Excellent service for monitoring servers using Nagios - Monguru

I’ve been looking for ways to monitor servers for sometime. Most services charge way too much to automate monitoring multiple server. One could do it nicely with a second server running Nagios, and a shared Nagios could be used by many people. The guys at Monguru have just done that. If you are into running web servers, you should definitely have heard of Nagios.
The documentation is scant and the installation scripts are distributed across different wiki pages, blog posts etc. Basically to get this working, your server needs to run an SNMP agent that can be polled by Nagios and you have to register at Monguru. They provide you a login to their shared Nagios instance and you can add your server to that instance for free. The dashboard is simplistic and config files are uploaded through a very simple interface. Anyways, what you should do to get your server monitored, is to download the script

$ wget https://raw.github.com/monguru/configuration_scripts/master/add_new_server.sh
$ chmod +x add_new_server.sh
$ sudo ./add_new_server.sh

Then, follow the steps mentioned… like naming your server. The script downloads all the SNMP config files that are needed. It downloads python scripts that will create a username, password that you need to remember. It will create an instance in your monguru website as well that you can use for Twitter notifications or git integration of your config files… It is pretty simple, but cool stuff!!

Microsoft Songsmith is Apple Garageband Competition

Everyone and anyone who has used a Mac off late is sure to have seen Garageband – Apple powerful yet simple audio mixing, editing, recording, instrument tutoring application that’s part of the iLife suite. Its simplicity is simply superb! At CES 2009, Microsoft showed Songsmith as a competitor to Garageband.

While Microsoft has done all kinds of software applications, audio is one place where in my knowledge Microsoft has never stepped in. Songsmith is one application that is going to change that all. Here’s a youtube video showing some of its features in an advertisement for Songsmith (store link).

While Songsmith is relatively new, you will find a few loopholes and it’s audio detection isn’t perfect… But from what I’ve tested, it is quite good for the Garageband!!

Microsoft will be on a publicity drive for Songsmith over the next few months. Watch out for the new Windows musician in your neighborhood… It might just be better than the Apple-pwn’d band!!

Continuous Integration System Roundup

Continuous Integration Systems are one of the most important tools for agile software development. They automate the process of building and testing. A lot of people seem to have realized their importance and there are quite a few products in this arena. I already used Hudson and CruiseControl, but for OpenMRS we need to find one which is best suited to our needs. So I started out about 3 weeks back to create this roundup of continuous integration servers. This should be a useful roundup for any project with similar requirements.

Why does OpenMRS need a Continuous Integration System?

Any software development effort needs to take care that regression doesn’t happen with new code changes. Often a change in the API/module core results in breaking of modules dependent on an earlier method. A Continuous Integration System will rebuild OpenMRS after a change is committed and provide information on how that change is affecting related code.

OpenMRS would also benefit from an easy to understand UI that Continuous Integration Systems provide for number of failing tests. The number of passing or failing Unit Tests will indicate the quality of a build and help implementers/testers realize the stability of a build. We can also set some goals on how many test methods we need to write before an API method can be finalized or deprecated.

The work done in different branches and modules can be monitored and looked at easily by the community.

Building of OpenMRS Installer using NBI can be automated and new users can directly test with the latest build of OpenMRS using the cross-platform installer.

Thus to summarize, a continuous integration system will bring better release quality, more transparency, quicker bug finding and fixing, simplicity and TDD frame-of-mind.

Disadvantages for OpenMRS in using Continuous Integration System

• Additional Load on Servers
• Not every developer is motivated to write unit tests ;-)

Features that OpenMRS needs (Not exhaustive)

1. Easy to monitor tests and easy to understand dashboard
2. Support for SVN and Ant
3. Dependency integration
4. Email/RSS/IRC notifications when a build fails or bad code is committed
5. Warning flags when a committed code doesn’t follow coding rules (naming, newline format,etc.)
6. Allow code committers to modify build and test parameters from the GUI
7. Optimal Performance
8. Price & Open-source development

Comparison of Continuous Integration Systems:

	CruiseControl	Continuum	TeamCity	Bamboo	Hudson
Monitoring UI	Dashboard introduced since v2.7 is not intuitive	Dashboard only shows tests	Advanced UI & dashboard.	Advanced UI, Detailed reporting out-of-the-box, Intuitive	Simple Dashboard, Plugins enhance reporting, Intuitive, somewhat detailed
SCM Support	All Support SVN
Dependency Integration	Scripts need to be written for each new dependency. Tracking different versions of dependency jars is very complex	Easy for Maven2.0+ projects, but not so easy for other types of projects	Dependency can be managed easily. Advanced UI for dependency management	Dependency management is easy and intuitive. Different versions of same library not automated. Creating test/build plans allows dependency of different versions	Dependency management is easy to configure. file fingerprinting simplifies identification of different versions. Automatically can detect and build project dependencies
Email/RSS/IRC	Emails. Plugins - RSS, blog, IM with Jabber	Email, IRC, IM with Jabber, MSN	Email, Jabber, RSS, external HTML widget	Emails, RSS, IM Notification using Jabber or OpenFire	Plugin – Emails, RSS, IRC, Jabber, Google Calender, Twitter
Code Quality and Patterns	Not very easy to define	Could not find a way	Can be defined with plugin for IntelliJ IDEA	Managed through test plans. Manual test plans have to be created	Plugin provides UI. Test plans can be created manually out-of-the-box
Security and User Management	Easy to configure with different roles	Roles can be easily defined	Roles can be easily defined	Simplistic UI for user build plan management. Easy integration with JIRA	Easy to configure roles for users
Performance	Fast	Fast	Somewhat slower in comparison, but includes a lot of features	Fast in build and integration. Slightly slower in reports. Includes lots of features that may not be used. Distributed builds with slaves speeds up performance	Comparatively lightweight out-of-the-box, but requires plugins. Distributed builds with slaves speeds up performance
Pricing	Free & OpenSource. Paid version called Cruise available.	Free & OpenSource	Professional version is free, but enterprise is paid	Free for opensource projects	Free & OpenSource

iPhone App Store’s $30 Million May Be Second Best

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in an interview yesterday to Wall Street Journal that the iPhone AppStore made $30 Million in the first month of sales. That is  approximately close to $1 million everyday for July. Its an amazing feat when you think about the problems with the launch of App Store & iPhone 2... And $1 million a day is not a small amount, but will the business scale?? Will it be the winner for online content distribution??

Steve Jobs has already proved his amazing entrepreneurship in the past with the iPod and iTunes Store. Apple has changed the face of online music sales with its iTunes store and is surely building it up everyday by adding more and more content. The iPhone is also one of the most successful smartphone product, which in its first-generation already got a cult status and has been a hit in its second re-incarnation as well. But with all the success coming its way, there aren’t too many people who are looking at Apple’s shortcomings.

Apple’s failure in web services like .mac and MobileMe is probably its biggest recent failure. But then there is also the bad sales of AppleTV and Jobs Cube (oops MacMini) which still isn’t in the living room!! Apple desktop and laptop sales may be growing, but they still aren’t anywhere outside the US. But with those products not working as well, Apple still rocks with the iPhone.

The App Store fetches 30% of total revenue to Apple and the remaining 70% to the application developers/publisher. 30% does sound a lot for just hosting your App, but then with the developers getting rich for their not-as-much efforts, why would anyone have a problem with Apple getting an even bigger share?? For example, Super Monkey Ball is the most successful paid app on the App Store and has sold more than 300,000 copies in 20 days at $10 each. This means Sega (…and OtherOcean Interactive) made $2.1 million in 20 days. This has made OtherOcean create a new iPhone apps division, which obviously shows that they want to make many more such wonderful apps. I expect many more such developers coming up with interesting apps for the iPhone in the future.

But what we need to think is how much will people keep spending on the App Store and what will be the kind of competition that will come up for developers on the app store... If you need comparisons, most people will obviously look at iTunes, but I don’t think music and games/apps can be considered to be similar content. Obviously music can be downloaded and used whenever, where-ever you want. You could be playing your favorite tunes all through the day, but is it the same with games/apps on a mobile device?? How many hours can you game on the iPhone ?? How many apps do you need on the iPhone?? How much more will you really spend on the iPhone after that purchase??

On the PC side of things, there’s another company getting big on the online content distribution front. And its Valve Software, with its Steam Content Delivery System, which I think has more “steam” in the long run. Desktops/wired networks have lot more bandwidth to download and gaming hardware is lot more capable on PCs. Also we may be moving to specialized gaming consoles from desktop computers, but then Steam could very well be moved to consoles in the future. Steam already has 15million users, who use Steam servers for multiplayer gaming, buying new content, social networking and the like. Steam also has the support of many game developers and studios. And new studios are getting interested everyday to share their content on the Steam system. With all that and improving PC gaming numbers from other countries than the US, it feels that Steam could very well be the leading content delivery system of the future.

How Apple scales its App Store and how developers come up with new and interesting applications/games on the App Store will determine its future success. But the start is surely on track!! Probably, App Store is the constant stream of revenue for Apple, since someone somewhere is going to need an app, but then $1 billion revenue which Steve Jobs is expecting from the App Store is way... way too much!! Atleast not until every kid on the block owns an iPhone!!

Improve Apparent Application Performance Through UI

Have you ever felt that your application feels heavy or takes a lot of time to load? Do your users and customers expect "Improved performance" in the what's new list with every release? Does your manager feel you've been sleeping when he asked for performance improvement? Don't worry... this post is will provide hints on how to improve performance by making the user feel that the application is smoother and faster.

As developers, we generally tend to look under-the-hood to improve performance. A better algorithm, lesser memory leaks, better caching etc... is what we think when we wish to improve performance. But with just some simple user-interface (UI) tweaks, we can do wonders. Its not that the above improvements don't work. Its always better to optimize things under-the-hood, but a often simpler and faster way to speed up the feel of your application is at the UI-level.

To give you a few examples of widely used applications, Windows Vista SP1 is supposed to have improved file-transfer performance. One of the improvements was to improve the UI and it really proved useful to convince the user of a better performance. For web applications the use of AJAX improves perceived performance. Although whole page refresh takes longer and AJAX will help load only certain page elements, the implications of use of AJAX is more than that. Most of the times, even if AJAX takes longer to process a server request, we can have asynchronous smaller updates to a webpage and since the user saw some change on the page, it makes the user feel that the operation is happening faster, although in reality its gotten slower.

To point out another example, which I observed 3 days back was with the gmail's new loading screen. Gmail seems to advertise improved performance with the latest release, but I've observed that the loading time has actually increased. But since they added a new loading screen with a progress bar (screenshot below), it feels faster than previous loading times.

From those example we come to understand that perceived performance can be improved by:

1. Smoother ending to a loading screen makes the user feel that the loading finished faster.
2. Quick start to a loading process feels like faster performance
3. Smaller but quicker changes improve perceived performance
4. Shortening transition animations makes user feel that performance has improved.

List of Programs That Don't Work With Vista SP1

Microsoft has done a lot of work with Vista SP1, so much so that a lot of security programs don't work properly with SP1 although they used to work with Vista RTM. Kernel changes and some networking tweaks are basically the reasons why these programs aren't working. The list may not be completely exhaustive, but Microsoft's Support Center lists these programs.

Programs that are blocked from starting after you install Windows Vista SP1

• BitDefender AV or Internet Security 10
• Fujitsu Shock Sensor 2.1.0.0
• Jiangmin KV Antivirus 2008 or v10
• Zone Alarm Security Suite 7.1.078

Programs that do not run after you install Windows Vista SP1

• Iron Speed Designer 5.0.1
• Xheo Licensing 3.1
• Free Allegiance 2.1

Programs that have a loss of functionality after you install Windows Vista SP1

• NYT Reader v1
• Rising Personal Firewall 2007
• Novell ZCM Agent 10.01

There may be other programs that Microsoft has not identified and still have problems with Vista SP1. A few programs may also not display the incompatibility dialogs, but may contain potential issues with Vista SP1. If you are using any of the above products and have problems then, Microsoft's list with explanation and solutions can be found here.

Google doesn't want Microsoft's OOXML to be standard

Google has been bashing Microsoft quite a bit these days. A few days back it was with the Yahoo bid and today its about Microsoft's request to ISO to make OOXML format a standard. For people who haven't heard about OOXML (Office Open XML), its Microsoft's new XML-based format used across Microsoft Office 2007 which replaces Microsoft's earlier binary format. Microsoft has been trying to make OOXML as a standard through ISO, but last time the draft text was not approved by the ISO committee and Microsoft has resubmitted the draft.

Google at its blog mentions that ODF (Open Document Format) is already a standard and Google supports this format. ODF is used across a host of products including Open Office, KOffice, IBM Lotus Symphony and Google Docs but is not supported in Microsoft Office 2007. IBM has shown open criticism earlier regarding OOXML and is very much behind ODF. Sun Microsystems originally developed the ODF format and has also been lobbying against OOXML or transition from OOXML to ODF. The deadline for the vote from the ISO members for making OOXML as a standard is March 30th and Google hopes there is unification of OOXML to ODF.

There are also others who are running a campaign against OOXML becoming a standard. These people have mentioned various problems with OOXML and have been lobbying that ODF should be the standard for documents. Even Microsoft somewhat agreed that there are problems with OOXML, but thinks those can be resolved. Microsoft could easily add a filter to add ODF documents and still keep the docx as default and end the matter. I know Microsoft can lobby and make OOXML, but it would be better for everyone, if Microsoft added ODF to Office 2007 SP2.

NewsPond - A Sleek Looking Techmeme + Digg

I'm not a big fan of bling and show, but sometimes some things make you realize that "sleek" feels great. A few days back I came across a website Newspond.com, which is an automated news engine like Techmeme, but with a lot more oomph attached to it. Infact, I have to say that I'm completely in awe with the design of the website and every edge looks well polished.

Now before you think that I have been paid to talk good about these guys, let me assure you that is not the case. I will first talk about the bad things I've seen at the web site. I have seen some downsides with the news aggregator algorithm that they seem to use. Some news just come above others because of the comments and hence you can actually write spam comments and get the stories higher. Even the indexing of the websites from which stories are shown is not very fast and generally stories take some time to appear at Newspond. May be I am comparing it with Techmeme.com here, but techmeme is a river and this is a pond right ??

But when you consider the look and feel of the website, you tend to forget if the stories appear a little late. Chan Karunamuni needs to be applauded for the brilliant design that he has done on the website. His portfolio shows some of his previous designs and speaks of his skills with the bling. The animations with javascript are great and you can turn off the animations if you are on a low-end computer. Ian Reardon, the other founder of the website has also done a good job with the stories that automatically appear on the website. All the digg-like code where users can comment on stories and give their own views is also good work from Ian.

In the world of Web 2.0 where people share stories, talk about other people's stories on their own blogs, finding different views on a story can be very useful. That's what Web 2.0 is all about. Newspond truly gives you a gorgeous view of the entire blogosphere (as a pond)...

AMD Releases Browser & Media Player

AMD which is known for making processors has released a set of software tools for its Live platform. The AMD Live is the product package from AMD to sell multimedia computers with software that can enable you to bring the computer to the living room. Intel also has a similar product and is called the ViiV. Don't they rhyme well!!

Today, AMD released a new piece of software known as AMD Live Explorer which is a software package built over Vista components. AMD will be shipping it free of cost along with its CPUs and Live machines. AMD recommends Phenom processors, but I'm sure you just need an AMD Live PC.

The AMD Live Explorer is a software suite with Image gallery,  Web browsing (using IE7 engine), Audio player (using WMP 11) and TV viewing. AMD Live Explorer is actually a UI over the Vista software components. I liked the look of the interface overall, especially the 3D video (just like the NorthFace demo which Microsoft had shown before Vista launch) and the video rendering was pretty good. It is in the beta testing and hence AMD asks users to give feedback for the software.

Download the beta of AMD Live Explorer from here.

Download the demo video which AMD created.

Google Docs Brings Form Filling

How many times have been online and want to ask friends, students, visitors, clients to fill out forms to get feedback?? I'm sure its a common thing to get feedback from people using forms. Google docs has released a new feature that enables users to create forms and share these forms on any webpage. You don't need to setup a database or code any form webpage. Just create the form in Google docs and share it on your page.

The big idea here is to simplify the creation of forms and collecting information instead of passing the spreadsheet across. The responses that the users give on the forms are automatically updated on your spreadsheet. There is also a Google docs iGoogle Gadget that can be used to display your recent active forms and also the responses that you have received.

After all the feedback you have received all you have to do click on the "Add Chart" button to create good look diagrams to represent the data you have collected. Nice fun to do things fast!!

Opera Mobile 9.5 - Desktop Internet for Mobiles

Opera announced the commercial release of the latest version of its mobile browser Opera Mobile 9.5. Opera will be previewing this version exclusively at the Mobile World Congress 2008 that is to be held between Feb 11-14 at Barcelona, Spain.

Opera Mobile is currently shipped on more than 100 million phones around the world and Opera is expecting the OEM's will upgrade the mobile browser to version 9.5 and the reasons to do that is compelling. Opera Mobile 9.5 brings the desktop internet experience to the mobile phone through a lot of new innovations. Javascript, AJAX and Flash run on the Opera Mobile 9.5 just like it would on the desktop. If mobile handset manufacturers install Flash Lite 3 in the devices, then users would be able to experience youtube videos just like they would on the desktop. Opera Mobile 9.5 allows Web-page zooming, password management and offline browsing.

The Opera Mobile 9.5 experience includes many of the innovations found in Opera's trend-setting desktop browser including:

• Intuitive user interface
• Tabbed browsing
• Improved text wrap
• Page overview, zooming and panning
• Landscape mode
• Save Web page for future offline access
• Call phone number from Web page
• Send link as SMS/MMS
• Send image as SMS/MMS
• Small Screen Rendering™
• Password manager
• Web address input auto-completion
• History and bookmarks
• Copy text
• Opera Widgets

There will be obvious comparisons of Opera Mobile 9.5 to WebKit, which is Apple's contribution to brining the desktop web experience to the mobile phone. WebKit is open-source and will be part of Google's Android platform. Currently its part of Apple iPhone's browser and Opera Mobile 9.5 has similar features to the iPhone's browser. But the good part about Opera Mobile 9.5 is that it can be installed on a wide variety of handsets and the vendors don't have to put in much efforts. Opera Mobile 9.5 also allows use of  Widgets that allow data retrieving from the internet without opening the browser. This enables a lot of different applications and new avenues for internet-based software applications on the mobile phone.

As I mentioned earlier, the Opera 9.5 SDK can help bring these features to other devices and thus opens a lot of new places for the developer. You can watch the video demo of Opera Mobile 9.5 below:

Fourth Undersea Cable Cut - Conspiracy Or Doomsday

In what seems to be the next twist in the tale of events happening in the world of internet connectivity, another undersea cable has been cut after last week's 3 cable cuts in the Middle-East. According to the reports from ArabianNews, Qatar Telecom (Qtel) said on Sunday the cable was damaged between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE island of Das on Friday.

This fourth cable cut has affected the internet connectivity of Qatar only and UAE has been largely unaffected by this mishap. Earlier, there were suggestions and reports all around the world that the earlier cable cuts were due to the anchoring of a ship. But the latest news suggests that the place where the cable cuts had taken place is a prohibited area and ships cannot travel through that region.

Egypt's Minister of Communications issued a statement, "A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time,".

These confusing reports have resulted in conspiracy theories that these have been done by terrorist organizations. Some people have also suggested that the cable cuts are a way to move the attention away from the phone-tapping news in UK. Whatever be the reason, it seems extremely odd that 4 cables have been cut in a span of just 5 days. Is the doomsday for internet arriving??

Detailed Images - Find the Undersea Cable that affected 75million netizens

Its been 3 days since the undersea cable between India and Middle East got cut by a ship and according to some analysts about 75 million people got affected by the cable cut. The internet speeds across India and the Middle East was slow, but I personally haven't observed any speed drops on my connection. May be the global torrents have slowed down, but downloads from http/ftp and surfing speeds have been unaffected.

A Detailed Image of Undersea Internet Cables (courtesy Guardian & Telegeography: click for a larger image)

A gist of what everyone's reporting:

The Inquirer - Middle East loses internet

DailyTech - No YouTube for You

Reuters - Internet disrupted in Egypt and India

Trak.in - Internet Down

The latest reports suggest that there has been a third cable cut in the Middle-East known as the Falcon. But this won't affect the current traffic which is now being temporarily redirected through the older SeaMeWe-3 cable.

How to Access Blocked Sites From College

I have recently been observing a lot of students at college trying very hard to access blocked sites from college labs. Quite a few colleges block sites like Orkut, Facebook and other sites. College authorities feel that such sites waste student time, but students waste more time trying to pass through the firewall blocking these sites. They keep trying different proxy servers, but these are most of the times very slow or unstable. Also, there are a host of anonymous proxy software or anonymizer which are paid software.

Instead of all the pain and waste of time, a simpler method to access blocked sites is by the use of the Tor or Onion Network. It allows anonymous access to the internet and helps bypass those firewalls that are blocking the internet. Simple to install and easy to use, you don't have to do much to bypass the college firewall. There are also security advantages of using Tor as it prevents tracking through cookies and when used with privoxy also helps block ads by default. The official website lists these advantages and who uses it.

The nice step-by-step tutorial with screenshots for different platforms can be found here, but below I've listed a 3 step guide to be anonymous and access blocked websites.

1.) Download and install Vidalia Bundle which contains Tor, Privoxy and TorButton. (I have linked the latest nightly builds, you can also try the stable build)

2.) Start Firefox and go to addons. Get Extensions and install the TorButton Extension, if it isn't showing the bottom-right corner of the browser window.

3.) Toggle the Torbutton to enable and enjoy surfing the web anonymously and bypassing the blocking firewall.

 

Note: Don't blame me if you get banned from college for accessing adult websites through Tor. Technology, like everything else has good and bad sides. The CHOICE is always yours!!

Wikia To Let People Search The Web In Jan 2008

Wikia just launched a search engine in Beta (actually the founder said pre-alpha) yesterday. You can write an email and get an invite to Wikia Search. The announcement was made on the mailing list. Wikia had promised a search in 2007 and technically just 5 days are left for 2007 to end. So they have just met the deadline by an inch. Wikia Search is expected to publicly launch on January 7th, 2008.

Wikia is known for Wikipedia and founder Jimmy Wales said in December 2006 that he would be launching a web search engine as a competitor to Google. He had earlier said that Google's search engine shows too many incorrect results and in his words, "spam" results. This he wants to rectify with Wikia Search which will be using the Grub! web crawler technology. The following is from the WikiaSearch website about the future of Internet Search and Goals of Wikia Search:

Our Four Organizing Principles (TCQP) - the future of Internet Search must be based on:

• 1. Transparency - Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
• 2. Community - Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.
• 3. Quality - Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.
• 4. Privacy - Must be protected, do not store or transmit any identifying data.

Active areas of focus:

• Social Lab - sources for URL social reputation, experiments in wiki-style social ranking.
• Distributed Lab - projects focused on distributed computing, crawling, and indexing. Grub!
• Semantic Lab - Natural Language Processing, Text Categorization.
• Standards Lab - formats and protocols to build interoperable search technologies.

I somewhat agree that PageRank and Google's current search doesn't currently work best, but the new Blog search and News search are starting to change it for the good. Infact, Google Knol seems to be a response to Wikia Search from Google which will be relevant and more related to giving users data for the query rather than plain links.

Wikia has just recently launched OpenServing, which is free webhosting for Wikis. Its a useful service and I think Wikis have got quite popular for information sharing on collaborative projects that are done online. OpenServing and Wikia Search and so much like Knol and Blogger that it seems that Wikia and Google are on a head-on collision very soon.

Although somewhat controversial, I have found wikipedia to be a very useful tool. And I hope that Jimmy will be able to bring some competition to the search market. It will surely help improve the condition of the current web searching.

Want To Know What Celeb You Look Like??

Found this really interesting website, thanks to the complimentary LINQ from the Inq. You can go the MyHeritage Face Recognition website and upload a closeup photo of yours. It'll run some complex face recognition program and match your face to the faces of celebrities that are present in their database. After the search is complete, it creates a collage of celebrity faces that are your look-alikes!!

Its a flash based interface that they have built and it looks pretty slick. But you can't say the same about the accuracy of the face recognition. We all know that face recognition is a complex thing to do, but how about me looking like Winona Ryder or Halle Berry for accuracy!! :)) Even the 66% match with Jesse Bradford was flattering that anything else!

 

 

To test the accuracy I tried an image of I also tried an image of Salma Hayek and Elisha Cuthbert. The Salma Hayek face detection said, that Salma Hayek looks like Amisha Patel, the Indian actress - a fact I've been saying for sometime now!! And the Elisha Cuthbert detection is an awesome one... The picture I upload didn't quite look like Elish Cuthbert to me (but actually the photo is of hers) and the app found her!!

Other than the celeb face recognition there is also a genealogy on their website which is also pretty interesting.

Tell me who you look like and how accurately it seems to find you?? and which celeb do you look like??

Google Transliteration: Write Hindi In English

Yeah, you heard me right!! You can type English alphabets and get corresponding Hindi text. Its called transliteration and should not be mixed with translation. Translation in this case would mean, finding a Hindi word which has the same meaning as an English word, whereas transliteration means, finding a Hindi word which sounds like the English word. Go here if you wish to play (and work) with Google's Indic Transliteration Web Application.

Google released this application for Indians to play with about a month back, and I saw it about 2 days after launch. But a lot of people who use other indian language typing softwares, still don't know about it. I thought this post will help them, since I find this application extremely useful and use it quite often!! Congratulations & praise to Google for making this application. Its really not easy to make such an application, and it works nearly perfectly. And they gave it free!! Dont we all love google for their free stuff !!??

The good part about this application is that you can copy-paste the output to any html file. It really can't get any simpler than this. No copying fonts, no complex software, no clicking on an on-screen keyboard, just type and see the output. For me its a winner application and I see in my blogger account that Google is using the same application with blogger as well. Its a javascript that they are using to render into the textarea. So its simple to import into any other application Google wishes to.

PS: Does anyone know if you can use this javascript in your own webpage or application?? (With Google's permission obviously). I've tried the FAQ as well as had a hard time trying to understand the Google TOS.

Two Solutions To Save Ram Setu

Recently I have read comments here and here regarding the debate on Ram Setu or Adam's Bridge. Historians from all around the world are debating now, if the Ram Setu is a man-made (ape-made) structure or has it been naturally made. Whatever it may be, man-made or otherwise, it has sentiments of hindus and Indian culture intervowen with it. Ramayan is a prevalent story (history) across not only India, but across countries like Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, SriLanka and many other countries from South-East Asia. So, it is never a good idea to question someone's faith and especially not when you have so many people in a belief.

People who do not know what the Sethusamudaram Project that the government has proposed is, this explanation is for them. Currently ships traveling from the East coast of India to the West Coast have to travel across Srilanka (see figure below). The Government of Tamil Nadu and the Government of India proposes a new route which will decrease the travel time by 10-30 hrs. For this the ocean has to be dredged and the total cost of the project is Rs 2,427. So there's a development issue to it as well. The project will save on the costs of travel as well as improve navigation. So the big issue today is should faith/belief/religion come in between progress/technological development??

My idea is that we should find an in-between solution to the problem. Most of the debate happening around the world is not resulting in a solution. So, I thought how about giving out 2 solutions that can be implemented in this case.

The First Solution (Easiest and Cheapest):
We already have a land bridge between Pamban island which is used by cars to travel from Ramanathapuram to Rameshwaram. The height of this bridge should be increased, so that ships can travel from below this bridge. Additional dredging needs to be done across the sea bed, but it would be cheaper and easier compared to dredging the whole area near the Ram Setu.(see figure below). There are few examples around the world where such things have been done before, so shouldn't be a technical problem.

The Second Solution: (An Engineering feat to make India Proud)

India could build a canal bridge, something like done in Germany at Wasserstrassenkreuz. India has to build a similar bridge over the Ram Setu and it could be a great engineering feat. It would be a little costly, but India could take toll on the travel of ships for the maintenance of this bridge. It will be great achievement if India could pull this one off. The bridge can be 3km long since the width of the Ram Setu is less than a few hundred meters. The sea surface is not very deep and hence building such a thing will be easy. The Panama Canal and Suez Canal's architecture for water logging could be used to fill the bridge with water. (View the bridge here)

I have just proposed 2 solutions to this issue. There are many more solutions to the problem. Please leave your comments if you have any other solutions. Also, it would make many Indians happy if politicians could provide solutions rather than make noise on the issue.