Ada Lovelace Day!

Interesting! Today is ‘Ada Lovelace Day’! I am ashamed that being a women of science and technology, I never heard of this before 😦

As always, I must say: better late than never 🙂 So here are few info from the wiki:

Ada Lovelace Day” is an annual event celebrated on October 16th whose goal is to “raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and maths”. The Ada Initiative is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the involvement of women in the free culture and open source movements.

It is named after Ava Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine; thanks to this, she is sometimes considered the world’s first computer programmer.

The computer language Ada, created on behalf of the United States Department of Defense, was named after Ada Lovelace.

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A Very Rich Communication Platform – Apture!

Just came to know about this nice tool ‘Apture ‘. Its really cool tool that we can use in our  blogs to have an interactive page rather than  a flat one. I am very impressed by the idea of this tool and have installed it to start using it in my blog. About Apture – From its website :

Apture provides the first rich communication platform that allows people to intuitively experience the web.

With just one line of code, publishers and bloggers can quickly and easily turn flat pages of text into a compelling multimedia experience. Apture gives content creators the power to find and incorporate relevant multimedia items directly into their pages.

Readers can then access these items without ever leaving the page, providing them with a deeper and more meaningful web experience.

Here is a clip from our tour to London Tower Bridge. I added the  video link from youtube and also added the google map,wiki page, image links & some Amazon info related to ‘London Bridge Tower’ using the ‘Apture’ tool. It helps the visitor who are looking at the video can simultaneously read the wiki post or the map without leaving my blog!! This is a very impressive!! With the pace of use of media and links into blogs this is a very helpful tool we can use which will facilitate our blog post by making it lot more interactive and interesting for our visitors.

The Beauty Of Symfony!

These days most of my works are in the symfony framework. A completely new thing for me which I am both working on and learning too. It amazes me how symfony’s form features are so wonderfully balanced. The capability of form validation and security implication are really impressive.

Before I talk about these details, I should write few words about what symfony is: (From its website)

“Symfony is a complete framework designed to optimize the development of web applications by way of several key features. For starters, it separates a web application’s business rules, server logic, and presentation views. It contains numerous tools and classes aimed at shortening the development time of a complex web application. Additionally, it automates common tasks so that the developer can focus entirely on the specifics of an application. The end result of these advantages means there is no need to reinvent the wheel every time a new web application is built!”

The old way of bulding web application is cumbersome, unmanagable. With framekwors complex web application can be handled very easyly without much of a headache on programmers side. Using symfony, when we define a form, we implement validation for each field, we can make some of the fields validation mendatory (such as Name, Age etc.) and we can do string or number validaition very easily. Symfony is build on the basic concepts of OOP, ORM, RAD, DRY, KISS, TDD, YAML, and PEAR. Therefore handling any DB activity is very easy and trouble free. The ambiguity of using different naming conventions for getters & setters are also easily handled.

Recently, I worked on an Auto complete search in our application. It was a search box, and as user goes with entering  letters all available options similar gets popped up. It was so much easier to do in symfony. Using Ajax in symofony also makes many complex things handled easily.

Its not that I have sit here to write a lecture on symfony, but most of my work are involved in these are now a days and I can not help expressing how much I am enjoying working with this 🙂

Downloading YouTube Video

YouTube is the place where I spend most of my spare time, listening/watching favorite musics, dramas, and other misc stuffs! Well, even though its a service to watch video, what annoys me most is sometimes I want a song to repeat as long as I want to listen to it. I want to leave it open in my computer and may be read a book in my bed. I could not find any way of doing it 😦 If any body knows its possible, please let me know.

So, out of this frustration I thought, why not download the song I like from YouTube and listen to windows media player/realplayer where I can hear the song as long as my heart desires 😉

To that attempt, I found many ways of doing these. Here are some ways I liked (links to follow) which I would like to share in my blog:

(Credit goes to google for giving these results and all these sites for such wonderful useful tools)

Online Download:

http://www.techcrunch.com/get-youtube-movie/
http://tubezoid.com/

Download Using Tools:

http://www.orbitdownloader.com/How-to-Download-YouTube-Video.htm
http://www.download-youtube-video.net/
http://www.xilisoft.com/download-youtube-video.html

Miracles of Technology !!

After knowing about the possibility of human cloning, now it does not seem surprising the new development towards creating artificial life! The researcher move one step closer towards this invention. Here is some part of the news:

Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute, a research group that’s trying to create artificial life, moved one step closer to their goal by synthesizing the complete set of genes of a bacterium. The goal is to use artificial genomes to create bacteria designed to take on specific jobs, such as converting underground coal into a more easily extracted gas. The scientists previously inserted the genes of one type of bacteria into the cells of another. If they can use that method to insert the artificial genome into a cell, they’ll have created the first new life form controlled by man-made DNA.

It’s a wonderful breakthrough that could change the way we think about gene therapy,” said David Magnus, co-director of Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics.  “It would allow us potentially to create chromosomes exactly the same as a patient’s chromosome but with genes that have been corrected. This could be a future treatment for diseases.”

Full News: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aMRsRfCRfN5w&refer=us