Saturday, July 21, 2007

Ubuntu Essentials

Recently my team members got hooked into Ubuntu (they moved from windows obviously), all this happened thanks to our Technical Architect - Vinu Thomas (www.vinuthomas.com), he inspired all and it got me also into trying it out. Have installed the Ubuntu Studio and find it no different from Windows, leaving windows for me was like a kid leaving home to go to stay in hostel, unless the kid finds out the fun in hostel he will always be skeptical.

So I do keep searching for sites which help me in my knowledge to grab more of ubuntu, hence my seeking took me to this site Ubunti Essentials site - www.ubuntuessentials.net, it provides information on the essential software that needs to be installed to make life much more easier that it already is.

Repository of free software/tools

This site file hippo, has the links to all freeware software/tools that can be downloaded.

The site also has a rss feed : http://www.filehippo.com/rss/ to track the updates.

Adding Machine

Stumbled upon this cool video explains the concept behind binary addition (same as what the computer uses to compute), in this video the Mathias Wandel uses a wooden machine and using marble explains the concept.

Watch the video
.

More information of the binary adding machine can be got at http://woodgears.ca/marbleadd/index.html.

Courtesy : Matt's Woodworking website

Friday, July 20, 2007

Unlocking the door using cell phone

Found this interesting blogging at http://ashishrd.blogspot.com/2007/07/cell-phone-controlled-door-latch.html, which tells how to unlock a door using a cellphone.
It uses the DTMF (Dual Tone Multi Frequency) tone to accomplish this.
Very interesting.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Google introduces hosted search solution for business

Found this piece of information on the Google blog.
Google have released 'Custom Search Business Solution' CSBE for business that do not have a quality search, CSBE is a hosted site search solution that provides Google-quality results for one's website.
CSBE allows you to put a search box on your website, and let visitors access search results from any website or websites that you choose.

There is a demo of the product available at http://www.google.com/enterprise/csbe/csbe_video.html

Saturday, July 07, 2007

Pics takne during the HCI course

I have started uploading the pics taken during the HCI course at IIT Mumbai.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kumarsatishn/sets/72157600640966074/

Thursday, July 05, 2007

HCI Course - IIT Mumbai

Today is the 3rd day at IIT Mumbai, attending the course on HCI (Human Computer Interface), its been quite interesting course, I am learning lot of new stuffs (some boring though).
Ulhas, Vinu, Yogesh, Srinivas and myself have come over here, this is a 10 day course from July 3rd to July 13th.
The travel from Bangalore to Mumbai in Deccan airlines was an experience to remember, the travel is cheap in Deccan but also scary, the landing was so bad that it scared the shit out of us and there were few women folks who were praying for a safe landing, I would think twice again before flying in Deccan again. Srinivas threw up due to the landing (this was apprarently his first flight).

Professor Anirudh Joshi is the person who is handling the course.
First 2 days have been learning about the concepts, CI - Contextual Inquiry, 5 sutras of Interview (interviewing the users is one of the most important aspects of the entire usability design process).
We went around the IIT campus scouting for people to interview for the Home accounting software project we have choosen, our hit ratio has been 2:3, both the person we interviewed were pretty friendly and gave us lot of input, we are supposed to interpret the interview and find out Key Observation, Insights, Design data, etc.....

In the evening it gets quite boring as we do not have much to do, but from tomorrow we have decided to explore the surrounding areas...