Open Source Tech India

Optimize Your WordPress Permalinks

2011-10-25T10:19:00.001-07:00

I am going to teach you how to optimize your WordPress permalinks for better On-Page SEO, which is the first thing you need to do as soon as you have installed WordPress on your server. Learn how to create a custom permalink structure for your WordPress powered site, optimize them for Search Engines and why it is important.

1. Default WordPress Permalinks

By default, the WordPress permalinks for your posts and pages are very SEO-Unfriendly and look a bit like this:

http://www.domain.com/?p=1

If you know the basics of on-page SEO then you know how this is a problem. Basically the ending of your URL should contain keywords that reflect the content of that page or post. Not only is this more user-friendly (and looks less sketchy when people share links to your site) but it also helps tell search engines, like Google, what that page should be about (On-Page SEO is all about “Relevance”).

Your permalinks should be something like this:

http://www.domain.com/optimize-wordpress-permalinks

2. Optimizing Your Permalinks

Luckily WordPress does provide a very easy way to optimize your permalink structure. All you have to do is log into your WordPress admin panel and go to the following location:

Settings –> Permalinks

On this page, click on “Custom Structure” and then to the right you’ll want to enter the following:

%postname%

Now your permalinks will be created using keywords from your post or page title.

*If you notice I put a “.html” at the end of mine. I really like it because I have subfolders on my domain and it helps distinguish between the two, but it probably doesn’t do much or anything in terms of Search Engine Optimization.

3. Manually Editing Your Permalinks Per Page Or Post

After you set up your custom permalink structure you can also manually edit your permalinks while creating or editing your posts/pages. This way you can choose the exact words you want for your URL structure. To do so just click on the small “edit” button right under the field where you put in your post/page title (see image below). Makes sure to click “save draft” or “update” after you change it.

4. Advantages Of A Better Permalink Structure

The advantages of optimizing your permalink structure to a keyword-rich one are the following:

Makes your URL’s easier to read by search engine robots
Makes your URL easier to read in search engine results (may increase clicks)
Gives more weight to the words in your URL

5. Quick Tips For Better Permalinks

Changing the permalink structure works pretty well, however, you may want to edit them manually (as explained above) to make them even better then the default. Keep the following tips in mind when optimizing your permalinks.

Keep them short -hopefully between 1-4
Keep them relevant – make sure to choose the keywords you want your page or post to rank for(obviously they will be relevant to your content)
Avoid “fluff’ words – don’t use words like: it, and, of, the…etc.

reboot is not the same as init 6

2011-10-21T17:30:00.001-07:00

Here’s an interesting Linux tidbit that not many ESX admins realize.

reboot is not the same as init 6

In Linux, the init 6 command gracefully reboots the system running all the K* shutdown scripts first, before rebooting. The reboot command does a very quick reboot. It doesn’t execute any kill scripts, but just unmounts filesystems and restarts the system. The reboot command is more forceful.

So, should I use reboot or init 6? – neither! My advice is to use the shutdown command. shutdown will do a similar job to init 6, but it has more options and a better default action. Along with kicking off an init 6, the shutdown command will also notify all logged in users (logged in at a tty), notify all processes the system is going down and by default will pause for a set time before rebooting (giving you the chance to cancel the reboot if you realize that you made a mistake). Jolly civil.

How does this advice apply to VMware ESX servers you ask? Well I’m not a VMware kernel developer so to be honest I’m not the best person to ask (if you do know murky details, then please let us know in the comments). However I will say this; I will always use shutdown -r first and foremost. It’s just a better habit to get into.

Is there a difference on an ESX server? Yes, but as I said I’m entirely sure how it affects the VMkernel processes. The reason I definitely know – a couple of times I’ve had to use the reboot command to force an unresponsive ESX shutdown -r.

P.S. This also applies to init 0 / halt (i.e. use shutdown -h instead).

Creating Web Pages with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - Free 408 page eBook

2011-10-20T09:14:00.000-07:00

The Easy, Example-Based Guide to Ajax for Every Web Developer. http://bit.ly/ajaxguide

Using Ajax, you can build Web applications with the sophistication and usability of traditional desktop applications and you can do it using standards and open source software. Now, for the first time, there's an easy, example-driven guide to Ajax for every Web and open source developer, regardless of experience.
You'll not only learn how to write "functional" code, but also master design patterns for writing rock solid, high-performance Ajax applications. You'll also learn how to use frameworks such as Ruby on Rails to get the job done fast.

• Learn how Ajax works, how it evolved, and what it's good for
• Understand the flow of processing in Ajax applications.
• Build Ajax applications with XML and the XMLHttpRequest object.
• Integrate back-end code, from PHP to C#. Use XSLT and XPath, including XPath Axis
• Develop client-side Ajax libraries to support code reuse.
• Streamline development with Ruby on Rails and the Ruby programming language

Download Here: http://bit.ly/ajaxguide

10 Ways To Launch and Promote A Product Using Social Media

2011-09-27T21:03:00.000-07:00

Recently I joined the Customer success team in my company and found this article from Jeff Bullas , interesting and worth a share. All these methods will surely improve the social footprint.

Launching a product using social media provides multi-media rich global platforms that makes it easy for each social network community to share the message and let other people know about your brand.

Promoting, marketing and launching any product globally was usually left to multi-nationals with big budgets and access to prime time TV and other expensive mass media and to be effective required multi-million dollar budgets.

Here is a case study of Guy Kawasaki’s launch and promotion of his book ‘Enchantment The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions‘ and how he used a multi channel social media marketing strategy and tactics that can be applied to any product.

This approach or a subset of his campaign can be applied by anyone with the right discipline and appropriate resources and ‘yes’ you will need a marketing budget but it will not need to be 6 or 7 figures.

Guy Kawasaki is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist (Garage Technology Ventures), a well known blogger and also famous for his RSS aggregator “Alltop”

He was involved in launching and marketing the Apple McIntosh in 1984 and has written ten books with ‘Enchantment’ being his latest.

So how did he launch and promote his book using social media?

1. Facebook

The Facebook fan page was built specifically for the book and its main aim was to provide a community site on the largest social networking community on the planet that would engage and then share. To build up the fan base that provided critical mass to share an incentive to “like” the page was achieved by giving away a free book. In this case it was his first book “The McIntosh Way”

Primary Goal:

Create an incentive for people to “like” the page by providing a free product and so grow his fan base

Cost: Approximately $2,700

2. Website and Blog

He realized after 2 months that Facebook was great but limited and needed a site he owned that was not restricted to the whims and restrictions of the Facebook environment and its terms and conditions. He built the site which was part of his own website.

Primary Goal

To make it easy for his book reviewers to obtain information and images necessary to review the book.

Cost: Approximately $4,000

3. Book Reviews by Other Bloggers and A-Listers

Building a tribe before launch becomes very apparent here and with Guy’s access to his Alltop data base of 20,000 bloggers he was able to offer a free review copy to all 20,000 and from that he attained the following traction. He used eCairn to indentify the social media movers and shakers to find other bloggers outside of his own database listing.

1,300 requested a copy
150 interviews
200 reviews

All reviews appeared on his website which gave visibility to all the reviewers as a way of saying thank you.

Main Goal:

To provide 3rd party credibility authority and social proof that was widespread and ubiquitous

Cost: $16,000 (but this was borne by the publisher)

4. Email

The shiny new toy ‘social media’ is not the only marketing tactic that he used and they knew that a 160,000 emails (130,000 acquired over 30 years of making contacts including his blog and website) would be highly effective.

The numbers and results for this

30,000 extra email from AlwaysOn
3.75% click through rate

Primary Takeaway:

Again it is the building of a marketing base via email prior to launch that is vital to have in your tool kit and assets to ensure launch success

Cost: Approximately $4,500 set up and $1,000 per month (allow 3 months) for the email campaign (Total $7,500)

5. Banner Ads

This was a 6 week campaign on Google AdWords, Facebook Ads and Twitter (Promoted Tweets). They used Clix Marketing for managing the campaign. Both Google Adwords and Facebook ads are easy enough to do your self

Primary Goal

To get access to potential buyers outside of his sphere of influence and use the power of Google and Facebook to target the rightaudience.

Cost: Allow $2,000-$3,000

6. Photo Contest

Every one loves a contest and they work well on Social media. He offered 5 cameras and an Apple iPad. He had a Facebook contest app designed by Strutta.

Results

1,150 entries
35,000 visits
70,000 entry views

Primary Goal

To create ‘Buzz’ .

Cost: Approximately $6,000 (App $2,000 and prizes $4,000)

Major Takeaway: Start a tribe before even writing that book or product so that when you launch you have a a fan base that will be ready to buy and spread your message for you whether that is on Facebook, Twitter or Blog. Guy used his blog, website and his social media community on Alltop as his primary platform for marketing his product.

7. Quizzes

He took a quiz he had in his book and took it online and provided it in two channels (Facebook and his website). The surprise here was that the website version results far exceeded the Facebook results.

700 took the Quiz on Facebook
2,900 took the quiz on the website

He used Wildfire which costs $400 per month to create the self-serve quiz and used Electric Pulp to create the website version ($3,000)

Primary Goal: To engage and also create more buzz.

Cost: Approximately $5,000

8. Infographic

The popularity of the infographics was taken into account and resulted in reviewers and bloggers embedding it in their sites. He hired Column Five to create the graphic which provides an overview of the book in one image.

Primary Goal: To provide a media that could go ‘viral’.

Cost: Approximately$2,000

9. PowerPoint

He had created a PowerPoint presentation that would not only be used at key note presentations but would also be published on Slideshare and spread the brand and buzz.

So far it has been

Viewed over 40,000 times
Favorited over 180 times
Embedded in over 90 websites
ReTweeted 81 times
Shared on Facebook 126 times

Enchantment v3.0

View more presentations from Guy Kawasaki

Primary Goal: Placement on the Slideshare social networking platform to make it easy for people to share and embed

Cost: Approximately $3,600

10. Slideshow on YouTube

Thank you is a small phrase that produces big results and as a way of saying thank you to all the companies and people involved in the book project launch and promotion he created a slideshow on YouTube. They used Animoto to create the slideshow.

Primary Goal: Provide another online digital property that spreads worldwide and as a minimum will be shared by the all the parties mentioned

Cost: Approximately$1,000 for design and $50 a month for the software (professional edition)

Total Cost: Approximately $50,000

(Including $16,000 for books from the publisher and $34,000 by Guy)

This could be reduced significantly by doing some of this yourself and also focusing on the channels that provide the greatest leverage.

The major takeaway is that you need to build a tribe before you launch any product or book. Guy Kawasaki has worked over the years to build his tribe and here is a snapshot of its size.

Twitter: 351,000 followers
Email subscribers: 130,000
Bloggers: 20,000
Facebook: 52,000

Have you started growing your tribe?

This case study was sourced from Guy’s own article about his book launch on Mashable.

Chapter 1: { RedBean Review } Subversion History

2011-09-07T03:16:00.000-07:00

I have started to deep dive into Subversion and its usage to better understand the architecture and fundamentals which makes them as a critical component in the SDLC process. In this regard, I have planned to blogpost on each chapter i read, which can summarize the core concepts delivered.

Anyone new to Subversion are recommended to work on the book "Version Control with Subversion" By Ben Collins-Sussman for in-depth knowledge.

Version Control Systems

Art of Managing changes to information in a standard Repository style. The specialty of the Subversion repo is that it remembers every change ever written to it: every change to every file, and even changes to the directory tree itself.

Subversion Timeline

CVS was the early and most popular version control system which had lots of pitfalls, By then CollabNet Inc. had a collaboration software suite called SourceCast which used CVS as its initial version control system. CollabNet then had an idea to bring out a new Version control system in the name of Subversion which overcame most of the drawbacks of CVS.

Subversion Features

Unlike CVS, Subversion provides:

a. Directory Versioning

b. True Version History

c. Atomic Commits

d. Versioned Metadata

e. Choice of Network layers

f. Consistent data handling

g. Effective branching and Tagging

h. Hackability

Subversion Architecture

Subversion Components

svn

The command-line client program

svnversion

A Program for reporting the state of the working copy

svnloook

A tool for inspecting a subversion repository

svnadmin

A tool for creating, tweaking or repairing a subversion repository

svndumpfilter

A Program for filtering subversion repository dumpfile format streams

mod_dav_svn

A plugin-module for the apache HTTP Server, used to make your repository available to others over a network

svnserve

A Custom standalone server program, runnable asa deamon process or invokable by SSH; another way to make your repository available to others over a network

SSH and SCP: Howto, tips & tricks

2011-08-26T04:43:00.000-07:00

This tutorial is about SSH and SCP. You will learn how to connect to a remote host and how to copy between hosts. This tutorial also documents a few important differences between the commands.

Difficulty: Basic

Before we start: in this tutorial, you will come across both SSH and ssh. The difference is this: SSH is the general protocol, and ssh is the linux SSH client command.

SSH

SSH is some kind of an abbreviation of Secure SHell. It is a protocol that allows secure connections between computers. In this tutorial, we'll be dealing with the ssh command on Linux, the OpenSSH version. Most Linux distributions feature the OpenSSH client today, but if you want to be sure, have a look at the SSH manpage on your system. You can do this by typing:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ man ssh

Note: this should be done in a terminal. This tutorial assumes that you have some basic terminal knowledge, like knowing how to start a terminal session on your system and being familiar with the basic commands and syntaxes.

If it displays something like this

NAME
ssh - OpenSSH SSH client (remote login program)

then you can be quite sure you're running the OpenSSH version. For more background information about SSH, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSH.

The most simple case

In the most simple case, you can connect to a server that supports ssh with a syntax as short as this:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ ssh yourserver

Note: If you do not have any ssh server nearby that you can access, you can also try this command with your own computer as a server. To do this, replace "yourserver" with "localhost".

Of course, yourserver should be replaced by a hostname or an ip address of the server you want to connect to. As you can see in the terminal snippet, I am logged in as rechosen. If you do not specify a username (I'll explain how to do that later in this tutorial), SSH will assume that you want to login with the username you're currently logged in with. So, in this case, SSH will try the username rechosen.

Of course, you need to be sure that the server supports ssh connections. The ssh client tries to connect to port 22 defaultly. This means that, if you want to connect to a remote host with the default settings, you should make sure that, if applicable, port 22 is forwarded to the server you're trying to connect to. You will find more regarding the SSH port further in this tutorial.

Now, back to the command we ran. If the server supports SSH connections and you can reach it by port 22, you should be prompted for a password (if this is the first time you try to connect to the server, ssh will first ask the question if you want to continue connecting, which can generally just be answered with a 'yes'). If you type a password here, you won't see asterisks appearing. Don't panic, this is ssh's normal behaviour. It makes connecting using ssh even more safe, because any accidental spectators won't be able to see the length of the password. After entering the password, if the username and the password were correct, you should be running a shell on the server. If not, make sure you are connecting to a server of which you know that you should be able to login with your username and the specified password. You could try connecting to your own computer (see the note beneath the terminal quote) or read on to learn how to specify an other username.

Once you're done trying the ssh shell, you can exit it by pressing Ctrl + D.

Specifying a username

It's actually quite simple to specify a different username. You might even already be familiar with it. See the following example:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ ssh yourusername@yourserver

The above will make ssh try to connect with the username "yourusername" instead of (in my case) rechosen. This syntax is also used by a lot of other protocols, so it'll always come in handy to know it. By the way, you will still be asked for a password. For security reasons, it is not even possible to directly specify the password in the syntax. You will always be asked interactively, unless you start configuring the server in an advanced way (which is exactly why that topic is out of this tutorials scope: this tutorial documents how to use the clients, not how to configure the server).

Specifying a port

There are many reasons to move the ssh service to an other port. One of them is avoiding brute-force login attempts. Certain hackers try to get access to ssh servers by trying a lot of common usernames with common passwords (think of a user "john" with password "doe"). Although it is very unlikely that these hackers will ever get access to the system, there is an other aspect of the brute-force attacks that you'll generally want to avoid: the system and connection load. The brute-force attacks usually are done with dozens or even thousands of tries a second, and this unnecessarily slows down the server and takes some bandwidth which could've been used a lot better. By changing the port to a non-default one, the scripts of the hackers will just be refused and most of the bandwidth will be saved.

As the ssh command can't just guess the port, we will have to specify it if it's not the default 22 one. You can do that this way:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ ssh -p yourport yourusername@yourserver

Of course, you will have to replace "yourport" with the port number. These is an important difference between ssh and scp on this point. I'll explain it further on.

Running a command on the remote server

Sometimes, especially in scripts, you'll want to connect to the remote server, run a single command and then exit again. The ssh command has a nice feature for this. You can just specify the command after the options, username and hostname. Have a look at this:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ ssh yourusername@yourserver updatedb

This will make the server update its searching database. Of course, this is a very simple command without arguments. What if you'd want to tell someone about the latest news you read on the web? You might think that the following will give him/her that message:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ ssh yourusername@yourserver wall "Hey, I just found out something great! Have a look at www.examplenewslink.com!"

However, bash will give an error if you run this command:

bash: !": event not found

What happened? Bash (the program behind your shell) tried to interpret the command you wanted to give ssh. This fails because there are exclamation marks in the command, which bash will interpret as special characters that should initiate a bash function. But we don't want this, we just want bash to give the command to ssh! Well, there's a very simple way to tell bash not to worry about the contents of the command but just pass it on to ssh already: wrapping it in single quotes. Have a look at this:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ ssh yourusername@yourserver 'wall "Hey, I just found out something great! Have a look at www.examplenewslink.com!"'

The single quotes prevent bash from trying to interpret the command, so ssh receives it unmodified and can send it to the server as it should. Don't forget that the single quotes should be around the whole command, not anywhere else.

SCP

The scp command allows you to copy files over ssh connections. This is pretty useful if you want to transport files between computers, for example to backup something. The scp command uses the ssh command and they are very much alike. However, there are some important differences.

The scp command can be used in three* ways: to copy from a (remote) server to your computer, to copy from your computer to a (remote) server, and to copy from a (remote) server to another (remote) server. In the third case, the data is transferred directly between the servers; your own computer will only tell the servers what to do. These options are very useful for a lot of things that require files to be transferred, so let's have a look at the syntax of this command:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ scp examplefile yourusername@yourserver:/home/yourusername/

Looks quite familiar, right? But there are differences. The command above will transfer the file "examplefile" to the directory "/home/yourusername/" at the server "yourserver", trying to get ssh acces with the username "yourusername". That's quite a lot information, but scp really needs it all. Well, almost all of it. You could leave out the "yourusername@" in front of "yourserver", but only if you want to login on the server with your current username on your own computer. Let's have a closer look at the end of the command. There's a colon over there, with a directory after it. Just like Linux's normal cp command, scp will need to know both the source file(s) and the target directory (or file). For remote hosts, the file(s)/directory are given to the scp command is this way.

You can also copy a file (or multiple files) from the (remote) server to your own computer. Let's have a look at an example of that:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ scp yourusername@yourserver:/home/yourusername/examplefile .

Note: The dot at the end means the current local directory. This is a handy trick that can be used about everywhere in Linux. Besides a single dot, you can also type a double dot ( .. ), which is the parent directory of the current directory.

This will copy the file "/home/yourusername/examplefile" to the current directory on your own computer, provided that the username and password are correct and that the file actually exists.

You probably already guessed that the following command copies a file from a (remote) server to another (remote) server:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ scp yourusername@yourserver:/home/yourusername/examplefile yourusername2@yourserver2:/home/yourusername2/

Please note that, to make the above command work, the servers must be able to reach each other, as the data will be transferred directly between them. If the servers somehow can't reach each other (for example, if port 22 is not open on one of the sides) you won't be able to copy anything. In that case, copy the files to your own computer first, then to the other host. Or make the servers able to reach each other (for example by opening the port).

Well, those are the main uses of scp. We'll now go a bit more in-depth about the differences between ssh and scp.

*: Actually you can also use it just like the normal cp command, withhout any ssh connections in it, but that's quite useless. It requires you to type an extra 's' =).

Specifying a port with scp

The scp command acts a little different when it comes to ports. You'd expect that specifying a port should be done this way:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ scp -p yourport yourusername@yourserver:/home/yourusername/examplefile .

However, that will not work. You will get an error message like this one:

cp: cannot stat `yourport': No such file or directory

This is caused by the different architecture of scp. It aims to resemble cp, and cp also features the -p option. However, in cp terms it means 'preserve', and it causes the cp command to preserve things like ownership, permissions and creation dates. The scp command can also preserve things like that, and the -p option enables this feature. The port specification should be done with the -P option. Therefore, the following command will work:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ scp -P yourport yourusername@yourserver:/home/yourusername/examplefile .

Also note that the -P option must be in front of the (remote) server. The ssh command will still work if you put -p yourport behind the host syntax, but scp won't. Why? Because scp also supports copying between two servers and therefore needs to know which server the -P option applies to.

Another difference between scp and ssh

Unlike ssh, scp cannot be used to run a command on a (remote) server, as it already uses that feature of ssh to start the scp server on the host. The scp command does have an option that accepts a program (the -S option), but this program will then be used instead of ssh to establish the encrypted connection, and it will not be executed on the remote host.

Tips & Tricks with ssh and scp

Quite a handy thing about scp is that it supports asterisks. You can copy all files in a remote directory in a way like this:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ scp yourusername@yourserver:/home/yourusername/* .

And you can also just copy a whole directory by specifying the -r (recursive) option:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ scp -r yourusername@yourserver:/home/yourusername/ .

Both of these also work when copying to a (remote) server or copying between a (remote) server and another (remote) server.

The ssh command can come in handy if you don't know the exact location of the file you want to copy with scp. First, ssh to the (remote) server:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ ssh yourusername@yourserver

Then browse to the right directory with cd. This is essential Linux terminal knowledge, so I won't explain it here. When you're in the right directory, you can get the full path with this command:

[rechosen@localhost ~]$ pwd

Note: pwd is an abbreviation of Print Working Directory, which is a useful way to remember the command.

You can then copy this output, leave the ssh shell by pressing Ctrl + D, and then paste the full directory path in your scp command. This saves a lot of remembering and typing!

You can also limit the bandwidth scp may use when copying. This is very useful if you're wanting to copy a huge amount of data without suffering from slow internet for a long time. Limiting bandwidth is done this way:

scp -l bandwidthlimit yourusername@yourserver:/home/yourusername/* .

The bandwidth is specified in Kbit/sec. What does this mean? Eight bits is one byte. If you want to copy no faster than 10 Kbyte/sec, set the limit to 80. If you want to copy no faster than 80 Kbyte/sec, set the limit to 640. Get it? You should set the limit to eight times the maximum Kbyte/sec you want it to be. I'd recommend to set the -l option with all scp'ing you do on a connection that other people need to use, too. A big amount of copying can virtually block a whole 10 Mbit network if you're using hubs.

Final Words

Well, that was it! I hope you learned a lot. Of course, you can always have a quick look at this tutorial again if you forgot something. Please tell other people who might be interested about this tutorial, you'll help this blog to grow if you do =). Thank you for reading and have a lot of fun with your new knowledge!

Create a Compelling Resume Online With WordPress

2011-08-17T09:25:00.000-07:00

Do you stand out?

Here’s a news flash – the economy is a little rough these days. With the unemployment rate creeping up, it’s a time when you need to be clear about what you can bring to a prospective employer or client and, above all, to stand out from the competition. Fortunately, it’s cheaper and easier than ever to make yourself “present with authority.”

One of my new year’s resolutions was to get my online identity sorted out, which means making the most of the available tools and delivering a consistent message. After taking inventory of the various professional sites to which I belong (e.g. LinkedIn, VisualCV), I decided that I needed an aggregator to take charge and deliver my message, my way, in my style. I had registered my own name as a domain many years ago but not done anything with it, and so I decided to use WordPress to tell my professional story.

What Are the Benefits?

If you think about your career as a product that you’re selling, wouldn’t it make perfect sense to have a web site? Of course it does, and you want your personal brand to have the same benefits:

More and more, clients and employers are performing online searches to learn more about the people with which they are considering to engage. Having a search engine friendly web site makes it more likely they will find you.
Indexing your experience through the use of keywords makes it easy for people to zero in on the skills and/or expertise in which they’re interested (more about that later).
Multimedia capabilities (i.e. images, video, presentations, links) make it easier for you to tell your story in a vivid and interesting way.
You can use specialized links to direct people to specific content areas of your profile.
While this practice may soon be common place, for the moment at least it will help you to stand out from the crowd.

Laying the Groundwork

The first decision is your domain name. One option is to use Blogger or WordPress.org (e.g. jondipietro.wordpress.org), which is free. However, for the few dollars a year it costs you are far better off registering your own domain name; preferably your first and last names if available. This article will discuss building your online resume using WordPress on your own hosted site.
Once the basic WordPress installation is in place, the first thing you’ll want to do is to find a clean, professional theme and install it. There are a number of plugins that I install on every WordPress site right out of the gate:

Add to Any Sharing and Subscribing buttons: Makes it easy for visitors to share, save, bookmark, and/or subscribe to your site.
All in One SEO Pack : Provides a bunch of handy tools to make your site more search engine friendly.
Contact Form 7 : Create customized forms for visitors to send you messages.
Exclude Pages from Navigation : Allows you to easily build landing pages.
FeedBurner FeedSmith : Synchs your blog with FeedBurner.
Google Analyticator : Installs the Google Analytics script on your site so you can track traffic.
Google XML Sitemaps : Creates the XML site map files that makes it easier for Google to discover pages on your site.
Simple Tags : Makes it really easy to manage the tags that you’ll use to mark your areas of expertise.
SlideShare : Allows you to embed SlideShare presentations.
Social Links : Display buttons with links to your social networking sites in the sidebar.
WordPress Database Backup : Ounce of prevention, and all that…
WP-Mail-SMTP : Reconfigures the wp_mail() function to use SMTP instead of mail().

Turn the Page

Now it’s time to set up the pages. I decided on the following site map:

Home
About Me
- Work History
- Skills
- Volunteerism
Experience
Companies
Social Networks
Contact Me

The tricky thing about this is that, by default, WordPress publishes blog articles to the front page of the site. In order to implement my strategy, it’s important to change that. You can do this on the Reading Settings page by selecting “Home” for your front page and “Experience” as the posts page.

Change the default settings for the front and posts pages.

Next, you’ll need to populate the Home, About Me, Work Experience, and Skills pages. The Home page functions as a sort of generic cover letter, while the other pages represent the customary sections of a resume. However, you have the freedom to be a little more creative and verbose in this environment than on a paper resume.
What you don’t see in the site map (or in the menu) is my social networking landing page. Another benefit of having your own web site is the ability to create landing pages from other sites that allow you to customize messages and, again, tell your story. For example, Twitter provides very little space to customize your profile but they do allow you to enter a web site URL that you can point to a customized landing page. This is where the “Exclude Pages from Navigation Menu” plugin comes in handy.

Rubber Meets Road

Skills, experiences, clients, etc... are displayed in the tag cloud widget.

The power of this approach now takes shape as you create blog posts to describe specific projects, publications, and experiences. The key is carefully selected categories and liberal use of tags for the posts. This will allow employers and/or clients to quickly zero in on the topics in which they are interested. And since you’re making it easy to find the information they’re looking for, you can feel free to include lots of details, making them as interactive as possible. You’ll want to include the Simple Tags tag could widget in the sidebar.
The categories are also important and you can use them to organize your pages and posts at a higher level than the tags. How and where the categories are displayed is somewhat dependent upon your theme. Some themes display them as menu itmes while others are displayed in the sidebar and is a matter of your personal preference.

Shout It Out Loud

Once your online resume is good to go, you can send out customized links to direct people straight to a particular area of interest. For example, if I’m looking to secure a consulting contract for VB.NET development, I could send the following in an email:

“Please see the VB.NET projects listed on my online resume.”

The “VB.NET” link is http://www.jondipietro.com/tag/vbnet, which will automatically display a list of all pages or posts that were tagged with the VB.NET keyword. You can begin to see how easy it is to send customized links to employers and clients that zoom right in to the areas on which you want them focused.

Conclusion

As I mentioned, I didn’t initially set out to create an online resume but once I started putting the idea together it became clear how compelling and useful this approach can be. But I’m interested to hear about other creative ideas for leveraging this medium, so leave some comments. Oh, and feel free to share a link to your own online resume.

Easy Page-Specific WordPress Sidebars

2011-08-07T23:28:00.000-07:00

In yet another step to make WordPress function more like a CMS than a simple blog, there is a recently updated plugin that I think is worth noting.
By default, the WordPress sidebar remains identical on every single page of your web site. However, sometimes we need to be able to have a specific sidebars for different pages. For example, maybe you have a “Products” page that needs testimonials along the sidebar while your “About Us” page sidebar needs to display a listing of awards.

Solutions:

The Advanced Way:
Create a separate page template with it’s own sidebar widget function. Alternately, you could include a conditional statement in your sidebar.php to display different sidebars depending on the page that’s being displayed.
If none of what I’m saying makes any sense to you, then you’ll probably want…
The “Regular Folks” Way:
Simply download the Per Page Sidebars plugin at
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/per-page-sidebars.
Once it’s installed, you’ll notice that at the bottom of each of your pages is a box titled “Custom Sidebar” (see image below). To set up a unique custom sidebar for the page that you’re creating, simply check the “Activate Custom Sidebar” box, and select which of the sidebar widget areas you’d like to replace. In the screenshot below, we’re replacing the “Primary Widget Area” – which is the sidebar that goes at the upper right-hand side of every page.

Now go into the “Widgets” page of your admin, and you’ll see a new widget area labled “PPS-” followed by the name of the page with the page-specific sidebar.

A couple of things to consider:

At this time the plugin only allows you to set up custom sidebars for pages, and not for posts or custom post types.
Removing a custom sidebar widget was a little bit unintuitive. To do so, simply go to the page with the custom sidebar, and uncheck not only the “Activate Custom Sidebar?” checkbox, but also the radio button next to the name of the sidebar that your custom sidebar was replacing.

How to fix the ‘The plugin does not have a valid header’ error when activating a WordPress plugin

2011-08-07T04:54:00.000-07:00

You want to extend WordPress’ functionality and decided to download some plugins found in the Official WordPress Plugin repository. After searching the repo, you’ve found two plugins that accomplishes the tasks you needed to implement in your blog. Downloading the plugins gives you two ZIP files that when double-clicked, shows you the contents in the following format:

plugin-a.zip

plugin-a-folder
---- plugin-a-main-file.php
---- plugin-a-readme.txt

plugin-b.zip

plugin-b-folder
---- plugin-b-subfolder
-------- plugin-b-main-file.php
-------- plugin-b-readme.txt

There are two ways to install a plugin. Option 1 is to unzip the file and upload the contents to wordpress_root/wp-content/plugins/ directory. Option 2 is to use the Add New -> Upload option found in the left panel bar of the administrative page of WordPress. Let’s assume the two plugins went through the two installation options.

Installing ‘plugin-a.zip’ using Option 1

Unzip the file
Upload the contents to wordpress_root/wp-content/plugins/
Login as admin and go to Plugins -> Installed.
Locate plugin and click Activate link.
Result:
Plugin activated.

Installing ‘plugin-a.zip’ using Option 2

Login as admin and go to Plugins -> Add New -> Upload
Locate the file plugin-a.zip by clicking the Browse button.
Click Install Now button.
Result:
Unpacking the package?
Installing the plugin?
Plugin installed successfully.
Click Activate Plugin link.
Result:
Plugin activated.

Installing ‘plugin-b.zip’ using Option 1

Unzip the file
Upload the contents to wordpress_root/wp-content/plugins/
Login as admin and go to Plugins -> Installed.
Locate plugin and click Activate link.
Error: Plugin does not exists in the list.

Installing ‘plugin-b.zip’ using Option 2

Login as admin and go to Plugins -> Add New -> Upload
Locate the file plugin-b.zip by clicking the Browse button.
Click Install Now button.
Result:
Unpacking the package?
Installing the plugin?
Plugin installed successfully.
Click Activate Plugin link.
WordPress ? Error
The plugin does not have a valid header.

Based on our testing, plugin-b.zip seems to fail on both methods of installation. To find out what is causing the error, we have to understand how the plugin installation works. Upon checking the core files I found this excerpt in get_plugins() function:

* WordPress only supports plugin files in the base plugins directory
* (wp-content/plugins) and in one directory above the plugins directory
* (wp-content/plugins/my-plugin). The file it looks for has the plugin data and
* must be found in those two locations. It is recommended that do keep your
* plugin files in directories.

The plugin data that the function is looking for can be found below:

01
02/*
03Plugin Name: Name Of The Plugin
04Plugin URI: http://URI_Of_Page_Describing_Plugin_and_Updates
05Description: A brief description of the Plugin.
06Version: The Plugin's Version Number, e.g.: 1.0
07Author: Name Of The Plugin Author
08Author URI: http://URI_Of_The_Plugin_Author
09License: A "Slug" license name e.g. GPL2
10*/
11?>

So in order to properly install and activate a plugin, the following two conditions must be satisfied:

that a plugin main file (.php) must be placed in plugins root folder or in first-level subdirectory within plugins folder
and it should contain the necessary plugin data for identification/validation purposes

In the case of plugin-b.zip, although the main PHP file contains the needed plugin data, the validate_plugin() function returned an error since neither the file can be found or check if it contains the plugin data because it is placed in the second level subdirectory, a directory location in which the function is not designed to scan the content.
To fix the plugin-b.zip file, it needs to have the following content structure:

plugin-b.zip

plugin-b-folder
---- plugin-b-main-file.php
---- plugin-b-readme.txt

I hope this post will enlighten WordPress users who wants to maximize their blog’s potential

What is new in Joomla 1.7 vs Joomla 1.6?

2011-08-04T21:19:00.000-07:00

The Joomla team recentlyannounced Joomla 1.7 is now stable for live sites. This new version fixes a variety of issues with Joomla 1.6 as well as introduces the ability to upgrade to future versions from within the Administrator panel.

No more uploading via FTP, hooray!

This marks the first step towards a upgrade system that is similar to WordPress, thus making your life as an administrator easier. The Joomla 1.7 release does not bring a huge amount of changes, but it is a vital step in the right direction for Joomla and it’s new release schedule. In this article I will cover what is new, if you need to upgrade, and why I used such an ugly graphic for this post.

What are the newest and biggest features?

One click upgrades – Starting from Joomla 1.6 you can upgrade your install by going to: Extensions -> Extension Manager -> Update -> Find updates.
Faster release cycles - Short term releases will be changing every six months and only supported for one month after the next release.
Multi-Language improvements – Associate menu items to different languages.

There are a variety of other minor changes that you can review on the officialJoomla 1.7 page.

Thank you Joomla

Do I really need to upgrade?

Depending on what version of Joomla your site(s) are on now, this may be the last time you have to do a “scary upgrade”. Scary meaning doing it all via FTP and hoping you didn’t miss any upgrade instructions or caveats. Upgrading is really easy since J1.6, so this shouldn’t be a huge deal.

It’s also important to note that Joomla 1.6 will go end of life in August 2011. That means no more security updates or patches or fixes for vulnerabilities. If your site get’s hacked 6 months from now due to some kid developing some obscure technique, you will only have yourself to blame–not Joomla. Upgrade them sites!

I am on Joomla 1.5. How do I do it?

There is no upgrade path from J1.5 to J1.6 or J1.7. You will have to migrate. There are a variety of changes from J1.5 to newer versions including changes to tables and the ACL (access control list) so a migration is the only way. If you are comfortable with migrating from different Joomla releases you probably have a system in place. If not, you can try out this extension. I personally have not tried it, but it seems pretty straightforward. Take all the usual precautions and backup your databases and files before doing something like this. Try it on your development site first and test the process before doing it on a live site.

I am on Joomla 1.6. How do I do it?

It’s easy peasy if you already made the leap to Joomla 1.6. Just go to: Extensions -> Extension Manager -> Update -> Find updates.

What’s up with that ugly Joomla image you used in the beginning of the article?

Kids refrigerator magnets are cute, cheap and fun. They also stick to anything metal. Slapping some fridge magnets on a whiteboard or something metal or *gasp*, your actual fridge is a good way to nag yourself that this upgrade is very important and needs to be done soon.

Do I have to worry about extensions breaking?

As with any upgrade there is always the potential for things to break. You should never do a upgrade or migration without some tested and proven way to revert back to a working site if it all goes pear shaped. The changes from J1.6 to J1.7 are pretty minor, but ther are so many extensions that do so many things, it’s hard to make a blanket statement.

How about you?

Do you have any tips or tricks I didn’t cover? Let us know in the comments, we would love to hear from you.

Angry Birds....!

2011-07-30T23:56:00.001-07:00

Angry Birds

Industrial Training on FOSS! Share Your Feedback and Get Updated with Latest in FOSS Industry!

2011-07-21T18:20:00.001-07:00

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;Loading...&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

Live Blogging : Yahoo Open Hack 2010, Bangalore

2010-07-23T22:16:00.000-07:00

1. YQL by Chris!
2. YAP by Lavanya and Balachandar:

App is defined by gadget XML : defines open apps, meta data
Conforms to OpenSocial Standards

YahooSmall View, YahooFullView,Preview ->YML Works only on these

Yahoo Small View:
->No JS, Faster, HTML or YMLLite, two state(default, personalised)
Yahoo Full View:
->Support HTML,CSS, YML, YUI , Caja friendly JS, rich interface, opensocial, YML adds allows ad,

Preview View:
-> Content to those who have not signed in, haven't installed, motivated to install, yml:customize tag for installing app, no user info is passed to app,

Yahoo MarkUp Language:

similar in format like XML

Caja:
->Tansform JS and XML to secure form
->prevents insecure JS
YUI is a library of JS utilities and controls for building rich interactive web application.

Open social and its Compatibility

-> OSML and Open Social Templates are in beta stage
->support Open Social 0.9 JS API's and open social 0.8.1 RESTful api.

Sample Gadget XML
Caja is where insecure js is prevented and for stripping out unreliable content, YUI supports accelerated design.

Libraries to use:
Caja, opensocial, YUI, YML

Sections at Gadget XML:

Module per section -> covers meta data for app-> to make searched and featured by yahoo,title for app, screenshot url's,

Steps to create Gadget XML:

check out : http://developer.yahoo.com/yap/

check out-> YDN Devtool Page

Yahoo Social API's
->design a Open Application Or OAuth
select *from social.profile where guid=me;
select * from social.contact where guid=me/guid info;
select * from social.updates where guid=me;
select * from social.updates.search where query='ipad';
select * from updates.search where source='appid';

MeMe:
check out : http://developers.yahoo.com/meme/

insert into meme.user.posts(type,content, caption)values("photos", "http://yahoo.com", "this is a photo caption")

Social SDK's

examples for opensocial, php, python
perform oAuth Authentication

Host your Social Apps @ Joyent, google app engine, amazon web services,

What came First, the chicken or the Egg?

2010-07-11T06:34:00.001-07:00

British researchers may have uncovered a partial answer to the age-old question, "what came first the chicken or the egg?"

According to a team, comprising researchers from the University of Warwick and the University of Sheffield, the answer is "chicken" or at least a particular chicken protein.
There is, however, a further twist - this particular chicken protein turns out to come both first and last. That neat trick it performs provides new insights into control of crystal growth which is key to egg shell production.
Scientists have long believed that a chicken eggshell protein called ovocledidin-17 (OC-17) must play some role in egg shell formation. The protein is found only in the mineral region of the egg (the hard part of the shell) and lab bench results showed that it appeared to influence the transformation of (CaCo3) into calcite crystals. The mechanism of this control remained unclear. How this process could be used to form an actual eggshell remained unclear.
University of Warwick researchers Mark Rodger and David Quigley, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Sheffield, have now been able to apply a powerful computing tool called metadynamics and the UK national supercomputer in Edinburgh to crack this egg problem.
Dr David Quigley from the Department of Physics and Centre for Scientific Computing, University of Warwick, said: "Metadynamics extends conventional molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and is particularly good at sampling transitions between disordered and ordered states of matter."
Using these tools, the team was able to create simulations that showed exactly how the protein bound to amorphous calcium carbonate surface using two clusters of "arginine residues", located on two loops of the protein and creating a literal chemical "clamp" to nano sized particles of calcium carbonate.
While clamped in this way, the OC-17 encourages the nanoparticles of calcium carbonate to transform into "calcite crystallites" that form the tiny of nucleus of crystals that can continue to grow on their own. But they also noticed that sometimes this chemical clamp didn't work. The OC-17 just seemed to detatch from the nanoparticle or "be desorbed".
Professor Mark Rodger from Department of Chemistry and Centre for Scientific Computing, University of Warwick, said: "With the larger nanoparticles we examined we found that the binding sites for this chemical clamp were the same as the smaller nanoparticles but the binding was much weaker. In the simulations we performed, the protein never desorbed from the smaller nanoparticle, but always fell off or desorbed from the larger one. However in each case, desorption occurred at or after nucleation of calcite."
The researchers had therefore uncovered an incredibly elegant process allowing highly efficient recycling of the OC-17 protein. Effectively it acts as a catalyst, clamping on to calcium carbonate particles to kickstart crystal formation and then dropping off when the crystal nucleus is sufficiently large to grow under its own steam. This frees up the OC-17 to promote more yet more crystallisation, facilitating the speedy, literally overnight creation of an egg shell.
The researchers believe that this new insight into the elegant and highly efficient methods of promoting and controlling crystallisation in nature will be of great benefit to anyone exploring how to promote and control artificial forms of crystallisation. '
The study appears in the international edition of the journal Angewandte Chemie.

Welcome to our 4th Edition of Barcamp Chennai!

2010-06-25T00:54:00.000-07:00

I am excited to attend the 4th edition of barcamp chennai. Plan your calendar on 27th June 2010 @ Cognizant Technologies, Okiyam, Thoraipakkam. Check this out!

A New Identity for Indian Rupees! - For the Growing Economy!

2010-06-25T00:39:00.000-07:00

Rupee is to about to join the elite league of World Economy through its new symbol! Reserve Bank of India’s Executive Director HR Khan feels a symbol for the rupee was absolutely necessary.

“Every currency has a symbol so we thought that the Indian currency should also have a symbol. It is more of a symbolic value because we are an emerging power and most countries have some symbol with acts as an identification for the currency worldwide.”

Check these finalized 5 symbols and post your comments,

Cloud Computing Workshop by CSI and IEEE [at] IIT Madras

2010-06-25T00:26:00.000-07:00

Workshop on
Cloud Computing
August 19-20, 2010 at IIT Madras, Chennai, India
Organised by

Computer Society of India
Div IV (Communication), Chennai Chapter and SIG-Grid Computing
and
IEEE Computer Society, Madras Chapter

Supported by
Platinum Sponsors
Yahoo, Google, HP, Amazon, IBM, HCL
Gold Sponsors
Novell, VMware, CSS Corp, Ramco, TCS

Fee & Takeaways

Industry Delegates : Rs. 1500/=
CSI / IEEE Members: Rs. 1250/=
Academic Faculty, Researchers & Students : Rs. 1250/=
CSI / IEEE Student Members : Rs. 1000/=

(Note: Students should attach copy of the membership card and also a certificate from the HOD / Principal along with registration form and payment.
Right of acceptance is reserved based on the flow of registrations)

Workshop Takeaways
Apart from the opportunity to hear the technical presentations from the Industry leaders
in Cloud Computing, each delegate will be provided with the following five items.

Workshop Kit

CD containing presentations (subject to copyright) and whitepapers,
user case studies being shared by the sponsoring organisations

AWS coupon worth USD 25 to try out Amazon Web Services

A hard copy of the book "Cloud Computing: A Practical Approach"
by Anthony T. Velte, Toby J. Velte and Robert C. Elsenpeter,
published by TMH and priced at Rs. 475/= or similar one for reference.

Certificate of Participation

Yahoo Open Hack India : Registrations Open

2010-06-18T11:42:00.001-07:00

Namaste! Open Hack India is back, and we’re excited to see what creative hacks the vibrant Indian developer community can come up with. This is the 13th Yahoo Open Hack event we’ve hosted globally and will be the 3rd one in Bengaluru. The event will be held on the weekend of July 24-25 at the The Taj Residency, Bengaluru.

Registration is now open.

Due to the limited size of the venue, we will be reviewing applications for attendance and giving preference to those we believe will best be able to contribute to the development of a hack at the event. You can hack individually or in groups, but please sign-up individually.

There are two types of registration choices:

Info Geek Those who are interested in attending the Technology Seminars and presentations on Saturday morning but not the main hack event. If you sign up here, you will be asked to leave after the tech talks end on Saturday.
Hacker Gurus Those who are pure of heart or creative souls, love hacking up new ideas, possess entrepreneurial passions, or just want to build something for world peace…or for an overnight tech-mayhem-and-hacking-bliss. It includes the Saturday tech presentations, hacking through the night, Sunday demos, and judging.

Book your place now! You know you want to. We will send Open Hack Day Confirmed emails by the first week of July to all the selected registrations applications.

Join Us @ Indian Python Software Society

2010-06-18T10:23:00.000-07:00

Greetings Everyone,

An All India Society for Python has been registered for conducting Pycon at India and to promote python in India. Everyone from novice to experts in Python are invited to join the mailing list to know the latest in the society and volunteer yourself in spreading python and Evangelizing it!

Mailing List URL:
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/ipss
further information about the society may be obtained here:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/CategoryIndianPythonSoftwareSociety

Courtesy: Thanks to kg for his invite in Ilug Mailing List!

Wordpress 3.0 : Out of the Box!

2010-06-18T00:52:00.001-07:00

With the release of Wordpress 3.0, Everyone are excited to upgrade their blogs to this latest version and this post will let you know some cool features of this new flavor which is worth a try!

Here are some of the highlights of the Wordpress 3.0:

WordPress and WordPress MU have merged, allowing the management of multiple sites (called Multisite) from one WordPress installation.
New default theme "Twenty Ten" takes full advantage of the current features of WordPress.
New custom menu management feature, allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets.
Custom header and background APIs.
Contextual help text accessed under the Help tab of every screen in the WordPress administration.
Ability to set the admin username and password during installation.
Bulk updating of themes with an automatic maintenance mode during the process.
Support for shortlinks.
Improved Custom post types and custom taxonomies including hierarchical (category-style) support. (Try the Custom Post Type UI or GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools plugins to see the possibilities.)
A lighter admin color scheme to increase accessibility and put the focus more squarely on your content.

The Open Source Entreprenuer

2010-06-17T23:32:00.000-07:00

BBC talks to Bob Young, the co-founder of Red Hat: "Bob Young is a self-confessed contrarian with a strong desire to change the world by allowing people to share and collaborate. The approach has served him well and has helped turn the Canadian into a multi-millionaire."

Calling all C/C++ Developers!!

2010-06-17T22:56:00.000-07:00

All C/C++ Developers are invited to port their applications and components to Intel AppUp Center for profit. Sign Up for the free instructional session and hands-on-lab and network with other developers and make profit!

Event Details
Date: 26th June, 2010
Time: 9:30 am - 5:00 pm
Venue: Taj Residency, Trinity Circle, Bangalore

OSCO GO-OS 2010, Open Source Conference @ Madurai

2010-06-17T05:08:00.000-07:00

Greetings,
I am gratified to see many Student Community, Universities, Corporates adopting Open Technologies and advocating the public towards Free and Open Culture especially in softwares. This time it is the second largest city in TamilNadu, next to Chennai; Yes! It's now Madurai hosting the Conference on Open Technologies cum Exhibition to spread the awareness for Students, Universities and Enterprise.

The upcoming busiest IT hub, next to chennai, Madurai stands out as a prime importance for all Tech Evangelist to adopt Open Standards and Open Source Business Models, hence this Conference is planned to address a wide audience and will surely educate most of them. Students are invited for Paper Presentation Contest, Speakers with a sound knowledge in their domain are requested to volunteer for the event! Get Started... Because Open Source Matters!!!

Check out http://osco.in for more details and Registrations!

Welcome All!!!

-Regards,
V.Santhosh,
Author : OpenSourceTechIndia

Open Web Awards 2011 : Web Awards 2011

2010-06-16T09:01:00.000-07:00

I’m extremely excited to announce the Open Web Award 2011 in collaboration with Berlin-based art and digital culture Festival transmediale. Following the Mozilla Drumbeat Berlin event we’ve had good talks with Free Culture Incubator and hope to announce more great open web art initiatives soon. Stay tuned, and please tell the world (or just your friends) about the Open Web Award 2011! Open web art is important to show the world what can be done by building on the open architecture of the web!

The award will be given to the most creative work or art project that:

- are on the web and about the web
- use open and free technology
- incite participation

giving specific consideration to “the creative use of HTML5″.

The winner will receive a total prize of 5000 EUR, and will obtain ’supported’ status on Mozilla Drumbeat (including the opportunity to fundraise, if needed). Download Flyer

Deadline: July 31, 2010

ENTER YOUR SUBMISSION HERE

RTBI Monthly Entrepreneurs' Meet

2010-06-16T01:23:00.000-07:00

Hosted By: RTBI & IITM Research Park

Hi Everyone,

This is an RSVP for the Monthly Entrepreneurs' Meet for the Month of June 2010.
Following on the response that we received for the Monthly Entrepreneurs Meet in May,This meet has been decided as regular affair and will be continuing this on the Third Friday of Every Month.

So do Mark it in your calendars.

Date: 18th June 2010
Venue: Auditorium, IITM Research Park
Time: 3:00pm - 4:15pm
Speaker: Badri Seshadri, Founder of Cricinfo, and New Horizon Media
RSVP @ http://anyvite.com/ro4jzi0rt6

Outline of the Talk:
Anyone who follows Cricket in India would recognize the brand that is Cricinfo. Having been acquired by ESPN now, its one of the reliable and favourite destination for the millions of Cricket Aficionados in India and abroad. As usual, we are posing three interesting questions for Badri Seshadri to cover for the audience during this talk - apart from his Journey as an Entrepreneur:

1. Cricinfo was founded along with a Co-founder. What has been his experience having a co-founder, are there any cons to that equation and what would his advice be.
2. How does one get into an industry like Cricket - which is more or less a religion in India - and prevail in it, given that bigger players constantly threaten to enter into that market.
3. The Journey of Cricinfo and are some Entrepreneurs reluctant than others to get into business and the perspectives behind it.

The Monthly Entrepreneurs' Meet is an initiative by IITM's Rural Technology and Business Incubator, along with IITM Research park.

Forget You, Focus on your Ideas

2010-06-15T09:15:00.000-07:00

For all my blog readers out there, this is a fabulous post everyone needs to pay attention. Everyone wants to self-promote themselves and become a RockStar! But in the process of Self-promotion, most of them end up with self-adulation which in-turn sabotage your esteem.

Self-promotion may be key to career advancement but, let’s face it, cross that line into shameless self-congratulation and bragging and you’ll just turn people off in a major way. So how can you edge right up to that invisible boundary but not cross over it?

Copyblogger’s Nathan Hangen tackled this question recently and came up with a very simple but hugely useful distinction between boorish bragging and helpful self-promotion — the former is all about you, the latter all about your audience. Hangen explains:

The reason that self-promotion works and self-adulation doesn’t is because self-promotion is the art of spreading ideas, concepts, and a greater vision. Self-adulation is just the promotion of accomplishments, deeds that have already been done.

When you promote ideas, you give people something to cheer for. You give people a cause to support. People, in many ways, are selfish. They promote the things that make them feel good. Your accomplishments aren’t likely to make them feel good, but your ideas do.

Your ideas might inspire hope, thought, or action . . . but as a general rule, good ideas inspire something.

In the rest of the post, Hangen offers some tips on exactly how to broadcast your ideas effectively. If you’re interested in the topic, it’s well worth a read.

5 Tips to never forget a name again

2010-06-15T09:06:00.000-07:00

Make a choice to care. A kind of “first principle” of relationship building applies here. If you make a conscious decision that you are going to remember names, because you care about the people you meet, you will immediately become much better at doing it!
Picture the name written across their forehead. Think that sounds dumb? It’s not. It was a trick used by Franklin Roosevelt and he amazed his staff with how well he remembered names.
Listen to the name of the person you are being introduced to. If you don’t hear the name clearly the first time, ask them to repeat it. Again, this seems obvious, but some of you are so convinced you aren’t going to remember that you don’t even listen in the first place!
Repeat the name as soon as possible. You can either repeat it as a confirmation, “Joe, right?” or in conversation, “Nice to meet you, Joe.” Either way, say it aloud and look the person in the eyes, too.
Use word or picture associations to make the person-name combination more memorable. For someone named Joy, picture her with a huge smile on her face, glowing with happiness. Imagine Sandy on a beach. Maybe Mike is singing karaoke. The more unusual the picture, the more memorable. Be creative!

10 Tips to Impress HR

2010-06-15T08:54:00.001-07:00

Never badmouth anything or anyone. This applies to your former employer, coworkers, or Osama bin Laden. We’re trying to screen out whiners and troublemakers. I don’t care if your last supervisor was a tyrant. Be kind and magnanimous about everything and everyone.
Make sure your appearance is in order. Fair or not, you are judged based you based on how you look. Check your fly and make sure your eyebrows are smooth.
Don’t smoke on the day of the interview. We can smell it. We don’t like it. There is an unconscious bias against smokers, and let’s face it, you have a reputation for being lazy. Smokers are more expensive to insure, too. Why would we want you on the payroll? Help me help you. Don’t smoke.
Don’t be too aggressive and tell us how awesome you are. You’re here, aren’t you? A little humility, and some self-deprecating comments, will go along way with HR professionals. Trust me.
Don’t tell us your life story. We hate it when you confuse HR with your mother, your therapist, or your best friend.
Don’t expect us to have a timeline for the interview process. We have no idea how long it will take to fill the position. Ideally, we want to fill the opening tomorrow so we can get back to online shopping. Realistically, it will probably take a few months.
Be prepared to talk about your strengths and weaknesses. Don’t ever tell us that you struggle to delegate. You care too much. You take on too much responsibility. An interview is a conversation, not a bad eHarmony profile. Show some self-awareness.
When you take us through your resume, don’t gloss over the mistakes. We like it when you stop and tell us about an experience that taught you something. It shows character. Address your flaws outright and tell us how you learned something.
Compliment us. Seriously. We are human beings, too. Scan our offices and look for awards, photos, or something noteworthy. Make a connection. This is what salespeople do, and it works. We will remember your praise.
Make it easy for us to hire you. When you give us examples during the interview process, frame those examples in a way that relates to the job description, the issues in the industry, or the company’s mission. Be relevant and you will be remembered.

Atlast Yahoo caught the CyberSquatter Flicker.com

2010-06-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia terms "Cybersquatting" as

" Cybersquatting (also known as domain squatting), according to the United States federal law known as the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price. "

Typo-prone photographers appear to owe Yahoo a "thank you." After making at least one generous offer and then resorting to a lawsuit, the company's acquired Flicker.com, presumably for the sake of saving people who misspell "Flickr" from visiting the wrong site.

Flickr should start seeing more visitors before long, though, and this move may boost Yahoo's reputation in addition to its traffic stats, since helping people reach their intended destination isn't such a self-serving act. Still the site has not been redirected!

6 Online Networking Mistakes you need to Avoid!

2010-06-15T08:10:00.000-07:00

I find many HR's looking around the Social Networks to make a best fit of the project to the Employee's area of interest, thereby giving the employee a well-known platform to work with and use their creative skill and latent interest in the work assigned to them. In this context, there are many online gaffes possible which can sabotage our career advancement. Check out this article where you can avoid the 6 usual mistakes @ social Networking!

Check Out : 6 Online Networking Mistakes you need to avoid!

Top 10 CEO's in Prison

2010-06-15T07:52:00.000-07:00

An article recently interested me; yes it's the top CEO's commit Frauds and feeling guilty behind the bars! These guys do it basically due to Evil, Arrogance, Evil, Stupidity, Personal Disorder.

So, if it’s a behavioral disorder, that sort of begs the biggest question of all: Can you somehow identify these people before they actually commit the crime? Any thoughts on that?

In any case, here are my Top 10 CEOs in Prison:

Jeff Skilling, former CEO of Enron
Serving 24 years for fraud, insider trading, and other crimes related to the collapse of Enron
Bernie Ebbers, former CEO of WorldCom
Serving 25 years for accounting fraud that cost investors over $100 billion
Dennis Kozlowski, former CEO of Tyco
Serving 8 to 25 years for stealing $134 million from Tyco
John Rigas, former CEO of Adelphia Communications
Serving 25 years for bank, wire, and securities fraud related to the demise of Adelphia
Sanjay Kumar, former CEO of Computer Associates
Serving 12 years for obstruction of justice and securities fraud
Walter Forbes, former CEO of Cendant
Serving 12 years for fraud
Richard Scrushy, former CEO of HealthSouth
Serving 7 years for bribery and mail fraud
Joseph Nacchio, former CEO of Qwest Communications
Serving 6 years for insider trading
Sam Waksal, former CEO of ImClone
Served 7 years for securities fraud (released last year)
Martin Grass, former CEO of Rite Aid
Served 6 years for fraud and obstruction (just released this year)

Today @ Sathyam Cinemas: Unlocking the Sands of Time

2010-06-15T06:29:00.000-07:00

“an adventurous prince who teams up with a rival princess [Tamina, played by Gemma Arterton] to stop an angry ruler from unleashing a sandstorm that could destroy the world.”

The Adventurous, Fantasize, Action game "Prince of Persia : The Sands of Time" , now crafted by Disney as a complete Movie is running houseful in all theaters here at Chennai. I with my friends went to Sathyam Cinemas and enjoyed the movie. Hatts of to Director Mike Newell who unlocked the sands of time and carried us back to the days we played the Game! Fantastic Casting!

Plot: A young fugitive prince and princess must stop a villain who unknowingly threatens to destroy the world with a special dagger that enables the magic sand inside to reverse time.

Had a great day with my friends. Comming Next in the Movie Column: Ravanan! Letz Wait for the until June 18th.

Wow! This time @ Konai Falls and @ Kalahasti, Andra Pradesh!

2010-06-14T02:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to Konai Falls and Kalahasti Temple @ Andra Pradesh! It was an awesome experience for me to see how matured people are in cherishing the customs and spiritual gifts left by ancient rulers. My dad enrolled me and my sister in a pooja @ Kalahasti. I still can't able to understand why there are many untold and unknown science behind all these customs and beliefs. Anyway I enjoyed a long travel, Konai Falls and beautiful temples all the way from Chennai to Andra!

5 day Industrial Training @ SSN by Free Software Foundation

2010-06-11T17:18:00.000-07:00

Greetings,
The 5 day Industrial Training conducted by Free Software Foundation, TamilNadu in association with SSN Engineering College ended today with a great blast! 220+ Students attended the 5 day Training and all sessions were fabulous learning experience. Mr.Ravi Jaya (Python Session), Mr.(Linux) Baskar (Linux Installation, Dir Structure) and all other speakers were great in delivering knowledge to all students.

I need to specially thank Mr.Shanu, Mr.Praveen Chandrahas, Mr.Siddharth, Mr.Welkin, Mr.Shashan, SSN Management and all volunteers in making this event a great success. Mr.Shanu's session on FSF helped everyone to know what Free and Open Source Software is and how they can contribute. Mr.Siddharth handled enlightening session on Software Patents and FSMI. Mr.Praveen's session on Cloud and his complete presence helped all newbies to acquire clarity on many issues. Mr.Welkin's session on Downloading,Compiling and Creating Application was very interesting and informative. I (Santhosh.V) handled a session on "how to do Projects" and shared my experience with FSF, TN.

This Event has motivated and gave a clarity of thought and usage to 220+ Students where you can see many of them already started working on Linux. Projects were assigned to every college participated. Hats-Off to FSF, TamilNadu for their good Work!

-Regards,
Santhosh.V
Regional Manager, Joomla User Community- Asia,
Student, Arunai Engineering College

Shrek 3D @ PVR Cinemas and Marina! Cool Moments with my Frndz!

2010-06-11T02:35:00.000-07:00

ILUGC Monthly Meet : June 12th, 2010

2010-06-10T09:25:00.000-07:00

I have not been to few previous Meet-ups of Ilug's and I am excited that I would attend the upcoming event @ IITM. The topic which grabbed my attention is Django Framework. I hope Ms.Rajeshwari will give a fabulous intro on the framework and to accelerate the python newbies into developing web apps in python.

The days goes like this;

Time : Sat June 12th, 2010 (3-6 PM)

Venue: Studio No. 2,
Third Floor,
IC & SR building,
Near Gajendra Circle,
IIT Madras.

Talk 1:
-------

Topic : Introduction to Django
Speaker : Rajeswari S

Description : Django is a Python Web framework.
It follows a Model View Controller architectural pattern.
It is used to develop web applications rapidly.

Link : http://www.djangoproject.com/

Talk 2 :
--------

Topic : Introduction to Latex
Speaker : Arulalan T

Description : LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it
includes features designed for the
production of technical and scientific documentation.
LaTeX is the de facto standard
for the communication and publication of scientific documents.

Link : http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX

There will be a general group discussion on the following topics.

1. Running Summer Workshops
2. Mentoring Students for contribution

Welcome All!!!

Personal Development | Robin Sharma

2010-06-04T08:54:00.000-07:00

Personal Development | Robin Sharma

Watch this!! Exceptionally Fabulous Video!

10 Technology Twitter Feeds You Should Be Following

2010-06-01T02:03:00.000-07:00

If you just joined Twitter, you need to know the top techies worth following. Below is a list (organized in alphabetical order by last name) of technology thought leaders who post useful information, including links, news, tips, inside information and perspectives on current events.

	Chris Anderson Editor in Chief Wired @chr1sa		David Pogue Tech columnist The New York Times @pogue
	Ryan Block Co-Founder gdgt @RyanBlock		TechCrunch @TechCrunch
	Hank Green Founder EcoGeek @EcoGeek		Joshua Topolsky Editor in Chief Engadget @JoshuaTopolsky
	Jason Hiner Editor in Chief TechRepublic @JasonHiner		Lance Ulanoff Editor in Chief PCMag @LanceUlanoff
	Tim O’Reilly Founder and CEO O’Reilly Media @TimOReilly		Alex Wolfe Editor In Chief InformationWeek @AWolfe58

Who would you put in your list of top technology Twitter feeds?

Biggest Event for StartUps - StartUpCity 2010: Bangalore

2010-05-28T10:08:00.000-07:00

Hey,

Just wanted to let you know about an exciting event siliconindia is organizing on May 29 & 30, 2010 in Bangalore.

Limited seats. Register FREE: http://www.siliconindia.com/startupcity2010

Roll up your Sleeves. Meet over 100 cool startups. Learn new Technologies; Watch live product demonstrations; Get a peek into cutting edge technologies; Lay hands on the best-of-breed solutions; Meet young, energetic, passionate geeks; Experience the culture of innovation in small companies; Listen to Visionary Keynotes and In-depth Panel Discussions

Come. Meet the Startups that will become tomorrow's industry leaders.

Here's you chance to meet and hear inspiring entrepreneurial story from Krishnakumar Natarajan, co-founder, CEO & MD of Mindtree and Bharat Goenka, Co-Founder & MD of Tally Solutions

Heads of Dell India, Sage India, Mphasis will talk about building next generation technology companies from India.

Founders of startup companies like SMSCountry, 123 Greetings.com, Manthan Systems, Ittiam, Jade Magnet will talk about concept to success and idea to revenue.

You also get to hear interesting discussions on Mistakes entrepreneurs make when approaching VCs and Best Opportunities for Entrepreneurs in 2010, Angel Money and many others from leading venture capitalists like IDG Ventures, Intel Capital, Helion, Clearstone, NEA-IndoUS Ventures.

This is undoubtedly the biggest event for startups.

There are limited seats. You can register yourself for FREE at: http://www.siliconindia.com/startupcity_09/index.html

Thanks
V.Santhosh

ChennaiPy Workshop Tomorrow @ MIT, Chrompet

2010-05-21T07:40:00.000-07:00

Greetings Everyone,

Tomorrow there is a session planned @ MIT, Chrompet by ChennaiPy UG. I am happy that ChennaiPy is doing their activities in fairly good manner as I am seeing them from their start. I believe a good number of audience tomorrow and wish I would attend. Here are the details. Come and Get Started with Python.

Date: 22-05-2010
Time: 3pm to 5pm
Venue: NRCFOSS, AU-KBC Research Center,
            MIT, Chrompet

> ************************************
>
> Talk 1 : Introduction to Python
>
> Speaker : Balakrishnan, BCA Student, Sri Sankara Arts & Science College
>
> Duration : 30 min
>
> *************************************
>
> Talk 2    : ncurser in Python
>
> Speaker : Arulalan, MCA Student, Saveetha Engineering College
>
> Duration : 30 min
>
> ****************************************
>
> Talk 3 : Introduction to Scipy and Scilab
>
> Speaker : Jai Sathishkumar, M.Tech Student, Anna University
>
> Duration : 30 min
>
> *****************************************
>
> Talk 4    : Introduction to PyGTK Programming
>
> Speaker : Rajeswari, NRCFOSS
>
> Duration : 30 min
>
> ******************************************

Meet U [at] ChennaiPy!!!

Mozilla Devday 2010 ' Bangalore : 27th Feb : Live Blogging

2010-02-26T23:10:00.000-08:00

Mozilla
Arun Ranganathan, Technology Evangelist
Ragavan Srinivasan, Product Managaer, Mozilla
Seth Bindernagel, Director, Localization, Mozilla
Vineel Reddy, MCR, Community Marketting,
Lucian Teo and John Britton, Drumbeat Initiative, Mozilla

Mahiti
Sree Rameshaiah, executive Director,
Chethan Elvis, Marketting Director,
Sara Baptiste Brown, social Business Coordinator, Mahiti

Center of Internet Society
Sunil Abhram

Mozz Drumbeat Session:
The Future of the Internet

Session :2 The Embracing Web Platform -Arun Ranganathan'
What's good Platform?
Speed-->
JS Performance Wars
Power-->
Device Capabilities
Deployed at scale
Beauty-->
Make Users say wow!

what's In the Web?
Faster JS than Ever
Better Mashup Capabilities
2D and 3D Drawing Capabilities
Virtualized Storage
Device Integration
No Plugins Needed

Integrating with File System
Better File Analysis Capabilities in web pages
File API Support
(exif data ->Geo Tags)

Power: a Look at better Mashups
1.AJAX
2.Mashup have to be safe
3.Cross-site XMLHttpRequest with CORS Headers
4. IE8, XHttpRequest with CORS Headers
5. TweetPics

Make Data Location Aware
1. GeolocationAPI in browsers
2. navigator.geolocation supported in chrome (API)
(FF 3.3.6)
3. Google service SSID Wifi Spot -Mechanism of picking signals and identify location . -> GeoIP is collected and manipulated

Beauty
HTML5 and CSS3
1. Support for CSS3 @font-face in IE,Opera, FF and others (link the fonts across the server)
Case Study :TypeKit.com
Business based Open Fonts

Drawing 2D
HTML, JS(reading keyboard i/p), Canvas

Orientation Events
DOM Events Model: MozOrientation
Accelerometer

Then, There's Video
out-of-the box Vieo Capabilities
HTML5 -> video element used
Codec remains contentious
h.264 codec ->flash propertiary

theora
ogg -> open Standards

Demos: Green Screen
or light blue

CSS3 and SVG Powered Demo

Dynamic Content Injection - Demo

WebGL :Bringing 3D to CAnvas
OpenGL ES2.0 and share-based
An API "on top" of underlying Hardware
Demos: Toy car,

Keep in touch! arun@mozilla.com
there are no foolish questions, only fools who do not question.

Session :3 By Seth

Out of process plugins (OOPP)
Better startup time
Jetpacks support
Theme updates
Extension Manager Redesign
Tab Matches in Awesome Bar
Weave integration
Integrated Developer Tools
Source: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects

Firefox 3.7 and next Firefox 4.0
catch the ppt @ http://people.mozilla.com/~sethb/BangaloreDevDay/Firefox.Next.html

Sponsor Event: Mahiti.org

Convene is the key project and hacking is better, how postgrey is better than Oracle...Applied Engg and pure Engg, Conducting FOSS Workshops and TTP

There are three main categories of workshops.
1.Source Camps :
Source Camps are week-long workshops that focus on the use of free and open source software (FOSS) in the non-profit sector. They create opportunities for practical learning and skills exchange. An emphasis on community building, which runs through everything from content design and delivery to the agenda and location, makes Source Camps an unforgettable experience. The relationships created during the workshops last long beyond the week of the Camp.

2.General Workshops:
These are generally 2 -3 day workshops where the selected participantsi would like to gain an insight into open source and use this knowledge in migration.Some of these participants might be already familiar with open source but would like more information about the topics being covered.

3.Custom Workshops :
These are special workshops custom made for customers on request.These organizations had either attended our source camps or non-residential workshops and would like to effectively deploy open source technologies at the workplace more effectively.One example would be the custom training programmes we conduct at the Centre for Women's Development and Research. ( www.cwdr.org.in ) ,These have been highly effective in helping the organization migrate effortlessly from proprietary tools to open source.We did the migration ourselves and trained the staff on use of the tools effectively.

Topics which can be requested for these workshops could be anything from Linux OS to alternatives to MS Office and Outlook.Video and audio editing tools are also covered on request.

Please contact us with your requirements and we would be glad to assist you.
Our email is ngoinabox@mahiti.org .
Click here for our postal address and phone numbers.

Patents and Copyrights by CIS-India
Portable Network Graphics (PNG) ->alternate innovation.
OGG theora, Dirac, (and maybe On2's VPS)
Microsoft ->covering custom XML
Blackberry -> 615 million

Mozilla Labs : Raghavan
a virtual lab where people integrate and participate in bringing innovation
1994 (2001-Wikipedia) Mosaic Web Browser

geode, snowl, ubiquity, weave, Personas, jetpack, test pilot, bespin

The web is personal
User <--> Producers
The web Platform
Innovation Services

Weave Sync
-------------------------------------------------------
Encrypted Data in client-side
Full Browser Sync
Use Mozilla's Server or your own
Extend, Customise

Demo : Weave Sync

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Developer -> Documentation and Weave API Spec, Library for using Firefox data across all other devices.

You--> Identity
Account Manager : Connecting to Site very easy and consistent

Demo: People on the Web
web Finger is protocol, Activity Sreams, OpenID, OAuth, OAuth-WARP
Creating our own personas and become an approver.

Jetpack ->HTML, JS, CSS (Powerful FF Add-Ons)
Web-based, Secure, Robust, Extensible

Bespin -Web Based Code Editor

Design Challenge--> Mock-Up an idea for Firefox Product Team, Prototype, Design and bring in ideas into reality.
Video Presentation posted by raghavan
Speaker: Alex Faaborg, Mozilla Design Team-->Design Challenge from Mozilla open to new ideas to leverage FF!!!:) Concept Series-> Design Challenge for Firefox 4.0 "The Home Tab"
http://bit.ly/degign-challenge

Check out Save Our Tigers | Join the Roar

2010-02-13T10:15:00.001-08:00

Title: Save Our Tigers | Join the Roar
Link: http://www.saveourtigers.com/JoinTheRoar.phpion

I am really unhappy to hear that we have only 1411 tigers all-togethere in India. Lets participate in this Project and help people get aware of this issue and we need strong support from all to save our tiger resource of our Nation.

{DAY-2}- FSF, TN Conf @ SSN : Take the Plunge....Breath Free!!!

2009-12-06T09:13:00.000-08:00

{Day-2} @ SSN started with Ajax followed by most exciting Linux Distribution Making and Hands-On lab on making Linux distros. After the lunch, we had sessions on Patents and then came the most awaited project session where each team were assigned a project under FSF and brief timelines where given to us on project submission. What's more than these fabulous sessions, we had our refreshments and concluded FSF Conf.

I really enjoyed these two days and I thank all those who were behind this initative. HariShankar (my jnr) and I had a really log drive in his Passion+ and finally he dropped me @ Guindy while other 3 guys had SSN Route Buses to drop them home.

Working Technologies into projects is more important than learing them through Workshops and Conference. In this context, FSF and SSN has helped us to work on technology rather than just learning them. I have no words explaining these days in my life rather than start working on projects told to me on these two days, which I feel is the real way in which I can thank SSN Engg college and FSF Team.

FSF Rockzz!!!

FSF Conference @ SSN {DAY-1} - An Splendid Start

2009-12-05T10:20:00.000-08:00

It was 6:15AM, 5th December, 2009 when I started from my home to take the Route Bus to SSN. I reached the college @ 8:15AM and the Greens and aesthetic beauty of the campus greeted me as I entered. I was joined by 4 of my college guys (my jrs) and we made ourself present at Mini-Auditorium for the sessions.

Previewing Big-Bucks Bunny Movie the session began by a fabulous talk from Mr.Siddharth (Core FSF Member, Cognizant Employee). His talk helped us to know better what Free S/w is and what Open Source software is. He explained how important not to patent our innovation, as it prevents development of Science for the next 20 years from our date of patent. His talk made us to visualize the generations of human development from primitive-industrial-modern.

Next we had a talk from Mr.Praveen Chandrahas, IITian aand FSF Promoter, where he briefed out Filesystem and their implementation and steped down Ubuntu Installation process.

We had an Community person from Tamil Computing Team, Ubuntu Mr.Thangamani Arun briefing us on Android Architecture and its SDK's. He showcased a demo on how to work on Android Development Toolkit in Eclipse IDE and to use a Emulator.

Android session was followed by Shell Scripting by Mr.Bharathi Subramanian, FOSS Evangelist, ILUG Team. This session was really gr8 as I explored the basics of SHELL programming. I will surely work on this scripting a lot more than just listening to it.

We were served with refreshments in-between the sessions and {DAY-1} was really excellent. Tomorrow {DAY-2}, I am waiting for even more exciting stuffs @ FSF.

FSF RockZZZ!!!

All you wanted to know about hacking!!!

2009-12-03T22:50:00.000-08:00

Hacking has always inspired me from my schooling, and knowing on it from an Computer Security Consultant Ankit Fadia, who at the age 15 wrote his book on 'Ethical Hacking' is still more awakening..Here are the questions put to Ankit and his views on them...

When did you realise that you could hack?

I got interested in hacking at 12, but it took a while before I figured out how to do it. My first hack was quite interesting. I defaced a magazine site and put my own profile, pictures and e-mail id on it. But then I thought I might get into trouble, so I sent a mail to the editor with the solution on how to prevent hacking the website. He got back to me with a job offer but when he learnt that I was 13, he asked me to wait till I turned 18. I learnt my lesson. I never did an illegal hack after that.

Is hacking cool because it allows entry into forbidden territory?

It is. It gives you the power to do something that most people can't do, that too in the confines of your room. It gives a false sense of security.

What exactly is 'ethical hacking'?

You need to have the same knowledge as cyber criminals, but you put that knowledge to positive use. You go to sites, find out their flaws and correct them. I coined the term when I wrote my first book, Ethical Hacking, at 15.

You have worked with the FBI too. Isn't that a heady feeling?

I started working with them at 16, when a Pakistani group was planning to attack an Indian site. I traced the chat transcript and the site was saved. Then, this was like a game for me. But now I realise that there's a lot of responsibility involved in what I do.

Why did you take up the show, What The Hack?

Last year, I won the MTV Youth Icon award and was introduced to the programming head of the channel. I asked him if they wanted to do a show on hacking. They agreed. There are lots of channels which air tech shows that review technology and gadgets. But this show stands out because we teach people cool things that they can do in the virtual world.

Give us some tips on how to become good hackers?

You have to know the programming well and also think like a criminal. You have to get into the criminal's mind to become a security system expert.

-An Interview by Yahoo India

Plan your Calendar for Mozilla Free Cultural Roadshow @ Chennai

2009-12-03T21:59:00.000-08:00

I am eagerly looking for the Free Cultural Roadshow @ Chennai, through which I am planning to associate with my fellow Mozilla Campus Representatives and I believe this is an excellent platform for us to discuss on Open Web and its future. Talk your way in the Festival and Win a trip to Mozilla Drumbeat Festival,Amsterdam on June 2010. Catch me @ Mozilla free Cultural Roadshow,Anna University this Tuesday (8-12-2009) :)

Mozz Rockz!!!!

Mozilla Free Cultural RoadShow - Catch the Excitement @ CEG and IIT

2009-12-03T21:47:00.000-08:00

We love the web, and you do too. It creates huge opportunities along with new tensions.

What will the web look like in 5, 10, or 25 years? Will it still be a platform for creativity, self-expression, and open commerce? Or will it be enclosed by private interests and enveloped by surveillance and censorship?

Mozilla is traveling from city to city to celebrate the open web and remix culture. Join some illuminating talks, to speak your mind, and to meet new friends. Prepare a 5minutes of Talk which adds to your fame @ Mozilla Drumbeat!!!

Next dates

December 8, 2009
Anna University, Chennai

December 9, 2009
IIT, Madras

December 14, 2009
Mount Carmel College, Bangalore

December 16, 2009
CIS Office, Bangalore

December 18, 2009
CEPT, Ahmedabad

December 20, 2009
India International Centre (co-hosted by Magic Lantern), Delhi

December 22, 2009
Jadavpur University, Kolkata

The Roadshow events are 100% free and open to everyone.

Joomla User Group- Welcome Chennai, Fabulous Start-Up Meet

2009-12-03T11:37:00.000-08:00

Today 3rd December, 2009, I prepared Slides for my JUG presentation @ 3:00 PM and headed straight to Mary Brown @ Anna Nagar. It was 4:30 PM when Gokoul and JayaPrakash from P.M.R.I.T , Bro Rajesh, Swamy from Jaya Engineering College and his friend accompanied me at the venue for the meet. We were 6 , started with FOSS talk , CMS , then I presented my ideas on JUG and its purpose and activities to be conducted. Everyone shared their ideas which helped us to better plan JUG Activities.

It was a wonderful day, where the meet had everything from Joomla to Nuggets and Burgers. Soon a new web-portal for Joomla User Group, chennai will be hosted (http://jug-chennai.co.cc will be our temporary webspace) We shared many issues on Joomla and our user group activities @ the meet. I hope JUG always stays active and contribute for Joomla in all possible ways it can, becoz Open Source Matters...

From Left: Gokoul (P.M.R.I.T), JayaPrakash(P.M.R.I.T), Santhosh.V (Arunai Engg), Mr.Rajesh(E-ndicusInfo Tech), Swamy(Jaya Engg), Swamy Friend(Jaya Engg),

Joomla User Group - Start-Up Meet on 3rd December,2009

2009-11-30T21:43:00.000-08:00

Here is the Invite for our first JUG meeting to be held at Anna Nagar. Celebration is about to Start!!! Get ready for the Exciting Stuffs to be explored through JUG Chennai!!!!

Free Software Foundation, Tamil Nadu Workshop @ SSN on Dec 5th and 6th - Book your Seats...

2009-11-29T06:56:00.000-08:00

Wow..!!! Its now FSF, TN who will make my holidays more enjoyable. A Cup of Scripting , Linux Customization Salads, Python Feast...whats more to special this December!!! Here goes the Invite...

Hurry up Students !!! Click here http://fsftn.org/content/workshopssn2 to register to the workshop. Only 120 Seats available !!!!

*Automatic enrollment to projects* of Free Software Foundation on registering to the workshop. In the workshop you would learn :

- Business Models in Free Software
- How to configure Linux for your day-to-day use?
- Scripting Languages !!
- Learn all these on-hands at Lab.
- Learn Ajax.
- Ever thought of having your own Operating System? Learn it, Build it!!!
- Start working on Free Software projects with guidance from experts in Software industry.

*This is the ideal way to use your holidays !!! Fun, Learn, Hack !!!!!!!*

ChennaiPy Session - I @ AUKBC-MIT

2009-11-29T04:33:00.000-08:00

This is really a good start for chennaipy as it conducted its 1st session @ AUKBC- MIT Campus. This time, I reached the campus early and had my seat prior to the session start-up. 14 Members were in the session as it went and the session was filled with novice python group. Ms.Rajeshwari took the web-scrapping session and Mr.Jaganadh took Bio-Medical Text processing with python.

To my surprise, the talks were over very soon and I was given a chance to share my experience in python programming. I was not prepared to face the audience, but still, I managed to brief out my D-Bus Project and we had good discussions from all the attendees.

I am happy that from now ChennaiPy will regularly conduct session and I shall be a part in bringing out the sessions @ MIT which complements to better understanding of the language.

This was a draft posted by Mr.Jaganadh, Professor @ MIT on the session:

"This months chennaipy meet started at 3.10 p.m 28-11-09 at AU-KBC Research Centre MIT Campus of Anna University Chennai. Total 14 people attended the meeting. The first talk was given by Rajeswari S on WebScraping with Python, Santhosh give a talk on D-Bus programming with Python and Bio-medical text processing with python by Jaganadh G. There was discussion on IDE for Python, python web programming etc... The meeting ended by 04.50 p.m"

I thank Mr.Jaganadh, Mr.Surendar, MIT and NRCFOSS without them this session would have not been successful platform for us learn. I wish we must continue these session in future and bring out the best Python programmers in Chennai Region.

GYAN - Collective Learning

2009-10-27T10:54:00.000-07:00

How to obtain the latest version of LAMP on Ubuntu:

2009-09-08T21:31:00.000-07:00

(Apache 2.2 + MySQL 5.1 + PHP 5.2 + PERL 5.10 +PEAR + SQLite + ProFTPD + phpMyAdmin + Webalizer + phpSQLiteAdmin + XAMPP Control Panel)
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/223410
http://www.apachefriends.org/f/viewtopic.php?t=21531#108517

The commands in this HOWTO must be entered in the terminal:
Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal

Download XAMPP to your desktop and extract the files:
http://apachefriends.org/xampp-linux
cd ~/Desktop
wget http://www.apachefriends.org/download.php?xampp-linux-1.7.1.tar.gz
sudo tar xvfz xampp-linux*.tar.gz -C /opt

Create a XAMPP start menu entry:
cd ~/.local/share/applications
gedit xampp-control-panel.desktop

Paste the following into the open file:
[Desktop Entry]
Comment=Start/Stop XAMPP
Name=XAMPP Control Panel
Exec=gksudo "python /opt/lampp/share/xampp-control-panel/xampp-control-panel.py"
Icon[en_CA]=/usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable/devices/network-wired.svg
Encoding=UTF-8
Terminal=false
Name[en_CA]=XAMPP Control Panel
Comment[en_CA]=Start/Stop XAMPP
Type=Application
Icon=/usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable/devices/network-wired.svg

[Desktop Entry]
Comment=Start/Stop XAMPP
Name=XAMPP Control Panel
Exec=gksudo /opt/lampp/share/xampp-control-panel/xampp-control-panel
Icon[en_CA]=/opt/lampp/htdocs/xampp/img/logo-small.gif
Encoding=UTF-8
Terminal=false
Name[en_CA]=XAMPP Control Panel
Comment[en_CA]=Start/Stop XAMPP
Type=Application
Icon=/opt/lampp/htdocs/xampp/img/logo-small.gif

Save and close the file.

Publish:
XAMPP uses /opt/lampp/htdocs as the root web directory, but you can publish pages in your home directory this way.
cd ~
mkdir public_html
sudo ln -s ~/public_html /opt/lampp/htdocs/$USER

Now any files and folders you place in ~/public_html will be
published to your personal webserver.

Start XAMPP via the terminal:
cd /opt/lampp
sudo ./lampp start

Stop XAMPP (if necessary):
cd /opt/lampp
sudo ./lampp stop

Via the XAMPP Control Panel:
Applications -> Other -> XAMPP Control Panel

If Apache2 or MySQL is already running, then XAMPP will not start. You must stop these applications, if you want to use XAMPP:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

PHP5 is the default, but you can switch between PHP4 and PHP5, if you like:
cd /opt/lampp
sudo ./lampp php4
sudo ./lampp php5

Open your new webpages at:
http://localhost/username/

Security:
http://apachefriends.org/xampp-linux/381

1. The MySQL root user has a blank password.
2. MySQL is accessible via your local network.
3. ProFTPD has user “nobody” with password “lampp”.
4. PhpMyAdmin is accessible via the local network.
5. Examples are accessible via the local network.
6. MySQL and Apache running under the same user “nobody”.

To configure some of the security features of xampp:
cd /opt/lampp
sudo ./lampp security

The Origins of Linux - Linus Trovalds

2009-09-08T21:21:00.000-07:00

Google Wave!!!! - The Wave of the Future!!!!

2009-09-08T21:12:00.000-07:00

Delighted to hear another new makings of Google!!!! Email+IM+Wiki+RealTimeCollaboration+Documents+Workflows+ServerSideBots+GoogleMagic+OpenStandards = Google Wave

This is the "Wave" of the Future ;)

Check this out!!!!

Ride the D-Bus, Control your Linux desktop from the shell

2009-09-08T07:10:00.000-07:00

What is the D-Bus?

From the D-Bus documentation: "D-Bus is an inter-process communication mechanism—a medium for local communication between processes running on the same host. (Inter-host connects may be added in the future, but that is not what D-Bus is meant for). D-Bus is meant to be fast and lightweight, and is designed for use as a unified middleware layer underneath the main free desktop environments"

So for the non technically inclined (why are you reading this anyway) ;) basically a simple way to think of D-Bus, is that it's a way for processes on an operating system to communicate with each other. That's probably a simple and non accurate enough wording, but it should help grasp the concept. Many utilities nowadays are implementing D-Bus connectivity. It is especially interesting (well for me anyway) to script some GUI elements like for example my KDE-4 desktop from the command line. This would help automate some tasks and is cool anyways. Let's see how to begin talking on the D-Bus

In order to communicate with running applications on the D-Bus, we need a front end CLI application, or we could use a language binding (say python bindings). However, we will choose a CLI application. It is possible to use "dbus-launch", or the "qdbus" command part of Qt4. I will be using qdbus since it demonstrates the point and is faster to use. So, let's launch qdbus, and list the running communications buses.

# qdbus
:1.1
org.kde.klauncher
:1.10
org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver
org.kde.krunner
org.kde.screensaver
:1.12
org.kde.plasma
:1.1249
... List continues

So basically, qdbus now contacts the running session D-Bus and lists available buses. The buses are named in a reverse DNS style names as you can see. Some buses do not have names, but rather numbers, as far as I can see those represent specific sessions of some applications. Now we need to pick an interesting bus to talk on. I will run the following command to list only freedesktop dbuses, as I believe those should work whether you're running Gnome or KDE. So, it should help any reader follow along

#qdbus | grep freedesktop
org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver
org.freedesktop.Notifications
org.freedesktop.PowerManagement
org.freedesktop.DBus

so, let's pick the ScreenSaver bus. In order to list the available objects on any specific bus, we call it like so:

#qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver
/
/App
/Interface
/KBookmarkManager
/KBookmarkManager/konqueror
/KDebug
/MainApplication
/ManagerIface_contact
/ScreenSaver

I mostly find only one "useful" object, in this case "/ScreenSaver". Let's contact that object, and list its avialable "methods". The methods of an object for those who have not done any object oriented coding before, is basically the list of actions or "things" this object can "do". So listing the methods:

# qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /ScreenSaver
signal void org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.ActiveChanged(bool)
method bool org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.GetActive()
method uint org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.GetActiveTime()
method uint org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.GetSessionIdleTime()
method uint org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.Inhibit(QString application_name, QString reason_for_inhibit)
method void org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.Lock()
method bool org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.SetActive(bool e)
method void org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.SimulateUserActivity()
method uint org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.Throttle(QString application_name, QString reason_for_inhibit)
method void org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.UnInhibit(uint cookie)
method void org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.UnThrottle(uint cookie)
method void org.kde.screensaver.configure()
method void org.kde.screensaver.saverLockReady()
method QDBusVariant org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties.Get(QString interface_name, QString property_name)
method void org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties.Set(QString interface_name, QString property_name, QDBusVariant value)
method QString org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable.Introspect()

Hmm, interesting stuff. Can you see the following method:
org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.GetSessionIdleTime
Obviously it gives you the session idle time, i.e. how long has the interactive user not touched his keyboard or mouse. This piece of information is interesting if you want your shell script to only do certain things when the user is not interactively using his machine. Without D-Bus, getting this kind of information would be almost impossible, or too tricky. Now how do we call this method you ask? easy! just append it to the command line:

#qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /ScreenSaver org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.GetSessionIdleTime
0

So, the output from this command is a "0". Meaning the session idle time is zero! Everytime you execute this command, you get the same answer. Starting to guess why ? :) Basically, as you hit "enter" to run this command, you reset the session idle time back to zero! So, what do we do to test the functionality, try this:

# sleep 5 ; qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /ScreenSaver org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.GetSessionIdleTime
4

So, that previous combo command sleeps for 5 seconds .. then executes the D-Bus query without touching any further keyboard keys, so this time we get an answer of "4" seconds. Don't know where that extra second slipped though :)

Ok, as a second example let's focus on the following method:
method bool org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.SetActive(bool e)

This method sets the screen saver active, i.e. it launches the screen saver from your shell command or script. Let's test it out:

# qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /ScreenSaver org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.SetActive
Error: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod
No such method 'SetActive' in interface 'org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver' at object path '/ScreenSaver' (signature '')

Oops, this time we got an error. Why? Basically the error is telling us that it cannot find that method we're calling with that "signature". A method signature usually means the arguments you pass to it and the return type. This simply means we're not calling the method the way it's meant to be called. The sharp shooters are going to instantly know this is because we missed the (bool e) at the end of the method. This means the method call is expecting a boolean (true/false) argument. So, let's call the screensaver method correctly this time:

# qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /ScreenSaver org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.SetActive True
true

Cool! We're now launching the screensaver from the command line. Let's see what else we can do:

# qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /ScreenSaver org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.Lock

Yep, that locks the screen on demand, cool! I'm hungry for more. Let's see. Let's call that inhibit method. This will basically inhibit the screensaver from kicking in, even if your computer is idle. Why would that be useful ? Say you're watching a You-tube longish video, and AFAIK, Flash doesn't yet communicate that to the system, and thus the screensaver will kick in to interrupt the video playback. So, let's do it:

# qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /ScreenSaver org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.Inhibit "$$" "Testing D-Bus Interface"
5822

Let's explain those arguments we passed, the first one should be the application name, in my case, the special shell variable $$ is the PID for the currently executing shell. The second string is the "reason for inhibit"! The method call returns a cookie, i.e. a magic number that identifies my request. This is useful when you want to turn off the inhibit, i.e. return the system to its normal state. You would need to pass back that magic cookie. This is used by the system to identify the different inhibit requests. So finally let's uninhibit our screensaver using that cookie number

# qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /ScreenSaver org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.UnInhibit 5822

Cool! Are you starting to see the possibilities just yet? Hope you had fun on this D-Bus tour

Detecting Network Connectivity Using D-Bus

2009-09-08T06:21:00.001-07:00

Preface

The Intel® Mobile Internet Device (MID) platform provides a full internet experience in a pocket-sized form factor. Combining Moblin-based operating systems with the Intel® Atom™ processor, MIDs are able to run any application that has been built for the x86 architecture, including Adobe Flash 10* and Adobe AIR 1.5*. While the features of the devices that are and will be on the market vary depending on OEM and target market, there are several features that the devices share in common; small form factor, emphasis on internet connectivity rather than extensive storage, and alternate input methods.

Although there are ultra-mobile computing devices in the market that run Microsoft Windows XP* or Windows Vista* and that are built on the same hardware platform as those running a Moblin-based operating systems such as Midinux* or Ubuntu* Mobile Edition, this series of whitepapers focuses entirely on Moblin-based MIDs. For information on how to retrieve this information from Windows operating systems, please consult that platform’s documentation, or see the Intel® Mobile Platform SDK.

The functionality described in this paper is also provided via the Platform Awareness Service, a light-weight, D-Bus initiated platform information provider. However, because the final software stack for each device is influenced heavily by the OEM and Service Providers, this service may not be pre-installed on some Moblin-based devices. We have therefore written these whitepapers in order to simplify access to this information on platforms that do not have this service installed.

For further information on how to use D-Bus to retrieve information from the Platform Awareness Service, please refer to the Platform Awareness Service documentation.

Introduction

With the advances of computer networking within the last decade, devices can be connected via a myriad of technologies and protocols, wired and wireless. This connectivity has become so prevalent that many applications can’t function without it. Some application functions take advantage of network communications such as email, network gaming, web browser, etc. Some real-time applications, especialy networking games, require a large bandwidth and high network reliability. These applications must be aware of the network connectivity. Mobile computing devices such as a laptop or Mobile Internet Device (MID), frequently use wireless technology and thus network awareness becomes even more important. Instead of letting each application write its own connectivity awareness code, we propose a uniform way to convey the connectivity information to applications. Laptop/MID applications can then refer to our system to get information on network connectivity and make proper decisions at run time.

As part of a whole project, MID Platform Awareness, this paper shows how we can call connectivity awareness methods and get event notifications.

The system was developed on Moblin[4], a Linux* platform, and uses D-Bus communication[1] to transport information to users [1]. Applications which want to get connectivity information need to use D-Bus as well. In the following sections, we briefly describe D-Bus and how we implement network connectivity awareness service using D-Bus. We show examples of how an application can retrieve the network connectivity information; (1)whether or not the device is connecting to a network, (2)whether or not the device can reach a given website, (3)the latency of the network when the device does connect, (4)the data rate involved when the device reaches a website, (5)the media type of the current network, and (6)the link speed of the network.

Background on D-Bus

D-Bus is a fast, lightweight message system which allows applications to communicate one on one or to broadcast messages to subscribers, (inter-process communication). [2]. D-Bus can be used as low-level API or via a higher level binding, such as Qt, Python*, Java*, C#, or Perl. This paper shows an application written in C using Glib bindings. Glib is the base library of GNOME and provides an object-based, event-driven environment.

Two buses are defined in D-Bus: the system bus and the session bus. The system bus allows communication between an application and the operating system while the session bus is designed to allow communication between two applications.

In order to use D-Bus, we need to understand a few basics. First, an object is an endpoint on the bus that is created by an application in the context of that application’s connection to the bus. Objects have names, and these names are called object paths. We can find an object via its path. A proxy allows clients to reference objects on the bus. Once we find an object, we usually keep a proxy to that object so we can subsequently refer to that object without searching again.

An object can perform specific operations, referred to as methods. Thus, a client can send a request to an object and ask the object to invoke a method. The object then executes the method (if the method exists) and the result is sent back to the client. If a method requires input parameters, these parameters are passed with the request. The result can be one or more output parameters, which are sent back to the client in the reply message. At the D-Bus layer, this method invocation/message passing sequence occurs asynchronously; the glib wrapper for the D-Bus object proxy allows the methods to be called either synchronously or asynchronously.

An object can also emit an event, or signal. When a signal is generated by an object, it is broadcasted to any interested observers. Signals can also carry parameters. Methods and Signals are embedded members of an object that can be grouped into an interface. An object can declare one or many interfaces.

In order to generate dbus-glib binding code, we use a tool called dbus-binding-tool. We first create an XML file, referred to as an Introspection XML file, in which we describe the methods and signals. Defining the interface this way ensures that clients can discover and introspect our D-Bus service. An example of the introspection XML is shown below:

- collapse sourceview plaincopy to clipboardprint?

1.
2. 3. "-//freedesktop//DTD D-Bus Object Introspection 1.0//EN"
4. "http://standards.freedesktop.org/dbus/1.0/introspect.dtd">
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.

"-//freedesktop//DTD D-Bus Object Introspection 1.0//EN"
"http://standards.freedesktop.org/dbus/1.0/introspect.dtd">

In this introspection XML file, an interface called org.moblin.Platform.Connection defines six methods:
IsConnected, IsReachable, GetLatency, GetDatRate, GetMediaType and GetLinkSpeed. The annotation XML tags tell dbus-binding-tool what the name of the implementing C function should be. For example, IsConnected is the name of the method that will be visible to users over D-Bus. Internally, we need to implement a C function called isConnected. Method parameters and return values are both specified using the arg XML tag. The direction attribute for a parameter is "in"; for return values, the direction attribute is "out". Note that parameters and return values both have name attributes.

The type attribute of the arg XML tag indicates the data type of the parameter or return value. For example, the value "b" in the IsConnected method return value indicates that the method returns a Boolean. The second method, IsReachable, takes a string parameter representing the target URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) and returns a Boolean value. The next two methods, GetLatency and GetDataRate, also take a string parameter representing the URI and return a double representing seconds and kilobytes per second, respectively. The output of GetMediaType is a string. Finally, the output of the last method, GetLinkSpeed, is a Double data type, representing the number of kilobits per second.

Two signals are defined in the introspection XML file. The signal "Connected" is generated when the system changes state from having no connection to having at least one connection. The "Disconnected" signal is generated when the when the system changes state from having at least one connection to having no connections.

Below are primary steps to implement a D-Bus service. For more details, look here.

* Run dbus-binding-tool for an introspection XML file to generate dbus-glib binding code
* Acquire the D-Bus GObject wrapper
* Implement the instance initialization
* Implement the methods
* Register the object on the D-Bus

To call the methods implemented on a remote object, a client needs to follow the following steps:

* Connect to the bus
* Create a proxy object
* Invoke the methods on the proxy object.

The connectivity awareness service below uses D-Bus as a communication channel to send information to clients regarding network connectivity. Clients can thus use D-Bus to get connectivity information by querying the methods provided by the connectivity service. Client applications can also listen for the signals that the connectivity awareness service generates. The methods and events mentioned in the introspection file are implemented by the connectivity awareness service.

Getting Network Connectivity Information

The connectivity awareness service provides the means to query the following connectivity information on the computer where the service is installed.

Detecting the network connection

A networked application obviously requires an established network connection. Before allocating resources for a network transaction, it is useful to know whether or not the system has an established network connection. Therefore, the network connectivity service provides a method called IsConnected, which returns a Boolean value confirming the status of the network. The network connectivity service checks the status of all network devices on the computer. If at least one network device has an established connection, the Boolean value TRUE is returned. If all network devices on the computer are not running, the Boolean value FALSE is returned. To query the connectivity, the application first must bind to D-Bus service as shown in the following example

- collapse sourceview plaincopy to clipboardprint?

1. #include
2. #include
3. #include
4. #include
5. #include
6. #include
7.
8. #define PLATFORM_SERVICE "org.moblin.Platform"
9. #define PLATFORM_PATH "/org/moblin/Platform"
10. #define PLATFORM_CONNECTION_IF "org.moblin.Platform.Connection"
11.
12. int main(int argc, char** argv)
13. {
14. DBusGConnection* conn;
15. GError *error;
16. DBusGProxy *platformProxy;
17.
18. g_type_init();
19. error = NULL;
20. conn = dbus_g_bus_get(DBUS_BUS_SESSION, &error);
21.
22. // Create the proxy Platform
23. platformProxy = dbus_g_proxy_new_for_name(conn,
24. PLATFORM_SERVICE, // target for the method call
25. PLATFORM_PATH, // object to call on
26. PLATFORM_CONNECTION_IF); // interface to call on
27.
28. gboolean result;
29.
30. if (!dbus_g_proxy_call(platformProxy, "IsConnected", &error,
31. G_TYPE_INVALID,
32. G_TYPE_BOOLEAN, &result,
33. G_TYPE_INVALID))
34. {
35. g_printerr("Failed to call remotely: %s\n",
36. error->message);
37. g_error_free(error);
38. }
39. else
40. printf ("Remote call successes with returned value: %s\n", result? "TRUE" : "FALSE");
41.
42. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
43. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
44. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
45.
46. return 0;
47. }

#include
#include
#include
#include
#include
#include

#define PLATFORM_SERVICE "org.moblin.Platform"
#define PLATFORM_PATH "/org/moblin/Platform"
#define PLATFORM_CONNECTION_IF "org.moblin.Platform.Connection"

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
DBusGConnection* conn;
GError *error;
DBusGProxy *platformProxy;

g_type_init();
error = NULL;
conn = dbus_g_bus_get(DBUS_BUS_SESSION, &error);

// Create the proxy Platform
platformProxy = dbus_g_proxy_new_for_name(conn,
PLATFORM_SERVICE, // target for the method call
PLATFORM_PATH, // object to call on
PLATFORM_CONNECTION_IF); // interface to call on

gboolean result;

if (!dbus_g_proxy_call(platformProxy, "IsConnected", &error,
G_TYPE_INVALID,
G_TYPE_BOOLEAN, &result,
G_TYPE_INVALID))
{
g_printerr("Failed to call remotely: %s\n",
error->message);
g_error_free(error);
}
else
printf ("Remote call successes with returned value: %s\n", result? "TRUE" : "FALSE");

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

return 0;
}

Note that the application invokes the method IsConnected implemented in the connectivity awareness service: no input is required, and the method returns TRUE if the computer is connected to a network.

The back-end implementation of this method basically computes the list of network adapters available, and confirms the connection status if there is at least one network adapter running. The function detecting whether or not a network adapter is running, is shown below

- collapse sourceview plaincopy to clipboardprint?

1. netdev_ret netdev_get_running(netdev_dev *dev, // in
2. netdev_running *running) // out
3. {
4. struct ifreq ifr;
5. if(_get_ifreq(dev->ifname, SIOCGIFFLAGS, &ifr) != NETDEV_SUCCESS)
6. {
7. running = RUNNING_UNKNOWN;
8. return NETDEV_ERROR;
9. }
10.
11. short flags = ifr.ifr_flags;
12. if(flags & IFF_RUNNING)
13. {
14. *running = RUNNING_RUN;
15. }
16. else
17. {
18. *running = RUNNING_STOP;
19. }
20.
21. return NETDEV_SUCCESS;
22. }
23.

netdev_ret netdev_get_running(netdev_dev *dev, // in
netdev_running *running) // out
{
struct ifreq ifr;
if(_get_ifreq(dev->ifname, SIOCGIFFLAGS, &ifr) != NETDEV_SUCCESS)
{
running = RUNNING_UNKNOWN;
return NETDEV_ERROR;
}

short flags = ifr.ifr_flags;
if(flags & IFF_RUNNING)
{
*running = RUNNING_RUN;
}
else
{
*running = RUNNING_STOP;
}

return NETDEV_SUCCESS;
}

Detecting HTTP reachability

The second method queries the reachability of a specified website. When getting this request, the connectivity service forms a HTTP GET message[5] and sends it to the specified address (web address) at port 80 (the typical port for HTTP protocol). The socket timeout is set to 3 seconds in this implementation: the service will wait for a HTTP response with status 200[5] before disconnecting the socket. This method, IsReachable, requires a string parameter as the target address (web address) and returns a Boolean value confirming whether or not the web address can be reachable within the socket timeout. The format of the valid entry takes the protocol (http in this case) follows it with the URI. Examples of valid inputs are shown below

"http://www.intel.com/", "http://www.google.com/", "http://www.yahoo.com/", etc ...

The third method, GetLatency, computes the time delay between sending a HTTP GET message and receiving the reply. This method takes an input parameter which is the URI of the website and returns a value of type double, representing the time in seconds. If the socket timeout expires, this method returns a null value.

The fourth method, GetDataRate, calculates the data rate when sending a HTTP GET message and receiving the reply. This method takes an input parameter which is the URI of the website and returns a value of type double representing kilobyte per second (kBps). If the socket timeout expires, this method returns a null value. Data rate is computed using the following formula:

(length of HTTP GET sent + length of HTTP reply) / latency

Code referring to these D-Bus methods is shown below.

- collapse sourceview plaincopy to clipboardprint?

1. int result1;
2.
3. if (!dbus_g_proxy_call(platformProxy, "IsReachable", &error,
4. G_TYPE_STRING, "http://www.intel.com/",
5. G_TYPE_INVALID,
6. G_TYPE_BOOLEAN, &result1,
7. G_TYPE_INVALID))
8. {
9. g_printerr("Failed to call remotely: %s\n",
10. error->message);
11. g_error_free(error);
12. }
13. else
14. printf ("Remote call successes with returned value: %s\n", result1? "TRUE" : "FALSE");
15.
16. gdouble result2;
17.
18. if (!dbus_g_proxy_call(platformProxy, "GetLatency", &error,
19. G_TYPE_STRING, "http://www.intel.com/",
20. G_TYPE_INVALID,
21. G_TYPE_DOUBLE, &result2,
22. G_TYPE_INVALID))
23. {
24. g_printerr("Failed to call remotely: %s\n",
25. error->message);
26. g_error_free(error);
27. }
28. else
29. printf ("Remote call successes with returned value: %6.3f seconds\n", result2);
30.
31.
32. if (!dbus_g_proxy_call(platformProxy, "GetDataRate", &error,
33. G_TYPE_STRING, "http://www.intel.com/",
34. G_TYPE_INVALID,
35. G_TYPE_DOUBLE, &result2,
36. G_TYPE_INVALID))
37. {
38. g_printerr("Failed to call remotely: %s\n",
39. error->message);
40. g_error_free(error);
41. }
42. else
43. printf ("Remote call successes with returned value: %8.2f KB/sec\n", result2);

int result1;

if (!dbus_g_proxy_call(platformProxy, "IsReachable", &error,
G_TYPE_STRING, "http://www.intel.com/",
G_TYPE_INVALID,
G_TYPE_BOOLEAN, &result1,
G_TYPE_INVALID))
{
g_printerr("Failed to call remotely: %s\n",
error->message);
g_error_free(error);
}
else
printf ("Remote call successes with returned value: %s\n", result1? "TRUE" : "FALSE");

gdouble result2;

if (!dbus_g_proxy_call(platformProxy, "GetLatency", &error,
G_TYPE_STRING, "http://www.intel.com/",
G_TYPE_INVALID,
G_TYPE_DOUBLE, &result2,
G_TYPE_INVALID))
{
g_printerr("Failed to call remotely: %s\n",
error->message);
g_error_free(error);
}
else
printf ("Remote call successes with returned value: %6.3f seconds\n", result2);

if (!dbus_g_proxy_call(platformProxy, "GetDataRate", &error,
G_TYPE_STRING, "http://www.intel.com/",
G_TYPE_INVALID,
G_TYPE_DOUBLE, &result2,
G_TYPE_INVALID))
{
g_printerr("Failed to call remotely: %s\n",
error->message);
g_error_free(error);
}
else
printf ("Remote call successes with returned value: %8.2f KB/sec\n", result2);

The back-end implementation of the above three methods shares a common function: this function parses the input URI and then searches for the URI reachability using HTTP protocol. The parsing function validates the URI and retrieves the target IP address. The reachability function forms a HTTP GET message and sends to the target IP address at port 80. The reachability is confirmed if a HTTP reply message is received within a timeout limit. Readers are encouraged to refer to the source code of the MID Platform Awareness project for the implementation. For illustration, only the reachability function is shown below

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1. bool HTTPIsReachable(
2. unsigned int *pTime, // in msec
3. double *pRate, // in KB/sec
4. PURI_INFO pUri)
5. {
6. bool bRet = false;
7. unsigned long StartTime, StopTime;
8. int dwStatusCode;
9. int conn;
10. int Len = 0;
11.
12. if (pTime)
13. *pTime = 0;
14.
15. if ( pUri->Port == 0 )
16. pUri->Port = HTTPPORT;
17.
18. StartTime = getTime();
19. if (pUri->DestPath)
20. conn = (int)socketClient( pUri->pHostIP, pUri->Port, 0);
21.
22. if (conn < 0)
23. {
24. printf("conn<0\n");
25. goto GracefulExit;
26. }
27.
28. char req[1024];
29. sprintf( req, "GET /%s HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: %s\r\n", pUri->FileName, pUri->DestPath);
30. strcat( req, "User-Agent: hget/" LIBHTTP_VERSION "\r\n");
31. strcat( req, "Pragma: no-cache\r\n" );
32. strcat( req, "Accept: */*\r\n\r\n" );
33. dwStatusCode = HttpRequest(conn, &Len, req); // in Bytes
34. close(conn);
35.
36. StopTime = getTime();
37.
38. printf("return code %d\n", dwStatusCode);
39. if ( dwStatusCode == 200 || pUri->FileName == 0 )
40. {
41. bRet = true;
42. if (pTime)
43. {
44. unsigned int st;
45. st = StopTime - StartTime; // in msec
46. *pTime = st;
47. *pRate = (double)Len / (double)st; // in KB/sec
48. }
49. }
50.
51. GracefulExit:
52. return bRet;
53. }
54.

bool HTTPIsReachable(
unsigned int *pTime, // in msec
double *pRate, // in KB/sec
PURI_INFO pUri)
{
bool bRet = false;
unsigned long StartTime, StopTime;
int dwStatusCode;
int conn;
int Len = 0;

if (pTime)
*pTime = 0;

if ( pUri->Port == 0 )
pUri->Port = HTTPPORT;

StartTime = getTime();
if (pUri->DestPath)
conn = (int)socketClient( pUri->pHostIP, pUri->Port, 0);

if (conn < 0)
{
printf("conn<0\n");
goto GracefulExit;
}

char req[1024];
sprintf( req, "GET /%s HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: %s\r\n", pUri->FileName, pUri->DestPath);
strcat( req, "User-Agent: hget/" LIBHTTP_VERSION "\r\n");
strcat( req, "Pragma: no-cache\r\n" );
strcat( req, "Accept: */*\r\n\r\n" );
dwStatusCode = HttpRequest(conn, &Len, req); // in Bytes
close(conn);

StopTime = getTime();

printf("return code %d\n", dwStatusCode);
if ( dwStatusCode == 200 || pUri->FileName == 0 )
{
bRet = true;
if (pTime)
{
unsigned int st;
st = StopTime - StartTime; // in msec
*pTime = st;
*pRate = (double)Len / (double)st; // in KB/sec
}
}

GracefulExit:
return bRet;
}

Detecting the media and speed of the network connection

The last two methods, GetMediaType and GetLinkSpeed, return the network media type and the link speed of the network. In the current implementation, only Ethernet and WiFi are supported. The output of GetMediaType is a string (i.e., "802.03", "802.11g"… etc) and the output of GetLinkSpeed is a value of type double, representing the number of kbps (kilobits per second).

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1. char *result3;
2.
3. if (!dbus_g_proxy_call(platformProxy, "GetMediaType", &error,
4. G_TYPE_INVALID,
5. G_TYPE_STRING, &result3,
6. G_TYPE_INVALID))
7. {
8. g_printerr("Failed to call remotely: %s\n",
9. error->message);
10. g_error_free(error);
11. }
12. else
13. printf ("Remote call successes with returned value: %s\n", result3);
14.
15. double result4;
16.
17. if (!dbus_g_proxy_call(platformProxy, "GetLinkSpeed", &error,
18. G_TYPE_INVALID,
19. G_TYPE_DOUBLE, &result4,
20. G_TYPE_INVALID))
21. {
22. g_printerr("Failed to call remotely: %s\n",
23. error->message);
24. g_error_free(error);
25. }
26. else
27. printf ("Remote call successes with returned value: %10.1f Kbps (kbit per sec)\n", result4);
28.

char *result3;

if (!dbus_g_proxy_call(platformProxy, "GetMediaType", &error,
G_TYPE_INVALID,
G_TYPE_STRING, &result3,
G_TYPE_INVALID))
{
g_printerr("Failed to call remotely: %s\n",
error->message);
g_error_free(error);
}
else
printf ("Remote call successes with returned value: %s\n", result3);

double result4;

if (!dbus_g_proxy_call(platformProxy, "GetLinkSpeed", &error,
G_TYPE_INVALID,
G_TYPE_DOUBLE, &result4,
G_TYPE_INVALID))
{
g_printerr("Failed to call remotely: %s\n",
error->message);
g_error_free(error);
}
else
printf ("Remote call successes with returned value: %10.1f Kbps (kbit per sec)\n", result4);

The back-end implementation of the method GetMediaType is shown below.

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1. char* RetrieveMediaType(void)
2. {
3. netdev_dev netdev_list[MAX_DEVICE];
4. int numInterface = 0;
5.
6. if(netdev_get_devices(netdev_list, &numInterface) == NETDEV_SUCCESS)
7. {
8. int i;
9. netdev_dev *net_devPtr = netdev_list;
10.
11. for (i=0; i= Frequency802_11a1) &&
12. (freq <= Frequency802_11a2) &&
13. (rate <= MaxRate802_11a))
14. return ("802.11a");
15.
16. if ((freq >= Frequency802_11b1) &&
17. (freq <= Frequency802_11b2) &&
18. (rate <= MaxRate802_11b))
19. return ("802.11b");
20.
21. if ((freq >= Frequency802_11g1) &&
22. (freq <= Frequency802_11g2) &&
23. (rate <= MaxRate802_11g))
24. return ("802.11g");
25.
26. return ("Unknown");
27. break;
28. }
29.
30. default:
31. return ("Unknown");
32. break;
33. }
34.
35. }
36.
37. else
38. return ("Unknown");
39.
40. }
41. }
42. net_devPtr++;
43. }
44.
45. }
46.
47. return ("Unknown");
48. }
49.

char* RetrieveMediaType(void)
{
netdev_dev netdev_list[MAX_DEVICE];
int numInterface = 0;

if(netdev_get_devices(netdev_list, &numInterface) == NETDEV_SUCCESS)
{
int i;
netdev_dev *net_devPtr = netdev_list;

for (i=0; i= Frequency802_11a1) &&
(freq <= Frequency802_11a2) &&
(rate <= MaxRate802_11a))
return ("802.11a");

if ((freq >= Frequency802_11b1) &&
(freq <= Frequency802_11b2) &&
(rate <= MaxRate802_11b))
return ("802.11b");

if ((freq >= Frequency802_11g1) &&
(freq <= Frequency802_11g2) &&
(rate <= MaxRate802_11g))
return ("802.11g");

return ("Unknown");
break;
}

default:
return ("Unknown");
break;
}

}

else
return ("Unknown");

}
}
net_devPtr++;
}

}

return ("Unknown");
}

The back-end implementation of the method GetLinkSpeed is shown below.

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1. double RetrieveLinkSpeed(void) // in bps
2. {
3. netdev_dev netdev_list[MAX_DEVICE];
4. int numInterface = 0;
5.
6. if(netdev_get_devices(netdev_list, &numInterface) == NETDEV_SUCCESS)
7. {
8. int i;
9. netdev_dev *net_devPtr = netdev_list;
10.
11. for (i=0; i

double RetrieveLinkSpeed(void) // in bps
{
netdev_dev netdev_list[MAX_DEVICE];
int numInterface = 0;

if(netdev_get_devices(netdev_list, &numInterface) == NETDEV_SUCCESS)
{
int i;
netdev_dev *net_devPtr = netdev_list;

for (i=0; i

Readers are encouraged to refer to the source code of the MID Platform Awareness project for more details.

Monitoring Network Connectivity Change

An application can query the network connectivity information by invoking the methods above. However, instead of constantly invoking the method to query the network connectivity status, sometimes it is more practical that an application just subscribe to network events, or signals. The application will be notified whenever the network connectivity changes status. Two network events are defined: Connected and Disconnected. The Connected event is emitted by the network connectivity service when the network suddenly becomes available. Similarly, the Disconnected event is emitted by the network connectivity service when the network suddenly becomes unavailable. The following code shows how to use D-Bus signals for monitoring network connectivity.

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1. DBusMessage* msg;
2. DBusConnection* conn;
3. DBusError err;
4.
5. printf("Listening for signals\n");
6.
7. // initialise the errors
8. dbus_error_init(&err);
9.
10. // connect to the bus and check for errors
11. conn = dbus_bus_get(DBUS_BUS_SESSION, &err);
12. if (dbus_error_is_set(&err))
13. {
14. fprintf(stderr, "Connection Error (%s)\n", err.message);
15. dbus_error_free(&err);
16. }
17.
18. if (NULL == conn)
19. exit(1);
20.
21. dbus_bus_add_match(conn, "type='signal',interface='org.moblin.Platform.Connection'", &err);
22. dbus_connection_flush(conn);
23.
24. if (dbus_error_is_set(&err))
25. {
26. fprintf(stderr, "Match Error (%s)\n", err.message);
27. exit(1);
28. }
29.
30. printf("Match rule sent\n");
31.
32. // loop listening for signals being emmitted
33. while (true)
34. {
35. // non blocking read of the next available message
36. dbus_connection_read_write(conn, 0);
37. msg = dbus_connection_pop_message(conn);
38.
39. // loop again if we haven't read a message
40. if (NULL == msg)
41. {
42. sleep(1);
43. continue;
44. }
45.
46. if (dbus_message_is_signal(msg, PLATFORM_CONNECTION_IF, CONN_CONNECTED_SIGNAL))
47. printf("Received signal %s\n", CONN_CONNECTED_SIGNAL);
48.
49. if (dbus_message_is_signal(msg, PLATFORM_CONNECTION_IF, CONN_DISCONNECTED_SIGNAL))
50. printf("Received signal %s\n", CONN_DISCONNECTED_SIGNAL);
51.
52. // free the message
53. dbus_message_unref(msg);
54. }
55.
56.

DBusMessage* msg;
DBusConnection* conn;
DBusError err;

printf("Listening for signals\n");

// initialise the errors
dbus_error_init(&err);

// connect to the bus and check for errors
conn = dbus_bus_get(DBUS_BUS_SESSION, &err);
if (dbus_error_is_set(&err))
{
fprintf(stderr, "Connection Error (%s)\n", err.message);
dbus_error_free(&err);
}

if (NULL == conn)
exit(1);

dbus_bus_add_match(conn, "type='signal',interface='org.moblin.Platform.Connection'", &err);
dbus_connection_flush(conn);

if (dbus_error_is_set(&err))
{
fprintf(stderr, "Match Error (%s)\n", err.message);
exit(1);
}

printf("Match rule sent\n");

// loop listening for signals being emmitted
while (true)
{
// non blocking read of the next available message
dbus_connection_read_write(conn, 0);
msg = dbus_connection_pop_message(conn);

// loop again if we haven't read a message
if (NULL == msg)
{
sleep(1);
continue;
}

if (dbus_message_is_signal(msg, PLATFORM_CONNECTION_IF, CONN_CONNECTED_SIGNAL))
printf("Received signal %s\n", CONN_CONNECTED_SIGNAL);

if (dbus_message_is_signal(msg, PLATFORM_CONNECTION_IF, CONN_DISCONNECTED_SIGNAL))
printf("Received signal %s\n", CONN_DISCONNECTED_SIGNAL);

// free the message
dbus_message_unref(msg);
}

Conclusion

D-Bus is a lightweight Remote Procedure Call (RPC) which is suitable for many applications running on a desktop. Because D-Bus is simple and relative small, yet powerful, we can adapt this technology for Mobile Internet Devices (MID). In this paper, we introduced a platform service for MID using D-Bus technology. We briefly described the six connectivity-related methods and two signals provided by the MIDPlatformSvc.

Although this implementation has been tested on the Moblin stack, this technology should also work on a Windows platform as well: therefore, with minimum change, this application should work on other form factors like UMPC, which run Windows* instead.

References

[1] D-Bus, http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus
[2] D-Bus Tutorial, http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-tutorial.html
[3] http://www.moblin.org/toolkits/basicDevGuides/mobLinux/toolkits_DevGds_mobLinux_createDBUS.php
[4] Mobile and Internet Linux Project, http://moblin.org/
[5] RFC 1945 "Hypertext Transfer Protocol – HTTP/1.0"