Solved the Rubik's Cube

After a half's days effort today, i have been successful in solving the Rubik's puzzle. It is really not that hard to solve the puzzle, although it looks like it is. just that you will need to have a step b step approach and use some simple algorithms to have the output. you will also need loads and loads of patience to get it done.



Steps

Step #1 : getting the first row right.

I have no clue of what algorithm to use here. i did it on my own so it should be simple.
Finnish off one side right and place it in the bottom so the completed side faces the bottom. Now we will do completion towards up.

Step #2 : getting the second row right.


Two algorithms here, left one and the right one

Left one: Ui Li U L U F Ui Fi
Right one: U R Ui Ri Ui Fi U F

Step #3: Now you should have completed the bottom 2 layers
Creating a cross on top, either from a center piece, or from a L or from a line

===> F R U Ri Ui Fi

L should face towards North West



Step #4: Aligning the cross Elements to relevant center pieces

When you complete the cross which has 'four center pieces', at least two of them will be aligned to the center pieces of the the four sides, if the aligned pieces are adjacent to each other place one aligned side on your opposite and one on right and do this algorithm, if they are opposite to each other try this algorithm to get adjacent pieces and then repeat the step as detailed.

===> R U Ri U R U U Ri


Step #5: Aligning the aligning edge elements to their positions

===> U R Ui Li U Ri Ui L

up , away from you (r) , up inverted , away from you (l), up , towards you (r) , up inverted , towards you (l),


Step #6: Super rotation

===> Ri Di R D

Note: nothing will go wrong in step 6,don't be afraid, if you repeat step 6 - 6 times, the cube will come back to its original position. also when you align one corner piece on the topside, rotate the topside anticlockwise to get a new corner to be aligned, don't rotate the whole cube when you align one corner price in step 6

After a few attempts you are done. See the completed version of my cube here.

the Zilla ! vs Business User

"The Zilla" has become my new nickname in office (with all credits to Collen for this amazing initiative) after I have started with bugzilla project to manage development activity at Chennai office. And the same guy says that I talk in C++ when he talks to me in English. I was wondering what makes me/us different from others, I think i have spend more time learning business process engineering, on-demand businesses, web design and marketing then with learning PHP or AJAX. So I thought of comparing the software that we use everyday to see if I can find any key differences in the way we work

An assumed list of tools that a business guy will use Windows Outlook CRM Web Meeting MSN Messenger Word Excel Powerpoint Internet Explorer Skype Notepad Microsoft SQL Server Technologies/Concepts that they work with everyday Saas Strategic Planning EPM Strategy Maps BSC Six Sigma BI EFQM TQM

List of tools that I use everyday grub (the boot loader) ubuntu (my operating system) gnome (window manager - I tried KDE, didn’t look well) pidgin (MSN messenger) wine (to run some windows apps) eclipse (the development environment) php (one of the main languages that I speak) umbrello (UML) dojo (the JS toolkit) dijit (more into dojo) jquery (the other JS toolkit) apache (the big - boss) evolution (my email client) firefox (obviously) firebug (yes!) subversion (source code management) bugzilla (work management) nautilus (file manager) gedit (more that just notepad... ) shell (well the all illusive command prompt) sudo (‘I am the god’ mode) nano (notepad when I become god) emacs (1 more) Technologies/Concepts that I work with everyday JSON XML REST SOAP CRM BI SaaS

From the above comparision (length of the list)we infer that they are obviously doing lesser work then developers (he.. he.. i know i m gonna get kicked when collen sees this). They have fancy names for thier software, the only well known name in the list of my tools is firefox. But I never managed to understand what EFQM means??? 

Finding the Right Programmer.

I was trying to find to resurces to properly evaluate programming candidates and i stumbled upon this article which i thought was perfect 10/10 measure to exactly identify a good progammer. But i am not sure how good this articale will be if we had to apply the same logic in a country like india, where exposure to computers only starts after college. (But when i put down myself in the same race, i did bunk my +2 tutions and school classes to hang out in internet cafes and try out Suse linux 6.3 using at that time's most advanced installation module-Yast2. Now when i look at myself. i almost manage to score a 9 out of 10 in these questions. ) . Read on this will be really intresting if you are really into programming. Finding the Right Programmer.
http://www.inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a-good-programmer/

Plugins for Joomla CMS

Some nice Plugins for Joomla CMS

• 
  
  • Tag Clouds
  • 
    http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,2287/Itemid,35/
    
  • Joomla Featured Articles Module
    
    Simple, lightweight module which allows you to display your selected articles titles, to attract attention to these articles. Just enter comma seperated list of content IDs and you are up and running.
    
    http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,2385/Itemid,35/
    
    
  • Content Item Module
    This modules allows for publishing content items or articles in areas other than mainBody(). Choose if you want to display a single item, all items from a category, all items from a section, or a number of content items/categories/sections specified by a comma separated list of ids. Simply enter the content item ID in the module's parameters field, assign a position to the module, and publish it. You can copy the module and assign a different name, position and contentitem id to the copy.
    http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,listcats/cat_id,1766/Itemid,35/
  
  
  
  
• 
  

Apple Safari in Windows

I saw an RSS feed this morning about apple coming up with a windows version of safari. so the first thing i wanted to do when i stepped into office this morning was to evaluate it...
i got a shock when i heard about its features.

it has 12 great features ... apple advertises on all these .... apple thinks that these are the features that you will need to switch from your traditional browser to safari.

here is the list from their website.

1. Blazing Performance
2. Elegant User Interface
3. Easy Bookmarks
4. Pop-up Blocking
5. Inline Find
6. Tabbed Browsing
7. SnapBack
8. Forms AutoFill
9. Built-in RSS
10. Resizable Text Fields
11. Private Browsing
12. Security

all of them seem to work great. until for one small issue....

the apple safari on windows will not render text in any form menus, dialogs, buttons, pages,etc...

here is my one feature vs steve jobs' 12... why should i use a browser which will not render text....

have a first glimpse of safari screen from my notebook....

First Glimpse at Hannover

I was jus browsing at ibm site to see if there are any new updates in developerWorks and Lotusphere , then i stumbled upon a link which said IBM has announced the public beta for Lotus Notes 8, (better known as Hannover in the Lotus notes user community).

just imagine... Hannover is to Lotus notes , what Longhorn or Vista is for windows....

This is the coolest and the most advertised version of Lotus Notes ever to be released... with a Extremely new UI and Functionalities, I didn want to miss a chance in evaluating the latest beta from IBM site.

I jus went ahead and downloaded the 623 MB file from IBM site and installed it on my machine.

I have given some screen shots in here, which are taken from that version.


This is the Defaluts Home Page of Hannover, you can access sametime... you can subscribe for RSS feeds. Read Feeds, Compose mail, Creadee Docs, Spreadsheets , Presentations, Databases ... right from the Hoempage.... Its extremely user friendly





Mail Interface for Lotus notes: This is the coolest thing... we all are gonna have a interface thats gonna compete with other e-mail clients (MSO2007/WinMail) in UI... this is the major innovation from the Notes user prespective.






Calendar looks great with new user interface and a wide range of other options.



Creating spreadsheets and presentations can be done on the fly without the need of using microsoft office.... notes has integrated SOFFICE page built in to it... the Office package offers excellent compatibility with Microsoft office file formats , so the switch over process will be a lot easier


With the New version of Lotus Notes.... IBM is offering a big challenge to Microsoft by offering a solution which integrates the basic needs for office environments, like e-mail, instant messages, creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc...

Notes is all set to crack the market with this innovation.

Forgot Visual Basic

Yesterday i came early home and i tried evaluvating Visual Studio 2005.... Jus thought of trying something different from the world of open-source programming..... These PHP, JS and HTML programming have very much affected my life..... i was struggling hard to write a code for showing a message box.... in Vbasic 6 it is "MessageBox" Function... but it will not work in VBasic 8 .... since the technologies behind are extremely different from each other.... I have completely forgot Visual Basic , years back i was very good at it ... desktop programming was like a piece of cake...

Visual Basic has grown very much from the days of a RAD tool used for application prototyping ... to a enterprise level app- dev tool... its good to hear these things... i will be evaluating the 2005 edition for web-devlopment .. will review the features in next blogs

Windows Vista vs Mac OS X

I have some clips comparing features of Microsoft's Windows Vista vs The OS X

NYT: Did Microsoft rip-off Apple Mac OS X in Windows Vista?






Apple WWDC 2006-Windows Vista Copies Mac OS X

Custom Apache log Formats

Log Files. ..... he he .... i hate em...

Apache Servers can be customized to create log file to record hits of user activity on a certain website. These logs are automatically configured by default. The Default log format called as "Extended Log Format" provides you exhaustive information about User's IP , browser agent, file requested, server responmse HTTP Referral,  etc.

but the default log format is not usually compete. in the sense, the default log format wont help me to identify a user session. ( because default session tracking uses ip/user agent config. if i am browsing from my company the entire company has the same external ip and almost the same browser agent. so i cant be uniquely identified ). SO in order to provide a stong Session Tracking machanism . We will need to use a modified log format which can also track cookies. This is called the combined cookie format.

About Cookies.

There are two kinds of cookies. First party cookies and Third party cookies.

Cookies which are set and retrieved  by the same we-server are called first party cookies. If  a cookies is set bey a third party website, then it is called TPC. normally Third party cookies have a high rejection rate. So its always advised to use a first party cookie.

Apache Server can be configured to set persistent First party Cookies.

Default Log Format

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" extended

Now Lets examine the Combined cookie log format

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\" \"%{Cookie}i\"" combined-cookie

So once these cookies are configured to log.

We can configure a new session tracking mechanism (Admin Console, select Web Analysis > Options > Session Tracking > add\edit a Session Tracking definition .) in webtrends to process the persistent cookie set by our apache server.

Now you can unleash the power of web log analytics. Most Reports in webtrends can be enabled with this configuration change.

Processing HTML Files as PHP Files

This is one of the most useful configurations that you need when you try to configure php on a apache web server.

Parsing HTML files as PHP Files

There are a lot of advantages in rendering PHP code as HTML files instad of a ".php " file.

• HTML extensions are user friendly
• say if you are migrating a site from some other technology to php, this can be very helpful.

The Process of adding .html extension to php scripts is relatively easy. Jus add the following line to your .htaccess or httpd.conf file

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .html

and thats all its done. This works fine with the my version of apache (HTTP Server 2.0.59).

Welcome to Web Analytics

 
"Welcome to the world of Web Trends", this is wat aditya told me when he introduced me to a weird web based charting and graphing tool (thats how webtrends looked like to me when i had m first look at it), For a moment i thought like it is just another customized web based analytics and reporting engine, which generates reports outta databases... But as usual i was wrong. :-) That was when i first began to have a look at the dirty big web analytics engine.

Web log Analytics (or simply WebTrends) is a software technology that allows users to examine webserver log files to understand user-activity, behavior patterns, requirements and client side specs of people who visit a website. The information thats gathered can very much help to increase the ROI of any organization, Web analytics mainly help in understanding user behaviors on a website, understanding their requirements, hurdles in reaching the information you need, conveying the correct information to the correct customer., etc.

In a current day scenario, where web based marketing plays a very critical role in business activity of every organization, web analytics tools like webtrends provide you total control and information you need on the web-activities you get involved in.

Say if you handle marketing for a organization. you will invest in paid searches in various search engines, so in order to analyze data , you will have to access each search engine get data integrate em accumulate all statistics , and then analyze the data. On the other hand if you have a third party analytics engine, you can do all the analysis at you end and be able to access all your campaigns and marketing activities in a single place.

Its not Just about marketing , you generally get data about ever kinda stuff on web , whether it is time zone, or city or the browser version or even the search query they used to reach your website...

I started feeling sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepy now. will blog later on this... more tech(???) stuff to continue....

 

History of Progrmming Languages

I was just browsing around the web when i stopped at his link, about the history and evolution of programming languages.




===> Evolution of Programming Languages




This link depicts the evolution and developments in programming languages since Fortran to current Ruby.

Firefox to FireLion

# Aging Tabs
# Answers
# Colorful Tabs
# del.icio.us
# DOM Inspector 1.8.1.2
# DownThemAll!
# ErrorZilla Mod 0.2
# Extension List Dumper
# Firefox Showcase
# FireFTP
# FlashGot
# Google Notebook
# Greasemonkey
# IE Tab
# ImgLikeOpera
# It's All Text!
# M3U Ripper
# Mouse Gestures
# Nuke Anything Enhanced
# Paste and Go
# PDF Download
# Rewind/Fastforward Buttons
# Sage
# SmoothWheel
# Tab Effect
# Tab Mix Plus
# Talkback

I got this list from Aditya's blog on the list of firefox extensions.. these are the coolest set of extensions around for mozilla/firefox. Jus try them out