Happy Ganesh Festival - 27-Aug-2006

Lord Ganesh (Mumbai folks

One of the most popular Gods in India, lord Ganesh or Ganpati is considered a symbol of wisdom and a bringer of good luck. It is said that his elephant head epitomises everything related to wisdom-small shrewd eyes, long ears that miss nothing, a long nose that can smell out anything fight and his vehicle, a mouse, reflects how much importance a wise man gives to the smallest of life forms. Shown at gateways and on doors, either by visuals or symbols, generally facing the rising sun in the east, Ganesh is revered across India as a great clearer of obstacles. Meetings, gatherings, weddings, functions and celebrations begin with a prayer of lord Ganesh and no new venture-be it a new company, a new house, a new shop is inaugurated without reciting a 'mantra' of lord Ganesh.

Ganesh is remembered on chauth or chaturthi, the 4th day of every month of the Hindu calendered, but most of all on Ganesh Chaturthi which is celebrated as his birthday. Ladoos are distributed on the day-by tradition ladoos were placed in different corners of the house and eaten before the meal. Milk is offered to idols of lord Ganesh at home and at temples, and Ganesh puja is performed at all temples and hi-house prayer rooms. Fasting, feasting and distribution of sweets offered to Lord Ganesh are important aspects of Ganesh chaturthi rituals in India. Hindus pray to images of Lord Ganesha, large and small, many of them made specially for the occasion by cottage industries and street side artisans, and those that do not wish to keep the idols alive by daily prayers, offerings and lighting oil lamps, immerse them in the nearest water body (all rivers, lakes and the sea which are sacred to Hindus).

Business Intelligence - Tutorial

I found this Foundation Tutorial on Business Intelligence. Its very simple to understand. Visit LearnBI website for the tutorial.

Toad for DB2 - Freeware

Long back I used Toad for Oracle. Recently, I wanted a GUI client for DB2 UDB 8.x. With help of my friend Srini Rao, I came to know that Toad has DB2 version also.

The best thing I noticed on ToadSoft website is that "DB2 Freeware version does not expire". This is something great :-)

I also notice Toad has SQL Server, My SQL Clients too. I am impressed with Toad's GUI. Its very simple and usefull for any Database Professional.

For more details, visit ToadSoft Home Page.

Narayana Murthy retires from Infosys

Bringing his illustrious corporate career to an end, IT major Infosys Chairman N R Narayana Murthy retired on Sunday from the service of the company, which he had launched as a small firm in the city in 1981 and took it to enviable heights in the last two and a half decades.

Murthy turned 60 on Sunday and as per the company's corporate governance policy, he relinquished his executive post. However, he would continue as its non-executive Chairman from Monday.

Source: Rediff News

Yahoo! Widgets

Yahoo Widgets allows you to get Weather, Photos, Calendar and more on your Windows/Mac Desktop. To get this you need to install the Yahoo! Widget Engine. You can browse the Gallery here.

For more details, visit Yahoo! Widgets home page

Sony ships 50GB Blu-ray disc

Sony Electronics has begun US shipments of its 50GB dual-layer Blu-ray disc write-once media.

The company also confirmed that it plans to start shipping 50GB dual-layer rewritable media later this year.

Although it is expected that the Blu-ray disc technology will make use of the notorious regional coding system, it is reported this week that the US and Japan will share the same code.

The capacity represents more than four hours of HD quality video at a 24Mbps transfer rate, allowing users to take full advantage of Sony's Blu-ray disc burners and Vaio desktop and notebook computers.

Sony's 50GB dual-layer recordable disc has a suggested retail price of around $48.

Source: Computing

Microsoft Introduces BLOG Website

Everyone is familiar with many free Blog Websites. Googles Blogspot is one of the widely known Blog website. In fact, my Blog runs on Google Blogspot ;).

I recently noticed on my friend - Vijay Simha's Blog about the New Features Blogspot has introduced.

Now, its time for Microsoft to come up with its own Blog website. Check it out - its called Windows Live Writer. I am not sure how many of us would like to migrate from One Blog to Another blog website.

Some of the features of Windows Live Writer includes - WYSIWYG Authoring, Photo Publishing, Map Publishing, Writer SDK and Compatibility

Track Visitors on your Website

There are many free websites which helps you to track Visitors to your Websites. Any of these typical websites provies you with various reports which includes following details of the Visitor:

1) Country / Time
2) ISP Name
3) Browser used, JavaScript Version
4) Operating System
5) Monitor resolution.
6) Referring URL etc....

Most of these reports are provided in graphs.

Google introduced its own Visitor Tracking website called Google Analytics. Some of the other such free sites includes:

www.sitemeter.com
www.statcounter.com

Happy Independence Day - 15-Aug-2006

Greetings from an Indian Blog! India Celebrates its Independence Day on 15-Aug-2006. On this occassion, a warm wishes to all the vieweres of my Blog. Wish you all a Happy Independence Day 2006.
A Brief History of India's Independence Day:
The Indian independence movement consisted of efforts by Indians to obtain political independence from British, French and Portuguese rule; it involved a wide spectrum of Indian political organizations, philosophies, and rebellions between 1857 and India's independence on August 15, 1947.

The initial Indian rebellion of 1857 was sparked when soldiers serving in the British East India Company's British Indian Army and Indian kingdoms rebelled against British hegemony. After the revolt was crushed, India developed a class of educated elites whose political organising sought Indian political rights and representation while largely remaining loyal to the British Empire. However, increasing public disenchantment with British rule — owing to the suppression of civil liberties, political rights, and culture as well as alienation from issues facing common Indians — led to an upsurge in revolutionary activities aimed at overthrowing British authority.

The movement came to a head between 1918 and 1922 when the first series of non-violent campaigns of civil disobedience were launched by the Indian National Congress under the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi. The movement comprised large numbers of peoples from across India. Gandhi and the Congress took charge of the movement and obtained cultural, religious, and political unity. Committing itself to Purna Swaraj in 1930, the Congress led mass struggles between 1930 and 1932, followed by an all-out revolt in 1942 demanding that the British leave India (a movement called the Quit India Movement). The raising of the Indian National Army in 1942 by Subhash Chandra Bose would see a unique — though ultimately futile — military campaign to end British rule. Following the trial of Indian National Army officers at the Red Fort, a Naval Mutiny in Bombay, and widespread communal rioting in Calcutta, on 15th August, 1947, India gained independence from British rule, but only at the expense of the Partition of the country into India and Pakistan.

IBM PC turns 25

August 12 is the 25th anniversary of the IBM personal computer launch, a pairing of MS and DOS, Microsoft and the disk operating system.

Source: CNN

Database Technologies (SQL Server) WebCasts

A MUST resource for SQL Server folks: Found this link which contains many of the Microsoft Support WebCasts.

Microsoft Vista hacked at Black Hat

LAS VEGAS--While Microsoft talked up Windows Vista security at Black Hat, a researcher in another room demonstrated how to hack the operating system. :-)

Read on complete news.

Bird Watching @ Australia

My colleague Vinay took this snap at Sydney Botanical Garden, Australia. The bird seems to be a White Parrot.



Another picture of Red color bird (again Name Unknown- Lets call it Red Parrot) from Toranga Zoo, Sydney.

I guess my friend is doing lots of Bird Watching ;-)






No bird this time; this is a Seal Show at Toranga Zoo.

CTRL + ALT + DEL - The 3 Finger Salute

Do you know who invented the 3 Finger Salute - CTRL+ALT+DEL? Want to know more about it? Read on...

David J. Bradley (born 1949) was one of the twelve engineers who worked on the original IBM PC, developing the computer's ROM BIOS code. He is most famous for inventing the "Control-Alt-Delete" (also known as three-finger salute) key combination that was used to reboot the computer.

"David Bradley" -- He is the One who spent 1 minute and 23 seconds in writing the source code that rescues the world's PC users for decades.

Bradley did not intend Control-Alt-Delete to be used by end users — it was meant to be used by people writing programs or documentation, so that they could reboot their computers without powering them down. This was useful since after a computer was powered down, it was necessary to wait a few seconds before powering it up again if one wanted to avoid damaging the hardware. Since software developers and technical writers would need to restart a computer many times, this key combination was a big time-saver. He used this key combination because it is practically impossible to accidentally press this combination of keys on a standard keyboard.

This key combination still exists in the Microsoft Windows operating system. It either gives a list of running programs (in the case of Windows 95 and Windows 98), or gives a list of administative functions, such as to reboot the computer, give a task list, or password protect the computer (in the case of Windows 2000 and Windows XP).

It is used for these functions because only the kernel can respond to this key combination. Other programs are interrupted by it. It is therefore a secure way to assure that the operating system is running, rather than a hostile program that emulates the operating system to record passwords or other sensitive data.

David Bradley's (Retired Now) Quote : "I may have invented control-alt-delete, but Bill (Gates) made it famous." — at a gathering at the twentieth anniversary of the IBM PC, whilst sitting in a panel with Bill Gates."

Ultimate Collection of Bootable CD's

Booting the Operating from a CDROM is sometimes helpfull, in case of your Hard Disk Operating System crash. I have found some links of such Bootable CD's available on internet.

Ultimate Boot CD - A Linux boot diagnostic CD that has many different anti virus,hard disk,networking,bios,system info, and benchmarking apps

Ultimate Boot CD (Windows Version)

Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD

The 911 Rescue CD

XP Live CD

There are many Linux(Debain, Gentoo, RPM, Slackware) based Live CD's available too...

Virtual PC - What It is?

Got this text from Dan Fernandez's Blog. A very easy, well-defined terminology of a Virtual PC.

For those who don't know, Virtual PC is a software product that allows you to run another operating system (Windows XP, Linux, or even Windows 3.1) "virtually" from inside a single computer. You'll see that PC load in a window and act as if it was a virtual PC (more info here). I'm a big VPC fan and I think this is great to hear. In fact, our developer division fully embraces Virtual PCs, so much so that the Community Tech Previews for Visual Studio "Orcas" will come as VPCs and, as an MSDN subscriber, you can download a VPC with Windows, SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 Team System fully installed.

PC's Five Year's from now
I'm always surprised that virtualization doesn't make IT news anymore as one of the big things that will change the landscape in the future. In less then five years, Intel is aiming for a 32 core processor chip runing at 20GHz. I also don't think it's a stretch to think you'll have multiple terabyte hard drives in five years. If you combine the PC power in five years with advances in Virtual PC, you can start imagining running your day-to-day work environment, from Office to Visual Studio, in a Virtual PC.

=> Backups - Backing up a Virtual PC is as easy as copying the file. No really, that's it, copy/paste and you're done.
=> Deployment - Want to setup and configure your 10,000 employee shop? Just script each PC to download the approved company image and voila, your done. If somebody hoses their PC up, they can get up-to-speed in a matter of minutes by downloading the base image
=>Experimentation - Want to experiment with new features, just take your current VPC and create a differencing drive and go to town on it. The changes are only stored in the new drive and your "base" drive doesn't change.
=>Compatibility Testing - Want to easily test Windows XP Japanese with SQL Server 2005 English and Visual Studio 2005 Japanese? Easy, create a script to install the different permutations on a virtual PC or virtual server

Source Link

India Govt. Income Tax - Learn Taxation

The Income Tax Department of India has published detailed information on "Taxation of Salaried Employees Pensioners & Senior Citizens" at this link.

For more details visit the Official Home Page.

WWW celebrates its 15th birthday today

Extract from Times Of India, Bangalore - 06-Aug-2006

WWW had come a long way - See its history

06-Aug-1991 - Tim Berners-Lee founds World Wide Web
12-Dec-1991 - First web server founded
22-Apr-1993 - Mosaic, the first web browser, released
Feb-1994 - Two students start Yahoo to offer a directory of other websites
13-Oct-1994 - Netscape browser launched
01-Jul-1995 - Amazon starts as an online book store
24-Aug-1995 - Internet Explorer is offered with Microsoft Windows 95
04-Sep-1995 - eBay starts operations as Auctionweb
04-Jul-1996 - HoTMaiL launched on US Independence Day
Sep-1998 - Two students start Google at a garage in California
May 1999 - Napster started to share music files
04-Sep-2001 - Google awarded patent for its search algorithm
05-Feb-2004 - Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" becomes the most searchable image in the web history ;)
19-Aug-2004 - Google goes public with an IPO
Jul-2004 - Tim Berners-Lee is knighted
TODAY - There are over 9 crore websites

Happy Friendship Day - Sunday 06-Aug-2006

Wishing all the viewers of my Blog and all my friends a Happy Friendship Day.

While surfing on Internet I learnt that there is a Organization in India called "Society for the Confluence of Festivals in India (SCFI)" which promotes such events in India.

"As a socially responsible manifestation, SCFI in India endeavors to create value for the Indian society by introducing the beauty, grace and wisdom embodied in the various festivals of India, thereby preserving India's rich cultural heritage. SCFI bring unique customs, traditions and goodness of Indian festivals to form a distinct association known as the Society for the Confluence of Festivals in India."

DB2 Certification in a Nutshell

Nice article by Howard Fosdick found at DBAZine.com that provides complete details with various helpfull links to go for IBM DB2 Certification.

MSDN Library is FREE !!!

Hurray! Thanks Microsoft to make MSDN Library Free to download. Click here for the MSDN Library May 2006 Edition download link and instructions.

This download size is 450.9 MB to 1729.1 MB

Detailed Review & Comparison of Blogging Software

I found this interesting link for Bloggers. Check this link for complete review.