Rajiv's View

Moving..

2013-04-12T15:49:00.001-07:00

I am now retiring this blog.
I now have two new blogs:

* My solution architect blog at http://solnArchitect.wordpress.com
and
* My author blog at http://authorrajivram.wordpress.com/

Please update your bookmarks.
Thanks for visiting
Rajiv Ram

Hooker Blonde

2010-11-23T19:06:00.000-08:00

Love this blonde. Tastes great

Two Blondes from Belgium

2010-02-07T16:57:00.000-08:00

It is not often that one pays $15 for a six pack of ale but if you are spending it on either of these Blonde ales from Belgium, it is money well spent.
Alligem, is a smooth excellent beer with a mild after-taste. It is not too bitter and has a thin texture for an ale. According to the website, it won a medal at the Luxembourg fair in 1951. I can assure you that it lives up to its reputation even today.
Leffe also blonde and from Belgium packs a great distinct flavor of its own. Both of these are excellent beers amd are heartily recommended.
And yes, they go great with a few helpings of the Superbowl!

Movie Review: Avatar

2010-02-05T14:04:00.000-08:00

Watching Avatar at Jordans IMAX was in every sense as spectacular as one could expect. The 3D effects were spectacular, with an astounding quantity of details packed into every frame.

The storyline is in every aspect built on the typical boiler plate, used in many movies like Dances with Wolves. The hero goes into a hostile territory, does soul searching are realizes that the evil is not where he ended up but from where he came from. He falls in love and stands up for what he believes in.

Then there are the usual cliches of developing a respect for nature, a nadir where defeat seems inevitable when the protagonists and his cohorts find the strength to stand up for themselves.

The minority who has not seen the movie are well advised to check out the scenes and contemplate the creation of effects of the movie rather than trying to get into the story. Director James Cameroon has indeed scored a big win in creating a beautiful world with human-like beings and wild beasts more fierce than any legends of the past have created.

Even the "normal" world where the protagonist comes from looks impressive in 3D with mamouth robots, futuristic fire power and sophisticated aircrafts. Indeed the critics were right when they said that it has changed movie making forever.

Cameroon has revived 3D and has struck a big home run for the film industry, in bringing back the movie experience to the theatres. We are already seeing the aftermath of this in that the two forthcoming Harry Potter films and the epic "Clash of the Titans" are all coming out in 3D.

In the meanwhile, Sony plans to bring the 3D experience to our living room, which is, as many pundits predict a risky move for the ailing electronics giant.

One other thing I liked about Avatar is that it did not take too may cheap shots always seen in other 3D movies, like bullets and daggers aimed at your face and the like. There is no need for such gimmicks anyway. The scenes are most impressive enough by themselves.

Except for Sigourney Weaver, there are hardly any big stars in the movie. This is probably a good thing, for the real star of the movie is the techhology that made it. Sure enough, there will be more like Avatar and there almost certainly will be a sequel. Hopefully, the screenplay for the sequel will be more imaginative than this one.

Nevertheless, I heartily recommend Avatar. It is not a movie to be missed.

Movie Review: Sherlock Holmes

2010-01-27T19:32:00.000-08:00

I have been a huge fan of the cocaine addicted, cigar smoking eccentic sleuth for several decades now. From savouring the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the stellar portrayal of Holmes by Jeremy Brett in a great BBC TV serial, I have seem many renditions of Holmes. I also liked many Sherlock Holmes movies I downloaded from the public domain.

Over the weekend, I got to see this rendition of Holmes, played brilliantly by Robert Downey Junior. While Sir Conan Doyle may not be happy with this screenplay, that is not close to faithful to any of his works, Downey's Holmes is every bit as eccentric as his maker intended him to be.

Supported by a stellar cast that includes Jude Law as the not-so-bumbling Holmes' sidekick, Dr. Watson and Rachel McAdams who plays Holmes' love interest, Downey delivers a spectacular performance. This combination of Holmes and Watson are every bit as comfortable when it comes to brawling the bad guys as they are in intellectual analysis of a crime.

Extremely well directed by Guy Richie, the movie has memorable action scenes and impressive special effects. With an interesting plot, the movie is fast pased and gripping till the end.

My only complainabout the movie is that the villain was not menacing enough. The movie leaves behind the promise of a sequel that will revisit the rivalry between holmes and his arch rival, Dr. Moriorty. Hopefully this Doctor will be more fiendish than the one played by Mark Strong. Despite this minor setback, Sherlock Holmes is a must see.

Savouring Open Solaris

2010-01-20T18:09:00.000-08:00

Open Solaris

Thanks to the virtual box, I got to sample Open Solaris. Yes, it is not the latest, greatest version but it is the only image I could find for the Virtual box.

I love the azure blue background. The GUI and the layout have a striking resemblance to Ubuntu Linux. The distro comes with firefox, thunbderbird and a number of games and many of the other applications found in Linux distros. One other gizmo on Open Solaris a windows-like task manager. Well, for now, I'll stick to Linux, Mac and Windows

Savouring Flavors of Linux: EasyPeasy

2010-01-19T20:02:00.000-08:00

EasyPeasy

With the proliferation of Linux across severl platforms,it is no surprise that there is one targeted for the netbook market.

EasyPeasy is a distro specifically designed to run on Netbooks. Like most major Linux distros EasyPeasy comes with numerous offerings including office tools, several games, audio and video tools and encryption support.

All of this is neatly arranged in a slick desktop. This distro is indeed worthy of your netbook.

Sun VirtualBox

2010-01-18T17:01:00.000-08:00

Sun Virtualbox
another
Have you ever wanted to savour a flavour of Linux, Windows or the Chrome OS without the hassle of a complete installation? You could get another computer and install the new operating system on it. Another option is to boot off a USB drive or a live CD. This mechanism of sampling a new operating system through a flash drive or a live CD is particularly popular in the Linux world.

The sun virtual box offers yet another option, virtualization. This means you can run one operating system (termed the 'guest') from inside another system( the host) . Using a pentium 4 system running Ubuntu, I can sample several operating system and even use features not installed on my system, thanks to an install of the virtual box. With Sun VirtualBox the guest operating system runs just like any other application in the host system. VirtualBox is available as an install for both Linux and Windows.

First download and install Sun Virtualbox on your system.Then head over to this site to download an 'image' file of the guest operating system. This Lifehacker article is a great guide to run your guest operating system on your machine using VirtualBox.

There are some disadvantages to using VirtualBox. Firstly you may not get some guests running at all. Sometimes, specfic applications inside your guest operating system may not work at all.

Finally, the guest operating system usually runs slowly. If you want to check out the performance of an operating system, VirtualBox is not where you should test it.

Fisherman's Navigator Winter Reserve

2010-01-10T17:04:00.000-08:00

This is another great lager from New England. Brewed at the Cape Ann Brewing Company in Gloucester, MA Fisherman's Navigator Winter Reserve is a double bock lager which packs good flavor, a bit sour and not too bitter. It is quite heavy for a lager, but one of the best I've tried this winter season.

Savouring Google Chrome OS

2010-01-08T17:34:00.000-08:00

The Chrome OS from Google is one of the most anticipated of software applications that is set to come out this year. Thanks to this great article on Lifehacker, I have finally managed to savour a preliminary version of the Chrome OS.

With an install of VirtualBox, another cool tool which will be covered here soon and a customized packaging of Chrome OS, I had Chrome OS running on a Pentium 4.

In a nutshell, VirtualBox is a free utility from Sun, application that can run one operating system(the guest OS) within another operating system (the host) as if it was an application of the latter operating system.

In my configuration, I had Chrme OS running inside Ubuntu Jaunty. The disadvantage of this type of installation is that the guest OS runs much more slowly. Because of this setback, I could not experience one of the best features of Chrome OS, its speed.

However, I did get to test out Chrome and many of its features.Here are my thoughts:

If you, like me are used to a desktop, with a cool background image that houses many icons inside it, you may initially get disappointed.

As soon as you login into Chrome, you are presented with a familiar utility, a maximised Chrome Browser. You must make a paradigm shift in getting used to the idea that the browser is your desktop and all the applications you'll need are accessible through the browser. These applications include Google docs, Gmail and other Google utilities.

There are also image links to other tools like Facebook and Twitter. In previous posts, we have looked at several cloud operating systems(See Links below.) These are operating systems that reside in remote(possibly distributed) locations and accessible through a browser.

At first glance, Chrome may resemble them. However, unlike the other cloud operating systems we have seen before, Chrome OS uses HTML5, the newest version of the language of the web. While the other cloud operating systems make little use of resources on the local machine, Chrome uses HTML 5 to make use of resources like the memory and processor on the local computer.

Chrome OS is expected to hit netbooks later this year. HTC is working with Google to release a Chrome Tablet.

Below is a promotional video from Google on the philosophy behind Chrome OS>

The Wowwee Roboquad

2010-01-08T12:48:00.000-08:00

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This is one of the most versatile of Wowwee. It looks like an arachnid and walks like an arachnid but is four legs short of being an arachnid. Its body has been compared to an airport hanger and its head, perched high on its long neck can rotate 360 degrees, reminiscent of the Exorcist movie.

TheRoboquad can be controlled by his remote or from a PC, equipped with an IR transmitter running Robodance. He can move in several directions and is one of the most stable of robots in the Wowwee family. He is also a versatile dancer and puts on a fine show when you hit the demo function on the remote.

Shown below is a video of the Roboquad equipped with a webcam and controlled by Robodance to make a neat surveillance device. This video was created by Robert Oschler, the creator of Robodance.In the video we see Mr. Oschler control his Roboquad using Skype commands.

Wowwee has since created the Rovio which is customized for surveillance.

Related links:

The Roboquad on RobotsRule

Exploring Music-Media centers: MediaMonkey

2010-01-07T13:57:00.000-08:00

By rajivram
Mediamonkey is another music media center/organizer for your desktop that offers compatibility with iPhones, Palm Pres and Androids. Like all other music centers the UI features Album art, libraries and playlists. Mediamonkey can play many formats of music files. Like WInamp, it offers addons(plugins) to play music from Last Fm,etc, provisions for skins and virtualizations.

Developers can use scripting tools to create plugins for mediamonkey. MediaMonkey also offers Winamp API support. The default UI is not as slick as Winamp but MediaMoney makes a decent music center. It comes in two versions, a free version and a 'Gold' version with more features.

Exploring Music-Media Centers: Doubletwist

2010-01-06T17:49:00.000-08:00

DoubleTwist
Intended to be an iTunes replacement, DoubleTwist is a music center for your laptop or desktop that offers sync-support for a number of devices like the Android, the PSP, the Blackberry and the Palm-Pre.
As a substitute for the Apple Store, DoubleTwist allows you to purchase music from Amazon. The UI is fairly spartan, providing album art and support for creating libraries from your hard drives or devices. You can also create some playlists on DoubleTwist. Doubletwist can also play videos.

Unlike Winamp and Songbird, DoubleTwist does not offer any plugin and add-on development support or the ability to play Internet content. Doubletwist does provide an Api to add additional hardware support. DoubleTwist is too simplistic to pose any threat to iTunes, Winamp or Songbird.

The Wowwee Tribot

2010-01-05T13:42:00.000-08:00

Tribot

Released in 2008, the Tribot is another cool robot from Wowwee. It comes in twocolors, red and white. Unlike the Robosapien or his mate the Femisapien, the Tribot does talk. This is quite a detriment as it can be quite annoying.

He has three wheels and can move in six directions. He can also panic and sound an alarm by thrusting out his ears and screaming.

One of the modes he can be put in is the guard mode. Here he says quiet until he dectects motion in his path. When he does, he screams and raises his alarm.

Remote controlling of the Tribot is one of his most advanced features. The remote comes with buttons to move him in different directions and perform impressive routines. However, the coolest feature is that one can control the Tribot's motion simply by holding down a button at the bottom of the remote and then waving the remote in the direction he wants the Tribot to take.

Mr. Personality, another Robot made by Wowwee is an advanced version of the Tribot.

Related Links:

Tribot on RobotsRule

Black Dog Ale

2010-01-04T18:04:00.000-08:00

This is another good typical Amber Ale. Sour, medium texture and great tasting. It is too bitter either. It is brewed by the Spanish Peaks Brewing Company in Montana.

Mayflower Porter

2010-01-04T17:16:00.000-08:00

I have tried the Mayflower Pilsner and really liked it. This one is as good. It is not too bitter, maybe a little sour, but smooth and not too filling either. As mentioned earlier, it is brewed close to where I live,at the Mayflower Brewing company, in Plymouth MA

The Femisapien and the Robosapien

2010-01-04T11:25:00.000-08:00

As mentioned earlier, I dig robots. Having done a few personal projects and one at MIT on Lego Mindstorms, I have now gotten into the world of WowWee, makers of some of the best robotic toys this decade.
Robosapien

This robot, initially conceived by Mark Tilden was first released by Wowwee in 2003. It incorporated some of the most advanced capabilities for its time walking with legs, and grasping and even throwing small objects.

It created a huge hacker community that has over the years created many hardware are software hacks. Among the most popular of these is Robodance created by Robert Oschler.

Using Robodance, one may control the Robosapein from a PC using key strokes, voice control or by a Wiimote. The Robosapien does not speak words. He grunts, farts and groans. This is fine with me. Some of the newer robots from Wowwee do come with speech but many of them simply have annoying voices.

Wowwee has since released several cool robots, one of which is featured below.

Femisapien

In 2008, Wowwee released a mate for the Robosapien, the Femisapien. The Femisapien is a beautiful robot that moves with an elegant feminine grace. It does not come with a remote, for good reason.

There are many ways to interact with the Femisapien. One his through her joystick arms. Another by waving a hand in front of her face. Thirdly, one may control her using the remote control that comes with the Robosapien.
Infact, one can use the Robosapien remote to control the Femisapien to run joint interactive routines between the Robosapien and Femisapien.

Like the Robosapien, the Femisapien does not speak words.Unlike him, she squeals and giggles.And boy, can she dance? This robot moves with feline grace and and dance beautifully. Hold down her head for a couple of seconds and she will perform some beautiful moves to music.

Related Links
Robosapien on Wikipedia
Robosapien in RobotsRule
Femisapien on RobotsRule
Femisapien on Wikipedia

Best of 2009 software Technologies: Part 3

2010-01-01T16:29:00.000-08:00

Firefox 3.5
Any list of great software that came out of last year would be incomplete without the inclusion of Firefox 3.5. Firefox 3.5 has become the world's leading browser, stealing the thunder from
IE.

Release 3.5 has made Firefox to beat by including a slew of awesome features. Notable among them are

The awesome bar: This is the top address bar which provides intelligent suggestions as you type in an address or heading. Having used this feature, it would be hard for me to go back to other browsers.
HTML5 support: Firefox supports HTML5 and as a result, video becomes part of the page. This means that Firefox can display videos on HTML5 compatible web pages without asking you to download flash.
Private browsing and forget the site features: Firefox features a private browsing mode to hide your identity while browsing sites, similar to Chrome's incognito mode.It also has a 'Forget the site' feature that allow you to delete a site from your browsing history.
Session Restoration: The ability to restor a session when Firefox crashes.

Firefox has proved that it is the clear leader in the browser world. All other browsers have a lot of catching up to do to take away users from Firefox.

Opera

Opera 10.10 is another HTML5 compatible browser. One unique feature it has called 'Unite' differentiates it from other browsers. Using this feature, you can stream music from any laptop or desktop to another machine on the network running a browser, also running Opera.

Google Chrome Browser for Linux and Mac

In 2008, Google released the Chrome browser. After observing the follies of Netscape. IE and Firefox, Google produced a browser that runs each of its tasks on a separate thread. This means that if a tab in the browser is stuck in the midst of connecting to a site, the user simply closes the respective tab and does not have to restart the browser. The interface for the browser is intuitive and minimal. This and other features including speed made Chrome a nifty browser. See my previous post on the features of Chrome.

Best of 2009 Software technologies: Part2

2010-01-01T10:34:00.000-08:00

In this section, we will take a look at two of the most innovative of technologies to come from Google.
Google Wave

Email is several decades old, says Google. It existed long before the web. It was designed for a different time. It is now time to reinvent the proverbial wheel.On this note, Google delivered the Wave, the email for the millenium.

Part email, part chat, part collaboration tool, part digital white-board, Google Wave is a marvel. It provides an interface through which multiple parties can coordinate efforts on a common screen. For those of us trying to coordinate efforts on a project with email,Wave minimizes the overhead by giving every person on the team the ability to keep up with the newest status with an ingenius playback mechanism to review the sequences of changes made to the wave after it was created..

A person who has newly joined a wave can easily bring herself up-to-date by hitting the plgo mainstream ay button that shows her the sequence by which changes were made by other parties participating in the collaborative project.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to describing features of the wave. However, experience tells us that great technology by itself cannot make a ground breaking change. It remains to be seen how quickly this development would permeate our culture. Email, over the decades has become so ingrained in our habits, that we may not be able to give it up for a long time.

Is the Wave ahead of its time?Google wave is not proprietary to Google. Anyone can create applications that cater to handling waves. However, if the wave gets to be the accepted way of collaboration in the future, Google has the prime mover advantage.

Google Voice

When Google released the android, it sounded off a warning that it was marching into the mobile space. Google voice left no further doubts about Google's intention of entering into the domain of mobile computing.(No pun intended on domain). A few months ago, the hype began when news was released that Google had bought a million phone numbers.

It was then realized that Google was onto an idea that would change the way we handle all our phones, lanline, work and mobile. I have covered Google Voice in fair detail in a previous post.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to describing features of the wave. However, experience tells us that great technology by itself cannot sell itself, a sentiment explained today as the mousetrap fallacy. It remains to be seen if these two technologies would become part of our daily life.

Best of 2009 Software technologies: Part1

2010-01-01T09:09:00.000-08:00

As the curtains have fallen on 2009, it is time to reminisce on the most notable software and application releases from last year. I have been a bit biased toward Google in these series of articles but lets face it, none of the big (or smaller players) comes close to Google's ability to innovate.

Google has been a relative newcomer into the high-tech internet sector. As a result, the company has a huge advantage. While the Microsofts and the Yahoos have to factor in the overhead of redesign, re-factoring and rewriting of their products, Google can start off with a clean slate on many of their offerings. It has the advantage of learning from the mistakes made by its competitors and avoid them. It could look at existing products like email and voicemail. that were made decades ago and give them a new context, a context more in line with today's needs and not from the perspective of what we have been used to.

Among the others who have mad my list are some well-known players, and some new ones.

Let us now dig deep and analyse the software releases last year that could indeed change the way we live our life.

Windows 7

Amid high expectations, and under relentless public scrutiny after a debacle called Windows Vista, the Seattle based evil empire released Windows 7 in October. It finally lived up to its claims, satisfying many of the toughest critics when it came to performance, speed and robustness

Many agree that this is the best quality OS ever to come out of Microsoft. Earlier this year, I attended a presentation of a Microsoft salesman on Windows 7. 'We took a step back from Vista and removed many features that impeded the system', he said, without offering details.

"In one client site we were able to bring back many old computers that the client had shelved." He added. "These were computers that were unable to run Vista. Most of my applications seem to run faster on Windows 7. The screensavers and icons are also impressive in this release.Windows 7

There were rumors in many sites claiming that the Windows 7 upgrade would be available for $45. These were exactly what they were- mere rumors. The upgrade sells around $100. New installation packages go for $145.

However, Windows 7 offers a stable system for all the heavy duty applications I have used. It has a few great features for convenience, which include a snazzy task bar, the ability to arrange windows side by side, a search feature to search the local machine for files( a la Google desktop) and some movie making tools. It also comes with the Windows media center installed. If you have have used this application, it is amongst other things, a poor man's Tivo.

There is no doubt that Microsoft has established some credibility with this version of windows even among its harshest critics.

There have been a few important distros in the Linux world in 2009. Below we review the big three.

Ubuntu Karmic Koala

The most popular Linux distro released a new version, possibly a little too soon. Many of the software applications for Linux were not able to keep up with this delivery. Karmic offers better performance, a better UI, faster startup time and in my experience, better playback of audio and video streamed over the net. Ubuntu includes sub-flavors, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Mythbuntu. Ubuntu also has a server version for hosting documents, media files or for running a web server like apache. Many netbooks come pre-installed with Ubuntu

Fedora Unite

Fedora is another popular linux distro sponsored by Redhat. Unlike Ubuntu, Fedora takes a one-size-fits-all philosophy and comes in only one flavor with a standard set of features.

Fedora 12 has a very impressive UI and its performance in terms of start-up time and response are very impressive.

Open Suse 11.2
This distro, sponsored by Novell is another big player in the Linux community. It incorporates other open standards like CIM (the Common Information Model), and YaST (a standard, open source configuration and management suite for Linux).

The new release has a beautiful UI and incorporates a large array of great applications.

Google Chrome OS

When Google released the Chrome browser, few would have guessed that this was a precursor to an operating system that Google will release soon. The company gave previews of this operating system, named the Chrome OS. We have had browsers within desktops and have accessed desktops using browsers. On this operating system, the desktop IS the browser. This is a minimal operating system where most applications will be online or 'in the cloud'.While Google has only provided a preliminary demo release of Chrome OS, it will provide more stable versions soon. Google is planning to target the netbook market and then find a path into our desktops for this system. One brave announcement made by Google is that this OS will not support hard drives and will only run on flash memory.
2010 will be the year to watch Chrome OS and its permeation in the Netbook and laptop markets.

Java EE6: Another major release from 2009

2009-12-30T20:22:00.000-08:00

There was a lot of eager and nervous anticipation from the Java developer committee about the release of Java Enterprise Edition 6. The focus of the nervousness has been Oracle's acquisition of Sun in April and how it would impact the future of Java. Java EE6 was finally released on December 10th but questions on the impact of Oracle buyout remain unanswered.

The key points made on this release are:

* Glassfish V3 is the reference implementation for EE6
* Java EE6 builds on the persistence and annotation features of EE5.
* This release is about right sizing:
Profiles:
In this release Sun introduces the concept of profiles. Instead of providing a single programming framework that may be used to build different architectures for different industry segments, this release will contain industry specific profiles.

Profiles may be licensed or created based on need. They will incorporate multiple technologies and will cater to different needs. The current release of EE6 contains a full profile and a web profile.

The web profile according to sun will be used to build 'modern apps' and will include security, transaction management and persistence tools. It includes a generic or 'plain vanilla api'.

The new technologies will include the following:
* Java Servlet 3.0
* EJB(Enterprise Java Beans) light 3.1
* Java Persistence Architecture 2.0
* JSP(Java Server Pages) 2.2
* Java Standard Template Library 1.2
* Java Transaction API 1.1
* Debugging for other languages(JSR 4.5)

* There is a lot of pruning of functionality in an effort to keep it light weight.
- The JSR-RPC modules had a lot of UDDI(Universal Data Discovery Functionality) functionality to discover web services. This has been pruned as it is clear now that industry is not heading that way.
In EJB 3.1, Container managed persistence beans are now replaced with the Java persistence API
This was done, according to Sun to keep the API simple and also have Java developers use a single standard API.

* Another goal of this release is to embrace open source frameworks.

* Another new feature introduced in Java EE6 is Webbeans to unify JSF, JPA and EJB 3.0 into a single unified platform.

* Zero configuration drag and drop web frameworks,

* Plugin library jars using web fragment: Here one may setup a framework and bootstrap it into a container. It is a mechanism to integrate 3rd party frameworks into a container. It is used in Glassfish v3.
e
* More use of extensions:
* EE6 will increase the use of extensions from EE5. It will eliminate the use of the deployment descriptor. Further the deployment descriptor has been eliminated and the @WebServices annotation is used instead.

* Another feature is the ability to package the ejb inside the war file. The old jar file is still supported.

Related Links
Java EE6 technologies
Rod Johnson: "Java EE 6 Gets it Right"
JSR 313
Apache votes no on Java EE 6
JEE 6: Extensibility, Profiles and Pruning

HTML5: Its about time

2009-12-29T21:14:00.000-08:00

In the last decade, we saw a lot of changes in the web. Here are some of them.

* Laptops and Desktops are more powerful and hard drives have become bigger. Increases in processor speeds is a simple case of Moore's law at work. While the focus has been to keep applications in the cloud there has also been a growing demand to harness the power of the laptop or computer used to access these web applications. Rich internet applications began this trend. Microsoft created a smart client initiative to address this issue.

* While text is the most basic way to spread the word, the web has grown to transmit more audio, video and image data. When Tim Bernes Lee invented HTML, it catered to a more text-centric web. Since then, the changes made to accommodate other types of data have just been hacks. While html does provide an IMAGE tag, there were no primitives to display dynamic images or animation, or play audio or video media. Javascipt provided the means to embed players to stream audio content.

* One breakthrough in improving performance was the ability to use ajax with javascript and CSS so that only parts of a web page needed to be refreshed instead of having a server deliver the a complete web page and then having the browser refresh that page.

* The growth of Wikis, IM clients, shopping carts for online sites, blogs and social networking has revealed shortcomings of HTML.

HTML, the primary language of the internet has remained untouched since 1999. But now, the big browsers have banded together to push a new specification: HTML 5. The browser list includes Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Apple Safari.

How about IE? Well, the short answer is not completely. IE8 supports some of the tags specified in HTML5.

HTML5 is a development, teb years in the making.Here are the its key features.

Video and audio tags and controls
Specifying the the video file to play, width and height of the player, whether or not to display controls, whether or not to loop video will all be done in HTML itself. The specification also specifies how the video player must respond to a mouse or keyboard click or some other event.
It is then up to the browser as to how the media player will be rendered. There is also a similar audio control. No need to download flash.

There is also an embed element to embed external content like an audio or video file in a page.

Dynamic graphics with the canvas Tag
Using this tag, one creates a placeholder or container on the HTML page where one may display dynamic graphics or images.

Standalone sections using the figure element
HTML5 provides the ability to mark off sections with of a page with the figure element.

Create blog post-like functionality with the article element
The ideal place one could use this is on the main page of a blog where you provide a teaser snippet for a post. This is usually the first few lines or the first paragraph of a post with a "Read more" link at the end. Clicking this link would take you to another page in the blog that contains the text for the entire post.

Provide additional data with an Aside element
This is a useful feature to provide additional information on the content of the page.

Enhanced menu options
One of these is the command tag to specify a command button in the menu. Another is a datalist element to show a drop down list. The days of using Javascript to create this functionality may be numbered.

Enhanced text options
One of these is the dialog option when you wish to exhibit a dialog among two or more individuals on a site. Another is a section tags to specify a section in a page.There are also header and footer tags to add headers and footers to sections.

A new element has been thrown in to specify a date-time format.

No more Frames
The frame and frameset tags have been removed in HTML5.

Text formatting moved to CSS
Bold, acronym, center,font and a few such tags have been depreciated. HTML5 mandates that these attributes must be described in the CSS.

Also Read:
Does Internet Explorer 8 support HTML 5? - Stack Overflow

HTML 5, Firefox and Internet Explorer

How HTML5 Will Change the Way You Use the Web - HTML5 - Lifehacker

HTML5 and The Future of the Web

HTML5 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

HTML5 Gallery | A showcase of sites using HTML5 markup

HTML 5 Tag Reference

FengOffice: A decent office colllaboration Tool

2009-12-28T09:24:00.000-08:00

FengOffice

DO you want a central repository for your firm where people can share notes, documents, tasks, deadlines, statuses, etc. on Customers, Project, Corporate policy,etc? Feng Office (formerly OpenGoo) may be an option you could consider. You could listen to their promotional video,try out the free version first, and then decide if you want their premium version.

Feng office runs off Apache and uses MySql. (You could easily have it running on Xampp covered earlier.

While Google docs may be an alternative, you may feel it is more secure to keep you data on a local server. Besides, Feng Office is customized for office collaboration. It allows configuration of email,document upload time tracking and more.

With FengOffice one creates 'Workspaces' like Customers, Projects, etc. Within the workspace, one may keep relevant information like notes, email, tasks, statuses, links, documents and reports. Accoring to the website, Feng office is the most popular collaboration tool. It is certaiinly an option for small to medium sized firms.

Winter Bourbon Cask Ale

2009-12-27T16:32:00.000-08:00

Its the end of one holiday weekend and time to savour a good brew. Winter Bourbon Cask Ale(WBCA) is a good choice, especially for this time of year. Heavy but not as heavy as other winter ales, WBCA packs a great flavour. Yes, there is a hint of Bourbon and some chocolate(not of the sweet variety).

The big surprise is that it is brewed by Michelob, St. Louis Missouri. I'm impressed. It is unlike anything I have tasted before. I would definitely recommend it.

Lernid: A most useful classroom collaboration tool

2009-12-27T15:40:00.000-08:00

Lernid

Jono Bacon, one of the most popular bloggers in the Linux community had a problem conducting online classes. He used IRC, a popular IM client. His students first had to learn how to use IRC and then lean how to participate in the class in real time.
Necessity, being the mother of invention forced him to create Lernid, a nifty classroom tool that facilitators can use to conduct classes and students could use to actively participate in them.

Lernid is a cool tool that presents students with four panes. One pane is a customized calendar used to display session time information. Another displays a pane for displaying slides. The third is used by the student to get the actual lecture of the class in real time ascreensnd finally the last one is used by the student to participate in discussions.

Lernid provides the facilitator to create an event. This is done using a flat file where the facilitator may specify the respective web page, configure an IRC channel and schedule the event start and finish date/time information. The slides for the lecture are provided for Lernid as a pdf document.

During the lecture the facilitator has the ability to change slides or display a website while communicating with the rest of the class with a IRC client.

Lernid is a great and immensely useful tool. While there is scope for more improvement, it is hard for such a product to be commercialized or used on a grand scale. For now Lernid is available only on Ubuntu. Despite Ubuntu's immense popularity, I do not see too many lecture conducted on Ubuntu exclusively for a Ubuntu audience. Lernid also requires that the facilitators are comfortable with using script files. To the non-nerdy, this may be a turn-off.

Maybe Mr. Bacon has no such plans, but I'd like to see it ported to other platforms. I'd also like to see more of the newer technologies/applications integrated into Lernid, like other chat tools, Google Wave, etc. Nevertheless, Lernid is a great concept that I'd like to blossom in the next few years.