Tech Buzzwords that's selected as Words of the year - 2011 by Oxford Dictionary

• Arab Spring: A series of anti-government uprisings in various countries in North Africa and the Middle East, beginning in Tunisia in December 2010.
• Bunga bunga: Used in reference to parties hosted by the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, at which various illicit sexual activities were alleged to have taken place.
• Clicktivism: The use of social media and other online methods to promote a cause.
• Crowdfunding: The practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet.
• Fracking: The forcing open of fissures in subterranean rocks by introducing liquid at high pressure, especially to extract oil or gas.
• Gamification: The application of concepts and techniques from games to other areas of activity, for instance as an online marketing technique.
• Occupy: The name given to an international movement protesting against perceived economic injustice by occupying buildings or public places and staying there for an extended period of time.
• The 99%: The bottom 99% of income earners, regarded collectively.
• Tiger mother: A demanding mother who pushes her children to high achievement using methods regarded as typical of Asian childrearing.
• Sifi: A bank or other financial institution regarded as so vital to the functioning of the overall economy that it cannot be allowed to fail, a.k.a. “systemically important financial institution.”

How to handle missing Images in HTML

Try this simple code. Handle OnError event of Image-

<img src="http://www.satya-weblog.com/image.png" height="100px" width="100px" onerror="this.src = '/image/item-no-image.png'" />

Or-

<img src="http://www.satya-weblog.com/image.png" height="100px" width="100px" onerror="handleMissingImg(this);" />

1. function handleMissingImg(ele) 
2. { 
3.      ele.src = '/image/item-no-image.png'; 
4. } 

Or, you can also use this-

1. function IsImageOk(img) { 
2.  // During the onload event, IE correctly identifies any images that 
3.  // weren't downloaded as not complete. Others should too. Gecko-based 
4.  // browsers act like NS4 in that they report this incorrectly. 
5.     if (!img.complete) { 
6.         return false; 
7.     } 
8.  
9.  // However, they do have two very useful properties: naturalWidth and 
10.  // naturalHeight. These give the true size of the image. If it failed 
11.  // to load, either of these should be zero. 
12.    if (typeof img.naturalWidth != "undefined" && img.naturalWidth == 0) { 
13.        return false; 
14.    } 
15.     // No other way of checking: assume it's ok. 
16.     return true; 
17. }

No Major Application implement DEP and ASLR for preventing unauthorized programs for taking over your PC

Big-name Windows applications neglect security

Two important security technologies, Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), go a long way toward preventing unauthorized programs from taking over a PC. And Secunia Research just published a white paper with a disturbing analysis of popular Windows programs that don't use either. Windows XP Service Pack 2 introduced DEP back in 2004. It's is a technique that uses both hardware and software to keep a PC from executing programs that sit in areas that should be holding data. Historically, one of the easiest and most fruitful ways to take over a PC involves a buffer overflow - where an attack routine sticks a malicious program inside a data area and then tricks Windows into "running" the data. When a program asks Windows for DEP protection, and the hardware supports DEP, buffer overflow attacks are considerably more difficult. Not impossible, mind you, but DEP does pretty well blocking the most common and straightforward attacks.

ASLR arrived with the release of Windows Vista in 2007. When a program tells Windows that it wants to use ASLR, Windows sticks pieces of the program in randomly assigned parts of memory. If an attacker tries to access a specific location in the program, the attacker has to guess the location of the pertinent piece of the program, which can be quite difficult. Together DEP and ASLR aren't invincible, but they're formidable. In Windows 7 (and to a lesser extent Vista), turning on both DEP and ASLR is reasonably easy if the program is written properly and doesn't use certain undesirable coding techniques that fell out of favor years ago. That's why it's so shocking that many of the programs you and your users run every day don't support either or both.

Secunia tested sixteen applications - the most commonly used Windows apps as reported by Secunia's PSI scanning program. Each of the tested programs has been used as the vector in a real attack in the past two years. As of last month, none of these programs use DEP: Sun's Java JRE, Apple's QuickTime, Apple's iTunes (running on Win XP), OpenOffice, Google's Picasa, Foxit Reader, VLC Media Player, AOL's Winamp, and RealPlayer. Secunia determined that if a program doesn't use DEP, there's no reason to check for ASLR - kind of a security crawl-before-you-can-walk situation.

Read full story here : http://www.codeguru.com/daily_news/article.php/405208

Difference in Websites and Web Applications

Tim McLaughlin (computerworld.com) has written a good description on what is difference in Websites and Web Applications. Here is a snippet of the article. Found full article here.

There's an often misunderstood distinction in the IT world between Web sites and Web applications:

• A Web site is typically designed for casual or infrequent usage by individuals who often do not know, or do not even want to know, too much about the deeper mission of your organization.
• A Web application, such as an HR Intranet or portal that a company provides to its employees, is a very different system that must be optimized for a different use case.

It's important to make a clear distinction between Web sites and Web applications for three reasons:

1. To define what the site or system is optimized to do
2. To identify how the user is going to approach the features that are being made available
3. To pinpoint which specific use cases your designers and developers must create and test

For Web sites, consider that most users are coming through a search engine or by browsing the Web. If they are not able to quickly and easily find what they're looking for, they usually take off. The most common example would be a marketing focused, "brochure" Web site. Casual site visitors like to ease into getting to know your company and will rarely take the time to learn all of your products in their first interaction with your site.

Designing an interface that is easy to browse and navigate should be a high priority. Marketing Web sites that are difficult to navigate, or those that have poor search interfaces, experience high abandon rates, poor pull-through and fail to meet marketing goals.

Web applications are different in that their users are likely coming with a very specific goal in mind. Taking the HR portal example a bit further, consider that some of your HR staff believes that employees like to browse the HR resources available to them. Based on that assumption, they design a content-rich Web site that offers company information, articles of interests, special employee discounts, etc. In fact, the more likely scenario is that employees only tap the HR Intranet when they have to fill out a vacation request, or to update their benefits information, etc. Because these activities are performed less frequently, it's important that they be optimized for usability.

Google Buzz Launch Event

Google Buzz Launch Event

VNL, an Indian company, aims to bring solar-powered phone networks to villages

These cellular stations, which use only about 50 to 120 Watts of power which is low enough to be powered using solar cells and battery. With this low power consumption and the fact that they can be made self contained wireless units which needn't be connected to a grid, the technology is perfect for remote villages where it is difficult to bring connectivity by wired means or using conventional cellular towers.



A single such station would be capable of handling hundreds of users, and needs just two people to set it up. The station can be assembled and mounted on a roof top in the short span of six hours. This small station and others nearby can communicate with a base station withing 5kms (which itself is solar powered). The base station can then communicate with the main network.


The problem with traditional systems is, not only the fact that they need large amounts of power which necessitate the presence of a power grid, but also the cost involved. Traditional systems need customers to spend as much as Rs. 250 to Rs. 300 per month on average to make a profit, which is hard to get in rural areas. Thus their reluctance to provide coverage in such areas. VNL's system requires only as much as Rs. 90 to Rs. 100 per month per person on average from their customers to make a profit.

Currently as many as 50 such stations have been deployed in villages in Rajasthan and there are plans to introduce the technology in Africa. The systems deployed in Rajasthan are voice only, and dont support text or data, as most end users in those areas are cannot read or write.


It is nice to see such an innovation coming from India, and the fact that it can bring voice connectivity to the millions of people in India who are currently without any means of communication is heartening as well.

Read more here: http://www.thinkdigit.com/Mobiles-and-PDAs/VNL-an-Indian-company-aims-to-bring_4027.html

1Gb/second broadband speeds

1Gb/second broadband speeds: Google's plan to revolutionize the internet