The First "Computer Bug"

While Grace Hopper was working on the Harvard Mark II Computer at Harvard University, her associates discovered a moth stuck in a relay and thereby impeding operation, whereupon she remarked that they were "debugging" the system. Though the term computer bug cannot be definitively attributed to Admiral Hopper, she did bring the term into popularity. The remains of the moth can be found in the group's log book at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C..

Amazing "Morph" - Future technology from Nokia

'Bug'ged up weeks!

Past two weeks were really busy. So busy, that I did not get time,even to update my blog. WoW, I never imagined that I will be sooo busy that I will not even get 20/30 minutes a day to update my blog!

Being in the 'Software Testing' field, one has to know that 'one' bad build can really screw up an entire week! For us, last couple of builds were very bad and with 'basic functionality' also not working fine, we were on our toes for past two weeks. Finding bugs / crashes /exceptions, creating MR's(Modification requests) and again testing after getting an update from the developer - these were the only things on our 'to do' list.

Usually, even in situations like these, I grab some time to update the blog (during installations / uninstallations) but our IT guys, being the protectors of Band width, blocked the blogger site and indirectly blocked me from updating the blog.

At home, 'my not so friendly' CA personal Firewall was giving me a lot of problems during surfing the web. It made my Internet speed 10 to 15times slower, making it impossible to update my blog. After a lot of thinking and troubleshooting for over a month, I uninstalled CA and moved to Kaspersky which is so far OK.

So... that's what happened to me in past 2 weeks, finding bugs, at work in the day and fighting alien bugs in Halo 2 at home, during the nights. So, my past two weeks were spent with bugs day and night :-).

Now, most of the major bugs have been fixed at work(at least for this build), God know what's going to happen with the next!! But for now,there are lots of alien bugs for me to kick ass in Halo 2. I hope I will continue my blogging spree again from today onwards....

So, good bye for now, gotta kick some alien butt!!!!!

'Docufarm' is no more!

In my post Docufarm on October 9Th 2007, I wrote about a new search engine to search documents on the web, sad news is that Docufarm is no more and is closed from October 11, 2007.

One of the founders Laurent has to say that he decided to join another company to hopefully make Docufarm bigger and useful to many more people. In one word: scale it to the web and he is very hopeful that they will be able to launch a similar service soon.


For the news on when the new service will be online, keep checking the blog http://docufarm.blogspot.com/

Till then you guys can hook it to other online document viewers....Try Google docs, zoho, pfddownload, thinkfree.

DocuFarm

Are you searching for manual required for your JAVA class? or are you searching for an Excel sheet with data of "Historical population for Baseline Countries/Region, 1969-2007" ;-) or in the matter of fact, are you are searching for any document, pdf / ppt / doc / rtf / ps / xls? Here is DocuFarm, a search engine which searches only documents.



With the required key word we can search for all the documents available or if we want a specific type of document, we can choose from pdf / ppt / doc / rtf / ps / xls, and do a search.

So what are you waiting? hit on DocuFarm and search for the required documents.

World SysAdmin Day - 27'th July 2007(Today)

System Administrator Appreciation Day, also known as Sysadmin Day or SAAD, was created by Ted Kekatos, a system administrator in Chicago. Kekatos was inspired to create the special day by a Hewlett-Packard magazine advertisement in which a system administrator is presented with flowers and fruit-baskets by grateful co-workers as thanks for installing new printers. The holiday exists to show appreciation for the work of sysadmins and other IT workers. It is celebrated on the last Friday in July. The first System Administrator Appreciation Day was celebrated on July 28, 2000.

A sysadmin unpacks the server for us from its box, installs an operating system, patches it for security, makes sure the power and air conditioning was working in the server room, monitors it for stability, sets up the software, and keeps backups in case anything went wrong. All to save the work we have done

Also, sysadmin installs the routers, puts the cables, configures the networks, sets up the firewalls, and watches and guides the traffic for each hop of the network that runs over copper, fiber optic glass, and even the air itself to bring the Internet to your computer.

Not to forget, a sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out.

A sysadmin worries about spam, viruses, spyware, but also power outages, fires and floods.
When the email server goes down at 2 AM on a Sunday, your sysadmin is paged, wakes up, and goes to work.

A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work -- to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.

So if you can read this, thank your sysadmin -- and know he or she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the other side of the world, the instant message from your friend onsite, the free phone call from your brother in Australia, and this webpage.

Hasselblad H3D - Mother of all Digital Cameras*

When I said mother of all digital cameras, I mean it. Just see the below picture and read the technical specifications of the camera, I am sure you will agree with me.

Hasselblad unveiled its next masterpiece, the Hasselblad H3D, a digital SLR camera to be offered in 22-megapixel and 39-megapixel trim. Inside are some relatively gargantuan image sensors, the largest ones in the world at 48x36mm. But you'd better have plenty of storage on hand—the dimensions of that 39-megapixel frame are 5412x7212 pixels, filling up well over 110MB per pic.

Technical Details:

H3D-22:
Sensor size: 22 Mpixels (4080 x 5440 pixels)
Image size (8/16 bit RGB): RAW 3FR capture 30 MB on average. TIFF 8 bit: 66 MB
Storage capacity: 2 GB CF card holds 66 images on average

H3D-39:
Sensor size: 39 Mpixels (5412 • 7212 pixels)
Image size (8/16 bit RGB): RAW 3FR capture 50 MB on average. TIFF 8 bit: 117 MB
Storage capacity: 2 GB CF card holds 40 images on average

For complete Technical Specifications click here

The Hasselblad H3D is the world’s first 48mm. full-frame, large-sensor, medium-format DSLR camera system. The H3D has been developed around a brand new digital camera engine producing increased lens performance and a new level of image sharpness. By focusing solely on digital camera architecture, Hasselblad is able to offer photographers the full benefits of professional medium-format digital cameras as well as the ease of use of the best 35mm DSLRs

I know what you might be thinking, the price of this camera? Made by the company whose cameras were the first on the moon, will be almost enough to finance your own personal moonshot. The price is somewhere upwards of $30K to $40K (we can own a Mercedes Benz C-class at that price) ;-).

Wondering how the pictures will look like when you are using this camera? Take a look below:

So, what next? Dreaming to own one? I know everyone of us want to have this beauty with brains and at the same time we all know that beauty and brains does not come cheap.

All the best for all our future endeavors. We never know, one day we can own this beauty!!

Till then let's keep giving our best and Happy Clicking :-).

*as per my information.

Haven't you Blackled yet?

Blackle is a new Eco-Friendly search engine on the web. If you are thinking that I am asking you guys to bid adieu to our favorite search engine Google, you are wrong. Blackle is Google dressed in black!

So, why should Google dress in black? What difference does in make to the environment? Read on for the answers...

Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen." For more information on Energy Use and Power Levels in New Monitors and Personal Computers click here.

What made Google to go for Blackle?

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

Google believed that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.

However, for a CRT display, the difference of amount of power used for black and white is much high, but todays modern LCD displays use the same amount of power whether black or white. But technically there is still a difference for most LCD displays, however small.

How can we help?

Let us set Blackle as your home page. This way every time you load our Internet browser you we save a little bit of energy. Remember every bit counts! We will also be reminded about the need to save energy each time we see the Blackle page load.

Help spread the word about Blackle by telling your friends and family to set it as their home page. If you have a blog then give us a mention. Or put the following text in your email signature: "Blackle.com - Saving energy one search at a time".

Happy Blackling!!!

Some Interesting Facts about Internet

1991

AUGUST 6 th : www was created by Tim Bernsley.

DEC 12th : First server started in America.

1993

APRIL 23 : Browser mosaic released in market to work on windows operating systems

APRIL 30 : Web was made available to all.

MAY : First magazine on net The Tech was created by Massachussets institute of technology.

JUNE : HTML -Hyper Text Markup Language was released

NOV : Web cam was created

1994

FEB : YAHOO was created by two stanford university students David Filoo and Jerry Yang. first it was called 'Jerrys guide to world wide web'.YAHOO means Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle

OCT 13 : Americal official website http://www.whitehouse.gov/ was started by president Bill Clinton

OCT 25 : Commercial advertisements started on internet.

1995

FEB : First radio station on internet started its 'radioHK'

JULY 1 : Amazon.com ws started for the sale of books online

JULY 4 : Hotmail - Email service started

AUG 24 : Internet Explorer was launched as a part of Windows 95 operating system.

DEC 15 : Multilingual search engine Alta Vista started

1996

AUG : This month world wide websites reached 3,42,081

1997

DEC 17 : Web commentator Jorn Borger created weblog which became Blog later on

1998

SEP : Google was started in a garage in California.

FEB 7 : Eight prominent websites including Yahoo and CNN were closed due to hacking

2001

FEB 15 : Jimmy Wales released online Encyclopedia - Wikipedia.

2003

APR 28 : Apple company 'itunes' started

2004

JUN : Web creator Tim Bernsley was given Britain white hood

NOV 9 : Due to open sourcing revolution, Mozilla Firefox was released

2006

AUG : Total number of websites on net is 9,26,15,362


340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 : can u guess what is this number..................

in next three years there would be this much new websites

iPhone is here!

After iPod, the much hyped iPhone by Apple Inc. is set for release today. As the name suggests its a phone plus iPod and a device to access internet. So, whats special with this latest gizmo from Apple? It is completely touch screen operated and has all the dream options that user can think of.

Apple’s revolutionary iPhone™ will go on sale today, June 29 at 6:00 p.m. California time at Apple® retail stores nationwide. All 164 Apple retail stores in the US will stay open until midnight, and customers can purchase up to two iPhones on a first come, first served basis. Beginning Saturday morning, iPhone owners can learn how to get the most out of their new iPhone with free, in-depth workshops offered throughout the day at all Apple retail stores. Every Apple retail store will offer free support for iPhone at the Genius Bar and personal training through Apple’s new One to One program.

Apple’s online store will be taking orders for iPhone beginning at 6:00 p.m. PDT. iPhone will be available in a 4GB model for $499 (US) and an 8GB model for $599 (US).

iPhone features the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse. It’s an entirely new interface based on a large multi-touch display and innovative new software that lets you control everything using only your fingers. So you can glide through albums with Cover Flow, flip through photos and email them with a touch, or zoom in and out on a section of a web page — all by simply using iPhone’s multi-touch display.

Technical Specifications:

Capacity: 4GB or 8GB flash drive

Display: 3.5-inch (diagonal) widescreen multi-touch display 480-by-320-pixel resolution at 160 dpi Support for display of multiple languages and characters simultaneously

Operating system: OS X GSM:Quad-band (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)

Wireless data: Wi-Fi (802.11b/g), EDGE, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR

Camera: 2.0 megapixels

Audio: Frequency response: 20Hz to 20,000Hz Audio formats supported: AAC, Protected AAC, MP3, MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 1, 2, and 3), Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV

Video: Video formats supported: H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Low-Complexity version of the H.264 Baseline Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; H.264 video, up to 768 Kbps, 320 by 240 pixels, 30 frames per second, Baseline Profile up to Level 1.3 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats.

Input and output: iPhone 30-pin dock connector, 3.5-mm stereo headphone, minijack, iPhone Dock, Dock connector

Power and battery: Built-in rechargeable lithium ion battery

Talk time: Up to 8 hours

Standby time: Up to 250 hours

Internet use: Up to 6 hours

Video playback: Up to 7 hours

Audio playback: Up to 24 hours

I liked the features of the phone and loved the way it works, is anyone hearing? ;-). You can check out the iPhone guided tour here.

So, is iPhone is here to stay? Let us wait and see!!

Have you Googled it?

This is the question most people ask now a days if you ask them something. It has become a slang which is most popular these days. You can search of anything from Cooking recipes to Photos, White papers, Code, Downloads, News, Books, Universities, Blogs :-) ..Tips on anything....and more........and more.

To brief up you can search for absolutely anything under the Sun!! Ooops, that is wrong. You can search for anything under anything. This has become so popular that the word "Googled" was added to Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and Merriam-Webster in 2006. The meaning they gave for Googled is "to use the Google search engine to seek online information".

Google is the best self help that have happened to us. So if you dont know anything, just Google it!! You want to know for what company Bharani Surineni became youngest CEO. Just Google it!!...Kidding..........!!!!

Below are few of the Search options you have from Google:

Blog Search - Find blogs on your favorite topics

Book Search - Search the full text of books

Directory - Browse the web by topic

Images - Search for images on the web

Scholar - Search scholarly papers

Specialized Searches - Search within specific topics

University Search - Search a specific school's website

One thing you have to learn is giving right key words while Googling. This has to come by practice and as we keep on Googling we will come to know how to refine our key words. So, what are you waiting for? Happy Googling!!!

Microsoft Surface - Surface computing has arrived

I have seen computers evolve from: 286 processors to Pentium's and AMD's, from Green screen monitors --> black & white --> color --> LCD/TFT, from Keyboards --> mice --> Pointing pens --> touch screens

Now its Surface computing from Microsoft which is going to sweep us off our feet.

Surface computing breaks down traditional barriers between people and technology, changing the way people interact with all kinds of everyday content, from photos to maps to menus. The intuitive user interface works without a traditional mouse or keyboard, allowing people to interact with content and information by using their hands and natural movements. Users are able to access information either on their own or collaboratively with their friends and families, unlike any experience available today.

Surface computing features four key attributes:

Direct interaction: Users can actually “grab” digital information with their hands and interact with content through touch and gesture, without the use of a mouse or keyboard.
Multi-touch contact: Surface computing recognizes many points of contact simultaneously, not just from one finger as with a typical touch screen, but up to dozens and dozens of items at once.
Multi-user experience: The horizontal form factor makes it easy for several people to gather around surface computers together, providing a collaborative, face-to-face computing experience.
Object recognition: Users can place physical objects on the surface to trigger different types of digital responses, including the transfer of digital content.

Description:

Surface is a 30-inch display in a table-like form factor that’s easy for individuals or small groups to interact with in a way that feels familiar, just like in the real world. Surface can simultaneously recognize dozens and dozens of movements such as touch, gestures and actual unique objects that have identification tags similar to bar codes.

Surface will ship to partners with a portfolio of basic applications, including photos, music, virtual concierge and games, that can be customized to provide their customers with unique experiences.

For more videos and information on Microsoft Surface please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Watson: Debugging from Microsoft

Most of us might have always wondered how a software can be developed to near bug-free entity. When we were working with any Software it was easy for us to curse for all the trouble it creates.....

Read on this article which says that it is a near immposibility to make a software bugg-free...and also details how Watson Team tracks bugs at Microsoft ...

Watson:

People who don’t build software for a living have a quite understandable attitude that you should write your program, fix all the bugs, then ship it. Why would you ever ship a product that has bugs in it? Surely that is a sign that you don’t care about quality, right?

Those of us who work on non-trivial software projects naturally see this a little differently. There are many factors that determine quality of software, and some of them are counter-intuitive. For example, the first thing to realize is that you are not trying to get rid of every bug. What you are trying to do is maximize the known quality of the product at the time you ship it. If the last bug you have in the product is that a toolbar button sometimes doesn’t display correctly, and you fix it, then you ship the product, how embarrassed will you be a little later when you find out that the code fix you took to get the toolbar to display causes your application to crash when used on machines with certain video cards? Was that the right decision? Fix every bug?

The discipline of software testing is one that is rarely taught in university, and when it is taught, it is taught in a highly theoretical way, not in the way that it needs to be done to successfully produce high quality products on a schedule demanded by commercial software.

I often interview university students applying for jobs at Microsoft. They're usually excellent people and very talented, although we have to turn away most of them. One thing that always intrigues me is when I am interviewing people who want to be a developer or tester. If I ask them to write a little code, most of them can. Then I ask them to prove to me that their code works. The responses I get to this vary so widely it is remarkable. Usually people run the example values I gave them through their algorithm and if it comes out correctly, they say it works. Then I tell them, "OK, let's say I told you this code is for use in a firewall product that is going to be shipped to millions of customers, and if any hackers get through, you get fired". Then they start to realize that they need to do a little more. So they try a few more numbers and some even try some special numbers called "boundary conditions" - the numbers on either side of a limit. They try a few more ideas. At some point they either say they're now sure, or they get stuck. So I then ask them if they think it is perfect now. Well, how do you know?

This is a central problem in large software projects. Once you get beyond about 100 lines of code, it becomes essentially impossible to prove that code is absolutely correct.

Another interesting detail here is that people constantly confuse the fact that they can’t find a problem with there being no more problems. Let's say you have a test team of one person, and a development team of 10 (at Microsoft, we have a 1:1 ratio of testers to devs, so we'd have 10 testers on that team). But what if our poor lone hypothetical tester goes on vacation for 2 weeks, and while he is away the developers fix the few bugs he has found. Is the program now bug free, just because there are no known bugs in it? It is "bug free" after all, by the definition many people would use. In fact a good friend of mine who runs his own one-man software business told me once his software is in fact bug free, since whenever any customer tells him about a bug, he fixes it. I suppose his reality is subjective. But you see the point - whether you know about the bugs or not, they're in there.

So how do you deal with them? Of course, you test test test. You use automated tests, unit tests that test code modules independently of others, integration tests to verify code works when modules are put together, genetic test algorithms that try to evolve tests that cause problems, code reviews, automated code checkers that look for known bad coding practices, etc. But all you can really say is that after awhile you are finding it hard to find bugs (or at least serious ones), which must mean you're getting it close to being acceptable to ship. Right?

One of my favorite developments in product quality that is sweeping Microsoft and now other companies as well is an effort started by a couple of colleagues of mine in Office, called simply "Watson". The idea is simple. A few hundred (or even thousands) of professional testers at Microsoft, even aided by their expert knowledge, automated tools and crack development and program management teams cannot hope to cover the stunningly diverse set of environments and activities that our actual customers have. And we hear a lot about people who have this or that weird behavior or crash on their machine that "happens all the time". Believe me, we don’t see this on our own machines. Or rather, we do at first, then we fix everything we see. In fact, the product always seems disturbingly rock solid when we ship - otherwise we wouldn’t ship it. But would every one of the 400 million Office users out there agree? Everybody has an anecdote about problems, but what are anecdotes worth? What is the true scale of the problem? Is everything random, or are there real problems shared by many people? Watson to the rescue.

As an aside, I suspect that some people will read this and say that open source magic solves this, since as the liturgy goes so many eyes are looking at the code that all the bugs are found and fixed. What you need to realize is that there are very few lawyers who can fix code bugs. And hardly any artists. Not so many high school teachers, and maybe just a handful of administrative assistants. Cathedral, bazaar, whatever. The fact is that the real user base is not part of the development loop in any significant way. With 10^8 diverse users, a base of people reporting bugs on the order of 10^4 or even 10^5, especially with a developer user profile cannot come close to discovering the issues the set of non-computer people have.

The Watson approach was simply to say: let's measure it. We'll match that 10^8 number 1 for 1. In fact, we'll go beyond measuring it, we'll categorize every crash our users have, and with their permission, collect details of the crash environment and upload those to our servers. You've probably seen that dialog that comes up asking you to report the details of your crash to Microsoft. When you report the crash, if that is a crash that someone else has already had, we increment the count on that "bucket". After a while, we'll start to get a "crash curve" histogram. On the left will be the bucket with the most "hits". On the far right will be a long list of "buckets" so rare that only one person in all those millions had that particular crash and cared to report it. This curve will then give you a "top N" for crashes. You can literally count what percentage of people would be happier if we fixed just the top 10 crashes.

When we started doing Watson, it was near the end of OfficeXP. We collected data internally for a few months, and started collecting externally for the last beta. We quickly learned that the crash curve was remarkably skewed. We saw a single bug that accounted for 27% of the crashes in one application. We also saw that many people install extra software on their machine that interferes with Office or other applications, and causes them to crash. We also saw that things we thought were fairly innocuous such as grammar checkers we licensed from vendors for some European languages were causing an unbelievable number of crashes in markets like Italy or the Netherlands. So we fixed what we could, and as a result OfficeXp was pretty stable at launch. For the first time, that was not a "gut feel" - we could measure the actual stability in the wild. For follow-on service packs for Office XP, we just attacked that crash curve and removed all the common or even mildly common crashes.

For Office2003 (and OneNote 2003), the Watson team kicked into high gear with more sophisticated debugging tools so we could more often turn those crash reports into fixes. They also started collecting more types of data (such as "hangs", when an application either goes into an infinite loop, or is taking so long to do something that it might as well be in one). We fixed so many crashing bugs and hangs that real people reported during the betas that we were way down "in the weeds", in the areas where crashes were reported only a handful of times - hard to say if that is real or just a tester trying to repro a bug they found. So again we know how stable the 2003 generation of Office applications is - we can measure it directly. What a difference from the guesswork that used to go on. In fact we know for a fact that Office 2003 at launch is already more stable than any previous release of Office ever, even after all service packs are applied, since Windows now collects Watson data for all applications.

Microsoft offers this data freely for anyone writing applications on Windows. You can find out if your shareware application is crashing or its process is being killed by your users often - sure signs of bugs you didn’t know you had. The Windows team will also give you crash dumps you can load into your debugger to see exactly what the call stack was that took you down, so you can easily fix your bugs.

This is an example of what BillG calls "Trustworthy Computing". You may think that's a bunch of hoopla, but in many ways it is quite real - things like Watson are used to directly improve the quality of our products.

Interesting Easter Eggs

What is an "Easter Egg"?

The term "Easter Egg", as we use it here, means any amusing tidbit that creators hid in their creations. They could be in computer software, movies, music, art, books, or even your watch. There are hundreds of them, and they can be quite entertaining, if you know where to look.

In fact, most applications, operating systems, games, movies, and the like, do have these hidden tricks/features hidden/woven into their programming, something akin to the personal signature of a programmer.

For example an ester egg in Windows XP is "Con Folder":

1. In any windows or dos try to make a folder named 'con'.
2. You will be presented by an error that it already exists, or other error preventing you creating this directory.

Another example is in Dreamweaver:

1) Open a new .html document in dreamweaver.
2) From their switch to design view and type gibberish text.
3) Highlight the text you typed and go down to the properties box, open if not already open.
4) Now find the place where the color is chosen and next to it a number is in a textbox, highlight and delete that number in its place type "dreamweaver" without the quotes
5) Enjoy the good old fashion game of pong

PS: If you lose your internal speaker makes a noise not your regular speakers although the regular speakers beep when the ball hits the wall


Here are the sites that deal extensively with various easter eggs...

http://www.eeggs.com/

http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.com/eastereggs/