Harish Palaniappan's

Animating 2D or 3D characters is a painful process.. very much so that Sir Walt Disney is said to have taken many years to create the Mickey Mouse films, and also those were the days of traditional animation, where every frame of a scene is painted or drawn on paper.

If you even have worked on softwares like photoshop or corel draw like a hobby to drawing or designing something, you know how much time and pain it is to even design a proper webpage.

So, after all that when you go and see a movie like "Finding Nemo", "Monsters Inc", or "Cars", you open your mouth and gape.

Because every single frame of the movie which plays only for 1/24th of a second (in digital filming there are 24 frames per second) , has the characters, the environment or background graphics, with color, texture.. and to add to the complexity, they have lighting and related object surface color and shadow variations.

To put it lighter, one frame of a scene in animation movies is equivalent to drawing what you see below on a computer or a sheet of paper with whatever tools you want on earth (except a copier and printer).

So, that explains how much work should be done to make a movie like what Pixar does .. and how much effort to be Pixar, because they are the best today.

Obviously for any animator their work is inspirations, and people look forward to learn from their experience. Knowing this Pixar has interestingly put-up a brief of their process of making animation films on their website. The page mentions only the core steps or milestones of the animation film making process, but that itself would overwhelm you.

Pixar - How We Do It

What I learnt New from their processes..
> The animators make the frames of a scene and have the animation as digitized sequences, but this is not the movie that gets released... what we see as a film is a video recording of the sequences played up on their computers.

> If in a scene, a character raises its hand, the animators probably create one or two steps of the action or only one or two frames of the scene and the computer generates the in-between frames that show the motion of the hand as a smooth one.. the animators of course fine tune these in-between frames manually as necessary.

This is one other major advantage digital animations have over traditional animations. The first advantage obviously being able to correct or modify the art work easily, instead of redrawing the whole thing on another paper again.

> They use server farms just like all big software enterprises do.. they use a bulk of machines (farms) to render each frame. Probably this means redrawing the background, the characters, the lighting, etc., all into a frame, or integrating every other teams work into the final output.

Pixar says, on an average each frame with such bulk of servers, takes about 6 hours to render, and some complex frames take up to 90 hours too.

Interesting bit of information they had on their website.

Related link:
Blend it... its easy to make 3D graphics yourself

Posted by Harish at 6:46 PM | Permalink

You don't have to be a programmer / techy person to watch this.. but only understand that with a few thousand rupees spent on some hardware, and with installing a software demo available, you could easily test 3D on your TV display which shows stuff streamed from a computer. Just like this guy shows here.

I have not tried, or neither am I conversant with the technology that this guy Johnny shows in the video. But this guy seems to have successfully made 3D TV look possible even with cheap home-made technology.. while many big corporations out there are still experimenting with different technologies to make the next big thing in TV viewing.

If you have a nintendo hardware packed system with wii remote (wireless interface remote) and also probably related stuff to play computer images/video on TV, then, probably you can try his programs and experiments that are listed here.

Posted by Harish at 10:21 PM | Permalink

What happens when you decide to meetup with fellow web identities, so far total strangers, for an informal technical seminar.. so aptly called a camp. That's what I think I gave myself time to findout today at the pipescamp.

I got interested after reading an invite email from GaneshAPP for the camp. While I don't understand why even when the sender himself said too many times in the email message that it is 'SPAM', Thunderbird or gmail didn't think it was spam...sometimes these google guys don't believe users ..at all. ha ha.

pipesCamp was about Yahoo Pipes! There was both formal and informal discussions on the Yahoo Pipes' technology, the features, what is possible, what is not, why it is not great business sense to do mash-ups like yahoo pipes, and, some more brainstorming like that.

The camp was well organized and attended at Hotel Shaan Royal near koyambedu, chennai.. and it was all planned and pulled off with blogger support with just 3 days notice.

The take-homes from the camp were:
1. All it takes to make a camp and have people brainstorm around is.. just a few humble modest friends who have the contacts, and one guy atleast with the money to sponsor it, and regular blog post readers.

2. 'Geeks' is an utterly butterly over-used, abused, word. Everybody is not a geek in my opinion.. and not definitely just because we attend such camps. Don't brand us geeks please.

3. Remember to have MONEY as an output when you do something.

4. I didn't get convinced that Yahoo Pipes is great, neither got bored that it was just about feed processing... but one thing that was obvious is.. Yahoo Pipes is giving people new ideas to use and present content differently... even on their blogs...so imagine what they will think of doing for their commercial web projects.

Posted by Harish at 7:10 PM | Permalink

"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal"

I was taken aback when I read this somewhere and marked as an Einstein quote.. verifying, looks like he said it. Just couldn't believe he had this opinion on technological progress... probably was a guy who hated inventions, and only liked theories.

Posted by Harish at 9:40 AM | Permalink

This is an old one.. was searcing for it today and found images and steps in a website.

ok. do you want your cappucino to look like above. Here's how

Posted by Harish at 8:32 PM | Permalink

Softwares like moodle, hotchalk, are helping teachers, course authors, academicians and importantly, students, alike.

Slowly, internet and broadband are becoming a cannot-be-ignored delivery model for providing education.

For example, in the UK high speed broadband is free for public (probably with limits of bandwidth or other conditions).. and UK universities have all opened up for video conferenced regular classes which are also recorded and delivered so students can catchup later if they missed a class "in session". Imagine!! .. its not just class notes that you can catchup if you missed, but the entire class in session, who was saying what, who were all present and ofcourse if you bothered .. whatever the teacher was saying. :o)

My last employer used moodle for delivering assignments, conducting online tests, and announcing grading scores .. for their fresh graduate training programmes.

Good thing is.. you could catchup with your favorite courses even if you are a full-time student at a college... and you don't have to stress it, because it is delivered online without the headache or reading another bulk of study material, doing another set of assignments, etc., and if the delivery model of your course is mostly online, then the costs should ethically be low since it puts less requirements of time and resources on the course provider's side.

moodle.com and hotchalk.com guys have allowed their services to be entirely free, which keeps with the drive to transform education.

moodle is much more advanced than hotchalk, and is best downloaded, installed and maintained by the college admins.. to enable their teachers and students to use it. There are quite a few software people who provide services on this part, and charge a very simple monthly fee from the colleges that use their website's moodle installation.

hotchalk is for the startup teacher ..best for schools that want to try internet to deliver assignments and homework. It is quick and easy to use than moodle.. possibly because it doesn't have so many features like moodle, so eliminates complexity in the user-interface.

If you are curious on why is moodle powerful than hotchalk.

moodle is open-source.. for techies it means anybody can see the programs written for moodle, contribute to improve it or add more features, just like doing social work. If you are my kind, then you might like the people behind moodle.

and hotchalk is privately owned, and provided as a free service.

Actually, we shouldn't be comparing something as big as moodle, whose audience is much more than schools.. alongwith hotchalk whose audience is the simple teacher at your school next door. They address two different but important sets of.. the new term that I have slowly started using very often.. 'stake holders'.

Posted by Harish at 10:34 AM | Permalink

Saw this first through Digg.com at http://www.voltier.com/stereo/ and have been analyzing the interesting part of the illusion. The below image or animation is generated from two 2D images.

You should be able to easily see it in 3D perspective especially with the water splashed up.
If you don't see it please wait, it must be loading.. the image is 180kb

My understanding:
The effect is created by fastly swapping images taken at 2 angles from the subject.. or two perspectives of the view. Because your vision can remember an image seen for a fraction of a second, by the time the image is swapped.. your brain overlaps the new image with the image still in memory and gives you a feel of two sides of some portions on the image.. like the water droplets splashed up.

In effect you see more of a droplet than what you would see if you were seeing one of the 2D photos. So, it gives you a 3D feel. The 3D effect is not because of the shake.. the shake is just because it is an animation with more than required time between slides.

3D is about being able to see the 3rd dimension or the depth of an object to visualize it separate from the rest of what is seen.

The above concept is probably how our eye sight works, and so having two eyes may be too important for vision. With one of the eyes closed, we may be seeing things in 2D but still not realize the loss much.

I think I have heard about this concept long back... I can remember reading something similar in some journal about a 3D system being developed which could allow delivering 3D images on a normal LCD monitor itself, and probably technologists are at it already in using this same concept to create future 3D television and cameras.

I can imagine cameras having two lenses instead of one as it is now, and the images streamed properly to a monitor with both perspectives swapped at an optimum speed, to produce clean, non-shaky 3D for TV. What do you think?

Posted by Harish at 5:57 PM | Permalink

If your computer supports UNICODE, it can.

What is Unicode?
Unicode is an industry standard of characters, or, more correctly, character encodings.

It is like saying 1202240 means the character 'k' in small case. Computers understand only 1's and 0's so we keep numeric codes which are then easily converted to a big string of 1's and 0's. The equivalent for 1202240 in 1's and 0's would be a long code.. I will allow myself not take that trouble of converting it.

ASCII, EBCDIC, and many others you would have learnt or come across when you read computer books are all number codes(encodings) for language or symbols. So there are many different standard encodings, some companies even use organization specific encodings to keep information just understandable by their computers, some users also do something similar by inventing their own encodings and interpreting it.

I remember playing a spy-game with friends when I was a kid. We used to have charts of symbols we all put up together for each character in the English alphabet.. and for any text in English we translated it into our new written language. Hardly 26 characters but it could cover any English text and so it was fun though we took at least 3 minutes to read a word back into English.

The thing is Unicode has the largest set of characters, 100,000 of them, and when this is a standard for computers it means most language characters can be processed by a computer directly without internally being translated to something that the computer understands.

Fonts are different..
Not to confuse with unicode, remember that fonts are different, fonts are for displaying some text or symbol on screen.. not useful for anything other than displaying.

Fonts will be necessary and separately installed or used in computers to display or draw the unicode character or any character at all. So when we talk unicode, we are talking about text that is processed by a computer rather than text displayed on the screen.

For example, Windows latest Operating systems are UNICODE based for understanding characters and text, and they all ship with a font called Latha. So, in case I type a word in the Tamil language, I can setup windows such that it understands my keystrokes in unicode rather than what the keyboard sends (ASCII usually), and display the characters on screen using the Tamil font Latha.
How can I set it up? Not yet.. but we will discuss that.

Why Unicode?
Being an Indian, I can imagine how it is essential to know at least a couple of languages to be able to converse with different people rather than making mute actions with hands. We have many languages in India, forget the numbers, we have Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, ... and so on.

Does Unicode have character sets to cover all of them. No. Possibly the 'Unicode consortium' a non-profit organization handling the standard took only languages which where known to be used by a population greater than a threshold that they had in mind. While Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, etc., are there, Assamese isn't included...and so are a few other languages I suppose. Likewise, I am not sure whether if they have included Tamil they have all characters in Tamil or just the most most commonly used ones or ones that classify as modern Tamil.

How they classify or why they have this but not that, and whether they have all characters or not, etc., are questions we will have when we start using software based on Unicode.

Like I mentioned earlier, it helps a lot to know more than one or two languages.. and so Unicode becoming a standard and getting widespread application into all computer technologies means we can use software in any language comfortable rather than making Computers that can only understand English...which is the big problem we already have.

If you are a programmer this question must have occurred to you "Why am I always typing software programs or code in english like 'for', 'if', 'then', etc., why not in Thai or chinese?". Because internally, ASCII based computers understand only English, since only English is part of ASCII encoding.. also program compilers have to understand unicode based instructions.

The effects of this is like,
> give up your language for English because you use technology in your business,
>give up more processing power of your brain reading, writing, typing in english..while your elders trained your brain in your baby years with your mother tongue most possibly.
>And, if you want to control technology, you want to communicate with the computer in the language or character set it understands.

Evolution and Transformation of systems to support Unicode
Unicode didn't happen from nowhere. People understood well before Unicode that a universal standard with more characters was neccessary than the 255 supported by Computers because ASCII code was the standard.

So came in a lot of U for universal standards. UCS-2, UTF-8, UTF-16, windows-2525,.. or many things like that are all character encodings which are all now superseded by unicode. You can look at it like stepping stones towards UNICODE.

Many technologies started adopting UNICODE. Operating Systems of today are all mostly UNICODE based. Like Windows NT and above use UNICODE for all internal processing. Doesn't mean ASCII is not understood.. UNICODE is carefully derived from earlier systems such that all major previous standards also are part of UNICODE and there isn't a translation requirement at all most often.

It is not just the operating system that needs to become UNICODE based or Unicode compliant.. its an entire group of software technologies, protocols and standards that have to change into this. And we are not there yet...that is why programmers still type code in english, though anybody might be using Windows XP which is very much Unicode based.

All Email software, servers and clients, have to deal with encoding/decoding text in unicode for transmission and reception.

All web-based software, or web browsers should start understanding unicode, and servers should send unicode encoded content to the browsers. This transition has almost happened. If a webpage has unicode characters browsers search for appropriate fonts and display the character. This is why sometimes you might see the actual language text on some pages, while on some other language pages you might not see because the appropriate font was not mapped or unicode support itself is not there.

Here's a live sample of tamil font
முல்லை மலருக்கு ஆந்கிலதில் ஜாஸ்மீந எண்று பெர
(if you see only boxes your browser doesn't support unicode or it is not windows NT or above, or the Latha font is not there)..
(if you can read Tamil and find mistakes in above sentence forgive me i have just typed what i immediately understood with the keys... and you might like to read an entire Tamil blog here)

All programming language compilers should be able to understand unicode based instructions and be able to convert them into machine code.

Until now, I don't think there is any, not one, computer programming language compiler that can understand unicode.. they all understand only ASCII, and they may not for ever because, keyboards need to be small and can handle only ASCII english.

Yes, like you know we do have bilingual keyboards popularly used in Japan, china, etc., So, conversion to unicode also involves hardware industry and technologies. So, the conversion is taking time.

If that much didn't cover your apetite to know about unicode, below links might help you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_Consortium
http://unicode.org/

India and UNICODE
I was surprised, but proud to see an indian flag, and even a tamilnadu state government logo on the Unicode official website unicode.org. The site listed the indian government and tamilnadu state government as members of the consortium.

I was surprised because I am one of those critics on, India and its growth alongwith politics and development within the country, so I didn't expect to see the indian government understand importance of unicode or be a member of the consortium. I was proud for obvious reasons you will know.. I am an Indian.. and I didn't see flags of other countries or logos of governments.

And, regarding Tamilnadu, a state in India (where I live), happens to be one of the few states (outside the english speaking club) where there's a "government standard" for the regional Tamil language fonts and related tamil software standards.

Aksharmala
unicode.org had a link in the 'Useful Resources' link... to this software called Aksharmala.

http://www.aksharamala.com/

I downloaded (freeware) Aksharmala, which it seems can convert your keystrokes to an indian language font on the application you are typing the text on...provided the application is built with unicode support. For example, notepad.exe doesn't understand unicode (even if you use aksharmala), while outlook or thunderbird do.

How to type in Tamil:
To type emails in Tamil language, I install aksharmala, set the Tamil keymap, and set Latha (shipped with windows) as the tamil font it should translate my keystrokes to. I then open Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird, press Ctrl+Alt+T (Hotkey) to enable aksharmala, and go ahead type away tamil into my email.

Few things here:
1. The above can be done even without aksharmala in a unicode supported windows. Windows NT or above. Windows itself can do this conversion mechanism if you do the proper settings in the 'Regional / Language settings' under 'Control Panel' (details below). But, yes not as easy as enabling/disabling conversion with a hotkey i think.

2. If I use aksharmala, I can use the font conversion feature even in Windows 98 which is not unicode based. But then, the font 'Latha' won't be there on Windows98 and so I will have to find, download and install some tamil font and tell aksharmala to use that.

Similar software like Aksharmala should be very much available for non-indian languages also. or, at least it will be very easy to configure support for a regional language if the operating system understands unicode.

'Regional / Language settings' under 'Control Panel' in Windows
You can find information on how to make your keystrokes mean languages other than english, on windows NT or above version computers, here: http://www.geocities.com/csd_one/keyboard/KBD_inst.htm

Note: To do settings mentioned in above link, you might need Windows installation CD if multilingual support was not enabled during installation (appropriate language fonts might not have been copied).

3. The recipient of my email should read it in Thunderbird or outlook or a browser that can understand unicode, and appropriately display correct language fonts.. otherwise the recipient would just see boxes in place of text.

Unicode Resources:
The website unicode.org has many links to useful resources here.

Typing in Tamil, Hindi or other indian languages.. is easy through below links.
All you do is type the equivalent of the language word in english.. and the applications below translate that into the language text in unicode. You can then copy the language text and paste in your web blog or email or any unicode supported software (like in any latest browsers).

www.quillpad.com
http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic

Posted by Harish at 1:27 AM | Permalink

Read this interesting article by a scientist, actually a vision of future technology which will prove that santa is for real..

Science of Santa Claus

All these years old people always told curiously awake children that santa claus is not for real and its not possible for him to deliver all gifts around the world in one night...

The scientist's vision in the above link, mimicks a claim that such a santa exists, telling its all very much possible. Better watch out if you have yet to tell your child that santa is not real...may be you wait for another 5 years. :)

Posted by Harish at 3:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Look forward to this guy making some news in January & February 2007.

Above is a satellite, Space Capsule Recovery Experiment(SRE) that the indian space research organization (ISRO) has planned to launch coming january 10th 2007...alongwith with 3 other satellites, from the same launch vehicle PSLV -C7 (Polar satellite launch vehicle -level C7)

The SRE experiment:
Indians are trying to catch up a wee bit of space technologies like 'space-to-earth rentry' which the Americans have known for two decades now. ISRO is making this SRE experiment to understand and test its technologies of satellite or object rentry into earth's atmosphere.

The SRE is planned to be put in an orbit for a week or may be a month, and then commanded and manoevered to re-enter earth, navigate itself and fall 120km away from its initial launchpad, into the waters of the bay of bengal.

The technologies involved and that are expected to be tested are,
> Decceleration, to try reduce speed on re-entry since objects from space drop at blistering speeds into the earth.
> Temperature insulation methods, objects rentering earth, at blistering speeds have blistering temperatures. (remember those sci-fi movies where something drops from space into the ocean and lot of evaporated gases around making up for the sudden cooling of the hot object falling in the water)
> Navigation, guidance and control of the object during the re-entry phase,
> Testing of drop methods, like 3 sequentially openend parachutes at different altitudes once entering the earth,

ISRO says: It would be a forerunner to ISRO mastering the re-entry and recovery technologies, which are required to help ISRO build its long aimbition in launch vehicles, the "re-usable satellite launch vehicle".

The last mission of ISRO trying to launch a few other satellites failed, because the launch vehicle burned up on course, due to faults in the rocket system. Hence this mission is quite important to ISRO and indian space technology buffs to boost up confidence in their work.

Posted by Harish at 3:24 PM | Permalink

There is this old hack (which i knew only today) about configuring browsers to load pages faster in faster connections. By default, most browsers seem to have configuration that fits a dialup connection better.

The video in the link below will show how to improve page load speeds in Internet explorer or FireFox browsers .. provided you have a broadband connection.

Please remember to reset the configuration back when you have to use dialup connection, for it tries to use more bandwidth through dialup and might crash the browser.

Video: Lightning Fast Browsing Trick For Internet Explorer And Firefox

If you are technically inclined.. to know why the suggestion on the video works.. then you can read the technical details here

Posted by Harish at 11:16 AM | Permalink

Thanks to Amit, a friend who forwarded me these pictures.

Posted by Harish at 3:55 PM | Permalink

You would have experienced hearing marketing messages on your phone.. I am talking about the automated ones. Communications providers like TATA or AIRTEL, are technology front-runners in the sector in India.. and they prove it in that they do machine driven phone calls to their subscribers to advice of bill payment dates... very often they do marketing calls in the disguise of "value-added services"

I have been receiving one such call from AIRTEL quite often on my mobile phone.. that just does not leave me if I ignore the call.

Looks like some intelligent programmer made sure his program ensures that the recipient hears the message and if the call is ignored or not connected the call retries after a few minutes. I do not have any idea whether the programmer has any threshold wherein if i ignore a specific number of times they will bear my number... but they surely don't seem to respect the 'DO NOT CALL' registry on their website on which i have registered many times.

Currently the solution i have is ... I recorded the number of the call, stored it as 'Airtel Virus', and whenever the call comes i take the call and disconnect after 2 secs.

After a few times like this, I started smiling whenever my phone says 'Airtel Virus calling...' So, its become a way to have a sweet surprise once in a month.

If you are in chennai, and having this problem too, the number for Airtel Virus is +9199400 12600 Other cities probably have different numbers. If you know of any, please comment to this entry.

And don't bother to register on Airtel's DO NOT CALL registry, they just don't care about that list for sure.

Happy disconnection with the virus.

Posted by Harish at 5:45 PM | Permalink

Indian government has finally realized the threat of the web, or actually the threat of few disturbing websites on the web.

Government sources announced interests in practising URL blocking on all international internet gateways linking to India. Currently there are 8 such gateways of which 5 are owned by VSNL (a part-government, a part-TATA enterprise), 2 owned by Reliance Infocomm, and 1 owned by Bharti network running Airtel broadband.

By way of this implementation, those website/blog URLs (or addresses) which have disturbing content for Indians, those that could pose a security threat, will be blocked at the international gateway level itself, which would prevent access to such websites in India.

It seems all this time, the government had implemented ban on such websites through service providers (ISPs) like AIRTEL, TATA or RELIANCE, and the ISPs which didn't have such infrastructure to block websites easily, blocked them at the domain level.

As this list of websites grew unmanageably large, ISPs due to mistakes or other problems, started blocking many normal websites occasionally. No wonder, the ISPs have now appreciated the government decision on implementing this themselves.

Is this good or bad?
Depends!

For the optimist reading this article, especially from outside India, its good news that such implementations are happening and this could probably eliminate a lot of current problems with blocked websites, and also allow for better monitoring on the Nation's security front.

For the pessimist (like me), especially people living in India (pessimistic can also be termed the 'realistic' approach when it comes to Indian government implementation of reforms), its going to become easier for politicians to bribe or frighten somebody and block websites like tehelka.com which has a reputation for exposing corruptive politicians time and again through online videos taken during secret sting operations. Once such a thing happens, it could probably take years in the courts for the website to get out of the blacklisted sites and continue operations.

Posted by Harish at 5:19 PM | Permalink

Scrybe is a new application on its launchpad. Yes, One of those many hundreds of (probably free) online applications for web users that are on launchpad. But the features of iScrybe are simple, new and impressively simplify day to day tasks.

If you are one of those people who would fancy internet applications (or computers at all) for organizing your tasks, appointments, etc.,, you should have a look at the demo of 'scrybe' here.

Source Website: iscrybe.com

From what I saw, I was inspired to think back how things have evolved from scribbling everywhere, to scribbling on paper, to scribbling on notepad, .... enter technology.. to Scrybe.

Posted by Harish at 12:37 AM | Permalink

Was reading through somebody's compilation of popular IT embarrasements. It read "Peter Coffee's Dirty Dozen IT Embarrassments"

... basically list 12 popular software misuse or failures. Though the list is compiled from a USA perspective, it does convey the message that when IT fails... it fails royally. And when I say IT it doesnt include the word-processor software on your PC.. or small things like that.. We are refering to enterprise level software misuse / failures here.

In 1982, the US seems to have used a software virus (or more technically they used a Trojan Horse) to induce errors into a pipeline management system which the russians were actually allowed to steal and install on their trans-siberian oil pipeline.. Russians were earning close to 8billion $ per year on the pipeline and they installed the system with the pirated software alongwith the trojan horse the US bugged it with. The virus propogated through the system, increased pipeline pressure levels beyond control and blasted the pipeline at a core junction destroying things around for a few 100 metres.

The trans-siberian pipeline blast happens to be one of the very few non-nuclear explosions that could be seen and recorded by satellites from space. Such was the magnitude of the explosions it seems.

Though there were no casualities, the damage costed the russians enough and they couldnt complain because if they did, everyone would know that they had been stealing US technolgoy under cover for a while.
After the pipeline blast, the russians feared using all software and technology stolen from the US and its said this was the starting point of things that ended the cold war between the Russian and the US.. with the US emerging victorious under covers.

While the above incident is one of the popular embarrasing IT errors that happened (error for the russians, success for the americans), there are many occassions reported where software errors have crumpled huge data networks, created big data errors and loss to an organization over a long-term, and so on.

There are proven instances such as,

>Similary, patients who use computers to recieve or report treatment information to/from doctors have misunderstood information and taken the wrong treatment and sufferred problems.
... and you could make a list of a million big errors that have happened.

All such grave errors, are wrapped up under covers and hidden from the people who would be bothered to know that it was caused by a technical mistake.

A recent example was how a long-term study uncovered a bug in a IT system program in a large bank which over a certain combination of operations seemed to ignore a certain value of money which accumulated to make a few million dollars in losses after a long-term for the bank.

And when we discuss banking errors, if you are wondering where these errors go.. they actually eat up on the bank's direct/indirect customer's/investor's money.

Even if your bank's systems had such bugs you wouldn't know or neither will you be informed, because the banks only try to wrap it up to avoid paying up and meeting more losses and losing people realiability. And to add up these bugs dont show up on the next day's statement.. but on some earlier transaction you did months or years back which you dont remember and cannot verify.. and because of which your current balance is lesser than it should be.

The world of IT errors.. and we will live and prosper within it.

The next time you hear that an US coalition force fighter aircraft fired missiles into an iraqi marriage party based on mislead information that militants were there, you know what to guess.... and then move on.

Posted by Harish at 5:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Open source software is the idea of making free software.. that's not all.. the source or the programs of the said software is also free. The deal is to create a community of developers who like the product to start adding more power to the programs their own way, and contribute to the software's evolution.. even though its free software where money does not compensate for efforts.

The best compensation a dreamer and innovator can get is the response from fellow dreamers, innovators and typically the opening up of a new possibility for end-users for peanuts or no cost.

All that thing about open source is already known.. what's different now??

A new project, to put it more brighter... a new movie project has won loads of recognition for its good showing of use of a free 3D software called blender.. and blender's pals or tools for movie and picture editing.

"Elephant's dream" is the name of a short movie that's been entirely created and finished through open source softwares.. majorly the 3D animation tool "blender".

And as per open source community ethics.. the creators of Elephant's dream have left the production files of the movie open for the community to download and play with. So, the movie is free (some 300-400 mb), the production files are free, and the softwares that were used were already free.

In my humble opinion, may be 3D enthusiasts can't ask for more to learn, feel and make similar and better movies..

and movie watchers can't ask for cheaper free, and still, good quality movies,

and the free 3D blender software community and open source community itself have rose a step bigger to deal with software as an enabler of creativity, technology and many other things for even simple, humble, not-so-financially strong technology enthusiasts ..

Did we forget to say here.. that blender software's programs itself are open source.

In that context, Open source software is an Elephant's dream.. so open source is definitely evolving into a bigger dream than what commercial softwares can dream. That's power of making a community.

Related links:
Download Elephant's Dream here
Blender Free 3D animation software

Posted by Harish at 1:58 AM | Permalink

If you are a geek .. the kind of person watching computer monitors more than the time you watch anything else in a day.. then you would have come across technical books on computers very often using the naming foo and bar in their examples.

Except the first few times, you wouldn't have had time to bother why always everyone had examples named that way... the other common practise is to output 'Hello world' in programs, but that is ok.

Foo and bar are the disgusting words which never meant anything that you already knew, probably.

I recently jumped on a question in a technical forum where a 'newbie' as they call a new programmer, had this question as to what is foo and bar... and whether they were names of technologies, or commands sent to the computer to allow running the program or something ?? :o)

Some programmers themself have had done some research to find out where it all started, and why the early programming authors took to using names like foo and bar in their examples.

The end result of such research is as below. you could also find this at wikipedia.

Many people believe its an evolution of the US military slang 'FUBAR'...
[ click above wikipedia link to know more about the military slang...you will find some interesting definition that explains little frustration.. which I am not comfortable adding to my blog as it is :o) ]

May be somebody started the practise by using that military slang.. or, may be someone liked a candy called 'foo bar',

or whatever,

but at the bottom of it, the examples use foobar in the names to drive a fact that the author of the book or program wants to convey, and the fact is that foobar is just a name and you could use anything in its place without any particular meaning or impact.

Hey .. did u notice, while typing this post, i think i made an exciting name for a candy.. "foo bar candy" sounds good :o) .. we should stop foobar in our programs, and start thinking choclate bars for the name i think.

Posted by Harish at 11:47 PM | Permalink

There was an excellent article on webopedia.com (link below)
It covers > existing hard disk drive technology,
> existing superparamagnetism problem which limits packing more gigs into a Hard disk
> the new technology

The new technology could push the current limit of 150GB max on one hard disk platter... to anywhere close to 1Terabyte on a single platter 3.5 inches wide.

Read it on webopedia.com: Perpendicular Hard Drive Recording Technology

Posted by Harish at 9:01 AM | Permalink

All major hardware providers are eyeing changes.. A new era of computing is started. 64bit computing.
Every time the computing platform changed, from 8 to 16 to 32 bit computing that we have today, the change has indirectly had major possibility additions to IT infrastructure.

More bits mean more computing power and more possibilities with new same-size or less-size hardware. And even totally new industry of hardware could be born because there's more power.

When 32 bit happened it invited many capabilities because of higher processing power, and one major industry that spawned out was computer gaming. Because computer gaming by its nature requires lot of support from the hardware of the machine, more processing power lead to invention of new powerful graphic cards, rendering engines like DirectX and so on.

So, 64bit becoming bigger by the day, is inviting more technology and automation.

One thing I am pretty excited about is whether there will be a new world called 'computer robotics'.. given the need some people have generated with robots even entering hospitality industry, those crazy toy dog robots, there could be something bigger. Something like cutting down of costs on home robotics allowing for more people to enter the cravy market of gadget homes.

Storage media:
Also, chaging is the space issue. While some companies are trying to find evaluation markets for currency coin sized 80GB hardDisks, the fighting in the DVD market between blu-ray discs(25gb to 50gb) and HD-DVD(15gb to 30gb) formats, continue.

The 64bit players:

As usual Microsoft is trying to play giant here too... and has tie-ups with AMD and HP on their 64-bit platforms.

And there's the new player Apple which has come out a new ripe apple, with proven new innovations of ever smaller & cleaner computers and devices. Cleaner here means they are miniaturizing technology rather than forcing all existing ones into a small box.

The next computer giant :
...obviously, this will be the better 64bit guy. Whoever it turns out to be. Currently only server hardware is considering serious change to 64bit.

PCs will take time. As of now, 64bit PCs still have to support running 32 bit applications, and in fact current 64bit PCs have only a handfull of 64bit applications running on them other than the operating system. Because, all that software we use till date which are 32bit cannot be thrown away or upgraded to 64bit at the press of a button.

With the new Intel Mac being in the spotlight, and Intel being seen more focussed on Apple, a lot of market watchers are having all the questions that any media would thrive to make a cover story of.

Is AMD gaining on microsoft's OEM provider radar as against Intel?
While Intel seems more closer to Apple... Microsoft looks closer to AMD these days..
Given that AMD is the only other big processor guy who can possibly compete with Intel in the market, every new tie-up, press-releases, product, and every new news from these guys is considerably important to IT itself than just for the companies.

"Do more with less".. the line that steve ballmer launched in campaign of windows server 2003, is now sported by AMD on its products also. Is it just the Microsoft line that is getting into AMD or, the 'preferred provider' status also?

To add up, Steve ballmer speaks in support of AMD 64bit platforms on AMD's website.

As far as 64bit computing seems, a "coalition IT giant" is emerging, rather than one giant company like Microsoft is today. And my guess is the coalition could well be,
'Microsoft -AMD 64bit processors', in the Server market,
while... it would be 'Microsoft -Intel 64bit processors' in the PC market,
'Apple -Intel 64bit processors', in the multiMedia computing market...but Apple is still small, and has diversified vision compared to Microsoft's.

By the way, will Microsoft windows based applications run on Mac since they are powered by Intel?
A few microsoft applications already run on Mac much earlier than the new Intel Mac's.. Examples are Internet explorer for mac, word 2004 for mac. Go to www.microsoft.com and on the search box there try 'mac'.. to find results related to microsoft applications for mac.

What's new though is.. you can run Microsoft windows xp operating system on the new Intel powered MACs through a technology called bootcamp. Windows OS on MAC was not possible earlier.

Related reading:
PCWorld's: Are You Ready for a 64-Bit PC?

Posted by Harish at 5:01 AM | Permalink

Recently I learnt about a technology called 'widgets', actually a framework or skeleton system which allows easy creation of small, neat, clean, and handy gadget like software.

My excitement to using widgets increased after seeing a wonderful Desktop Weather widget.. which comes part of installation of something called Yahoo! Widget engine.. And as we all know, if Google or Yahoo! aquire something, they break the technology in there.. to easier pieces that a layman can not just use but also develop on it. Same things to say with Yahoo! Widgets.

You don't have to be programmer to download and use widgets.. its just like any other downloadable software.... actually much easier than that.

It seems that the idea of widgets has been there for some years now (firstly thought of in 2000 by one person 'Arlo Rose').. and later became known as 'Konfabulator', which was later aquired by Yahoo! to be renamed and branded "Widgets"... just like Gadgets in electronics.

The digital clock Image in this post is a worldTime widget that I created. Download it here. To be very specific, worldTime is a Yahoo-Widget since it requires Yahoo-widget-engine to run, .. Apple's version of widgets (& probably Microsoft's version also) are different in widget implementation.

Learn more about Yahoo-widgets here.. widgets.yahoo.com
Learn more about Apple-dashboard widgets here..http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard/

Vista Gadgets
As usual, good guys at Microsoft have got excited about the possibilities of widgets which first came out with Apple's Mac OS Tiger last year, ... and Vista has it and calls it 'Vista Gadgets'

Posted by Harish at 1:29 AM | Permalink

Recenlty, I had discussed in an earlier post about a mobile phone tracking service which is available in the west...which uses the GPS technology.

I saw it on the BBC's programme ">Click", and today the programme reported a few comments they received from their viewers on that programme. The ineresting comments were,

1. "Did you also know that its possible to remotely activate the microphone on a mobile phone without the phone owner knowing it.. Its also possbile to remotely activate the camera of the mobile phone. So its possible to not just track, but also see and hear what the person is doing."

- For goodness's sake, the person didn't say how... and I only hope its atleast difficult to do.

2. "They can track where-all the person is going by tracking his phone.. so easily, then why can't they track my stolen mobile phone?"

- The BBC presenter said, "I really don't know the answer for that question".

Posted by Harish at 8:29 PM | Permalink

I don't regret using 'idiots' in the title of this post ... people who send SPAM regularly don't deserve any credibility to even live on earth. These are people who are like terrorists on the internet. Technology gets open and free to help improve methods of doing things... but there are crazy nuts who misuse this openness of technology to make money, and sometimes even to make fun. They are all NUTS .. $%^&#%^%.

Ok. I will stop swearing them for what they are doing... and better write this post for nice readers who sometimes get caught unexpectedly with such 'Technology Terrorists'.

SPAM, is not an acronym.. though its most often written all caps. Its more like an english slang for referring to unsolicited email. Its not a unique name either....a search on a website like www.acronymfinder.com would throw up a list of things that are referred by 'Spam' other than unsolicited email.

Spam or unsolicited email is also referred as bulk email...or junk email.... bottomline is; its useless email, that you didn't expect to have receive, and you don't know the sender of the email in any manner.

If you have an email account you definitely would be receiving Spam. The worse thing is... It doesn't stop with emails....

If you have a blog, you might be receiving comment spam. If you have a webpage with a form, you might have spam form submissions.... and so on.

Why & Who:
People spam for simply taking benefit of the spare time you might have when you read spam... and sometimes innocently click on the links mentioned in the spam or buy products advertized through the spam. The logic with spammers is, "Out of 1000 or 3000 people who I spam, atleast 40 will respond, and atleast 2 or 3 of them will buy my product".

Sounds weird, considering the percentage of success if we were to think of spam as a marketing tool. Its still popular, because spamming doesn't cost anything, and with computers and the networks that one can use free on the internet, its easy to send millions of spam in a single day.

I don't know what is 'phentermine'... I hope neither you know, but both of us have received emails asking us to buy phentermine or similar medical products for cheap.. correct? We never bothered...since we knew that its just spam marketing. But there are people who buy the products... that 1 in 1000 person ... mostly out of curiosity to enhance his manhood spirits believing whatever junk the email says.

First result which spammers achieve is 'traffic'. Internet traffic to their website or the marketing link increases because people try clicking on links in spam messages.... sometimes because of a good marketing text that encourages to respond.

Second result which spammers achieve is '$$money$$'. It could be by way of affiliate commissions through sales of some company's products, or by selling his/her own stuff.... ....and after a project of Google called 'adSense', people spam to make more people visit their webpages and click on google generated Ads, for which Google pays a cost-per-click to the user.

How do they spam & What are the effects:
Setting up spamming on computers is not anybody's play. But there are more and more spammers because some stupid software companies out there, make cheap spamming software, for the $money$.

There are quite a few easy programs on the internet for spamming... hearing the very functions of them drove me crazy.

I too bought a book on spamming:
I went crazy ahead, spent some spare money I had, 50$ of it in buying a book that a spammer idiot had written, to understand what the hell these guys are doing.

His book, he claims, will help people make money through blogs... around 500$ of it in 20 days and stuff like that. No, I didn't buy it for that...honestly.. i have always read such claims on websites for years, and even some blog friends tell me they are making huge money, which I wanted to know how...and what unethical way they are using. As a technology person, my curiosity got over me, and I bought the book.

Here's the stupid guy's website ..where he sells this book.
Here's the book's pdf link...to download (without buying).

This is what I read from the stupid book:
> There's a software called voodoo blogger which can create 1000's of blogs on sites like blogger.com, post an article to all of them, and add a google ADsense ad to all the starting pages of the blogs.
......And there are these search engines that are programs which sometimes misunderstand these blogs as effective blogs, and link them to search results.
.......The idea is you get a top rank in search engine listings, and many people who searched for something landed up on your webpage unintentionally, and may be even clicked on your google AD for which you get paid.

> There are softwares which can search the search engines and list a set of keywords for which there are not many search-engine results, so that, you could make blogs or write junk comments with the keywords put many times in it.
.......Again, search engines, misunderstand this as valid content for the keyword and link your blog or comment to the search listing.

Imaging that, drives me crazy... those are methods to junk the valuable information gateway, called the Internet.

With all this, in 5 to 10 years down the line, I wonder will Internet information be discarded as totally junk??. Even today, there are lot many occassions where we start searching on the internet thinking we will find information in 2 minutes, and end-up spending 2 hrs with not much useful information.... or sometimes we get into something else and read that information, rather than what we were searching for.

In next page:
> How is spam tackled?
> Where are we heading?

Continue reading "Only idiots will send SPAM" »

Posted by Harish at 3:32 AM | Permalink

This has always been an argued topic..whether technology is allowing more disadvantages than advantages?

Though I lean more often towards the technology side because I like what technology enables... for this article's purpose I am trying to explore the critical or disadvantageous side of things with some gadgets, online services, and the technologies.

The GPS...