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I got down to delhi today and its soo good to be at home...:)
meanwhile its raining heavily at warangal ... good that i came back hehe

Hmm I didnt knew that about me:)

Your Inner European is Italian!

Passionate and colorful. You show the world what culture really is.

Who's Your Inner European?

Character Recognition

IIT Powai has a techfest every year sometimes in Jan. This year its from 20-22 jan, there are a lot of events to participate in but most involed creating some sort of robots. My knowledge about bot making is limited to creating AIM chat bots:) so nothing in there for me. But we liked the event on handwriting recongnition its for hindi alphabet. The sytem we designed is a bit slow for now but i think it will improve. Any ways we sent the abstract yesterday lets see how it turns out to be.





Tags: IITB, Techfest, Character Recognition

Semantic Web Tags and More

One of the ways people can organise information better and help others search for it is by using tags. Meta data can help solve many problems related to semantics and appears to be a easy way to avoid more formal ontology matching which has its own problems. Things are heating up in the semantic web (SW) with lot of people coming up with new ideas to use the semantic web(SW). I recently had a few good discussions on the semantic web mailing list maintained by w3c. I found a rather nice use of the semantics in encoding for database compression and security. You can download the whitepaper at about semantic encoding in databases at the above link.

Ps: I deceied to tag my posts...:)


Tags: Semantic Web, Databases, Web 2.0

FastBlogit

During my discussions in the semantic web mail list i met Russel seth.
I hit across a new and better blogging service FastBlogIt I am posting on a group there about semantic search engine. You can try its fun... and a nice way to organise things.

This semantic web thing is good i got new friends and many associations...:D

Tim got a blog now

Tim Berner's Lee the creator of the world wide web has finally taken to the blogging world. He recently started to write his blog. Welcome to the blogsphere tim:)

Tim's Blog

Intel v/s AMD now in F1

Intel decied to sponsor BMW's Sauber... AMD already is the sponsor for Ferrari... this makes sure that the chip wars will now be fought in F1 as well...:)

Read more at today.reuters.co.uk/new...

Open Solaris Xmas

Dont knw if my girl is ready for open solaris but the this xmas tree sure looks cool....:)
Xmas Tree

PC World's Techlog - Is Google About to Buy Opera?

Hmm now it seems that opera is going to be the google's new browser. Its all speculative but if they acquire opera it will heat up the battle betweeen IE and FF and make it triangular...

Read more at blogs.pcworld.com/techl...

New Audio Blog

Odeo.com allows you to create a channel for podcasting or direct link to be used as a audio blog....
I created a new audio blog for me... here you go...

Carry On Coding - Comics

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live - Martin Golding

Read more at upsterzcomics.blogspot...

Google Extension for Firefox

Google has added a new firefox extension called the blogger web comments... it allows you to see whats happening about the current page ur surfing in the blogger community and you can add ur own post directly within the extension on ur own blog... its kinda kwel but now google knows all the pages i visit too :(

Semantic Web

I am working on the semantic web search and recently I sparked off a discussion in the semantic web mailing list. It was about how will the semantic web emerge? Most people think that a time will come when the web developers will start tagged their content and slowly the web will change from human readable to machine readable. But the question is why as a web developer I will like to tag my data? Unless I get some real good benefits from it I am not going to take the extra pain of tagged my documents. So what I believe is that the acceptance and increase in popularity of semantic web can happen only when there are applications based on semantic web which give better performance then traditional web.

Apache on Windows

I had never used the apache web server before. All my past sever side scripts ran on the IIS which is available with windows. So this time i deceided to go on with apache. The installation is swift and took no time at all. But the configuration of the server is the tricky part ( compared to IIS) , I had to add only one line in the httpd.conf file in the conf folder... it was the servername= localhost... all files that you want to put on the site go into the /htdocs folder the same as the www/root folder in IIS. Finally i had a few problems with running perll scripts on apache but he error.log file was helpful to figure out wat was wrong...

Fun Tests...

Sun Java Studio

I downloaded the Sun's Java Studio enterprise edition which was not free earlier from the sun download site. The Java Studio is intended to be a IDE for software development in java. It looks very rich in features from the looks:). The tomcat server latest edition is preincluded for programming with servlets and other web applications in java. Java Studio looks like its all set to rival microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 which was released earlier this month. Java Studio too comes with templates for software design and a large number of examples with full online support. This initiative should encourage use of java even more...

Solaris Back on Track

This is with reference to the earlier post on messing up os. We finally found a way to get that system back on track, we stoped solaris while booting by pressing stop-a and then gave the command boot -s in ok prompt. That makes solaris boot in single user mode via console. After logging in as a root user we executed /usr/bin/smartcard -D to disable login by smart card and got the normal password based login.:)

Installing Woes...

I think we are to blame microsoft and windows for making all tasks seem so easy. We have been trying to install the smart card drivers and the neccesary software on linux and its getting us into a lot of trouble. Type this configure that and so on.. the list is endless. Compare this with the simple installation package on windows which just expects us to press the next button:D.
I fail to understand why dont the ppl workin on linux too follow some standards and provide easy installations. Unless this is done the acceptance of linux as a desktop os for home user will remain a far fetched dream.
The use of rpm intiated by the red hat is a good step in this direction and should encourage developers to bundle thier software in that format. Even Mandrake adopted it and ships with all rpm packages :).
BTW mandrake is no more , they have changed the name of the release to mandriva. The lastes os mandriva 2006 can be downloaded from http://wwwnew.mandriva.com/en/downloads

My lens on Squidoo

I built my first lens on squidoo u can acess it at http://www.squidoo.com/asankhaya. Its all set to magnify this blog : )

Setting up Lan on Linux.

I had to set up the Lan on a Red Hat 9.0 system today. The process is fairly simple thought not as in the windows environment.

-Log in as root and open a terminal
-Type netconfig
-Select the propoer ip address and subnet mask
-press ok
-now you have set your system at that ip address
-type ipconfig to see ur present ip address
-you can use ping command to check if you are connected

Messed up the OS

Today i was just playing with the smart cards on the sun blade workstations. I allowed smart card based login and lol the normal prompt for login was gone and it asked for the card. When i inserted the card (sobs) it said login failed. I had succesfully locked my self out of the sustem:(. anyways there are no plans to correct it as we are going to load solaris 10 on it.

Sun Blade Workstation

Today was very eventful ... We installed two sun blade workstations from scratch for our project. The sun blade machines(sun blade 1500) come preloaed with solaris 9. we booted it and bang.. no one knew password for root we tried all combinations till the lab assistant came up with the list of password given by the vendor. Then it booted the solaris 9 has gnome and a common desktop preloaded.
Later we set out to install red hat linux on two machines wich was rather routine now.

Then we decied to load solaris 10 on the blade machines but we had only the x86 version. So we loaded it on other machine:). The solaris 10 os has a java destop environment which looks very kwel indeed. Didnt have too much time playing wid it may be tommrow...

Gmail Antivirus

Google added virus scanning capabilities to their mail service on 2nd dec. As people will know that gmail doesnt allow you to send an exe file as attachment. But even with the virus scan in place you cannot send an exe file (altough there are ways to do it but for common user it will not be easy). Moreover the virus scanning feature cannot be disabled which is useful in case you are sending the infected file to the antivirus support to get help.
People are already complaining about this. To add on google doesnt even tell which company's service they are using to scan the emails. The users would really apreciate that they know which antivirus software is scanning their mails

Partition Magic

I had a little problem with my partitions. One of them had too much free space and the other had a little and i couldnt simply move the data so i decieded to move the free space. The software i used was partition magic 8.5 its quite easy to use and simple. The resize partition option enabled me to change the sizes of the partition. So the space problem is sloved for the time been :)

Solaris 10

Today we had our very first experience with installing solaris 10. The operating system takes a lot of space(it asked for about 8gb for full installation) but the interface is similar to linux. We could install it on one partition but it didnt boot properly. We maganed to log on to a shell only once and could execute popular unix commands like ls, cd etc. I dont knw what is the problem maybe it isnt installed properly.
Lets see what happens next. :)

Firefox 1.5 released

So mozilla finally released the new 1.5 version of the browser firefox... most of the changes hav been cosmetic even thought the release was long expected. The browser is now in its 2nd year.. and has a market share of about 10% since it was launched in november last year. IE still leads the market but firefox ios catching up... no mozilla is going to design a new marketing campaign for the browser...

U can download firefox 1.5 from http://www.mozilla.com