How technology solves

Recently I traveled from Erode to my home which is a small village after Dharapuram. I went in a government bus. The conductor had an electronic ticketing machine. I was watching the conductor so closely as I was quite surprised that even these buses that don't connect big cities have such technologies. As I was thinking so, I noticed the conductor checking the machine after every stop and counting the number of heads in the bus. Then, suddenly in the middle of the journey the conductor said that two people have not taken the tickets and asked them to get the tickets immediately. Nobody responded to it. Then, he asked the driver to stop the bus and asked everyone to show their tickets.And very soon, the conductor was able to track down the two people who did not purchase the tickets. It was the machine that was able to track and tell the conductor how many people were inside the bus between two stops. Traveling without a ticket has become impossible now. Thanks to the simple technology thats able to solve everyday problem.

A small story

Lord Buddha used to travel to many villages preaching his philosophy along with his disciples. During their journey, they don't carry any food with them. They usually beg for food on their way and eat it. Once he and his disciple where on their way to a small village. As usual Lord Buddha asked for some food to a lady outside the village. The lady got very angry and started scolding at Buddha very badly. But Lord Buddha did not utter even a single word. He silently left the place. The disciple was very much surprised by the behavior of Buddha. He immediately asked Buddha, why he dint react and told that he should have shouted back on the lady. Now Buddha wanted to teach a lesson to his disciple. So he put his hand into his bag and took a handful of rice and gave it to the disciple. The disciple immediately received the rice in his hands. Now Buddha asked him to return the handful of rice back. The disciple gave the rice, but Buddha never lifted his hand to receive it. The disciple told Buddha to lift his and receive the rice. But Buddha did not move. Then, slowly Buddha enlightened the disciple saying "I never put anything into my heart that makes me angry or unhappy. Its always under my control to take things into my heart. I did not take into my heart what the lady scolded. And that's why I did not react". That day, the disciple learnt a beautiful lesson.

Sunfeast Majja Run 2009

The twitter is so fast... as gmail goes down...

Today being a friday afternoon I wanted to relax apart from my usual work at office. I wanted to check my inbox in gmail. I was logging into my account but unfortunately it showed a server error. I tried 3 or 4 times but my efforts were in vain. Immediately i wanted to find out whether gmail is down or there is some problem with my account. Now twitter was my only hope. Opened twitter searched for gmail down and to OMG i found more than 20 tweets saying gmail is down.. below is the snapshot from twitter

CAPTCHA

Whats CAPTCHA? Whenever you fill an online form you come across a small image which is very not easy to read and you have to recognize and type them in the form to successfully submit the form. This is actually a CAPTCHA. The wikipedia definition says captcha is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. This is done mostly to prevent crackers to automatically run scripts to submit the online forms, thereby bring down the resources of the host. It is a kind od security service. Captchas are most common in email registration, blogs when you post comments, banking applications and other sigin features. But this is sometimes horrifying to many users because they have to recognise the text and enter them everytime. Also in some sites such as banking captchas are too difficult to read. Though they are hard to crack by text recogniton software, they frustrate the users. The user need to refresh to get another image. I have even seen images which has to be typed case sensitive and it becomes even more difficult. Arent there any other way to prevent these issues. Lets wait n watch.

Power of CSS

CSS stands for cascading stylesheets. In a normal web document the HTML gives structure to the web page, Javascripts adds behaviour and CSS gives the presentation. All the three are considered to be the tri-God of the web. All the 3 together gives a powerful and amazing user experience on the web. Here is an interesting page which has the same content but different presentations. Its an wonderful example how we can seperate data from presentation.

The following is the link to the site http://www.csszengarden.com/

Something I found interesting

I attended a web front end training programme recently. The trainer gave many interesting information about front end tools. During his speech he gave some interesting links. One of them was http://www.archive.org/index.php. This site which is called wayback machine was interesting because it had the snapshot of all the websites in varying time frames. Out of curiosity I tried the Yahoo! homepage. I was surprised to see the page with just hyperlinks in the year 2000. Really web 2.0 has changed the internet a lot and is changing more rapidly than anything in this world.