Captcha

A Captcha is a program that protects websites by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but computer programs cannot. For example while registering a new email id for yahoo a box with distorted text will be displayed which the humans can read but current computer programs can't.



The term Captcha ( Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart ). Some Captcha's now use pictures instead of words where the user is presented with a series of pictures and asked what is the common element among all of the pictures. By entering that common element, the user validates the transaction and the computer knows it is dealing with a human and not a bot.

Take Off '07

Flying colours all over in Koramangala Indoor Stadium, Bangalore on Saturday. Really a rocking day for all IBMers and got excited from the moment we entered inside the audi.



It was a moment of pride for the bluish guys and the pinkish girls rushing in. The excitement doubled when people saw a paper rocket placed on each and every seat in the stadium. We got back to our college days and it is really awesome to see rockets flying all over.

It’s a big moment to get inspired for a crowd of more than 3000. Peter Lorenzen started the show in style throwing a big rocket into crowd saying “Mine is bigger than yours”.



Navjot Singh Siddhu was the guest speaker for the eve really which I think is the best part of the day. Since I am bad in Hindi but some how managed to enjoy his jokes. Mind blowing talk with good sense of humor and made me curious to know more about him.

After his talk there was an award ceremony for the best employees, projects, managers, and competencies. And I am really proud to be a part of the best competency Application Hosting Services (AHS) led by Perumal M Kakkum even though we are not part of the success. I hope we do in the future.

Then started the next entertainment with Shaan created lot of expectations but doesn’t reach up to the level. But the Laser shows are damn good and got better with the music.

RSS ( Rich Site Summary )

In some websites we could notice a small orange color link on the right corner of the address bar or anywhere in the web page with RSS feed label on it. What is RSS exactly? RSS is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many NEWS websites, web logs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS feed to whoever wants it.

RSS solves problem for people who regularly uses the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest contents from the sites you are interested in. You save time but not visiting each site individually. You ensure your privacy by not needing to join each site individually. You ensure your privacy by not needing to join each site's email newsletter.

Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allows you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.

Popfly mashups

Yesterday I got an invite from the Microsoft Popfly team to test their mashups. For creating these mashups we need Microsoft Silverlight as a pre-requisite. Then there was a 5 step tutorial available to begin with. This is a mashup that gets pictures from the live image search website and animate them on a rotating sphere.



Step 1:

Find the Item labeled Live Image Search in the list on the left. These items are called blocks because you build your mashups with them.



Step 2:

Drag the Live Image Search block into the middle of the screen. This area is called design surface because it’s where you design stuff you make. Click on the wrench beside the block to zoom in. Change the query to whatever you want cats, monster trucks. Click on the wrench to get back to the design surface.



Step 3:

Find an item named PhotoSphere and drag it into the middle of the screen.



Step 4:

Click once on the Live Image Search block and then once on the PhotoSphere block. This will connect them and make a mashup.

Step 5:

Click on the preview link at the top of the design surface to play with your mashup.

Live Image Search is a control responsible to get the images we have queried, PhotoSphere is a control to display these images in a sphere and the functionalities of these 2 websites are combined to form a mashup.



Really exciting right? If you guys want to test this integrating more than 100’s of web applications Just give a comment to this post along with your mail ID.

SME Toolkit

SME toolkit is a website launched by IBM offers free business management information and training for small businesses. We can learn the basics for starting a business free of cost. All success stories of entreprenuers and all other information related to businesses are available. Find the link below.

http://www.smetoolkit.org/

This website gave me lot of valuable tips for my carrier.

' Mashups ' sew data together

I am still wondering how this mashups work in a real time scenario. But this article has cleared my doubt till some extent.

As Hurricane Catrina approached the Gulf in August 2005, storm trackers at Shumacher group, Lafayette a company that manages physicians for emergency rooms consulted a vareity of information resources like weather reports, a map studded with pins representing homes of nearby doctors and a computerised phone book to make sure hospitals would be fully staffed.

Almost one month later by the time hurricane hit, the storm trackers had new software that let them see weather conditions along with locations and contact information of the area physicians overlaid on a map all on one screen.

The hurricane software took less than two days for a developer to build, thanks to a new technology called "mashups". More and more companies are adopting the same technology. Mashups essentially are a way to take data trapped in seperate software applications and combine them into new hybrid applications. Mashups however are easy to build and cheap.

IBM and Microsoft among others recently released easy to use mashup building tools. IBM in February launched QEDWiki which provides developers with a portal where they can choose which application to include in a mashup and define how they want this applications to work together.

Microsft's mashup tool Popfly work with its Sharepoint collabaration software. Google has let developers make mashups with its popular mapping software since 2005.