenID

OpenID is not a perfect solution for a normal user, until he’s getting used to it, and to prevent the security problem, the user must choose a secured OpenID provider.

References

• (2010). Retrieved on 2010, April from wired.com: http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Use_OpenID
• (2010). Retrieved on 2010, April from zdnet.com: http://blogs.zdnet.com/digitalID/?p=78
• (2010). Retrieved on 2010, April from penn-olson.com: http://www.penn-olson.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/openid.gif

*Both terms “Photoshop” & “Ps” will be used interchangeably throughout the article.

Getting Started

What do you want to do?

First of all, you must find the answer to this question because how effectively you can use PS will be decided depending on your requirement. More specifically, you should clarify whether you need PS to work with or not. For an example, if you have to work with a lot of shapes, lines, illustrations & such things (which are called vector graphics), then you may use Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw or Inkscape etc. rather than Photoshop. (Inkscape is a good open source alternative for vector graphics.) This is because those applications are designed specifically to work with vector graphics whereas Photoshop is not so. Photoshop is basically appropriate to design & edit pixel based images.

Does it suit my work?

Think of the range of the work you need to get done. If you just want to do relatively simple things, you can use Microsoft Paint or an open source alternative such as GIMP rather than going for PS. Because, you must consider whether you would use a simple &/or easily reachable software or a highly expensive product (though powerful) such as Photoshop to create a simple birthday card (at the time I’m writing this, the retail price of Photoshop CS4 Extended version is US$999).

It’s just a tool

This is a very important thing that you must keep in mind, when working with Photoshop (this is applicable to any technology you would use, indeed). Though it’s a nice piece of software, in the end the output will depend on your talent. Hence, you must try to put some degree of creativity in to your work.

Installation

Currently, Photoshop supports only Microsoft Windows & Apple Mac OS X platforms. Following are some of the minimum requirements for the installation of PhotoshopCS4 Extended version on the windows platform, as recommended by Adobe.

• Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (Service Pack 3 recommended) or later
• 1.8GHz or faster processor
• 512MB of Ram (1GB recommended)
• 1GB free hard-disk space for the installation & additional space required during the installation.
• 1024×768 (1280×800 recommended) display with 16-bit video card

If your computer has a multi-core processor, you will feel better. From my personal experience, it’s better to have at least 1GB of memory, if you’re going to work with a lot of effects & higher resolutions. For the program files (including the additional software), it takes only about half of the required disk space. The rest is taken up during the installation process. It will be better if you have a larger monitor (at least 17”), since there is enough space & higher resolution that will be helpful to improve the quality.

Preparation

Before start working in Photoshop, we may do two things.

• Identify the workspace
• Setting up the preferences

Identify the workspace

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended – Screenshot

After the installation, open the application and you will see a similar interface as shown above. Here is a little introduction to the environment, in which you’re going to work.
*If you have uninstalled CS4 Extended version before, you might see that, there is an option in the un-installation process as “Remove Application Preferences”. Before uninstalling, if you had customized the PS preferences, workspace & other settings, & if you didn’t check that option to remove the preferences at the un-installation, you might get a little different workspace than the default view shown above.

Application Bar

Though it has a new look, it contains some of the already known, common features. Therefore it makes reaching those tools from a single location easier.

Workspace Switcher

This is a new useful feature. It automatically & very quickly modifies the workspace according to the user’s choice. This includes options such as, “Basic, Advanced 3D, Video, Web” & more. As the name implies, when the user selects one of those options, the PS workspace is automatically changes according to the selected option. Mostly, these modifications are done regarding the palettes (by default, placed at the right). For an example, if you choose “Typography”, the workspace will be modified by showing up the palettes such as Character, Paragraph & Styles, which allow you to do modification to the text in your documents such as change the font attributes, setup the alignments & apply various effects. If you have worked with any older version of PS, probably you might have faced the problem of reaching the necessary palettes & other tools to get your work done. For example, if we had to paint something & the Brush palette is closed or not popped up, then in the old way, we will have to choose it from the Window menu or take it in to the front to be visible. Since this new enhanced feature offers us almost all the necessary tools that are needed to do a specific task, we don’t have to repeatedly go looking for it & get bored. Also, there is an option at the end of this menu as “Save Workspace”. This allows us to save the workspace we customized as desired. This may increase the ease of using the software further. Choose different options & observe the changes happen in the environment & their features. The default workspace is “Essential”. So for now, you may leave it as it is.

Main Menu

As you might have seen in most application software, PS has a main menu bar which includes menus for almost all the tools we need to work with. As usual, there are shortcut keys to most of them.

Options Bar

As you can see in the above screen shot, the option bar is placed by default below the main menu bar. As the name implies, this area includes the options related to the tool you have currently selected. Choose several tools from the tools palette. You may notice that, some options are unique & some options are common for several tools.

Tools Palette

This includes various tools to work in PS which we use very often at work. There are single tools & grouped tools. You can identify the grouped tools by a little triangle at the lower right corner of those tools. To see & choose the hidden tools of the grouped tools, right click on the tool. Then you’ll be able to view the related sub tools.

Other Palettes

Except the Tools palette, the rest of the palettes are usually placed or to be placed at the right side. While we use the tools in the tools palette to do various tasks such as drawing, painting, cutting & typing, the rest of the palettes include a lot of options to make adjustments to those work.

The Document Window

His window consists of the working area with some other features such as the zoom level, document size etc. at the bottom. We can have our opened documents docked in one window in a tabbed manner or undock them as we desire.

Setting up the Preferences

Here, we’re going to look in to some configurations in PS CS4 Extended, & modify them as necessary. Setting up the configuration to meet our needs will make it easier efficient to use the software once we’ve started working.
First, open Photoshop & choose Edit > Preferences > General from the main menu (Ctrl + K). Now, you must have got the dialogue window as below.

Preferences Dialogue Window - General Tab

I feel it’s better to introduce some options displayed here, which might be useful to you so that you can adjust them as you need. Here are some options appear in the “General tab”.

Auto-Update Open Documents

Assume that, you need to work on the same image in both PS & some other application (GIMP for an example) at the same time. When you did some changes to the image in GIMP & saved them, you may have to close & re-open the same image in PS to see those changes. But, if you enable this option, you won’t need to do so. Meaning, when you saved some changes to the image in GIMP, you just have to come back (focus) to PS. You’ll see that, the changes you made in GIMP are updated in the same image without having to re-open. So, this is a really useful option, if you have to work on the same image in two places at the same time. By default, this option is disabled (not checked) in PS CS4 Extended version.

Zoom with Scroll Wheel

Check this option if you need to zoom using the scroll wheel of the mouse. I think this is the easiest to way to do so. If you enable this option, you won’t be able to scroll the window up & down using the scroll wheel as it is in the normal way. Hence to do it, you must hold down the Alt key while you’re scrolling using the wheel. If you want to get an even zoom ratio, you may also hold down the Shit key (as well as Alt) while you’re zooming in or out using the scroll wheel. But, if you use the zoom tool in the tools palette, you will always get an even value for zooming. This option is also disabled by default.

Zoom Clicked Point to Center

Not checked by default. When this option is checked, whenever you click on some location of an image to zoom, that point becomes the center of the view. This is useful when you have to zoom in to a large value because, without this option you might have to scroll to the required location since it might be not appeared in the viewable area.

History Log

Assume that, you did a really good work but you forgot how you did it when you want to do it again. If it’s a simple work, then you may find it out easily. But, it’s not that easy when it comes to a lot of drawings, text, effects, etc. as you’ll have to spend a lot of time & effort to find how you did it. This option is very useful in a context like that. Check the option, & then you’ll be allowed to choose one of three options. If you just want to store the editing details for your own purpose, just select the option called “Text File”. If you’re selecting that option for the first time, you will be asked for a location to save the file.   Under the History Log, there is another option called “Edit Log Items”. By default the “Sessions Only” option is selected. It just stores the details of opening & closing of PS & each file with date, time details. If you select the second option called “Concise”, the session details & the data appearing in the “History palette” will be saved. The last option “Detailed” allows saving all of the previously mentioned details as well as the details appearing in the “Actions palette”. This option is useful to you, if you need to track the complete history.

A History Log File (With Detailed tracking)

Now, select the Performance tab from the left side and the Preference options will be displayed. There are some important configurations that directly reflect the effect at work.

Preferences Dialog Window - Performance Tab

Memory Usage

Here you can see the available free RAM capacity from the total RAM capacity installed in your computer. “Ideal Range” is the suggested RAM capacity to assign to Photoshop by itself. Percentagewise it is usually around 70%. You can assign the suggested value of RAM or a value decided by yourself using the “Let Photoshop Use” text box or by dragging the slider. This is a critical setting. It’s better, if you assign at least 50% of the available RAM. When you’re working with a lot of images &/or with higher resolutions you will be required more memory. Anyway, it’s  not a good idea to assign the entire available RAM to PS.

History & Cache

“History States” is to specify a number of history states to appear in the History palette, that can be used later to go back to some points of your working. “Cache Levels” helps to speed up the redraw of images with higher resolutions. The default value is 4. To disable caching, select the value 1. However, don’t disable this option. A value less than 4 is suited to work with lot of layers but with a small number of pixels. A higher value is good to work with large documents, but with fewer layers.

Scratch Disks

Works like the virtual memory of an operating system. When there is no enough RAM  memory to work, it will free some memory from the specified drive/s &/or from the partition/s. PS detects the internal disk partitions & list them here as you can specify them. Usually the disk partition, on which the operating system is installed, is selected as the primary scratch disk by PS automatically.  You might not able deactivate it from the list, but you can assign another partition as you desire. Adobe recommends implementing the scratch disks in a different drive/partition than the one, where the operating system uses the free disk space as its virtual memory. This is because if the operating system’s virtual memory uses the free disk space, where both virtual memory & the PS scratch disk are at one place, then if there is no sufficient free disk space to be allocated by the PS scratch disks, it will affect the performance PS critically. If you get the error message from PS as “The scratch disk is full”, then you will have to free some disk space by deleting PS temporary files. You may find them named in a format as “~PST####.tmp”, where “####” is a number. If you don’t want to free the disk space manually, you can use “Windows Disk Cleanup” or similar tool to do so.

GPU Settings

CS4 & CS4 Extended versions include this feature. GPU means the “Graphics Processing Unit” of the graphics display card installed in your computer. GPU improves the screen redraw instead of using the main processor of the computer for that. “Screen redraw” means, redisplay something on the screen. This is required when some modifications are made to the current drawing of the screen. The support of GPU for OpenGL (v 2.0), 126MB of RAM & Shader Model 3.0. Otherwise, this option might have disabled. This feature is useful to work smoothly while     zooming, rotating & working with 3D objects in CS4 Extended version, etc.
These preferences might be very useful to anyone, who is going to work with Photoshop CS4 Extended version. Except Other than these, you can find more options in the preferences. You can check them out by yourself if you want. This article focuses only on some configurations, which are critical to the performance.
So, this is your time. Check these out & you’ll be ready to get started. Whenever you want to set the default settings (such as preferences, workspace, etc) hold down the Ctrl, Alt & Shift keys as soon as you open the PS. This must be done before the initialization process at the startup. If you did it correctly, you will be asked to delete the current Photoshop settings file. Click “Yes”. Then the software will opened with default settings configured.

References

• (2010, April). Retrieved from adobe.com: http://www.adobe.com
• Adobe Photoshop CS4 – What’s New, Adobe Systems. (2008). Adobe Systems.
• Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended Workspace. (2008). Adobe Systems.
• Dan Moughamian, Wiley Publishing. (2009). Adobe Photoshop CS4 Bible, Stacy Cates.
• Morris, T. (2008). Adobe Photoshop CS4 Keyboard Shortcuts

Augmented reality changed the way the users see the world. Augmented Reality enhances a user’s perception of and interaction with the real world.  The virtual objects display information that the user cannot directly detect with their own senses.  The information conveyed by the virtual objects helps a user perform real-world tasks. The base of the augmented reality is on computer graphics. Next-generation augmented-reality systems will display graphics for each viewer’s perspective. Augmented reality (AR) works on the same principles as virtual reality.  Augmented reality overlays virtual objects and information over the real world, unlike VR (Virtual Reality) where the user is immersed in a completely virtual environment. This is usually achieved by the use of see-through head mounted displays and tracking devices.

Applications

iPhone

There are augmented reality iPhone and Smart Phone applications released in to the market. iPhone’s Layar application is a nice example for augmented reality. The Layar augmented reality browser looks at an environment through the phone’s camera and overlays data on top of points of interest such as restaurants, shops and tourist attractions. The app retrieves information from third-party developers who contribute their “layers” to the Layar platform. For example, there is a layer called iMetro, and when that’s selected and you’re standing outside, Layar will display digital overlays of nearby bus stops and the time the next bus is arriving.

There is an augmented reality feature which can be accessible through Easter egg in iPhone 3GS, which is activated by shaking the handset three times. A message will appear reading, “The Monocle has been activated,” and then a Monocle button will appear in the upper-right corner. Tapping that button will launch your iPhone camera, and digital overlays of business listings, accompanied by star ratings, appear on screen. The app presumably draws its geo-aware powers from the iPhone 3GS’ digital compass and GPS.

SmartPhone

There’s a smartphone app named Recognizr uses recognition software to create a 3-D model of a person’s mug. Then it transmits the model to a server, which matches it with an image stored in the database. An online server performs facial recognition, shoots back a name of the subject, and links to his social networking profiles.

Medical

In Medical, Augmented Reality technology could provide an internal view of the human body to 3-D digital dataset in real time. This can be reduced the need for larger incisions.

Military

In military, aircraft and helicopters have used Head-Up Displays (HUDs) and Helmet-Mounted Sights (HMS) to superimpose vector graphics upon the pilot’s view of the real world. Besides providing basic navigation and flight information, these graphics are sometimes registered with targets in the environment, providing a way to aim the aircraft’s weapons.

Transportation

Transportation navigation is one of the main achievements of Augmented Reality. Modern GPS navigation systems using street views which contain augmented reality technologies.

Business and Marketing

In the business world, Augmented Reality could be a really good marketing tool among businesses. Best Buy is a good example for AR advertisement.

In Future It Can Be Used To

• Entertainments, where real world people can be interact with virtual objects. This can be used in gaming environments perfectly.
• Transportation signs and signals, where the roadside signs can be created virtually and placed
• Road vehicles’ navigation system can be replaced with AR technology. Where the driver can interact with the real world virtually.
• Without leave the house, people can do the shopping. Find, match, and change products with a single touch.
• Documents can be created in real world by virtual objects such as virtual AR word processing software.

Disadvantages

Even though Augmented Reality has a lot of advantages, it has some disadvantages as well. Currently, the cost for the technology is high. Therefore, not every people might able to take the advantage of the technology. The GPS on a mobile phone normally only gives a position within around 20 meters, while the iPhone’s compass orientation is only accurate to around 20 degrees. This can lead to problems in determining exactly what’s within the camera’s view.

References

• (2010, 04). Retrieved from cs.unc.edu: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/ARpresence.pdf
• (2010, 04). Retrieved from augmentedrealreality.com: http://augmentedrealreality.com/
• (2010, 04). Retrieved from howstuffworks.com: http://www.howstuffworks.com/augmented-reality.htm#
• (2010, 04). Retrieved from vr.ucl.ac.uk: http://www.vr.ucl.ac.uk/projects/arthur/arthur2.jpg
• (2010, 04). Retrieved from wired.com: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/tag/augmented-reality/
• (2010, 04). Retrieved from venturebeat.com: http://venturebeat.com/2010/01/27/augmented-reality-the-next-generation/

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

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.

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/

• 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

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