TECHNOLOGY-All That Matters Today

What is special about Node.js?

2012-01-25T09:35:00.001-08:00

I am not a Node.js programmer, but an aspirant to give it a try and try to do some real time stuff. Few days back, I came across this link on wired Theres are lots of things given in that link, but I have copied the best lines which I think is the best summations about Node.js

Node is the successor to Ruby on Rails, the programming framework that made it big when Twitter made it big. “First there was C, which Amazon was written in,” he told us this past spring. “Then there was Perl, and Craigslist was written in Perl. Then there was PHP and Facebook, and then Rails and Twitter. With each of these things, they solved a lot of hard problems, but then new problems arrived. Node solves the next set of hard problems, the problems that come with all this real-time stuff.”

I have been a great fan of real-time things. Also I was amazed when I saw Google doing real time analytics at Google Analytics. Since then, I am just tapping my feet to get Nodejs running of my laptop and have a taste of it. Hope the above paragraph was useful to you.

Thanks.
See you again soon.

Comman line error in BlackBerry app development

2012-01-16T09:23:00.000-08:00

Hello all, not much to share with you all, but some serious but silly problem that bugged me for a while. I was trying to create a simple BlackBerry project, HelloWorld and I faced with an error when I started running the project.

Command Line Error - BlackBerry Smartphone Simulator
----------------------------------------------------
Unknown option: World
Try "fledge /help" for command line help.

Later I found the solution on Google.

Solution
Just remove any spaces from your project name. Thats it.

This is a silly thing that RIM allowed to pass in into BlackBerry JDE plugin.
anyways, see you soon with some new stuff.

Growing your contact network on IntouchId

2012-01-08T07:43:00.000-08:00

Hi folks, its been a great time to see ya all.

Today I am going to talk on something really different. Its not technology, its not programming, its not some kinda break through that I have done. But its about a small innovation, which I believe should grow out and become a de-facto standard of sharing contact information between people.

Image even in the world of Quad Core smart phones and tablets, we still exchange contact information like an idiot. One guy asks the other for his/her cell no. then the first one types and missed calls the other one and then they save the numbers, that too in a static manner. Tomorrow either of these guys looses the number and they again exchange the contact information in the same static way.

I mean, common man, we are all living in 2012. Here phones are smarter, TVs are smarter, even Web is smart enough to work, even in the situations of absence of Internet connectivity.

ok, so what exactly is this magic, I am going to talk about. Its the magic.

What is IntouchId?

IntouchId is a great way to share contact information and stay intouch with people forever.
No matter how many cell phone devices you change, no matter if your phone contacts are lost or entire phone is lost.

And at the top of all, its not only about phone nos. Its about
1. Emails
2. Addresses
3. Contact Notes

They have mobile apps for almost all types of mobiles, Android, Apple iOS, BlackBerry, J2ME and Nokia's Symbian. In addition to this, they also have browser plugins to view your contact information from within the browser.

Beside, IntouchId also creates event pages which help you connect with people you meet at different events and share contact information with them.

Hope you have got an idea of what exactly IntouchId is. If you have any questions, feel free to throw them up in the comments.

Using Google Analytics with HTML5 or PhoneGap apps

2011-11-26T06:49:00.001-08:00

Hello all, this time I am back after so many days and have brought with me some cool stuff related to HTML5 and PhoneGap mobile web applications. I had been going thorugh Google Analytics SDK for Android and figured out that they have a really cool way of tracking app usage of Native android apps.

What about mobile web apps developed using HTML5, CSS and Javascript or say PhoneGap.?

:( :( ;( .... !#*"&!)£+=$;^"%.... developers cry.

Putting the javascript code provided by Analytics Dashboard does not work in case of Android web applications. I have already tried it.

So I begun my challenge of achieving this. I wrote a simple app which had a couple of couple of HTML pages in it. To get such an app running into the Android mobile device, we essentially create a WebView component and then load the first HTML page of the app into this webview. Then the user is good to play with your application.

Now getting back to the Analytics tracking of this web app, I used the code provided by Google here.
So the code becomes somewhat like this.

public class  myWebApp  extends Activity{

Webview mWebview;
GoogleAnalyticsTracker tracker;

  protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

tracker = GoogleAnalyticsTracker.getInstance();

// Start the tracker in manual dispatch mode. The following UA-xxxxxxx-x code must be replaced by //your web property ID.

tracker.startNewSession("UA-xxxxxxx-x", this);

mWebview = new WebView(this);
  mWebview .setWebViewClient(new myWebViewClient());

mWebview .loadUrl("file:///android_asset/www/index.html");

private class myWebViewClient extends WebViewClient

{

//After the user visits a particular page, send the tracking notification to GoogleAnalytics.

@Override

public void onPageStarted(WebView view, String url, Bitmap favicon)

{

tracker.trackPageView(mWebview.getUrl());

tracker.dispatch();

}

On the similar lines, PhoneGap also uses the WebView component to get the app running in Android. So the same code(or little bit modified) can be used to track user engagement in the PhoneGap applications.

This feature should be used to determine the user engagement into your application and nothing more than that. It will help you figure out which features of your application are used more by your user and enhance the user experience, user interface of such features.

Note: It should be made sure that your application conforms to the terms and policies of Google Analytics.

HTML5 Support in Android 4.0

2011-10-20T10:58:00.001-07:00

Hello Android folks and mobile freaks, just about a day before I came to know that Google has shipped out its long watched Android 4.0 aka Ice-Cream Sandwich operating system for mobiles as well as tablet devices.

Thought it would be great to take a ride on Android 4.0 browser & test out its support for HTML5. Just fired up some code and found out that there are some good improvements in 4.0 browser.

CSS3

Javascript APIs

Input attributes

Input types

Miscellaneous

Sorry for posting the snaps directly this way, but had been busy with work, anyways, the purpose is conveyed. Feel free to share the article as well as above snaps.

Using Google Docs as database in cloud

2011-10-02T10:55:00.001-07:00

Hello all,

sorry for long awaiting, just had been busy with work, as usual.

For sometime back, I was looking for something using which I can control the data on client applications. I could definitely host a server for this and it could get me the work done, but that was not what I wanted.

I wanted to achieve this without hosting a server, I thought, why not use Google Docs as a database and get done what I want.

In the sample project that I have created for you people, I have used Google Docs as simply a READ_ONLY database, I did not explore into how to use it on READ_WRITE mode. So this is the limitation you people are going to face.

Now all I have to do is just change the data on the spreadsheet in google docs and my client application gets the updated data in a while. But please note that, this takes some time for data to appear on the client, for me it once took entire one day.

Heres the download link for the sample project, which is hosted on Google Code website.

One look at BlackBerry App Development

2011-09-13T10:18:00.000-07:00

Recently I happened to take a look at BlackBerry mobile operating system while I started developing some applications for my day job.

And to the astonishment of myself, I discovered that it is a fabulous operating system. I just wonder why has it not attracted the developers' attention as yet. Some of the key features that I would like to enlist here are:

Great documentation with embedded code samples.
Pretty good device emulators and enough of them.
BlackBerry OS 6.0 exhibits Webkit based advanced browser.
Extensive API to do almost everything.
Free App Developer registration.
Monetization through ads.
App Developer gets paid in Paypal account(which is a great feature over Android Market, where app selling is not allowed in lot many countries.)

Also, as now I have got into BlackBerry, I was curious to know where are they heading these days. BlackBerry OS 7 is currently in Beta and it is also one of the good and promising mobile OS(I dont say that it will take over iOS or Android, but definitely RIM can breath with this OS flavor in the market for a while.)

One of the great things with BlackBerry now, is that they provide Webkit based advanced browser, which greatly supports mobile app development frameworks like JQueryMobile and Sencha Touch. Again this is great opportunity for Cross-platform or Hybrid App developers.

I dont know to what extent BlackBerry will attract developers, but looking at OS 7, better documentation, better and alive official forum (as opposed to Nokia's) and support of Standards based web browser will definitely play good for their recent future.

HTML5 Application Cache Tutorial

2011-08-25T09:13:00.001-07:00

Hello all, not much time to talk about. Here straight way we goto the tutorial of HTML5 Application Cache. I hope u know what it is and how useful it is, if not, I will tell you in short.

Application Cache or AppCache is HTML5 feature using which whole or a part of website can be made available offline. It has following great advantages.

Make your web apps available offline.
Load your web apps faster.
Reduce the server load.
Save bandwidth.

There are some changes to be made on server in order to provide support for AppCache.

If you are using Apache, LAMP, WAMP, MAMP or any other server based on Apache, follow the steps below.

1. Goto appropriate installation directory or search for httpd.conf file.
2. Add 'AddType text/cache-manifest .appcache' to it and save the file.
3. Restart the server.

Or if you are using Google App Engine. Put the following code in your app.yaml file.

- url: /mystaticdir/(.*\.appcache)

  static_files: mystaticdir/\1

  mime_type: text/cache-manifest

  upload: mystaticdir/(.*\.appcache)

Now you are set to use AppCache for the content hosted from this server.

Download the AppCache Demo Project from here and open index.html

Use Google Chrome to study this sample application. In Chrome browser press 'Ctrl+Shift+I' to open Chrome Developer Tools and click on resources tab. When the index.html downloaded from the above project is loaded in the browser. You should see something link as shown in the picture.

cached resource from your localserver

Now just open the cache manifest file and change the version no. in it. Make some change to the already cached files and click refresh in the browser. The newly changed file is cached again.

Application Cache can be used by mobile phones also to make web apps more responsive. Android 2.2 and above supports HTML5 Application Cache.

Update: You can check out what has been cached and what not in your Chrome browser by typing 'chrome://appcache-internals' in the address bar.

Update: If you want to check support for various HTML5 features in your browser, you can use the following Apps.

Chrome App
Android App

Creating Nested List using jQueryMobile

2011-08-13T21:29:00.000-07:00

Hi folks, for the past 2 days I have been working on creating a small demo nested list for mobile applications using jQueryMobile(JQM).

jQueryMobile is one of the most famous mobile UI framework. It is based on jQuery and currently in Beta. Thought its Beta, the perfomance of Nested Lists using JQM is really good on low end mobile devices as well. I have tested it for only Android 2.2 though.

What I have noticed while writing my last two mobile Apps using JQM is that list transition is more responsive than page transition. I had to put much time to get JQM Nested Lists working, so I just created a simple nested list application shown in the picture above. Its freely available for download under GNU GPL v3 Open Source License. The link for the open source page is JQM Nested List.

Update: After downloading the code given below, please do open it using a webkit based browser like Google Chrome or Apple Safari.

Download Nested List Demo Code

Sencha Touch vs jQueryMobile

2011-07-23T06:37:00.000-07:00

Hello all my dear visitors, techno geeks and novice users. Today I will list out some outstanding features, Pros and Cons of mobile App development frameworks which I could figure out while learning to develop using them.

Since last couple of months, I have been working on content driven mobile apps.

I have had a good experience in learning both of these mobile frameworks while developing these two applications.

JQM and ST, both are HTML5 based Mobile App development frameworks.

Sencha Touch:

Steep learning curve, means it will take you time to learn and implement Apps using Sencha Touch. Better understanding of JavaScript is required, but extremely powerful API.
Lots of UI controls like buttons, panels, window, list, nested list, layouts and more native look and feel.
Faster across variety of mobile devices from Android 2.1 and up.
Sencha touch, one of the first mobile App frameworks, runs gracefully in webkit based browsers.
e.g.
Android and iOS, and probably Meego also, I never tried it.

JQueryMobile:

Very easy to learn and implement.
Not too many UI controls.
Currently it is beta, consequently slower across mobile devices. Expected to be improved a lot when stable version is released.
JQM, hails from a royal family of frameworks and spawned from community of jQuery, the most famous cross platform JS library. Works great with mobile browsers from Symbian, Android through iOS to Blackberry, Window Phone 7, WebOS.

Conclusion: Both the frameworks are good and it depends upon your app requirements which one to use.

If too much of work is to be done, just using HTML5 and JS, Sencha Touch is more appropriate. In case, you just need the UI and rest of the work needs to be done in native programming, JQM is more suitable.

How to learn to develop for Android/anything.!!!

2011-06-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Its been around a month or so I have been learning Android. I have got nice experience with the books I have been learning Android from. So just wanted to share my experience with all you guys.

I started of learning Android when I felt like I have a good hold of Java. My protocol to learn computers is simple, take a reference book/reference website and start reading.

This is something I have seen many people criticizing. They say, why take a book and learn,
They would say
1. Write some App and you will learn it.
2. Use Google to learn things on the fly.

1. Write some App and you will learn it.
But what I believe is writing an App will give knowledge of that particular API part that you have used in your App.

For instance, I will give you a scenario. It was sometime when I had written my own Download Manager in Java. I developed it all though, I never came into a scenario where I would want to change color of JPanel. When I was doing some other project, I ran into such a scenario and learned something interesting about changing it background color.

JPanel jp = new JPanel();

a. jp.setBackgroundColor(); // did not work, as I tried a lot.
b. jp.getContentPane.setBackgroundColor(); // DID WORK.

Merely writing an App did not teach me these things. I had to read it somewhere.

Using Google to learn something, what methinks, is wrong. It wont teach you anything, it will just get you the work done.

2. Use Google to learn things on the fly.

Google is, not doubt, a great utility to use to learn something. But let me ask, did I just say 'learn something', it should be 'get done something'.
As you all know, by profession, I am a software developer. I keep working on computer, solving problems, developing something everyday. When I need to do to something I have been asked for, I just google it, get the solution and do the work. Thats it.

But did I learn something? No, I just got done something.

For example,
take another scenario(This is a very basic example, but imagine of some bigger than this). I want to embed some HTML page in my android project. My naive approach would be, I will fire Android Web Browser, to show the HTML page.

Now, I have been through the API using either a reference book or Android reference website. I know there is something called WebView in Android that can be used to display HTML in the currently running App itself, than firing separate browser process and display it.

Another instance, try writing HTML5 App, you get all the help and code snippets using Google. But referring to W3C website is always good. In a sneak peek it will give a view of what method and properties are provided by that HTML5 API rather than just getting you work done using Google

So I would suggest, learning things from their respective reference website/guide is always better. I am not saying to by-heart everything, just a watchful overview might take about 3 days or a week or a couple of weeks, but will do great.

The biggest advantage to reading from books/ reference websites is
1. You can fore plan how your project is going to behave and how its going to be developed.
2. What would be the correct design patter for it.
3. You can easily figure out what is easily possible and what is going to take tolls.

So coming back to learning Android. I bought 2 books and what I have found about these books. (Note: none of these books act as guide books)

1. Wrox Professional Android 2 Application Development.
Its a good book to get started with. They seem to be missing somethings sometimes, but later in chapter 5 they caught the track.

2. Manning Android in action.
It is ok, but its more App development oriented. I needed something that will teach me how to play around with basic building blocks of Android.

for example, teaching me how to fire an Intent and invoke BroadCast Receiver or how to create a service which count till 100 in the background etc.

3. Hello Android (e-learning)
This is totally Application development based book. They teach me developing for Android from the perspective of tick-tac-toe. Though you are doing it step by step, it comes to the case explained in '1. Write some App and you will learn it.' above.

Conclusion:
I did not find any book which gives me a reference of API as well as they small demos with code to use those APIs
I would suggest, learning from Developer Guide from official Android website. I am currently referring the same while developing for Android.

Above is my perception of learning things.

Thanks and bye. I expect a lot of criticism for this blog post. You can just fill it in the comments box below.

Google Reader, best way to stay in touch with the latest tech updates.

2011-06-03T22:16:00.000-07:00

I have been using Google Reader for about an year and I have noticed that among my friends hardly does anyone know about it. Google Reader is an online RSS Reader Application by Google.

I have been addicted to read news using Google Reader ever since I started using it. Its one of the best Applications ever by Google and greatly helps me in staying updated with the news from Silicon Valley, Mobile Technologies, Internet, Android etc.

The video below will explain you in plain English what is and how to use, Google Reader.

I can suggest you sites worth subscribing on Google Reader.

Engadget
TechCrunh
AndroidOS.in
MobileCrunch
ReadWriteWeb
LifeHacker
GigaOM

The list goes on as per your interest and needs. Above are the sites I frequently used to go and visit, but Google Reader came to rescue.

And Google Reader is not limited to only this. I am a software developer and I have made the suggestions accordingly. Besides technical sites, you are free to subscribe the RSS feeds of sites that relate to ,say, Cooking, Sports, Automobiles, Economy, Politics and possibly everything.

Just login into your Google Reader and start scrolling the articles. Thats it. Ain't that easy.!!!

5 things I liked about Chrome OS & Chrome Book

2011-05-14T03:39:00.000-07:00

The rate at which the Innovation is taking place in the world is tremendous. Some company introduces a new technology today, people begin to adopt it, someone introduces another new technology the second day and the earlier one goes obsolete.

The advancement in science and technology is responsible for all these things & of course the Internet. One such recent innovation has caught up my attention recently. Yes you are right, thats Google's Chrome OS.

So here I have enlisted about 5 features that I really liked about Chrome OS, but these features are not just about Chrome OS, but any Cloud based Operating System.

1. The Concept of Cloud Computing: Cloud computing, like Internet, will prove to be a boon to mankind. Though it has not come up with its full run as yet, but it will help mankind to soon as we start living the fully connected world. The concept is really great. I have all my data on an unknown server, at an unknown place, I dont bother about it. I can access the same data from any of my devices. All I have to do to get the data back is just query the service, thats it. My laptop is stolen, no more worries, nothing. With Cloud, I dont have to bother about the threat to my data. Upgrades are done automatically, so no worries about outdated software.
Even from small things like preferences, settings, passwords and my favorite Apps everything resides in the cloud. I just DONT HAVE TO BOTHER.

And common, dont talk to me about security, recently CCAvenue was hacked, Gmail accidently deleted 150K user email accounts, Sony's blog hacked. You can take measures, try to avoid it from happening. But theres nothing that cannot be compromised.

I have been a guy who carried out experiments since childhood. I hardly used to like things the way they were, so I used to change them to fit my needs. With Chrome OS I have full FREEDOM to remove it, to change it.

2. Chrome Web Store: Already before launch of Chrome OS and Samsung's Chrome Book there were more than 4000 applications on the Chrome Web Store.
Its easy to download, install and use the applications. Once I install them I dont have to bother reinstalling them for life long even if I change the computer or reinstall my Operating System. All that I have to do is just sync the applications onto the cloud. Thats it.

3. Chrome Book keyboard: The Chrome book has been launched at Google IO and there are many controversies about it. Chrome Book really seems to be light weight and the keyboard is fully web based. It does not have those old function keys F1 through F12, but pretty useful keys like refresh, forward, back, full screen and tab switch.

4. The Search Button: Many a times I have seen myself take pain to open up a new tab and search for something that I need. But you dont have to do this with Chrome Book, just press the 'search' button shown in the picture. It opens a new tab and places the cursor in the address bar. Pretty simple.

5. Size of Chrome Book: The Chrome Book is pretty slim and it enables users, students, business-men to carry it easily and move wherever wanted. The adjacent picture shows the thickness of it as compared to human hand.

Why Microsoft de-emphasized Silverlight at MIX11 | IE10 comes with HTML5 support

2011-04-29T22:41:00.000-07:00

So here I come with some news-like post. Recently when I was going through tech news early in the morning, I came to know that Microsoft has been de-emphasizing Silverlight and seemed to adopt HTML5 at MIX11. MIX11 is a Microsoft web developers conference.

   As has always happened, Standard and Open Source technologies have always been at the top of all the other technologies. HTML5 is extremely powerful and sooner or later everyone is going to provide support to it. Earlier Microsoft went on with its jargon of Silverlight and did not provide complete support for HTML5 in its browser till IE9. Recently they have announced and released a developer preview of IE10. They are boasting that IE10 provides great support to HTML5 and CSS3 Gradient and CSS3 Flexible Box Layout.

   Probably Microsoft initially wanted Silverlight to go like Adobe's Flash and become prominent for internet users, thats the reason they did not provide support to HTML5. But besides providing support to HTML5 in IE10, they have been de-emphasizing Silverlight. At MIX11, Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president of Internet Explorer, did not even mention Silverlight even in the keynote speech, according to CNET NEWS.

   All this brings us to a conclusion that Microsoft may sooner or later slowly fade out Silverlight development, eventually kill it and adopt HTML5 completely in future.
   Lets see how do the web standards direct the growth World Wide Web.

UPDATE: In a recent blog post on Zdnet, I got to read something, that I was hoping to know from Microsoft. Refer the image below.

Google Chrome Packaged App Tutorial

2011-04-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

Hello folks, recently I have registered with Google and published a couple of Google Chrome browser applications to the Chrome Web Store. I am here to share my experience and knowledge with you all.

The first app that I published to the Google Chrome Web Store is my blog app, The4thDimension, as shown in the screenshot.

   Later I published a 'Hello Packaged App' app to the Chrome Web Store and now its up and working fine. I have also written a small Game App, show in adjacent picture, for Google Chrome, you can download it here.

   The primary difference between a Packaged App and a Hosted App is the manifest.json (I will explain one shortly). Rest all is same for both of them.
In behavior, a Packaged App is an installable application & can RUN even when the browser is offline whereas the Hosted App is hosted from a web server and will NOT RUN offline.

1. What is 'manifest' file and how to create it?
A manifest file is a little JSON description file which holds the meta-data of your application. The code for manifest.json file is available at the chrome web store docs, but here is the customized code for the Hello Packaged App manifest file.

{
  "name": "Hello Packaged App",
  "description": "Demonstration to create a simple packaged app",
  "version": "11.4.2.2",
  "app": {
   "launch": {
   "local_path": "main.html"
   }
  },
  "icons": {
   "16": "icon_16.png",
   "128": "icon_128.png"
  }
}

Copy the above code into the notepad and save it as manifest.json. Here is the description for the above code.

name : This field of the manifest file denotes the name that will be seen in the web store by the users of your application.

description : This field describes the functionality and usability of your app in brief.

version : This is the version of the app. It can have value with three decimal point at the most. For example 3.2.0.1 would be correct value for version of the app.

app : The app field describes the behavior of the app. app field has a child field 'launch'

launch : The launch field describes the action to be taken when the application is launched. launch filed has a child filed 'local_path'

local_path : The local_path field denotes the path of the target file to be launched when the app starts running. It can refer to .html, .js, .php kind of files.

icons : This field has 2 sub fields '16' and '128' which refer to 16x16 PNG image icon and 128x128 PNG image icon for the application. Both of these fields are compulsory for the application to run.

2. Creating the target file for the launch field.
   In the above code I have created main.html file. You can write whatever you want but must be a valid HTML code.

3. Packaging the application.
   This is where I was stuck initially, but had figured out the way later. Now you have to select all the 4 files mentioned below and create a zip archive for example 'HelloPackagedApp.zip'
1. manifest.json
2. main.html
3. icon_16.png
4. icon_128.png

4. Publishing & Charging for the application.
   Log into Chrome Web Store and goto the Developer Dashboard. Click the 'Add Item' button. A page will appear where it will facilitate you to upload the 'HelloPackagedApp.zip' file, fill the entries in the page and click 'Publish'.
   Regarding the money that you can charge to users, Google provides a Web Store Payments API which makes is pretty simple to charge the users for the App, maintain licensing for the App etc.

5. Testing & Running your App.
   When you are done with publishing the app. Search the Chrome Web Store with the name of your application (here 'Hello Packaged App') install it. When you open up a new tab, you should see something like the one shown below in the red colored rectangle.

When you run the app you should see something like this.

Thats it. You can now call yourself a Chrome Web App Developer.

Joli OS, another addition to the bucket of Cloud Based Operating Systems

2011-03-20T03:43:00.000-07:00

   Hello all, as you all know(or at least I think) that I am one of the biggest information miner on the internet, I keep on stumbling upon on the websites which make me more and more information crazy.
    Recently I came to know about another Cloud Based Operating System, Joli OS, the earlier one being Google's Chrome OS. I suddenly wiki it and found it to be interesting. So in this blog post I will walk you through what is Joli OS, Cloud Based Operating System and how they are beneficial to developers.

What is a Cloud?
   A Cloud is a powerful remote computer(server) unknown to a user where it is situated and the data is securely stored on it.

What is Cloud Based Operating System?
   A Cloud Based Operating System is an operating system which runs in an environment like that of a web browser and all the data stays on the cloud. These operating systems have been developed for people who spend almost all their time on the Internet. It runs the web applications and all the user data is processed using the web applications. There are many potential web applications in use daily, for e.g. Gmail, Google Maps etc are all the web applications that run in the cloud based operating system.

   So getting back to Joli OS, I must tell that it is the Linux Based operating system with one of the best user interfaces I have ever seen. The snapshot is as shown below

App Launcher

Joli OS provides a good integrations with utilities like DropBox, VLC Player, Skype etc. One prominent thing I like about Joli OS is that, besides providing support to the user installed apps and software, it also provides access to the files stored on the local machine. Theres a lot for Joli OS, if u intend to try one, visit jolicloud.com

Whats in there for Developers?
Ahhh... at last the question comes in. As far as I understand, there is software revenue for developers.

Instant App Creation Wizard

You can develop a web application using software-as-a-service model or platform-as-a-service model or freemium pricing model for selling software.

HTC to release Android and Windows Phone 7 Devices.

2011-03-16T05:40:00.000-07:00

Lately spotted in the wild are some great mobile phones by HTC. HTC is set to release Pyramid, Prime and Ignite. Of these devices, HTC pyramid will run Google Android operating system while HTC Prime and Ignite will be running Microsoft Windows Phone 7 operating system. The specification of these devices are as below.

HTC Pyramid is a 4G mobile with the following specs.

Android 3.0
4.3″ display 960×540 res.
Dual-core Qualcomm 1.2 Ghz
Adreno 220 GPU
768 MB Ram
8MP Rear & 1.3 Front cameras
WiFi 802.11b/g/n
Bluetooth
3.5mm headphone jack

HTC Prime

Windows Phone 7
3.7″ display 480×800 res.
512 MB Ram
1 GHz Snapdragon CPU (Not Confirmed).
5 MP Rear camera
WiFi 802.11b/g/n
Bluetooth
Full slide-out QWERTY keyboard

HTC Ignite

Windows Phone 7
3.7″ display 480×800 res.
800Mhz Qualcomm CPU
512 MB Ram
5 megapixel camera
WiFi 802.11b/g/n
Bluetooth

Apple iPad 2 vs Blackberry Playbook

2011-03-10T10:46:00.000-08:00

I have just compiled the list of the best and outstanding features of today's electronic market rocking gadgets, Apple iPad 2 and Blackberry Playbook. Few weeks before someone had told me that the Playbook is also one of the great gadgets launched recently. So I took some efforts to compile & compare its features with Apple iPad 2. Lets take a look.

Apparently from the comparison it seems that the winner is Apple iPad 2, but we must not forget that this iPad is second launch of Apple tablet computer in the tablet market. Apple already had launched iPad earlier which would have surely failed in front of Playbook.

Spice Android Mobile MI-310 comes with a WiFi Router

2011-03-05T10:22:00.000-08:00

Recently I came across a news that Spice Telecom, Indian Mobile maker is also set with launching an Android mobile handset. Spice already has some other non-Droid mobiles in the market. Micromax and Intex, competitors of Spice, have already set their sails towards the Android world few months before.

The entry level MI-310 is set to be price at about Rs. 7500. The hardware and software information of the device are as below.

Specifications :

Android 2.2
3.15 inch capacitive touchscreen with resolution of 320x480
2MP camera
WiFi
Bluetooth
GPRS, 3G, aGPS
Supports upto 16GB T-Flash card
Internal Memory : 85MB
FM
Can be used as a WiFi Router

Preloaded Applications

Nimbuzz
Naukri.com
Ibibo
Spice Gang
common Google Apps

Motorola Xoom Vs Apple iPad

2011-03-01T22:16:00.000-08:00

Not much to talk about. The comparison is self explanatory by itself.

Is Google Chrome Web App Store an opportunity for web developers?

2011-02-22T03:09:00.000-08:00

Recently Google ,the search giant, unveiled its Web App Store for Chrome browser at Google IO Developer Conference. You can practically check this out by opening a new tab in your Chrome browser. The picture below shows the applications installed in my Chrome browser. The Web Store (third from left) is a default app which links to the Chrome App Store.

Applications installed in Chrome browser

Applications Available in Chrome App Store

Chrome App Store can contain paid as well as free applications that can run in the web browser as stand alone application or the hosted web application. You can find the Developer Documentation here. All that a programmer needs to develop an application for the chrome app store is to know HTML and some scripting language. Thats the reason when I look at the Chrome tab showing me something like in the above picture, I persistently see an opportunity for the future of the web and the web programmers.

From my research and point of view, I personally feel that this might be a strategy of Google to provide a full-fledged app store for its to-be-launched Chrome Operating System. Chrome OS based PCs by name Cr-48 have already been released to some developers in Nov 2010. Chrome Web App Store will be officially launched to customers by the year end. By the time the network based Chrome OS is released officially to the customers, the Chrome App Store will be in its full strength with probably more than hundreds of thousands of web applications for users to install and play around with. Not only this but Google is also geared up to provide support for many ubiquitous file formats like xlsx, pptx, svg, ttf etc. in Google Docs to pave a way to flourish its upcoming network based Chrome operating system.

Like as every coin has two sides, there are some who are saying 'what exactly is Google selling in the name of Software as a Service' and yet there are some who show a firm confidence, in what Google is trying to formulate the web, by saying '5 reasons why Chrome OS will succeed'.

I just would like to say, 'just believe in yourself and do what you like'. You like web programming and wanna write some game or some application for Chrome App Store...! just GO FOR IT... Don't give a damn to what others are saying, just don't think if this will succeed or not, if this will persist or not. JUST GO AHEAD.

HTC Thunderbolt 4G Vs Motorola Atrix 4G

2011-02-20T08:19:00.000-08:00

So here goes the comparison between upcoming 4G mobile handsets HTC Thunderbolt 4G and Motorola Atrix 4G.

Android growth statistics

2011-02-17T09:50:00.000-08:00

Ahh...! No prolog for this blog post...I really dont have much time for one.

Today lets have some look at the growth of Android, its app market, the revenue it got for its developers and all. The following statistics are based on the report given by LookOut Mobile Security.

As pictures speak more than words, I have compiled some statistics and graphs which indicate aggressive growth of Android in recent years.

HTC Flyer Vs Samsung Galaxy Tab Vs LG Optimus Pad

2011-02-17T04:24:00.000-08:00

As I already am screaming that the war for the mobile computing has begun, many technology giants like Apple, HTC, LG, Samsung, ViewSonic, Dell are adding fuel to the fire. All of these mammoths have at least one mobile PC in the market. You may see it in the face of tablet computer, multi-core processor mobile device or an ebook reader.

Whatever you call it, the next face of computing is MOBILE. These incredibly beautiful gadgets have outstanding capabilities likeWiFi, 3G network access and to the amazement of all, in-built Graphics Processor, some of them are even having an Ethernet port. Today I have compiled a features' comparison tablets PCs of some of the well know manufacturer. Lets take a look.

HTML5 will be completed in 2014

2011-02-15T10:56:00.000-08:00

Hello folks, once again back with the Tech talks. This time its web. As far as I know, it was HTML that got me interested into computer world and you can even say that it was HTML who made me an Engineer. It was the first language, Mark-up though, that I wrote code in solely with my own will. I still remember that evening, I came home from college, turned on the computer and sat with a HTML tutorial book I had borrowed from the library to develop my own website. It was the language which gave me an evident that computers are not fools. There is something you can do with computers and programming if you know quite a bit about them. And it all began from there. Today I code in so many different computer language Java & PHP being some of them.

    The wonderful language of the web that every browser understands is about to get a new specification, elimination of some of the existing elements and ready to change the world once again. The HTMLWG (Working Group) has been set and started a long lasting testing of the specification of HTML5.

    HTML5 has already being used on a large scale by the web developers all over the world. Some of them have started replacing Flash player and leveraging the ability of canvas tag and video tag to play the animations.

   With the advancement of HTML, emergence of different APIs for the web development will also help boost the growth of the web. The APIs like Geo-Location, Web Worker, JQuery and Offline-Storage are amongst the few to be named.

   Many hardware software giants like Sony, Netflix and LG have already joined World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to keep a watch on what course is the WEB set to, so that they can pave a better way for their IP TVs and Internet connected televisions.

And I believe that there is a lot more to come in the web world as anything is possible in the4thdimension.

Facebook to launch mobile phone

2011-02-14T23:14:00.000-08:00

So once again back with some great news for the Facebook fans community. The long rumored Facebook mobile seems to have come into existence. With the joint efforts of HTC and Facebook, now the facebook mobile has also come up. These 2 devices will be branded as a HTC mobiles though, have been unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Both of devices will run Android 2.2 sporting a Facebook button labeled 'f' on it. Primary goal of these mobiles is to enable Facebook users to directly upload and share the photographs, status messages and links on their Facebook walls.

HTC mobile with the Facebook button is as shown. Possibl it will be called as HTC Snap 2.

Features:

Android 2.2
QWERTY keyboard
GPS-enabled

The other one looks like a modified HTC Desire, which will possibly be called as HTC Icon. You can see that Facebook button labeled 'f' at the bottom of the handset.

Features:

Android 2.2
GPS-enabled

Nokia to kill Symbian and move to Windows for its mobile phones

2011-02-12T23:04:00.000-08:00

Nokia windows mobile

Voila, one of the biggest booms of the market today, Nokia, is about to ditch its own mobile operating system, Symbain. In a conference headed by the CEO of Nokia and Microsoft revealed that Nokia is going to make Windows as its primary mobile operating system. Nokia will gradually phase out its well known and well accepted operating system Symbian and adopt windows as its primary mobile operating system. This will not only help Microsoft to prosper in a better way in the mobile market but also will help Nokia to compete its rivals Google and Apple.

As per Gartner's prediction shown in the above statistics, Symbian was expected to be one of the strongest players in the mobile market.

Nokia Windows mobile concept

So what about Meego now...?
Meego, a joint mobile operating system project by maemo from Nokia and moblin from Intel, will become an open source mobile operating system project. Nokia meant to make Meego as its primary operating system which was supposed to be competing with Android and iOS. Now this intention of Nokia seems to be a dream far off from realization.

What about QT...?
Sorry for Qt Developers, but as like Symbian, Qt will also be phased out with time.

What will be consequences...?
As a consequence of this deal between Nokia and Microsoft.

Microsoft's search engine Bing will be placed on the home screen of the Nokia windows mobile devices. This will give momentum to Microsoft's search services and products and advertisement revenue.
Nokia's content and application store will be integrated with Microsoft marketplace for a more compelling consumer experience.

How a simple C program works

2011-02-10T10:44:00.000-08:00

Hey reader, long time no C...! So lets start this time with C. I mean lets start this discussion with a simple C program.

I just had been too busy with the work to find time to get up on the blog to have few words for you people. You know I am an addictive internet stumbler. I always am exploring new directions and dimensions on the WEB. Thats kinda how I found the4thdimension.

So anyway, I just wanted to share something good that I found few days back while I was stumbling the internet.

Its nothing big but a pictorial explanation of how does a simple C program work.

And to the gain of knowledge of everyone, almost every language that is compiled (and not interpreted like HTML, XML etc) works in the similar way as shown in the above image.

I guess this much is fine for now. Will meet again, keep visiting.

Why is social networking important?

2011-01-30T04:18:00.000-08:00

Hello folk, we meet once again, with something little non technical today. Yes, you are right, today we are going to discuss the importance of social networking in our day to day life.

I wonder how our life is changed these days by websites like facebook, orkut, twitter etc. These websites have become an integral part of our lives. These websites help you stay connected with your friends, colleagues, old school-mates. These giants are now a days called social networks.

I go to office in the morning at around 9. I always stare at the advertisement of Aircel which I get to see on the way down to my office, shown in the picture below.

The mobile telephony service provider Aircel, and might be many others, are taking help os such socail networking websites to reach a more customers, promote their products and harness the potential of social networking.

I can explain you all this in simple words. Take this situation, I write a blog post here at the4thdimension. I embed some code so as to publish the Facebook like button at the bottom of this blog post. Then some visitor, say 1 of 10 likes this blog post. The like appears on his wall which is then seen by others. The other people in his connections come and read this blog post. This is how I get more visitors. The same way companies like Aircel, Engadget, TechCrunch and many more make use of social networking websites to promote their services and products.

Thanks for reading.
Keep visiting.

Are desktop computer applications dead?

2011-01-28T22:13:00.000-08:00

The answer is certainly, NOT. The desktop application are not dead yet, neither are the desktop computers. But what hard core desktop application programmers need to turn their attention to is, to begin thinking and coding the desktop application which will harness the multi-core processing power of the CPU.

The processing power of the CPU has been increasing as never before. In the earlier days it used to be a single CPU pushed strongly into the mother-board of the desktop computer. With the passage of time, advent of new technology and enhancements in the chip fabrication technology, engineers have become capable of embedding 2 or 4 CPUs on a single substrate of the chip.This used to be called as the spatial placement of the CPUs on the chip substrate. Now a days , what engineers do is they place the CPUs over other CPUs. This has led to spatial as well as vertical expansion of the chip substrate. This has enabled us to pull the number of cores on the CPU from 2-4 to 8 or 16. Withing few coming years, the CPUs with 16-32 cores will be available in the market. So in order to be always one step ahead of the technology, a programmer has to take into consideration the number of increasing cores on the CPU and write his application accordingly.

The application should be multi-threaded, parallel processing or a concurrent application. Such an application will harness more computing power of the CPU and the probability of the CPU to stay idle will be reduced.

The following facts from some of the renowned technology websites are evident of what I have already mentioned in the above paragraphs.

So I think as a desktop application programmer, everyone should code a multi-threaded application. Be it a sky fire desktop game or a text editor, there is a high chance that you can leverage the multi-threadeding capability into your application program.

Samsung to launch 4 new Android handsets.

2011-01-27T01:13:00.000-08:00

Hello folks, its so pleasing to hear that Samsung, world's second largest mobile device manufacturer, is set to launch four new Android mobile phones. After the grand success of its Galaxy family of mobile phones, Samsung reported the sales of over 10 million handsets in seven months. Now its prepared to launch some new handsets ranging from low-end to mid-range devices. Lets take a look at some of the features of these all new handsets.

1. Galaxy Ace

Android 2.2 Froyo
3.5-inch HVGA TFT display
800MHz processor
5-megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash
Social Hub, TouchWiz interface, Swype; document viewer/editor
Quad-band GSM, HSDPA, A-GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi
150 MB Internal Memory
1350 mAh battery
3.5 mm headset jack
Expected: First half of 2011

2. Galaxy Fit

Android 2.2 Froyo
3..31-inch QVGA TFT display
600MHz processor
5-megapixel autofocus camera
Social Hub, TouchWiz interface, Swype; document viewer
Quad-band GSM, HSDPA, A-GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi
1350 mAh battery
150 MB Internal Memory
Expected: First half of 2011

3. Galaxy Gio

Android 2.2 Froyo
3.2-inch QVGA TFT display
800MHz processor
3-megapixel autofocus camera
Social Hub, TouchWiz interface, Swype; document viewer
Quad-band GSM, HSDPA, A-GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi
1350 mAh battery
158 MB Internal Memory
Expected: First half of 2011

4. Galaxy Mini

Android 2.2 Froyo
3.14-inch QVGA TFT display
600MHz processor
3-megapixel fixed-focus camera
Social Hub, TouchWiz interface, Swype; document viewer
Quad-band GSM, HSDPA, A-GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi
1350 mAh battery
158 MB Internal Memory
Expected: First half of 2011

BSNL 3g internet speed review

2011-01-26T09:22:00.000-08:00

Just a few days before I got to use BSNL 3G internet. I used it for over 10 hours in a time period of 4 days. I was quite impressed to with the experience I had while using 3G internet. For internet addicts like me, 3G seems to be a boon. The speed is awesome, very unreliable though.

The following snapshots have been taken at different instances of time.

Google, some interesting facts and figures

2011-01-18T10:38:00.000-08:00

I was just surfing the net for a leisurely cyber stroll, I must say...so I came across some interesting facts and figures about Google, our beloved search engine. It is said that Larry and Sergey wanted to name Google as Googol, but it was some mistake somewhere and it came to become Google.

Google Employee Profitability

Size of Google

Secrets of Google

Motorola Droid Bionic vs iPhone 4 vs HTC Thunderbolt

2011-01-16T09:39:00.000-08:00

Creating a Download Manager in Java

2011-01-16T08:11:00.000-08:00

Hello folks, I am back here again...!
Being a Java fanboy, I keep myself indulged with writing some sort of applications or code snippets in Java in my leisurely time. During last few months I have been working on this Java download manager...Its nothing but a simple program having lots of classes and files etc.

Java Swing download manager

But most importantly, there are many threads of program execution.This download manager is not a kind of some professional software, its simply a single segmented multi-threaded download manager. Multi-threading being one of my programming manias as foretold on my About Me page. The whole download manager is based on just a following Classes in Java. Though I have added some more classes to create the Software Application user interface(UI) in Java.

Creating an URL object
Getting URLConnection object from URL object
Getting InputStream object from URLConnection object
Then reading the InputStream as usual

/*A simple algorithm to read and write the downloaded file to the local disk.*/
FileOutputStream fos;
InputStream is;
   while(is.read()!=EOF)
      {
           fos.write();
       }

   With the above code the file located at a specific URL is downloaded and saved to the local disk. I have packed the whole simple read-write program into Java Swing desktop Application. This way I also got to learn a little bit of a Java Swing API.

The following screen-shot depicts the program activity on the console or command prompt.

Console Output

I believe and assure that this is a software written just out of interest, but your comments and criticisms are always welcome anywhere on The4thdimension.

$35 tablet computer from India soon to become a REALITY

2011-01-11T06:38:00.000-08:00

Sakshat

Hello all, I am at the pinnacle of excitement while writing this blog post. Just 5 minutes before, I got to read this news great news. As already announced, that India is going to manufacture world's most inexpensive tablet computer.
The dream has come true. The tablet is soon expected to be launched. The date was set to be 10th of January, but due to some reasons it has been delayed.

The price of the tablet has been set to $35 or Rs.1500, but it is expected to rise. The features of the tablet are as follows.

HARDWARE

7 inch Display
Wi-Fi enabled
Fixed Ethernet capability
USB
Mini USB
MiniSD Card Slot
Sim Card Slot
Video Out
Headphone Jack
2 GB of Memory using Memory card
2 Watts of power consumption
Multi-touch Resistive touch screen
Rugged casing with a rubberized feel
Solar charging option

SOFTWARE

Android Operating System
PDF Reader
Zip-Unzip capabilities
Educational software developed at Indian Institute of Technology
Web browsing, video conferencing and word processing software

The Hardware and Software is being developed by Indian Institute of Science and Indian Institute of Technology. The device being battery backed-up and rechargeable, is manufactured by HCL Infosystems.

Nokia C6 did not stand to the expectations of its users

2011-01-08T02:00:00.000-08:00

Hello folks, I have recently noticed that Nokia C6 did not perform well in some of the aspects like battery, OS stability. The stability of the Operating System of any device is a concern of utmost importance. If the OS of the mobile is not stable, I just dont understand how do these vendors sell such devices.

1. It was around a couple of weeks before that my mobile had suddenly restarted for no reason and without expectation. When it settled, I found that I have lost all my messages that I had stored in the memory card.
Thank GOD, I did not have any important data in the message inbox of my mobile.
After this mishap occurred, I have started storing all my messages in the phone memory. Lets hope that safe now.

2. Another anomaly I noticed with Nokia C6, was its battery. Earlier when I used to charge the battery completely it used to run the mobile for more than 2 days. Now I have noticed that when I charge the mobile, the battery drains off within 1.5 day.

Fully charged battery at night.

Battery drained one-level just in 8 hours of stand-by

The above incident is really ridiculous. Something that used to take about a day to happen, is happening in just 8 hours. This simply means that the performance of the battery has degraded.

So I suggest that DONT GO FOR NOKIA C6, rather go for some Android Device. The Android Operating System is fairly stable and has very little to no issues.

So I want to ask Nokia, if this is something they wanted to sell to their people, who always trusted them and that too at such an alarming time of Mobile OS wars.

9 Coolest Android Smartphones at CES 2011

2011-01-07T22:53:00.000-08:00

Hello all mobile monsters. As we all know that the Consumer Electronics Show(CES) 2011 has already commenced on 6th January at Las Vegas, USA. There are a variety of gadgets and consumer electronics put forth for exhibition. It is also expected that Microsoft may reveal Windows 8 for the first time at CES. I have been looking for something of my interest in the CES and ultimately I think I have found some. Some 3G and some 4G Android mobiles by Motorola , LG, Samsung have been revealed at the CES. Lets take a look at these coolest Android phones. Almost all the mobile phones below are 4G phones.

1. Motorola Atrix 2 :

Specifications
CPU : Dual-core Tegra 2,2Ghz (1Ghz each Core)
RAM : 1GB
Screen Size : 4.0 inches
Operating System : Android 2.2
Network Support : 4G
Primary Camera : 5MP
Front Camera : VGA

2. Motorola Droid Bionic :

Specifications
CPU : Dual-core Tegra 2,2Ghz (1Ghz each Core)
RAM : 1GB
Screen Size : 4.3 inches
Operating System : Android 2.2
Network Support : 4G LTE
Primary Camera : 8MP
Front Camera : VGA

3. HTC EVO Shift :

Specifications
CPU : Qualcomm MSM7630, 800Mhz
RAM : 512MB
Screen Size : 3.7 inches
Operating System : Android 2.2
Network Support : 4G
Primary Camera : 5MP
Front Camera :

4. LG Optimus 2X:

Specifications
CPU : Dual-core Tegra 2,2Ghz (1Ghz each Core)
RAM :
Screen Size : 4 inches
Operating System : Android 2.2
Network Support : 4G
Primary Camera : 8MP
Front Camera :1.3MP

5. LG Optimus BLACK :

Specifications
CPU : OMAP3630 Texas Instrument
processor,1Ghz
RAM :
Screen Size : 4 inches
Operating System : Android 2.2
Network Support : 3G
Primary Camera : 5MP
Front Camera : 2MP

6. Sony Xperia Arc :

Specifications
CPU : Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon 1GHz
processor
RAM : 512MB
Screen Size : 4.2 inches
Operating System : Android 2.3
Network Support : 3G
Primary Camera : 8MP
Front Camera : N/A

7. LG Revolution :

Specifications
CPU : Qualcomm 1GHz processor
RAM :
Screen Size : 4.3 inches
Operating System : Android 2.2
Network Support : 4G LTE
Primary Camera : 5MP
Front Camera : 1.3MP

8. Motorola Cliq :

Specifications
CPU : Qualcomm MSM7201A, 528Mhz
processor
RAM : 256MB
Screen Size : 3.1 inches
Operating System : Android 1.5
Network Support : 3G
Primary Camera : 5MP
Front Camera : N/A

9. Samsung Infuse :

Specifications
CPU : Qualcomm MSM7201A, 528Mhz processor
RAM : 256MB
Screen Size : 3.1 inches
Operating System : Android 1.5
Network Support : 4G
Primary Camera : 8MP
Front Camera : 1.3MP

Dell service/support in India is awesome.

2011-01-05T07:40:00.000-08:00

Hello all, the cyber organisms. I am here with a very good news as well as a bad news for all the Dell product users. I had just bought my Dell Inspiron 1440 in Feb last year.

Since many days I have been facing a problem of slowly running laptop. I was totally annoyed with it. Recently I discovered that my hard drive had got some bad sectors. I was surprised to see it because my usage of laptop is very good. I never let it run for a night long, neither do I use it roughly. But then I had found that this had happened to my laptop. I was worried about taking back-up of all my important data onto DVDs and friends PCs.

And then I directly called up Dell Customer Care on 18004254051(toll free) yelled at them "how did my laptop face such a serious problem within an year of purchase and I have already faced a battery problem earlier". They just calmed me down, took down the error code that I got while carrying out a memory test in BIOS and took down my address. Then within 2 hours I got another call from Dell for taking my appointment to get the hard drive replaced. In the evening I got another call for confirmation of my address. I was told that the Dell Engineer will come the other morning at 11.

I just spent the whole night taking backup of my important data. The Dell Engineer showed up in the morning sharp at 11 am and I got the faulty Western Digital hard drive replaced with a brand new Toshiba.

So in all, I would like to appreciate the support and service that Dell provided me for the defects I have faced with the battery and the hard disk within 24 hours.
THANK YOU DELL.

Technology predictions for 2011

2011-01-02T23:10:00.000-08:00

So once again we come back to our tech talks on the4thdimension. With the arrival of new year, there are a lots of talks going on in the market about business trends in 2011, economical ups and downs that will occur in 2011 etc. but as you all know, my taste lies in the Trends in technological advancements in 2011. I just came across these discussions about the ups and downs and new arrivals in technology in 2011.

Here are some key issues that need to be addressed while considering the technological prediction for 2011.

1. Mobile Computing : With the advent of high speed networks like 3G and 4G, there will be a boo of web usage on the mobile devices. In India around 40% of the internet users use mobile devices to surf the web, hang out on social networks and e-mail access. With the release of Google's free and open source mobile operating system Android, the world will see the face of day-to-day life into mobile phones. Mobile payments, video calling, sophisticated apps to use on mobile phones have made the life comfortable. Many big players like Samsung, HTC, Motorola and beginners like Intex and Micromax Informatics, India have already climbed up the Android bandwagon. This wild-fire that has been set up by Android and iPhone will continue to rise in 2011. The mobile phones are the future of computing.

2. Cloud Computing : Referring back to what has already been mentioned, 3G and 4G networks have facilitated high bandwidths for individual users. For advanced internet users, half of the time of the day is spent online, people are shopping from their personal computing devices, GPRS seems to have gone. Cloud based services like Gmail, DropBox have become emergent, concepts like PaaS and SaaS have evolved. Network based PCs like Google's Cr-48 has got momentum in research. 2011 will add fuel to the fire, giving rise to competition in network based application and computing.

3. Concurrent Programming : I did not see that wildfire for concurrent computing has been set up in the arena yet. As far as I have researched the technology using internet, technical news and articles etc, I believe 2011 will trigger an era of Concurrent Applications to be developed. I can support my view for this by stating two things.

Supposedly by the end of 2011, processors with more than 4 Cores will begin to ship out. The computing work assigned to the CPU will prove to be far less than the computing capabilities of the CPU. The computing paradigm will change its face.

Facebook tops the list of Most Visited Websites in 2010

2011-01-01T03:26:00.000-08:00

A very happy new to all my beloved readers. Its been a good year 2010 for my blog just coz I registered my own domain name for the blog the4thdimension.net
    While having my morning coffee, somewhere on the internet, I just read that Facebook is the highly visited website of the year 2010. I already have discussed the way Facebook took down orkut .

    Having your profile on a social networking website is great. I have also noticed that some start-ups and organizations have realized the power of social networking. They are now planning to release their own small social networks for their customers rather than having discussion forums to discuss reviews of their products, connect with each other etc. This also makes me wonder if Web 3.0 will come up with companies having their own individual social networks. The discussion forums will have gone soon.

   The Social Networking Giant Facebook has topped the list of the highly searched items. It has rendered Google on rank no. 2 in the list of the highly searched items on the internet as reported by Hitwise.com.

           So I wonder that after Facebook took over Orkut and other famous websites and Social Networks in almost all the countries, is it now the turn of Google, the www Goliath, to be superseded by David in the name of Facebook.

Beautiful themes for mobiles.

2010-12-29T04:54:00.000-08:00

I have just been stumbling the internet for a while to download some important software for my new Nokia C6. I just came across a package of some beautiful themes. I have sorted these themes out and also have taken three screen shots of each of the themes. One for the Home Screen, Second for the Music Player, Third for the Menu.

The themes are applicable to the following mobile devices which are having Symbian OS Series60 5th edition.

Nokia 5230
Nokia 5233
Nokia 5228
Nokia 5250
Nokia 5230 Xpress Music
Nokia 5800 Xpress Music
Nokia 5800 Navigation Edition
Nokia C5-03
Nokia C6-00
Nokia N97
Nokia N97 mini
NokiaX6
Samsung i8910
Sony Ericsson Satio
Sony Ericsson Vivaz
Sony Ericsson Vivaz PRO

1. Dark Night

Download Dark Night

2. Deep Space

Download Deep Space

3. Default Nokia C6 Theme

This Theme is already available with the mobile.

4. Energy of Music

Download Energy of Music

5. Flower 5th

Download Flower 5th

6. Gallardo With Tone

Download Gallardo With Tone

7. Heaven View

Download Heaven View

8. Illustrator

Download Illustrator

9. iPhone Killer

Download iPhone Killer

10. iPhone4

11. Nature

12. Silky White

13. Steel Black

14. Texture Wood

Download Texture Wood

15. Touch Colors

Download Touch Colors

16. Touch Fire

Download Touch Fire

17. Water Touch

Download Water Touch

Cheapest Android Phone in India | Intex to launch Android Mobile for Rs 5500

2010-12-26T22:25:00.000-08:00

Just today when I opened up my Reader in the morning with a sip of a coffee..., I came across a surprising news about the launch of cheapest Android mobile device in India.

Recently, Sudhir Kumar, assistant general manager of the telecom division at Intex, announced that Intex is going to launch Android Mobile with Android version 2.2 in the first week of February. The device is set to be priced at Rs. 5500. In addition to this Intex is also planning to launch mobile devices with in-built projector. These devices will also be capable of running Office Applications and eBooks.

With this step Intex has also stepped up the Android bandwagon. It seems that the year 2010 has sparked up the mobile OS war and year 2011 will continue to add fuel to the fire. This will make the war more aggressive as already the big players like Apple and Nokia are competing with the wildfire of Android.
Some big shots like HTC, Motorola, Samsung which seemed to be silent, have come up with embracing Android as their platform.

When and How to innovate.?

2010-12-25T23:25:00.000-08:00

Just yesterday I had an Alumni meet at my college PICT. I felt really great to be there once again in my college after so many days...There were not too many people for the meet, but then I got to meet some people whom I had met in just first year of my Engineering. There were people who had passed out from PICT in 1988 to the students like me who have passed out just in 2010.

Few of the great people I got to meet there, were Tarun Sharma, CEO of BMC Software. He is also an alumni of PICT, who was invited as the chief guest for the meeting. I wonder how great it must be feeling when you are invited in your own college as a chief guest.

Besides, there were some other great people who visited the college for the meet were, my apologies for being not able to recall their names, some Architect from Intel Corporation, some Security Manager from Symantec, some from IBM ISL, some elderly people from Oracle Corporation and many more.

I was impressed by Tarun Sharma, the way he begun with his speech.
He said that the most important thing he would like to tell us all is,
‎"Imagine, Aspire, Innovate...at the early ages of life...in order to become a great Entrepreneur, Engineer or a Developer tomorrow."

No doubt, his words were transparently true. His words were more directed towards the students of PICT. He supported his words with the renowned examples for Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook, search giant Google, Yahoo. He said "All these things were born in the colleges itself. So always have a vision and work towards its achievement, because once the college life is over, there is very little time we get to put into these things."

Disclaimer: Just wanted to spread above great words to my fellow PICTians. I may not have been able to exactly reproduce the words of Mr. Tarun Sharma, so my apologies, upfront.

EA Mobile launched 8 new games for Android devices.

2010-12-24T04:53:00.000-08:00

With the advent of Android into the number of mobile devices, the impetus that mobile application development received is tremendous. Android has become a primary choice for anyone who thinks of buying a new mobile device today.

Recently there had been a news in the market about the launch of Need For Speed- Shift for the Android mobiles. The game is available for download from the Android Market for just $4.99 as stated by the report on AndroidOs.In. The prices have recently been dropped down to 99cents.
In addition to this, there are some more releases of games for the Android by EA Games. The names of the newly released games, besides NFS-Shift are as follows.

Tetris
MONOPOLY
THE GAME OF LIFE
FIFA 10
Bejeweled 2
Worms
The Sims 3

Technology-All that matters today, now on an independent domain name

2010-12-23T10:14:00.000-08:00

Hello all the beloved visitors. You might have noticed that yesterday my blog has been down. The reason not being Google's server down but I have recently bought a domain name the4thdimension.net, as you might have noticed, for my own blog and I have been playing around to get it working.

Buying a domain name is not a big deal, but the money that you have to pay to buy a domain name matters, sometimes. There are hell lot of domain name registrars out there in the market, but to choose the one that suits you is your choice. The domain name registrars like GoDaddy, DynaDot and many more might be known to you, the one I chose is NameCheap. I wanted to go for GoDaddy, but they were to charge me heavy to protect my information from WhoIs public database. WhoIs is a public database which can be queried by anyone to know the details of the owner of a particular website. Moreover, NameCheap asked me for no money to get protection from WhoIs and additionally they sold me a domain name for 10$ cheaper than what GoDaddy offered.

Getting your information listed into the WhoIs Database is not a wrong idea, but if you dont want any spams, ad mails, domain hack threats, then it is advisable to stay away from getting listed into WhoIs database.

So this was all about my new domain name. Set your bookmarks accordingly and search for the4thdimension.net next time you Google to reach me...!

bye and have a great day.

Are desktop computers Obsolete or Dead?

2010-12-20T10:21:00.000-08:00

Voila, I guess this is my fourth post in the same month. I would like to let all you people know that my blog has just completed an year on this world wide web. Recently I just wondered, if everything is on your mobile device, where the hell will today's desktop computers be seen tomorrow...!

     As far as I recall, ten years back from now,Internet was highly costly in India, charges for incoming call on mobiles were higher than the outgoing calls. Mobile phone was possessed by 1 of 100 people and computer was possessed by 1 of 1000 people. But with the advent of new technologies and the passage of time, computers have become a part and parcel of everyone's life. In such a scenario when mobiles are taking over computers in every aspect, what would be the future of desktop computers ever after 10 years or 20 years!!!. Lets dig in.
      Today everyone uses his mobile to stay connected, notebooks are used to gather and spread information, 99 of 100 people who use computers are the members of famous Social Networking websites, netbooks are available for computing on the fly. If everything has become so much into mobile computing, do you think the Desktop Computers will still serve human beings for long...?

    In search of an answer to this question, I just hunted down internet to gather some useful information.
    In recent time, with the arrival of new technologies and more efficient ways of fabricating transistors onto a silicon wafer, the advancement of the handheld device is at apex and still growing. The smartphones in 2006 had CPU speed of about 200Mhz whereas today's mobile devices are shipped with CPU speed of about 1Mhz. In fact the cost of LCD screens, which is the most costly part in an electronic device, are falling down. Costs of expensive parts of notebook computers are falling too.

Notebooks, netbooks and tablet PC's are taking over the world. I still recall the start of my engineering days, when I had bought my first desktop computer when I was pursuing Computer Studies at the University of Pune, just for the reason I got desktop PC twice as fast as notebook just for one-third the price of notebook. Today for the same price I get a notebook computer which is twice as fast as my then Desktop PC. Netbooks, though slow in performance, are gaining popularity.
The ubiquity of broadband Internet and the Cloud Computing model of computer usage have given a boost to the use of connected devices, mobile devices and hand-held devices. The theory behind Cloud Computing is that the Internet would, in essence, replace your computer's hard drive. Netbooks are so tied in with Internet access that telecommunication companies such as AT&T and Verizon have taken to selling them packaged with wireless Internet service.

In 2009, 13.5 million netbooks were sold throughout the world. With the passage of time and following the Moore's Law, the number of transistors integrated onto a piece of silicon wafer has increased tremendously. This phenomenon has given rise to more and more smarter mobile devices. They not only help you to send and receive messages and calls, but they are now becoming the sources of information, primary ways of staying connected with friends, colleagues, companies etc.

The Desktop computers are rapidly loosing grounds to the smartphones and mobile computing. The number of units of mobiles, netbooks, tablets that are manufature every month is increasing exponentially. The IP addresses in this world have exceeded the population count of the human beings on Earth and more mobile phones than Computers are being sold every minute. Lets see if the Desktop computers also walk the way Vacuum tubes and Transistor based computer went into demise.

Accord Android tablet PC for INR 9,999 only

2010-12-18T07:14:00.000-08:00

Hey there everyone, so here I am back again with some great thing. Recently I came across a news that some company called Accord, dont know from which country, launched its own Android tablet PC P270. The tablet is quiet thin and seems to have good hardware.

Most importantly, the device has got an Ethernet port, which means that you can connect you wired internet connection directly to the device. One more great thing the device comes with, is its inherent ability to connect mouse and a key-board. This really helps one to save time and errors caused due to usage of the touch-screen input.

The specification of the device are as follows:
1. OS: Android 1.7 - The device comes with Android version 1.7, which is usually not good. The latest version of Android being 2.3 (codename Gingerbread).

2. CPU : VIA 8505 400Mhz - VIA Technologies is a Tiawanese Chip and Microcontroller manufacturer. In addition to this they also manufacture Mother Board Chipsets, CPUs and Memory. The CPU of 400Mhz gives the tablet PC the same power as that of my Nokia C6. Nokia C6 has got an ARM 434Mhz processor.

3. RAM : 128MB DDR2 - The RAM of the tablet seems to be low, but cant really say anything unless I have my hands on the device.

4. HDD : 2GB - The device come with 2GB of storage which is enough to store e-books, documents etc. This storage can be extended to 16GB Micro SD card. With the memory extended to 16GB, you can easily store more than 15 movies and with still some space available for some documents.

5. Screen Size : 7 inches - The size of the display screen is same as that of samsung galaxy tab. 7 inch screen is pretty much enough for watching movies and videos on a tablet PC.

6. Input : Resistive Screen - The device has a 7" Resistive touch screen. Though resistive touch is not so responsive, it is more durable than capacitive touch screen. The approximate durability of Resistive touch screen is 3 years whereas for the Capacitive touch screen it is 2 years. Almost all the devices available in the market come with resistive touch screen. In addition to this, the device also has an ability to connect mouse and key-board or even external Hard Disk.

7. Network : 3G, Wifi, Ethernet - As stated earlier, the device also enables the user to connect the wired internet connection through its Ethernet port.

Popularity of the programming languages

2010-12-14T09:44:00.000-08:00

Hello IT folks, here we go with strictly technical post. Sometime back, I was just stumbling upon somewhere on the web and I came across this beautiful statistics someone came up with. There are always some dudes playing around with somethings to create something new in this world. Some guys just classified the popularity of the programming languages by the number of tags on Stackoverflow and the number of projects in those languages on Github and the results were as depicted in the following picture.

As we can see here, whatever the language might be, there is still its existence in some way or the other. There are projects in languages from Java, PHP, javascript to apparently dead languages like ada, smalltalk, FORTRAN etc. Here, the picture walks us through the popularity of the programming languages whereas I recently came across a news that Mozilla is developing a new programming language called 'Rust'. Some of the key features of the new language Rust have been announced to be as follows

1. Object Oriented.
2. Explicit memory control.
3. Multi-platform, developed on Windows, Mac and Linux.
4. Memory Safe.
5. Creates lightweight tasks.

While Mozilla is upto developing a totally new programming languages, despite of Apache Software Foundation resigning from Java Executive Committee, Oracle has taken initiative in releasing a higher version of Java 6. Oracle Corporation has announced the release date for Java 7 to be July 28th 2011, whereas it is also working on the development of Java 8 and seems its release will be announced soon too.

So lets see how does the above picture change with the advent of new technologies and the arrival of new programming languages.

How did Facebook spread out and took over Orkut in INDIA ?

2010-12-13T22:59:00.000-08:00

Hello folks I am back again with some new tech talks. Lately I have been going through some articles on the ReadWriteWeb and I came across some interesting post. It depicts the growth of Facebook and the demise of Orkut in the world.

As we can see from the above picture, Facebook is the highly dominant Social Networking site in India in Dec 2010. But back then in time of June 2009, the picture was something different as shown below.

I still remember the Q1 of 2009 (the first quarter of 2009), I was in the 3rd year of my degree course of Computer Studies at PICT, all of my friends and everyone in the college was crazy about Orkut. They used to sit for long hours in days and nights in front of their boxes playing those fancy games made into Flash.They used to sit long just for the desire of breaking the records of the games which determined the typing speeds, the games which enabled them slap their friend in their network. The world seemed to stay within the then Social Network, Orkut.

The time changed and things tend to get worse for Orkut, people began to hang out on a new Social Network which spawned in the name 'FACEBOOK'.It started to burgeon out rapidly in INDIA. People began getting addicted to this new mania. Orkut seemed to begin becoming history. I still remember those 'Likes' and 'LOL's people used in their usual gossips too. And now theres hardly anyone who logs into Orkut, I dont even remember when was it the last time I had logged in into Orkut.

But the time changes for everything. The time comes for everything to end someday. Today its Facebook, the Social Networking Giant, might be it will be something else tomorrow. Who knows how the time passes along and what is in there destined for all of us.

Micromax launched least expensive Android mobile in INDIA

2010-11-30T22:38:00.000-08:00

Hello mobile monstors, I am back again with some great news for all you people...!

   Being watchful on the wars between the IT Giants like Google, Nokia, Samsung, Apple, Motorola etc. for taking their Mobile Operating Systems up at the pinnacle, today I came across a great news when I fired up my Reader with the morning tea. INDIA based Mobile Manufacturer 'Micromax Informatics Ltd.' has recently launched the cheapest Android OS based mobile device in India. The device named as 'Andro A60' is absolutely INEXPENSIVE, full touch screen mobile device with the latest version of the Android 2.1 (Codename Eclair). The information regarding shipping out of India has not been confirmed yet.

   I have enlisted the OUTSTANDING features of the mobile device along with their comparison with the devices of the mobile tycoons in the current market, rest of the features are commonly available in all costly mobiles.

1. Price : Rs. 6990 which is less than $180.
   The price is too low as compared to the recent Android mobile devices available in the market. Read the features below and then only compare the devices.
2. Processor : 600 Mhz.
   Compared to Nokia and Motorola, only the devices with price atleast Rs. 15,000 and Rs. 20,000 come with processors with 600 Mhz clock speed.
3. Internal Memory : 150MB.
4. Memory Card : 2GB at purchase time.
Nokia's mobile with price more than Rs. 12000 (approx. $255) comes with the 2GB memory card. So conclusively this is more affordable than that.
5. Memory Card expandable upto :32GB.
   This is much more than my Nokia C6 too. It supports memory card maximum upto 16GB.
6. Video Streaming. : YES.
    I guess this is a video streaming in the browser which will facilitate watching videos on the mobile devices. If my guessing is correct, it will be a victory over many other mobile devices like Micromax Q7, Samsung Corby which do not stream a video from Youtube.
7. Stand-by time : 10 days
     This is something I have read on the Micromax website, but after all this also depends under the situations in which the mobile device is kept.
8. SWYPE : SWYPE is a touch screen gesture recognition technology. It was first available in Samsung Omnia II which was a Windows OS mobile. For more information on SWYPE click here
9. Voice Assisted GPS : The device comes with the GPS system which is enabled by voice assistance while navigating using GPS.
10 Camera : 3.2 Megapixel
   This is really ridiculous. I havent seen a mobile device of price Rs. 6999 with 3.2MP camera. I suspect the quality of the images though.

My new Nokia C6 hardware-software review | Nokia C6 hands on

2010-11-10T06:49:00.000-08:00

Hi there mobile freaks. On the eve of 'Diwali' (A festival of lights in INDIA), I recently bought brand new NOKIA C6 handset. I hand been eying the Nokia's coming mobile devices. Nokia recently launched E5, C6, C7 and many other devices.

Out of these available ones and recently launched ones E5, C6 & E71 were some of the devices which allured me. I carried out a deep research and then decided to go for C6 coz my priorities were a QWERTY keyboard, Wi-Fi, 3.5mm jack.

Some of the features in this device are really outstanding and some of them have been degraded by Nokia. Click here to check Nokia C6 specifications .So I just thought, I shall come up and make a post here for all my dear mobile freak friends to let them know about Nokia C6.

QWERTY Key-board : The 4 row key-board is really user comfortable and easily accessible.It was really great to know that C6 comes with a 5-way Navigation key as shown here. It is extremely useful and makes using the key-pad an additive pleasure. A special key 'Sym' has been given for 'special symbols'. Usually Nokia Symbains have a button with a 'pencil' button on it. This button was used to mark,cut,copy, paste the text. Though C6 has no such button, the 'Shift' can be used for the same. One of my friends having 3 row QWERTY Key-board Nokia N900 says C6's QWERTY is more comfortable. :-)

On-Screen Keyboard : Lately I have discovered that there is an on-screen keyboard also available in Nokia C6. Earlier I used to open up QWERTY keyboard every time I had to type a particular thing even for searching a contact or setting up the alarm, but now it seems to be more comfortable with the key-board shown in the adjoining figure. The one that appears on the device is much more better that the one shown here. There is one more feature I liked in the device, that is 'Handwriting'. Handwriting allows you to write on the screen with you finger and the intelligent interpreter inside the mobile recognizes what the text you have written might be.

Web Using Wi-fi : Using Internet over Wi-fi is really damn fast. I could download at about 40KBps on the device. The in-built browser can provide me support for full screen view of pages and makes web-surfing a real pleasure with the sacrifice of rapid battery discharge.

PDF Reader : The Adobe PDF Reader provided with this mobile device is not so good. I mean I can easily view the ebooks, but I can not see them full screen while reading. The 'Options' sidebar always keeps up in the right of my screen. Anyways its a third-party software, so we cant really blame Nokia for this.

Music Player : I have had a very bad experience with the music player of this mobile device, not with the music quality but creating play list. When I add the songs to a new play list (or existing one) it gives me a prompt with all the available music file on the device. This is what I am not satisfied with. I wanted to have a 'File Manager' kind of prompt which would help facilitate me to enter into directories and choosing the files individually. What it provides me now is just a 'tree view' of songs and I have to keep searching and choosing the songs of my choice which is really a painful task.

One more issue that I noticed with my new Nokia C6 is that when I am playing some music while the mobile key-pad is locked, I cannot adjust the volume of the music tracks being played unless I unlock the mobile. As far as I know, I had seen that other Nokia Symbain devices used to support this feature of volume adjustment while the device is locked.

Video Player : The in-built RealPlayer is good in playing H264(AVC) videos. It feels good to watch music videos in the mobile device.

Nokia Accessories : The Accessories that came in the Nokia C6 box are :

Nokia C6-00
User manual and Quick guide
Travel charger
microUSB cable
Stereo headset with microphone
2GB microSD card

All the things were good but the headset. The headset are really and outstandingly cheap. Technically speaking the headset introduce a kind of distortion called 'humming' in Electronics soon as I plug them into the mobile. Speaking about the music quality of the headset is also very lousy. So before buying get some decent head-phones or ear-phones if you are a music freak too. Thank GOD I had my own Philips S series in-ear ones.

Proximity Sensor : The proximity sensor on the front panel of mobile is great. I turns off the LCD backlight when you bring the phone close to your ears while talking. It helps saving battery power.

5.0 MP Camera : The camera is really really worth appreciating. The feature I liked most is the auto-focus.
See comparison of C6 camera snaps vs N900 camera snaps

Ctrl button : I had just been playing with the mobile and figured out that the Control 'Ctrl' button on the key-board is very useful. While texting or writing some text document, you can use some desktop PC familiar shortcuts like as follows:

Ctrl+A : To select all the text in the text document.
Ctrl+Z : To undo the latest changes made to the text document.
Ctrl+X : To cut the text.
Ctrl+C : To copy the text.
Ctrl+V : To paste the text.

Final Thoughts
I loved the Nokia C6 very much, though the disappointing thing is that it lacks Android OS,but I think the pros far outweigh the cons for this mobile device.

I will keep this blog post updating regularly as I go on using C6 so keep visiting.

Are Mobile Devices the future of 'Computing'...?

2010-11-04T06:41:00.000-07:00

Hello folks, today I just found some more time to stumble the Internet when I came across some great technical post which was related to Oracle suing Google for using some Java code used in its Android OS development.

I just found some great pic (or logically speaking 'a directed graph') of companies filing lawsuits against each other & on one another. I was stunned to see that is this something that always happens with the companies. One more thing I pondered about was Are these companies competing each other coz Mobile Device Computing is tomorrow's Computing Era and I believe it is.

Take a look at the picture, the strongest player,while talking about Operating System, being at the center of the picture.

Simple way to configure MySql Connector/J on Windows

2010-10-29T21:13:00.000-07:00

Hello IT fellows, I think I am finding more time these days to post onto this blog. This is my third post on this blog in the same month.

So lets go on with out tech tweak (KIDA)for today. I recently have joined Advanced Java Coaching just because I love Java unlike any other language. Anyways we will have a separate post on this blog to see why am I so verbose of Java & always keep on talking so much about Java.

I was just playing around to connect MS Access with Java. I could do it easily coz the windows OS inherently provides drivers for connection with Microsoft products. Then I thought of taking the program different way by connecting it to MySql. I found that there was no Driver available with my OS to connect Java with MySQL. So I downloaded it from here . Unzip the rar file and look for some .jar file in unzipped directory. Now you have to set Enviornment variable

CLASSPATH=something that already exists;.;path_to_this_jar_file;

Now your Java program is able to find the driver for MySql. This worked fine for me on Windows 7.
Credits to Aniket Zamwar's Blog

What exactly is a web server | Server concept explained

2010-10-24T10:24:00.000-07:00

OMG this is my second post in one day. This is funny for me myself. If you scroll down and just take a look at the frequency of my blogging you will realize it why. OK anyway lets get back to our technical JUGAAD(hack).

    It is not even a week passed when I was sitting with my friends and someone asked in the discussion 'Hey what exactly is a server?'. The question not only lit a flash in my mind but also a flashback. The flash relates to the question which was technical delight for me and flashback relates to my days of Engineering when I was just a novice guy in Computer Science.

    It was then, when sometimes I used to think what a server is. Many people came and told me that it is a computer or machine to which Client sends a request and the machine responds, sends webpages, files etc. But this was what a server does, this was not what I wanted. Anyway I already knew these things I needed some practical answer. There was no one who came upfront and told me what really a web server is until I realized it through my own experience.

     I agree a server is the one which responds to clients requests, maintains sessions & blah blah. If tomorrow some childlike Computer student comes to me and asks me what really a web server is, I am gonna tell him that "A web server is a simple computer with a special server software running on it. It has one directory called 'public directory'. When the client request file/s, the public directory is searched for and the file is delivered from it."

PATH and CLASSPATH EXPLAINED

2010-10-24T09:14:00.000-07:00

Hello IT Folks & computer nerds (computer KIDE in Marathi), I am back once again with something to 'EXPLAIN' to you guys. Recently I came across writing and compiling Java programs. I usually prefer Netbeans IDE for working with Java which does all compilation and execution for me on just a click of the button. Its been really long to have worked with compiling and running Java programs from the command line. But this time I felt the need to run the programs from the command line and all I could say was Oh My GOD...!

So I begun hunting down Java tutorial websites, Java Discussion forums, Coding forums. I did not know what CLASSPATH & PATH mean and why do I necessarily need to do it. Setting only the values of these variables was not something I was looking for, but I wanted the explanation of the terms CLASSPATH & PATH which I came to know about with the help of my friend. So here we go with today's blog post.

In simple language PATH is an Operating System variable whose value refers to the location of the executable (.exe) file to be launched from the Command Prompt. This is that location where the OS looks for file 'java.exe' or 'javac.exe' when you type 'java' or 'javac' in the command prompt (For more technical definition of PATH refer wiki here)

Same is the case of variable CLASSPATH. In simple language CLASSPATH refers to the location where the .class files of the compiled Java program are kept. Most of the programmers who use command line for java programs will set CLASSPATH to current directory (denoted by a dot). (For more technical defination of CLASSPATH refer wiki here)

Is 'MONEY' all that IT has to offer...?

2010-10-01T21:21:00.000-07:00

Hello folks it has been really long time ever after I had my last post on this blog. So here I am once again to present my views regarding what all Information Technology Industry has to offer to you. The views that I have expressed below is just my personal belief, you may have somewhat different belief than this.

     For fellows from non-IT profession I must foretell that when you are hired by any software firm, you are working on the probation(temporary) basis for about 3-6 months. During this term your salary is also minimal. Later depending on your performance your are chosen to be a permanent employee of the company.

     When your position is made permanent in the company, your are also offered with higher salary. When someone is offered such higher salary I have seen that there is a glimpse of smile with happiness hidden in it. But if I were at his place,I would really question myself :

1. Do I really deserve what I am being offered.
2. How much development did I go through in a particular period of time as I am accepting this offer now.

      I mean, I really feel like money is NOT the only thing that a person can achieve by being an Engineer, Developer, Researcher in an IT Industry. There are far more important things like 'Knowledge', 'Information', 'Skill' etc that can be achieved if one is determined to do so and in order to do so, one has to keep learning, reading & implementing what he has learned or read earlier in his life. Refer to Abhishek Desai's Blog for more on self development.

Always bear in mind that 'A knowledgeable person is always appreciated where ever he is' and hence they say 'Knowledge is Power'.

So I think I shall conclude. I already have stated above and I am again restating it in conclusion.
"What I have said above are just my personal belief which, by NO WAY I want to impose on anyone, your own believes might be different and I shall have no objection with them".

Thanks for visiting.
Good Bye.

Problems With String Variable Comparison

2010-07-07T09:20:00.000-07:00

Hey there everyone... Its been really long since I have had the last post on this blog...
I had just been busy with some work...!

     So lets delve into today's technical discussion. Today we will discuss the issue I had been troubled by, for about 10-15days in my BE project, for which ultimately I had to take some other route to get my work done. I again came across the same problem this day. It is the problem of comparison of two variables which hold some string values. Both the times I came across this problem, I was working with web-programming languages.

   While working today with my personal project, I came across some variables in PHP which held string values in them. I was supposed to take one value from the user (lets say 'string1') and the other from the database (lets say 'string2'). Then I had to compare these two strings. The code is as below.

               if(strcmp($string1,$string2)== 0)
                          echo "Comparison Successful...!!!";
       else
                          echo"Comparison Failed";

Here, whatever was the reason, the strings were never evaluated to be equal albeit they had the same values in them. This glitch in the code has pestered many of my friends and BE project guide too. It was today when I was told by someone to use the trim() function inbuilt to PHP to get rid of this problem.

               if(strcmp(trim($string1),trim($string2))== 0)
                          echo "Comparison Successful...!!!";
       else
                          echo"Comparison Failed";

   The trim(string str) rips the string of the trailing and leading blank space.

Conclusion:
   The reason for such thing happening is still unknown but the closer prediction of mine I can make is the presence and absence of '\0' while storing the strings in the variables.

Disclaimer: The above conclusion is purely based on my learning and programming experience. If someone figures out the exact reason as to why the discussed problem was occurring, his suggestions and thoughts are cordially welcome in comments.

Recovering GRUB (Bootloader) after windows installation

2010-05-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) is a bootloader package used to support & load an Operating System from a list of several operating systems already installed.

   I dont know about others but here at P.I.C.T most of the students install Linux on Windows with the help of WUBI (Windows-based Ubuntu Installer). When you run wubi on windows operating system it prompts many options but most of us select 'Install inside Windows'.

   I also have been doing the same since many of my last semesters, but I always used to face the same problem. The problem is 'how do I recover my Ubuntu installation if I reinstall a fresh copy of Windows operatin system.' This is where recovering GRUB comes into picture. So this time I just set my shoulders to go ahead and take a look into getting this all in charge.

    There was nothing like a rocket science in all this. First of all to get this done I just backed-up the bootloader from within windows. You people are advised to follow the steps below carefully. The procedures to back-up the bootloader is as follows:

1. Right click 'My Computer' on the Desktop.
2. Goto 'properties'.
3. Goto 'Advanced'.
4. Click 'Settings' under 'Startup and Recovery' division.
5. A window titled 'Startup and Recovery' will pop-up.
6. Click 'Edit' under 'System Start-up' division.
7. A text file named 'boot.txt' will pop up. (as shown in the adjoining image)
8. Now copy the lines written in this 'boot' file and save these copied lines in a new text file. (Dont save on Desktop.)

This is how I backed-up bootloader in windows. But in order to getting Ubuntu enlisted in the startup booting screen you also need to back-up two more files namely wubildr and wubildr.mbr

to do this just goto C:/ (or where ever your windows is installed) and back-up these files in some other file in some other Drive say(D:/)

Now, what I did was just begun installing a fresh copy of Windows operating system. I got windows running again on my computer in just 7-8 minutes (using USB Boot). Now what you have to do is just open up the boot loader as mentioned earlier and copy the code from text file saved in step 8. above and save this 'boot' file.
Also copy those files (wubildr and wubildr.mbr) back to C:/ (or where ever your windows is installed)

Now just reboot Windows and voila...!!! your Linux is back again to life.

Configuring and using SNORT (IDS)

2010-05-06T04:57:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: This tutorials is just an assistance to get a start with snort, in no case I will be held responsible for anything happening to anyones' system.

SNORT is and Intrusion Detection System (IDS). We are given a problem statement as
"Study, Install and Configure any Intrusion Detection System (IDS)" in our lab manual.
I have just played with Snort for about 4 hours and now I am able to detect network traffic from internet to my computer and able to raise alert as specified in the rule file.

I wont talk much about anything else now, we will just begin with the tutorial for configuring snort and writing a very basic 'rule file' for snort.

1)I assume that all of you have snort installed on our systems.(if not just type 'sudo apt-get install snort'). first of all I will teach you how to write a rule file for detecting a specific type of intrusion from a certain host.

1.1create a plain document named 'rule' at the path /home/your_username
e.g. /home/jayz/rule

1.2 Now I will explain you the syntax of writing a rule file.
rule_header (rule_options)
e.g alert tcp any any -> 192.168.1.4 any (msg:"JaysComp anyTCP intrusion detected ...!!";sid:1000984;)
A. rule_header consists of following fields

(rule action) (protocol) (src address & port)->(destination address & port)

rule action= this is an 'alert' that is raised when some intrusion occurs
protocol= this may be tcp, udp, icmp, vlan etc. I have used tcp for pinging GOOGLE.
src address and port= address and port number of intruder. you can take this value to be 'any any'
dest address & port=this is usually your address. I have used my LAN address(192.168.1.4). you can take this value to be 'any any'

B.rule_options consists of following pattern
keyword:argument; keyword:argument; ...

The keywords that I have used in my rule file are msg and sid.

e.g. msg:"Hey Intrusion detected"
sid:1000983 (I think this can be anything but I am not sure.)

2) Now we are ready to run snort and detect tcp intrusion on any of our port from internet.

open a terminal and type
'sudo snort -d -h 192.168.1.0/24 -N -c /home/jayz/rule -i eth0'

Explanation:

sudo= super user previledges.
snort= command to run snort
-d= Dump the Appication layer
-h= home network address
-N=Turn off logging (alerts still work)
-c=Use Rules File at this location
-i= Monitor the given network interface

for most wired connections the value for -i=eth0 for rest it may change.
When you run this command, you will see an output like this

now open up the web browser and
just surf for few seconds.
Now again switch back to your
terminal and press 'Ctrl+C'
Now the terminal looks pretty mcuh like this

Now just open the path /var/log/snort

here you will find an 'alert file'

To this alert file all the alerts, as specified
in the 'rule file' are logged.

Now you can play with Snort to try out
different protocols' and hosts' intrusion
into your system.

May be there are some spelling mistakes here but just ignore them.

Securing Passwords

2010-04-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

Hi ya all,
I am once again here to chatter about something that I know. Many of you guys must be wondering if your accounts are safe with your given passwords.
Can anyone open up your account, may or may not be financial, may be LinkedIn , may be FACEBOOK...?
What do u think?

The answer is somewhat difficult but it is 'YES' for some scenarios. Because the the security provided by Google, Facebook, Paypal, Ebay is very high but still such incident happen. What do you think why are there incidents of online thefts, looting and robbery.
The reason is that most of us(I am primarily talking about INDIANS) need to go to Internet Cafes at least once in a month or two, even though we have a net connection at our home. Most of the novice computer users are not aware of malicious software that may be running at the back-ground in the system. Such software are deployed to steal the passwords of the confidential accounts like Paypal may be your Bank account passwords etc.

The reason for stealing such passwords can be any of the following:

Greed
Revenge
Hacking Trials
Malicious Intent

A properly chosen password can compel a hacker to take about 238 years also to break a particular password. A password of even 6 characters can be hard enough to break.
Best practices to choose passwords:

1. Choose small and meaningful passwords.
A password that cannot be memorized or recalled when required is of no use. So while choosing a password you can opt to chose first name of your child or wife concatenated with the two or four digits of your cars number.

2. Make use of characters, numbers and special characters while choosing a password.

The strongest passwords in the world are those that are accompanied with digits, characters and any of your favorite special characters. A password with random characters and digits is more secure but difficult to memorize and recall. Anyways, I personally like the policy of Ebay. It prompts the user to choose a password that is a combination of numbers and characters.
For example: Dx87/Tm or Hr430Jx (These passwords are just for the demonstration I suggest you to create your own and use them.)

3. Avoid choosing a password that is purely numerical.

Numerical passwords can be easily broken by employing a counter program to the password field and running it from 0 through a very large number to get the required password. So its very dangerous to keep mobile numbers, PAN Numbers as your financial accounts' passwords.

4. Avoid choosing the passwords which can be broken through just a guessing.

Choosing a password that can be easily guessed by anyone may prove fatal. This situation may be like choosing a password of your own name may be the name of someone beloved. The point number 2. describes the best way of choosing the password.

Prevention:

Before logging into your account check the taskbar whether any suspicious software is running.
You can also open task manager and close such malicious software.
While typing the password second half of the password must be typed first and then mouse must be placed at the start and then the first half of the password must be typed. This is because the key-logger and similar software cannot recognize the mouse movements.
After you are done with using the browser, just clear of the cookies and other resident data in the browser.Click here to see how to clear the cookies in different web browsers.

OK, this much is enough for this time will meet again soon. Keep visiting.

Blender- An open sorce alternative for animation and game development

2010-04-10T23:43:00.000-07:00

Recently there was a workshop conducted in my college(P.I.C.T) by 3 students namely Kapil, Bhanu and Nitin from IIT, Bombay to teach the features and the extraordinary functionality of BLENDER. Blender is an open source software which is incredibly very powerful. You can create interactive 3D games and beautiful 3D animation in blender.

The power of blender surely resides above the abilities of Flash as well. I cannot comment about Maya and 3DMax because I have never been the user of these development tools.

The primary virtue of blender that makes it so useful is that it provides you with as many views of an object/s as you wish. It creates different frames in the main window which can be used by the developer to entitle them as front view, top view, side view, camera view. The changes made to the object in one view are respectively reflected in all the other views.
Blender runs Python scripts at the background. So if you intend to get your hands up on blender, its preferable to have python installed on your computer. Even if you dont have any python installation on your computer, blender runs smoothly but it cannot guarantee running all the inbuilt scripts properly.
Blender Download Page
Python Download Page

Few examples of the animations developed using Blender :
Kajimba
Project London

Arrival of my new DELL Inspiron 1440

2010-02-26T09:49:00.000-08:00

Its been just few weeks when I got my first Laptop..Precisely this 14th .... yeah the Valentines Day

Its Dell Inspiron 1440. The laptop is quite good. But one major shortcoming is that it has only 1 LED on the front panel, That only LED indicates battery chargin, processing, power and all this. But the laptop is OK.

Another major issue I wanted to discuss is that I have faced the driver probelm too much since windows XP is being treated as outdated by DELL. the only drivers available at the Dell Support were for the Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

Finding the common drivers was pretty easy, but it really took great tolls upon me to find out the Wi-fi driver for my Inspiron 1440. So here I am posting a link that I found somewhere on the net, was useful for me.

ftp://support.digiworld.com.vn/DRIVERS/NOTEBOOK/DELL/INSPIRON/1440.824/XP/

Thank You ...!

'LUCK' Does it ever exist...!

2009-12-13T01:06:00.000-08:00

Guys this is my first article on this blog...!

I have often seen people blaming their incapability by a hypothetical entity,in this universe, called 'LUCK'. I have often seen many of my friends blaming their luck.
Once when I was going through examintaions in second year, one of my room-mate was asked to write a program in Assembly Language which was too simple and the other room-mate was caught in trouble coz he was asked to write a program to simulate a copy command of DOS in ASM, which was quite difficult for us at that stage.

      The second room-mate somehow managed to write a copy command simulation program, but the first just could managed to do anything in the exam and had to face the consequences later on.

   Here the first roomy kept on blaming his LUCK....While the second kept mum and was enjoying.

Personally I dont believ in luck and here I just want to notify you that LUCK never exists. All a person gets is due to his abilities, deeds and the main thing is his POTENTIAL.

     'POTENTIAL' matters the most in this world. When we read or learn something our potential is raised,      though little. I can define potential as 'ability of a person to do a certain thing' e.g. pass an exam, answer a difficult question etc.

     Thus the second room-mate had a little more potential than the first one and this was the only reason why he could manage to write a program that was a bit harder than that of the first one.
Obviously, Potential of a person goes hand in hand with the Briallance of a person. But a slow learner (like me) can raise his potential just by practice or by learning, reading a certain thing he wants to master etc.

      Once my friend could not just pass an aptitude test taken by INFOSYS, there he began groaning...!
     "Yaar mai to pass ho gaya hota, par aaj mera luck hi nahi chala.".
      Instead of saying this he should have thought that was he really well prepared for the test or he should have prepared a little more for the test.

Always remember "Success and Failure are only the choices that we make through our won DEEDS".

So guys next time onwards whenever you fail just think twice before blaming 'LUCK'. Such a thing is merely imaginary. All what we get is the outcome of our efforts and dedication to your work.