Murali's Arena

10 Cool Cars We Want Now

2008-12-23T17:29:00.002+11:00

This blog post lists 10 cool cars and I couldn't take my eyes off from the Audi R8.

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/12/10-cars-we-want.html

Article on software dependencies

2008-08-31T16:12:00.004+10:00

I came accross a very good article on software dependencies and I encourage you to have a look when you have some time for a reading.

The auther talks about problems with tightly coupled architectures, effect of coupling on testing and other design patterns such as dependency inversion and dependency injection. Read the full article here.

Cloud computing

2008-05-07T11:35:00.001+10:00

I don't think that I can find a Software Professional who is not aware of this technical phrase 'Cloud Computing'. It is the current talk of the town.

This article on 'Cloud Computing' describes about the term, how Google and IBM would probably dominate the world in this area and its consequences.

Personal data on Facebook at risk

2008-05-02T10:43:00.001+10:00

A news published on the BBC website has reported with proof, that how the personal information of the Facebook users can be hacked and used for any other purposes.

An application written for Facebook can gather the user's personal data as well as his/her friends', when it is added to the user's profile. That means, you can't stay secured by not adding any applications to your profile; You details ca be stolen when one of your friends adds those malicious application.

Read the full story here.

Schedule delivery of mails in Outlook

2008-05-01T09:46:00.001+10:00

There is a nice feature in Outlook 2003/2007, which makes it possible to delay the delivery of a message. This should be very useful in many occasions but one simple situation is when we want to send wishes to a person on his/her birthday or anniversary. We don't have to worry about whether we are away from the computers on that day, the message will be sent by the server on the scheduled time (this will work only when outlook is connected in exchange server mode).

Read more from here.

Daylight Saving time

2008-03-28T11:45:00.001+11:00

A news story says that the PCs in some states (New South Wales, Victoria, ACT, Tasmania and South Australia) of Australia, will not be able to automatically adjust the daylight saving time this year. Not mentioned in the story, according to one of my colleagues in New Zealand, this will affect them as well.

A software update from Microsoft may solve the problem.

Read the full story

Percentile calculation in Oracle

2008-03-12T12:26:00.001+11:00

A percentile is the value of a variable below which a certain percent of observations fall. That is; the 80th percentile is the value below which 80% of the observations can be found. More informations about percentile and the mathematical calculations can be found on the wiki page.

I had to use percentile function in one of our applications where the only option was to use Oracle. I did some research on the subject and found the solution.

There are 2 analytic functions in oracle which can be used for the purpose finding the percentile.

1. Function: Percent_Rank
This function gives the percentile rank, between 0 and 1, in the set (table rows).
Format:
PERCENT_RANK(<value>) OVER (<partition_clause> <order_by_clause>)

E.g.:
SELECT department_id, last_name, salary, PERCENT_RANK()
OVER (PARTITION BY department_id ORDER BY salary DESC) AS pr
FROM employees
ORDER BY pr, salary;
The results of this query will present the department, employee last name, salary and the percentile rank of the salary within the department the employee belongs to, order by percentile rank and salary.

2. Function: Percentile_Cont
This assumes a continuous distribution; the function will retrieve the value for a given percentile.
Format:
PERCENTILE_CONT(<value>) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY <expression> [ASC | DESC]) OVER (<partition_clause>)

E.g.:
SELECT last_name, salary, department_id,
PERCENTILE_CONT(0.5) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY salary DESC)
OVER (PARTITION BY department_id) PCT_CONT,
PERCENT_RANK()
OVER (PARTITION BY department_id ORDER BY salary DESC) PCT_RANK
FROM employees
WHERE department_id IN (30, 60);
This query returns the employee last name, salary, department, 50th percentile value of the salaries within the departments, percentile rank of the employee salary for departments 30 and 50.

These analytics functions may take some time to response when queried against large tables.

Long wait is over

2008-02-22T14:58:00.001+11:00

I had been away from posting on my blog for more than 3 months. I was neither busy with office projects nor with personal projects; I made a major move in my life. I and my family migrated to Australia and I was busy with preparing to move from Lanka and settling in the new place.

Now, I am back to my usual life; meaning that I have started blog posting as well.

Encrypting web.config sections

2007-10-26T16:52:00.001+10:00

In ASP.Net web applications, we are used to keep some confidential data in clear text and we do not even care about their importance to the intruders. One of them is the database login credentials, kept in the connectionStrings section of the web configuration (web.config) file.

Recently, I was involved in designing a public secured web application for our customers site. After the implementation was completed, we left the application with our 'IT Security Specialist' to evaluate its secureness. One of his feedbacks was to keep the confidential data encrypted. So, we decided to use the .Net Data Protection API for encrypting the database connection information, i.e. connectionString section in web.config file. I share the details on how to encrypt/decrypt (here I have used the 'machine store' option and it is the good choice when the web site is hosted in a shared environment) the particular section in the file.

Finish the connectionString section configurations in web.config
Open command prompt, change the directory to %WinDir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\<versionNumber>
e.g. C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727
Execute the following command (AppName: virtual directory name of the
application in IIS e.g. myapplication)
aspnet_regiis -pe "connectionStrings" -app "/AppName"
-prov "DataProtectionConfigurationProvider“
Open web.config file and verify the encrypted section

If it is required to decrypt the section (to change the database settings), this is how to do that.

Open command prompt, change the directory to %WinDir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\<versionNumber>
e.g. C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727
Execute the following command (AppName: virtual directory name of the
application in IIS e.g. myapplication)
aspnet_regiis -pd "connectionStrings" -app "/AppName"
Open web.config and the section would be in clear text

More information about the Data Protection API can be found here.

Google products you may not know about

2007-10-26T16:19:00.001+10:00

Lifehacker has listed 10 Google products which many people may not be aware of. Even I have not used a few among the list.

Top 10 Google Products You Forgot All About

DevDay 2007

2007-10-19T17:44:00.000+10:00

Microsoft Sri Lanka and the dotnetforum.lk conducted the above event on the 16th Tuesday at the Mount Lavinia Hotel. Yes! this time I was able to attend (I missed a similar one, 3 years back).

There were 2 speakers, 'Chua Wen Ching' from Malaysia, talked mostly about .Net framework 3.5, C# 3.0 and LINQ and 'Venkata Rangan' from India, talked about the 'Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)' and 'Silverlight'. It was a bit difficult to tune to Ching's English, but the contents of the presentations were good and at last he ran out of time because of too many demos. Venkata had made his session more interesting by showing colorful animations, mainly a matrimony site with pictures of lots of young girls :-).

I expected to receive a Visual Studio .Net 2008 beta installation DVD at the end of the event, but the forum guys said it had not arrived on time to Lanka.

Backlinks to your site

2007-10-15T16:43:00.000+10:00

I just came accross a web site especially useful for web masters. Its Backlink Watch.

We can type the URL into Backlink Watch and get complete detailed information about the quality and quantity of backward links pointing to the website. It shows anchor text, Google Toolbar PageRank, total outbound links on that page and nofollow flag for each of the inbound links available.

I compared the 'backlink watch' results for my site with the results from Google 'web master tools'; This site had provided a more complete and accurate information.

Umbraco tip - Publish event action handler

2007-10-12T14:50:00.000+10:00

I have been working with Umbraco, the open source CMS (content management system) in .Net, for quite some time. Though it is a good system with many features, the documentation available on the web is not sufficient enough to help the developers with their 'how to' questions. So, I think the help should be provided by sharing the knowledge. With that in mind, I like to include useful umbraco tips within my blog, starting from this post.

There can be many situations where one would want to catch the default events and to implement custom action handlers. One of the important events in a CMS is the 'Publish' event and I have provided here the code to implement a custom action handler.

It is used to make the navigation menu (drop down or what ever) on a web site to be dynamic so that it can be automatically updated without the developer intervention. Usually an editor who adds or removes pages from a site would see this feature a really useful one in CMS enabled site. Here the technic is that, when the home page of the site is published, it automatically updates the javascript which is used for the navigation menu.

The steps to follow;

Create a visual studio project to build an application library
Create a class and add the following code
Change the code according to your requirements
Build the solution
Place the built dll file into the umbraco installation's 'bin' folder
Verify the action form the umbraco management site

Code fragment

public class MenuHandler : umbraco.BusinessLogic.Actions.IActionHandler
{

String umbraco.BusinessLogic.Actions.IActionHandler.HandlerName()
{
// return the name of the custom action handler
return "lib.MenuHandler";
}

umbraco.interfaces.IAction[] umbraco.BusinessLogic.Actions.IActionHandler.ReturnActions()
{
// return the actions for which this action handler is used
return new IAction[] { new ActionPublish() };
}

Boolean umbraco.BusinessLogic.Actions.IActionHandler.Execute(
umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web.Document documentObject, umbraco.interfaces.IAction action)
{
// if more than one actions are returned in ReturnActions() method,
// the action parameter can be used to decide the current action.

// check whether it is the home page which has been published
if (documentObject.ContentType.Alias.Equals("HomePage"))
{
// Code to rebuild the navigation menu
}
}

}

Perfect domain for me

2007-09-27T17:44:00.000+10:00

I have been trying to get the perfect domain (www.balamurali.com) for my online presence, for some time, but I didn't succeed until the previous registration expired last month. After years of patience, I grabbed my dream domain through the domain auction agent snapnames.

From now onwards Balamurali.com will be my permanent place, globally on the web, and I'm trying to find some free time to renovate my personal web.

Engineering vs Software Engineering

2007-08-22T15:27:00.000+10:00

In the last issue of 'Engineering and Technology' magazine by the IET, I read a small article (I forgot the name of the author but I remember the topic). It was about the usage of the job title 'Engineer' within the software industry. The author had said that an Engineer should be a person who is involved in hardware design and manufacturing activities. In all the other industries such as 'Civil', 'Electronics', 'Mechanics', 'Aeronaughtics' etc. the tasks of an Engineer is related to designing hardware components. In contrast, the software industry has been mis-using the job title 'Engineer' for people who design software, which difers a lot from usual engineering processes. Hence, they should be called 'Software Designers' instead, he had further added.

I have been hearing these kinds of arguements time to time from various people I meet. The reasons I think for all these mis-understandings are;

1. Software industry has not matured enough or it has not aged well to define its standards.
2. Software Engineering is a totally different aspect of Engineering where people are new to the intangible properties of the product and its capabilities.

Because of its immatured nature, the people in this industry have started using many different job titles without standardizing/defining them in a proper way. This has lead to many problems and mis-understanding. However, I believe that the 'software engineering' would soon come under the 'umbrella of engineering' as the community become more aware about the issues nowadays.

One puzzle

2007-08-06T14:57:00.000+10:00

Most of the time, I enjoy listening to radio channels rather than playing a music CD on my car stereo. Comperes can make the channels more interesting by having lots of fun items within the programs. One stuff they often do is 'riddling'. They throw away some quiz questions and let the audience answer them through the phone.

Today, on my way to the office I heard this quiz, being asked again and again by the Compere but not answered for hours of time.

Greater than God, more evil than the devil, the poor have it, the rich need it, and if you eat it, you will die. What's that?

He was also providing some statistics about the riddle; He said 80% of kinder-garden students answered while only 17% of Standford university seniors. I didn't get the answer during my journey so I searched the net when I reached the office and found out that it is a famous riddle.

The answer is 'Nothing'.

Now I can read the puzzle with the answer in place.

Nothing is greater than God; nothing is more evil than the devil; the poor have nothing; the rich need nothing; and if you eat nothing, you will die.

Multiple web sites in IIS 5.1

2007-08-01T20:37:00.000+10:00

Last few weeks I had been working with one web based CMS (Content Management System) software called Umbraco. The system has a limitation which does not allow it to be hosted inside a virtual directory within IIS. It has to be installed in the web server root in order for it to work properly.

I wanted to install and try the software at any cost. However, I didn't want to mess up my existing web server as I have already configured many virtual directories in it. I could not create a new web site instance through IIS also because, its not possible with Windows XP Professional and IIS 5.1. I had to find a solution for the problem because I couldn't just find a machine to install the new software only. So, as usual I googled the net and I could find some cool tools available to do the trick. Here I share the tool which I still use in my machine.

IIsAdmin.NET: Create Multiple Web Sites Under Windows XP

The only limitation with the tool is that only one web site can be active at one time. Since I use my machine for development purposes I feel it is tolerable.

Team Trip - Hotel Blue Water

2007-07-31T19:59:00.000+10:00

Our project code-named 'JERI' was successfully completed by mid of June and as usual we were allocated the fund by our Development Manager to go for a trip (team outing). It's just after around one month of our annual trip, which we didn't appreciate much. So, this time we wanted to visit a near-by beach hotel so that we could reduce the cost and time for travelling and spend more for hotel stay. We didn't have any second comment in choosing the hotel The Blue Water in Wadduwa as the destination.

July 28-29, was very much entertaining and relaxing weekend at a wonderful hotel surrounded by fantastic coastal atmosphere. We admired the way the water is circulated everywhere including the huge swimming pool, keeping the place really cool.

As the event was with lots of fun stories, I think my photo album would say it all. Here is the link.

Trip to Hotel - The Blue Water

LinkedIn or Facebook?

2007-07-27T15:51:00.000+10:00

People often talk about Facebook and LinkedIn, 2 popular social networking services. I have been using LinkedIn for sometime and it's not new for me. I wanted to know how the Facebook works and its pros (or cons) over the other service.

This article seems to address the issue by comparing the 2 services. Today I have planned to explore the features of Facebook little more so I can verify the author's comments.

Entrepreneurs Need Both Facebook and LinkedIn

My LinkedIn profile

Open source Content Management Systems

2007-07-18T18:16:00.000+10:00

There was a need for me to investigate about several open source Content Management Systems (CMS) for a personal project. It was a big list where I had to choose the better one which suit my requirements. Three systems were in my short-list.

I had already worked with a commercial Enterprise CMS, called Tridion in my company. So, I didn't have any problems when evaluating the functionalities in each system in my short list.

Here I talk about the system which I have chosen to be the best within the short listed candidates.

Umbraco (http://www.umbraco.org/)

This is an ASP.NET based CMS, uses Microsoft Sql Server as the backend. Currently the latest stable version is 3.0.1.

It took more than half-a-day for me to install because there were lots of problems I had to solve during the installation. I found out that, when it is installed in IIS web server, it should be the root application. It cannot be installed in a virtual directory. I used the Sql Server Express 2005 which I installed as an instance (not the default option). It raised a lots of error messages when I tried to access the application saying that it could not get the database connection (even after I configured it properly). Then I had to re-install the database with the default option.

I write this small review with my usage of few hours of the software, so I might have missed a good feature altogether. So, please bear with me. I'll update my blog with my experience later. This is the only CMS which is similar atleast in few features of the standard Tridion software. This has the flexibility of making the building blocks of the web site from scratch. When it is installed fresh, there is no predefined settings, even for the member groups. It is possible to create a simple web site without using the .Net programming knowledge at all. But it is necessary to have enough programming skills to build a sophisticated web site. Developers have the option of utilising the .Net web/user controls or the XSLT style sheet to define the layout and contents.

Other options in my list were Mambo and Cuyahoga. I didn't go deep into the features of Mambo as it has used PHP for its front end which is not suitable for my purpose. The laster has used ASP.Net for front-end and Sql server, MySql or PostgreSql for the back-end. Though this offers flexibility in database, the features were not useful. I can say it has limited range of usage.

Today is 13th, Friday

2007-07-13T16:10:00.000+10:00

Today is the second Friday the 13th in this year (first one was in April), believed to be the most unlucky day by the Englishmen. The fear of 13th Friday has also been given a name, Paraskevidekatriaphobia.

When I searched the Net to get good articles about of this culture, I found a lot of resources. Among them, I feel the below links have got better information.

iPhone review - good one

2007-07-03T18:19:00.000+10:00

Still, I haven't got a chance to try the currently-hot device, Apple iPhone. It has not been yet marketed in our country. I normally use the published reviews to knowledge myself about the new arrivals. Good reviews always help to get the feeling of a hands-on usage of the devices.

Here is a very descriptive and focused review about the recently released iPhone.
iPhone review

Trip to Dickwella

2007-06-25T19:48:00.000+10:00

Dickwella, a place in the south coast of Sri Lanka, had been chosen to be the spot for the company annual trip (for our group). We enjoyed the pleasure trip on 23rd and 24th June at the Dickwella resort. We travelled on Saturday morning in 3 buses and returned on Saunday night.

It was a fun-filled weekend with more relaxation, food, dinner dance, sports and fun events. My wife and kid accompanied me this time and it had been our first long trip with her.

I have shared the photoes in my album.

Trip to Dickwella

Web Browsers - timeline

2007-06-25T15:56:00.000+10:00

The timeline of web browsers shown here seems to be very useful. I can think about the following ways, the information can be utilized.

Details of all the existing / non-existing web browsers and their version release periods
The ways in which different web browsers have evolved and their ancestors
Maturity levels of the browsers
etc. (there may be more)

I couldn't find the famous text based 'lynx' browser (found in Linux OS) in the timeline. May be it was not considered as a web browser?

Web 2.0 - design guidelines

2007-06-22T15:11:00.000+10:00

I was googling to find some resources about web 2.0 design trends. I say web 2.0 design trend because the web sites' designs have changed drastically since the introduction of web 2.0 services. I found this as a good article on the topic.

web 2.0 how-to design style guide

It gives good explanations on the changes to the web design with examples and some links to more information.

Opera Mini - mobile browser

2007-06-14T13:54:00.000+10:00

While I was in Sweden, I met Ms. Malin Rundberg, Project Manager of Opera Mini software, at Graziela's (our Development Manager) birthday party. We had a good chat about various things for some time. One of the topics was about the Opera Mini, the free mobile browser.

I use Nokia 6230 and I had been using its default browser to access the internet over GPRS. At the party Malin recommended me to use the Opera Mini, not just because she is the Project Manager of it, but it has got some nice features. When she was telling the features of the software, I was thinking like, 'how did I miss this nice piece of software?'. I decided to try this when I'm back home.

I downloaded the software and I have been using it for a while. It's amazing! If I say the truth, now I don't like to open my phone's default browser at all. I recommend this software for everybody around and I should thank Malin for introducing me to this application.
This is how you install the product (phone should support java applications):

Open the default mobile browser and connect to the internet
Access the site www.operamini.com
Download the software by clicking the appropriate link
Allow the phone to install the java application
Exit your phone browser, now the application has been installed.

Opening the browser is as easy as running a java application in the phone. Just select the 'Opera Mini' from the phone's applications collection and let it to connect to the internet (you will be prompted to allow network access). Now you can play with it.

Trip to Sweden

2007-06-11T14:17:00.000+10:00

I was a bit busy these days hence I could not blog for some time.

I visited our Sweden offices to participate in few knowledge transfer sessions and one meeting. This was my second time in Sweden and this time I felt more comfortable than the previous visit in 2004.

According to my travel schedule, I had to go to the Stockhom city by flight and then by train to Linkoping. Unfortunately due to the Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) strike, I had to change my connecting flight during the last moment. My flight destination was changed to Goteborg with a different carrier, 'Air France'. It was late night when I arrived Goteborg so I stayed at the Hotel Landvetter. Next day morning, Jens came and picked me up from the hotel and we travelled together to Linkoping in his car. It had been a nice journey where the average speed of the car was above 100 km/h. After the knowledge transfer sessions, I took over the responsibility of 3 systems from a person in Sweden. These software systems will be developed further under my supervision in Sri Lanka.

Paris Airport

While I was in Linkoping, I was able to try several dishes for my lunch including the typical swedish menu with dear meat, potatoes and cucumber salad. I should thank Henrik and Mats for taking me to different restaurants everyday. Once we went for a dinner to the 'Texas Longhorn steakhouse' and I ordered the medium cooked meat for me and others ordered medium rare. Initially I was a bit scared to have a dish with the blood and pink meat. But, it tasted good.

Linkoping

Then I had to go to Goteborg to participate in a meeting with the Area Manager (Jens) and our Development Manager (Graziela). I had to go by train and the X2000 journey was a bit disturbing. I got travel sick. On the same day I went for the Birthday celebrations of Graziela and Eva as I was invited by Graziela. This was really a wonderful event where I could meet a lot of different people in Sweden. There were few who left IFS and working for some other companies. We talked a lot; about software companies, Opera software (one Project Manager from Opera was there), visiting Sri Lanka, current situation in Sri Lanka etc.

Goteborg

The next day I travelled to Stockholm and stayed there for a day before my departure. It was really a nice place with more people on the road and many sites to see. I enjoyed that day walking along the streets of Stockholm. I had to return to the hotel early as I had to travel back the next day morning.

Stockholm

Frakfurt Airport

On my return, I travelled through Frankfurt airport and reached Colombo on 4th morning. I was thinking whether my little one would identify me as this was first time I was away from her for a week. She was a bit scared initially but later she realised that its her father.

I have shared some of the photoes which I took during the trip.

Oracle tip - using CLOB columns

2007-05-25T15:47:00.000+10:00

Recently I had to investigate about the usability of the CLOB (Character Large OBjects) columns in oracle database tables. Actually the requirement was to store a ralatively larger string values into the table column. I discuss my experience with the task here.

When creating a LOB (either CLOB or BLOB) column, oracle offers 2 ways of storage to choose from.

In-line storage
Data is stored within the table row. For the values which are greater than 3964 (from reference) bytes, oracle stores the data in a different place (most probably a separate table space) and keeps a pointer to that location within the row.
The clause ENABLE IN ROW is used to select this option.
Out-of-line storage
Data is always stored outside and the location pointer is stored in the table row.
DISABLE IN ROW is used to choose this option in the storage clause.

Both options have pros and cons. I had looked at them in different aspects to choose the right one for my purpose.

Performance: Option 1 will give better response time when saving and retrieving a row. This can be even better when saving a value of size lesser than the maximum limit for in-line. So, if the application gives more important to the performance, it should be option 1.

Storage: Amount of space occupied by the same value in both options are different. I got to know this through experience. Option 2 uses more space than it is required for option 1. This implies, if the application's database can be allocated large storage space, going for option 2 should not be a problem.

There are other storage parameters like CHUNK SIZE which affect the performance and storage. But, I don't want to discuss that here. Oracle reference can give good knowledge on that.

In my situation, I had to choose a method where performance is more important and the space usage is minimal. The avarage size of the sample values was also a factor, where it was almost 4000 bytes. So, I decided to go for option 1, which seemed to be the most appropriate one.

However I want to say one experience based fact here. When VARCHAR2 and CLOB (in-line) are used to store the same column value in a table, the later occupies much more physical storage space than the former (even double). We shouldn't just go for CLOB since it offers more room. In conclusion I would say, VARCHAR2 should be considered first in every angle before thinking about CLOBs.

Dinner with Henrik

2007-05-24T14:44:00.000+10:00

Our Service Manager, Henrik Celinder has been here with us for more than a week. Following IFS culture, we went for a team outing, a dinner on the 22nd of May. It was another fun team event that we enjoyed. The restautant was the 'Cafe Asiana', in Hill Street, Dehiwala this time. Even though the food and the serving standard were not in top level, we had a good time with Henrik.

I have shared some photoes in my photo site.

Dinner with Henrik

We discussed lot of things including the europian special 'handball' game and different food menus like greek and Lebanese.

Cost effective localization

2007-05-17T16:07:00.000+10:00

In todays world of software applications, localization plays a vital role. Almost all the web sites tend to localize their contents to enjoy better reach among their target audience. Our global company web site; www.ifsworld.com, for example, maintain seperate sites for many countries. All the sites share the common design skeleton but they consist of localized contents in local languages to suit the people of the country. This is the same for the stand-alone applications delivered to different countries; They are localized.

Translation is one of the major aspects of localization. A user can better interact with a software application when it is native to him/her. That is, when the application communicates with the user in his/her mother tongue and in native ways. To make the end-user feel more happier, the developers put more effort in the design and implementation of the software. There can be lots of things which hinder this; cost is the worse and annoying constraint which can affect the software quality.

With respective to localization, the cost for translation can significantly affect the price of the software delivered. To be cost effective, the company should adpot proper methodlogies to reduce the money spent on translation. It is not a good idea to minimize the level of localization. But, it is possible to minimize the number of words (for which the translators charge) to be translated in the application. But again this should not affect the level of localization.

During the development of a software application, the attributes which need to be translated are first collected. They are analyzed for duplicates, to get the distinct values. Finally for each of these attibutes, translators are consulted to localize the attributes. These are the typical tasks involved in localization of an application through translation. However, this method is acceptable when the collection of attributes is small and provided that there is a way to find out the duplicates.

But in an enterprise system, huge number of attributes are involved. Enterprise systems are generally component based and each component is independent from the other. It is not possible to identify the duplicates as it's done for smaller systems. It requires proper organization of data and a seperate system; a cost effective system to handle the translations.

Discussing about such a system; firstly, a scanning system is required to build a repository of all the attributes. The word 'term' is introduced and it is defined as a single translatable item in the system. A term can have several forms of translations such as short, long or full. For each form of translation there exists translation in every languages used in the system. As the second step, a term base is organized with terms retrieved from the attributes. This is actually a generalization process. Attributes are generalized to create terms. Thirdly, each and every attribute from the repository is bound to a suitable term in the term base. This bond will also determine which form of the term translation is required by the attribute. The final result is that there are many attributes pointing to one term (this is the whole purpose actually). Finally, all the bound terms are sent to the translators. When this is done in a typical enterprise system, no. of attributes is to no. of terms ratio becomes around 5. This leads to more than 80% translation cost reduction in the system.

So, the localization should not only be effective but also be cost-effective for the product to survive. Thats why the localization has become an integral part of the enterprise systems nowadays.

Web 2.0 awards - 2007

2007-05-10T15:49:00.000+10:00

seomoz.org says, it has reviewed and ranked hundreds of web 2.0 sites and awarded the best sites under 41 categories; 3 places (first, second and third) exist per category. Interviews with the founders of some winners have been hosted.

Digg (Social News), LinkedIn (Professional Networking) , del.icio.us (Social Tagging) and Technorati (Blog Guides) are among the winners.

Check out the list:
SEOmoz's Web 2.0 Awards

Google as a Proxy

2007-04-17T17:19:00.000+10:00

When we were at the university we were restricted to access some sites on the internet. Accessing those web sites had been a big challenge and we tried several ways to overcome that. I could really remember my campus days while I was reading this article. It explains how to use Google as a proxy to access those banned sites; i.e.: accessing other sites through Google servers. (Google is always accessible from any network).

Two tricks have been listed.

Using Google translation service
A request is made to Google to translate the required page (already in English) to English. This is done by replacing the section in red with the required URL, to which the access is denied by the home network.
http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=zh%7Cen&u=http://www.myspace.com/
Using Google Wireless Transcoder
This is a straight forward method. First access the page at http://www.google.com/gwt/n and then enter the desired (banned) URL in the text box there. Only drawback here is that, the page is rendered to suit a modile browser. Something is better than nothing!

I'm sure that the author would definitely be honoured by those who have been suffering from the firewal restrictions.

Weekend madness

2007-04-06T20:13:00.000+10:00

Employees often welcome the weekend, especially when there have been too much workload for the week. We all need to rest at least once a week, otherwise it will lead to health problems. Thats the serious side of the issue.

But people create funny pictures, showing the behaviour of the employees on Mondays (start of the week) and on Fridays (end of week). I do enjoy laughing at those pictures and sometimes I wonder the authors imaginations.

Here is one example, where I couldn't stop looking at the baby's facial expressions.

Hey.. enough watching that baby! Now its time to return back to your work. He he he!

Love vs Marriage

2007-04-06T14:59:00.000+10:00

Today I received this nice piece of joke through email and I think I should share it.

A student asks a teacher, "What is love?"
The teacher said, "in order to answer your question, go to the wheat field and choose the biggest wheat and come back.
But the rule is: - you can go through them only once & cannot turn back to pick."
The student went to the field, go thru first row, he saw one big wheat, but he wonders....may be there is a bigger one later.
Then he saw another bigger one... but may be there is an even bigger one waiting for him.
Later, when he finished more than half of the wheat field, he starts to realise that the wheat is not as big as the previous one he saw, he knew he has missed the biggest one, and he regretted.
So, he ended up went back to the teacher with empty hand. The teacher told him, "...this is love... you keep looking for better ones, but when later you realise, you have already missed the person ...."

"What is marriage then?" the student asked.
The teacher said, "in order to answer your question, go to the corn field and choose the biggest corn and come back.
But the rule is: you can go through them only once and cannot turn back to pick."
The student went to the corn field, this time he is careful not to repeat the previous mistake, when he reach the middle of the field,
he has picked one medium sized corn that he felt satisfied, and came back to the teacher.
The teacher told him, "this time you bring back a corn.... you look for one that is just nice, and you have faith and believe this is the best one you get.... this is marriage."

Did it make sense? :-P

New web mail era

2007-03-28T14:20:00.000+10:00

Yahoo! has announced that its going to provide unlimited storage for all its users from May, 2007. This is an interesting news today.

Almost every free web mail provider has been offering lots of features (mainly storage related) during the last 2-3 years. Hotmail increased the storage from 5MB to 25MB and then to 1GB. Yahoo, from 100MB to 250 MB and later to 1GB. However, this new web mail era started since the introduction of the GMail with ever-growing storage (initially 1GB I think). Every free web email user should thank Google for releasing such a competitive product which has boosted the whole web mail industry.

I have been using Yahoo mail, Gmail and Hotmail for longer period of time and I personally prefer GMail for several reasons; its way of organizing the whole bunch of emails (through labels, archiving, etc..), free POP and forwarding facilities, integration of one account (Single Sign On) for several applications (GTalk, Blogger, Reader, etc..) and so on. And also, GMail has always been an initiator and not a follower.

The current trend of the web mails shows that we can expect more from each vendors in future, such as the present announcement from Yahoo. We will wait and see!

[This is not a marketing for Google]

UPDATE:
This is an iteresting article from TechCrunch; A Comparison of Live Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail

My college magazines online - thanks to www

2007-03-26T19:28:00.000+10:00

My schooling was in Jaffna and it was at St. John's College. I was one of those who suffered by the displacement in 1995 (from Jaffna peninsula) due to the local war. It was such a difficult and unforgettable time period in my life and I could not take more stuff when I moved. One of the items I missed during that time was the collection of my college magazines (publications, issued annually, detailing the college's and students' achievements). Still I am worried, thinking whether I can get them back in anyway.

Today, when I googled for something (related to my name), accidentaly I found some of the college magazines, published online. And the publications where my achievements (GCE Ordinary Level and GCE Advanced Level) listed are also there (find 'balamurali' in the page). I should thank the www for giving me a chance to have a look (at least some) after a decade.

I refreshed my memories through the articles in the site and I feel I miss my alma mater.

St. Johns College magazine (1994-1996)
End of an Era (1993)
175 years at St. John's College

I should start singing my college song now...

Decked with shady palms and trees,
Fringed with rich mahoganies,
There beneath a glowing sky,
St John's upraise her crest on high.

Bill Gates to receive his degree

2007-03-23T20:35:00.000+11:00

Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft and the wealthiest man in the world is going to receive an honorary degree from Harvard, the same university which he dropped out from the degree course to start the company around 30 years back. This is to happen in June in a commencing ceremony of the university, according to this news item.

So, now Gates got an entry for the education column of his resume?

Team Outing with Petra and Iréne

2007-03-22T15:03:00.000+11:00

Our guests Petra (Process Manager) and Iréne (Project Manager) are here in Colombo this week, mainly sharing knowledge with the Hatrick team (a sub team of the Corporate Services development team). I don't work for Hatrick, but we do communicate with each other.

Our company culture always encourage us to go for an outing with our guests. So, we decided to go for a dinner. As sea food is the most wanted item for our visitors, we chose the 'Fisherman Cove' at the Mount Lavinia Hotel.

Yesterday evening we all left our office for the dinner together with Petra and Iréne. The hotel was already illuminated with some lights and the sun was about to set. So, we rushed to the beach to see the sun set and we didn't miss it. This nice photograph should say how nice it was.

We moved to the roof-top of a building as someone in the team suggested that the view would be eye-catching. Thats true. We could see a wonderful view of the west coast of sri lanka, even our office at wellawatte was also visible.

Time was up so we again came back to the 'Fisherman Cove' to order the dinner. Loads of fresh sea food items were showcased for us to choose. We ordered grilled fish with french fries and vegetables. The dining table was set on top of a boat (not in the sea) in the beach side with lantterns and candles lit around. I already have had similar beach side dinner many times before but everytime its a different experience with different people and menu.

We talked about a lot of things; about globalization of food items and restaurants, fruits special for sri lanka, sweden and some other countries, Politics and also about the cockroaches and mosquitoes in sweden. Everybody shared their experiences in different countries with different people and food. It was really entertaining.
Before leaveing the place we took a snap of the our team.

I enjoyed the dinner and I hope everybody would feel the same. This kind of outings improve the relationship between the co-workers which eventually will increase the productivity of everyone.

Domain name unavailable? one reason here

2007-03-21T16:47:00.000+11:00

You search for a domain name through a domain registrar's search page; You make sure it is available and decide to register later; But when you try to register the same domain the next day, it has already been registered. You wonder who is that black sheep that wanted the same name. This is a common issue that many people might have experienced.

This article describes a cause of the above problem and lists some tips to avoid.

Stealing domain name research

The Slow down Culture

2007-03-14T17:35:00.000+11:00

I received this nice article from one of my friends. It's really worth reading it till the end.

An interesting reflection: Slow Down Culture

It's been 18 years since I joined Volvo, a Swedish company. Working for them has proven to be an interesting experience. Any project here takes 2 years to be finalized, even if the idea is simple and brilliant. It's a rule.

Globalize processes have caused in us (all over the world) a general sense of searching for immediate results. Therefore, we have come to posses a need to see immediate results. This contrasts greatly with the slow movements of the Swedish. They, on the other hand, debate, debate, debate, hold x quantity of meetings and work with a slowdown scheme. At the end, this always yields better results.

Said in another words:
1. Swedenis about the size of San Pablo , a state in Brazil .
2. Swedenhas 2 million inhabitants.
3. Stockholm , has 500,000 people.
4. Volvo, Escania, Ericsson, Electrolux, Nokia are some of its renowned companies. Volvo supplies the NASA.

The first time I was in Sweden , one of my colleagues picked me up at the hotel every morning. It was September, bit cold and snowy. We would arrive early at the company and he would park far away from the entrance (2000 employees drive their car to work). The first day, I didn't say anything, either the second or third. One morning I asked, "Do you have a fixed parking space? I've noticed we park far from the entrance even when there are no other cars in the lot." To which he replied, "Since we're here early we'll have time to walk, and whoever gets in late will be late and need a place closer to the door. Don't you think?" Imagine my face.

Nowadays, there's a movement in Europename Slow Food. This movement establishes that people should eat and drink slowly, with enough time to taste their food, spend time with the family, friends, without rushing. Slow Food is against its counterpart: the spirit of Fast Food and what it stands for as a lifestyle. Slow Food is the basis for a bigger movement called Slow Europe, as mentioned by Business Week.

Basically, the movement questions the sense of "hurry" and "craziness" generated by globalization, fueled by the desire of "having in quantity" (life status) versus "having with quality", "life quality" or the "quality of being". French people, even though they work 35 hours per week, are more productive than Americans or British. Germans have established 28.8 hour workweeks and have seen their productivity been driven up by 20%. This slow attitude has brought forth the US 's attention, pupils of the fast and the "do it now!".

This no-rush attitude doesn't represent doing less or having a lower productivity. It means working and doing things with greater quality, productivity, perfection, with attention to detail and less stress. It means reestablishing family values, friends, free and leisure time. Taking the "now", present and concrete, versus the "global", undefined and anonymous. It means taking humans' essential values, the simplicity of living.

It stands for a less coercive work environment, more happy, lighter and more productive where humans enjoy doing what they know best how to do. It's time to stop and think on how companies need to develop serious quality with no-rush that will increase productivity and the quality of products and services, without losing the essence of spirit.

In the movie, Scent of a Woman, there's a scene where Al Pacino asks a girl to dance and she replies, "I can't, my boyfriend will be here any minute now". To which Al responds, "A life is lived in an instant". Then they dance to a tango.

Many of us live our lives running behind time, but we only reach it when we die of a heart attack or in a car accident rushing to be on time. Others are so anxious of living the future that they forget to live the present, which is the only time that truly exists. We all have equal time throughout the world. No one has more or less. The difference lies in how each one of us does with our time. We need to live each moment. As John Lennon said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans".

Congratulations for reading till the end of this message. There are many who will have stopped in the middle so as not to waste time in this globalized world.

vi editor by Microsoft

2007-03-09T17:15:00.000+11:00

I too get upset with the Microsoft office assistant popping up and asking me silly questions when doing something serious. It might be helpful for the dummies. Who knows.

Here is an imagination of how the Microsoft version of the famous vi editor (linux) would look like. Really funny.

How the vi editor would seem if it has been made by Microsoft

2 useful sites

2007-03-09T14:41:00.000+11:00

I want to share 2 links which I think would be very useful for web developers.

Ready.mobi: provides an analysis of how your web content is likely to function on a mobile device. The report prints a rating out of 5, for the page. It also gives the results on some additional tests as passes, warnings, fails and comments. It seems that I haven't designed my personal web .mobi friendly as it received an overall rating of 1 out of 5.
MiniAjax.com: a collection of downloadable Ajax and DHTML scripts. They call it a showroom of simple and downloadable scripts.

Firefox themes

2007-02-28T15:35:00.001+11:00

Today I came accross this nice blog entry, which has listed almost all the currently available firefox themes with the screen shots and the download links.

I have been using Noia 2.0 (eXtreme) and its one of my favourites. A clean yet cool interface. Changes are very important in human lives, and they must be there in my firefox browser which I use more than any other apps. So, Today I plan to make a switch to the 'Metal Lion (vista)' theme.

May be, I would feel like I have had installed a new browser :-)

Firefox Themes in an overview

Tool for domain name appraisal

2007-02-23T19:03:00.000+11:00

dnscoop.com, one of its kind domain tool, produces domain reports with whois info, domain history, page rank, traffic rank, http status, site value and link value. The site value gives a figure in $ using some factors.

By curiosity, I just checked our company domain (ifsworld.com) and its worth $124,540.
I wanted to check the values of other popular domains like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc., but I couldn't do it because the site was very busy.

Check it out!

End of the Internet - from Google

2007-02-20T16:51:00.000+11:00

To check the new items in Google Reader, I use the bookmark ('Next>>'), provided by the site. Today, when I clicked my bookmark, I saw the bookmark was redirected to this URL; http://www.google.com/reader/next?go=noitems. Obviously it has the meaning that I don't have any new items to read. But a funny page was displayed with a link to an interesting page.

And this is the page to what the 'End of the Internet' link is pointing to.

By curiosity, I checked the registration information for the domain SHIBUMI.ORG (where the page is hosted) and its not registered to Google. Google, points to an external link as the end point of it service... isn't it interesting?

Precious Gift to your valentine

2007-02-13T17:09:00.000+11:00

Tomorow is the Valentine's Day, almost everybody in the world is aware of it and would be getting prepared for it now. Its common to gift roses, chocolates and jewelleries, so some people would think of a different gift this time.

How would you feel, if you can gift an unforgettable and precious item, which may last for a life time? I'm sure that the items clicked in your mind would be a diamond, a white gold jewellery or something which is very expensive. A priceless, but precious item exists. It is FORGIVENESS. Forgive your partner's mistakes and misunderstandings in the past, and accept him/her as flawed human being as yourself, from this Valentines Day. And you hope that your partner would give you a similar gift, may be in the future.

I think this could be the perfect gift that all can afford and keep staying together.

Just read the following blog entry from Yahoo Health. Its really nice.
Forgiveness! Better than chocolate for Valentine’s Day!

Free fonts

2007-02-09T18:32:00.000+11:00

A nice site I came across today; UrbanFonts.com. A wonderful collection of computer fonts, for windows and/or mac. I hope, many of us would enjoy the visit to the site, because.......

large number of the fonts are downloadable for free :-)

[It's hard to believe that there are some stuff in life, still FREE]

Preparing youself to ahieve your goals

2007-02-05T15:44:00.000+11:00

Recently I read an article about changing our characters to achieve the goals in our careers. It points out that our characters determine whether we could achieve our goals or not. We should improve our characters by adopting the inferred qualities such as discipline, confidence, resourcefulness etc., which are required to achieve the goals.

The steps you follow in your career are;

Setup your goals
Identify the qualities required to ahieve those goals (particularly the ones you are lacking)
Prepare yourself to improve such qualities
Your goals become ahievable.

Its worth reading the whole article here.

I accept the fact that some missing qualities in ourselves might affect us in achieving our goals. This would be an issue only for the people who set goals and try hard to achieve them. People, who face the life as it comes in, will not feel the concept :-)

Blogger - currently unavailable ??

2007-01-23T18:24:00.000+11:00

This should be a rare situation and not everybody would have noticed. An interruption to a google service, blogger, in the state " We're out of beta!", has been captured.

Today I got this maintenance page when tried to access my blog. But, when I refreshed the page, it had gone and correct site was loaded (just a few seconds of downtime).

Google personalized search - permanently disable

2007-01-19T15:30:00.000+11:00

Do you enjoy using the Google personilized search? Or you are worried whenever it starts with your first sign-in to one of the google services such as gmail, blogger, calendar, etc..?

If you are one of the disappointed, don't worry. There is a way to permanently disable it. And you can enable it back whenever you want.

1. Permanently disable it
2. Enable it back

Wikiseek - the wikipedia search engine

2007-01-17T18:58:00.000+11:00

A search engine called Wikiseek has been launched yesterday. This search engine has indexed the wiki pages in Wikipedia along with the sites which are linked from those pages.

Search interface
The simple, googlish interface looks very nice and the results are presented in a professional manner too.

Results
The search is very responsive; results are fetched faster and presented in a user friendly format. All the wiki links are marked with a 'W' sign in the results to differentiate them from the others. A tag list (wiki categories) is shown on top of the results page and one of them can be clicked to refine the results by that category (powered by searchme). Right side of the results page is used for the text advertisements, simlar to the Google Adsense.

People can promote the Wikiseek by adding the 'SearchMe' (search box + button) in their sites. Also the site says that the major part of the ad revenue is donated to the wikipedia foundation.

Happy Pongal

2007-01-12T22:36:00.000+11:00

For all my hindu readers out there,

இனிய பொங்கல் வாழ்த்துக்கள்!!!
HAPPY PONGAL!!!

15-01-2007

Backtrack the history of websites

2007-01-11T17:23:00.000+11:00

How long have you been on the internet? How long you have been accessing a famous web site like Yahoo or Google? Can you tell how those popular web sites have developed over the time (last 10 years or so)?

I'm using the internet since late 99, but now I couldn't backtrack my memory to get a clear picture of their look and feel at that time. I think this would be case for everybody out there. It is difficult because the internet is intangible and people rarely save even the screen shots of these sites.

Don't you feel excited to see how the famous Yahoo! web site looked like in 1996, 2000, 2004 and today (2007).

How about the Google home page in 98? Thats when Google first appeared as a search engine on internet.

A wonderful web site Wayback Machine, powered by Internet Archive, is the magic behind all these screen captures. It provides browsable archive of the web sites since 1996. The archive consists of multiple versions of the web site arranged in yearly basis and whenever the web site is updated a new version is created.

If a web site is missing there, its possible to submit manually too. They claim that it will be available within next 6 months.

It is unbelievable

2007-01-09T19:27:00.000+11:00

I usually read Jonathan Schwartz's blog and I have already listed it as one of my favourites. Its always interesting.

Recently he has blogged about 5 things about himself that other people don't know. Among them the first and most amazing fact is that he had worked as a security guard of a museum in the past.

I have noticed, almost every famous personality has got this kind of bad experiences in life. It has become a quality of famous people? May be these are the indications of their hardwork, dedication and what they had paid in the past for their present success in their lives.

Original Post: Five things

Just for joke;
Moral of the story: If you have some bad experience from the past, Don't worry! You would be one of the greatest people in the world.

Firefox Tip: Drag n Drop URL text

2007-01-09T15:16:00.000+11:00

What do you do when you find a URL in text format, in a web page. You can't just click because its not an anchor;the cursor won't change to a hand. Only possible way is the famous "copy n paste".

But, If you are a Firefox user, you are lucky;there is a shortcut. You just highlight the URL text, drag it to the addressbar and drop there. The browser will load the URL immediately.

Trackbacks in Blogger

2007-01-05T19:06:00.000+11:00

A big disappointment I have with the Blogger is that, it doesn't facilitate trackbacks in its blogs. Today, I googled the net to find out alternative ways to do that (I was sure that I would find at least one solution, since millions of users host their blogs here).

Haloscan, 'weblog commenting and trackbacks', had been recommended by many, so I chose that and registered myself. I followed the instructions they had provided, to install the trackback into my blog. After that, I could see a new hyperlink 'trackback' appearing below the 'comments' link. Assuming everything goes fine, I tried to make a trackback ping from haloscan, and it resulted in a 'System error'. Tried many times and it didn't work :-(

Then I checked my blog to check whether it looks ok; I found a big problem; the right side bar was missing. I spent some time on editing the template HTML, but I couldn't get it working properly, so finally I rolled back my blog to the state it was before trackbacks.

It has been everybody's wish to have trackbacks in blogger and I hope the google won't delay to provide such a feature soon.

UPDATE: The problem was due to the template I used for my blog earlier. Now it works fine! My blog site looks better now! huh!

LinkedIn - are you using it?

2007-01-05T17:05:00.000+11:00

I was invited by one of my colleagues to the LinkedIn network, months back. Since then, I have been using it to keep my professional network alive and I'm proud to have 15 connections already. You can access my profile here; I welcome invitations from the people I know.

If you are not using it, just read what this blogger has said about it. You may change your mind and sign up for the service soon.
10 ways to effectively use LinkedIn

Online ASCII art generator

2007-01-04T20:02:00.000+11:00

I came accross this nice online tool which converts the real picture into ASCII characters, symbols and spaces. Original image can be recognized when you watch the output from one step back. I converted my picture and it worked fine.

Just give a try, you will like it.
ASCII Art

Preparing for presentations

2007-01-04T17:08:00.000+11:00

I have been busy this week, organising the knowledge transfer sessions, on the recently completed project. I was asked by our Development Manager to share the knowledge which I gained, with the development team.

I have already conducted 2 sessions, a 1 hour and a 2 hour sessions with demonstrations, and another one, scheduled tomorow.

When I was an undergraduate student at the university, I didn't like the subjects which consists of students presentations. I think most of the students were like that. It was not because I didn't like preparing the slides but due to the scaredness about presenting in front of others. Those kind of thinking was very common within the student society and not within the working people.

But now, I would say that, preparing for a presentation is more difficult than actually presenting it. Presentation is just about make others listen to you. And its easier to present your own stuff than others' preparations. I could also remeber the guidelines given on the topic developing good presentation skills, by our university lecturers, and I still follow that.

So, my conclusion is, one person's skills depend not only on his/her talents but also on the society he/she lives in. Its true that people tend to follow others in their society.

Happy New Year

2007-01-01T15:07:00.000+11:00

Its time to celebrate; ears are used to the noise of crackers; eyes like to watch the fireworks; mind relax in exchanging wishes with friends and relations; and the toungue needs those tasty sweets again and again. I think everybody feel or want to feel happy today.

I'm one of those who like this happiness to last long in a peaceful world. I hope the new year would bring hapiness to everybody through peace.

Happy New Year!

2006 - look behind

2006-12-27T16:44:00.000+11:00

Its just 4 days left for a new year. This is the time; all of us remember the past and have new resolutions and plans in mind for the future. I just want to look behind to see how was this year for me.

A significant event in a lifetime; We got a new family member this year, our wonderful little angel Ashvitha. I should say it was such a nice experience spending 3 nights at the hospital, looking after the child and the mother. I have been always attracted by the new born's actions, sounds and the way she learns about the surroundings and I like spending time with her. However, I had some bad luck with the medical insurance. I could only claim half of the hosipital expenses since my wife had not completed an year in the scheme.

My MSc degree was conferred in the annual convocation of the University of Moratuwa. I was very happy to take my wife and my mother to the event (I was worried too as my father was not alive to participate). I got 2 enlarged photographs which had been framed and mounted on our house walls. Also this year, I sat for the IELTS exams and succeeded with 7.5 overall band score.

I upgraded my old home computer (PII 450MHz) with a P4 (2.8GHz) processor. Actually it was not an upgrade. I had to change everything from the processor to the casing. I re-used only my hard disk (still in good condition) and the monitor (using this as no space is available to keep it). Now I got the power to work with the windows XP Professional even at home.

Also, I bought my digital camera (SONY CyberShot DSC-S600) this year. One of my friends brought it from U.S. for me so it was tax free :-). Its a 6 mega pixel one with 3x optical zoom. I have shot more than 1000 pictures already and I feel that I have become good in photography after buying this.

Its this year, I dropped my old domain (Murali.Org) and I registered a new domain(MuraliOnline.Net) for my personal sit. I didn't like the old name because I felt the name did not represnt a personal web. I have planned to upgrade my personal web and move it to a paid hosting.

How about the country and people? This year have been very disgusting for the Sri Lankans as the internal war had started; living costs went up; many people lost their lives due to the war. People are scared to go out freely as the war had spreaded even to the capital city, Colombo. Also, the central bank had printed and issued the 2000 rupees notes as a result of falls in the rupee value.

Seems that I and the country have some memorable events happened this year. I should be prepared for the next year as I have planned many stuff.

Wish you all a very Happy New Year!

Practice makes us perfect?

2006-12-22T15:22:00.000+11:00

It would always be annoying when we make faults in repeating a well practiced shots in games. We always say that its due to lack of practice and we think that our muscles did not corporate with the brain.

But, according to an article which I read today, the cause is not only the muscles but also the brain. It claims that a study from Stanford University shows that human brain is incapable of planning the same movement each and every time. Hence, practice can never make us perfect.

Interesting...?
Here is the source article: Why practice can't make perfect

Google Patent search

2006-12-14T15:44:00.000+11:00

Everybody know, a patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by an authority. Now, Google has launched a new tool for searching patents in U.S. This tool provides the patent number, contents and any pictures associated in the results.

I just searched for the 'Java Virtual Machine' phrase and found that the IBM Corporation had filed a patent on March 11, 2003. Here is a screen shot of the patent details.

You too can start searching at the Google Patent Search site.

Java 6 is out

2006-12-12T18:08:00.000+11:00

Sun has released the next major version (6) of the Java platform, an outstanding release ever with the open-sourced Hotspot JVM.

The new release provides "out of the box" performance, where you don't need to pass the VM parameters to tune the heap, threads and garbage collection to improve the performance, as you do in the previous versions.

If you are really interested to know more, its worth reading the top 10 features of the new release, listed by Sun's Java SE platform lead, Danny Coward.

Java 6 at Sun

Planning possible here?

2006-12-10T19:44:00.000+11:00

Planning is the key to the success in life. It's necessary in everything you do in your life or work. Bad planning may sometimes result in loss of life too. Recalling this facts in mind, just continue reading the experience about 'planning in sri lanka'.

Many people would have heard about an institution which conducts the international english examinations in sri lanka in addition to the British Council. As many of my contacts recommended the institute, I too registered for a preparation course. The course consisted of 30 hours; 3 hours per week; advertised to be started on a particular date and to be finished on a defined date.

My plan was to sit for the exams as soon as the course was over. I thought I would loose the pace and the concentration if I delay. Also, it was required to register for the exam before 2 months as many tried to register. So I registered for the exams on the next week of the completion week of the course hoping that a famous institue would not slip the scheduled dates after setting them.

Course started, first day was good. The lecturer gave a good introduction about the exam and the course. All were happy. Next week they have divided the class into two and they were conducted without any problems. But the third week, they said the classes were cancelled and informed that there would be no classes for the following week also as its a public holiday in lanka . Then, they conducted the classes for 2 more weeks and again said that there won't be classes for the following week because they woud be shifting their place.
[Even though I have comments about the quality of the course, Idon't want to put them here as it would take some more space]

Like wise they cancelled the classes many times without considering the students' schedules. At the end, when I reached the test date, 15 hours (half) were left to be completed in the course. I had missed the half of the course because of my decision to take the exam as soon as the course is completed. Anybody who did not plan and just waited until the course was finished would have done the exam with the full preparation. I just see, where the planning had lead me in this situation?

I couldn't execute a simple planning because of the fault of a popular (for what?) institute. I should accept this since I'm living in Sri Lanka.

Windows Vista FAQ

2006-11-29T20:31:00.000+11:00

Came accross a compiled Windows Vista FAQ today. Historical information such as the previous shipping date, reason for the name change and much more have been included. I would say this answers many of our questions in mind about the new OS.

Here is the link.
Windows Vista FAQ

3D mouse - SpaceNavigator

2006-11-28T20:06:00.000+11:00

A company called 3D Connexion (a subsidiary of Logitech) has developed a 3D counterpart of the computer mouse, the SpaceNavigator. This new peripheral uses the USB port for connectivity. Google's support for this in 'Google Earth' should make the device more popular.

More information and pictures of possible movements of the SpaceNavigator can be found here:
A mouse counterpart for the 3D world

JAAS and JBoss

2006-11-28T15:03:00.000+11:00

I spent some time on JAAS and JBoss. Just to share some experience about my experience.

JAAS (Java Authentication and Authorization Service):
is a set of APIs that enable services to authenticate and enforce access controls upon users. It implements a Java technology version of the standard Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) framework, and supports user-based authorization.

JBoss:
is a J2EE based application server which can be configured to use JAAS for authentication and authorization.

The system needed 3 types of authentication. These types are required to enable the SSO (Single Sign-On) with JAAS.

Token: A token (web ticket) is passed through the URL. This happens when a user is redirected from one of our systems where he has already been authenticated.
HTTP Header: A custom defined http header is set whenever the user is redirected from particular systems.
Form (LDAP): When a user could not be authenticated through the first 2 types, the user is presented with a form based login. This authenticates against an LDAP server.

The system was configured to use the JBoss supplied JAAS 'client-login' (org.jboss.security.ClientLoginModule) module for authentication. And the authorization was done using a custom developed OracleRoles login module. This basically grants the required oracle roles to the authenticated user.

Further the major part of the development is a servlet filter. This filter first gets the http request and decide the type of authentication. Then it authenticates and authorizes the user using JAAS and passes request through the filter chain, if the type is either 1 or 2. When the user could not be authenticated, a redirection is done to an ASP (Active Server Pages) module to perform the form based LDAP login. After the LDAP login, the user is again sent back to the system to continue.

useful sites:
JAAS Authentication Tutorial
JAAS LoginModule Developers Guide
Security on JBoss
Wiki - ClientLoginModule

Paper storage

2006-11-26T16:56:00.000+11:00

I received this messsage through email and I got hits from some relaible news sites for the search on the google news.
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=&ie=UTF-8&q=data+can+be+stored+on+paper&btnG=Search+News

Yahoo Mail - open source?

2006-10-03T21:30:00.000+10:00

Got to know from BetaNews that Yahoo has decided to open up its e-mail source code. The news further said that only the browser based authentication scheme for Yahoo Mail will be accessible to developers.

I'm sure that, funny looking and different applications will emerge in the near future. I too want to try something different. Remember what we did when google released an API for its most popular search functionality.

Father of "Ctrl + Alt + Del"

2006-09-26T14:01:00.000+10:00

I'm sure that every users of Microsoft Windows operating system should have used "CTRL + ALT + DEL" many times. But how many of us know the inventor of this?

It's David Bradley, an engineer from IBM, spent only 1 minute and 23 seconds to write the code which rescue the world of PC users for decades. After microsoft had included this in its windows os, it had become well known. The author commented his relationship to Bill Gates by saying "I win whenever he looses (windows crash)".

More information can be found in wiki pages.

Windows Integrated Authentication

2006-09-23T16:37:00.000+10:00

This week I spent sometime on learning a system administration stuff. "Its really worth to know about everything and master in something"; I remember this statement. Actually I felt very much knowledgeful and my talks were senseful when I talked to our project system admin regarding the above topic.

It was about setting up the application/web server to use IIS server authentication. We wanted to setup the 'Windows Integrated Authentication' but there was an error raised by the application server. As usual, I was interested in investigating the problem. But I was not aware of IIS and its authentication mechanisms. So, I did some research and now, I want to share with you the resources, I used.
IIS USER AUTHENTICATION TUTORIAL

And also, my further investigations showed that this authentication can be done using the most popular apache server also. This is done using a new apache module (mod_auth_sspi). This module is now hosted as a sourceforge.net project. Still I haven't tested this. But, this week I'm planning to setup the apache with the windows integerated authentication to see how the open source competitor performs. Here are some useful links:

Integrated Authentication | Apache

Sourceforge.net project site

Murali goes online?

2006-09-22T16:02:00.000+10:00

Posting after a verrrrrrrry long time. Hmm..its really an un-tolerable gap. I should not allow this to happen again.

Today I have registered a new domain MuraliOnline.NET and it's pointing to my existing blogging site. So, the domain means this blog title :-).

Our Little Angel

2006-05-18T20:01:00.000+10:00

We got a cute little baby girl on the 3rd. She was 54cm long and 3.4kg weight.

It is a nice experience to live with the little one in home. We have named her 'Ashvitha'. Many people commented its a nice name.

Do you use a strong password?

2006-04-26T14:18:00.000+10:00

I don't have to explain here the need for a good password. Everybody knows it.

But how to assure that your password is strong enough so that nobody can hack it.

Microsoft provides a way of doing it. Just verify your password's strength here.
Password checker

Top 10 Tips - Windows XP - Too late?

2006-04-24T18:40:00.000+10:00

Came accross a site listing top 10 Windows XP tips. Even though its almost very late for looking for tips for the 4 years old OS, the information is useful.

Top 10 Windows XP Tips Of All Time

Best Firefox extensions

2006-03-06T17:04:00.000+11:00

Some cool firefox browser extensions have been listed in 2 volumes by the CNet's Download.com. The descriptions and the comments from the users will guide to decide if anybody wants to try them out.

Volume 1
Volume 2

Windows Vista Versions

2006-02-28T17:11:00.000+11:00

Read a news about the different versions of the upcoming Microsoft Windows Vista operating system.

Windows Vista versions unveiled

There are 6 different versions to be released. I'm very much sure that this is going to confuse the end users. Because OS is the foundation for any PC, it should be very simple to chose. But, many flavours of the same OS with different features may lead the user to chose a wrong one that won't suit his/her needs.
There is a comment from a sales personnel. He had mentioned that, its very difficult for him to explain the differences between the 3 existing flavours of the windows xp home, media center and professional. So, how would it be for the new 6 versions?

Build a website with Google

2006-02-24T15:55:00.000+11:00

Got to know about another free service from Google. Buidling websites through the internet browser. According to the news, no knowledge about HTML or Javascript is needed. And the hosting is also provided by Google for free.

Original source of this news: Build a website with Google

The common problem with the free services happened here too. Now Google says it couldn't offer new accounts due to heavy demand. So we have to leave our email to be notified when ready. Just check it out!

Uninstalling IE7 beta

2006-02-21T14:43:00.000+11:00

Last week I installed the Microsoft Internet Expelorer 7 beta, even though it was released for public. As usual it had replaced my already existed version of IE. I didn't bother about it as the new version didn't give any problem at the beginning.

But later I couldn't continue my office work because I was getting many troubles by the beta. I couldn't successfully complete even a secured form filling process (the problem of displaying unsecured items within the secured page). So, I wanted to rollback to my earlier version. But how... No uninstaller available.

Tried many technics...Nothing worked. However, I got it removed at last.

This is the way.

Have fun!

Web's creator's blog

2005-12-23T19:55:00.000+11:00

A great news for the internet users.

The founder of the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee has started a blog during the 15th anniverssary of the world wide web. The blog is being hosted by MIT.

His first entry tells about how the web has changed from a space for sharing information into a publishing medium.

This is the URL: timbl's blog

Attack of the instant messengers

2005-11-14T16:20:00.000+11:00

This is an interesting article found at ZDNet.

Part 2: Attack of the instant messengers by ZDNet's Garett Rogers -- In the future, possessing the IM of choice could play a deciding factor in determining the victor of the "feature war", already underway.

Optical Illusions and Visual Phenomena

2005-10-21T16:05:00.000+10:00

This is nice web site which demonstrates 59 optical illusions.

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/index.html

splogsplosion - at Google

2005-10-19T14:50:00.000+10:00

Hey..
Do you know what is splogsplosion? It is formed from the words splogs (spam blogs) and explosion.
This word has been used by Tim Bray, technology director at Sun Microsystems Inc., to describe the automated spam blog attacks.

Now this has happened at Google through its freely available blogging site Blogspot.com . These splog entries consist of major keywords people used to search for. The results returned for the queries with these keywords listed these fake entries in the top places and this was the major problem bloggers faced due to the attack.

More information:
Blog spammers Take Aim at Google

IESL - 99th Annual Sessions

2005-10-19T14:09:00.000+10:00

This is a notice from the Institute of Engineers, Sri Lanka (IESL) about the 99th annual sessions.

The 99th Annual Sessions of the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka would be inaugurated at the BMICH on October 21, 2005 at 0900 hrs. Honorable Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse would be the Chief Guest. The two Guests of Honour would be Hon. Minister of Urban Development and Water Supply, Dinesh Gunawardena and Vidya Jyothi Eng. (Dr) A N S Kulasinghe, a Past President of the Institution.

The inaugural sessions would be followed on Saturday the 22nd by a Seminar on ‘ Regional Impact of the Sethusamudram Canal Project’, which would be held at the Wimalasurendra Auditorium of the Institution from 0900 hrs to 1400 hrs. A panel of experts representing various sectors that would be affected by the project is expected to make presentations on topics related to commercial issues, engineering, environment, fisheries, legal issues, ports and shipping at the seminar.

Presentations of Papers would be held for three consecutive days commencing from Monday- October 24. There would be sessions both in the mornings and in the afternoons.

A visit to Ceylon Tobacco Company at Kotahena has been arranged on Thursday – October 27, 2005. A bus will leave the IESL headquarters at Wijerama Mawatha, Colombo 7 to the Ceylon Tobacco Company in the morning and return in the evening.

The Members of the Young members Section of the Institution would present their papers on Friday – October 28, 2005.

The Sessions will conclude with the Annual General Meeting on Saturday – October 29, 2005. The meeting, which would commence at 0900 hrs, would be held at the Auditorium 2 of the Institution at Wijerama Mawatha.

Concurrent with the Annual Sessions, the Techno Exhibition 2005 would be held at the New Sirimavo Bandarnaike Exhibition Centre from October 21 to 23, 2005.

Tips and Tricks for Hacking Google

2005-10-14T18:41:00.000+10:00

I couldn't post anything for a long time. There were lots of reasons behind that including my trip to Jaffna for a week.

Anyway, I have got really really useful information for the Google fans. Just go through and you will definitely raise your eye-brows.

http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=162281,00.asp

The first tip was very useful for me as I didn't have enough space in my main drive.

Have fun!!!

Fuel saving

2005-09-29T19:13:00.000+10:00

Everybody in our team were reading that email with excitment. It was forwarded by one of my office mates.

'Bring down your petrol and diesel cost by up to 27%'; this was the subject of the mail and it contained an advertisement about a gadget called FuelMAX. The manufacturers claim that the gadget, when fixed around the fuel hose drastically reduces the fuel consumption of the auto-mobile. But later we were able to find out the truth from the below listed web site. I gained a lot of knowledge about these various tricky products.

Its really worth going through the whole contents of this web site if you want to reduce your vehicle's fuel consumption in proper ways.

Fuel saving - a professional engineer's view

Internet's Secret Goldmine

2005-09-29T15:33:00.000+10:00

I was browsing the net last night to find some good expired domain names. I could read an interesting article "How to Uncover The Internet's 'Secret' Goldmine" by Simon Grabowski, CEO of GetResponse.com.

The author had listed the domain names which had turned them into hot commodities because they are memorable, short and suggestive. Its really amazing to think about the profit the sellers of these domain names would have gained by the transactions.

- business.com sold for $7.5 million
- asseenontv.com sold for $5 million
- altavista.com sold for $3.3 million
- loans.com sold for $3 million
- autos.com sold for $2.2 million
- wallstreet.com sold for $1.03 million
- forsalebyowner.com sold for $835,000
- drugs.com sold for $825,000
- cinema.com sold for $700,000
- art.com sold for $450,000
- engineering.org sold for $199,000
- fruits.com sold for $160,000
- perfect.com sold for $94,000

It means that you're more likely to win the lottery than find a good domain name.

Phishing / Pharming

2005-09-05T20:49:00.000+10:00

Do you know the actual meanings of these two actions ?

Phishing involves the receipt of an e-mail message that appears to come from a legitimate enterprise.

Pharming attacks compromise at the DNS server level, re-directing you to a hacker's site when you type in a company's Web address.

Google Desktop - review

2005-09-02T17:42:00.000+10:00

I wanted to write a review of Google Desktop 2.0 (beta), but I din't have time due to the usual workload I had before the application release. Today I got to read this review which I want to share.

Review: Google Desktop 2.0 Beta

I would like to add some more comments about searching and indexing which are not mentioned in the above review.

I have been using the previous release Google Desktop Search (GDS) for more than 2 months so that I could find out the new features with this new release.

1.
In GDS, the user can't specify the locations which are to be indexed. This was very annoying to me as I wanted to index and search many documentations which are available in the network folders within my office. Thank to Googlers. They have solved it now. You can give any folders including network paths to be indexed.

2.
With this release users can set the application to encrypt both the index and data files. This would be a great news for the users who need more information security.

3.
Results are displayed while you type the search phrase. The response time is very good in my experience as I didn't wait a single second for it to display the results.

I recommend to install this software. Atleast you will enjoy the search feature.

Performance per watt

2005-08-25T13:15:00.000+10:00

"Performance per watt" is a measure of how fast a computer can process the data and the power it uses to do so. Intel says that "Megahertz" and "Gigahertz" are out in measuring the computer processors speeds.

Intel's CEO Paul Otellini in his first Intel Developer Forum speech as CEO introduced several chips which will hit the market next year using Intel's "dual core" technology in which computations are done with "two brains" on a single chip. He predicted that this technology will reduce the power consumption of the processors drastically.

If I look at the history and present situation, consumers have been trained to look for the clock speed as the measurement of the processor speed. Intel has spent years and billion dollars to convince the consumers to believe so. Because of this, I hope that Intel may face marketing challenges to again convince the consumers that "Performance per watt" matters.

We should wait to see whether Intel suceeds with this new technology.

FOSSSL 2005

2005-08-24T03:09:00.000+10:00

The LAMP stack consisting of Linux as the operating system, Apache as the Web server, MySQL or PostgreSQL as the database and PHP, Python or Perl as the scripting language is taking over the application development platform.

FOSSSL '05 provides you with a unique and fantastic opportunity to hear all about the LAMP stack by none other than the creators and drivers of the LAMP stack.

Happening in beautiful Sri Lanka, this is your chance to get up to speed on LAMP!

The globally renowed list of keynote speakers include:

Michael Tiemann
President of Open Source Initiative
[OSI], VP of Open Source Affairs
Redhat and father of G++

David Axmark
Co Founder of MySQL

Martin Michlmayr
Former Debian Project Leader

Bruce Momjian
Lead contributer to PostgreSQL

Greg Stein
Chairman,
Apache Software Foundation

Resmus Lerdorf
Father of PHP

Sanjiva Weerawarana
Member of OSI Board
Apache Web Services Leader
Chairman - Lanka Software Foundation

Sam Ruby
Member of Apache
Board and Hacker
Extraordinaire

More information at http://www.fosssl.org/.

Microsoft's Linux Lab

2005-08-15T20:58:00.000+10:00

Have you ever seen Linux in action within Microsoft?

Microsoft's Linux and Open Source Software Lab serves as both a place to examine the threat posed to Microsoft products by open-source offerings and a venue for testing software from Microsoft and others that's designed to span that divide. The lab is home to hundreds of servers and desktops that run dozens of different types of Linux and Unix.

Just see these two photoes of that lab.

RSS Screensaver

2005-08-12T14:48:00.000+10:00

I got to know about this RSS Screensaver about two weeks back. The review published on the net urged me to download and install this software. (its free to download and use)

In the settings dialog we have to provide URLs of RSS feeds. When the screen saver is active, this software connects to the URLs, fetches the feed data and caches it locally. It presents this feed contents with some nice background images (can be supplied by the user also), changed periodically in a very nice format.

This is the settings dialog for the screen saver. I have added 3 feed URLs already.

Some limitations and bugs also exist.

One is that, it can't display the HTML contents in the feed. For example, it didn't display the Google News feed properly (last in the list).

I don't think that, other known bugs such as, sometimes screen saver displayed with the taskbar visible, keyboard arrow keys do not serve the purpose of browsing the feeds while the screensaver is in action, etc would not make me to change my screensaver in near future.

Download Here

Google News Feeds

2005-08-10T19:15:00.000+10:00

Google has provided with the RSS feeds for its news site from tuesday.

Google news used email news alerts to send news updates earlier. But in real-time world email updates can seem slow. This may be the reason behind this new offering from Google.

Available kinds of feeds are;
1. News sections feeds
2. News search results feeds
3. Customized news feeds

To get the links of the feeds visit: http://news.google.com/intl/en_us/news_feed_terms.html

My new car

2005-08-08T18:35:00.000+10:00

Today is one of the happiest days in my life time. I bought a new car (even though its a used one, its new for me) from Panadura.

I am the proud second owner of this 'Toyota - Corsa' sedan typed car of wine red colour, one of the attractive colours among the car lovers. The exterior, interior and the engine had been maintained in excellent condition. I suppose the reason would be that it was owned by a company previously.

Front view

Rear view

I should thank my school mate for spending time with me to search for and to select a car.

I went to the Kathiresan Kovil, Bambalapitiya to get the blessings of God Ganapathi for me and my new car. In the evening I took my wife and mother in the car. Everybody including my family appreciated the car.

Our Trip

2005-08-02T18:18:00.000+10:00

Last weekend we (our team) went on a two days trip. It was a family trip where the spouses of team mates also participated. My wife aaccompanied me.

OUR GROUP
I had to wake up at around 5.30 am in the morning with my wife woke up before me on that day. We planned to take dhal curry to have with the bread as planned. After we got ready we left home around 6.40 am and reached the office at around 7 am. Others had come already and they were ready to get into the bus. We left the office at around 7.30 am.

On our way we collected the sliced bread and continued the traveling. At around 8.30 am we stopped by the side of a rubber garden and had the breakfast there. It was a tasty meal, bread with dhal curry, chicken curry and seeni sambol. Some of us bought some rambutan fruits from the street side shops.

We played cards while traveling. There were different kinds of sweet items brought by our mates. Those helped us to postpone our hunger.

We reached the 'River Garden Resort' at around 1 pm. That is one of the restaurants which provides the means to have safer bath in the river (belihuloya). It was very much refreshing to have a bath in the running water. We enjoyed it and had the lunch as well.

It was around 3.30 pm when we left that place, and we traveled towards our main destination 'Bandarawala'. 4 cottages already booked for us at the 'Holiday Resort, Ceylon Tourist Board'. The hotel and surroundings were very attractive. We selected the cottage 8 and occupied it at around 6.30 pm.

As the journey was very tiring, we took rest for an hour and then went to the common hall to watch the television. It was Sanath who was with the bat in a match against India. So it was interesting to watch his shots. After having the dinner we went to sleep.

Next day the hotel people delivered the tea to the cottages. Then we packed up the things and got ready to leave the place after having breakfast.

After around half an hour from the time we started the journey, our bus got problems with the 'leaf springs'. We had to wait for 2 hours to fix that.

Then we continued to travel to the Ravana Elle water falls. It was really an atrractive falls and there were lot of people watching and taking baths. Some of the guys from our group took bath and others were wandering around. My wife and me bought a wooden made stuff where 2 birds sitting on the branches looking each other from a small shop there. Then we moved to differnt place to have the lunch and continued travelling.

We reached the Adisham bangalow by 5 in the evening. It was such a nice place with beautiful garden. The could get a better view of the surrounding mountains from the peak where the bangalow is. There was a sales outlet with the products from the adisham factory. They said the products are 100% pure. And we bought 2 'Nelli Syrup' from the outlet.

We started traveling back to colombo. Journey was not as interesting as saturday's one because everybody was tired and went asleep. We had the dinner (Parota, chicken and dhal curry) at a small restaurant and continued traveling. At about 11 pm we arrived at the office premises. Luckily we got a lift from one of my co-worker to my home.

It was 11.30 pm when we got into the house.

I could feel happiness after the first outdoor entertainment after our marriage. It was really happy trip. I would remember this for a long time.

Finding a Blog in a Haystack

2005-07-20T16:04:00.000+10:00

Traffic at blog search engines is soaring. When will Google and Yahoo! join the fray?

Lunchtime on Street. Let's say a trader hears a rumor of an impending buyout over his pastrami on rye. Back at his desk, he wants to see if anyone has talked about it -- especially in the past few hours. Where to look? Google ? There, the top-rated link might date all the way back to 1999.

No, if you're looking for today's buzz, the first place to click is a Web log search engine such as Technorati, Feedster, or Blogdigger. By picking up the latest posts, minute by minute, from some 12 million blogs, these sites showcase an ever-changing mosaic of what is on the world's mind.

Source

Microsoft sues over Google hire

2005-07-20T13:59:00.000+10:00

Opening a new chapter in its rivalry with Google, Microsoft on Tuesday sued the search giant and the former Microsoft executive who has been tapped by Google to run its China operations.

The suit was filed in a Washington state court against Google and Kai-Fu Lee, who until Monday was the corporate vice president of Microsoft's Interactive Services Division.

Read the full story

Concepts through examples

2005-07-18T19:32:00.000+10:00

We had a course called IEM in our 3rd and final years of Undergrad studies. The subject had contents from Industrial Management, Accounting, Management of Technology and Law. There were 4 people teaching those different sections.

The lecturer who taught management was an interesting person, who provided humourous but senseful examples to explain the concepts. This was one of his examples, he used to explain marketting in general. ( Even though I couldn't remember what he told those days, When I received this from my friend, I remembered his actions to explain the concepts).

You see a beautiful girl at a party.
You go up to her and say, "I'm very rich. Marry me!"
That's Direct Marketing.

You're at a party with a bunch of friends and see a beautiful girl.
One of your friends goes up to her and pointing at you says, "He's very rich. Marry him."
That's Advertising.

You see a beautiful girl at a party.
You go up to her and get her telephone number. The next day you call and say, "Hi, I'm very rich. Marry me."
That's Telemarketing.

You're at a party and see a beautiful girl.
You get up and straighten your tie; you walk up to her and pour her a drink. You open the door for her, pick up her bag after she drops it,offer her a ride, and then say, "By the way, I'm very rich. Will you marry me?"
That's Public Relations.

You're at a party and see a beautiful girl.
She walks up to you and says, "You are very rich.."
That's Brand Recognition.

You see a gorgeous girl at a party.
You go up to her and say, "I'm very rich. Marry me"
She gives you a nice hard slap on your face.
That's Customer Feedback !!!!!

You see a beautiful girl at a party.
You go up to her and say, "I'm very rich. Marry me!"
And she introduces you to her husband.
That's Demand and Supply gap.

You see a beautiful girl at a party.
You go up to her and before you say, "I'm very rich. Marry me!"
She turns her face towards you ------------ she is your wife!
That's competition eating into your market share.