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Showing posts from 2011

Plan your hosting options - CIR or Monthly transfer?

This blog provides an insight to plan your hosting options. Calculating CIR What is CIR? In simple terms, it is the quantity of bandwidth measured as Committed Information Rate in megabits. CIR allows you to channel as much web traffic as possible within a given bandwidth. CIR calculation will help you to model your deployment option, whether to avail hosted model, or host the application in one's own dedicated server, or avail hosting provider service for monthly transfer or avail hosting provider service in pro-rata basis. What are the important parameters one needs to consider? One important parameter is, total number of simultaneous sessions that your web application is expecting. With this value, we can derive certain other parameters that would help us in arriving at CIR. Do not mean that simultaneous sessions imply simultaneous connections. This only means that, if we assume each session represents one user, we have that many users using the application at any gi

My Kaltura experience

Guyz, for the past 3 years, I have been indulging myself in media distribution and delivery platforms. Currently, working with one such customer who has 7 products under his belt and is on aquiring spree.. I would like to discuss the open source option for video delivery, that is Kaltura. KalturaCE is available for free and is an open source option for video distribution. Predominantly built over LAMP stack and has flex/flash components for the consumption layer. What I found after installing on my Ubuntu is that this platform offers basic media management features like publisher management, content uploading, transcoding, managing encoding profiles, playlist management, player embedding, playlist embedding and so forth. There is no extensive, i would actually say, a good mechanism to create and categorize content the way many want it to be. Kaltura provides client library APIs in java, C#, PHP to enable existing solutions to go media distribution enabled. The platform comes with

List of MIME types for different file extensions

Here is the list of MIME types for different file extensions. mime-mapping extension='.html' mime-type='text/html' mime-mapping extension='.aif' mime-type='audio/x-aiff' mime-mapping extension='.aiff' mime-type='audio/x-aiff' mime-mapping extension='.aifc' mime-type='audio/x-aiff' mime-mapping extension='.ai' mime-type='application/postscript' mime-mapping extension='.au' mime-type='audio/basic' mime-mapping extension='.asc' mime-type='text/plain' mime-mapping extension='.asf' mime-type='video/x-ms-asf' mime-mapping extension='.asx' mime-type='video/x-ms-asf' mime-mapping extension='.avi' mime-type='video/x-msvideo' mime-mapping extension='.bin' mime-type='application/octet-stream' mime-mapping extension='.bcpio' mime-type='application/x-bcpio' mime-mapping

Definitive trend in office automation - Records management

I am talking nothing new... This is the trend that is seen in eGovernance area, especially in Indian scenario. Opportunity up for grab, at the same time, however, be prepared to make loss as you still need to work with babus. Records management deals with maintaining records of orgnaization from the time of creation till the time of disposal. This includes classifying, storing, securing, destruction, and preservation of records. Records are not for everyday use, but need to be kept for references on special occasions. Records management will have following features, in persuance of legal obligations or transactions of business 1. Systematic and efficient control of the creation 2. Receipt 3. Maintenance and disposition 4. Processes to capture and maintain evidence of information Record shall comprise content, context, and structure sufficient enough to provide evidence of activity. The key is 'evidence' A record can be either physical or digital. Example: Medical r

Letter from Abraham Lincoln to his son's teacher

##This letter is supposedly written by Abraham Lincoln## I am moved by the respect and concerns he has for the teacher and values .... “My son starts school today. It is all going to be strange and new to him for a while and I wish you would treat him gently. It is an adventure that might take him across continents. All adventures that probably include wars, tragedy and sorrow. To live this life will require faith, love and courage. So dear Teacher, will you please take him by his hand and teach him things he will have to know, teaching him - but gently, if you can. Teach him that for every enemy, there is a friend. He will have to know that all men are not just, that all men are not true. But teach him also that for every scoundrel there is a hero, that for every crooked politician, there is a dedicated leader. Teach him if you can that 10 cents earned is of far more value than a dollar found. In school, teacher, it is far more honorable to fail than to cheat. Teach him to lea

What is social graph?

It is a representation of a person's online identity, activity and relationship to other people and content. One can make use of this data for several other purposes like targetting specific ads, more relevant content publishing, improved targeted marketing and promotions. The data will be used to derive context that is specific your website's audience. One can develop social media apps like social networking, messaging, media sharing, message boards, forums, review sections and many. Figure: Social graph - an illustration In simple words, you can make your website context sensitive to your website audience. Give what your audience like, not the other way!

Innate and Non-innate learning

I am reading a book called 'What did you ask at school today?' by Kamala V Mukunda. Would like to share some learning. The book is intended for teachers as primary audience, nevertheless, good for any adult to gain deeper understanding on learning process. She talks about brain structure, innate and non-innate learning aspects and talks about synergy needed between the two in the first two chapters. Firstly, innate learning is something that would not need explicit training. For example, kids learning the language. They wont feel strained or stressed during this kind of learning, just because they enjoy the process, where as non-innate learning focuses more on class room learning. It is accepted that learning through playful means will have more impact on kids than the impact through the structured learning. A physcologist, David Geary puts it this way - while learning through playful means has more impact, children should be encouraged to learn the skills through structure

Socialism Vs Capitalism

I was discussing sociallism vs capitalism with my father, who is a retired economics professor. Found some interesting facts ... Sharing them ... Socialism believes in distributing wealth equally. For example: If there is INR 10000 and 10 people in the pool, every one gets INR 1000. Wow, that sounds great in a diversified society like ours. Will this work? My take is NO. Because, the focus is only on sharing the wealth. If every one gets equal share, high acheiver will downgrade himself or herself and low acheivers will still downgrade themselves. This is a chain reaction and will reach a point where you will not have anything to distribute. The opposite side is 'Capitalism' where only the acheiver gets the rewards for his or her efforts. India adopts hybrid policy of Socialism and Capitalism, where the distribution of wealth happens through public sector enterprises and wealth creation happens through private sectors. The policies will be made in such a way that private se

Enjoy video experience whilst treadmilling ...

What I am talking is not totally a new discovery, but am sharing only my experience. Requisites: Treadmill Any WLAN capable mobile device Wireless router Headset Hook your mobile to your wireless router, log into youtube. Choose anything that interests you, say, online tutorial videos, motivation lectures, songs, serials and so forth... Good thing is, since the screen size is small, you dont experience, great buffering delays. Video expeience is very much acceptable. More over, your workout will now have access to different content, rather than just usual workout music. Hope you liked it..

My first experience with RoR

As I was thinking of implementing customized filterable datalists in Alfresco, my focus shifted to RoR. I had heard about RoR being simple scripting language that would help me in converting my thoughts to machine-actionable instructions! With the hope of creating the list in an hours time, I quickly committed myself to RoR inclusion. RoR comes with its own set of problems. First the RoR examples that work with older version dont work anymore with 2.3.4. The latest version 3.0 was not available for download. Anyways, I downloaded, Aptana's RadRails 2.05 and started my experiments. RoR promotes convention over configuration. This looked very interesting and promising. I had to struggle to get proper libmySQL.dll to get connected to my MySQL server. It seemed that Ruby 2.3.4 does not work with latest dll of MySQL (learnt from posts across the net). Finally, I was good to go. Indeed, I could get my first application (CRUD) in just 2 hours. Here are my initial opinions on RoR. I

Alfresco experience contd ...

With regard to Alfresco, I am trying to use Alfresco share capability to enable small and medium companies to have their own collaborative ECMs. I feel, Alfresco Share is decent enough to do the job. I am using 3.4b version. I have done look and feel change to the theme, the changes are kept to color and logo only. Even though the layouts can be tampered, I feel and suggest not to tamper with. Alfresco share uses FTL for UI layouts and JS for providing dynamic behavior to the UI. One needs to spend a lot of time to in decoding the links between context files to do even the smallest adaptation that may be required. Once, you know how to read and related context files, then this exercise becomes pretty easy. I hope, that good documentation may ease the process, if you go for enterprise edition. It is important to understand the business intent before jumping guns on customization. For example, the firm wants to maintain the daily recruitment tracker to find out how many candidates ar