Hug a developer today

Got an interesting video today and thought will share. This is an interesting other side of the story, although I am not as repressed as shown.
Good humour too. Enjoy this.

A genious called Vishal Bharadwaj !!

The below movie below was directed by Vishal Bharadwaj and co-produced by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is one of the four short films by four Indian directors on AIDS awareness. What amazes me is the way Vishal has portrayed the fear first and then has given strength too to alley the fears of a common man infected by HIV. Hats off Vishal, You have to go too far...

Blood Brothers by Vishal Bharadwaj


Other movies you can see here:
Migration by Mira Nair
Positive by Farhaan Akhtar
Prarambha by Santosh Sivan

PhotoZoom...Way to go with Silverlight...

Finally Silverlight 1.0 is RTMed, Silverlight 2.0 is in BETA and along with these you will see a host of applications which uses Silverlight. Microsoft itself unveiled its Deep Zoom Composer in MIX08 Conference in Las Vegas(http://visitmix.com/2008/default.aspx).

Deep Zoom Composer allows you to quickly import your own images, arrange and position them to your liking, and export the final output as either a Deep Zoom Image or Collection that can be fed into Silverlight's MutliScaleImage control. To enable this in one more way, MS Live labs came up with a site too(http://photozoom.mslivelabs.com/) which can do all the zoom intense processing at MS Servers for your albums. I have created below collage for my pics using Photozoom. Have a look. You can zoom in/out the collage by using mouse wheels and drag the pics using your mouse.





Steps to do if you wanna give it a try:

1. Visit PhotoZoom website and login with your Windows Live ID.
2. Create a photo album and upload a bunch of images over there.Wait until the "Processing album zoom data" warning goes away.
3. Once you are able to see the streaming content on the PhotoZoom website, do a view-source of the page and look for the first iframe tag.
4. Copy this iFrame tag and paste it into your web-page. You can change the width and height to suit the available real estate on your page

With this.. you are done. Silverlight is indeed a new web experience...

Thought for the day: Vote-bank politics of Reservation.

Enough technical....I thought I should give words to my thoughts today on a burning issue called reservation.
Have tried to contribute to this students movement and fight this raging controversy in whatever way I could. Still I feel myself guilty to my own young generations for not being able to give enough support to the guys who are fighting hard for not only ourself, but for a larger section of society.
Strange enough to see a learned prime minister bowing down to the deep shit of politics and stranger is the view of the so called upper section favouring opposition, led by BJP, which is giving silent support to this bloody act of UPA.
Even the HRD Minister has no plans or data whatsoever in this reservation matter. They are single mindedly, illogically pushing for this vote-bank politics of reservation.
This will ultimately lead to brain-drain in India and 5-6 years down the line, the talent pool in India will begin to decrease.
Kudos to our so-called learned Prime minister and so called learned Mr President.
Brain drain will start from here........but do our currupt politicians care?

CISCO AON for RFID

Cisco® Application-Oriented Networking (AON) is the foundation for a new class of network-embedded products and solutions that help converge intelligent networks with application infrastructure based either on service-oriented or traditional architectures. With Cisco AON products and services, organizations can embed a new class of application message-level intelligence into the network to better meet the underlying needs of applications for real-time visibility, security, event-based messaging, optimized delivery, and other core integration and deployment services. Cisco AON technology can natively understand the content and context of application messages such as advanced shipping notices, stock allocations, or purchase orders and can conduct operations on those messages in transit according to business policies.
RFID is exactly the type of network-based application in which the policy-driven infrastructure services provided by Cisco AON meet the challenges encountered in deploying enterprise-class solutions. Cisco AON uniquely integrates RFID event capture and intelligent message routing into the pervasive network, centrally coordinating the wide distribution of RFID capabilities throughout the network. The Cisco AON for RFID solution uniquely provides RFID tag data filtering, aggregation, and other services that manage, route, and secure RFID data all in the fabric of the network. As enterprise initiatives mature from early RFID pilots toward large-scale production deployments of RFID technology, the use of RFID tagging continues to proliferate. However, by filtering much of the tag data at the network edge, and by coordinating across disparate RFID deployments throughout the enterprise, data center applications avoid being flooded with unwanted information.
Cisco AON is designed to use existing investments in Cisco Systems® hardware. Enterprises that already own a Cisco integrated services router (ISR) or Cisco Catalyst® 6500 Series switch can upgrade their current networking equipment to an RFID-capable system simply by adding an additional blade or module. These provide core Cisco AON services integrated with RFID filtering and reader management capabilities provided by ConnecTerra, a leading supplier of enterprise software for RFID and device computing.

EPC Global Network in Action

Working in coordination, the components defined above provide the ability to capture and share information in the EPCglobal Network. To capture data, inexpensive EPC tags carrying a unique EPC number are affixed to objects in motion in the supply chain. Then, strategically placed EPC readers at gateways throughout the supply chain will read each tagged object as it passes and communicate the EPC number, the time, date and location of the read to the EPCglobal Network. EPC Middleware will control and integrate the EPC tags, readers, and local infrastructure at the individual site.
Once the information is captured as described above, the EPCglobal Network then uses Internet technology to create a network for sharing that information among authorized trading partners in the global supply chain. Discovery Services is a suite of services that enable users to find data related to a specific EPC and to request access to that data. The ONS is one component of Discovery Services. From there, actual access to data in the EPCglobal Network is managed at the local level by the EPC IS where the company itself designates which trading partners have access to its information. The result is a network of information that traces individual product movement in real time.

Radio frequency identification (RFID)

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is revolutionizing the way organizations around the world track the location and movement of goods and assets. RFID technology utilizes inexpensive wireless RFID chips or tags that report their location to nearby scanners. Items with RFID tags can be tracked from a supplier’s factory floor to the retailer’s store shelves.
The technology is already helping major retailers better control their inventory. Soon other organizations are expected to find innovative uses for RFID.