Hurricane Katrina, Data, What Companies Do?

There has been a great deal written about Katrina in the recent week. There has'nt been much loss in lives when compared to the previous category five hurricanes. But when compared financially this storm has casued an estimated 20 billion loss for the insurance companies alone.
Kathrina has knocked out power to the offices in NewOrlanes. The companies that were geographically distributed would have had only minor problems. But most of the small companies that did not have their mail servers located in two places, so these companies have no means of receiving their mails. At least some of the mails would definitely be lost. Not only this, a "fairly significant percentage" of companies don't have a disaster recovery plan in place, let alone one that makes use of e-mail recovery systems.
Most of the companies dont tend to do this because of the cost involved. But in a region where there has been five hurricanes in six weeks it's worth weighing up your data's importance against the cost of setting up a backup server. I also saw a blog that tells about a disaster data recovery system that was deployed in New Orlanes. It's was pretty intresting though i did not understand it completely.

Find more about... you.

I somehow landed into this site http://www.blogthings.com It had some very intresting stuff. It has a lots of tests that assess various aspects of your personality. These tests are very simple and very quick. Some of the test, like the personality test, are as easy as clicking on the image that strikes to you the most. Once you have clicked on the image from a set, your personality is displayed. The best test I would say was the "What are the keys to your heart?". I did that test and felt that the results were pretty correct.
The most useful one, is the test to finds your hidden talents. It did for me too, it listed out certain things that i considered not to be categorised as talents, so it did find hidden talents. There is a test that are very detailed and give you an indepth analysis about your personality that i found to be good.There are tons of other tests too, some are very wierd(like testing how wierd you are?), some useful and some intresting.

Cyber Wars!

The major problem for internet users today is to prevent their computer from getting compromised by cyber crooks. There are thousands of computers that are being compromised everyday. Once a system is compromised they have full control it, which enable them to do whatever you do in your computer. Most of the systems are compromised using botnets or worms.
And why do people do this? Money. They see a compromised system as a means to send spam, get users credit card numbers/ their banking details and also use these compromised systems to compromise more systems, all of which generates money. This method has been so lucrative that these people now operate in gangs. Lately there has been strong evidence that these cyber gangs are fighting against each other, to control more systems. For example; a worm and its variants exploit a security hole in the plug-and-play feature in the Windows 2000 operating system. But some other worm comes around a few days later and undoes the effects of earlier worms, suggesting that the creators are battling to take over computers that others have already compromised.

Once your computer is infected it's very hard to clean it up now-a-days. The best and some times the only soultion seems to be "format c:".

A Novel Way to Advertise

Ignoring advertisement billboards is going to get a lot tougher with billboards in UK now being installed with the ability to beam ads directly to passing cell phones.
This is how it works, once a Bluetooth enabled cell phone enter a range say 100 meters from the billboard, it receives a message asking the user if it wants to receive ads. If the user says ‘yes’ then they receive pictures, movies or animating pictures, further promoting the product.
The creators of this novel way of advertising say that it’s also very safe because it does not download any executables into the cell phone, avoiding the risks of viruses. Can this sort of advertising be categorised as a spam? The creators say no, because they feel that the ads are sent only after getting the approval of the receiver. This is my view of it, what if you walk into a railway station with a Bluetooth enabled cell phone, and there are 20 billboards in the station???
It’s definitely going to be annoying…

For more information please refer new scientist

Unified Modelling Language (UML) Intro

UML was first introduced in 1997.It is the product of three other modelling languages (OMT, OOSE, Booch). The primary goal of UML is to provide the development community with a stable and common design language. It’s similar to the blueprint used by construction workers. Therefore by modelling your project using UML notations, it’s easy for a UML proficient person joining your team, to understand the application under development and become productive immediately. The increasing popularity of UML can be attributed to the facts that it’s independent of any programming language and it’s not a methodology but a language by itself.

There are many UML diagrams, the most useful (standard) UML diagrams are explained very briefly here.

A) Use-case Diagram:
A use case is used to communicate a unit of functionality provided by the system. The main purpose of the use-case diagram is to help development team visualize the functional requirements of a system, including the relationship with users.
B) Class Diagram:
It shows how the various entities in the system interact with each other. As the name represents class diagrams are used to represent classes. These classes can be either logical or the real implemented classes. It denotes a class with it’s name, attributes and methods. It’s also is used to display relationship between various classes.

C) Sequence Diagrams:
Sequence diagrams show a detailed flow, for a specific use case or even just part of a specific use case. They display the calls between objects in the sequence in which they occur.
D) State Chart Diagram:
As the name indicates this diagram displays the different states of a class and also the transition from one state to another.
E) Activity Diagram:
This diagram is used to show the procedural flow of control between two classes. But the difference between this and sequence diagram is that this is used to make non- technical people to understand the business process.
F) Component Diagram:

It shows a physical view of the system i.e. it shows the software dependencies on other software component.

For people wanting to learn more please refer the links below:

The official UML Web site

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/769.html

http://www.rational.com/uml/resources/documentation/index.jsp

http://www-140.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/products/rose

Web Services For Dummies

A web service is a collection of standards and protocols used for exchanging data between different systems or applications. The primary idea of web services is to allow software applications written in various programming languages, which are running on different operating systems, to communicate between each other across a computer network. To agree upon some way of communication, there must be some standards. These standards are being administered by OASIS and the W3C.

Standards followed:

1)Protocol Stack: The main standard and protocol used to build a web services is known as a protocol stack. It’s basically a collection of networking protocols that that are used to define, locate, implement and make web services talk to each other. These protocols can be categorised into four parts depending on their functionality.

a) Transport: These are the protocols responsible for the communication between different applications. Examples are HTTP,SMTP,FTP. They act as the internet layer protocol.

b) XML Messaging: These are protocols responsible for encoding the data into xml format. Examples include SOAP,XML-RPC. They act as the transport layer protocol.

c) Service Description: These are the protocols required to give a description of the interface of the web services. Currently Web Server Description Language (WSDL) is used for this.

d) Service Discovery: These are the protocols used to register a web service into a common registry, and publish their location and description for easy retrieval and usage. UDDI is currently used for this purpose.

2) Data : All the data that is transferred with XML tags . The fitting of data into tags, and transporting them to transport protocols like HTTP, FTP or SMTP are done by protocols like SOAP etc.

The working of web services will be provided in my blogs next week.

Shaking the World

Researchers at the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone have come up with a technique that enables them to control humans. I was able to get an idea as to how they do it. The researchers use a remote that signals the receiver (a box attached to the persons back), which then responds and produces an electrical current, which is delivered to the back of our ears. The vestibular system, which controls our sense of movement and balance, is thrown off balance by electrical currents delivered just behind our ears.Just have a look at this clip to see a woman being controlled by the device. After having a look a the clip you could easily guess why they have named the project ‘shaking the world’.


Yes it sounds scary, but the good news is that this technology is a long way from controlling me.

Science playing with perception!

Different scientists around the world are trying out weird things that toy with our perceptions of things. For example scientists at Heat and Glow have come up with Aqueon fireplace that produces fire from water (yes, fire from water). This is how it works; it uses normal tap water, passes 220 volts into it and separates hydrogen from oxygen. Once this is done it ignites the hydrogen and then passes some amount of oxygen to colour up the flame while the rest of the oxygen is released to the surroundings . The finishing of the fireplace is also very artistic as seen from the picture. Though this seems very cool, it’s HOT!!

For more details visit Aqueon

Google's Worries!

Just have a look at the picture above. Google's share value has tripled from their first release in on 19th Aug 2004. This huge increase in google's shares is not only because of their patented searching technology, but also mainly due to their other innovations like Adsence.After adsence was released it's has enticed sellers from ebay and other sites, severely affecting their stock prices(have a look at ebays stock go down after start of 2005).Ok having recorded a market share of more that 52% for search engines why should google worry?Well one of their problems is that they seem to have run short of innovative ideas.The second reason being both microsoft and yahoo are catching up quietly.Yahoo launched it's much awaited competitor to google's adsence was released today. Microsoft seems to also be worried about google's search market share and plan to catch up with their start page which is going to compete with google's plan to let users Personalize their Google homepage .

I don't think that just by luring top execs from Microsoft or yahoo would do the trick. Google has to do a lot of thinking in the months to come or they are sure to lose their market share to competitors.