Making an Impact through Mini-Projects

From days of yore , education in India has been a very integral part of Ones life. Indian culture is stepped in education of different types – from the age old Gurukul system to the modern Montessori methods. Traditionally Education in India is looked upon by everyone as a holistic experience.

Engineering has become a core area where students step into in a large numbers. For Engineering Students  especially for Computer Science and IT students  it is important to pad up their industry skill-set before they are placed to compete in the global arena. Students nowadays are placed in their third year itself and the final year projects are being carried out in their fourth year leaving behind their practical skills during campus placements. Keeping this in mind many students have started doing mini projects. In some of the technical groups in which I am a member, nowadays I see my fellow students started with their mini projects.

Mini projects develops practical skills in students. In spite of all the theory we learn, the industry should also know our ability in completing projects using our own initiative. I am fascinated with the latest trends in attending internships from the companies as we get to learn lots more from these.

On-line mini Projects through sourceforge.net and other open source development initiatives will surely add value to our experience cloud. These projects would definitely benefit ourselves, but the very least we can do in our second and third year of our engineering would be to work on mini projects and present papers.

InternetBus Project : Explore the World of Internet

We probably know Google from the products on the Internet, like Google Search, Gmail, Orkut and Google Maps. Soon, they may even visit a town near you, to give you a first hand experience of what the Internet has to offer you.

The Internet Bus Project is an attempt educate people about what the Internet is, and how it may be beneficial to their lives, by taking the Internet experience to them through a customised Internet-enabled bus, which will travel to several towns and cities across India.

The bus started at Chennai recently and there was lots of people who realised the essence of the work carried out by Google and supported it. Due to the problem in Srilanka, the local goverment here at Chennai declared bandth and the roads were left with none. If this has not happened now, Iam sure that this project would have reached a wider audience.

Fortunately Google have planned this project to take place in every town in the state and the Internet Bus is now on the roads heading straight to vellore. I am sure that people and fellow students at vellore will be able to make use of this event to realise and Explore the World of Internet.

Here is the schedule that the Google Internet Bus will follow:

February
03 Feb Chennai
05 Feb Vellore
06 Feb Krishnagiri
07 Feb Salem
11 Feb Erode
12 Feb Tiruppur
14 Feb Coimbatore
18 Feb Dindigul
19 Feb Madurai
23 Feb Tirunelveli
25 Feb Nagercoil
27 Feb Tuticorin

March
02 Mar Pudukkottai
03 Mar Tiruchirappalli
06 Mar Thanjavur
08 Mar Kumbakonam
10 Mar Neyveli
12 Mar Cuddalore
13 Mar Tiruvannamalai

The Database TASTE Challenge – SQL Vs Oracle

Recently all Oracle certified Professionals were given a chance to migrate to Microsoft SQL 2008. The moment I deployed SQL 2008, I found it was a excellent platform for all DBA’s. I realized SQL provided me the perfect stage to exhibit all kind of services from Analytical to BI.

Comparing ORACLE 11g to MS SQL 2008, I found all the additional services as built-in feature in MS SQL 2008, but not in ORACLE 11g.Secure, robust, easy to maintain, cost-effective solution is provided by SQL 2008. SQL 2008 are launched in different flavors, and let me chart all those here;

Express Edition, Workgroup Edition, Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, Developer Edition, Web Edition, Mobile Edition.

I will advise Enterprise level to all, as it has no CPU limit and unlimited storage. Each flavor is special in its own.  Watch this video and you will know what peers think on SQL 2008.

Let’s get some Taste Teasers!!!

Sans Review

FIREBUG – A must have Add-On

Sans Review

Man. I thought the Web Developer extension for Firefox was extremely cool, but this very useful add-on to the world’s best browser is an even better equipped toolbox for front-end developers. You can tweak every little code detail right from the browser and see the results instantly. I found the option to temporarily disable individual lines of CSS code to be very useful. A must have for web designers.

WANTED TECH GURU

Every once in a while ideas pop into my head. I can’t help it. Most are crap, but some warrant further investigation. Problem is that I do not have the technical knowledge to look into some of them and create proof-of-concept type applications. I’m pretty good with WordPress and Scripting, and Database development. One of my ideas would require using the Google Maps API for instance, others need somewhat sophisticated database operations or SMS interaction, or… who knows.

What I’ve been looking for for a while now is someone to collaborate with on these concepts, brainstorm about them and -if we feel there’s something to them- go ahead and realize them. This, of course, is not a job offer. Chances are you’ll never make a dime, but there’s also a slim chance we’d be the next Twitter, or even the next YouTube. So if you’re into PHP (Ruby?), javascript, and like exploring new technical developments, contact me. Who knows what it’ll lead to.

Browse Photos in 3D from Firefox

How cool is this? A Firefox plugin that raises the bar for all other image browsers. Installing it will add a small ‘play’ button to images on Flickr, Picasa and tons of other sites. Clicking that button open the PicLens screen where you can intuitively browse through the gallery in 3D. Very easy to set up, and a surefire way to impress your friends.

http://www.piclens.com

Chrome Out of Beta

Sans Review

Google’s Chrome Web browser for Windows is no longer beta software. The company released Chrome 1.0 on Thursday, a mere 3-1/2 months after its initial release. Google describes its business as search, ads, and apps. Search and ads, it dominates. The online applications market remains contested, not to mention the mobile applications market. Google needs a browser of its own, so it isn’t dependent on the goodwill of Apple, Microsoft, or Mozilla for access to its users.

According to me, the 1.0 designation is meaningless. Chrome is both done and a work in progress. Mac and Linux versions are still being worked on, with no declared target date for release. New features, like an API for extensions, also are under development. And then there are the bugs. Google’s Chrome bug-tracking system lists more than 2,400 open issues. Not all of them are bugs and not all are serious bugs, but clearly plenty of significant issues remain.

Googling It – 2008 Hot List

I was moved with the latest release of ” Top searches of 2008″ from Google. The Summit was based on a yearly search statistic carried by Google India.  NDTV recently published these statistics, on behalf of Google. As Information forming the integral part of every person’s daily life, companies like Google needs to record the exact mindset (need) of their customers. There are 60,million users surfing in India, variably there are  66 million cable tv user. The impact of media and Information Technology, in today’s fast changing world shows the collective mindset of the people. The country (INDIA) has grown really International as  the quality of search being carried by the people reflects this.

Google reported, Social networking sites are beating e-mail sites. This issue is because communication has become more integral part of every citizen. Indian’s are very social. Social networking ratings in the Google Hit list shows that, the sites such as Orkut, Facebook serves an efficient way of communication. People in India, at early mornings are more inclined towards checking their mailboxes, hence there is more traffic in E-mail sites, whereas in evenings people are inclined towards social networking sites and entertaining searches such as “Katrina Kaif”, eventually losing their sleep 🙂

There have been a large Indian’s putting a good show through their mobile searches. Having 300 million people using mobiles, Google releases the top mobile searches. These include

Orkut, yahoo
Wap tricks
Gmail
Katrina kaif, etc…

There has been a passion towards Information, in the recent past and people have a collective opinion on all areas as these statistics reflect the Nation’s true mindset. I was shocked by seeing some new faces into the top search list of 2008 as south Indian actress Namitha is into the top 10 searches and there are people who are really consistent in the search list since 2006, they are Mahatma Gandhi, Sachin Tendulkar, Sania Mirza.

These results really show how people have refined in using internet and these stats prove, how efficiently they search. I do believe that, information retrieval will become more sophisticated in the days to come as people have started using their mobile phones efficiently and I hope with the arrival of 3G phones, video searches in mobile phones will be more popular and sites like Youtube will make a revolution in the search history.

Some of the other search terms which marked its presence in the “Top 10” were

how to lose weight
how to gain weight
what is global warming
what is internet
what is computer
where the mind is without fear
why did i get married

🙂