One More Geek Thought

MusterLink

2012-11-06T19:59:00.002+05:30

An App on Android to Save the web links for future reference

- abhijitsinghh

Outlook - A New Destination for your Emails

2012-08-02T02:32:00.005+05:30

Microsoft has launched a new web email service, Outlook.com, thus discontinuing with its slowly fading and not so happening 'Hotmail'. Outlook is pitched against Google’s Gmail. It integrates Skype, the popular video chat service that Microsoft bought last year.

Outlook looks extremely fresh, cool and vibrant with the Metro UI style in its design. It’s the same style that is used in, took its birth with Windows Phone, Microsoft's Mobile OS. Microsoft seems like incorporating the style in its products and services and that is really a good sign. Hotmail was struggling so Microsoft wanted a new web email service and that is now in the name and form of Outlook. Don’t confuse this Outlook with the email client available with MS Office on Windows OS to manage the emails. Anyways, it seems the name is derived from there itself.

Outlook is lot clean than Hotmail and a bit similar to the rival Gmail yet lot different than it. Once a user has his account with Outlook, the sign in can be done in two ways, one is to type the chosen password as usual and other way is to use single-use code. A code is sent to the mobile number registered during account creation which is to be entered to gain access to account. The code is invalid after use. This single-use code enhances security and should be used when operating email account from other's devices to avoid data logging or trace of password. After sign in, the page displayed shows a list all the emails in inbox. All the options asking for user's major involvement is on the left comprising of the basic services like Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Deleted(Trash). The email messages load next to it in the right half. The services of Mail, Calendar, People (Contacts), SkyDrive (cloud data storage service) is available on top left bar which can be seen by clicking on the drop down arrow that appears next to the Outlook text logo when mouse cursor is moved near it.

A good amount of java scripting is used in the page design. Few links such as one mentioned above and email delete, flag options is visible only when mouse cursor hovers in the correct region. Surely this is a good design, a neat and clean one but since email service is used by all category of people, this may cause some problem to the less frequent and/or naive users who sign up with it.

The email compose form is neatly designed and in a new way. The receivers email address is to be mentioned on the left half and subject fill up and message composition on the right half. A proper observation of the pages gives a good feel of the UI. The pages are almost equally divided in two halves. This will ease the swipe on tablets and mobiles. This allows us to have a proper, clean, uncluttered view of each half and then swipe to the next half. There might not be a need of having any third party application to handle outlook emails on the smaller devices.

Users can also chat with their friends using by inviting them by clicking the chat icon to the right of user name on top right bar. The account sign out option is available on the top right after clicking on the username or profile image. The popup menu looks quite similar to the new Gmail pop up at the same position. If you have used Gmail before, you will definitely feel the similarity, though it’s not all same. An option here is to 'Edit Profile' and it’s a big pain. All the things are categorically divided and many details have to be entered repeatedly but at different privacy levels (public, friends etc). This must be worked upon and improved. Microsoft can give a tough competition to its rivals and emerge winner with more and more of its native products and services incorporating Metro UI. The success of Outlook will be an added advantage to Windows Phone and thus Microsoft as it will familiarize and promote Metro UI among the users.

So for users, Outlook is a new and one more option to look out for with their mailbox. Users can sign up using their previous Hotmail account or creating a new one. There are a few inspirations for creating a new email id and signing up with Outlook. Users are already getting a new email service to try out. But most importantly, being it new platform for email, people can try out for their ideal email id that they always wanted e.g. firstname.lastname@outlook.com. Other reason may be to 'try' move away from the spammers spamming the mail inbox. The rush is on among the users to grab that perfect email id before anyone else does. Rush hours have already begun. Go and grab your id now or wait to do the permutations and combinations in the near future.

Look Out, There is Outlook!!

- abhijitsinghh

My Opinion

2012-05-29T23:44:00.004+05:30

There are several social networking websites like facebook, twitter, google plus but none of them leverage the power of social networking in true sense. A system built to make use of this power can benefit the mankind to a great extent and completely change the way we live. It can show the path to the needful, person in problem, solve numerous problems by discussing upon them socially.

An attempt can be made in the same direction with aim at spreading social awareness among people; imbibe in them the social values thus enriching the mankind. People should be able to raise and discuss their social problems, ask for advice, help and more.

The system should serve as a common platform for public, the users of the system to raise social issues and carry discussion on them. This will bring people from various regions of globe together and make them discuss and give opinions on the prevalent issues. Discussions help us solve a lot of things. A conclusion should be reached upon through this discussion which can ease a lot of things. NGO’s and Government bodies will have authority to take actions or provide help depending on the discussion and its conclusion.

The system can act as a social map for people. And can change the face of the nation in positive sense thus making the nation a supreme place to live, enjoy, travel and everything else you can think of socially.

The new system tries effectively to put forth a platform for public to interact and discuss the issues plaguing the society. It allows user to authorize to the system by creating their account and using the details from next time onwards and then access the information on the website.

Features of MyOpinion

User Authorization - Only authorized user can access the contents of the website
Four types of users - Public User, NGO & Government bodies, Moderator, Administrator
Aims to trap and solve the social issues viz. bribery, dowry, honor killing etc
Imbibe social values in citizens life
User can create new discussions, post their social problems. Admin is employed to approve the new discussion.
Irrelevant discussions are rejected by the moderators.
Admin can view the discussions approved and/or rejected by the individual moderators. Thus keeping an eye over the working of the moderators.
Every user has enough authority to initiate new discussions. A notification about the new discussion is sent to every user registered on the website. The user can then decide and respond whether he wants to participate in that discussion.
User chooses and replies if he wants to participate in the particular discussion thread or not.
He can ignore the discussion with “No participation” message and henceforth no notification is sent to him for that discussion.
If user wants to participate then he continues to get further notifications as and when new opinions are obtained on that discussion.
A time limit is maintained with each discussion. Every discussion is brought to an end once this limit is reached.
Every discussion is concluded before end.
User is notified by an error page wherever required.
User feedbacks are collected via feedback page.
Proper mechanism to “Sign Out “ user account

Tools and Technologies Used

IBM RAD v7.0
IBM DB2 C Express
IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition
IBM Rational ROSE
IBM Lotus Symphony
J2EE, JavaScript

My Opinion

Every Opinion Matters

- abhijitsinghh

LinkedIn C Zone

2012-02-05T22:54:00.000+05:30

LinkedIn C Zone is a Cloud hosted website that collects the reviews about the work environment and related things at a particular IT company and also allows the users to rate them. This will be beneficial to the people looking for job in IT industry. Apart from this, there are several other features that are described later on this page.

Whenever any person wants to be employed or is interviewed by a company, he wants to know the public opinion about the company because it’s the best method to know about the workplace. He needs to know all this because its the place where he has to work. You may get one or two views but they may be biased or even contradicting. True and honest public opinion is missing. It’s not the problem of an individual or a group of people. It’s the scenario everywhere with everyone seeking employment. Hence this issue must be addressed.

We present our system “LinkedIn C Zone” on the same line. The system aims to collect public view about the companies in which they work or have already worked with. And also allow the company to be rated out of a score of 5. On any company website, you only get the details of the company and not the views of people working there. By this system, you can find reviews of all companies at one place at a click of a button. A user need not visit and collect information from website of each and every company.

“LinkedIn” is a well known social networking site for users to grow their professional network. If we have to take people view about their profession at a particular company then the best identified network is “LinkedIn”.

In the application, LinkedIn services i.e. LinkedIn API’s are used to validate the user and fetch all the required details thus avoiding inventing the wheel again. Along with that, other tools and technologies used to develop the system include J2EE, JavaScript, Google App Engine (GAE), Java Database Objects (JDO), GChart, and Eclipse.

A user needs to authorize to the website by providing his credentials by clicking on the 'SignIn via LinkedIn' plugin. A user must have a LinkedIn account to access the website. A link is also provided to create a LinkedIn account if the user doesn't has one.

Features of Linked In C Zone

Services from LinkedIn are used to validate the user and extract profile information
Provides a platform to rate and review the IT companies in the market
Helps job seekers get fair idea about the company
Support others view by Like button
Order the reviews based on date when the review was posted
Ratings are represented effectively by the graphs.
Companies can be searched as per their working domain.
User can get the information about the pre-requisites for being selected as a employee at a particular company
User can request to add a company if it is not present in our database.
RSS Feeds from the respective companies
User can share this web application with their social networks. This will help us in reaching more people and thus have more and better source of reviews.
User can help us know what they feel about the system by giving their valuable feedback. This is available in the footer section of each page.
By the website, we aim to achieve our mission of making company search easy. We rely on our users to help us achieve the mission. Hope the readers will visit and try the website.

We have used resources from several websites, the below image is an acknowledgement to all of them.

URL of the website:
http://linkedinczoneext.appspot.com/

LinkedIn C Zone

Company Search Made Easy

- abhijitsinghh

Personal Information Security System

2011-02-25T14:50:00.000+05:30

Personal Information Security System is a desktop application that takes cares of all your user-id and their password in a secured manner. It eases you of the problem to remember passwords for every account that you hold offline or online. As a user, you need to remember only the password of our application and rest can easily be retrieved anytime using the application.

Today, every person on earth has at least a dozen of accounts each accessed by a user id and protected by a password. A person is in real mess to remember the passwords of each of them. People often use unsafe practice of smaller length passwords, writing them somewhere etc.

Taking the technological advantage, we try to bring an end to all these concerns by presenting a very practical, safe, easy to use and manage and rewarding application. Using this you can keep all your secret information secured at one place without worrying about its theft or piracy.

The user can enter his/her personal information into our system and the system keeps it secure. Personal information can be like information related to bank account, ATM card, credit card, online account, personal contact etc. A number of attributes defining this information can be maintained through the system.

The information is stored using file system and its security is taken care of by encrypting it using well known security algorithms with suitable bit length key. The system employs an authorization mechanism. An authorized user can ONLY request for the services of the system and only he can view his own stored information.

The user information never exists in plain text format on the secondary memory; it exists only in the encrypted form. Information is encrypted if the user chooses to save it and decrypted if and only if he chooses to view it. So there is no possibility of retrieving plain text from the memory history as you might have heard in a few cases.

Thus, with this application, we are confident to achieve our goal of keeping our user tension free regarding his confidential information and also free him from burden of remembering all the information.

Apart from this security feature, we provide the following features also:

Download and Upload all the contacts in CSV(Comma Separated Value) format. CSV is an easy and useful way of maintaining Address Book or Contact List.
All the data (belonging to all categories that we have identified) stored with the system can be downloaded in CSV format.
Reminders for recent birthdays so that you don’t miss to wish your near and dear ones.
Fully portable application whereby a user can carry his data in removable drives and application allows user to locate his data.

Please feel free to try out the application. All the readers who are interested in trying the application please write here. Every system requires users and receive feedback and opinions from them. We will appreciate responses. Your feedback is important for us to grow.

Personal Information Security System

Your Privacy is Important to Us !!

- abhijitsinghh

Java is a Virus

2010-12-23T18:39:00.000+05:30

[

"BASED ON A TRUE STORY"

This piece is a simple illustration of an incident that took place with me on one of the nights.

Warning*: The end result may be hilarious.

*Conditions Apply

]

A small story..

This is in fond memory of Antivirus Software installed on my computer system.

Recently I got the antivirus Norton 2011 by Symantec installed on my computer system.

I was very much impressed by its GUI(Graphical User Interface, the part of a software that is visible to the user). Its Home and Performance screen could be flipped to show each other. I had never seen such effect in any software but yes I had always wanted to implement this in my 12th class(year 2007-2008) Visual Basic project but couldn't as I didn't knew how to do it and also didn't got any (good) reference for it at that time. Norton implemented this, probably the development team scanned my brain. Ha Ha..

Personally I was also impressed by its performance. It was fast, doesn't slow the system and most important it had removed all the malicious objects(W32.Redlofwen) present in my dear computer(PC). W32.Redlofwen is a worm(virus) that spreads by copying itself to all drives(in the form of "new folder.exe") on the compromised computer, including removable and mapped drives thus increasing the usage of memory(both primary and secondary) space. System had gone quite slow because of it(increased memory usage). You all might have experienced this common virus. PC which choked with plenty of virus(single virus, multiple copies) a few days ago, was fully healed and breathing properly(thanks to Norton).

Everything was fine.

Tragedy starts here..

Late night Tuesday 2010-12-07, I was working on my college project(with GUI support) to be completed in "Java" programming language.

I made a few changes in the source code then compiled(using the tool javac) to check for the correctness. It compiled successfully, no errors, no warnings. Thats something good(I can write code which are (syntactically)correct as per javac). After every compilation I generally run the program to see the change in process. So I did.

First attempt failed..

No run time error or exception message but still..

No update on the black screen, the "Command Prompt".

It was like a command has executed but without performing any action. I tried again with no different result.

I could not understand whats wrong with my project start up form(screen). It was perfectly alright in the last session of work. Only a few changes were made that too in the subsequent forms and not the start up one. If any problem had taken its birth during the change in source code then at least the first screen should be displayed. Think Tank started its job of thinking in many different simultaneous directions. I made my mind to check the (source)code again.

As I was going to do it, immediately next a message popped up in the notification area(like an incoming chat on gtalk) which shook and shocked me.

Such messages are very dangerous for a programmer's health.

It was "SONAR has removed the threat java.exe".

SONAR is a program by Norton Symantec which takes its stand as "Symantec Online Network for Advanced Response" and removes unknown security risks in real time whereas its prey "java.exe" is used to interpret and execute a Java program(byte code).

I and JDK(Java Development Kit) were left handicapped.

I looked for the file in the Quarantine but a sorry status.

No other way was left.

Thankfully I keep all "Set Up" files safe with me on the system itself.

Dejected I had to again set up the JDK.

"This case is something like I have milk(java.exe) in kitchen(PC) and fear the attack by a cat(a virus) so I get a pet dog(antivirus) to protect it(the milk). But the dog itself did what cat might do. As a repair(replace) work, I will have to get down from my building to the fetch a milk packet from market, boil(install) it, store, and continue whatever I want to."

I am still decoding what was wrong with the executor(java.exe); was it really malicious or somebody(SONAR) in the security family wanted to have party. Soon I had to abort my coding session to provide the body the rest(sleep) of the night.

So my dear friends if next time your program does not do anything(as above) and you have an antivirus installed on your system, especially the above mentioned one, then BEWARE...

You are not always wrong... Believe in yourself, you are a good programmer... :) ;)

I still continue to use the same antivirus because it has done significant good for my system(in particular) but bluffed only once.

It is quite common for an antivirus to pick up a .exe file and dump(delete or quarantine) it. It was also one such case. Thanks for being patient and reading this.

Happy Coding... Keep Hitting Keyboard...

- abhijitsinghh