4 long years passed. Still most of the students are doing the same, looking for ready made seminars or preparing for seminars on common and old topics. In this post, I am going to say a few words about three interesting topics. If I would be in my 7th semester, then I must be selecting one of these three topics as my seminar topics. If by any chance, any such student read this blog and anyone of these three topics interests you, then you can choose that topic.

Let’s start with Gravatar. Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatar. The above pictures are Gravatars of those people. You must have watched recent Hollywood blockbuster Avatar. If you have not watched it like me due to any reason, then you must have heard much about it. So, what’s Avatar? If you have some knowledge on Hindu mythology, then you must have heard about Dashavatar. From Wikipedia,

In Hinduism, Avatar or Avatāra (Devanagari अवतार, Sanskrit for “descent” [viz., from heaven to earth]) refers to a deliberate descent of a deity from heaven to earth, and is mostly translated into English as “incarnation”, but more accurately as “appearance” or “manifestation”.

But when it comes to computing, an avatar is a computer user’s representation of himself/herself or alter ego whether in the form of a three-dimensional model used in computer games, a two-dimensional icon (picture) or a one-dimensional username used on Internet forums and other communities, or a text construct found on early systems such as MUDs.

Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. It needs only your email id to identify you and shows your image associated with the email id. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums; Gravatar will help you to identify you on any site. If your email id is not associated with any Gravatar, then your avatar will be anyone of the Mystery Man (WordPress default), blank (seriously, nothing will be displayed there), Gravatar logo, Identicon, Wavatar, MonsterID, or any other image. Identicon, Wavatar, and MonsterID are unique for each email id.

More info on Gravatar can be found on its website and Wikipedia. If you are choosing this topic, then show one or two scenes from movie Avatar and few photos from Dashavatar of Vishnu, while explaining Avatar. This will make your presentation interesting. Don’t add more, otherwise Gravatar or Avatar (computing) will loose the weight in the presentation. Also, don’t forget to tell about Yahoo Avatars. And the MonsterID is the funniest part of this. You must be knowing few people who would be attending the seminar and the email ids of those people. Try to get the MonsterIDs of few of them (who must have a good sense of humor) and show during the presentation. As a celebration of this post, I turned on MonsterID for this blog.

Let’s come to reCAPTCHA now. A CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs can’t:

The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University.

There are many type of CAPTCHA are available. One of which are reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. Normally there are computer applications which scan books and converts words to digital format. The problem with these applications are, they are not perfect. They are not able to interpret many scanned words correctly. Here reCAPTCHA shoots two birds with one bullet.

There other types of CAPTCHA are available. Like asking to solve a small mathematical problem like addition, or subtraction etc. Some show you an array of images and ask you to find the odd from the even. Some shows an image and ask how many kittens are on that image. Some shows some images and ask you to choose a word from a drop down list which is related to those images. Some CAPTCHAs also support accessibility. If you can’t read the word, then you can hear them and then type. reCAPTCHA also supports this well.

If you are choosing this topic for your seminar, then tell about the problem of spam, the CAPTCHA, then reCAPTCHA and then tell alternatives of reCAPTCHA.

And now let’s fall in love with the Fail Whale. Who wants to be fail? But the Fail Whale loves to be. The “Fail Whale” is this above graphic of a whale held up by a flock of birds illustrated by Yiying Lu (@yiyinglu on twitter). It is employed during periods of downtime by the social networking service Twitter. And to know what happened to that please click here (middle click to open in a new tab).

This is an interesting and funny topic. There is a risk in choosing this topic as your seminar. But if you take risk, then you may be star in your class.

If you choose anyone from those above topics, then please share your experience with me. Please comment below.

Let me start with the term Carelessness. Being a perfectionist at my job, I hate people who are careless in their job. If you think to build any website, then you will think how will be the logo or the header. So I will about the header banner of the OJEE e-Counseling application. It’s written as “e – Counselling” on the banner. See the snapshot below.

However we can forgive this mistake. This type of spelling mistake is called as FCM (Frequently Committed Mistakes) and can be ignored while evaluating.

Before few days I came to know about that this time OJEE is introducing e-Counseling. I felt happy. I know that every year many people who come from far places from Bhubaneswar complain about the distance they travel for attending the OJEE counseling. So I was happy to see the development. As booking tickets online made my life easier, I dreamed that OJEE e-Counseling will help the counseling process much easier for thousands of students and their parents. One day one of our family friend came to me and told me to fill the college choices for his son. He had done the registration in some Internet Cafe before coming to me. He suddenly blamed the e-Counseling process. But I started advocating in the for of e-Counseling. Then I entered into the application and became a eye witness how OJEE e-Counseling sucks life of people related to it.

My task was to select choices as per the preference of colleges and branches. At my left hand side of the screen, there are 380 choices – different colleges and branches. However the list is sorted alphabetically, there was an option to filter all choices (colleges) by district. There was no option to filter choices by branch. Who would be using filter by district? You don’t choose institutes as per the district where they are located. Even few people don’t know which college is located in which district. I bet even few people don’t know how many districts are there in Orissa. And you will find few people who can tell the name of all 30 districts. So the sucking rule is “Give the feature which no one will use, but don’t give the feature which every one need”.

But there is one option to sort all choices by branch. The option is located in such a place that it is near by invisible. I entered to that page many times, but just noticed it while writing this post. If you notice it then it can help you a little bit. Sort by branch code is not really helpful. Take an example: if your branch is mechanical, then those choices will be far down in the list. If you use the add button next to any choice from those with mechanical branch, then the page submits and reloads with the other branch options at top. You need to scroll again and search for the college you want to add. However you can check all the colleges and then click on “Add Multiple” button. But the option to filter the choices by branch would have awesome.

So I added all the choices to the left hand side of the screen after a long struggle. Now I have to sort it as per my preference of colleges. There are more than eighty choices which I needed to sort it by putting 1, 2, 3 so on. This was the toughest job, even tougher that coding a complex part of any web application. And if you missed a number while assigning a preference number to it, then while saving it, it will not allow you to save due to validation process. And to find where you made the mistake may make you cry. It happened to me and I quickly applied a formula to find out where I made the mistake, like I do to search for a bug. And it helped me and I able to find the missed number. I got lucky, otherwise God knows how much time I had to spend to find the little mistake.

On the second day, I wanted to bring the number 42 to number 1. One might guess that it’s an easy job and can be done by few clicks. But my friend it was never that easy. The validation process made it much difficult. Normally we have validation process to make life easier, for both the application and the user. But here the validation process sucks. It makes your life much harder. So to bring number 42 to 1, I had to remove all numbers from number 1 to 42. Then I have to assign number one to the old number 42. Then type other numbers (2 to 41) to other choices. This requirement was simple, so I did not cried. But imagine if you have to make many alteration to the sequence of choices, then you are dead.

If they could have added drag and drop to sort feature, then it must have much easier to sort all choices as per our preference. And adding such feature is very easy, using jQuery or any other popular Ajax framework. Who knows, people at NIC know jQuery and AJAX or not? WordPress does not have option to order the pages using drag and drop. Instead there is an option to put a number to order the page. You assign any number and it’ll allow you to sort accordingly and without any problem. I also remember, when I was working on my first PHP project, we have done something similar to sort all videos of anyone’s channel. We are allowing any number to place there.

I have talked much about few stuffs on a single page. There are many pages which I have not used. And if I will start writing about those, then it’ll end with writing a book. But let me tell you the most sucking part of this application. The session expires too quickly that when you are busy with selecting choices to add multiple choices or assigning a number to order them according to your preference, the session expires. And after all those hard work, when you submit the page, you will find all your hard work goes in vein. You have to do those hard work again, but you are unsure whether it’ll work that time or again the session will expire. As I am a web application developer and understand how the session works, so I opened another page of the website and kept it reloading in few intervals. Which kept my session alive, while I was working hard on another page. Guess if a normal person will face this issue, what will happen? I wonder how people at NIC tested this.

Now let me talk about how this e-counseling is bad for thousands of students and their parents? There is not much access to Internet in rural parts of India. How a normal person (aam admi – mango people) from a rural area will take this opportunity of e-counseling? I don’t know whether Govt. of Orissa or NIC made any arrangement for this. The person who asked me to do all these stuff told me that almost everyone is facing issue with this e-counseling. He also mentioned the OJEE officials also facing problem to use another part of this application. If this is how a NIC web application works, then I will undoubtedly say NIC Sucks.

What is Soluto

Short Description: Soluto’s goal is to bring an end to PC user frustration, using advanced driver technology combined with collective user wisdom.

Long Description: Soluto’s goal is to bring an end to the frustrations PC users encounter, with transparency, honesty, killer technology, and the wisdom of the crowd. Soluto’s software combines low-level driver technology with collective wisdom, to detect PC users’ frustrations, reveal their cause, learn which actions really eliminate them and improve user experience. All this data is gathered in Soluto’s PC Genome, a knowledgebase of frustrations and solutions built automatically through the usage of Soluto software, for the benefit of all PC users.

Why Soluto is created?

Having been PC users since a very young age, we were simply tired of being so frustrated from our PC usage experience.

A few basic things just didn’t make sense to us:

1. Why our PC’s didn’t do what we asked them to do, when we asked them to do it.
2. Why our PC’s became increasingly sluggish and unresponsive the more we used them, and so quickly after we bought them.
3. Why we had to think twice before installing additional software, for fear of it having a negative effect on our PC’s performance and our usage of it.

We then realized that we could build technology that could undo this state of affairs. And so we did.

How Does Soluto Work

Soluto employs innovative low-level Windows kernel technologies to identify what users are asking their PC to do, and what their PC does in return. Soluto is able to pinpoint and analyze what resource obstacles stood in the way of the user’s desired actions. These can be I/O issues, network issues, resource locking, and so on.

Soluto uses the same technologies to determine what actions users took that had a positive effect on their computing experience. For example, pausing certain processes and reconfiguring certain applications can dramatically improve the behavior of a particular piece of software.

This anonymous technical data is gathered and sent to Soluto’s PC Genome, a one of a kind knowledgebase containing statistical insights about PC software and hardware behavior, as well as remedies to alleviate PC usage frustrations. By putting this information into the light, the PC Genome will help consumers and vendors alike.

Soluto employs another set of innovative algorithms to determine which remedies will have a positive impact on each Soluto user’s unique PC system. These remedies are then shared with other relevant Soluto users.

How it reduced my frustration

The above long explanation was from press kit of Soluto. Now, I will explain my story with it. Sprouter is a twitter for entrepreneurs. On their newsletter, they highlight few cool startups. I came to know about Soluto from Sprouter newsletter. And the tagline Anti-Frustration Software attracted me to check the app. And the information on the website was enough to convince me to try this app (watch the video bellow). I installed the app and waited few long hours to see it in action. I needed to restart the PC to make this work. And finally, when I booted the PC next day, it started counting the time my PC takes to boot. Then I realized my PC was wasting too much of my valuable time while booting everyday.

Soluto – Anti Frustration Software from Soluto on Vimeo.

And the cool interface of Soluto, showed me what are the application can be removed from the boot or can be paused to run after the boot completes and become stable. Normally, when we have a fresh OS installed on our system, there was few applications which starts with boot. And when we use our PC and install new software many applications join the boot, few with our knowledge and others without. However we can see the list of applications or processes which start with boot and remove them from the boot, but it’s a boring process. Also, we don’t know all the applications or processes to determine whether we should remove them or not. But if you will use Soluto, you can know few info about the application and also can know how many people did what with that application. Also, the feature to pause application to start after few seconds when boot completes and your PC becomes stable is awesome. I love it.

I am waiting for PC Genome to come. This will really help to manage PC frustration. So what are you waiting for? Download and let Soluto manage your frustration!

Many bloggers and even I, love to include one photo related to the topic. There are few other bloggers too, who just put any image to their blog. That taste is different, but good. Depending upon the source and type (like copyright etc.) of the image, it’s difficult to search a good image, which is related to your topic. For example, you need to search for a photo, which defines ‘love’. It’s easy. You will get many photos. Similarly, when you search for a photo of a mountain, you will get many. But when you will search a photo, which will show you “mistake”, then it’s difficult to find one. But sometimes, I get lucky. And found a good photo with a rare keyword. I want to share those, so I created a new category on this blog: “Photos which speak”. This category will only feature images, which are CC and express some keyword. Keep reading.

It would be much easier. If the photographers will perfectly add the tags, or keywords. But it’s also difficult to find the exact keyword for them, unless they want to sell. I tried to search a good image for this post with the keywords like “speak”, “speak up” etc. But it’s really though to get what I exactly want. When I searched for “voice”, found this.

I always say “I proud to be an Indian”, “I love my India” etc. I don’t find enough reason to justify what I say. My question to those people, who ask why should they proud to be an Indian or why should they love India: “Do you find reasons to love your mother?”. So no need to find any reasons to justify your love to your nation. In this post I will focus on some points which an (or every) Indian should. If people will follow these rules, then a day will come, those people who think they should not be an Indian will feel ashamed.

No Indian should spit on road, on corners of public or private offices, or any public or others private places. The only place they should spit is a trash bin or special spit boxes or on a wash basin. If you are spiting on a wash basin, then please run the water to clean it. What’s the main reason of an Indian’s spit so much and anywhere they want. Because they eat paan and gutkha (a tobacco product). Eating paan without tobacco is not bad. This is a part of our culture. So we can’t ask people to stop eating paan. Instead we (means our govt.) should make arrangements, so that people can spit at the right place. I don’t eat paan. But when I have a cough, I always look for a suitable place to spit it. I don’t spit it on everywhere. And I understand difficulty of finding a suitable place to spit. By the way, why there is no law against spitting on public places, like smoking in the public spaces?

No Indian should litter on everywhere. In India, most of the place look like a litter graveyard. Road to train, everywhere people litter without thinking for a second. Some people don’t use litter box where available, just put their waste anywhere. And sometimes I find difficulty to find a litter box to dispose my waste. Why there is not enough litter boxes everywhere? By the way, why there is no law against litter on public places?

There are many such small but serious activities not to be done by any Indian. If I will write one by one, then the post will be much longer and no one will read this. But why people do what they should not do. Nothing will change by this post. Most of the people who do those activities will never read this post. So, what should we do? We should educate them. This is something which will change India. How many people educate their children not to spit or litter on public places. Instead those people do all the wrong activities in front of their children. If you ask why are you doing this wrong stuff, the answer may come like these: “What’s your problem?”, “What’s wrong with this?”, “Everyone is doing this, will you stop them?” etc. Still we have to stop them and educate them. Nothing will change by criticizing them or writing an article which will create a buzz to get fame.

Let me explain the situation first. And yes, this problem came into my mind, while I was working on some task. In fact I was testing something, and solved this problem while trying to get the exact issue.

So, there are 5 variables, say numbers. And a function adds all numbers one by one and returns you the result. But the function does not work all the times. You are not sure about which numbers is it missing. So you need to run this few times and note which number is it missing each time. You have one advantage. You can decide which number to assign to those 5 variables. So, you need to assign 5 unique numbers, so that you can know which numbers the function is missing, while calculating the sum, by just looking at the output.

Please email your solutions to contests [at] debiprasad.net. Write answers of three questions.

1. What are the five numbers will you choose?
2. How these five number will help you to find which numbers the function is missing to add?
3. Why do you think the numbers you selected are the best among all other answers?

Also let me know about you, send me links to your twitter/blog/website.

Are you thinking what will be the prize for the best entries? I am not sure what to give as prize. Anyways depending upon the number of entries, I will try to feature most of you in this blog. So why are you waiting for…. send me your solution. Also, wait for my next post for the answers.

So here is the challenge for you. Write a query, which will return date of last Saturday. And remember, if today is Saturday, then consider today as last Saturday. Remember, this will be in another query. The part of the query is:

SELECT COUNT(user_id) FROM users WHERE created >= ...

To participate in this contest email your solution to contests [at] indibits.com. You can take reference/help of anything you want. I request you to write about from where you take reference/help honestly (that I will not publish).

You must be thinking, what will be the prize for the best solution? Yes, there are many. This contest is sponsored by Indibits. And if you able to provide a good solution, then either you are a great developer or you have the potential to be great developer. So, Indibits may offer a full time job to you. Also, I may give you a surprise gift. Also, your solution will be published on this blog with full credit (your name, about you and a link to your blog/twitter/site). I will publish almost all correct entries, with credits (your name and a link to your blog/twitter/site).

Unable to solve this, but you need a job? Please check out all jobs at Indibits.

Do you need a web or business solution? We create really good web applications. Please visit our website or email us at development [at] indibits.com

The project may become the first product of Indibits. As a teaser, we can just reveal, it’s going to be a simple web application, and will solve few simple problems.

So who can be the part of the internship program? We have created a page and inviting applications from the pool of talents around the world. Yes, I said it right, “around the world”. This is a remote internship program and anyone who can available online when needed to collaborate can apply for the internship.

To know more, please visit the Summer @ Indibits page.

I came to know about one wired fact from an online magazine that, “Mosquitoes have killed more humans than all the wars in history”. And my friend Debasish tells many times “u gotta be kidding me! its already 2010 & i still have to suffer mosquito bites”. I don’t know about other countries, whether there mosquitoes are an integral parts of human life or not. But in India, it’s an integral parts of Indian life. You may not believe, but people here are cultivating mosquitoes, by their bad habits though. And if you go to a general shop, you will see many products related to mosquitoes. Mosquito repellent coils, mats, liquid refills, sprays, body cremes etc. There are many brands and for every brand there is a good market too. Did you notice, all these are repelling mosquitoes. Why these companies can’t come with a product which kills mosquitoes. Well, you must be thinking how fool I am. How these companies will kill themselves. Killing mosquitoes means, making a hole in their pocket. So they create such products, which will repel mosquitoes outside. Those mosquitoes will go to their home, will have a wild party (like IPL Nights), have sex with their partners and increase their population. And the next day, they will come to join you. You will again need those mosquito repellent products. So an evergreen marketing plan.

So who will stop them to run this long term suffering plan? Why can’t Govt. of India can’t ban these companies to produce mosquito repellent products. Why can’t Govt. of India spend few money on research to end life cycle of mosquitoes? Oh!!! Now I realize (after one mosquito bite) that the local municipal corporations is not doing anything to save us from these zombies. How can I expect the top level Indian Govt. to take any serious action on this? If we spend a little fraction of money we had spent on buying mosquito repellent products on research to end life cycle of mosquitoes, then we can easily get that done.

I feel that every life in this world has a meaning. They do some good stuff to balance life in the world. But mosquitoes are only useless life in this world. They are not doing any useful stuff.

Few months before, I saw few peoples, who are not in power in local politics, were protesting against mosquito problem in my city Cuttack. But nothing happened significantly. Let me explain why nothing happened. Suppose, Mango eating party is in power and Butter licking party is in opposition. So, now Butter licking party made some hungama with the powerful presence of mosquitoes. And one day come, when Butter licking party will be in power and Mango eating party will be in opposition. If there will be no mosquito then what these people will do?

Several mosquitoes have already bitten me, while I am writing this. And I will not surprise, if I hear someone commits suicide due to terror of mosquitoes. But I have a hope that I will die after mosquitoes become history like dinosaurs.

Image credit: Fickr – tanakawho – Mosquito

Then we were introduced to ‘sunstroke’. We stopped going out at noon during summer. But the morning was always cool. The days in the summer used to too hot in the evening, but too cool in the morning and I never used to run the fan in the morning. But morning are not like those days. The world is now boiling.

It was May 2007, when I reached at Chennai to join my first job. I have heard that Chennai was too hot and experienced it then. It was too hot there that in the morning, I found sweat around my neck while I was sleeping, it was morning and the fan was moving in it’s highest speed. Sweat around my neck? When I never needed fan in the morning, how I can feel sweats around my neck? Oh, I see. So this was the heat of Chennai. I spend more than two years in Chennai. People (those who are out of Chennai, but stay there for professional/business need) say, “There are two weathers in Chennai. Nov to Feb: Summer and rest of the months are Deadly summer”. Fortunately, those two years I stayed in Chennai were not that hot as other years do. But I found myself almost naked always to beat the heat of Chennai.

I left Chennai and moved back to my home town Cuttack. And finally summer arrived here. Before I talk about summer, let me think about other seasons. Rain… it rained this year. So Rainy season is alive. Then I did not feel presence of Winter. I had never used any kind of winter special cloth this year. Then I thought what happened to Autumn? There are two seasons in Orissa, which comes after Rainy season and before Winter. First one is Autumn and I don’t know English of the other. Both are dead now a days. After winter is over, I wanted to feel the favorite season of many people: Spring. But before I feel Spring is here, I started feeling Summer.

I work late in the night, so sleep late in the night. So accordingly, I wake up late in the morning, around 9. Once I went to sun around 9 AM and the sun was so hot that it felt like a burning sun of 12 PM in the summer. Similarly, now a days when someone turns off the fan in the morning, then I feel similar to I were in Chennai. These are enough for me to realize “The World is Boiling”.

The question here is, the world is boiling. What are you doing to save it? Every little help helps. But the situation is so worst now that we need to come up and help in a bigger way. I am planning to plant few big trees in this rainy season. Just planting a mango tree (why mango? Yes, mango tree are needed for mango people, aam log) or few mango trees and posing in front of camera will not save the earth. How many of them are alive today? We need to take care of those trees until we would sure that those trees are big guys now and can take care of themselves. How many trees have you planted, after seeing a celebrity planting a tree? I think most of the answers will echo ‘NO’. So, dear celebrity, I don’t want to see you planting a tree before a camera. I would love to see a plant really growing up. If it becomes Maa ka bigda hua ladla, then OK. But I need them to grow up.

Seriously, I am asking you. What will you do to save mother earth. Forget mother earth. What will you do to save yourself? Comment here, reply me on twitter @debiprasad. I would love to see you doing a great job to save yourself. What about me now? What will I do? I am not sure. But I am seriously looking a land few lands to plant some really big trees. If you want me to help you or involve with you while planting some trees or doing some awesome stuff, then please let me know.

Image credit: Fickr – JohnLeGear – Cool Globes Chicago Sad Earth