I had posted about network latency sometime back and the delay it can cause determined by the distance between the communicating systems. But will it hinder someone’s work? If you haven’t heard of the 500 mile email case then here is the link to “The case of the 500-mile email“, an interesting phenomena caused by the distance between communicating systems.

One of the key highlights of Web 2.0 trend is to engage user participation and enrich site with user provided content. The enormous valuable content for sites like Wikipedia comes from user participation. Wikipedia is online encyclopedia covering entire possibilities of content that’s available with us scattered around the world. User participation could also be narrowly focused on a specific site to bring more value to a specific area where users specialized or who have something interesting to share can add that value. I came across this site Radeopaedia.org which allows users to add content in the department of Radiology. I think there would be more such sites coming up focusing on specific areas and allowing users to add content when they have something useful to share to others.

Today is TechMasala’s first anniversary. Thank you my dear friends for reading my posts and your continual support. Thanks to my mentors and fellow navigators at Compassites for their support and encouragement to keep me writing.

When I studied computer science GIGO was a common term that’s commonly used to nail down into my head that computers are stupid if you write something stupid. GIGO stands for Garbage In Garbage Out which means computers are mere processors that produce appropriate output for the input provided. So if you throw in garbage you are sure to get garbage out. Even to this day GIGO is valid and you cannot throw in anything you want to a computer and expect out something meaningful. It is just that we now have good looking screens to put the garbage in and good looking screens to get the garbage out.

Undoubtedly we all accept that at this point, Google is the most powerful search engine and one that is widely used. In fact it is hard to believe that it is a search engine and gives a feel that it is the starting point of internet. We also know from search engine to many other useful tools that have changed the way we look at World Wide Web. All of them for free. What’s more in store? Watch this video “Master Plan - The power of Google” for a visual insight.

Happy Weekend!

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!