Search your TV ….. the google way.
Wonder if the days are near when Google will crawl souls and then they will let you do some soul searching.
Archive for the ‘What is :’ category
What is Google TV
June 16th, 2010Vuvuzela
June 10th, 2010If you are in South Africa and heading down to the football stadium this world and you hear a bunch of elephant trumpeting, don’t run its probably a bunch of football fans blowing their Vuvuzela. Vuvuzela is the unofficial musical(if it can be called so) instrument of the world cup.
Vuvuzella is the unique way South African football fans express their love for the game. Vuvuzella is basically a horn attached to a long tube, which makes incredibly loud sound if played right. It requires flexible lib movement and good lung strength.
This bizzare instrument has equally bizzare stories of origin – from bicycle horns to zulu instruments. Its also not short of controversies as players and refrees have often complained about distractions caused due to this instrument.
Well all is fair in love and war and football happens to be both.
Total Football
May 28th, 2010Total Football is the concept of a influential tactical theory of football in which any outfield player can take over the role of any other player in a team (except the goalkeeper!). It was pioneered by Dutch football club Ajax from 1969 to 1973, and further used by the Netherlands National Football Team in the 1974 FIFA World Cup. It was invented by Rinus Michels, a famous Dutch football trainer/coach (who was the coach of both Ajax and the Netherlands national team at the time).
The Dutch eventhough used this theory to much effect in the 1974 FIFA world cup, they lost in the final to West Germany.
In Total Football, a player who moves out of his position is replaced by another from his team, thus retaining the team’s intended organizational structure. In this fluid system, no player is fixed in his nominal role; anyone can be successively an attacker, a midfielder and a defender. The only player fixed in his nominal position is the goalkeeper.
Total Football’s tactical success depends largely on the adaptability of each footballer within the team, in particular his ability to quickly switch positions depending on the on-field situation. The theory requires players to be comfortable in multiple positions; hence, it places high technical and physical demands on them.
Reference:
Wikipedia
Treskilling Yellow
May 26th, 2010
The Treskilling Yellow is a postage stamp of Sweden issued in 1855. It is considered as the most expensive stamp in the world auctioned at a price of $2.3 million till date.
It is also considered as the world’s rarest stamp.
The name is derived from the denomination of 3 skillings (Scandinavian Monetary unit) of the stamp.
The normal three skilling stamp printed in Sweden is colored green while the eight skilling stamp was printed in yellow. However, due to an unknown error (but most likely the three skilling plate was accidently replaced by an eight skilling one), the three skilling stamp was printed in yellow, creating the Treskilling Yellow Stamp.
In the 1970s, the Swedish Postal Museum caused controversy by declaring the stamp to be a forgery, but after examination by two different commissions, it was agreed that it was a genuine error.
History
The only known copy of the Treskilling Yellow was discovered by a schoolboy named Georg Wilhelm Baeckman in 1886 while going through his grandparents’ attic.
To this date, this is the only copy known in existence and is worth about $80 billion/pound by weight – one of the most expensive objects in the world!
References:
http://www.famousstamps.org/treskillingyellow.htm
red ring of death
May 18th, 2010Those having a X-Box 360 gaming console will dread one thing more than playing those gory games…the so called ‘Red ring of death’.
The X-Box 360 gaming rig has a way of displaying the technical problems that it can encounter over its lifetime. Many of the issues can be identified by a series of red lights flashing on the power LED of the console; the three flashing red lights nicknamed as the Red ring of death being the most infamous.
The Xbox 360’s ring is divided into four separate quadrants. Each division turning red indicates a separate problem, all with a different way of resolving the issue.
Under normal operation, the power LED is illuminated with green light. Three flashing red lights around the Xbox 360 power button represent an internal problem that requires service. Warning signs may include freeze-ups, graphical problems in the middle of gameplay, such as checkerboard or pinstripe patterns on the screen, and sound errors, and the console only responds to pressing the power button to turn it off.
This error code is usually caused by failure of one or more hardware components, although it can indicate that the console is not receiving enough power from the power supply.
The 3 flashing lights error code is designated as ‘General Hardware Failure’.
Causes of the hardware failure
Reports say the problems may have started in the graphics chip which was designed in-house by Microsoft.
One possible cause of the General Hardware Error may be cold solder joints.
Another report blames the problems primarily on the use of the wrong type of lead-free solder, a type that when exposed to elevated temperatures for extended periods of time becomes brittle and can develop hair-line cracks that are almost irreparable.
Mercedes-Benz Classic Centre
April 19th, 2010The Mercedes-Benz Classic Center in Fellbach is the port of call for owners and prospective buyers of the company’s classic automobiles from all over the world.
Being the largest corporate department for historical vehicles, the Classic Center offers a comprehensive range of services – for all classics from the Benz, Daimler, Mercedes and Mercedes-Benz brands.
The Center is situated in Stuttgart.
At the Classic Center, an extensive range of model cars, accessories, literature and watches is on offer, as well as the opportunity to drive Mercedes-Benz classics.
There are cars as early as 1900′s that can be acquired, of course at a price!
The Classic Center is the only place where spare parts of any Benz car ever made can be procured.
Reference:
http://www.mercedes-benz-classic.com/
What Is : Light Peak
February 4th, 2010Light Peak is an optic fiber based technology from Intel to replace the existing clutter of ports creeping into laptops, desktops and media-player with a single connector. The clean-up task originally taken up by the USB ports have fallen short due to the limited bandwidth supported (4 Gbps on yet to be adapted USB3.0). Light Peak promises 10Gbps with a cable length of 10s of meters if not 100s. With Light Peak connectors standards like network, USB, HDMI, DVI, display port ‘can’ become a thing of the past.
Light Peak is not only targeted at the desktops/laptops and other xTops, a low powered version is also expected targeted at hand-held devices. And the very interesting fact according to engadget is that the request for such a technology has come from, guess who, Apple.
This year the gadgets around us might go ‘light’ on the ‘wire’ noodles.
What is : cscope
January 24th, 2010cscope is an open source tool that aids in source code browsing by indexing the code tree. Apart from C, C++ – for which it was originally intended – cscope supports Java, Python, Perl, PHP.
cscope supports searches for symbol, function definitions, where the function is called from, list of functions within the function among others. It based on index file that has to be generated before using cscope. If the code size is large the search may take several seconds but there are methods to optimize this. Which I will cover in the coming posts.
cscope can also be integrated with Emacs. cscope is also supported in Windows, here is how to use cscope with emacs in Windows environment …
Goto
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cscope/files/cscope/
Select the latest vertion that has csc<ver.no>.zip
This was the latest version at the time of writing this post
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cscope/files/cscope/15.4/csc154b.zip/download
Unzip the downloaded file to a convenient location. The unzipped files contain a bin directory. Add the path of the bin directory to the path environment variable ( generally right click on My Computer -> Advanced Tab -> Environment Variable and select edit on the PATH variable).
Get the xcscope.el file from the source and copy it to the site-list folder of the emacs installtion.
You are now good to go.
How to use cscope :
Goto the top level directory where you want to search for symbols and definitions and run this from command line :
cscope -b -R
This generates an index file.
Now open emacs and you should see a cscope menu, clicking on which lists the commands available and their keyboard shortcuts. Happy browsing !
Useful links:
10 Minutes MBA
November 25th, 2009Jeff Moser a software engineer smitten by the ratio of engineers to mba graduates takes an intrest in management studies and picks up the book ’10 days MBA’. The link below is an outline his read. You can find a few paragraphs each on:
- Marketing,
- Ethics,
- Accounting,
- Organizational Behaviour,
- Quantitative Analysis,
- Finance,
- Operations,
- Economics
What Is: AES
November 17th, 2009AES stands for Advanced Encryption Standard a de facto standard in current encryption scenario. It’s a successor of the DES – Data Encryption Standard. Both AES and DES are symmetric key algorithm, in simple term they use ‘a’ key whose secrecy should be maintained and is used for both encryption and decryption. This method compares against Asymmetric Key Algorithms such as RSA algorithms where different keys are used for encryption and decryption. The key used for encryption called the ‘public key’ can be distributed. Only the secretly held ‘private key’ can decrypt an encrypted message.
An analogy : The symmetric key can be compared to a pad lock. You use the padlock on the object you want to keep safe/secret and lock it with a key. Only you who has the key (or whoever you share the key with) can lock and unlock the padlock.
The asymmetric key algorithm can be compared to a numeric pad lock, which doesn’t have a key but knowing a secret sequence of number can unlock the key. So I would give out the numeric padlocks to everyone, this is publishing your public key. If you want to send a secret message in a box to me you use the numeric padlock to lock the box. Once locked you cannot unlock it as you don’t have the secret key. Only I the owner of the secret number sequence can unlock and read the message.
Here is an excellent link to a blog by Jeff Moser which demonstrates how AES algorithm work, the theory and math behind it using stick man figures and its humorous too : http://www.moserware.com/2009/09/stick-figure-guide-to-advanced.html.
Related link : AES Animation
