Hard Core Child Pornography-You May Get Framed!!

There are reports around that malwares/viruses are downloading hardcore child pornography into the hard drive of unsuspecting users. For actual pedophiles this is a way of keeping the evidence away from his own machine, yet have the facility of remote viewing. Or, else if somebody wants to frame you. Whatever may be the motive, you better take guard. If you are caught with child pornography images on your machine, it is hard to defend that they are not yours.

So to guard against such disasters have your anti-virus absolutely up to date and keep it running whenever your machine is running. Another step that is necessary is to keep your browser up to date too in terms of the latest patches released by the manufacturers.

Recruitment Season Revisited

My last post was about campus recruitment and I am at it again. Couple of incidents in the interim makes me keep thinking about the dilemma that faces the students. Should they take anything that comes along or wait for something meaningful to happen!

First of these incidents is about a delegation of boys who came to meet me and wanted to get the second class test postponed. They begin around the 22 Nov of this month and couple of them had a clash for tests to be conducted for some jobs they have applied for. On pushing hard they came out with the fact that these were a little higher level clerk jobs with the state owned State bank of India. usually these banks take a few engineering graduate at the level of probationary officers who help with loan application assessments for engineering projects. I had to tell them to make their own choices between these glorified pen-pushers and the vital second test that is towards fulfillment of their degree requirements.

The second incident is about one of the brighter boys in CSE (Computer Science & Engineering) boys being picked up by the Air Force recruiters. But, what a waste! This boy will go to the technical wing of the Air Force and will get chances to work with computers. On the flip side though he will have an agreement to serve the force for twenty years. The most difficult part, according to me personally, would be to sir the seniors. This includes the guy who graduated as an officer six months prior to him. Discipline demands that he'll have to do yes sir to just about everything event to such people and I would have gone crazy to keep doing that for twenty years at a stretch. I had a good mind to catch hold of that guy and advise him against the job. But, on second thoughts did not quite do that. I am just hoping some better alternative comes along for him before he commits to the Air Force!

Recruitment Season and Student Concerns

This is the recruitment season for fresh engineering graduates coming out of colleges by next year Mar/April/May. Due to recession not many companies are visiting the campuses and students are in panic. You can see that from their questions regarding what is good for them. They'll mention every possible recruiter and ask if it is worth taking up a job with them.

At one level, this is a hard question. During this recession time it is not easy to give anything a go by. One tends to grab at any opportunity that can come along. It is hard on us too. As we know some of the jobs are dead ends. Because of our planned economy legacy, there are a lot of jobs with Government run agencies. Usually you get a life time job but then get into something where nothing much happens. It'll be criminal not to point out the hazards to guys who have half a mind and have learnt to exercise that.

ZOHO, An Amazing On-line Resource!

Bright hub editors have started using Zoho and that piqued my interest back on. I had fiddled with the original zohowriter when that on-line offering of MS Office like tools had a very strong curiosity value. I logged in again. It showed I was logging in after 1074 days or some such numbers. That's 3 years!

I was in for a very pleasant surprise! It has a whole array of tools, interface is newly designed. I just used the Zoho show and share and was duly impressed. I have vowed to myself to use it regularly. There's just about every facility you could ask for as a office productivity tool. As I keep changing place between my workplace and home, such on-line stuff is going to be very useful indeed!

University Syllabus WBUT

I have been teaching Advance OS and Distributed computing for sometime. They have similar content. They talk about distributed computing. Advanced features such as a higher level OS that can co-ordinate the OS of individual yet disparate systems are the topics of discussion. What I cannot help wondering is how many such systems are being built? The computers on networks are able to communicate as peer to any other peer and get the work done without trying to synchronize events in geographically dispersed locations. How many of the computer science engineers we are producing are going to use the techniques being taught!

On the other hand we have virtualization that really manages multiple and different operating systems withing one physical box. Cloud computing is a super hot topic that handles thousands of boxes in a data center. Should not we talk about these topics! Granted the synchronization and communication techniques are going to be useful. But giving the students a touch of reality is important too!

A Strange Dilemma

There has been a lot of discussions at my current workplace aboutt how to make students attend classes more. The requirement of the university is 75% during a semester. On the one hand this does not happen in case of many a students. Yet, it is really hard to stop a student from appearing in the final semester exams because of this. There has even been court cases and the courts seem to say that you cannot really stop the students from appearing from the examinations. The cirteria is that they should pass the final test. If they can do it without attending classes the what's the problem!

I personally also think that we should really not bother about attendance. These are professional courses. If students can clear their examps without attending classes so be it! This should, entirely, be voluntary! If most students pass without attending classes, where we are supposedly teaching the subject to them, then the problem lis elsewhere. The examination standards then become suspect.

How Not to Do a Seminar

Here was this company at our institute to talk about ERP, the enterprise resource planning, technology to the students and memebers of the faculty. The standard way of doing it is the sales presentation to show off how you could do a lot of things with the software and try to relate them to the way your prospective customers could solve problems in their life. But, there would not be much in it for students who would like to understand what it is all about, the structure of the software in terms of software architecture terms and so on.

They were so used to the standard approach that despite actually being told how to structure the talk, they still came up with the standard sales pitch. No wonder, students started slipping away. While we started with 60 odd guys in theseminar we ended up with just about half a dozen by the time we finished! Who can blame them! If I was not the host, I would have too.

Microsoft, Yahoo and Google

The MS- Yahoo! deal finally came off! That makes Microsoft Bing the no 2 search engine. Apparently it has something like 15% of the market. between Yahoo! and Bing this share is expectyed to go up to 30% or better and start challenging Google who's sitting on more than 65% share.

With this one move Microsoft moves to number 2 position. Yahoo! gives up search business and saves on the R&D expenses. Yahoo woyuld server up ads on the Bing search results and have a sharing arrangement with MS. Look like it is quite win-win for both of them.

Is Google worried! Te gap is so large, if they maintain theinnovation periodically, they should be oki. But, for consumers it is good to have a number 2 challenging number one. The number one is likely to get complacent over time.

Android is Moving into Sub-laptop Space

When Android came out on a cell phone, it was quite a sensation. Within a couple of years now, it seems to be moving into these small formfactor laptops. Gartner reported from Computex 2009 in Taiwan that Android is set to move into this space certainly. Computex showed quite a few exaples of these products that used Android.

This space actually includes couple of types of products. The netbooks, 10 inch display with Atom on the inside kind of products that are primarily aimed at being a net aid. These products are actually PCs with scaled down performance, being the same Wintel combination. In fact lot of people are seeing these as truly affordable laptops.

The other product category in the same display format are called smartbooks as these use the processors used in smartphones and giving you similar net access on the small notebook format.Thees are predominantly ARM processor based.

Examples on both kind of platforms were seen on the show floor, coupled with the fact that Microsft is not going to port windows 7 onto ARM, there's enough incentive for Goole to fill that vacuum. Additionally ports to MIPs also were shown. Acer is even doing a x86 port of Android. So, what's going to stop Android! Let's watch and see, this is going to be interesting.

Embedded Center of Excellence!

I'll be embarking on teaching a course this coming semester starting end Jul/beginning Aug. I hope I am able to do a good job at it. More than anything else though I'd like to set up something that'll give students a practical orientation.

Setting up an embedded centre of excellence would be a nice thing to do. Bsides offering students the practical orientation, it'll also provide the institute opportunities at industrial collaborations. If things work out properly it can even be a collaboration center for off-shore projects too.

I am trying to intriduce some changes in the student projects this year. I'd like the faculty too to make their hand dirty and participate in the projects themselves too. Not only forces them too learn practical ideas, students too would like the leadership. Rigorous tresting is another thing I'd like to introduce so that software projects create products rather than yet another data acquisition system!

Integrated Netbooks-Some More Thoughts

If we ever arrive at a definition of an integrated device that does netbook functionality, can cover the smartphone features and be an eReader too, it'll make life so much easier for students in general! With Kindle like facilities they would never need to carry a school bag to carry books again. Whatever other books they need can get downloaded via wireless from the school library! All their communication needs, access to the internet as well as reading and researching books can be fulfilled by this one device! You just carry this handy unit in your shirt pocket( may be the jacket pocket) and you have everything you need!

If the claims like those from Nvidia that powerful graphics chips they are bringing out will beat the likes of Atom from Intel and make for truly powerful netbooks, they may continue to play games or view videos and other entertainment activities after school hours are over too.

Natural Language Processing

I was discussing a possible R&D programme with my colleagues. We did a litt brainstorming and top of the chart item came out to be natural language processing. No wonder it was top of the mind issue for many of my colleagues. It is such a complex area to investigate. Computer implementation of comprehension, learning and the synthesizing natuarl languge is so tough for computers. It is because we derive so much information from body language the tone and inflexions used by the speaker, a lot of contextual information. These contextual stuff may even be unspoken and lot of it is something we pick up on our way in growing up!

However, human babies pick up these skills so quickly and so well. I is the learning abilituies of us human being that makes it so easy to learn these skils. Same goes for writing comprehension as well as actual writing. Humans do it so easily all the time, yet it is so tough for machines. The CAPTCHA used everywhere beats a program most of the time. Yet, one look and you are able to read the CAPTCHA letter/ numbers presented to you!

Prduct Boundaries Blurring- revisited

In the last post I delibareted about netbooks, smart phones and may be ebook readers blurring. I had not considered the digital camera mainly because of the miserable resolution offered by the phones. But, looks likke even this product might get subsumed into this one hypothetical product that we'll be carrying around some time in the future.

Though the resolution uis still low, thwe new iPhone 3G S brings ibn a innovation in cameras that indicate, if only resolution reaches 7 to 8 MP levels, a smart phone might include good camera too.The biggest innovation is a macro focus mode in the camera of the latest iPhone. I do not know yet how good this is is but macro used to be offered only with bulky optical lenses only. And that used to be one problem in integrating a good camera into a phone. If such innovations are coming it may not be far when we could get a good camera in the phone.

The autofocus camera in the iPhone can adjust for color, light etc besides focusing. The focus can be changed by tapping and so on. The camer takes good video that an be dowbnloaded easily too. The time may not be far when I carry a device that is a phone of course but also can let me do productive work that I can do on a laptop, carry my entire book library ( beside the musiclibrary it can do already!) and let me read them anytime and let me take pictures and videos and edit them. Becaus of the high speed network access downloading a book, uploading video, doing my work and staying touch with other via the video conference is not going to be a problem at all! Is that where all this is heading. Let's watch and see!

Product Boundaries Blurring

In those earlier time products used to be very distinct. A TV was a TV, a PC was a coputer you used for computing and Internet use. A laptop was a laptop you lugged around when you hit the road and a cellphone was a phone you carried with you wherever you go!

Then things started getting complex. Cell phones started eveolving and email, net surfing became fairly common. A FM radio receiver, a digital camera, a music player are all sort of expected in a phone. What adds a new dimension is the capability to uncompress and play HD video on phone( see, TI OMAP 3430 Processor Handles Video For Smartphones). That takes a lot of processor power. It is also a short step to tag on some general computing tasks, run some applications. That's happening. In fact iPhone hyas a store dedicated to applications running on it.

Laptop meanwhile eveolved into netbooks. Smaller displays, less capabale processors, less power consumption and of course less costly applicaes came on the scene. This is the netbook category and being driven by the likes of Intel Atom processor. Can we not have a device then that is like a netbook and gives me the phone capability! Will it be any different than the smartphones! People have started promoting a category called smartbooks that fill this niche. So what is this device going to be like, going to eveolve into finally!

My own thoughts are it will be really nice to have a netbook, a little smaller, thinner format that is like a comuter, net surfer, a mobile phone of course. Otherwise it does not make sense to carry a phone, a netbook and such other multiplicity of devices. Ideally I should be able to carry one device and be able to take care of everything that we need to do on the road!

Content, SEO and Crap

Search engines decide what is an important web site by several methods. If a site had good content there will be a good use of keywords the topic it is dealing with. So keyword desity is an item on this chart. Lot of people will obviously refer to the content if it is good. There is that back-link concept.

As long as things worked on these assumptions, this was working reasonably. However along came the e-commerce revolution. People needed traffic to their sites. If you have a large enough number coming to your site, a certain percentage of them would become buyers of your products. Now, if visitors cannot find you in the millions of search results, you remain the store on the main street of some obscure town-the internet equivalent. You have to get on to the first page if not the number one position!

Along came the SEO experts and discovered the above among other things. I am sure they work. But one direct consequence is that a lot of content on the net is simply useless. They are aimed at generating these keyword densities and the backlinks. The actual content could actually be meaningless. It' gotten so bad, you'll find sites easily which has parts of a page simply repeating the keywords over and over again. Meaning of "ad nauseam" hits you straight! Generating backlings has taken over the comments on forums, blogs and networking sites. There only aim is to create a link back to the target site. What the comments say is irrelevant.

People have started realising this, I guess. There is a momentum building slowly about quality content. Just the stirrings now. Hopefully, things will work out.

Computing in Turmoil

There are several high visibility changes happening recently in the computing scene. Some time back Cisco announced their entry into computing server scene. They supply network infrastructure anyway. So the bid is for a complete offering for the data centers that support the corporate computing environment or the cloud computung as the case may be.

The we had IBM trying to acquire SUN and trying to get into the data server space with that. This mating ritual went on for some time and then eventually Sun rejected the overture. Now comes the news Oracle has acquired SUN. Oracle too seem to be positioning for a fairly integrated offering (except networking hardware).

While all this is happening comes a report from a reputed analyst that cloud computing costs are not all that cheap! It can actually be more expensive than in-house computing. That throws a spanner into the economical justification for going over to the cloud completely. There was that issue about some major players disowning the cloud computing manifesto.

It would really be interesting to keep watching and see how things stabilize.

Cloud Over The Cloud Manifesto

There has been a bit of a bruhaha about the original cloud manifesto coming out.Looks like the basic tenets the original thinkers wanted to follow was of complete openness. Given that there are some inherent advantages in that paradigm of computing, also that several vendors are offering services on the cloud, the real ground swell of a revolution has not started yet.

One of the issue holding back customers has been the concern about security. I remember, the earlier avatar, the ASP model or the application service provider died off because of this kind of concern. The fact that the earlier recession had arrived the round the 2000-2001 did not help either. it simply got clubbed into the sad "bubble burst" phenomenon.

This time vendor lock-in also is a concern. The manifesto talks about not getting tangled into this issue and keeping things really open. And controversies have started. Some original participants have disowned the manifesto. Is it that they see a lock-in opportunity! That would really be short sighted. What needs to be done is a concerted push by all vendors to address the data security concerns rather than trying to protect teritorries.

The Ghost Net

News is floating around that a network of cyber espionage has compromised computers in 103 countries and mostly in foreighn ministries and embassies. A Canadian think tank has discovered the existence. they are not absolutely sure it has been organized by the Chinese government. Evidence does point to that though. So this too is a tool in the espionage activities.

As in the real world cat and mouse games espionage, counter-espionage activities will keep growing. What botheres me though is whatever infrasructure we have now, the computers, the operating systems in them, the networks;particularly the Internet were never designed against such things. The Internet was designed to be a open forum for collaboration when it started.

I am sure as things eveolve all these will start becoming robust agains such malpractices. The internet probably would take the most time to make it really secure. Hopefully it too will become totally secure someday!

JTAG is Such a Universal Thing!

JTAG staretd as a means of testing complete systems. The standard has gone through some three revisions. And it has kept growing. Today no complex embedded system can do without it. Not only it is needed for getteing the testing to be done right but it is a major tool during development. his is the interface through which you work during development. Do the compiling of your software on a PC and download through the JTAG. Use your debug tools through the JTAG and make sure it is running properly. Typical development, debug scebnario is a PC connected to the target hardware board through the JTAG cable. This used to be far more complex situation with emulators and sophisticated logic analyzers and may be with disassembly of the bus transactions and so on!

Cisco Acquires Pure Digital

Pure Digital is the maker of Flip Video cameras, very affordable video cameras. They have released a new high definition version too. One of the reason for their popularity besides the low price is that you can directly hook up on USB and upload the video to the sharing sites. Cisco has just completed a deal to acquire the company.

Combine it with the announcement that they are moving into the blade server space with their California offerings and it starts to look like these are bets against the recession by diversifying the portfolio. Thy'll have to go head to head against companies like IBM, Sun and so on. So the product they are going to offer better be good. Not only that, to be able to break into existing market they'll have to offer very clear differentiating features on their products. Interestingly IBM seems to be bent on acquiring Sun for a price of somewhere between $6.5 to $8.x billions!

Both are growth areas despite the recession. Particularly the video segment, the video share segment is growing hugely. Servers also should be growing. There's speculation Cisco is interested in personal/home video conferencing. Let's see how all this plays out!

Smart Passports- Do They Invade Privacy!

There was a news release about smart passports to be issued by the Indian Government. It is now possible to record a lot more information that can uniquely identify a person into thse smart chips used in the passports.

There has been a debat that this ammounts to invasion of privacy. On the one hand all the personal information recorded into the passport will also be available on servers somewhere in the government dungeons and it'll be easy to get at that information if security is compromised somehow. Also that anyboy with an appropriate reader possibly could read this information off the passport too.

That definitely is a difficult boundary to establish. Where does the need for unique identification end and where does the invasion of privace begin! In these days of heightened terrorist activities all over the globe the boundary possibly needs to be pushed back. Need to prevent terrorism by identifying terrorists is for the greater good. That should be the criteria to determione where this boundary move to.

Photo Edits Online-Mostly Free!

CNET recently reviewed 15 such sites. With the trend of everything going onto the web, websites getting published every other minute and then this urge to share everything on some social site; you need a handy photo editor. There are several now available that provide this service, they'll even make transporting the photos to social sites easy.

Most of these are free with some charging you a subscription when you use their premium features. According to the survey they cover a fairly wide range of services. Mostly the feel and the comfort you feel and the exact services that you need will decide which one is the best for you.

Following are the sites. Just add a .com to access them except one as indicated in the list.

• Flauntr
• Fotoflexr
• Lunapic
• Phixr
• Phoenix(www. aviary.com)
• Photoshop.com
• Picnik
• Picture2File
• Pixenate
• Pixer.us
• Pixlr
• Snipshot
• Splashup

Give them a try. They are going to be useful sooner or later.

Kindle, Mobile phone or what!!

Battle for the electronic reader has been going on for a while. The holy grail seems to be a book sized device that offers the same ease of page turning as book. Though Amazon's Kindle has been in the market for some time and there's a second version of it now out, nobody knows for sure if this is waht the readers at large need. Kindle offers additional advantage over a book in the sense that you can download a book anytime you want. It's like acrrying a library with you and picking one to read at any time. That's an advantage over a book. but not everybody is comfortable reading the electronic display however close to printed paper look like. Will electronic paper take over here! The verdict is not in yet. The yonger generation who grew up with electronic displays may look at it differenjtly. they may me far more willing to read a book in the electronic form.

Now with the Google service of making books available on mobiles, iPhone & Andropid phones for the time being, will that compete with Kindle like devices! Mush smaller displays here adds another disadvantage to the book reading on the mobile paradigm. But the comfort is unbeatable. It is available with you all the time. qwe are used to doing a lot of things with these little things. So would we like to read books on them too! Who knows!!

ASP, SaaS and Cloud Computing

Just before the dotcom bust many web businesses came up with this Application Service Provider model. Idea was to take the hassle of keeping the software updated out of the users hands and bring the advantage of use & pay to the end users. That looked like a pretty neat model. However there was quite a bit of resistance on the part of the end users about sending the corporate data onto somebody else's servers. Then came the bust and everybody forgot about it.

In the recent past, it made a come back as Software as a Service (SaaS) avatar. Selling points are the same, advantages/disadvantages are thye same in fact the complete model is the same. It's gaining currency alright. There are several examples already, some of them are quite successful too.

From there the next extension is a small step. What if just do everything on the cloud( the internet cloud) that we do on a PC ! It's something Google would love to do, the WinTel combine loses all the hold! Google has a infrastructure that can serve the model easily. Even Microsoft has visions of it. So is it coming? It definitely is. Questions are when will it become viable! How much of the computing will get done on the cloud versus the desktop/laptop!

It ceratinly feels natural, we already store a lot of things on the cloud and this will be truly convenient. All you need is a device that can provide you network access and a keyboard!(or some other input/gesture device and a display. The concern about data priovacy remains. Let's see how that unflods over time.