HTML5

Just a quick update – I recently read this informative article about HTML5 – and it looks kind of interesting. I personally like the cleaner structure and the newer structural elements. Let us see how the Web-designing community reacts to it.

Heat your homes using waste from data centers

This is the neatest proposition I’ve seen/ read about in quite some time. IBM’s Zürich Research Lab demonstrated at Supercomputing 2008 how, within 5 years, they’re going to have data centers that use water pumped through microchannels within computers for cooling rather than traditional air conditioning or fans. Here alone we are talking about saving annual energy costs by billions of dollars! Then, additionally, this water that would absorb the heat from the huge data centers will be used to heat nearby homes, which would save more energy dollars. If this comes true, we are talking about a very efficient and effective step towards a greener earth, in my opinion. Even as I am holding my breath, you can read this interesting article here.

Shazam!!

Shazam is a new iPhone/ Android phone application that is capable of capturing from the surroundings any music playing and identifying which song exactly it heard. It has a database of 6 million tracks and it’s actually pretty neat. Talking from a first-hand experience.

Now if only someone will develop this for my RAZR… or my notebook…

Laptops getting hotter… time to cool them down

As this article clearly suggests, the laptops these days have so much processing power that they are no longer “lap-tops” anymore. The heat has to go somewhere, and it tends to move towards the cooler area, according to a certain law of Thermodynamics, to the user’s lap. Wow. I used to think the problem was only with my laptop. But it looks like the problem is more widespread than I initially suspected. So now these two researchers from the University of Virginia take an aim at this problem and toward laying the scientific groundwork that will facilitate more and more research in this area.

Folks, don’t forget the problem of dwindling battery lives, especially if the laptop happens to have a nice graphics card and Windows Vista. It’s not that the research has “still a long way to go” when it comes to keeping laptops cool and extending batteries lives, it’s just that the research in these areas has to keep up with the corresponding research in the chip speeds… come on, folks. You got work to do!

Free online courses from Stanford

After MIT, Stanford has done it too – they are providing 10 free online courses for free, accessible via YouTube, iTunes, MP4 and the like. These courses included a Programming Methodology course, a Programming Abstractions course, and a Programming Paradigms course – which cover basic programming techniques in Java and C++. Oh, and that’s not all. There are two more courses of special interest to Natural Language Processing researchers – an NLP course by Christopher Manning and a Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng. All the courses are quite interesting, energetic, and easy to follow…

As an aside, take a look at some of the Linux themes on this website – I find these to be especially aesthetic and appealing…

Secure your computer by using these easy steps

Ok, I found yet another article about protecting your computer against spyware, malware, viruses, trojans, and their brethren. But the good thing about this article is that a lot of the steps are really easy to follow, and include using a Website that will check all your email attachments for you. This service allegedly checks any file you upload to it with 10 different anti-malware engines, including those from Symantec, McAfee and the like. Based on what each of these engines thought about the file, you can decide whether you want to download that file or not. It also has a nice little uploader program that you can install on your computer to facilitate a simple right-click to send the files to the Website. The article further talks about a behavior-based method for malware identification, and a stunning revelation that apparently a cracker recently stole a webmail login information and emailed the friends of the victim asking them for money!! Now you certainly don’t want happening to you and your friends, do you? Lesson learned – use strong passwords – the types that only you can remember – and change them often. Crooks are out there to get you – don’t be under any false sense of security. The battle against crackers is raging and it always will.

Apple iPhone has a remote kill switch?

According to this news story, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has confirmed that the new Apple iPhone 3G has a remote switch, which can be used to remove software from the phones of the customers. He says it is meant for cases where we might need to protect users’ data, when a malicious program is released that steals the information from the phones worldwide… personally, though, I don’t really like how much power this gives to Apple, and how little the average user can control.  Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Are university ISPs faster than FiOS?

I am confused.

Everybody is singing praises of FiOS these days… however, at my university, I just did a speedtest.net test, and it shows a 35,000 Kbps download speed. That’s 35 Mbps, right? Now Verizon FiOS speeds are only 10 Mbps, 20 Mbps etc etc… how can that be? How can FiOS be slower? Are the university ISP’s always faster than residential lines?

Yet stranger is the fact that, I distinctly remember, my Charter cable at my older apartment (part of the rent, ethernet LAN) clocked 40,000 Kbps one night. What’s going on?

When I looked at Charter’s website, it says its high speed (max) Internet goes up to 16 Mbps (16,000 kbps). Then how on earth did it clock 40,000 that night? I also used to download Linux distros at 3000 KBps (24,000 Kbps) there.

Thirdly, I understand that, since the US is so big, it is hard to run cable in rural / wild areas and so the average Internet speed is lower here compared to that in Europe and Japan – which are much smaller and hence much easier to manage. America is huge with a lot of diversity and therefore bringing the national average to the top is next to impossible.

However, I hear that even the fastest Internet connection in America is not as fast as the fastest ones in Europe/ Japan? I don’t believe it is true – it doesn’t make any sense! America started commercial Internet – it all began here! Is it true that European countries have faster Internet? If yes, what’s the reason for this? I come from a place where the Internet was always slow, and to me the Internet in America appeared to be from out of this world – but now I hear it is not the best?

Why, according to Speedtest.net, is the Internet in such remote countries like Romania, Lithuania and Latvia soooo fast?

From what I feel, my conclusions are
(1) University ISPs are for some reason always much faster than what is available for commercial / residential consumption
(2) American Internet connections are amongst the best in the world, it’s just that some states are lagging behind because of geographical/ other reasons, and also because the country is so big and the population much larger compared to those tiny European countries or Japan, and therefore the national average is low
(3) We should take newspaper/ article headlines with a pinch of salt. A headline saying “American Internet behind that of other nations” would make you feel like we are the worst in the world, but when you read the article you realize we are still amongst top 10 out of 200 countries in the world. Stupid newspaper headlines. What are they thinking?
(4) People are often naïve and easily misled. Someone at this Website writes, “The whole of America is put to shame when you consider its fastest connection in Rhode Island strolls in at a very pedestrian 5 megabits” – how much more naïve can you get? This person does not realize that 5 is the AVERAGE and not the fastest. You can get a 50 Mbps download connection from Verizon FiOS any day. And did I mention my university’s download speed of 35 Mbps?

Thoughts/ remarks?

Mozilla Sunbird

I have been feeling the need of a calendar application for quite some time now, and even though I use Yahoo calendar reminders, I wanted something more, something with better detail and more options. I was kind of reluctant to use Google calender, partly because it is going to be online. And then I found Sunbird from Mozilla.

So far I’ve used it for 15 minutes and have created 3 events, but might I say I am impressed. Neat and clean, streamlined, aesthetic, and with a lot of options – this is a clear win-win situation! Creating new tasks and events and setting up reminders is a jiffy. Multiple views are available – daily, weekly, multi-weekly, monthly and so on. You can see the events separately and sort them in various ways. The events, the calendar (for any view that you choose), and a smaller, overview calendar are visible in three different frames. You can search for events. You can create multiple calenders – for you and anybody else using the computer. You can go as far as you want in the future to set some event or task, and getting back to the current day is a matter of one right click and one selection. It sure is a very beautiful and user-friendly application, with a chic and pleasing interface. The download was 5MB for Windows, and it runs like a charm, knock on wood. Give it a try! Good job, Mozilla.

Sunbird from Mozilla

Mozilla scores Guinness record

Our beloved Firefox has done it – it now has the Guinness world record for the maximum number of downloads in a 24-hour period. Over 8 million copies were downloaded worldwide on June 17^th, 2008. The article from Webware here.