If you are new to Rails application development then troubleshooting even the common mistakes and errors might be difficult. The Ruby on Rails Wiki has a “TroubleShooting Rails” page that has solutions for common starting trouble problems. Bookmark the page, just in case you are stuck.

The first web browser that was developed was WorldWideWeb. This was first of a kind of browser which acted as the primary way to access the internet.  To avoid confusion with what the internet world is referred to as World Wide Web, the browser was renamed to Nexus. February 26 was the day Nexus was born and thus was born the browser application. Know more about Nexus in Wikipedia. Happy Birthday browsers!

Two days back I had posted about Semantic Web. The key technology enabling Semantic Web is the Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF is a XML based specification that aims at providing a standard framework to represent the resources scattered around the web world. The RDF consists of three main elements namely subject, predicate and object.  How does these three help in identifying a resource? A good explanation of the elements of RDF and how it works is given in this little old article “The semantic web: How RDF will change learning technology standards“.

Have a great week.

I was traveling by train to my hometown couple of days back. It was an overnight journey. Around 1.30 AM when everyone was in deep sleep all of a sudden there was a loud cry.  A 3 to 4 year old kid suddenly got up and started crying.  It was a loud cry and soon lot of people in my coach got up including me. The boy wanted a ball and he wanted it at that moment. The kid’s parents tried their best to console him saying they would get him once they reached home but it didn’t stop him from crying. The kid’s mom carried him and took him near the door in that coach. Couple of things happened when this was taking place.  Few of them were unperturbed even to the millimeter and were sleeping with loud snores almost equaling the shrieking kid’s cry. Second, the kid’s cry woke up few more kids and it started a chain reaction and these kids started crying.  The parents of the kid somehow managed to control him by offering him a toffee. When everything seemed to quite down, the mother of another kid who had woke up had took a wrong path to put her kid again to sleep. She was saying to her kid that once they reach the kid’s cousin’s house she could play with her cousin with ball-catch game. That’s it, as soon the first kid heard the word ball again he started again.  To top it all for some reason the train had stopped completely in a no man’s land when all this was happening and didn’t start until 45 minutes later.

I was thinking how many images and information I could get on a ball with a connection to internet but I may not be able to get something like a real ball whenever I wanted. In fact I was little wrong as I tried to search for a ball (in the safe search mode of course )in Google Images I didn’t get a proper image of a ball in the first page. Even in Flickr I didn’t get a relevant result. That time of the night I was put into a thinking mode that there are certain situations in life that technology might never overtake and only a human touch or act can only help. I hope I don’t go wrong.

Happy Weekend!

Internet is all about different applications scattered around and each one using its own data repository behind the scenes to fuel up the running application. But if you consider the data held by all the applications what is the chance that each application is holding a data that also exists in one or more of the other applications? I get an immediate reply, a very high chance. If as a user you are using multiple applications on the web, again the chances of data relevancy between these applications could be highly possible. For example if I am using a calendaring application that shows me appointments why can’t I also see what my bank statement was on that day or the previous days? If there is way to interlink the numerous data that is scattered around the web and bring them up wherever you want as the context maybe then it brings a whole new perspective of how we look at web. It is no more just a network of interconnected machines but also a network of interconnected data. The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. Also refer to this article “The Semantic Web: An Introduction” and the wikipedia entry.

The chief internet evangelist and father of internet Vinton G Cerf was in Bangalore and gave a public presentation here in Bangalore on the past, present and future of internet.  Few of my colleagues attended the presentation.  Thanks to Narayanan, Sumanth and Prakash who summarized the presentation.

Vinton G. Cerf is the Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for the company.   Vinton spoke to a huge gathering on the topic - “A father speaks about his child’s past, present and future“.  Befitting the title of the session Vinton showed few glimpses of ARPANET (the past of internet), dealt on the effectiveness, speed, amount of data transferred using this ARPANET in the initial days.  Then he moved on to the present situation where the users of internet have almost increased tenfold.  He also showed the statistics regarding the usage of internet in the present day life and also connectivity across multiple electronic devices such as pc, mobiles, PDA’s …  Throughout he stressed upon that not just “Knowledge is Power” but “Sharing the Knowledge is Power” and he acknowledged that Google is committed to make it happen.  Vinton kindled few thoughts on how the future electronic devices could behave.  Be it programmed refrigerators that will e-Mail/SMS the owner about the contents that are stored or be it surfing board equipped with Laptop (supported by Wi-Fi) that helps the user to be connected through out.

With the kind of demand that is increasing rapidly, Vinton stressed on getting a structure to the scattered internet with more R&D on networking technologies like IPv6. With a standard disclaimer saying that Google is not involved in the project that he is leading, he spoke about his project “Inter Planetary Internet”.

Vinton showed the slides of this project which talks about a new way of transferring content/data with the help of other planetary systems like how a robot deployed in Mars sends the data back to earth. The constraint though is the existing protocol TCP/IP is not enough to get the expected response time because the transfer now has to happen in terms of astronomical distances which usually is about 4 to 20 minutes.  He mentioned that a new protocol Inter PlaNet (IPN) would be required to enable such a communication that will meet the required response time for data transfers.

Click on this link “About Inter Planetary Internet Project” to know more about it.

I am sure you get lot of spam emails like anyone does. While most of them are really junk mails, some of them are interesting reads. Seriously, sometimes if you are too bored, you could just open up couple of the spam emails and read them. One of the regular spam emails that I am used to getting is something like the below one.

“…
…
I am a major investor in offshore oil Riggs until recently when I was crippled by stroke which left half part of my body paralyzed, I have undergone major surgery but my health is still not improving. For the past fifteen years I have been waiting if I would be cured but all to no avail and recently my doctor gave me very sad news which is very disturbing to me he said that in about three months time my health may get worst and since I have no close relative around I will want to set up orphanage homes in my name and also donate the rest of my wealth to charitable organizations which you are going to be in charge.

My account balance presently is $12.2m united state dollars as reflected in my last statement account from my bank account and I have wish to use this fund to finance this project as I do not have much time left, you will be entitled to 20% of these funds for your good work and put the rest into the orphanage homes. Please send me a mail with your telephone and fax numbers if you are willing to honestly assist me. As soon as I receive a response from you I shall instruct my bank to deal with you directly for easy transfer of the fund. All the information regarding the fund will also be given to you with all the necessary documents for onward transfer of the fund to your nominated bank account.
….
….”

The senders of such mail belong to group of spammers called “Nigerian Email Fraud” whose purpose is to make an identity theft. Ultimately you will lose some money and you won’t get even a penny back.  How does this fraud ring work? Read this article “False Promises of Inheritance - Spam Email Fraud” to know more about how this fraud ring operate.

If you are a developer working on applications that is using calendaring, date/time operations then check out this news “Daylight-saving bug could foil computers” in CNN. You might want to do some tests to make sure your application works OK before it is too late to react.