Your Booking ID is : xxxxxxxxx

Someone from our sales team would get in touch with you and provide you with
the payment and delivery options.

The commercial version of the UbiSlate would be launched in early weeks of
December.

After the commercial launch we would get in touch with you to deliver your
device as soon possible.

Regards,
Anand
Support Executive
Contact No.: 1800-180-2-180
——————————————————————————

Hello Anand,
I haven’t received any update from you. Is Ubislate7+ available for purchase. If so could you please send one to my place.
This is my booking id : xxxxxxxxx
My address is : xxx
payment mode : cash on delivery
contact number : xxx
Regards,
—————————————————————————–

Dear Sir/Madam,
Ubislate7+ is expected to be launched by February end. The company will endeavour to fulfil all orders on a first come first served basis. You can check our website for latest information/updates.
An offer exclusively for you if you decide to make the payment in advance:
- You can have a prioritized delivery of your Ubislate7+ in March!

- Free shipping! Normal shipping charges Rs.199/- will be waived off!

If you decide to avail this offer, please mail a Cheque/Demand Draft for Rs.2999/-, payable to Datawind Innovations Pvt.Ltd. at the following address:
Datawind Innovations Pvt.Ltd.

8148,Jubilee Complex,

Sultanwind Road,

Amritsar -143001

For all Cheque/Demand Draft payment enquiries, please email us at supportin@datawind.com
———————————————————————————

Why are you asking me to pay in advance … I had prebooked this 2 months back … i believe on the first day itself … now you are saying even after paying in advance i get the tablet in March !!!

YOU KNOW WHAT FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SEND IT IF YOU WANT TO

YOURS IS NOT THE ONLY TABLET AVAILABLE FYI

——————————————————————————–

P.S. This wouldn’t have happened if they had done some capacity planning. They were planning to supply to all schools and colleges with the number of tablets that sold out in the first month ? Don’t you think this is just another way to create hype and “demand” in the market. Cannot believe the government does business they way they do it in the grey market.

2. Problem
Though human computer interaction has reached a level where a user can directly touch the screen and manipulate things as he wishes, it still demands use of hands i.e. motor work, which takes of course negligible amount of energy, but what if even that negligible amount is not wasted. The main problem of current standards is that they include use of hands to operate or to get the job done by any device (computer) or motor work which is not desired.
3. My idea
As it is known that present human computer interaction techniques, demand motor work, the question arises here is how to reduce that, or how to make interaction comfortable so that there should not be any use of hands or motor work. The idea in this paper is an answer to this question. The idea is: By using cognitive biometric techniques a user can interact with the computer through his thoughts. There will be a brain-machine interface where the interaction will take place. The interface is just like a sensor that will detect the human thought, and creates a thought pattern in the system and the system will act according to that pattern. Now how this can be used to enhance interaction, its simple, using human computer interaction screen designing techniques, a good screen is designed and using cognitive biometric techniques an user can interact with the system so that the desired job can be done in less time and in more effective way. To understand how to design good screen, some of the basic principles of screen design must be known.
4. Screen design goals
To make an interface easy and pleasant to use, the design goals are: reduce visual work, reduce intellectual work, reduce memory work, reduce motor work, minimize or eliminate any burdens imposed by the technology. The result of these goals will always be improved user productivity and increased satisfaction.
5. Organizing screen elements clearly and meaningfully
Visual clarity is achieved when the screen elements are organized in a meaningful and understandable ways. A clear and clean organization makes it easier to recognize screen elements and ignore the unnecessary information. The visual clarity is depended on multiple factors which include consistency in design, a visually pleasing composition, a logical and sequential ordering, and the presentation of the proper amount of information, grouping and alignment of the screen items. What must be avoided is visual clutter created by indistinct elements, random placement and confusing patterns.
6. Ordering of the screen data and content
It includes division of information into units that are
Logical, meaningful, and sensible. Organizing them by the degree of the interrelationship between the data or the information. Providing an ordering of screen units of information and elements that is prioritized according to user’s expectations and needs. Forming groups that cover all possibilities, ensuring that information that must be compared is visible at the same time. Ensuring that only information relative to the users tasks or needs is presented on the screen.
7. Screen navigation and flow
Screen navigation should be obvious and easy to accomplish. Navigation can be made obvious by aligning screen control elements, and judiciously using line borders to guide the eye. Using various display techniques focus attention on the most important parts of the screen.

8. Visually pleasing composition
Eyeball fixation indicates that during initial scanning of the display in a clockwise direction, people are influenced by the symmetrical balance and weight of the titles, graphics, and text of the display. The human perceptual mechanism seeks order and meaning, trying to impose
structure when confronted with uncertainty. Meaningfulness and evident form are significantly enhanced by a display that is visually pleasing to one’s eye.visually pleasing composition draws attention subliminally, conveying a positive message clearly and quickly.
9. Amount of information
Present the proper amount of information for the task, too little is inefficient and too much is confusing. Present all information necessary for performing an action or making a decision on one screen, whenever possible. Restrict the window or screen density levels to no more than about 30 years
10. Web page size
The size of the page should be minimum, restrict to two or three screens of information. Place the important or critical information at the very top so it is always viewable when the page is opened, locating it in the top 4 inches of page.
11. Scrolling and paging
Scrolling should be avoided to determine a page’s contents. Minimize vertical page scrolling, when vertical scrolling is necessary to view the entire page, provide contextual cues within the page that it must be scrolled to view its entire contents. Provide a unique and consistent end of the page structure.
12. Distinctiveness
Individual screen controls, and groups of screen controls must be perceptually distinct. Screen controls should not touch window borders, should not touch each other. Buttons should not touch each other, should not touch a window border. A button label should not touch the button border. Adjacent screen elements must be displayed in colors or shades of sufficient contrast with one another. Elements of the screen must be distinct, clearly distinguished from one another. Distinctiveness can be enhanced through separation and contrast.
13. Focus and emphasis
Visually emphasize the most prominent element and most important elements, or central idea or focal point. To provide emphasis use techniques such as higher brightness, larger and distinctive font, underlining, blinking, contrasting colors, larger size, positioning, white space and etc. to ensure that emphasized elements stand out, avoid emphasizing too many screen elements, using too many emphasizing techniques, screen clutter.
14. Conveying depth of levels or a Three dimensional appearance
Use perspective, highlighting, shading, and other techniques to achieve a three dimensional appearance. Always assume that a light source is in the upper left corner of the screen. Display command buttons above the screen plane, display screen based controls on, or etched or lowered below, the screen plane.
15. Presenting information simply and meaningfully
Provide legibility so that information is noticeable and distinguishable. Provide readability so that information is identifiable, interpretable, and attractive. Present information in an usable form, utilize contrasting display features to attract and call attention to different screen elements. Create visual lines implicitly and explicitly to guide eye. Be consistent in appearance and procedural usage.
16. Organization and structure guidelines
There are series of organizational and structural guidelines for specific kinds of screens. They are: information entry and conversational entry from a dedicated source document and display/read only screens.
16.1 information entry and modification screens
Organization of these categories of screens should be logical and clear, these screens should have most frequently used information on the earliest screens, at the top of screens, and the required information should be on the earliest screen and at the top of the screens. All the captions should be meaningful and consistently positioned in the relation to the data field controls, they should be left or right aligned, mixed case using headline styles. Text box and selection controls should designate the boxes, spacing and groupings should be created in a logical way making them medium size, about 5-7 lines.
16.2. Dedicated source document
Occasionally, it may be necessary to enter details into the screen by looking at the document in hand, for example an application form, a bank loan form or a reservation form. The main aim behind designing screen for such purpose is to make user complete the details or fill in the details without even looking at the screen, the screen must be designed according to the document. It includes organization of the image of the associated document, captions should consists of abbreviations and contractions, they should be consistently positioned in the relation to the data field , and they should be right aligned, text boxes should be designated by boxes and spacing and grouping should be done in the same way as in the document, headings should be included if they are present on the source document, control arrangement should be in the same way as in the source document and should be in left to right completion, keying should be done in manual tabbing.
16.3 Display/Read only screens
Display/read only screens are used to display results of the inquiry or a request or to display computer request. The main objective behind this is to minimize the human eye movement to optimize the human scanning, a consistent viewing pattern is established, now follows some of the guidelines for designing such screens, organization of these kind of screens should be logical and clear and the data should be limited to what is needed and necessary, most frequently used data is displayed on the earliest screens and on the top of the screens, captions should be meaningful and clear, they should be consistently positioned in accordance with the data field, they should be left or right aligned, text boxes should not have surrounding border or box, spacing and grouping should be logical, headings should be in uppercase or headline-style mixed case, set off from related controls. Data should be visually emphasized and should be given a meaningful structure. Data should be arranged into columns, organizing for top-to-bottom scanning.
17. Reading, browsing, and searching on the web
Usually a web page is scanned in a clockwise direction, people being influenced by the graphics, colors, headings and text. The page will be seen by large masses for its shape and structure. Studies of web users indicate that the users immediate attention is directed to page’s content, ignoring all the other peripherals like graphics, navigation areas, logos, slogans, advertising, or anything else considered fluff.
17.1. Scanning guidelines
Organization should be in such a way that eye movement should be minimized. Provide groupings of information, organize content in a logical and obvious way. While writing provide a meaningful title , provide meaningful headings and sub headings, concisely write the text, write short paragraphs containing only one idea, use bulleted and numbered lists, array information in tables, provide concise summaries. Highlight key information carrying words or phrases, important concepts.
17.2. Browsing guidelines
To browse facilitate scanning, provide multiple layers of structure, make navigation easy, respect the user’s desire to leave, upon returning, help the users reorient themselves.
17.3. Searching guidelines
To help user to search his desired information, identify the level of expertise of the user, anticipate, the nature of every possible query. The kind of information desired, the type of information being searched, how much information will result from the search, plan for the user’s switching purposes during the search process.
Interaction through brain-machine interface
The power of modern computers is growing alongside our understanding of the human brain. It is difficult to imagine controlling a system through your thought. That says, you think to move a cursor from one corner of the screen to other, and you’ll in the next second watch it really happening. Now, how this can be done. The answer is using a brain-machine (computer) interface a user, whatever he thinks will be passed to the computer as a signal and then in the system, the signal is processed by computer program or software. This software will make computer work according to the thought. Just consider controlling or manipulating a computer or a machinery just with the thought.
Brain-machine interface
The complete interaction between human and computer is based on this brain-machine interface; brain-machine interface can be designed only because of the way our brain functions. Our brain is filled with neurons, a nerve cell that is connected to other individual cells by dendrites and axons. Every time when we think, move or do some activity, our neurons will start working. This work is done by passing electric signal from one neuron to other. The signals are generated because of difference in electric potential of the ions present on the membrane of the neuron. These signals are actually transferred through a fatty substance that surrounds the axis of the cylinder of the nerve fibers called as “myelin”, some of the signals escape, these escaped signals can be caught and analyzed and interpreted to know what they mean. Then they can be used to command the machine to do the job.
How input is given to the system and how output is displayed
The input from the brain and given to the system is taken with the help of a electrode, it is called as “electroencephalograph” and it is attached to the scalp. This electrode detects the signals. However skull will block some of the signals and will not be clear, so to get the high resolution signal clarity, the electrode can be implanted into the gray matter or on the surface of the brain. This electrode will take the signal and pass it to the computer and the software in the computer will process that signal and display what is desired. The electrode will measure the minute difference in the voltage of the neurons and then the signal is amplified and filtered by some computer program.
My idea to improve the interface
The EEG is the device that is used to detect the brain signal and pass it to the computer program. To do this, an electrode should be implanted into the gray matter, which requires invasive surgery, and this is restricted to some people who are physically not capable. But, what for those who are normal physically. They just can’t allow implanting some electrode into their brain just to interact with the computer comfortably. The interface should be very easy to use,, something like a cap, or a hat; when a user wants to interact with the computer, he wears the hat or interface and then starts interacting immediately. This will attract many users and will take over all technologies in future. Thus, makes an interaction easy and convenient job unlike moving mouse from one corner of the screen to other, exercising your hand.
Advantages
The first advantage for designing such an interface is, it will provide a convenient way of interaction to those who are physically challenged, especially hands, and who has a good knowledge about computers.
Second advantage of introducing such an interface is, it will reduce the work time required for getting a task done using mouse, because everything will be done the moment you think.
It will reduce stress, use of memory for remembrance, and frustration that is caused due to slow response from the hardware devices.

Conclusion
Human-computer interaction has been playing very important role in the computer industries and in the life of a common man as well. Effective interaction has been of so much importance that it can cause a huge loss for a company, if it fails to make its user or customer comfortable at his site. Not only in the web world but also interaction has played a prominent role when dealing with software’s at home and in industries, ineffective design can cause loss of cost and job. For a company to earn profits, specifically business and software companies, it is very important and necessary for those companies to design their software’s and web sites effectively. To design a software or a web site, some of the screen designing principles are to be used. In addition to that, a designer should keep in mind that his customer should feel complete comfort when dealing with his work. This paper has presented a way in which human-computer interaction can be made extraordinarily effective and comfortable by introducing or combining cognitive bio metrics and neural technology with human computer interaction subject. This combination results in a great improvement in the interaction world. Interaction through brain-computer interface is a easy and comfortable way than any other way to interact with the system. It completely deals with thoughts. So it can be concluded with a statement that clearly explains the main aim of combining human computer interaction with cognitive biometrics is “What you see, is the way you think”

References
[1]. The essential guide for user interaction design by Wilbert O. Galitz.
[2]. http:\www.Howstuffworks.com\
[3]. Biometrics, Wikipedia.org
[4]. Human-computer interaction, http\Wikipedia.org

Chapter 1. Introduction

1. Introduction to neural networks

1.1 What is a Neural Network?

An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is an information processing paradigm that is inspired by the way biological nervous systems, such as the brain, process information. The key element of this paradigm is the novel structure of the information processing system. It is composed of a large number of highly interconnected processing elements (neurons) working in unison to solve specific problems. ANNs, like people, learn by example. An ANN is configured for a specific application, such as pattern recognition or data classification, through a learning process. Learning in biological systems involves adjustments to the synaptic connections that exist between the neurons. This is true of ANNs as well.

1.2 Why use neural networks?

Neural networks, with their remarkable ability to derive meaning from complicated or imprecise data, can be used to extract patterns and detect trends that are too complex to be noticed by either humans or other computer techniques. A trained neural network can be thought of as an “expert” in the category of information it has been given to analyze. This expert can then be used to provide projections given new situations of interest and answer “what if” questions.

Other advantages include:

Adaptive learning: An ability to learn how to do tasks based on the data given for training or initial experience.

Self-Organization: An ANN can create its own organization or representation of the information it receives during learning time.

Real Time Operation: ANN computations may be carried out in parallel, and special hardware devices are being designed and manufactured which take advantage of this capability.

Fault Tolerance via Redundant Information Coding: Partial destruction of a network leads to the corresponding degradation of performance. However, some network capabilities may be retained even with major network damage.

1.3 Neural networks versus conventional computers

Neural networks take a different approach to problem solving than that of conventional computers. Conventional computers use an algorithmic approach i.e. the computer follows a set of instructions in order to solve a problem. Unless the specific steps that the computer needs to follow are known the computer cannot solve the problem. That restricts the problem solving capability of conventional computers to problems that we already understand and know how to solve. But computers would be so much more useful if they could do things that we don’t exactly know how to do.

Neural networks process information in a similar way the human brain does. The network is composed of a large number of highly interconnected processing elements (neurons) working in parallel to solve a specific problem. Neural networks learn by example. They cannot be programmed to perform a specific task. The examples must be selected carefully otherwise useful time is wasted or even worse the network might be functioning incorrectly. The disadvantage is that because the network finds out how to solve the problem by itself, its operation can be unpredictable.

On the other hand, conventional computers use a cognitive approach to problem solving; the way the problem is to solved must be known and stated in small unambiguous instructions. These instructions are then converted to a high level language program and then into machine code that the computer can understand. These machines are totally predictable; if anything goes wrong is due to a software or hardware fault.

Neural networks and conventional algorithmic computers are not in competition but complement each other. There are tasks are more suited to an algorithmic approach like arithmetic operations and tasks that are more suited to neural networks. Even more, a large number of tasks, require systems that use a combination of the two approaches (normally a conventional computer is used to supervise the neural network) in order to perform at maximum efficiency.

Neural networks do not perform miracles. But if used sensibly they can produce some amazing results.

2.2	Learning the Distribution of Object Trajectories for Event Recognition

2.3	Radiosity for Virtual Reality Systems (ROVER)
The synthesis of actual and computer generated photo-realistic images has been the aim of artists and graphic designers for many decades. Some of the most realistic images (see Graphics Gallery - simulated steel mill) were generated using radiosity techniques. Unlike ray tracing, radiosity models the actual interaction between the lights and the environment. In photo realistic Virtual Reality (VR) environments, the need for quick feedback based on user actions is crucial. It is generally recognised that traditional implementation of radiosity is computationally very expensive and therefore not feasible for use in VR systems where practical data sets are of huge complexity. In the original thesis, we introduce two new methods and several hybrid techniques to the radiosity research community on using radiosity in VR applications. On the left column, flyby, walkthrough and a virtual space are first introduced and on the left. On the right, we showcase one of the two novel methods which were proposed using Neural Network technology.
Introduction to Flyby, Walkthrough and Virtual Space Flyby 3D Walkthrough Virtual Space		(A) ROVER Learning from Examples Sequence 1 Sequence 5 Sequence 8 (B) ROVER Modeling (C) ROVER Prediction

2.4	Autonomous Walker & Swimming Eel

2.5	Robocup: Robot World Cup
The RoboCup Competition pits robots (real and virtual) against each other in a simulated soccer tournament. The aim of the RoboCup competition is to foster an interdisciplinary approach to robotics and agent-based AI by presenting a domain that requires large-scale coorperation and coordination in a dynamic, noisy, complex environment. RoboCup has three different leagues to-date. The Small and Middle-Size Leagues involved physical robots; the Simulation League is for virtual, synthetic teams. This work focus on building softbots for the Simulation League. Machine Learning for Robocup involves: The training of player in the process of making the decision of whether (a) to dribble the ball; (b) to pass it on to another team-mate; (c) to shoot into the net. The training of the goalkeeper in process of intelligent guessing of how the ball is going to be kick by the opponents. Complexities arise when one opponent decides to pass the ball to another player instead of attempting a score. Evolution of a co-operative and perhaps unpredictable team. Common AI methods used are variants of Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms.
KRDL Soccer Softbots (3.1mb, AVI)

2.6	Using HMM’s for Audio-to-Visual Conversion

2.7 Artificial Life: Galapagos
Galapagos is a fantastic and dangerous place where up and down have no meaning, where rivers of iridescent acid and high-energy laser mines are beautiful but deadly artifacts of some other time. Through spatially twisted puzzles and bewildering cyber-landscapes, the artificial creature called Mendel struggles to survive, and you must help him. Mendel is a synthetic organism that can sense infrared radiation and tactile stimulus. His mind is an advanced adaptive controller featuring Non-stationary Entropic Reduction Mapping — a new form of artificial life technology developed by Anark. He can learn like your dog, he can adapt to hostile environments like a cockroach, but he can’t solve the puzzles that prevent his escape from Galapagos.
Galapagos features rich, 3D texture-mapped worlds, with continuous-motion graphics and 6 degrees of freedom. Dramatic camera movement and incredible lighting effects make your passage through Galapagos breathtaking. Explosions and other chilling effects will make you fear for your synthetic friend. Active panning 3D stereo sound will draw you into the exotic worlds of Galapagos.	Galapagos

2.8 Speechreading (Lipreading)
As part of the research program Neuroinformatik the IPVR develops a neural speechreading system as part of a user interface for a workstation. The three main parts of the system include a face tracker (done by Marco Sommerau), lip modeling and speech processing (done by Michael Vogt) and the development and application of SNNS for neural network training (done by Günter Mamier). Automatic speechreading is based on a robust lip image analysis. In this approach, no special illumination or lip make-up is used. The analysis is based on true color video images. The system allows for realtime tracking and storage of the lip region and robust off-line lip model matching. The proposed model is based on cubic outline curves. A neural classifier detects visibility of teeth edges and other attributes. At this stage of the approach the edge between the closed lips is automatically modeled if applicable, based on a neural network’s decision. To achieve high flexibility during lip-model development, a model description language has been defined and implemented. The language allows the definition of edge models (in general) based on knots and edge functions. Inner model forces stabilize the overall model shape. User defined image processing functions may be applied along the model edges. These functions and the inner forces contribute to an overall energy function. Adaptation of the model is done by gradient descent or simulated annealing like algorithms. The figure shows one configuration of the lip model, consisting of an upper lip edge and a lower lip edge. The model edges are defined by Bezier-functions. Outer control knots stabilize the position of the corners of the mouth.
Fig 2.8.1 The model interpreter enables a permanent measurement of model knot positions and color blends along model edges during adaptation to an utterance. The resulting parameters may be used for speech recognition tasks in further steps.			Lipread

2.9 Detection and Tracking of Moving Targets
The moving target detection and track methods here are “track before detect” methods. They correlate sensor data versus time and location, based on the nature of actual tracks. The track statistics are “learned” based on artificial neural network (ANN) training with prior real or simulated data. Effects of different clutter backgrounds are partially compensated based on space-time-adaptive processing of the sensor inputs, and further compensated based on the ANN training. Specific processing structures are adapted to the target track statistics and sensor characteristics of interest. Fusion of data over multiple wavelengths and sensors is also supported. Compared to conventional fixed matched filter techniques, these methods have been shown to reduce false alarm rates by up to a factor of 1000 based on simulated SBIRS data for very weak ICBM targets against cloud and nuclear backgrounds, with photon, quantization, and thermal noise, and sensor jitter included. Examples of the backgrounds, and processing results, are given below. The methods are designed to overcome the weaknesses of other advanced track-before-detect methods, such as 3+-D (space, time, etc.) matched filtering, dynamic programming (DP), and multi-hypothesis tracking (MHT). Loosely speaking, 3+-D matched filtering requires too many filters in practice for long-term track correlation; DP cannot realistically exploit the non-Markovian nature of real tracks, and strong targets mask out weak targets; and MHT cannot support the low pre-detection thresholds required for very weak targets in high clutter. They have developed and tested versions of the above (and other) methods in their research, as well as Kalman-filter probabilistic data association (KF/PDA) methods, which they use for post-detection tracking. Space-time-adaptive methods are used to deal with correlated, non-stationary, non-Gaussian clutter, followed by a multi-stage filter sequence and soft-thresholding units that combine current and prior sensor data, plus feed back of prior outputs, to estimate the probability of target presence. The details are optimized by adaptive “training” over very large data sets, and special methods are used to maximize the efficiency of this training.
Figure 2.9 (a) Raw input backgrounds with weak targets included, (b) Detected target sequence at the ANN processing output, post-detection tracking not included. Video Clip

2.10 Real-time Target Identification for Security Applications
The system localizes and tracks peoples’ faces as they move through a scene. It integrates the following techniques: Motion detection Tracking people based upon motion Tracking faces using an appearance model Faces are tracked robustly by integrating motion and model-based tracking.
(A) Tracking in low resolution and poor lighting conditions Jon		(B) Tracking two people simultaneously: lock is maintained on the faces despite unreliable motion-based body tracking. Double Tracking

2.11

Facial Animation

Facial animations created using hierarchical B-spline as the underlying surface representation. Neural networks could be use for learning of each variation in the face expressions for animated sequences. The (mask) model was created in SoftImage, and is an early prototype for the character “Mouse” in the YTV/ABC televisions series “ReBoot” (They do not use hierarchical splines for Reboot!). The original standard bicubic B-spline was imported to the “Dragon” editor and a hierarchy automatically constructed. The surface was attached to a jaw to allow it to open and close the mouth. Groups of control vertices were then moved around to created various facial expressions. Three of these expressions were chosen as key shapes, the spline surface was exported back to SoftImage, and the key shapes were interpolated to create the final animation. Mask Haida

2.12	Artificial Life for Graphics, Animation, Multimedia, and Virtual Reality
Some graphics researchers have begun to explore a new frontier–a world of objects of enormously greater complexity than is typically accessible through physical modeling alone–objects that are alive. The modeling and simulation of living systems for computer graphics resonates with the burgeoning field of scientific inquiry called Artificial Life. Conceptually, artificial life transcends the traditional boundaries of computer science and biological science. The natural synergy between computer graphics and artificial life can be potentially beneficial to both disciplines. As some of the demos here demonstrate, potential is becoming fulfillment. The demos demonstrate and elucidate new models that realistically emulate a broad variety of living things–both plants and animals–from lower animals all the way up the evolutionary ladder to humans. Typically, these models inhabit virtual worlds in which they are subject to physical laws. Consequently, they often make use of physics-based modeling techniques. More significantly, however, they must also simulate many of the natural processes that uniquely characterize living systems–such as birth and death, growth, natural selection, evolution, perception, locomotion, manipulation, adaptive behavior, intelligence, and learning. The challenge is to develop sophisticated graphics models that are self-creating, self-evolving, self-controlling, and/or self-animating by simulating the natural mechanisms fundamental to life.
A.Dog		Evolved Virtual Creatures	Sensor-Based Autonomous Creatures	A. Fish

2.13 Creatures: The World Most Advanced Artificial Life!
Creatures is the most entertaining computer game you’ll ever play which offers nothing to shoot, no puzzles to solve or difficult controls to master. And yet it is mesmerizing entertainment. One has to raise, teach, breed and love computer pets that are really alive. They are so alive that if it is not taken care of, they will die. Creatures’ features the most advanced, genuine Artificial Life software ever developed in a commercial product, technology that has blown the imaginations of scientists world-wide. This is a look into the future where new species of life emerge from ordinary home and office PCs.	Creatures

The following MPEG movie sequences illustrate behavior generated by dynamical recurrent neural network controllers co-evolved for pursuit and evasion capabilities. From an initial population of random network designs, successful designs in each generation are selected for reproduction with recombination, mutation, and gene duplication. Selection is based on measures of how well each controller performs in a number of pursuit-evasion contests. In each contest a pursuer controller and an evader controller are pitched against each other, controlling simple “visually guided” 2-dimensional autonomous virtual agents. Both the pursuer and the evader have limited amounts of energy, which is used up in movement, so they have to evolve to move economically. Each contest results in a time-series of position and orientation data for the two agents.

These time-series are then fed into a custom 3-D movie generator. It is important to note that, although the chase behaviors are genuine data, the 3D structures, surface physics, and shading are all purely for illustrative effect.

OTC Flow

1. SALES ORDER

Company Code: 4700

Sales Document type: ZOR

Sales Area: 4700/10/10

Screen Shot 1:

Click Enter

Step 2:

Header Level:

• Enter Sold to party: 1000991
• Enter Ship to party: 1000991
• Enter PO Number: Test
• Enter Payment term: 0001

Item Level:

• EnterMaterialsinItemLevel:1000309
• Enter order Qty: 1
• Enter Plant: 4702
• Click Enter:

Refer Screen Shot:

GotoItemBilling

EntertheINCOTermsintheItemLevels:CFR(COSTANDFREIGHT)

Click Save

2. DELIVERY

DeliveryDocumenttype:ZLF

T – Code VL01N

• Enter Shipping Point: 4702
• Enter Sales document number:
• Note:EnterDeliverydate:(DeliverydateshouldbetakenfromSchedulelinesinSalesorder)ReferScreenShotbelow:

Click Enter

Enter Picking Qty & Storage Location:

Click on Post Goods Issue:

3. BILLING

Billing Document type: F2

T – Code – VF01

Enter Delivery Document number:

Refer Screen Shot Below:

Click Enter

Refer Screen Shot below:

Click Save

Billing Document should be created (Refer Screen Shot below)

Display the Billing document: T – Code – VF03

EntertheBillingDocumentnumberfromtheaboveScreenshot:

Click on Accounting Document tab:

Refer the Screen Shot:

Introduction:

This document demonstrates the usage of Descriptive programming in QTP 8.20. It also discusses situations where Descriptive programming can be used. Using Descriptive Programming automation scripts can be created even if the application has not been developed.

Descriptive Programming:

Whenever QTP records any action on any object of an application, it adds some description on how to recognize that object to a repository of objects called object repository. QTP cannot take action on an object until unless its object description is in the Object Repository. But descriptive programming provides a way to perform action on objects which are not in Object repository

Object Identification:

To identify an object during the play back of the scripts QTP stores some properties which helps QTP to uniquely identify the object on a page. Below screen shots shows an example Object repository:

Now to recognize a radio button on a page QTP had added 2 properties the name of the radio button and the html tag for it. The name the left tree view is the logical name given by QTP for the object. This can be changed as per the convenience of the person writing the test case. QTP only allows UNIQUE logical name under same level of hierarchy. As we see in the snapshot the two objects in Browser->Page node are “WebTable” and “testPath”, they cannot have the same logical name. But an object under some other node can have the same name. Now with the current repository that we have, we can only write operation on objects which are in the repository. Some of the example operations are given below

Browser(“Browser”).Page(“Page”).WebRadioGroup (“testPath”).Select “2″

cellData = Browser(“Browser”).Page(“Page”).WebTable (“WebTable”).GetCellData (1,1)

Browser(“Example2″).Page(“Page”).WebEdit(“testPath”).Set “Test text”

When and Why to use Descriptive programming?

Below are some of the situations when Descriptive Programming can be considered useful:

1. The objects in the application are dynamic in nature and need special handling to identify the object. The best example would be of clicking a link which changes according to the user of the application, Ex. “Logout <>”.
2. When object repository is getting huge due to the no. of objects being added. If the size of Object repository increases too much then it decreases the performance of QTP while recognizing a object.
3. When you don’t want to use object repository at all. Well the first question would be why not Object repository? Consider the following scenario which would help understand why not Object repository

Scenario 1: Suppose we have a web application that has not been developed yet. Now QTP for recording the script and adding the objects to repository needs the application to be up, that would mean waiting for the application to be deployed before we can start of with making QTP scripts. But if we know the descriptions of the objects that will be created then we can still start off with the script writing for testing

Scenario 2: Suppose an application has 3 navigation buttons on each and every page. Let the buttons be “Cancel”, “Back” and “Next”. Now recording action on these buttons would add 3 objects per page in the repository. For a 10 page flow this would mean 30 objects which could have been represented just by using 3 objects. So instead of adding these 30 objects to the repository we can just write 3 descriptions for the object and use it on any page.

4. Modification to a test case is needed but the Object repository for the same is Read only or in shared mode i.e. changes may affect other scripts as well.
5. When you want to take action on similar type of object i.e. suppose we have 20 textboxes on the page and there names are in the form txt_1, txt_2, txt_3 and so on. Now adding all 20 the Object repository would not be a good programming approach.

How to use Descriptive programming?

There are two ways in which descriptive programming can be used

1. By creating properties collection object for the description.
2. By giving the description in form of the string arguments.

1. By creating properties collection object for the description.

To use this method you need first to create an empty description

Dimobj_Desc ‘Notnecessarytodeclare

Set obj_Desc = Description.Create

Now we have a blank description in “obj_Desc”. Each description has 3 properties “Name”, “Value” and “Regular Expression”.

obj_Desc(“html tag”).value= “INPUT”

When you use a property name for the first time the property is added to the collection and when you use it again the property is modified. By default each property that is defined is a regular expression. Suppose if we have the following description

obj_Desc(“html tag”).value= “INPUT”

obj_Desc(“name”).value= “txt.*”

This would mean an object with html tag as INPUT and name starting with txt. Now actually that “.*” was considered as regular expression. So, if you want the property “name” not to be recognized as a regular expression then you need to set the “regularexpression” property as FALSE

obj_Desc(“html tag”).value= “INPUT”

obj_Desc(“name”).value= “txt.*”

obj_Desc(“name”).regularexpression= “txt.*”

This is how of we create a description. Now below is the way we can use it

Browser(“Browser”).Page(“Page”).WebEdit(obj_Desc).set “Test”

When we say .WebEdit(obj_Desc) we define one more property for our description that was not earlier defined that is it’s a text box (because QTPs WebEdit boxes map to text boxes in a web page).

If we know that we have more than 1 element with same description on the page then we must define “index” property for the that description

Consider the HTML code given below

<INPUT type=”textbox” name=”txt_Name”>

<INPUT type=”textbox” name=”txt_Name”>

Now the html code has two objects with same description. So distinguish between these 2 objects we will use the “index” property. Here is the description for both the object

For1^sttextbox:

obj_Desc(“htmltag”).value= “INPUT”

obj_Desc(“name”).value= “txt_Name”

obj_Desc(“index”).value= “0”

For2^ndtextbox:

obj_Desc(“htmltag”).value= “INPUT”

obj_Desc(“name”).value= “txt_Name”

obj_Desc(“index”).value= “1”

Consider the HTML Code given below:

<INPUT type=”textbox” name=”txt_Name”>

<INPUT type=”radio” name=”txt_Name”>

We can use the same description for both the objects and still distinguish between both of them

obj_Desc(“html tag”).value= “INPUT”

obj_Desc(“name”).value= “txt_Name”

When I want to refer to the textbox then I will use the inside a WebEdit object and to refer to the radio button I will use the description object with the WebRadioGroup object.

Browser(“Browser”).Page(“Page”).WebEdit(obj_Desc).set “Test” ‘Referstothetextbox

Browser(“Browser”).Page(“Page”).WebRadioGroup(obj_Desc).set “Test” ‘Referstotheradiobutton

But if we use WebElement object for the description then we must define the “index” property because for a webelement the current description would return two objects.

Hierarchy of test description:

When using programmatic descriptions from a specific point within a test object hierarchy, you must continue to use programmatic descriptions

from that point onward within the same statement. If you specify a test object by its object repository name after other objects in the hierarchy have

been described using programmatic descriptions, QuickTest cannot identify the object.

For example, you can use Browser(Desc1).Page(Desc1).Link(desc3), since it uses programmatic descriptions throughout the entire test object hierarchy.

You can also use Browser(“Index”).Page(Desc1).Link(desc3), since it uses programmatic descriptions from a certain point in the description (starting

from the Page object description).

However, you cannot use Browser(Desc1).Page(Desc1).Link(“Example1″), since it uses programmatic descriptions for the Browser and Page objects but

then attempts to use an object repository name for the Link test object (QuickTest tries to locate the Link object based on its name, but cannot

locate it in the repository because the parent objects were specified using programmatic descriptions).

Getting Child Object:

We can use description object to get all the objects on the page that matches that specific description. Suppose we have to check all the checkboxes present on a web page. So we will first create an object description for a checkboxe and then get all the checkboxes from the page

Dim obj_ChkDesc

Set obj_ChkDesc=Description.Create

obj_ChkDesc(“html tag”).value = “INPUT”

obj_ChkDesc(“type”).value = “checkbox”

Dim allCheckboxes, singleCheckBox

Set allCheckboxes = Browse(“Browser”).Page(“Page”).ChildObjects(obj_ChkDesc)

For each singleCheckBox in allCheckboxes

singleCheckBox.Set “ON”

Next

The above code will check all the check boxes present on the page. To get all the child objects we need to specify an object description i.e. we can’t use the string arguments that will be discussed later in the 2nd way of using the programming description.

Possible Operation on Description Object

Consider the below code for all the solutions

Dim obj_ChkDesc

Set obj_ChkDesc=Description.Create

obj_ChkDesc(“html tag”).value = “INPUT”

obj_ChkDesc(“type”).value = “checkbox”

Q: How to get the no. of description defined in a collection

A:obj_ChkDesc.Count‘Willreturn2inourcase

Q: How to remove a description from the collection

A:obj_ChkDesc.remove “htmltag”‘woulddeletethehtmltagpropertyfromthecollection

Q: How do I check if property exists or not in the collection?

A: The answer is that it’s not possible. Because whenever we try to access a property which is not defined its automatically added to the collection. The only way to determine is to check its value that is use a if statement “if obj_ChkDesc(“html tag”).value = empty then”.

Q: How to browse through all the properties of a properties collection?

A: Two ways

1^st:

Foreachdescinobj_ChkDesc

Name=desc.Name

Value=desc.Value

RE = desc.regularexpression

Next

2^nd:

Fori=0toobj_ChkDesc.count-1

Name= obj_ChkDesc(i).Name

Value= obj_ChkDesc(i).Value

RE = obj_ChkDesc(i).regularexpression

Next

2. By giving the description in form of the string arguments.

Youcandescribeanobjectdirectlyinastatementbyspecifyingproperty:=valuepairsdescribingtheobjectinsteadofspecifyinganobject’s

name. The general syntax is:

TestObject(“PropertyName1:=PropertyValue1″, “…” , “PropertyNameX:=PropertyValueX”)

TestObject—the test object class could be WebEdit, WebRadioGroup etc….

PropertyName:=PropertyValue—thetestobjectpropertyanditsvalue.Eachproperty:=valuepairshouldbeseparatedbycommasandquotation

marks. Note that you can enter a variable name as the property value if you want to find an object based on property values you retrieve during a run session.

Consider the HTML Code given below:

<INPUT type=”textbox” name=”txt_Name”>

<INPUT type=”radio” name=”txt_Name”>

Now to refer to the textbox the statement would be as given below

Browser(“Browser”).Page(“Page”).WebEdit(“Name:=txt_Name”,”html tag:=INPUT”).set “Test”

And to refer to the radio button the statement would be as given below

Browser(“Browser”).Page(“Page”).WebRadioGroup(“Name:=txt_Name”,”html tag:=INPUT”).set “Test”

If we refer to them as a web element then we will have to distinguish between the 2 using the index property

Browser(“Browser”).Page(“Page”).WebElement(“Name:=txt_Name”,”htmltag:=INPUT”,”Index:=0”).set “Test” ‘ Referstothetextbox

Browser(“Browser”).Page(“Page”).WebElement(“Name:=txt_Name”,”htmltag:=INPUT”,”Index:=1”).set “Test” ‘ Referstotheradiobutton

Reference:

1. “MercuryQuickTestProfessional,User’sGuide,Version8.0.1”

INTRODUCTION

Staying Online

Back in the ’80s the Bee Gees crooned “Staying’ Alive”. In today’s parlance, this would be best said as “Staying’ Online”! Corny references apart, the fact is that being online and creating a strong web presence are the two most important things for personal and professional gains.

What is web presence? Is it just acquiring an e-mail address? Is it putting up a site? Is it your online conduct? As a matter of fact, it’s all of these things and much more. It’s almost like creating your identity online, like in the offline world.

Like in the real world, the internet also provides you various platforms to express yourself, interact, argue and learn. Some of these places can be found easily, others need you to be part of a network that is possible only after spending substantial amount of time with members of such networks. The advantages here are enormous.

Like with personal life, your professional life could also receive a major fillip with a good web presence. Being part of networking sites that are set up for professional reasons and even getting work online are ways of making proper use of your online identity.

But how does one do this? What is proper online conduct? How do I put up my site? Isn’t it costly? Questions such as these must be running through your mind. Don’t worry! We have attempted here to answer almost everything you may want to know.

Topics in our project range from creating your web presence to how you can use it best to becoming members of forums, why to set up your own blog and how you can benefit from it.

What is the correct way to communicate? How should you compose e-mails? Is there a wrong way to do it? Yes, there is. Netiquettes (Etiquettes to be followed online) are crucial. Additionally, topics like setting up and designing your own Web site will enable you to create a professional web presence.

But remember, like in the real world, you are only as good as your reputation. Work hard at maintaining it. And you will be welcomed with open arms into the web world.

1.

You and the Internet

Whether man can live in space or Mars is still debatable. But  life in cyberspace is already a reality. Like in the real world, though, for existence in the virtual world, it is important that you create your identity, a track record, a reputation—and maintain it. In this chapter, we try to find ways to do just this.

1.1     Creating Your Online Presence
Cyberspace is a vast sea of people… real people in the virtual world. Everyone is welcome, but who to trust is something no-one can say for sure. “Sheep in wolfs clothing” holds true more often than not here. The key to creating your online presence is ensuring you do not become one of these sheep: that you man­age to declare and define honestly who you are.
There are many ways you can announce your arrival in cyber­space: e-mail, Instant Messenger IDs, your own Web site or blog, or by becoming part of a community or forum that matches your interests.
The challenge in becoming a part of a forum or community is finding one that interests you, and then slowly but steadily mak­ing your presence felt. Treat it like a new college you’ve just taken admission into. Naturally you are apprehensive because you don’t know anybody. You don’t know where to go… but you walk around and familiarize yourself with your surroundings and the campus.
An online community is just that—a campus. Take your time finding out about all that exists and what activities happen here. Find out about existing members and their likes and dislikes. Know what would be offensive to other members and avoid doing that.
As you spend more time, more members would start noticing you and approaching you… much like it happened in college. There you have your first set of friends. From there on, it’s how you take it further.                                    2.
More on online communities and forums in some of the later chapters.

1.2     IMs for Contacts and Business
Instant Messengers (IMs) have evolved into a communications and business tool. You need to be signed up to use a particular service—for instance; you cannot use Yahoo! Messenger with a Hotmail account and vice-versa. Although there are some IM clients that allow any account to be used, those aren’t the best ones.
So there are two options here—sign up for all available IMs, or decide the one you want to use and stick to it. We recommend the first since it costs nothing, and it doesn’t hurt to have an ID even if you rarely use it.
IMs are a great tool for communicating with friends, whether they’re sitting a few cubicles or a few continents away! Just make sure you match your time with their time zones! IMs also allow you to share files and photos as you chat and play games with the other person. It’s as good as being there. To be honest, you are-just that it’s virtual.
An IM can also be a good business tool, and including your ID on your business card is a good idea. Whether you are a self-employed professional or a businessman or an employee of a com­pany, using IMs for business can save your company (or you) a lot of money for communication. But how is this better than e-mail? For one, instant messaging happens in real-time. If you have to coordinate with a client sitting in another city or country, you could save on long distance calls by using an Instant Messenger.
Some of the popular IMs are MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger. To be able to use these, all you need to do is sign up. The services are free, and you also get an e-mail address upon signup. In the case of MSN, it’s Hotmail that gives you a 25 MB mailbox initially (it’s about 250 MB if you’re in the US), and Yahoo! gives you a 1 GB mail account. Logically, you would rush to sign up for Yahoo!, but it’s worthwhile checking up on which of the two is more used within your contacts.

1.3 Using E-Mail
E-mailing is a great tool for keeping in touch and widening you business. But there is a fine line between spamming and being persistent when e-mailing.
Spamming is illegal in most countries, and if your e-mail account is found to be one of those that is spamming, you could well be blocked out by the recipient’s mail server, making your efforts futile. Worse still, your own email provider could block you out.

A widely-accepted definition of spamming is “the use of any electronic communications medium to send unsolicited mes­sages in bulk”. While this definition is normally limited to indis­criminate bulk mailing and not any targeted marketing, the term ‘spam’ can refer to any commercially-oriented, unsolicited bulk mailing that can be perceived as being excessive, and more importantly, undesired.
In the popular eye, the most common form of spam is the one delivered in e-mail as a form of commercial advertising. However, during the short history of electronic media, things comparable to spamming for non-commercial purposes in media other than e-mail have also been recorded.
Over the years, a variety of spamming techniques have been developed. These vary by media: e-mail spam, IM spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, weblogs spam, and mobile phone messaging spam.
It is important that you desist from all the above forms, and understand what could qualify as spamming before you decide to send out a mass mailer telling the world about your business— or even your arrival on the WWW.
Because the entry barrier for spamming is so low, the volume of unsolicited mail has produced other costs which are borne by the public (in terms of lost productivity and fraud) and by Internet service providers, which must add extra capacity to cope with the deluge.
Spamming is generally reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in a number of jurisdictions, including the United States’ CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

3.
1.4 Netiquette
When communicating with others on the Internet, observe the following common-sense net-etiquettes. These ‘netiquettes’ should be observed whether you are writing an e-mail message, participating in a chat session, or posting a message on a Bulletin Board.

Below are some basics you need to be minimally familiar with in order to be taken seriously in your online communications.
1. Do not type in all caps. Typing in all caps is considered yelling or screaming online. Those who type in all caps are perceived as lazy and not being considerate of those who will have to read their e-mail. Various studies on the topic reflect that it is more difficult and takes longer to read text that is typed in all caps.
2. Do not leave the ‘Subject’ field blank. Fill it in with a brief and concise description of the content of your e-mail. This is very important in helping those you communicate with, helping them organize and manage their e-mail. Avoid using all caps or all small case, terms such as ‘Hi’, ‘Help’ or ‘Please Respond’, or the recipient’s name in the subject field, as you may be misidentified as a spammer, and your e-mail automatically deleted.
3. Refrain from formatting your e-mail with colored text and background colors or images in your day-to-day communica­tions. Your color and formatting choices can make your e-mails impossible to read. In addition, formatting could make your e-mails difficult to reply to without having to go through a procedure to convert your e-mail to plaintext first.
Often, when people click ‘Reply’, they have to deal with your formatting carrying over to their reply, which makes communi­cating with you unnecessarily more difficult. Why would you expect people to convert your e-mail just to read and respond to you? They probably will not!
Using large background graphics that take forever to down­load, especially if you have a dial-up connection (which is still more common than most of us may like to believe) is simply inconsiderate. If you do feel the uncontrollable need to use any type of formatting in your daily communications, do so sparing­ly.
4. On those rare occasions where it is necessary to send a group of people the very same e-mail, as a courtesy to those you are sending the mail to, list all the recipients’ e-mail addresses in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field. When an e-mail address is designated in the BCC field, the recipient will get a copy of the e-mail while their e-mail address remains invisible to the other recipients of the e-mail-some or all of whom they may or may not know.
Long lists of e-mail addresses at the beginning of any e-mail is an immediate sign that the sender is either a novice/Newbie—or doesn’t care to respect other’s privacy. None of which, we’re sure you’ll agree, are complimentary perceptions! E-mail addresses are like phone numbers. Only the owner of the e-mail address or phone number should be able to authorize who they want to have it and make it public to.
Most people prefer to decide for themselves who has their e-mail address. By sending mass mails to a list, you have made that deci­sion for them—and that is a breach of assumed privacy when communicating. Let those you correspond with determine for themselves who they will make their e-mail address known to-do not make that decision for them!
5. If you are new online, raise your right hand and repeat:
A. “I will not forward any dumb joke, ‘chain letter’ or unimpor­tant e-mails to my friends without their permission.”
B. “I understand that by doing so I may fill up their inbox, use oth ers’ resources unnecessarily, and may cause other, impor­tant e-mail to bounce.”
C. “I understand that most people have seen these e-mails a mil­lion times and find them annoying.”
D. “I know that by forwarding these so-called humorous e-mails
I may offend or tick off people who do not share my sense of humor or who are sick of having stupid e-mails forwarded to them each time a Newbie hops online.”

4.

There! Now, that wasn’t too bad, was it? Hopefully, you will no longer be tempted to forward those jokes, untruthful or friv­olous e-mail that instruct you to forward them to your friends! And you’ll avoid looking silly and uninformed in the process. Read them if you must, then hit ‘Delete’. You don’t believe those e-mails that state that certain things will happen simply by you forwarding the e-mail to 10 friends, do you?

In addition, many of these e-mails are hoaxes or downright bogus. Before you forward an e-mail that appears good-intentioned with an incredible story that instructs you to “read and share” with everyone you know, you might want to first check www.snopes.com to see if the story is legitimate in the first place. Not doing so can have you eating crow when everyone you e-mail is informed you just forwarded a hoax without knowing better. And, don’t get mad at someone if they point out to you that you were uninformed by perpetuating a hoax! If you don’t know for a fact that the e-mail you’re forwarding is accurate and specifically apropos to the person you are forwarding to and you know they will want to receive it—all you have to do is ask first.
6. Never give out phone numbers or personal information with­out confirming you are communicating with a reputable party. Never give out personal contact information of others without their specific permission to do so.
7. Make a reasonable effort to search a Web site for the informa­tion you are looking for—’Frequently Asked Questions’ or
‘About Us’ sections may give you the answers you seek before you waste the site owner’s time by e-mailing for information that is readily available on their site.
If a Web site owner takes the time to provide information, read it. No one person’s time is more important than another’s, and common courtesy includes respecting this fact. If you do not find what you are looking for, search for the appropriate contact area for your question. Don’t just click on the first e-mail link you come across and blurt out your question(s). If you do, don’t be surprised if your e-mail goes unanswered if the information is easily found on the site.
It is important to understand the focus of each Web site as well. Each site cannot be everything to everyone, or be what you perceive it should be. Be sure to review the information provided to double-check that what you seek would even be covered by the site you are visiting.
8. Do not use Return Receipt Request (RR) for each and every per­sonal e-mail you send because you like ‘knowing’ when some­one opens your e-mail. Not only is this annoying to the recipi­ent, this feature is intrusive! How would you like it if every time you heard a voice mail, answering machine message, or opened a postal letter from a friend, it was immediately reported back to them that you had heard/opened their com­munications? The recipient should have the privacy to deter­mine when/if they want to open, read and reply—period. RRs should be reserved for those instances where it is critical to knowing whether the e-mail was opened. Such instances would include legal and important business issues. Keep in mind that opened doesn’t mean read, and that the recipient can decline an RR request so you will not be notified.
9. Understand that you will be on a continual learning curve. All of us are. The online world is changing constantly. The only constant is change! If you do not have the desire to learn and do not make the effort to understand the ‘culture’ of the tech­nology in which you are participating, you will not be taken seriously by your fellow Netizens. You also may get terse e-mails from other Netizens pointing such issues out to you— some may not be as nice as others. Do not fire back at them! Use such situations as an opportunity to learn what you are doing wrong so you do not anger others.
10. If you receive a nasty e-mail, do not respond immediately—if at all. People are bold and overly critical on the other side of this screen. They tend to not hesitate to point out what they think you need improvement on while not bothering to notice the good or positive points on the very same issue.
Many times, these people are simply trying to get a rise out of you (this is called trolling) or
5.
are trying to make themselves feel self-important. Many times, they’re just jerks. If you do not have something nice or constructive to say, or at the very least sternly professional—just hit ‘Delete’.
11. Keep in mind that all private e-mail is considered to be copy­righted by the author. If you post private e-mail to a public list or board, or forward it to an outside party in whole or in part, you must include the author’s permission to post the materi­al publicly. Not doing so can get you into trouble legally or with your friends and associates.
12. Always compress or ‘zip’ large files before sending. Many peo­ple who are new to the online world do not realize how large documents, graphics or photo files are. Guess what—they are large enough to fill someone’s e-mail box and cause their other mail to bounce! Get in the habit of compressing any­thing over 200,000 bytes. (You can view file sizes in Windows Explorer. Simply right-click on the file name and choose ‘Properties’.)

There are several types of file compression software available for these purposes. Do not send unannounced, large attach­ments to others because you think that photo or file is cute or cool. Ask first! More importantly, when sending business files, do so only during business hours—and always compress and ask permission first!
Many onliners still have to wait up to 30 minutes or more to open overly large files due to their connection speed. Most of those online do not have cable or DSL connections, they are on dial-up—many only @ 28.8 Kbps!
Another way of reducing the size of your attachments is to manipulate them using graphics software. Minimizing a photo or graphic’s physical size to no larger than 600 pixels in width will make them e-mailable—nothing need be larger than that size to view anyway. Or you could be really courte­ous and learn how to use the free Web space offered by your ISP to upload photos, and simply send the link to friends and family to view. And if you do not know how to do any of these things, all you have to do is learn!

To send large files that take a long time to download may not respect the other person’s time; the files may not reflect their sense of humor or point of view, and may even max out their e-mail box. This is being inconsiderate and lazy.

E-mail Woes
Unfortunately, the advancement of technology has its nega­tives. It is now possible to get a virus without even opening an e-mail—that started with W32.Nimda.A@mm (or simply, Nimda) in September 2001, which merely required you click on the subject of the e-mail in your mail program (or in some mail clients, have the preview pane on).
Several of the latest viruses actually use e-mail addressed farmed out of your address book or inbox to send the virus and propagate itself to all those listed, with your name in the ‘From’ field. The latest viruses can send themselves out with your friend’s names in the ‘From’ field, or any combination of e-mail addresses found on your system!
The need for a 24/7 real-time virus protection software is no longer a choice—it is your responsibility to remain virus-free. You will also need to update your virus files regularly. Check for updates every time you log on so that your computer is protected using the latest virus definitions.
The Basics of Virus Protection
o   Get an active program that is always ‘On’. This will catch any viruses as they are being downloaded, so they can immedi­ately be quarantined and cannot infect your system.
o   Update your virus definitions daily, or every time you log on. These updates can be downloaded from the Web site of your virus software manufacturer. Most have a scheduler to tell your computer to do this automatically.
You need to ensure your system is protected from any viruses that may have just been discovered since you were last online. New viruses are identified daily!
o Never click on any attachment or a .exe (examples: “Happy99.exe”, “free stuff, “click here” or “ILOVEYOU”) file attached within an e-mail without making sure the attach­ment has been
6.

checked for viruses. This holds even if the mail appears to come from someone you know well! The attachment may be virus-generated, and may have plucked your friend’s e-mail address off the infected computer of someone they communicated with. Or your friend may unknowingly be infected and not aware of the virus on his or her system, which has just spawned an e-mail that has their name on it and is addressed to you. The e-mail may look like it is from your friend just to get you to open it when in fact
it is generated by a virus.

The Benefits of Being Online

Being online today is more of a norm than a trend. Most people including businesspeople and students alike rattle off their e-mail addresses right after their phone numbers. One of the biggest benefits of being online is the possibility of reaching out to the entire world—quite literally. It’s a bit like putting up your shingle outside an office; the only difference is, the passers-by include the entire world.

2.1 Personal gains of being online
I our lives have come to revolving around our professional goals, and this start right from high school or college. We are so swamped by work, submissions and other related stuff that we have no time for friends, and we slowly drift away—leaving our­selves with just our colleagues as friends.

But being online and being active can mean that you are no longer kept apart from your friends. What’s better, you could even make new ones. You can also catch up with your friends from school and college and no longer feel isolated. Just how can you do this? Web sites that specialize in ‘networking’ is the answer.
7.

2.1.1 Online Social Networking
You may have heard some of your friends or acquaintances talk about sites such as Orkut,                Hi5,
Friendster, or Yahoo! 360. These are what are popularly known as online social net­working sites.
While they all claim to have the ‘most active’ or the ‘widest’ network in the world, you need to first check on where your friends are. Last thing you’d want is to be in one place while your friends are in
another! It can also be compared with your friends being at the movies while you are waiting for them at the coffee shop.
Getting online with almost all these social networking sites is as simple as a free sign-up and registration. In the case of some
sites such as Yahoo! 360, though, you may need an invite from an existing member.

2.1.2 How Does It Work?
Most such sites work on a simple principle. You can search for peo­ple based on common interests, hobbies, location, age, and any other criterion that suits you! One of the greatest things this does is eliminate boundaries of distance. You can also make new pen pals and keep in touch using the same forum.
Like with everything online, however, there are some pitfalls in the online friendship game. There are a lot of fraudsters out there who may win over your confidence and then try to misuse it.
Once you sign up with a social networking site, you can send invites to non-members to join and keep in touch with them using the Web site. Moreover, you can also find existing members and request them to ‘connect’ with you and share information and likes and dislikes.
As time passes, your network would grow, and before you know it, you would be part of a community where members share com­mon interests and keep in touch. So not having time outside the office is no longer a reason to not have friends.
In a lot of cases, members often meet outside the online pres­ence if there is a large enough community within a geographical area and get to know each other better.

2.1.3 Telecommuting
Although some may consider this to be a new way of working, telecommuting has been around for a while, and offers a great new way to work for the best companies in the world. As an aspir­ing professional, you need to keep an eye out for any company that may have a requirement for a telecommute job. These jobs allow you to work from home, and pay well, too. In some cases, the employer also sets up the infrastructure including the Internet connection and other necessities so that the employee is at par with the infrastructure at office.
For this, though, you need to really be aware of what is being offered and not miss out. Having your own site/blog could further aid your hunt in this as well.
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2.1.4 Your Global Office
Every professional and businessman dreams of making it big. But how do you do it? As a start-up or a small, growing organisation, you won’t always have the required finances or the manpower to go and meet all potential clients. Moreover, not all your potential clients would be in your city.
The Web and other online tools (e-mail, forums etc.) let your business reach new shores. Imagine yourself as a dealer of Indian handicrafts: your biggest potential market is the western world, but how many mailers can you send out? How many phone calls and samples can you send? Countless, to have any kind of impact and justify the expense of sending out the mailers in the first place.
Options like eBay that are now available allow you to list your product(s) in all English-speaking countries while sitting here in India. Isn’t that a world opening up to you? Other, similar services are equally effective, and can have a greatly positive impact on your business. It’s just a question of getting online and finding the right solution for you.
Summing up, having an online presence can help you elimi­nate costs, appeal to a wider marketplace, and further your per­sonal and professional causes.

It’s the chic new thing so far, but blogs—short for Web log—are the thing to have today. And sure enough, just about everyone has one (or more!). But what is blogging and what are its advantages? How is it different from a Web site? Fret no more… we will answer all this and more.

What Are Blogs?
Simply put, a blog is a compilation of thoughts, ideas, facts, news or whatever you will that someone has decided to put online! Called posts, each article on a blog can be connected with the pre­vious or not. That’s the thing. There are no rules and there are no restrictions. It’s your playground to experiment.
Blogs are usually structured, organized by category and are updated often; in most cases, daily. The owner (and in some cases, moderators) of the blog has the rights to control the content.
The term ‘blog’ was coined back in 1999, and ever since, blogs have caught the fancy of online dwellers. At last count, there were roughly about 10 million blogs on the Internet!

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Creating A Blog
It’s not necessary for you to know HTML inside out if you want to create a blog. You just need to be able to find your way across cyberspace and know the basics of Internet browsing.
Available for free, there are numerous tools you could use to create a blog. You can use an HTML editor like Dreamweaver or FrontPage Express to cre­ate your blog’s look and feel and to create posts. You could then send the content via FTP to a Web server.
However, if you’re unfamil-iar with HTML editors and using FTP programs, there are a lot of services that offer free blog-ging tools. Some of the more pop-ular ones are Blogger (www. blogger.com),

Blogsome (www.blogsome.com), and Typepad (www.typepad.com), to name a few.
When you set up a blog, you create a login name and password (similar to creating an e-mail account), select a template that will house your information and also create a nickname (optional) to sigh all your posts. Once you have the blog set up, you can post whatever information you like, whenever you want and as often as you want to.

3.1 The Benefits And Advantages Of Blogs

Easy to maintain and easy to start
If you don’t know HTML, using a template from one of the many tools available makes it easy to start off. You just post your info into the template and your account is created.
In most cases, the options within the template as offered by the service are extensive and allow you to categorise your posts. You can also link your blog to other blogs or sites to announce your arrival and popularise your space.

Post as often as you like
Post as much and as often as you like. None of the free blogging tools restrict the number of entries you can put up or the length of an entry. Heck, they are also offering free photo upload facili-ties now to brighten up your blog!

Blogs are highly interactive
Interactivity and quick! Most posts, depending on the number of regular visitors to your blog, would have a comment or two hun­dred soon after the post has been uploaded.
Blogs may also use a TrackBack’ system that allows a visitor to see who has written the original post and any other entry con­cerning it. Some blogs can also alert you when new or updated content is added.
Blogging gives a writer all the freedom he/she could ever hope for. While there is no censorship on the Internet, remember to be responsible with your writing. Also, take responsibility for what you write since your readers will comment on your writing and expect clarifications or explanations. This is the very thread that defines blogging and if you do not want it to be interactive, disable the com­ments on your blog.
The TrackBack option typically appears below a blog entry, and shows a summary of what has been written on the target blog, together with a URL and the blog name.

No lists or spam filters to maintain
E-mail spam filters do not block blogs because they are not an e-mail communication. With the advent of spam filters and the increasing refinement in the way they filter e-mails, delivery of newsletters and e-zines has become difficult.
Blogs are not delivered to any inbox and therefore, no methods of defeating filters are needed. Bottomline is that no one can shut you out simply because they are now searching you out!

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The number of blogs you can create is limitless
You can create as many blogs as you like, on as many sub­jects as you’d like.
So if your fancy has suddenly shifted to Indian Classical Music, go on, write about it. You could even upload samples of the music. Who knows how many peo­ple might be interest­ed in what you have to say or sing!

They’re search engine friendly
Search engines are constantly searching for new content and blogs match this requirement perfectly thanks to the constantly-chang­ing content daily.
There are numerous Web sites that act as ‘blog search engines’ as well. Do not forget to submit your blogs to these sites, so as to increase your exposure. This will also help with your page rank on general search engines.
Here are some of the places to list your blog:
o Technorati: www.technorati.com
o Blog search engines: www.blogstreet.com
o Globe of Blogs: www.globeofblogs.com
o Blog Universe: www.bloguniverse.corn
o Blog Search Engine: www.blogsearchengine.com

They’re economical
Actually you could get them for free! Since no lists are to be maintained, there are no list server costs. Blogging software and services are also very reasonably priced.
In most cases, they are free, but then you need to let them maintain a link back to them on your page. If you don’t want that, you could opt for a paid service and do what you will with the page and yet continue to use their content management module.
Some blogging services charge people to read, while others charge writers to write, but overall, the monthly charges are rather minimal either way.

They’re educational
Yes, there are some that are focussed and can be very educational. There’s such a variety of informative and educational blogs avail-

The average person reads 200 words per minute – The speed reading record is 1347 wpm. In 96 seconds they will read 320 words. So keep things short and to the point. This may sound crazy but these stats show that longer posts are often largely ignored.
able now that a search for any subject usually turns up hundreds of offerings.
For a view into popular blogs in many categories, just visit www.blogit.com or do a search at www.technorati.com.

You can get syndication
Syndication (RSS) is a great way to ensure that your writing and your views are exposed to as much of the general public as possible.
In most cases, Syndi-cation is now included in blogging services and this has drawn a great number of writers to this new medium.
For an example of a blog service that features syndication, visit www.typepad.com or www.blogger.com

Reading A Blog
o No special tools are needed to visit a blog or to read a post or leave a comment. You can use your existing Web browser like Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape or Internet Explorer. Blogs normally have addresses like http://blogname.blogser-vice.com where blogname is the name of the blog as defined by the owner of the blog and blogservice is the host or the tool being
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used to maintain that blog. So a blog on Blogger would have an address like http://digit.blogspot.com.
o Use a RSS (Really Simple Syndication) reader. You can subscribe to whichever blogs you want and they become immediately available in the reader. Using an RSS reader allows you to have all the blogs that interest you in one place—you don’t have to surf all over the Internet to read them.
What’s better is that everytime a new post is made, you would be notified within the reader and a link to the complete post would also be available. How convenient, isn’t it?

A sample “Yahoo 360” page.
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A sample “MSN spaces” page.

3.2 Blogs and Your Business
If blogs are all about expressing and making a point, how could they fit into a business? Here’s how:
Blogs provide great supplemental content and direct attention to areas of your business that you want to feature or highlight. More than that, blogs lend themselves to many other uses such as:
o Communicate with colleagues, partners, suppliers, and existing or potential customers
o Showcase industry/company news, introduce new products, serv­ices or marketing promotions, and provide tips
o Establish a company’s or individual’s reputation or brand
o Improve operations (e.g., project management or tech support knowledge-sharing)
o Demonstrate expertise
o Establish competitive differentiation
o Simplify and accelerate the publishing process!

The Marketing Potential
Blogs can be used as highly strategic desktop tools that are here for the long term. In addition to putting down your thoughts and cre­ating a corporate presence, think of the potential for your e-newsletter strategies:
o Articles within newsletters can be linked to a blog, extending life and creating a massive conversation giving you a clearer idea of what your customer is really thinking
o You can offer a bi-directional forum to customers to get true, per­sonal opinions on your
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products and services; something no survey with just numbers can guarantee
o Company experts can start a blog and become industry experts, helping your company edge out the competition. This, however, will need a great deal of work to go in the background.
o You can layer your blog with editorial controls and ensure noth­ing you wouldn’t want ever goes up there!

3.3 Exploitation of Blogs
Since its birth and over the last few years when it has grown in stature and reach, the Internet has become all-encompassing to the extent that we are more likely to say “Google it” than “let’s check out the library” if we are looking for information.
Despite this, though, we still haven’t dreamed of all the ways we’ll use it five years from now. But there are certainly indications that we’re going to have to be vigilant in recognising the differ­ence between honest business practice and the misuse of the net.
With blogs, since everyone has opinions, and we all now get a chance to offer our opinions up to worldwide scrutiny, we’ve recognised that it offers us an easy way to achieve our 15 minutes of fame! Guaranteed? Not quite.
Most people are using their newfound recognition to offer up their best: their interesting opinions, their hidden theories, their
creative thoughts. The passionate and opinionated now have an avenue to vent.
We find these people through mutual areas of interest—we can do a search and find them, or go to the standard blog-direct-ing sites and choose our favourite obsession to either read about or add some material to.
In either case, we feel like we’re part of a community of like-minded souls. On a movie-goers’ blog, we can rant and rave about the merits of why Sarkar is better than Black or whether Saif Ali Khan really deserved the National Award for a routine role in Hum Turn. It’s your playground. Say what you will!
But we belong to this community because of our substantial knowledge in the field, our love of the ideas or genre, and our beliefs of ourselves as amateur experts.
In any case, we’re in good—albeit possibly annoying—compa­ny. It’s become fun to find people and thoughts we would never have met otherwise but can immediately bond with.
Unfortunately, there is a downside to this also. There are peo­ple who are using the blogging world for fame and gain—and we have no way of knowing the difference between opinions and sleaze.

Link to other weblogs. Your readers may enjoy being introduced to the weblogs you most enjoy reading. The Web is a democratic medi­um and bloggers amplify each other’s voices when they link to each other. Generously linking to other weblogs enlarges the grassroots network of information sharing and social alliances we create together on the Web.

We Told You So…
There are people who expect nothing less of the Net, though. Their belief is that no one on the Net is to be trusted, that every comment or idea or opinion is self-serving—and therefore untrustworthy. These people just shrug at the mention of the ‘sleaze marketing’. Of course, they say. The entire Internet is sleaze marketing.
Is this true? Like in the offline world, though, there are some unscrupulous elements that hurt the usability and the credibility of the Internet. Unfortunately, these are spoken about more and are always in the limelight even if for the wrong reasons giving rise to the negative image of the Internet.
But not all of us believe that. For some of us, the Internet is a global arena that encompasses the group brain, where we can find answers to questions we haven’t asked, ideas that we haven’t thought yet, feedback in areas we had never challenged. It is our friend, foe, conscience, teacher and ability to touch base with peo­ple we could never meet or know of otherwise.
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Of course, not all available data is accurate or conscionable or wise. But like in the offline world where you steer clear of shady characters and associate with the good ones, the Web is a place to practise your discretion.
Blogs are allegedly the revolutionary new media, and are fast becoming increasingly difficult to ignore for those who spend time online. They are increasingly being recognised by businesses as a powerful communication tool. In fact, the medium has become so important that Bill Gates has a Web site of his own!
Be patient. Most webtog audiences are small, but with time and reg­ular updates your audience will grow. You may never have more than a few hundred readers, but the people who return to your site regu­larly will come because they are interested in what you have to say.
Researching information, finding answers and making con­tacts are the main reasons people in business log onto the Internet. A blog can aid in this process, resulting in online net­working opportunities. Having a business blog can be a good way for your customers to communicate with you, as well as between themselves, and in the process, form new relationships. While this may sound too esoteric, it’s happening right now on the WWW.
Blogging is fast, low-cost and offers a highly effective publishing, marketing and content management tool. However, before adding ‘blogging’ to your marketing mix, you should be sure you’re clear why you’re blogging and what you want to get out of it. Do you want your customer’s views about certain matters? Do you want to encourage communication between customers and your business?
Once these issues have been addressed, you need to find some­one to host your blog. This is a straightforward process, and is vir­tually free.
If you just search for ‘blogging’ in Google, you could have a tough time choosing!
Although new, the success of blogging has given rise to a new industry; entrepreneurial media companies have introduced ‘blog monitoring’, where they scour the net to advise brands on how their name is being talked about online, away from the traditional print and broadcast media
The idea behind this emerging service industry is simple. While there were only 130,000 blogs four years ago, today, there are about 10 million. These Web pages can make or break a company’s repu­tation because they provide links to each other and allow people to comment on postings—in other words, the blog is a huge image-making network that cannot be ignored. Even if you, as a company are ignoring it, others that may be using your products or services
are blogging about it. Wouldn’t you want to know?
However, it is not only large companies that can benefit from blogs. Blogs are a useful tool for companies of all sizes. Especially for the smaller ones.
Why not start with a private, in-house blog, which is password-protected, so that it can only be seen by certain users, for example a project team or company division? Staff can use inhouse or intranet-based blogs for diary management, project tracking, arranging meetings, collecting comments and publishing documents.
The key to success is to pick the areas in your business where blogs can solve communication problems, then train the blog own­ers to anticipate and deal with issues in advance. With many blogs reaching thousands of people daily, many of whom also blog, it is time for blogging to be taken seriously in the marketing mix.
So what’s your URL?
15.

Forums

The usefulness of online communities is best represented by looking at various forums. It’s the simplest way for like-minded people, or people with a common interest, to come together and share their thoughts and opinions—in true online style, without having to take the trouble to actually meet anyone. This chapter will look at forums to see what benefits they can bring to you as an individual, and we’ll use our own forum (www.thinkdigit.com/ forum) as an example.

4.1 The Importance Of Forums
Forums are simple to understand, and are, in certain respects, very close to communities in real life. The fact that they are very easy to use also increases their popularity—anyone who can manage to connect to the Internet, open a browser and type in a URL will find it easy to click on a link to a forum, and then register and post their thoughts.
Forums, unlike blogs, exist because of a group of people, and tend to reflect the sentiments of the community as a whole. Though a lot of people think a person loses his individuality on a forum, the fact is that forums breed better individuals. Take the case of a school, where students are further segregated into groups based on the class they are in. To an outsider, all the students of the school are alike-they wear the same uniform, and are generally all seen in the same place. There are no individuals visible to the outsider. Once the out­sider joins the school, he finds there are various groups that interest him, and within those groups, there are people who are intelligent, people who are funny, and even some who seem just plain silly! That’s exactly how forums work.
Take the example of the Digit forum (www.thinkdigit. com/forum): this is a place where members are as diverse as it can get. People from all parts of the world—all over India, the US and the UK—come together with one common bond: they all read, or used to read, Digit! Everyone on the forum loves technology, and most members love Digit magazine. Yes, just as in life, there is the dissenting minority here, but they are as welcome as the others, merely because it is a community, an online society, where accept­ance is a must.
Some would go so far as to say that only forums and online communities can mimic real life in the otherwise fantasyland that is the Web. In fact, some might opine that it is even better than real life, as everyone expresses themselves openly, merely because they need not fear ridicule, as in, “So a few people online hate my guts… big deal!”
Whether forums build better people is something that is beyond the scope of this book, and perhaps a conclusion best left to psychiatrists and forum members to thrash about. However, there’s no denying that the right forum can help you develop your skill sets.
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4.2 Forum Activity
Forums are not just places where people who love to argue get together and play one-upmanship games. Yes, this does happen often, and quite a few members on each forum are there specifi­cally to build their egos by winning arguments, or showing off their superior knowledge, but they still aren’t the majority.
Members in a forum can be broadly classified into the following groups:
1. One-time Visitors
2. Occasional Browsers
3. Regular Contributors
4. Forum Addicts
5. Troublemakers
6. Moderators/Administrators
Read on to find out which group you probably belong to, and which you ‘should’ belong to.

One-time Visitors
This group is simple to comprehend: they find your site via Google or from a friend. They decide to pay it a visit when they’re bored, or when they need quick answers, visit the forum a couple of times, and then forget all about its existence.
On the Digit forum, these members comprise about 15 per cent of the registered members. They register only because they stum­bled across the site and it sparked interest, but that spark was fleeting. Other users who make up this group are those with PC or technology problems: they’re stuck and need a solution quickly. They visit well-known technology forums, register, post their ques­tion and then wait a while.
There’s nothing really wrong with being a one-time visitor, and one can’t blame people for trying to find solutions to their prob­lems. However, netiquette demands that users check back on their questions a few days later and see if there are any replies. Even if you didn’t find the answer to your question at a forum, and found it elsewhere instead, return to all the places you posted the ques­tion at and give those people the answer. This at least enriches other forums with the right answers.

Occasional Browsers
These are generally users who are not particularly interested in a forum, but like to come back to see if there’s anything interesting happening. The reason for their infrequent visits might be lack of time. However, there are two very distinct personalities of people who fit into this category-those who come to learn a few tips now and then, and those who come to impart knowledge when they’re bored.
At the Digit forum, this group comprises less than five per cent of the overall member population. The reason is simple: because we are a monthly, almost all the members have something new to talk about each month. This breathes fresh life into every regular contributor’s typing fingers—whether it’s to criticize or praise is not important.
At Digit’s forum, most members fall into one of the other cate­gories: they either don’t care and are one-timers, or are hooked and come back at least a few times a month.

Regular Contributors
These members are the mainstay of any successful forum, and visit and contribute at least a few times a week. They have a genuine interest in the topics discussed on the forum, and enjoy the com­pany of their peers.
On the Digit forum, the majority of members (about 60 per cent) fall into this category. Most members of this category look towards developing their technology skills, and also help those in need of answers. It is these members that contribute most towards the growth in popularity of a forum, and word generally spreads through them.
Needless to say, it is vital that the majority of forum members fall into this category for a forum to become successful or popular. A shift in balance towards any other category will spell certain doom for any forum.
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Addicts
It’s hard to start anything online today without getting a few thou­sand people addicted, and forums are no exception. There are always a group of people who can derive enough fun out of absolutely anything to get permanently hooked.
These are people who post several times a day-as many as a thousand posts by a single member in two weeks on our forum! Such folks look forward to getting home and on the forum as much as some

people need coffee or tea every morning.
It may seem that these members contribute the most to a forum, and thus are perhaps significantly responsible for its growth, but in truth, it is the other way round. Forum addicts so badly need to post their views that they sometimes do not care whether their views will be appreciated.
On our forum, for example, forum addicts are not necessarily the most technologically sound members, and often end up mak­ing frivolous posts about inane topics that only make other mem­bers cry out in disbelief. Often, such posts lead to heated discus­sions and name-calling.
Addicts generally get called names such as ‘spammer’, ‘lamer’ and ‘nOOb’ (short for newbie). Other very colorful names and vari­ants of those names are also thrown about at random by the majority. This happens because members see the same people butting in everywhere with comments or questions, very often in threads or topics that they know nothing about, when in fact they would be better off waiting and reading posts by members who do have the knowledge to reply.
Just as we hate chatterboxes in real life, who never let you fin­ish a sentence and interrupt you all the time, addicts tend to be disliked by the majority.

Troublemakers
The terrorists of the online world, troublemakers have only one agenda-to disrupt everyday life on a forum. These people will do absolutely anything to shock and repulse members, and even enjoy the abuses hurled at them.
Unlike in real life, where such people can be caught and pun­ished, anonymity in the online world is not hard to come by. Forums are not made to be fortresses, and whatever security meas­ures are taken are hardly a deterrent to a troublemaker.
Sometime in late 2004, the Digit forum was attacked by a few such troublemakers: some were intent on spreading hate, others were trying to hack the forum, and one even went as far as post­ing filthy abuse and pornography. Thankfully, our members were mature enough to ignore it all, and recognised the immaturity and pointlessness of the troublemakers.
No matter how many IPs were banned, and how many e-mail addresses blocked, the troublemakers returned. In the end it was the members of the forum that got rid of these unwanted few. How? Just by ignoring everything they did. Nothing hurt more than the lack of confrontation and the sheer indifference they were shown.
Forums all over the world have stumbled across the same bril­liant solution. Online life, at least, proves that if you ignore it long enough, it will go away!

Moderators/Administrators
This is a group that everyone else wants to join—until they actual­ly do! The post of “Forum Moderator” or “Forum Administrator” is often much coveted, especially since they carry an aura of power. However, to shamelessly quote a popular comic strip, “with great power comes great responsibility”, and these positions of power can be thankless.
No, we don’t mean to compare forum staff to superheroes, but as is well known, when a hobby becomes a job, it ceases to be fun!
The Digit forum has a handful of members who were elevated to the coveted post of Moderator, and were initially thrilled with the opportunity. However, they soon learnt that what at one time was fun, was now the cause of exasperation.
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Perhaps the best thing any member of a forum can do is to recognise the amount of work that complete strangers put in just to develop the community. They reply to every little query, resolve disputes, ensure that the forum’s rules are adhered to, and, over­all, improve the quality of the forum.
Even members who aspire to become moderators, or people who want to start their own forum, should remember that they need to lead by example. If you can earn respect when you have no power, then you are fit to wield that power. If you just want to go on a power trip, you will end up being ostracised by your online community, and voted out like an unpopular politician!
If you start a forum, remember to award power only to the deserving. Remember that you may have a hundred friends, but not all of them will be suitable as moderators for your forum.
Before you start a forum, or, for that matter, join one, ask yourself the following questions:
o What are my interests?
o Do I want other opinions and thoughts on these interests?
o Will I benefit from meeting people with the same interests?
o What about those who disagree with my point of view?
o Can I handle criticism?
o Will I be able to make time to visit a forum regularly?
o Will/does this forum help people gain any knowledge?
Your answers should lead you to the right decision.

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CONCLUSION

Gaining Respect

Being online today is more of a norm than a trend. Most people including businesspeople and students alike rattle off their e-mail addresses right after their phone numbers. One of the biggest benefits of being online is the possibility of reaching out to the entire world—quite literally. It’s a bit like putting up your shingle outside an office; the only difference is, the passers-by include the entire world.

The rush to get online is, at least for the time being, over, evidenced by the plateau in the growth of the public Web. Maintaining a Web presence has become a routine, and in many cases, necessary activity for organizations of all descriptions.

Who should I be? There is no fixed answer to this question: who you are largely dictates who you will be in an online community. Depending on which of the previously mentioned categories best describes you, or interests you the most, you could be anyone. Perhaps the best way to contribute to a community is to join a forum that interests you. Not only should you be able to garner knowledge from a forum, you should also be qualified and willing to impart some.

In order to enhance your skill and knowledge, you need to gain respect and be polite. Treat a forum and its members like you would if all this was happening in the “real world”. Just as you would be polite in a meeting, and not interrupt a speech, you should read and understand first and ask questions later. Perhaps the role of a Regular Contributor is ideal, and that’s where you should aim to stay!

If you’re planning on starting a forum, or have recently been given moderator powers, remember how it felt to be a new mem­ber. Exercise patience and understanding, and most importantly, lead by example.

Rules are important, and though the Internet has thrived because of the fact that it has no rules, your forum will not. Once you join or start a forum that caters to a segment of human inter­est, stick to it. Changing focus often leads to something that is nei­ther here nor there, and as a result, isn’t too popular. Setting rules is the first step towards keeping your focus, and enforcing those rules is an even bigger step.

The past five years have witnessed extraordinary validation of the Web as “proof of concept”. Hopefully, the next five years will witness equally remarkable progress in fine-tuning the Web to enhance both the scope of its users, and the utility of its content.

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Bibliography

There are books about everything. And in recent years, books have also been written on topics such as Web hosting, blogging and so on. If you’re interested in any of these—for example, if you want to design a really professional-looking blog—you’d do well to read a book about it. This is not to say that there are no good Web sites out there that give you valuable information on such topics. Hence, in this chapter we’ve selected few books and Web sites for your reference.

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Managing Your E-Mail: Thinking Outside The inbox
by Christina Cavanagh
E-mail is one of the most useful and efficient business applications ever developed. However, many people today dread the chore of sorting through an inbox crammed with messages that don’t con­cern them and spam they don’t want. This book is a straightfor­ward guide dedicated to helping workers and organizations tame the e-mail monster and take back their time.
Managing Your E-mail is a simple, accessible reference for work­ers and organizations that want to get the most out of this ubiq­uitous and sometimes overwhelming method of communication. With new strategies for dealing with e-mail inefficiencies and practical tips on getting and staying organized, it will free up hours of time each week for what’s really important. It examines the categories and patterns of e-mail misuse and presents practical, research-based explanations, solutions, and quick tips on topics such as best practices for respond­ing to e-mail, when to choose more traditional communication methods over e-mail, how to struc­ture an e-mail for high-impact, how to craft more readable and understand­able messages, legal pitfalls to avoid, and more.

The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog
by Rebecca Blood
Weblogs—frequently updated, independently produced, and curiously           addictive—have
become some of the most popu­lar sites on the Web today. The Weblog Handbook is the first book to explain how weblogs work and explore their impact on the media landscape.
There is no formula for creat­ing a superb weblog—but there are lessons to be drawn from maintaining one. In The Weblog Handbook, Rebecca Blood draws on her experience as an early participant in the weblog com­munity to share what she has learned in three years of “living online.”

With a clear and engaging voice, Rebecca explains how to choose among the available tools, even walking the beginner through the process of creating their first weblog. Along the way she answers commonly asked questions concerning weblog eti­quette, how to attract readers, and the qualities that make a weblog stand out, alerting the novice to considerations—and pit­falls—they didn’t know to ask about.
Finally, the author examines how the weblog community has grown and changed, the dangers confronting it, and the ways in which weblogs are affecting and affected by both online and offline culture.                                        22.
Blogging: Genius Strategies for instant Web Content
by Biz Stone
Turn your home page into a microportal with fresh content that will keep readers coming back. The first hands-on book on build­ing blogs, this is an excellent tutorial for new bloggers, and includes many advanced techniques for veteran bloggers. Simply put, blogging is an easy way of updating a web page via a browser without the hassle of launching an FTP client or HTML editor. With all the templates, add-ons, and extra fea­tures associated with building this micropor­tal, the blog is a new take on the home page. The blog brings the voice of its creator to the surface, builds it into the design, and keeps the content fresh and meaningful. This book features hands-on tutorials for building a blog, adding a user based commenting sys­tem, adding team mem­bers, syndicating with JavaScript, adding searches to a site, and much more. This is the book for creative web-enthusiasts looking for the ‘next thing’ and it’s the first book of new ideas and advanced tutorials for bloggers already numbering in the hun­dreds of thousands.

Essential Blogging
by Shelley Powers, Cory Doctorow, J Scott Johnson, Mena G Trott,
Benjamin Trott, Rael Dornfest
Anyone can run a blog. From personal diaries to political commentary and technology observa­tions, bloggers are mak­ing their voices heard around the world. Essential Blogging helps you select the right blogging software for your needs and show how to get your blog up and running.
You’ll learn the ingredients of a success­ful blog, and then get detailed installation, configuration and oper­ation instructions for the leading blogging software: Blogger, Radio Userland, Movable Type, and Blosxom. After showing you how to acquire, set-up, and run these leading software packages. Essential Blogging takes you through the more advanced features, so that by the time you finish, you’ll be up and blogging with the best of them.

Written by prominent bloggers and authors of blogging tools, Essential Blogging is a no-nonsense guide to the technology of blogging.
23.

www.webfoot.com/advice/email.top.html

From the page: “This is not a document on the mechanics of send­ing e-mail—which buttons to push or how to attach a photograph. Those details are different for every different email software pack­age, and are better handled by manuals for the program. I instead focus on the content of an e-mail message: how to say what you need to say. I don’t think of this as e-mail etiquette (commonly called netiquette) because I don’t think these guidelines merely show you how to be a nice person. These guidelines show you how to be more efficient, clear, and effective.”

24.

www.dtcc.edu/cs/rfc1855.html

This document provides a minimum set of guidelines for Network Etiquette (Netiquette) which organisations may take and adapt for their own use. As such, it is deliberately written in a bulleted for­mat to make adaptation easier and to make any particular item easy (or easier) to find. It also functions as a minimum set of guide­lines for individuals, both users and administrators. This memo is the product of the Responsible Use of the Network (RUN) Working Group of the IETF (the Internet Engineering Task Force).

25.

www.thinkofit.com/webconf/afcnart.htm

This page is actually a single article, with resources at the end. The article begins, “Online discussion forums have played a key role in community networks ever since the first such networks began to appear in the mid 1980s. Forums permit direct interaction among community members. They provide a place where local issues can be discussed and information can be shared quickly and easily. The terms ‘forum’ and ‘conference’ are used to refer to a wide vari­ety of things, ranging from chat rooms to real-time video confer­encing. But this article will focus on text-based, asynchronous group discussions. Participants in such conferences can log in at their own convenience and read whatever messages have been posted since their last visit…”

26.

<Company Logo>

Proposal

To

<Client Logo>

<Client Name>

For

<Services Offered / Project name>

<Date: dd-mm-yyyy>

<Company Name>

<Company Address>

<Phone>

<Fax>

<Website>

Table of Contents

1.    Response to RFP.. 3

2.    Executive Summary.. 3

3.    Company Profile.. 3

4.    Scope of Work.. 3

5.    Architecture.. 3

6.    Assumptions. 3

7.    Work Estimate.. 3

8.    Cost Estimate.. 3

9.    Terms and Conditions. 3

10.      Company’s Experience.. 3

<Followed by document specific sections>

1.    Response to RFP

<Highlight the RFP / Solicitation identification number and a brief introduction to the document>

2.    Executive Summary

<This section should give an overall summary of the proposal and briefly mention the highlights of each section>

3.    Company Profile

provide information about the company>

4.    Scope of Work

<This section should in detail mention the solution or services being offered. This might contain the following elements:

i) Our understanding of the problem

ii) Proposed solution

iii) Modules of the software to be developed

iv) Features of the system >

5.    Architecture

<This section should describe in detail the proposed architecture for the system>

6.    Assumptions

<This section should list the assumptions made while making this proposal>

7.    Work Estimate

<This section should describe the work estimate required for executing the project>

8.    Cost Estimate

<This section should describe the cost estimate for executing the project>

9.    Terms and Conditions

<This section should list the terms and conditions laid down by “Company Name” to execute the project>

10. Company’s Experience

<This section should describe the past experience of “Company Name” in handling similar projects>

Apart from the above sections the proposal might also include project / client specific sections and appendices.

Download Link : Proposals and Contracts Procedure_1

Proposals and Contracts Procedure

Version1.0

1. 1.     Objectives

The objective of this procedure is to define and establish the process of generating and submitting proposals, and of reviewing and finalizing contracts.

1. 2.     Scope

The scope of this procedure applies to all proposals submitted to prospects and contracts finalized with the customers.

1. 3.     References

• Requirements Management Procedure
• Project Management Procedure
• Audit Procedure
• Review Procedure

1. 4.     Outstanding Issues

• None

1. 5.     Responsibilities

• It is the responsibility of the Project Manager in charge of that account to make business / commercial proposal under the guidance of the Business Development Manager (BDM).
• The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) / Vice President (VP) / BD Manager as the case maybe, is responsible for pricing policy for the company’s projects and applications, which will be reviewed from time to time. In case of exceptions, where special sanction is required for deviation from standard pricing and technical specifications, any one of them, as may be the case, would give the final approval for the same.
• BD Team is responsible for
  • Collecting RFP for any required projects
  • Sales of company’s products/projects
  • Generating leads in the company’s business line.
  • Coordinate with client during the initial project phase and whenever required during the life cycle of the project.
  • Primary requirements gathering from client
  • BD team should maintain a list of clients and do follow-up for all Projects with help of Project manager or Project Lead.

• Project Manager / Project Lead is Responsible for
  • Preparation of project proposal, estimation and forward to the VP for review and approval
  • Coordinate between client and VP during proposal preparation
  • Initial project resource allocation
  • Analyzing of Client requirements to a granular level before the start of a project.
  • Collecting and Analyzing End-User Requirements for the project.
  • Handling Change Request from the clients during project execution.
  • Tracking of Project Profitability and submitting to the Management.

• The VP prepares the contract based on inputs provided by the PM/PL and the BD Team
• The Project Manager is responsible for appointing a Project team to be assigned for each customer project which is being executed.
• During the contract period, VP/PM is responsible for collecting feedback from customer at regular intervals.
• Project core team should analyze the customer feedback and should report it to the concerned Lead or Project manager.

1. 6.     Inputs

• Request for Proposal

1. 7.     Outputs

• Signed Contract

1. 8.     Control Mechanism

• The VP approves all contracts, as applicable, between the company and external clients.
• Proper information sharing mechanism should be established to resolve the communication gap between VP/PM and Development Team, so that VP/PM is able to resolve client related issues regarding the project (Project status, Technical issues).

1. 9.     Procedure

Proposals

• A detailed proposal will be prepared by the concerned Project Manager / Lead The proposal addresses the following:
  • The company’s tool proposed for the particular hardware & network operating system and back-end, as applicable, and suggested by the client.
  • Additional technical information, as needed, about topology, networking, architecture etc., if applicable and required.
  • Brief description of the current situation and business needs
  • Client’s Acceptance Criteria for the project
  • List of known gaps, if any, major deviations, as compared to existing templates
  • Price of development tool / software license used (runtime or development version as needed)
  • Price of hardware, operating system and other software if intended to be supplied by  the company
  • Free or charged training and price thereof
  • Free or charged implementation support, if required
  • Arrangement for travel, lodging, boarding of project personnel if any onsite inspection is to be carried out
  • Price of other services, such as Data Entry services, if intended to be supplied by the company’s Payment terms
  • Any exclusions
  • Guarantee and AMC charges
  • Validity of the offer
  • Rates and taxes as applicable
  • Projects teams along with support teams, if applicable and required, will carry out the risk analysis based on known parameters and interaction with the prospects. They may, if required and applicable, suggest the time and cost estimates to be incorporated in the Proposal.
  • The concerned PM/PL will submit the proposal and follow it up periodically.
  • The complete Risk Analysis and Feasibility cum Business Study will be carried out by the Projects Team.
  • The feasibility cum business study will be conducted to make sure that the requirements of the prospect application, as understood at this stage, are within the capabilities of the company to achieve.
  • It could also cover business workflow, Management Information System (MIS) requirements, user groups and types of functional users, interfaces with other systems and document flow, as applicable.
  • The extent of the study will depend upon the technologies and the risks involved (financial, technical human resource as well as time schedule).
  •  It is necessary to carry out the feasibility cum business study before accepting the order, estimation methodology, in cases where the company does not have application templates.
  • The feasibility cum business study report should highlight
    • Feasibility of executing the project/activity in the organization.
    • Risk involved in the proposed project
    • New functionality’s (those which are not available in the existing templates)
    • A hardware and/or software platform where experience within the company is judged to be inadequate and additional training is required.
    • Estimated time frame and estimates
    • Deliverables
    • The VP along with Project Manager Reviews of Contracts and Proposals before it is been delivered.
    • It is in both the company and the customer’s interests to have risks identified. However, the company may choose to exclude some internal risks from the contract.
    • The final agreement to proceed will be given initially by the VP, after formal Presentation of the Proposal and Review risks.
    • The PM/VP clears the review actions and initiates action for amending the contract accordingly.
    • The VP approves the final Contract Review record.
    • The VP maintains the contracts file and sends a copy with the status for every review to the respective Project Manager.
    • If there is any amendment received by the Project team, it will be informed and discussed by relevant teams to look in to commercial aspect of the same. All such changes affecting the Project Documentation will be controlled in the Configuration Management system.
    • The company, for any changes or amendment to the contract will consider the minutes of the review meeting, approved by the customer, as acceptance by the customer.

After a few months the drive stopped functioning properly. I have no idea why. The light keeps blinking; does not detect. Tried on many different systems.

I was in Hyderabad when this happened. Believe it or not I couldn’t find an authorized service center in whole of Hyderabad/Secunderabad city.
So, when I got back to Goa I gave it back to the above mentioned store.

2 weeks passed by, I didn’t receive a call or anything. I called em up.
The response I got from then is shocking. They said there is physical damage. He told me that there was feviquick (adhesive) on the drive and that the drive was opened. Therefore, putting it under “Physical damage”.

I don’t see how I can do that!! (open a drive and stick it together)

Also I asked them to give me your customer care number. Guess what ? They gave me a wrong number. This was the number they provided me : 18004259888

And btw where in the world can I get your customer care number for India. It’s nowhere to be found on your website. Neither is live chat that you provide to Americans only. WTH!!

I am rather dissatisfied with the distance you maintain with your customers in India.

Following is the product number : KCAA130310

 sed 's/[0-9]\{1,3\}.[0-9]\{1,3\}.[0-9]\{1,3\}.[0-9]\{1,3\}/IPADDRESS-COMES-HERE/g' /SourceFilename > /DestinationFilename

Following is the link to a self extracting archive of the first project I ever did. My college website! Done with help of the great Subhash Dasyam.

http://projects.issani.in/astra/ASTRA_Demo.exe

https://github.com/shafiqissani/ASTRA-College-Website

This is a very very very old project. The structure of the website and code is horrible and outdated.

Make sure you scan this for virus. Most systems in our college were compromised. Also there should be a php shell in there somewhere … we used it for administrative purposes only.  :)

A thank you shout out to Mrs. Aruna Ranganath (CSE Head of Department) for getting me involved.

Ahhh… I feel nostalgic.  :)

# svcs | grep puppet
online          9:51:57 svc:/network/cswpuppetd:default

I will disable the nfs server:

# svcadm disable network/cswpuppetd:default

p.s. use `tail -f <log file name>`

A more robust approach, however, would be for you to create “tags” (tags are simply copies) – you committed revision 1234 to Subversion, but 1234 is a but of a mouthful. It’d be nicer if there was an easier, clearer way to refer to the code you’re interesting in testing. What you’d do is copy your existing code tree to a new directory, e.g. from /trunk/ to /tags/tag-2010-01-11_1500. Since tags (all copies, in fact) are in Subversion you may find you create tags frequently – /tags/build-2010-01-11_1600, /tags/releases-v1.2.3. Tags can be exported to Dev, QA and Production machines just as easily (if not more easily) than revisions.

• Deploy only HTML and JSP
• Deploy only compiled java classes
• Do only a restart
• Deploy only properties files

A framework / tool like ANT, helps in abstracting the script from a platform dependency and use simple XML file to define the build script.
Interestingly ANT itself is only a XML notation, that defines the sequence of steps. The steps themselves rely on the code base, framework binaries, SDK binaries etc.
In summary using any suitable syntax a build script should be defined. The script itself should automate the sequence of steps that needs to be executed to create a single unit of software.

In my experience, developers have no qualms about pushing code live to satisfy urgent business needs without regard to the fact that it may capsize an entire production environment at the most inopportune time. This happens repeatedly. My assumption is that a developer feels that refusing to meet a demand from the business side is more likely to result in termination than the huge finger-pointing that will ensue post-launch, making it evidently clear… the line that separates a developer from an administrator.

• Do the following in Terminal to install latest Firefox 4.0 and Firefox 3 in Ubuntu.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox-4.0
sudo apt-get install firefox

err: Could not retrieve catalog: Could not find class php in namespaces standardbuild at /etc/puppet/manifests/templates.pp:15 on domain.internal.com

running: phpize
sh: phpize: not found
ERROR: `phpize' failed

On Ubuntu/Debian you could run the following line in the terminal :

apt-get install php5-dev

that’s it

Follow me on Twitter, if you like. Or follow my latest project, TapType.   A kind of unspoken law has established itself in the software developer community in recent years: make it free or fail. From iPhone Apps to Windows Programs to Webapps, just about every developer has bowed to the silent pressure placed upon them to release their work for free. It has become almost a self-fulfilling prophecy: developers are led to believe the only way … Read More

via Kane Bennett

http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/6065851/Ubuntu_11.04_Alpha_1_x64_Vmware_Image.6065851.TPB.torrent

http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Ubuntu-11-04-Alpha-1-x64-Vmware-Image/44862a8395e727e933dfc80338afeb130f568876fc3b

Attributes : 

64 bits 

Gnome desktop

VMWare Image

Compressed size : 832 mb 

Actual size : 3.25 gb 

RAR compression in best mode (took about 20 mins to compress)

Fresh installation

USERNAME: user
PASSWORD: password

Ram 1GB

All other settings default

Installation with easy install, including vmware toolsBuilt on Vmware Workstation Windows 7.1.2 build-301548No software updates done.

It’s been 7 days, 4 hours, 13 minutes and 2 seconds since you last logged in, and we’re starting to get really worried.

We were just getting to know each other. You created 1 site, 1 page, dragged on 1 element, and then… nothing.

We were really excited for your new website, it had so much potential!

If you ran into any trouble along the way, we’re here for you. Making your own website is fun, fast and easy with Weebly. Best of all, you will have a website of your own to show to customers, clients, family or friends.

So we’ll make it really, really easy to start working on your Weebly website again: just click here!

If you have any questions, we’d love to help. Feel free to visit our Support Center or email us at support@weebly.com.

Sincerely,
The Weebly Team

bug on google chrome extension labs website

You forgot to change the path google developers !

link -> http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/apps.html

http://fma.issani.in

more content coming soon …

Go to http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout and install a browser plugin to disable Google Analytics.

1) System load of last one minute :

my $system_load = exec('uptime | awk -F "load average: " \'{ print $2 }\' | cut -d, -f1');
my $system_load = qx('uptime | awk -F "load average: " \'{ print $2 }\' | cut -d, -f1');

2) System load of last 5 minutes :

my $system_load = exec('uptime | awk -F "load average: " \'{ print $2 }\' | cut -d, -f2');
my $system_load = qx('uptime | awk -F "load average: " \'{ print $2 }\' | cut -d, -f2');

3) System load of last 15 minutes :

my $system_load = exec('uptime | awk -F "load average: " \'{ print $2 }\' | cut -d, -f3');
my $system_load = qx('uptime | awk -F "load average: " \'{ print $2 }\' | cut -d, -f3');

Can’t call method “syswrite” on an undefined value at /usr/local/share/perl/5.10.1/Gearman/Taskset.pm line 202.

… then change this