In God I Trust

Are mobile apps really apps ??

2010-08-09T22:00:00.003-05:00

I'd say more than 50% of the apps that I use are not "self-sustaining" apps. They wont work without the internet. They are dumb apps that are driven by webservices / web data. I am really wondering if the mobile apps are really apps or just an extension of the web data into our mobiles..Many pundits claim that this is the age of mobility and that mobile computing / technologies will dominate over the traditional computing systems. In a way we all see that. We see a lot more smart mobile devices being used compared to 4 - 5 yrs ago. Sure! they are a revolution but I think the internet / web is a more powerful phenomenon than the mobile revolution. Instead of using browsers on a desktop / laptop to access data from the cloud, we (or atleast I) are using so called mobile apps to access the same cloud. I use facebook / twitter more from my iPhone than my laptop. Infact mobile computing is boosting up cloud computing.
Sometimes I am at the crossroads of technology wondering which bus (mobile / cloud /..) to take. As a lover of CS and a passionate programmer, I'd always want to wet my hands & feet with every major technology. Ofcourse I want to write mobile apps and ofcourse I want to get much more involved with the cloud but IMHO the cloud will last longer than the mobile. The cloud will be the base and power much more than the mobile world. So why is the cloud growing in power ??? simple coz it has the data. I am getting reminded of deep throat advising Bob Woodward "Follow the money"... For us its "Follow the data"

Googles DIY tool for Android

2010-07-12T20:40:00.003-05:00

Google has released a Do-It-Yourself tool for Android whereby anyone can develop apps for Android. You dont really need Programming skills is what they claim. The video showcasing this tool portrayed a very simple app but I am not sure if this tool can help build complex apps. But I guess programming with a programmers mind set is any day good. Yes, tools are important but they can only help you so much. I am curious to see if a game changing app would come out of "App Inventor". Maybe Google just wants to get their app count competitive with Applez.

Getting back on track

2010-06-30T21:39:00.002-05:00

Itz been almost 6 months since I wrote something.. With a new look, I am hoping to get back on track :)
Some of the interesting things I learnt or worked over the last 6 months are..
1. Association Rule Mining using R - It was quite simple to perform Apriori based mining with the statistical tool R. R was fun to learn but m still a beginner.. need to explore a lot
2. Trying to dwelve into Mahout and Nutch

Couple of important events since my last post.
1. marriage
2. graduation

Hopefully I'll start getting active on my blog..

ciao.. Joe

Google App Engine vs Amazon EC2

2009-11-30T23:04:00.002-05:00

Our term project titled Hoo is a Question Answer system and we are using a Named Entity Tagger which will tag the person names in any given sentence. This tagger was demands a lot of memory and so we had to find a hosting service that would address our memory needs. Initially, I was trying out Google App Engine (GAE). Itz got a nice plugin for eclipse and so developing / deploying a Java web app is so much easy. The major issue I faced was with the various constraints set by GAE. Your request cannot take more than 30 seconds, your static file cannot be more than 10 GB etc etc gave us a hard time deploying the app in prod environment of GAE. So as I was analyzing other solutions, I hit upon Amazon EC2 instance. This is just too good. EC2 also has a great eclipse plugin from which I can start my EC2 instance, manage and monitor it and more. This was a perfect solution, as we got a machine with 1.7GB RAM and 3 Ghz processor for 10 cents / hr and a static IP for 1 cent. But over a period of time, this solution is expensive but if you have a lucrative website and you want perceive growth, EC2 is probably one of the best options..

Still alive and kicking

2009-10-31T20:06:00.004-05:00

I am still alive and kicking. Itz been almost 2 months since I blogged. tatz the longest break I have taken to blog since I started blogging.. I am on my final sem @ UIUC and working on a Advance DBMS course. This class is quite hectic with projects, assignments and study guide problems (SGP). SGP is a new concept that I am getting adapted to. we basically go through all the landmark papers in the database world. Right before every class we need to read the paper and frame a qn / ans and post it in our class SGP page. This would guide / help other class mates to learn broadly. I might be benefited by someone elsez SGP QA while someone could learn from my SGP QA. we also vote on these SGP QA and get graded on these ratings. Itz a great team work. I've been learning a lot in this class. For eg, I thot Map-Reduce was a ground breaking idea from Google but after reading about Gamma database, I was shattered to see a similar idea 20 years ago. I am constantly getting reminded about my ignorance as I keep learning.
Also our Prof. Kevin Chang has a search engine called iWisdm and we are working on to build a dirty version of search service. Me and my team mate are working on a "Who" search engine called "Hoo". You can ask a "Who" question like "Who is the father of computers" and it would answer "Charles Babbage" and provide an image of Mr. Charles Babbage. We still have a long way to go for refining the results etc but we are progressing well so far..

Google Code Jam 2009

2009-08-16T07:25:00.003-05:00

I have registered for Google Code Jam this year. More info here . Meanwhile I am trying to solve some facebook puzzles and itz getting quite interesting.

Triple Boot on MacBook Pro

2009-08-05T20:47:00.003-05:00

Boy, Am I excited ????!!!!
This is something that I was wanting to do since I got my MBP last year. With the recent HDD upgrade, I was able to allocate more space and configure triple boot (Ubuntu 9.04, OSX Leopard, Windows XP). I just mostly followed the instructions at this Ubuntu community site. The high level steps that I followed are

1. Installed refit on OSX Leopard
2. Using boot camp, created a partition for Windows
3. Restarted OSX Leopard with Win XP CD (hold the C button to boot from CD)
4. Formatted the Win partition as NTFS and installed windows
5. Restarted and logged onto OSX
6. Using the disk utility, partitioned my Mac partition for Mac and Ubuntu. I just left the parition to be hfs and not ext3 or anything.
7. Restarted and booted onto Ubuntu 9 CD.
8. Installed Ubuntu onto the newly created partition. Specifed the parition to be / and ext3 file system. Also I didnt create a parition for swap since Refit cant handle more than 4 partitions. Although Ubuntu would warn, you can safely neglect it
9. Restart and voila !! Refit would pose you with 3 OS and choose the one you like.

The best part I liked was that Ubuntu just recognized my wireless card. In the previous dell laptop, I had a broadcom wireless card and it was a restricted driver and I always had to spend time configuring it.

Although I can use only 1 OS at a time, it just feels cool and nice to have 3 OS running on my MBP. Itz hard to explain unless you experience it I guess..

Hard drive upgrade on mac book pro

2009-07-28T21:53:00.003-05:00

I was thinking of selling my MBP to buy the latest version. Main reason was that I had only 120GB HDD and I wanted to try Ubuntu on MBP. But after listing it on ebay and craigslist, I decided not to take a huge financial loss. so I got a new HDD (Western Digital 320GB) from newegg.com. I went through couple of sites with info on the process to upgrade hard drives and was reluctant to do it myself. I was specifically not feeling comfortable removing the whole keyboard unit and tinker with small wires inside my MBP. But then the "engineer" side of me pushed me to try it out myself. so I got the screwdrivers and stuff and started off. The procedure specified at ifixit.com was very very helpful. It had a great step-by-step notes with pictures. So I just followed it to get the HDD upgraded. It was a sweet experience and it really helped me gain more confidence. Also getting my data back was just so easy. Prior to HDD upgrade, I took a backup of my data using time machine. I installed Leopard on the new drive and on the first boot, I was given an option to restore time machine backups. So I was able to get my every bit of data and settings back in no time. Thanks to time machine, I dont really have to worry about losing data..

Google Chrome OS - does it matter ?

2009-07-08T21:38:00.004-05:00

This came as a shocking news to me today. Google has made a very significant move against the MS vs Google war with the announcement of Google Chrome OS. Specualtions of a Google OS has been in the wild for a long time. Two questions that came to my mind after reading this news was
1. why now ?
2. why netbook / browser centric ?

why now ?
Maybe there are playing tit for tat with MS. You Bing, I Chrome. With Bing hitting headlines and possibly stealing some of precious Google search shares, how do you counter attack and keep your publicity ratings high ? As long as I remember, this is the first time that the otherwise secretive Google has broken news on their vision for a netbook / browser centric OS. Probably Bing has forced Google Chrome OS to go on air.

why netbook / browser centric ?
Interestingly, netbook sales have been up during this recession. I was thinking that GOOG wants to target those sectors where it stands a chance. Converting desktop WIN users to a new OS will drain any company.Netbook is modeled to target customers who needs a computer for mail, chat, photos and the like. so positioning in this market should give GOOG a better shot.
Android -> mobile and other portable devices.
Chrome OS -> cloud computers.
Looks like the strategy is to break pawn chains, kill the bishop and rook before targeting the King.
Everyone knows that Google loves the cloud and intErnet. Browser based OS is a right choice for their philosophy to get things done in the cloud.

This is probably just the beginning of the battle. Google Chrome OS does definitely matter and it'll hold a spot in history

Predicting SSN from public data

2009-07-07T21:26:00.005-05:00

CMU researchers have published this paper which talks about statistical methods to predict SSN numbers from public data.

Overview of the paper :
The SSN Nomenclature :
SSN (9 digits) = AN (3 digits) + GN (2 digits)+ SN (4 digits)
AN - Area Number. It is assigned based on the zipcode of the mailing address provided in the SSN application form
GN - Group Number. Within each SSA area, GNs are assigned in a precise but nonconsecutive order between 01 and 99
SN - Serial Number. Within each GN, SNs are assigned "consecutively from 0001 through 9999"

Algorithm:
The prediction algorithm exploits the fact that people who were born in the same area are likely to have closer SSN numbers.
step 1: Use Death Master File (Itz a public file containing SSN #'s and place / date of birth of deceased people) to form clusters of people.
step 2: Now with the person's place / date of birth from social networking sites like Facebook or Orkut or watever, identify his / her cluster. This will reveal his / her ANGN.
step 3: Use regression to predict the SN.

Conclusion :
US Government is already working on randomizing SSN to defend against statistical attacks but those SSN's that we already hold are prone to prediction with certain accuracy as outlined above.

In the paper, they mention that aliens who got SSN long after their birth are outliers and wont be predicted. I am safe :) but nevertheless I will always remain skeptic & critic about the privacy of social networking sites

Excerpt from wired article
"With just two attempts, the researchers correctly guessed the first five digits of SSNs for 60 percent of deceased Americans born between 1989 and 2003. With fewer than 1,000 attempts, they could identify the entire nine digits for 8.5 percent of the group."

HTML5 - Interesting features and improvements

2009-06-29T19:38:00.003-05:00

As I couldnt attend Google I/O 2009, I was watching the keynote speech online and learnt few interesting things facts about HTML 5. It is the next version of HTML standards and is currently work in progress. Interestingly most of the leading browsers have incorporated many of the features. Five key features were discussed and they are
1. Geo Location - A new API for locating you (ie your browser).I was awe struck with this idea of a browser being able to identify geo-location and process that information. I was worried about privacy but they promise to not track you without your consent.

2. Video tag - You can embed a video simply by using this "video" tag and you since it is a DOM element, you can manipulate it however you want. It was interesting to see a demo on this

3. Application cache - Google gears uses this standard to store data offline making the weg-apps work offline. This is also a brilliant idea which can make a web-app more attractive.

4. Web Workers - This is like threading in a browser. So if you have any heavy computation on your front-end js, you can fork it out to a new thread so your page doesnt really crash.

5. Canvas - I am not an artist and this didnt really interest me.

Google has been gently pushing developers to adopt HTML5 and make the web a even more better place. Time will tell how fast it gets adopted

Kindle 1 - yet to mature

2009-06-27T20:12:00.003-05:00

I recently bought kindle 1 reader and have been enjoying certain aspects of it.
Some of my thoughts...

Pros:
1. Once you start reading on a kindle, your eyes seem to really forget that it is machine and feel more like reading from a paper (thanks to e-ink technology).
2. I also like the whispernet wireless which helps me download books from anywhere. Most of the kindle books have a solid sample chapter which you dont generally get to read before buying a paper based book.
3. Kindle books are cheaper by a significant margin compared to their paper counterparts.
4. Due to the easy access to several category of books, it is helping me to get on track with books other than tech / subject books.

Cons:
1. NO TOUCH SCREEN. I am sure Amazon is working on a touch screen version of kindle. If they are not ?? Nah, I dont think so. Amazon is smart. They should come up with a touch screen version.
2. I find it difficult to navigate pages. Like in a regular book, I would flip through and itz not all that simple here
3. Screen flickers when we move from one page to another. this is annoying.

Overall, I am glad to see the efforts taken to move out from paper but it sure has to mature a lot and hopefully in the years to come, Kindle would become more compelling. "Save paper, Save the Environment"

Phone App for Attendance

2009-05-19T22:56:00.005-05:00

I just got back from our Tuesday Church service. I really enjoy this service and have been able to learn a lot. After the service got over we were just having a little chat and a friend of mine was talking about how cumbersome it gets to note the attendance. she was casually asking if there wud be a better way for doing this than a pen and paper ? Got me thinking and i got this idea.. Think of a phone app that would scan the images of people who come in (through a built-in video camera) and using facial recognition just matches them to their names and marks their attendance. If someone is new, it would just show their image with no tag / name and once we assign the name, its all set for next week. The rough part would be that we have to make sure that the phone scans everyone who comes in.

Apache Mahout

2009-04-29T12:11:00.003-05:00

End of semesters are always the ruf time since you have continuous deadlines :(

With my interest in Data mining and machine learning, I checked out to see open source projects that focused on ML. Weka workbench seems to be quite popular but I dont see any active work happening around it, since most of the ML algos have already been implemented in it. Through GSOC 2009, I got to know about Apache Mahout. The goal of this project is to implement scalable ML algos. So they have chosen to implement ML algos on top of Hadoop. I am new to Hadoop and was just reading a tutorial on MapReduce since Hadoop is an open source version of the MapReduce concept. It is quite interesting to see how parallelization can be achieved. One catch that I see is that we need to be clever to make sure that data can be processed in a parallel fashion. For example computing fibonacci series cant be made parallel since we are always dependent on the previous 2 values. There is also a video series on MapReduce

If you are interested, please get join the Mahout gang.

Classification

2009-04-25T20:31:00.006-05:00

1. What is Classification ?
Classification is the technique of labelling new data with some specific class labels depending on some past observations (training data set). It is also called Supervised learning because you assist the machine learning process by training the system with some labelled data set

2. Motivation
Lets take this problem domain of spam emails. say, we want to automatically classify spam mails and send them to spam folders. How does the mail system know that a certain mail is spam ? Apply classification algorithms to teach the machines so it can identify spam mails.

3. Basic Idea
Classification is a two step process.

Step 1 - Model Construction:

Our goal is to train a system with training data set which has predefined classes. For example, our data has designation of faculties and their years of experience and specifies if they have a tenure or not. The classifier will learn a rule from the given data set to identify when a faculty can get a tenure. Once this training is done, we have a Trained Model that can be used for classification.

Step 2 - Model Usage:

We first test the constructed model for accuracy.

Once the accuracy is acceptable, we use the model to classify new data. So when a new faculty arrives, the Model would assign a class label ("Tenure" or "Not Tenured") depending on the rule that was learned during the Model Construction phase

4. Practical Applications
1. Spam Filtering
2. Anomaly Detection
3. Loan Approval

5. Important papers / Algorithms
1. Decision Tree - Ross Quinlan
2. Bayesian classifier
3. Support Vector Machines - seems to be the most preferred classifier
4. Neural Networks

6. Math concepts widely used
Probability and Linear Algebra are widely used

References:
Pictures are taken from Class notes of Prof. Han (UIUC)

Association and Correlation Analysis

2009-03-22T22:48:00.003-05:00

1. What is Association and Correlation Analysis ?
Association Analysis is closely related to frequent pattern analysis. Association rules are generated during Association analysis and they specify how items / objects are associated to each other. A simple example is {milk} -> {bread} is a association rule that specifies that people who buy milk also buys bread.
A frequent pattern mining could typically help discover thousands of association rules and many of them might not be interesting or useful rules. So a correlation measure helps to narrow down on the useful association rules.

2. Motivation
Suppose you are the VP of Marketing at a huge retail store like walmart and want to know how to personalize ads and marketing campaigns for your customers then simply do association and correlation analysis on your dataset. On doing an association analysis, you would get rules like {diapers, baby food} -> {baby toys} which translates as someone buying diapers and baby good are more likely to buy baby toys. Now you know who all buy diapers and baby food together from the little "discount card" your customer uses. So you can target them for baby toys. cool rite :)

3. Basic Idea
The general format of an association rule is
buys(X,"laptop") => buys(X,"printer") [support = 10%, confidence = 70%]
where support of 10% means that 10% of all transactions show that laptop and printer have been bought together. Confidence of 70% means that the possibility that someone buying a laptop will also buy a printer is 70%.
So why do we need correlation analysis ? The reason is that not all rules generated are valid in the real-world. For example, from a univ database, we get the association rule as play basketball => eat cereal [40%, 66.7%] is misleading since the overall % of students eating cereal is 75% > 66.7%. Hence we need to use different correlation measure to augment the support-confidence framework for association rules.

4. Applications
1. Analyse Market basket data
2. Bioinformatics
3. Web Mining
4. Scientific data analysis

5. Important papers / Algorithms
I guess frequent pattern mining techniques are the underlying framework that would help generate association rules.

6. Math concepts used
1. Statistics
Statistical correlation measures like All-Confidence, Cosine measure, Jaccard coefficient will help in correlation Analysis

DM Series - Frequent Pattern Mining

2009-03-15T22:16:00.004-05:00

I am planning to follow the below pattern for each of the DM functionalities / techniques I had mentioned in the preamble post of this series.

1. What is it
2. Motivation
3. Basic Idea
4. Applications
5. Important papers / Algorithms
6. Math concepts widely used

1. What is Frequent Pattern Mining ?
Frequent Patterns are those patterns that occur frequently in data. Depending on the data set, there are 3 main types of frequent patterns.
a. Frequent itemset - set of items that occur frequently generally in a transaction database like milk and bread
b. Frequent sequential pattern - It is a subsequence that occurs frequently. Eg: People who buy computers tend to buy printers.
c. Frequent structured pattern - when structures like graphs, trees etc occur frequently they form a frequent structured pattern. Eg: DNA structure analysis
The techniques used to mine / find knowledge in frequent patterns are called frequent pattern mining

2. Motivation:
Some of the motivating thoughts that leads to the need for FP mining are
- What items are generally bought together
- What is generally bought after buying say a PC
- What DNA is sensitive to this new drug

3. Basic Idea:
For performing FP Mining, we need to find the frequent patterns. A k-itemset is frequent if it satisfies a minimum support(min_sup) threshold quantity ie if this k-itemset occurs more than the min_sup quantity then this itemset is a frequent item set. For eg, if min_sup is 1000 and we scan a walmart shopping database, then the itemset {bread,milk} would have occured more than 1000 and qualify as a frequent itemset.
The issue with identifying the frequent itemset is combinatorics. For example, if walmart as 10,000 products then imagine the number of combination of items that would be purchased

4. Applications:
1. It is the basis for many DM tasks like Association analysis, Classification, Clustering etc.
2. Market basket analysis
3. Web log analysis
4. DNA sequence Analysis

5. Important papers / Algorithms:
a. Apriori Algorithm
b. FP-Tree algorithm -> Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation by Jiawei Han, Jian Pei, Yiwen Yin.
On a personal note, FP-Tree is developed by Prof.Han who is my DM course professor. He is just too good and am proud to learn from him.

6. Math concepts widely used
Statistics, Probability and Combinatorics are pretty widely used.

The Data Mining (DM) Series - Introduction

2009-03-07T20:50:00.003-05:00

Since Data Mining is my primary specialization in masters, I am planning to blog a series on the basics of Data Mining.

What is data(Knowledge) mining (DM) ?
As I had mentioned earlier data mining actually refers to mining knowledge from large amounts of data. Example: You are an email service provider and want to filter out all spam mails. You can apply data mining to simply identify the pattern of spam mails and filter them out.

Why do we need data mining ?
To learn hidden knowledge that might be present in vast amounts of data. Example: If you own a big retail store and want to find the target customers for a specific product, just mine the buying patterns in your customer database to find out the list of potential buyers

When we talk about DM, we would most likely talk about the functionalities of data mining.They represent the methodology used to perform mining. They are
1. Frequent Pattern Mining, Associations and Correlations
2. Classification and Prediction
3. Cluster Analysis
4. Outlier Analysis
5. Stream Mining
6. Sequence, Trend and Evolution Analysis
7. Graph Mining
8. Information Network Analysis
9. Web Mining

I'll elaborate on each of the functionality in this series.

Applications of Data Mining:
There are several practical applications of data mining. The list would probably be too big. So let me just name a few with the DM technique it uses
1. Spam filtering - uses classification
2. Intrusion Detection System - uses Frequent Pattern Mining / Classification / Stream Mining
3. Fraud Detection - uses Outlier Analysis
4. Forecasting (weather / market etc) - uses Trend Analysis
5. Web search - Web Mining

Math background:
The math concepts that gets heavily used in data mining are
1. Statistics
2. Probability
3. Linear Algebra

Math is truly elegant

2009-02-07T20:54:00.004-05:00

Since 3 yrs, I have always been trying to keep in touch with some of the basic Math concepts. my interest in math grew after I started realizing itz proximity to computer science.
1. RDBMS uses relational Algebra which is based on set theory
2. AI / Machine Learning uses a whole lot of Probability and Linear Algebra
3. Computer Architectures uses Boolean Algebra
4. The Confidentiality goal of Security relies heavily on unsolvable Math problems.

Although Math forms the basics of several concepts and subjects in computer science, it is sometimes less exploited in the everyday life of a programmer.
One of the most important ideas that I am learning is to find a pattern of a math concept in every problem / natural event. For eg, most daisies have 34, 55 or 89 petals. Those numbers are fibonacci numbers. The more you see such patterns in normal regular events that happen around you, the more you appreciate math.
I was listening to discrete math lectures on ADU and the lecture on Combinations and Permutations was just too good. The explanation on how Combinations help find co-efficients in a polynomial eqn and thus leading to the name binomial coefficients is wonderful. Understanding how this concept of binomial co-efficients ties counting and algebra together was sweetly elegant. Adding to this was the relationship between pascals triangle and Binomial co-efficients. I guess once you unravel and look deep into these relationships, its just pure joy.

Top 25 Programming errors

2009-01-20T22:43:00.003-05:00

A good list of top programming errors compiled by a group of professors, security researches, industry people et more. As always, the top issue is Improper Input Validation.

Happy Christmas

2008-12-25T01:11:00.003-05:00

Happy Christmas everyone.
I just thought of sharing what I learnt this Christmas season. The thought or message that really striked me this season is the idea of God planning to proclaim the news of the birth of Jesus to the shepherds. Imagine a prince being born in a royal family. Who would get the news first ? Probably the immediate royal family, maybe nobles and high-profile courtsmen. But when Jesus was born, God chose to share this news with the lowly shepherds. I mean who are these shepherds ? What are their strengths ? what degree do they have ? what office do they hold ? How influential are they in the society ? How impressive are they ? Are they cool people ? The answer to all these are Negative. Who gives a s*** about shepherds ? or put it other way, who gives a s*** about me ? God does. God surely does. He came for the meek and lowly sinner and not for the noble and esteemed people. How fortunate am I to know this savior who loves me just the way I am. I am baffled by the faithfulness of Jesus every single time. I have never stood a chance in many life situations and just by His Grace, He helps me sail through.
The song that touched me a lot this season is "O Holy Night"
O Holy Night! The stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of the dear Saviour's birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining.
Till He appeared and the Spirit felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.
Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices!
O night divine, the night when Christ was born;
O night, O Holy Night , O night divine!
O night, O Holy Night , O night divine!

Led by the light of faith serenely beaming,
With glowing hearts by His cradle we stand.
O'er the world a star is sweetly gleaming,
Now come the wisemen from out of the Orient land.
The King of kings lay thus lowly manger;
In all our trials born to be our friends.
He knows our need, our weakness is no stranger,
Behold your King! Before him lowly bend!
Behold your King! Before him lowly bend!

Truly He taught us to love one another,
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains he shall break, for the slave is our brother.
And in his name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
With all our hearts we praise His holy name.
Christ is the Lord! Then ever, ever praise we,
His power and glory ever more proclaim!
His power and glory ever more proclaim!

Information overload

2008-12-06T22:47:00.002-05:00

Just read this good post by Jeff Atwood on why email has become such a pain in this information age. I totally agree. I have been in situations at work where I would spend like over an hour reading all my mails and another hour or so to respond to them. It is crazy at times. I sometimes feel that email has led to an information overload. You have so many mails in your box and sieving through them all consumes precious time and doesnt really help much in making effective decisions. sometimes, you have to read through that mail to realize that it has been a waste of time. I m not referring to spammers spam to a "genuine spam". So how do we solve this problem ? I may be wrong but I look at it as a classification problem. From all the mails, the system should auto classify and show me what I really want for that day / moment. Sounds pretty challenging but I guess using proper ML techniques, we "might" be able to nail it.

Smart pen

2008-12-02T18:45:00.004-05:00

I saw an ad about a smart pen the other day and I think the idea is really cool. Itz a pen with a built-in computer. You have a special dot paper notebook that you should use it with. The pen has a mic that records the class lecture and maps the notes you take to the lecture. For example, if you are listening to a lecture on Bayesian classifiers and you make notes when the prof talks about Bayes rule. Now at home, you want to know what the prof told about Bayes rule, just click on the relevant notes you took on Bayes rule and voila! the pen starts playing the lecture at the point where Bayes rule was explained. You can import your notes into your computer and even share it online with classmates. I tried to see if they have the facility to convert all the audio lecture into text but they dont seem to have :(. If they had, then my AMM would have become a reality. Oh yeah, they have an SDK for this pen. so there is a good possibility that AMM can become a reality :) I am very much tempted to buy this pen but he only pain part is the cost - $149 for pen with 1GB and $199 for a 2GB model.

Voice powered Google search in iPhone

2008-11-18T00:07:00.003-05:00

Google has just released a new version of its app in iPhone with voice capabilities. You can open the app, lift the phone to your ear and talk to search. This is a really cool feature and is something that integrates voice to search to vision (as results are displayed in the screen). This should hopefully kick start the generation of voice based apps .
I just upgraded to this new version of Google mobile app and it was good. It is not perfect, atleast the app didnt really recognize my accent correctly. But the idea of integrating voice with search is very impressive and hopefully the app should learn my accent and voice soon.

Learn from the Best

2008-11-14T00:55:00.003-05:00

I play ping pong quite a bit and I started to play better after I watched some of the games of the best player at work. I kind of learnt some of the game strategies by observing his game. I applied those in my game and it worked pretty good. So that brought me to my utopian land again. How about having a machine learning algorithm that learns from the "best player" data set instead of a huge training data set. That would be just great - Learn the best strategies and moves from the best player. For eg, We try to get into the best schools so that we can learn from the best professors, rite. Why not adopt this idea to machine learning ? I searched a little bit but couldnt really find a place where this idea is being used. Now the problem is, "How to know whatz the 'best player' data" ? well, I thought of having some ranking algorithm that would point us to the "best player" data. Now how will this ranking algo operate or work ?? hm.. thatz a black box for me now.. still need to dig deep and see how to construct it, i guess. If you have any thots, plz ping :)

Automated Minutes of Meeting

2008-11-05T23:06:00.004-05:00

I hate documenting stuff.
So I was wondering if there is someway of automating the process of writing Minutes of Meeting(MOM). I guess an AMM (Automated Minutes of Meeting)would do the trick. AMM exists in my utopian world and hypothetically will work like this..
1. Voice record the meeting
2. Use a speech recognition system to convert the speech to text
3. Use a learning algorithm to automatically classify the text and give you the Minutes of the Meeting.
wow. 3 steps and I will be able to enjoy meetings :)
So trying to hunt down if there is an integrated system that would help me out, it was disappointing to see that there is currently no good speech to text translation programs available. The ones available give varying accuracy depending on several parameters like background noise, too many voices etc etc. So step 2 is not currently promising and would need some work
Now for step 3, there are quite a few text classification algorithms and models that can be used. I would be interested in using a Bayesian classifier (my fall project involves writing a survey paper on Bayesian classifier)
Oh yeah, AMM not only helps me but journalists, students and many more..

Faithfulness in little things

2008-10-28T22:41:00.003-05:00

So far as I know, there have been 3 good / great inventions transpired through class assignments / papers.
1. Huffman coding - One of the most widely used loseless encoding algorithm.
2. Star Cubing - This is a data cube computation algorithm developed by a student of our Datamining professor, Prof. Jiawei Han. During one of the lectures, the student got this idea of Star cubing.
3. Decision Tree Induction - In the field of supervised machine learning and specifically in Classification, the decision tree algorithm seems to be one of the most widely adopted algos. This was developed by Robert Quinlan during one of his class assignments.
What I really learn from all these is that when we are faithful in the small things that God wants us to do, large rewards are in store for us. So even if it is a class assignment or term paper or class project, if we put our heart to it faithfully, we can hear "Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!"

Netbooks

2008-10-28T22:36:00.003-05:00

The concept of netbooks seems pretty good. A lot of people I know of use their computers for mailing, photos and browsing. Netbooks are the best bet for them. It is cheap (like $350 or so) and is handy and light. Though their specs are not great, they surely serve the purpose of keeping you connected. I think it would be a good option for those planning to buy a system for their parents. News is that Linux is going to dominate the netbooks market. Time will tell i guess

Voice based apps

2008-10-07T21:41:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, I was discussing with one of my closest amis, Prasath about voice based apps. This is the idea. Mobile devices are the next gen computing platforms. The big issue that I see is "people cant see" ie the screen size is small that people really dont like to use it like a computer. So herez the great idea - change all viewable apps to voice based apps. Change the interface from seeing to speaking. The reason that 3 billion humans carry a cell phone is to talk. so why not develop apps tat literally talk to you and interact with you ? One of the big problem in that is voice recognition sometimes is not very user friendly. Also very specifically we were thinking that sometimes voice interface might not be all that great. For eg, say you call to a voice based Google (Voogle) and search for something, it would be annoying if Voogle talks back all the top ten results. we wud feel more comfortable viewing the top ten results and choose wat to do. So we thot that probably voice shud blend with vision and create a new interface or something. so with that we kind of concluded and moved on. Later in the eve, I saw a blogpost at Google about "Google Tech roundtable". Looked interesting and so listened to this talk on Human Language tech and people talked more or less about this idea that i mentioned above. Interesting huh ? There are quite a few challenges to it and would be a gud area to do a research i guess.

OWASP AppSec NY 2008

2008-10-07T21:24:00.002-05:00

During the last week of September, I attended the OWASP AppSec NY 2008 conference @ NYC. It was for 2 days and had several sessions running in parallel. Some of those that impressed me were

1. WAF - Web Application Firewall. This is like a hardware appliance that you plug in front of your web server. It intercepts all traffic to your webservers and analyzes for attack patterns (for eg : check for a 'and 1 = 1' pattern to narrow on a SQL injection attack). Security is not a layer / tier in your application stack / model but should be inherent in every part of it. So I was quite skeptical if this WAF is just a hype or myth or some marketing.. but I guess you can use WAF when things look really bad. For eg, if you are aware that your web app is under attack and dont have time to analyze and fix it, just plug in a WAF. Also I am planning to work on a survey paper on IDS for this sem. so I am kind of looking at analyzing how IDS in WAF works and their pros and cons.

2. Clickjacking - Although security researchers Jeremiah Grossman and Robert Hansen decided not to "zero-day" on this, they had a great presentation on some of the most common and interesting attacks that happen due to business logic flaws and coding flaws.

3. ESAPI - This is the Enterprise Security API. It is build on top of the various security functionality libraries like javax.crypto, JAAS etc. It looks really neat and makes sense. It is pioneered by Jeff Williams who is the chair of OWASP. I was really impressed with his simplicity

4. Security issues while Offshoring - This was presented by Rohyt Belani and he gave a great case study. I thoroughly enjoyed his theme that Offshore ITES companies should sell security as their differentiator.

All the presentations are made online. You can watch them here . Enjoy

Vision 2019

2008-09-20T11:48:00.004-05:00

Google is posting a series in itz blog about the visions for 2019 shared by many of its experts. Quite interesting stuff. Something I liked about Marissa Mayer's vision is that of a search-powered device that would have a microphone on it. It would listen to conversations and search for relevant facts in the background. say you go fishing and talk about a specific kind of fish or something, the complete facts about this fish is ready for you. The recent post is by Andy Rubin on the future of mobile. he talks about a scenario where you drive past a shop and look at a puppy, the compass and GPS would determine what you are looking at and get details about the price of the puppy and the food that needs to be bought for it etc. This looks like stripped down version of Jini technology which pushed for an impromptu community, where every device talks to every other device and gets their job done. For eg, a washing machine in the Jini community would scan your shirt tag and talk to the manufacturer to download instructions for washing it.

Free CS course from Stanford

2008-09-18T18:55:00.003-05:00

This is amazing. Stanford has made basic CS and Robotic courses online for free. Sometime ago I was just browsing on the fee structure @ Stanford and saw that it was like $5500 for 4 credits. Giving it away for free is a great move :). I am sure many people around the world will get benefited from this. Oh also, I recently read about many Prof's coming together against the book publishers who charge a lot for school text books. So that kicked off a project called connexions where Prof's and other industry experienced people share their knowledge and notes and references on subjects. Glanced through it and it looks good.

Drupal CMS

2008-09-09T08:23:00.003-05:00

I got involved in a project for building a web application to do some data management and was looking at a framework for it. Having heard about drupal at several places, I thot of trying it out. It was really good and simple. Installation didnt take much time on Linux or Mac. You just need the base framework of Apache, PHP and mysql. After downloading the drupal project files, copy them to Apache root directory and access drupal from Apache. Now when you access for the first time, you'll be guided through a web-based installation process which is like 4 steps or so.
I was amazed at the modules and themes that have been written for drupal. There are atleast 1000 modules (modules are nothing but small applns or components) and themes. A forum, blog, polling application and many more modules comes in by default. so if you want to a forum on your drupal based site, you just have to enable it.
IBM developerworks has some good articles on writing custom modules for drupal. I havent played much with it but at a glance from this article, it looks a bit overwhelming. I guess once we get a hang of the jargons and concepts, it might look simple. But overall, it was good to know abt a CMS which provides built-in support for many common functionalities of a web application (like login, menus, blog etc..)

Google Chrome - Start of World (Browser) War II

2008-09-02T21:19:00.005-05:00

I never expected this move from Google. Since they were funding Firefox and it was all good, it was not obvious to me. Anywayz, Google elaborates on why they have developed a new browser. They claim that we use browsers to work on applications than browse through mere webpages, which is true in a sense. Chrome is to support these next generation web applications which will push us more towards the cloud.

I am currently writing this post from chrome on my XP VM. It looks simple and I really like the memory statistics they provide for each tab (processes). If one of your tabs is hogging your system memory, you can kill that tab and save the rest. This is kind of neat. They seem to have taken a multi-process approach than the existing multi-threaded approach. I was reading the Google chrome comic that throws light on the thoughts behind chrome and I somehow felt that this browser has been thought out like integrating an OS to the browser. For example this feature of killing a specific tab seems new to me. They have used webkit rendering engine which Apple uses in Safari and yeah by Google's Android too.

I havent fully explored Chrome but I think for Chrome to move forward strongly, they should bring in some solid security features. I havent seen any highlight on security features of Chrome. If they could innovate some good web security in terms of phishing, malwares etc, that would make a good mark. Fortunately or unfortunately, they dont have a mac / linux version yet, so I'll be staying with Firefox and probably use it as a secondary browser once the mac version is released.

Is "Data Mining" really "Data" Mining ??

2008-08-31T14:28:00.003-05:00

I have taken up Data Mining course this fall and our prof Jiawei Han seems to have a great profile. His book ("Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques") was one of the first in this discipline. He was talking about the "Data Mining" misnomer with a simple example. When we talk about Gold mining, we actually refer to digging and mining gold out from sand or dirt or watever but when we talk about data mining, we actually dig out knowledge patterns from data. So it should actually be referred to as Knowledge mining or in better terms KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Databases)

Water Baptism

2008-08-31T14:24:00.003-05:00

I took that next step to get water baptized yesterday. I was in a dilemma for a long time if I really should get water baptized but then realized that it is just an act of obedience as Jesus himself got baptized. It was just great and refreshing. It cant be explained well by words but should be experienced. Although I am totally imperfect, His Grace and Love sustains me. All Glory be to Jesus.

Amazon's EC2

2008-08-26T20:36:00.003-05:00

Last week in the PLUG (Philly Linux User Group)meeting, we had Toby giving us an overview of Amazons Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). It was quite interesting. EC2 aims to remove the headache of planning and maintaining a data center. You can get an instance (the minimum config is like 1.7 Ghz proc with 160GB drive and 2GB RAM) which is like a Xen VM. So we can install and configure this instance however we want and if we want to scale our app or whatever we have, we can just pay and add more processor or RAM or storage. This is kinda nice but Toby briefed about some of the problems as well. Like, they dont have persistent storage. If the instance crashes for some reason, you would lose the data that is in memory. Just few days ago, Amazon announced that it has brought in persistence to EC2. Also Ec2 is not good for hosting transaction oriented applications but would be good for some distributed app. Toby pointed that Ec2 with Hadoop would be a great combination. It was good to know about the pros and cons of EC2. I had one of my biggest doubts clarified. I was earlier improperly comparing EC2 with Google App Engine. Both of the support as a platform for cloud computing but in their own different ways. EC2 offers a machine instance called Amazon Machine Image (AMI) where you get to install the OS and other applications that you want and can run absolutely anything you want. Google App Engine is a platform to host web applications where the infrastructure is completely managed by Google

Personal wiki

2008-08-20T17:29:00.003-05:00

I started using a personal wiki for a while now. It helps me to take class notes and other adhoc to-do lists and stuff. Itz quite useful coz I have hyperlink references in my class notes. The one I use is pmwiki (itz free) and itz configuration on mac didnt take much time. I had earlier setup mediawiki for official purposes and the difference I see in personal wiki is that there is no DB configuration that needs to be done. Itz definitely more simple and easy to setup a personal wiki. I heard that people carry some personal wiki applications in their flash drives and making it more accesible it for them. Google, in their Android platform had released a wiki application as a demo app. Personal wikis seems to be getting into many arenas.

The DNS vulnerability

2008-07-29T18:16:00.002-05:00

Good summary by Schneier on the recent DNS vulnerability disclosure.

Graduate in Learning

2008-07-19T19:09:00.003-05:00

A good advice from Google. It is very true that learning is a continuous process. It doesnt start and stop in college or any other educational institution. Esp in the field of computer science, there is always opportunities and means to learn something new. It is definitely a good practice to think about different attack strategies for a problem. This will help break all those mundane tasks and make things interesting.

iPhone 2.0

2008-07-12T16:26:00.002-05:00

Amidst the stressful load caused by iPhone 3G activations on iTunes server, I was able to upgrade to iPhone 2.0. I downloaded an app called "Remote Control" developed by Apple themselves. It makes the iPhone work like a remote. You can control the iTunes on your mac through iPhone. You can play, skip, pause, control volumes etc through iPhone and since it communicates through the wireless NW, you can be control it from anywhere in your home. A very impressive app given away freely by Apple.

Top Ten Security tools in Linux

2008-07-03T19:42:00.004-05:00

A good collection of security tools available in Linux.

Code Kata

2008-06-24T21:39:00.003-05:00

Lately I've been closely following and enjoying codinghorror.com and really enjoyed this post. It talks about how we need to keep practising as programmers and that might be the best way to refine ourselves to become great programmers. It referenced a site called codekata.com that contains few programming challenges that helps to practise programming. I quickly checked through that site and found it interesting (havent started on working on it though). It sure seems to help refine our programming skills. Happy coding...

Firefox 3 Download Day

2008-06-17T22:05:00.002-05:00

With the launch of Firefox 3 today, they are tracking on to claim it as the most downloaded software on a 24hr period, ever on the internet. You can track the download statistics here. I just downloaded the mac version and it looks cool. It gives the same look and feel like safari and is wonderful.

Take aways from Google I/O

2008-06-08T18:37:00.003-05:00

Itz been a while since I blogged. I had a great time in CA last week. Attended Google I/O and then had a get together with my relatives as well. Anywayz thot of quickly noting my take aways from Google I/O.

Keynotes given by Vic Gundotra and Marissa Mayer on wed and Thursday were great.
Vic was talking about how computing is moving away from pc's to the cloud. Google is taking strong steps to ensure a smooth transition from client machines to cloud. To support this, they cited few of their products like Google App Engine (a web application hosting solution from Google), Gears (a technology to make web applications work offline), Android (everyone talks about how mobile computing is going to take over the world rite ??!!). There was demo of an Android based phone which had touch screen features and the cool thing was it had a compass which was embedded in a street view. so if you invoke this compass, it'll show you as a view of the street with the compass rotating as you rotate your phone (magic of the accelerometer)

Marissa Mayer was talking about how things work at Google. She was explaining how much they experiment on the search results that gets displayed. For eg, they've tried out various background colors for the sponsored links and after an extensive analysis of the click statistics, they have settled on the yellow background that is currently being used. wat impressed me was the way brainstorming works at Google. It seems they would initially start off with watever comes to mind like "why not build a bridge from earth to moon ?" or "why not travel to north pole and establish a Google dev center ?" etc. Sometimes these thoughts have really resulted in products. For eg, one sunday afternoon few Googlers were chatting after lunch about taking pictures of their streets and add it to Google maps and that resulted in Street view feature of Google maps.

Some of the sessions were useful and some were ok types. Apart from the fireside chat - itz like a chat with the actual product development team of that Google product, all the other sessions will be made online in couple of weeks at Google I/O site. enjoy..

Google I/O

2008-05-26T08:27:00.003-05:00

I am flying out to Bay Area next tuesday for the Google I/O conference which is schedule for May 28 and 29. It is a Google developer conference where Google engineers will be presenting lectures, code labs and chat about some of the Google products. Almost 2500 people have registered for this event and hope this would be exciting. I'll blog about it once I get back

I vote for VMWare Fusion

2008-05-26T08:24:00.003-05:00

VMWare fusion provides better support for kubuntu 8.04 than Parallels. Performance of windows on VmWare Fusion and Parallels seems to be the same. I didnt measure the perf using any tools but I just tried my lecture videos using both of them and I didnt see any compelling perf difference. So I returned my parallels and got Fusion instead. I am happy with it.

College --> "Education and not Training"

2008-05-20T07:13:00.003-05:00

I have been listening to quite a few podcasts lately. I like the sermon messages of Charles Stanley and all his daily sermons are available as free podcasts. I also saw that Stanford has some podcasts . So I downloaded them and one of them was a presentation / discussion by professors from various cs research groups in stanford. They were talking about their vision for 2016. It was interesting. It was in the Q&A session of this talk, a prof explained that "Colleges provide only education and not training. We help people to think.." This is soo very true. Albert Einstein quotes thus "The true purpose of education is to train your mind to think". Education helps you to get an understanding of facts and think wildly and see beyond the obvious. You can "think deep" even with a good work experience but what differentiates education and experience ? I think education can impart an understanding and knowledge within 1.5 years and this amount of knowledge might take considerable longer time to achieve through experience.

Trying out Parallels desktop for Mac

2008-05-11T20:53:00.003-05:00

Since some of the my class lectures were not playing properly on Mac / Linux (due to some issue with the flash player), I had to use Windows or use flash 7 plugin on linux. After my move to Ubuntu, I couldnt get a flash 7 for Linux. With the recent announcement that Adobe has open-sourced flash, I hope this issues gets fixed soon. To listen to lectures, I thought of installing windows on my macbook pro. I was in a dilemma between bootcamp and a virtualization s/w. I finally decided on virtualization, since I dont have to reboot and could share all my mac/win documents. So I opted for Parallels desktop. It is a great product and it was running a Windows VM to near native performance. I didnt have any issues, I could listen to my lectures and could copy-paste across Leopard and XP. As ubuntu got released on Apr 24, I dowloaded a copy of kubuntu and installed it on parallels. It was not very supportive. I couldnt get full screen and was not able to change monitor settings and stuff. Basically, Parallels doesnt yet support (K)ubuntu 8.04 and it is frustrating. There was not much response from the parallels helpdesk forum. so I am planning to tryout VmWare Fusion. I guess i'll install a trial copy and then try out WinXP and Kubuntu 8.04 and if all goes well (Fusion claims official support for (K)ubuntu 8.04) i'll mostly switch over to Fusion

Android Developer challenge

2008-04-22T21:55:00.004-05:00

Myself with few of my friends worked on the prototype version of a mobile application that we submitted for the Android Developer challenge. If you are reading this, I'd surely appreciate your feedback on this app. The app will fetch events from your calendar and provide suggestions for various events and notifies the user on the nearest place where he could purchase the suggested item. For eg, if today is Mr.X's girl friends birthday, then the app would recommend a gift(say 'diamond ring') and would notify the user on the nearest place from where he could buy this gift. Your suggestions and thoughts on this concept would be much appreciated.

Google App Engine

2008-04-08T20:07:00.002-05:00

Google has released a program called Google App Engine where developers can host their web applications. The current preview release provides limited space and computing resources and the future versions will have options where we can buy more computing resources as per our need. This seems really interesting. I earlier heard about Amazon's EC2 which also provides webhosting service. But Amazon's service had atleast 2 outages in the past 3 months which is not a good sign. Hopefully Google App Engine stands against storms.
This new concept of "platform-as-a-service" will surely help developers by freeing them off administration tasks. The current release of App Engine provides a python runtime engine and so you can deploy python apps. I am sure Java is on its way :)

Parallelism the new / next big thing ??

2008-04-03T07:11:00.005-05:00

Read an article which talks about how Parallel programming will become a central theme in the time to come. Due to the focus shift towards multi-core processors, there is a great need for parallel programmers and looks like only 1% of world-wide developer community has an idea on parallel programming. With news like these, I was excited to read about the launch of Parallel computing research centers at UIUC. MS and Intel backs this research center with $10 million in funding. All these events and facts makes it interesting to concentrate more on my current semester on Computer System Architecture where we have just started talking about multi-core processors.

The FCC Auction

2008-03-24T19:19:00.003-05:00

FCC (Federal Communications Commisson) announced the results of the wireless spectrum auction last week. Several large mobile service providers participated in the auction and Verizon bagged the much coveted block C. This article from Technology review gives a good big picture of what this auction is about and why it matters.

Shutting down pacemakers

2008-03-12T20:47:00.000-05:00

Schneier comments on this new research which has been on almost all the major news columns. Researchers have found a way to remotely access heart a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker and they were able to shutdown the pacemaker.
Schneier finally concludes thus -
The general moral here: more and more, computer technology is becoming intimately embedded into our lives. And with each new application comes new security risks. And we have to take those risks seriously.
The general moral here is like an inconvenient truth...

Vint Cerf @ Google SFO

2008-03-09T14:56:00.004-05:00

I just watched this talk by Vint Cerf given at an Engineering Open House in Google,SFO.

I really enjoyed his talk, both for the content and his sense of humor. Cerf touched on ARPAnet history and moved on to the challenges of the Internet. They were

1. Authentication

2. Integration of applications etc

he also thinks 2008 will be a significant year in the history of the internet. Some of the reasons he had pointed were

1. More focused attention to IPv6. (he mentioned that as per current consumption, ICANN will run of IP's by 2010 and Google has performed some experiments on switching to IPv6)

2. adoption of DNSSEC protocol.

and more...

In all, it was a very interesting fun filled talk

My new macbook pro

2008-03-05T19:54:00.004-05:00

Thank God. The wait is finally over.

I have been wanting to buy a macbook pro since last october. I was expecting a version upgrade in december and then during the MacWorld conference in Jan and finally Apple released their new penryn based macbook pro by end of feb. After reading some reviews, I saw that the penryn based macbook pro's are not much different from the prev generation merom based macbook pro, except for some processor speedup and increased memory. The significant difference is wrt power consumption. Since the merom based macbook pro's were $200 less than the latest penryn based laptops, I opted for the former. I got it today and am posting this from my macbook pro.

First impressions -

1. Feels very light compared to my previous dell laptop.

2. OSX switch would take time i guess.

3. I had difficulty in locating all the apps. They have this finder application which has an icon for all the applications in your system. so you have to browse through them unlike a menu as we have in KDE / windows

4. The magsafe power adapter is pretty cool.

5. Welcome screen during first boot up was awesome.

6. Pages can be scrolled by using 2 fingers in the trackpad which seems very helpful.

So this is why I was eyeing and bought a macbook pro

1. My Dell laptop has touched 3 yrs and it is a single core 1.6GHz machine and I wanted to get a more powerful system.

2. Experience OSX. After getting some hands on with OSX, I am planning to install ubuntu. I am still contemplating on whether I should virtualize Ubuntu through Parallels or setup a dual boot with native ubuntu installation.

I'll post more of my experiences with macbook pro / OSX in the coming days.

Top 10 emerging tech for 2008

2008-02-20T20:29:00.002-05:00

MIT Technology Review has published the list of emerging technologies for 2008. I was glad to see offline web applications and surprise modelling. Google already has an API called Google gears which helps develop offline web apps although I havent seen any real app developed based on Google gears. hopefully this year ??!!

Semantic Web put to action

2008-02-20T20:16:00.003-05:00

Interesting to read how Reuters has opened up a semantic web API called Open Calais. This API could structure an HTML page for entities like organization, people, events and more. So if you give an html page, it would generate a meta-data of people (name), company (where they work), events(what happened in that company) etc. Doesnt it sound amazing :). OpenCalais uses NLP, machine learning to generate this meta data. This meta data is finally presented as RDF document. As you would have guessed, this could surely help information search in a lot of ways.

OpenID league expands

2008-02-07T22:16:00.000-05:00

Google, IBM, Verisign and MS have officially joined the OpenID league today. This is bringing in lots of strength to the OpenID project and I hope that it prospers and helps simplify authentication

Lock-in in the name of Security

2008-02-07T21:48:00.000-05:00

This is yet another brilliant article by Bruce Schneier. he starts with how iPhone is "bricked" by Apple in the name of security. talks about how vendors try to lock-in users and secure them from the customers.
excerpt -
Mostly, companies increase their lock-in through security mechanisms. Sometimes patents preserve lock-in, but more often it's copy protection, digital rights management (DRM), code signing or other security mechanisms. These security features aren't what we normally think of as security: They don't protect us from some outside threat, they protect the companies from us.

Cables that link us

2008-02-02T21:16:00.000-05:00

A good image of the cables that runs under seas and oceans interconnecting us. The image also depicts how the recent internet outage happened in mid-east and India

Yahoo joins OpenId

2008-01-17T21:43:00.000-05:00

I really like the OpenId project. It is a framework which provides cross-domain SSO (single sign on). ie, if I have registered with 10 websites who all have implemented open id, then i can choose one among them to be my identity provider and authenticate on all the 10 web sites with this one single id. Yahoo has announced today that they would be providing a beta version of this identity provider service starting this 30th. There are already more than 10,000 sites using OpenId framework which means that if I opt Yahoo as my identity provider, I can login to the other 10,000 sites with my yahoo id/pwd. Google and MS have already shown interest in OpenId and are working on to implement this framework. The benefit I see with OpenId is, the less passwords I need to remember, more stronger,the passwords would be. For eg, since I have registered for services with 20 - 30 sites with 20-30 ids / pwds, I might forget one or the other and get bugged up, which would lead me to set passwords that are quite weak (and so easily crackable). As a coin always has 2 sides, there sure will be some security concerns and issues while using Open Id. For eg, there might be phishing attacks leading to a wider id theft. But still, I think OpenId is here to stay. Hoping to see more open id migrations..

something in the air

2008-01-15T23:52:00.000-05:00

This morning, Steve Jobs unveiled the Mac Book Air which is the worlds thinnest laptop. He made this announcement in the MacWorld Conference, today. Mac Book Air looks sleek and stunning and lott of good engineering and design seems to have gone into it but is quite expensive. With Intel releasing the new penryn processors this month, I was waiting for an announcement on some upgrade to the mac book pro but there was none :( .

Wikia search launched

2008-01-07T20:35:00.000-05:00

Jimmy Wales launched the alpha version of wikia search today. As it is an alpha version, it is not fully functional but I like the philosophy of wikia - Keep the search algorithm transparent and make the search results partly human influenced. Time would probably answer if Wikia can make a difference.

Why Silicon Valley and not Cambridge ?

2008-01-06T21:30:00.000-05:00

With Stanford fueling the entrepreneurial spirit in Silicon Valley, leading to Sun, Yahoo, Google etc, I've always wondered why the MIT-Harvard duo didnot really make a bigger impact. MIT being the top Univ for technology and Harvard the top Univ for Business et al, should have transformed Cambridge as the home of Tech entrepreneurs. How did it miss out ??

Happy Christmas

2007-12-25T22:22:00.000-05:00

Amidst all the santas, the shopping and the gifts and the lights et al, I just wanted to focus on the reason for this season. It is because of Love that God gave His only begotten son as a sacrifice for all the sins of human. Just want to share this short story which is one of my favorite. read on..

It's a Wednesday night and you are at a church prayer meeting when somebody runs in from the parking lot and says, "Turn on a radio, turn on a radio." And while the church listens to a little transistor radio with a microphone stuck up to it, the announcement is made: "Two women are lying in a Long Island hospital dying from the mystery flu." Within hours it seems, this thing just sweeps across the country.
People are working around the clock trying to find an antidote. Nothing is working. California, Oregon, Arizona, Florida, Massachusetts. It's as though it's just sweeping in from the borders. And then, all of a sudden the news comes out. The code has been broken.

A cure can be found. A vaccine can be made. It's going to take the blood of somebody who hasn't been infected, and so, sure enough, all through the Midwest, through all those channels of emergency broadcasting, everyone is asked to do one simple thing:
Go to your downtown hospital and have your blood type taken. That's all we ask of you. When you hear the sirens go off in your neighborhood, please make your way quickly, quietly, and safely to the hospitals.
Sure enough, when you and your family get down there late on that Friday night, there is a long line, and they've got nurses and doctors coming out and pricking fingers and taking blood and putting labels on it. Your wife and your kids are out there, and they take your blood type and they say, "Wait here in the parking lot and if we call your name, you can be dismissed and go home."
You stand around, scared, with your neighbors, wondering what in the world is going on and if this is the end of the world. Suddenly a young man comes running out of the hospital screaming. He's yelling a name and waving a clipboard.
What? He yells it again! And your son tugs on your jacket and says, "Daddy, that's me." Before you know it, they have grabbed your boy. Wait a minute. Hold on! And they say, "It's okay, his blood is clean. His blood is pure. We want to make sure he doesn't have the disease. We think he has got the right type."

Five tense minutes later, out come the doctors and nurses, crying and hugging one another-some are even laughing. It's the first time you have seen anybody laugh in a week, and an old doctor walks up to you and says, "Thank you, sir. Your son's blood type is perfect. It's clean, it is pure, and we can make the vaccine."
As the word begins to spread all across that parking lot full of folks, people are screaming and praying and laughing and crying.
But then the gray-haired doctor pulls you and you wife aside and says, "May we see you for moment? We didn't realize that the donor would be a minor and we need ... we need you to sign a consent form."
You begin to sign and then you see that the number of pints of blood to be taken is empty. "H-how many pints?" And that is when the old doctor's smile fades and he says,"We had no idea it would be little child. We weren't prepared. We need it all."
"But-but...You don't understand." "We are talking about the world here. Please sign. We need it all!"
"But can't you give him a transfusion?"
"If we had clean blood we would. Can you sign? Would you sign?"
In numb silence, you do. Then they say, "Would you like to have a moment with him before we begin?"
Can you walk back?
Can you walk back to that room where he sits on a table saying, "Daddy? Mommy? What's going on?" Can you take his hands and say, "Son, your mommy and I love you, and we would never ever let anything happen to you that didn't just have to be. Do you understand that?"
And when that old doctor comes back in and says, "I'm sorry, we've-got to get started. People all over the world are dying."
Can you leave? Can you walk out while he is saying, "Dad? Mom? Dad? Why, why have you forsaken me?"
And then next week, when they have the ceremony to honor your son, and some folks sleep through it, and some folks don't even come because they go to the lake, and some folks come with a pretentious smile and just pretend to care.
Would you want to jump up and say, "MY SON DIED FOR YOU! DON'T YOU CARE?"
Is that what GOD wants to say? "MY SON DIED FOR YOU. DON'T YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I CARE?"

Father, seeing it from your eyes breaks our hearts. Maybe now we can begin to comprehend the great Love you have for us."

The Orkut worm

2007-12-21T20:23:00.000-05:00

Good that someone took efforts to show the problem with Orkut. One of the several reasons why I would not want to maintain an online profile or provide personal information on social networking site esp Orkut. If you have a profile on a social networking site, please reconsider the level of personal information you are providing. btw the $$ loss due to phishing in 2007 is estimated at $7billion.

From Fedora to Ubuntu

2007-12-12T07:44:00.000-05:00

alrite.. what do I say ?? I was a fedora user till yesterday. With all the news and references around Ubuntu, I thought I'll try out Ubuntu for a while and get back to Fedora. So I downloaded Ubuntu ISO and booted the CD.. They have this concept called "live CD" where the OS runs from the CD without having to be installed. It was impressive. Ubuntu recognized most of the hardware except the wireless card. From the Live CD, a simple double click helped me install Ubuntu. The partition tool was really simple to use and the whole install process was really friendly with no complaining. So after booting up into the installed version, I had to get my wireless card working. With fedora, I used to configure my wireless card through ndiswrappper (an utility which uses windows wireless driver to enable wireless card in linux). With Ubuntu, there was a well documented post to install the firmware for my card and within minutes my wireless card was configured. The whole install process took less than 2 hours. I am not familiar with the debian family but Ubuntu seems really "out of the box". so far i am impressed with Ubuntu and might not turn back to Fedora :( :)

Security in 10 years

2007-12-12T07:27:00.000-05:00

A very interesting discussion between Schneier and Marcus Ranum on the future of Security.
Excerpt --
"But throughout history and into the future, the one constant is human nature. There hasn't been a new crime invented in millennia. Fraud, theft, impersonation and counterfeiting are perennial problems that have been around since the beginning of society. During the last 10 years, these crimes have migrated into cyberspace, and over the next 10, they will migrate into whatever computing, communications and commerce platforms we're using."

Both of them point out that Simplicity is the way to go and some of the current complex systems will lead us to disaster. An interesting piece which I read about simple and complex systems is from this site called betterexplained. one of my friends referred this site and I really enjoy this site. Lot of basic concepts on various subjects are explained in simple terms with apt examples.

How I partitioned my 500GB MyBook

2007-12-02T18:39:00.000-05:00

During this ThanksGiving sale, I bought a 500 GB Western digital MyBook USB HDD. I wanted to use it for backup and I wanted to create specific partitions on it. The HDD came pre-formatted with FAT32 and I was looking for a good software which will help me create NTFS partition (Linux and Mac can read / write onto NTFS. so I made this choice) and format the drive. The free ones were not really friendly. I tried partlogic and it didnt recognize the USB drive at all. I have used partition magic earlier and its a very gud software but I didnt want to pay $70 for it. All this while, I was searching in google for a partition software. I thought of trying out something from wikipedia. voila! there was this entry on partition utilities and I navigated to western digital site to get Data Lifeguard tools. It was really easy to use this tool and I happily formatted and partitioned my USB drive for free :). If you are looking for a sw to partition your new drive, I would surely recommend Data Lifeguard tools. But please beware that it will format the drive in which you want the partitions.

GPS feature in Google maps

2007-11-28T21:21:00.000-05:00

wow.. this is a neat feature. I hope "My Location" gets tuned up well to be more accurate. One of the reasons I didnt want to go with iPhone was that it lacked a GPS. Technologies and applications like "My Location" could sure bring smiles to all those people who lack GPS enabled phones. btw, Google specifically mentions that it doesnt track any person but just locates a mobile phone through the cell phone towers.

First OpenSocial appln hacked

2007-11-06T20:39:00.000-05:00

There you go.... the first openSocial application was hacked to add some emoticons to the profile of the VP of a social networking site called plaxo. I had just blogged that OpenSocial doesn't seem to be concerned with Security.. someone has probably proved it i guess

Here comes Android

2007-11-06T08:10:00.001-05:00

Google has finally broken silence on itz much talked about entry into the mobile market. Android seems to be the answer from Google and itz Open Handset Alliance. They have specified that Android includes a Linux based OS and Java applications (both are my favo). The SDK is scheduled to be released on Nov 12. Although there are many vendors and handset makers with Linux OS, Java apps and many more, we might have to wait and see how Android could make a difference. I feel the success of Android would depend on how well it gets adapted in the developer community. With more useful applications being developed on Android, the usage rate and demand for Android platform would grow up. Anywayz, everything is uncertain in this world rite..

Open Social - beware

2007-11-04T20:01:00.000-05:00

Earlier, I used to think someone would have to crawl through social networking profile pages, collect information and then could try out social engineering or ID theft attack but now with the announcement of OpenSocial, it should be more easy since you have API's to access profile information. I haven't completely gone through the API docs, but from a glance, I could see methods to access user profiles. The docs seems to talk about the functionalities and don't refer to any of the Security challenges in OpenSocial. Does that mean that there are no security concerns in OpenSocial ? . So what if someone develops a gadget using OpenSocial api's with security flaws (maybe say XSS) ?? will Google validate all the gadgets for common web application security flaws ??

My concerns on Social Networking

2007-11-04T18:53:00.000-05:00

Social Networking has really caught up and is catching up with a lot of people. Some statistics here.
It has really become a great platform to catch up with friends. Orkut helped me get back in touch with one of my good old friend who moved out of my school after fifth std. As a coin has 2 sides so does social networking. I have used only Orkut and thought of sharing some of the concerns I have.
I was very uncomfortable after seeing that the scraps (scraps are short messages you can leave with for another orkut member)are public. If someone wants to profile on you, they could go through the trail of scraps to know the relationship you maintain with your friends (yeah.. itz crazy rite).
User profile is public. why would I want to share my interests, my favorite movies, my hobbies etc in public ? This data will help a lot to launch social engineering attack. For example, in some of the sites, the FYP (Forgot Your Password) asks for a security question and answer. Most of these security questions (i dont understand why they call it as a security question) are standard like "First School you studied in", "Name of your pet", "favorite passtime" etc. Most of the answers could be found from a well documented user profile in orkut. I dont have statistics but my gut feeling says that most of your passwords are atleast remotely linked to something you have on your profile (when i had my profile, atleast one of my password was linked to the data on my profile). For eg, your password might be linked to your passion or your favorite movie or one of the community you are a part of. So things are made easy for a cracker, he just have to try out all possible or widely used passwords relating to watever data you have on your profile.
Although social networking is on the uphill, it surely seems to aid social engineering. Alrite, with this problem in hand, the solution I could see is whitelisting. Provide power to the user to manage who could access(read / write ) what data. Although, Orkut has customizable profile views for friends and everyone, they might have to bring in something similar to the scrap / photo / video sections. Any thots ??

my visit to the National Cryptology museum

2007-10-24T19:08:00.000-05:00

First weekend of October myself and Prasath visited the National Cryptology museum at Fort Meade. It is situated adjacent to NSA and is the only museum in US dedicated to cryptology. Some volunteers from NSA conduct scheduled tours at the museum and we tagged along with a group of people who had scheduled a tour. It was just great. Our tour guide explained the history of cryptology and focussed on how cryptology helped US during the World Wars and cold wars. He gave a demo of how the enigma works and I had an opportunity to operate an enigma machine. A piece of advice he gave after sharing about the enigma was "Dont think something is impossible. If someone thinks it is possible, then surely it is". He was referring to how the Germans actually believed that the engima cipher was unbreakable and paid a heavy price for being stubborn on that thought. An interesting concept I learnt from the tour was "code talking". During WWI and WWII, US troops deployed native americans who speak rare dialects on the communication points. Even if the enemy intercepts the message, there is no way they would understand the meaning. That was the first time I heard about this simple but interesting concept. He was referring to a native american tribe called navajo who lives intact and whose dialect is really hard to learn for anyone. Overall, it was a good trip, esp with the guided tour. It was really neat to learn about how cryptology helped making decisions and saving lives during wars.

Future of SW development

2007-10-18T20:38:00.000-05:00

This article talks about the future of SW development and seems to be biased towards Agile development methodology. The main issue I see with Agile methodology is that it is overly person dependent. If you have really smart people, Agile would be great but then in reality you dont always get the creme de la creme. In any case, I think both Waterfall and Agile have their own advantages and scenarios where they would work best. How do we determine which works best when ??? hmmm thatz a million $$ qn and the correctness of your decision on that qn is proportional to your experience

ASLR - another appln of Randomization in Security

2007-10-18T20:30:00.000-05:00

Just read that the upcoming OSX Leopard is using ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to defend against malwares. Using ASLR, Leopard would allocate memory for critical operations in a random way so that malwares would fail in accessing memory area where OS related critical code gets executed. It is interesting to see another application of Randomization in Security. If you would want to read more about Randomization, you might want to check out this book.

Give one, Get one

2007-10-10T07:15:00.000-05:00

"Give one Get one" is the new scheme of the OLPC project. Though the project started off with the goal of developing a $100 laptop for children in the developing countries, they ended up with each laptop costing around $188. With this new scheme, the OLPC laptop called the XO laptop will be open for sales in US for a brief period of time in November and anyone who orders will pay for 2. They will be shipped one during Christmas and the other one will be donated to a child in developing country. I believe this to be a good scheme. For $400, you could actually buy a decent laptop these days but the XO is about helping some one in a developing country. Although many people criticize that kids in developing nations need food and water more than anything, I personally think that good Education can surely help them for good. There are many organizations whose visions are to provide the basic amenities for the developing nations and the OLPC project is envisioning a different cause. My hearty wishes to the OLPC team.

The GPhone

2007-10-10T06:55:00.000-05:00

Thought Google hasnt officially confirmed anything, GPhone is really catching up headlines these days. It is believed that Google is working on an OS and a stack of SW for the mobile platform and is set to make an announcement by end of this year. Lets see what impact / difference they cud bring to the mobile industry.

Randomization powered Security

2007-10-07T07:45:00.000-05:00

Last week I read about an interesting move made by LAX to improve security by implementing a system called ARMOR. ARMOR which was developed at USC will help in randomizing the checkpoints and patrols and searches done at LAX. By this, the bad guyz wont be able to analyze and study the patterns of security measures at LAX and so their confidence level on clearing security would go down. I was actually waiting for Schneier to write a great post about this idea but he just referred to itis a "great idea". I found a reference to this paper published in 2002 talking about a similar implementation of randomization to improve airport security. Initially I was not able to understand as to how randomization could be better than a deterministic model / approach (which is currently in use at airport security systems) but the paper referred above was very useful in clarifying my ignorance.

My new domain - joekumar.net

2007-09-30T08:11:00.001-05:00

I just created this new domain http://joekumar.net and have mapped it to this blog. So you can access this blog through http://joekumar.net

Algorithms and Computing power

2007-09-29T21:52:00.000-05:00

While talking about Algorithms, we mostly care about time and space complexity. we try to analyze a given algorithm by figuring out how fast it runs and how much time it takes. Depending on the time factor we classify the problems into one of the complexity classes (P, NP , NP-Complete or NP-Hard). We claim that algorithms which can solve problems, in polynomial time in the size of their inputs (ie P class of problems) are tractable. we worry a lot if a problem takes exponential time. We have lots of great brains working out to solve several hard problems in polynomial time or atleast get a feasible solution algorithm in polynomial time. Now when Moore's law is still holding good and when Intel and other chip makers envision tera computing, would the complexity theory go extinct ? I mean if our processors could crunch trillions of numbers and operations / sec, would we still classify problems on polynomial time ? Agreed that we cant take growth in processing power for granted but I am sure that advancements in computing power will greatly influence the way we define, analyze and solve problems.

Cloud Computing

2007-09-18T19:22:00.001-05:00

Recently I have been coming across this term "cloud computing" more often. 2 weeks ago or so, I read an article at NYT that Microsoft is jumping onto cloud computing by tying up some of the applications in its live portal to Windows. What is cloud computing anywayz ?? Simply put, it is the concept of delivering applications online so as to move away from desktop. If you are using some of the sophisticated applications like the new Yahoo Mail, google docs etc then you are already into cloud computing. This article on cloud computing talks about the arena of Web operating systems available today. WebOS sounds interesting but not sure how practical it could be. In case it penetrates well, what would happen if an outage similar to skype happens ??!! and then there are those privacy concerns as usual. As for me, developing trust in a WebOS takes a lott...

7 wonders of IT World

2007-09-10T20:03:00.000-05:00

Pretty interesting list here

Genealogy domain

2007-08-20T22:13:00.000-05:00

Read this nice article in NYT, highlighting the developments happening in the genealogy domain. For my DBMS course, I worked on a project in the genealogy domain and it was interesting. It is a pretty challenging domain and am sure lots of research is going on and will continue, to solve some of the interesting problems there. For eg, how do you track a person who has changed his name and has not updated records? There would be lots of missing links and lots of assumptions coming into play.
Recently I was searching to find a good social networking site for families, so that all my family members could be in touch. I browsed over myfamily.com and its has some good features like you can share news, schedule family get togethers and stuff apart from the usual photo, video sharing. It

ECC to replace RSA

2007-08-14T21:22:00.000-05:00

This article reports that NSA is pushing to migrate over from RSA to ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography). RSA is nearly 30 yrs old and still a 1024 bit RSA key is unbreakable. Although quantum computing has the potential to solve the Integer Factorization and thereby break RSA, we need to have the quantum computing concept materialize for use. Anywayz plans are on to migrate all assymetric encryptions to use ECC starting 2010 and ECC would become the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) standard.
Excerpt from the report --
ECC, a complex mathematical algorithm used to secure data in transit, will replace RSA and Diffie-Hellman because it can provide much greater security at a smaller key size. ECC takes less computational time and can be used to secure information on smaller machines, including cell phones, smart cards and wireless devices.
Gud that ECC requires smaller keys and is fast.

The KISS principle

2007-08-09T20:11:00.000-05:00

KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid is a design principle that I learned in my DBMS class. During ER modelling / DB design, we would need to have our design really simple and not complicate unnecessarily. Simplicity is a design principle that is getting repeated everywhere. Most of the Security design principles are based on Simplicity. Matt Bishop in his book "Computer Security - Art and Science" says "Simplicity makes design and mechanisms easy to understand. More importantly, less can go wrong with simple designs". Software Engineering also brings in the principle of Simplicity and highlights on the pros of having a simple design. An example of how simplicity could impact / have the winning edge can be clearly seen through the successful products of apple. I've read that Mac users love Mac coz itz lot more easier to get the mundane things done on a Mac than on a PC. iPod has a simple / easy to use interface and so does iPhone. That is the power of KISS.
Some quotes relating to Simplicity -
---- "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." — Leonardo da Vinci
---- "If you can't describe it simply, you can't use it simply." — Anon

Gigapixels and Security

2007-07-28T19:32:00.000-05:00

Recently I got to see this image which was taken by a camera with a resolution of 1500 mega pixels. I was marvelled and amazed at itz capability to zoom in to such a granular level. I kept zooming in on this Sydney picture and could even see the rooms in that building. It was then I realized that this amazingly awesome camera could pose such a great security risk. what if someone from your next street wants to zoom in and record your every move in your house ? what if someone eyes onto military / business confidential conferences ? the list could go on.. Even though the advancements in technology tries to make us look powerful, it surely seems to add a weak link somewhere !!

Important CS publications

2007-07-23T00:59:00.000-05:00

Came across this list of important publications in Computer Science at wikipedia and couldnt resist myself passing by without posting it.
This morning, I saw that Stanford provides online access to some of their seminars for free. The list includes some of the sessions from Prof. Don Knuth, Douglas Englebart and more. You can access it here.

Difference between Design Patterns and Framework

2007-07-20T23:06:00.000-05:00

Before I understood what design patterns were, I had a hard time trying to understand the difference between Design Patterns and Frameworks.
Design Patterns :
When you encounter a specific kind of problem during design, you group similar problems and apply a common solution to them and that solution is a design pattern. For eg, in an Email application, my email view (Inbox) has to be updated everytime I receive a mail. In a Stock Trading application, share prices of my portfolio has to be updated (I might view my portfolio as a chart / graph / etc) everytime the share price in the market changes. A common solution to this pattern of problem is called Observer pattern (you could use Model-View-Controller) as well where you have a Subject (email application / stock trading application) updating an observer(Inbox / Chart/ Graph of the trading appln) of any changes. It definitely takes experience to apply the right design pattern to the right problem.
Framework :
A framework is a set of classes and interfaces that make up a reusable design. It is built on top of one or more design patterns and have supporting class libraries to help design reuse. For eg, Struts framework provides a bunch of supporting libraries for a Model-View-Controller design pattern.

Some of the differences specified in the GOF book are
1. Design patterns are more abstract than frameworks.
2. Design patterns are smaller architectural elements that frameworks.
3. Design patterns are less specialized than frameworks.

Google and postini

2007-07-11T21:52:00.000-05:00

Google recently announced their acquisition of Postini, a company that provides hosted email security. Though it seems to be a very positive move for corporates planning on Google Apps , I am not very much convinced that Google can improve security by acquisitions. You cannot buy something and add it to your stack and claim to be secure. Security has to be layered. I mean Security has to be layered. If you are running a web application, your application code, the server (web / App / DB / Media / watever) on which it is deployed, the Operation System on which the server runs and the HW on which the OS is installed and the Network on which this whole system is setup, all have to be secure. Only then you could achieve a better score in security. I am sure Google is aware of this and is strengthening security on all their layers. I hope Google is not on a shopping spree for boosting their shares

Learning Smalltalk

2007-07-01T21:04:00.000-05:00

I am doing my Object Oriented Programming and Design course this summer and our prof Ralph Johnson is teaching us OOPD using Smalltalk. I am thrilled to learn smalltalk. I was and am shocked to see so many Java concepts being derived out of smalltalk. I always admired the concept of VM and thought that Java was the first Language to have a VM but squeak (the flavor of smalltalk we use) uses VM and it is more than 30 years old. List of functionalities that seems (for me) to have been ported into Java from Smalltalk
1. VM
2. Collection utils and Collection hierarchy
3. Concept of "Object" class. In smalltalk, Object is the top level class out of which every class originates.
4. Equals and Hash functionality
5. The concept of workspace which is being used in famous IDE's like Eclipse.

I'll probably add to this list if I recollect.

Lessons to learn from Apple

2007-06-08T22:07:00.000-05:00

I am getting impressed with Apple day by day. Apple has confirmed the launch of iPhone on May 29. I was really thrilled when I saw some folks back in India (who are non-tech people) keenly following the launch of iPhone. They are literally waiting for the launch of iPhone. I read this article which talks about the lessons to learn from Apple. The wider lesson is not to stigmatise failure but to tolerate it and learn from it

Upgraded to Fedora 7

2007-06-03T23:25:00.000-05:00

I have upgraded to fedora 7 (F7) in my laptop. The installation went smooth. As recommended by Fedora team, I basically installed F7 and didnt upgrade from Fedor Core 5(FC5). I had a few problems configuring my wireless but finally had it working. F7 comes with native drivers for my broadcom wireless card. Since I used ndiswrapper for configuring wireless in FC5, I wanted to take that route. so I installed ndiswrapper but then encountered conflicts with the native driver. After reading couple forums, I finally re-installed F7, blacklisted the native driver (bcm43xx, bcm43xx-mac80211) by adding an entry (blacklist bcm43xx, blacklist bcm43xx-mac80211) onto /etc/modprobe.conf , /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-compat and then installed ndiswrapper and configured my wireless card. The Login screen, desktop themes looks great. I installed skype, realplayer, xmms and flash plugin and all of them went smooth. I am yet to install Oracle and think I'll probably do it after my summer semester.Fedora 7 is so far so good.

Dell goes Ubuntu

2007-05-25T18:26:00.000-05:00

Dell has unveiled desktops and laptops pre-installed with Ubuntu and has promised to get more hardware vendors to provide driver support for Ubuntu. This is a great news and a very positive move for the Linux community. I havent personally used Ubuntu but planning to try it out sometime. With all the claims of Ubuntu fans, I hope people would be happy with the ease and power of use of Linux. Way to go..

Will Phone be the Next Computer ?

2007-05-16T21:08:00.000-05:00

MS envisions that Phone will replace computers in the future. I would agree with them. Phones are really getting smarter and has good industry and research backing. Maybe Web 3.0 might be Phone 1.0 ?? wherein people would migrate over to using their phones for some of the common functions like mail, word processing, browsing, ecommerce and more. The main issue I see with Phones are the User interface. Even if we have smart keypads and total LCD based display, it is still inconvenient to view pages and work on a phone. If we could integrate virtual reality with the phone, maybe it would become easy to visualize data in phones.

Entity Search Engine

2007-05-10T22:46:00.000-05:00

As a part of dbms course, we had a guest lecture presented by our senior TA, Tao Cheng who is doing his Phd in UIUC. He explained about the concept of Entity Search engine and it was very interesting. Thought it would be useful to share my lecture notes with everyone.

Entity Search Engine : There is a need for a search engine to query various data entities which are available over the internet. For eg: Search the Web for Amazon.com's Customer Service Phone number

Current situation : Web Search engines serve only pages and not entities. Since they view the web as a set of documents and not entities, they donot support entity search. There is a need to take an entity view of the web and transform the traditional search pages into entities.

Solution – Entity Search Engine :
we look for specific entities like phone number or address or cheapest fare for a commodity etc.
The entity search engine addresses this exact problem. The search engine transforms the web documents into entities and the ranking system would rank the entities so that the results for queries could be ordered. Two of the interesting features that I noted at http://parrot.cs.uiuc.edu/entitysearch/ are

1. Ability to search specific patterns, say phone number of person X and the fax number of person X.
2. Filter the search to specific entities. For eg: Search the phone number of professors but filter it down to dept = database and univ = UIUC

Potential Issues I could see :
From a privacy perspective, I could see 2 potential problems

1. Information of certain high profile people would need to kept private
2. Certain sensitive entities like SSN should not be indexed or results displayed.

One solution is to have default filters for SSN / other sensitive search entities. For maintaing privacy of people information, we could maintain a "DONOT DISPLAY" list in which we could add the list of people who want to maintain privacy in the Internet world and then add this list to the filter while querying

Also, if a user tries to increase the false positive result by intentionally providing incorrect information over several resources on the web, then the entity search engine should be made intellegent enough to identify the false positive information. For eg: a user might have intentionally given his email id as smith@j.com in some site and would have given smith@q.com in some other site. It would be interesting to solution this problem in the entity search engine

Some gud readings

2007-04-28T15:38:00.000-05:00

With my final exams coming up next week, I have been busy lately with projects and stuff.. just posting some articles which was really worth reading..
1. About why Mediocre (Security) products succeed ?
2. What is the difference between Computer Science Engineering, Software Engineering ?

National Secure Coding Assessment - SANS

2007-03-26T19:04:00.000-05:00

This is a great and exciting news. SANS is unveiling certification exams which will test and certify programmers who can write secure code. The exams will be conducted for C/C++, Java/J2EE, ASP/.Net and PHP/Perl. They even have some practise exams and you can register for the inaugural test too. This is really interesting and I would love to start working towards this.