Technology Blog

Quadratic Solution Calculator

Advance Maths

Today I installed VB in my computer and got to work as soon as I installed it. I did some reading and my brother taught me some tricks in it. It gave me some problems while installing, after installation there was no problem.

VB is easy and takes about 2 hours to learn the basics and make a simple program, but it is good if you have some previous programming because it will make your job easier. Well I made a program that calculates the solution for the equation ax² + bx + c = 0. It gives the 2 values of x that can satisfy the equation.

This is no complex program, has a very simple interface. I am working on a cool program tonight (the reason why I installed VB).

Download: Quadratic Solution Calculator

Open Social and Facebook API platform

Open Social is a new initiative which is led by industries big player Google along with websites like Hi5, Salesforce, Oracle. It is a platform where different developers can contribute to these social networking websites using any language like HTML, Java scripting, PHP and if these are good they are plugged into the social networking websites and hence increase the quality and services provided by the social networking website.

This is like a huge hit for facebook developers as open social allows any language. In facebook platform developers are allowed to use a special markup language which works only on facebook and it cannot be used in other websites. Google is trying to over come facebook and thus launched this business strategy.

Developers will now go towards Open Social because many big websites are involved with it and you don’t have to learn any new language inorder to develop. The simplicity of Open Social has attracted a huge group of develpers who will be working towards safe and better plugins and additional features for websites. Though it still is a fact that facebook is the most popular social networking website for now, no one can predict the impact of Open Social on it.

Google has a very clever strategy in this case, Facebook platform was only oriented towards itself and this was a big problem for the developers, but Google Open Social is really open (any language). I have applied to Open Social and I have given my preferred language as PHP and I will be looking forward to develop applications using PHP, HTML and Java Scripting. I am not sure about the time that they will take to allow me into the Open Social coders network.

Bugatti Veyron

Bugatti Veyron is like the girl (I am not sure if girls like cars that much, do you?) we always dream about. It has the perfect curves and is of the right size. Till date it holds the record of being the car with the fastest 0 - 60 and 0 - 100, this beauty car has also a big price tag to go along with it, goes up to 1,500,000 $. While doing car reviews I don’t go to all technical terms, I like to keep it simple and before reading this, remember “This car is a babe“.

Personally I’d buy this car if it was available in my country but it’s not Though this car is real fast, it’s not very fuel efficient and has a very low mileage (aah man!). The good news is that it’s a 1000+ hp engine, that is like real powerful (Roman soldiers had 1 hp, you have 1000 if you own this). When the Bugatti Veyron was released it was the fastest car but it was overtaken by other cars but till date it’s the costliest, legal, production car. Try guessing it’s top speed, you’ll be shocked to know that it can go up to 400 km/hr (more like 250 m/hr), with this car I can travel from my city to the nearest city in half an hour and would never have to wait for 2 and a half hours to travel 140 km.

Well that is the good part about the Veyron now let’s take a look at the bad side of this monster machine, the bad side to this has always been it’s fuel efficiency. To travel 100 kilometers I’d have to put 35 liters (In my country every liter costs 1.5$). Travelling in a plane would be cheaper for me than taking this car (Ha ha, it costs 40$ to go 100 kms). In my other post I had expressed my concerns over cars and bikes that were not fuel efficient, so that is one bad point. If some how fuel efficiency was made better this car would be perfect for everyone, the brats and people who are concerned about environment.

We need more fuel efficient bikes

Global warming, pollution and rising prices of fuel are some of the major concerns all over the World and I’ve not seen many countries working real hard to control it, yeah some measures are being taken but they are not good enough. Technology keeps on getting better and makes out work easy, today brain power is more than muscle power (unlike the Roman fighting days) but this does not mean that it has to be sustainable. We are enjoying the good parts of life but will the same case be with the future generation? may be not.

Transportation system is one of the leading causes of pollution in many developing countries like India and here it costs about 1.5$ for a liter of Petrol (Gas?) but bikes here are very fuel efficient, they give about 80 kilometers per liter (Unlike Hayabusa which gives 8 kilometer per liter). These types of bikes not only save money but they save the environment, save nature and save natural resources. If all the bikes are replaced by fuel efficient bikes then the time for crude oil to get completely exhausted will be increased by 5 times.

Chinese are following a more sustainable method, they use bicycles. Not that they are poor but they want to contribute to nature (not exploit it). Going on a bicycle is health, costs nothing and does not consume any type of fuel that will deplete (and take a lot of time to replenish).

Is Digg exchange trend healthy?

Digg.com is a famous social bookmarking website where webmasters announce new news and articles on their website and other users digg it (in other words bookmark it) and when a particular topic is dugg by a user, it gets added in his profile list. This concept was introduced due to the increase in the total number of blogs and search engines could not index the hot news from the blogs as soon as it was released. Using these bookmarking services, Webmasters can announce hot news and opinions and visitors will know what has taken place immediately.

The more an article is Dugg, the more popular it gets. Hence webmasters are always looking towards getting their articles Dugg and sometimes the webmasters use unfair methods to increase the popularity of their article. I personally believe Digg exchange is one of the unfair practices. Webmasters usually need about 30 diggs to get their article into the Hot section of any upcoming news, from there it will get a lot of exposure and may come into the main Popular section.

This is one type of spam (I gave it a shot just to see what happens and believe me I got a lot of Diggs but I can’t say the same about the visitors), articles which actually deserve some attention is pushed down and articles that don’t are brought into popular section. Digg has fought with lot of Digg Exchange websites, one of them being Diggboss.com, now the one which is popular is Diggfreak.com which pays for Digging other articles. I am sure by the end of this year Digg will target Diggfreak.com too and maybe remove all the Digg exchange websites.

You can see a clear point that the owners of Digg make in the Terms of Service

with the intention of artificially inflating or altering the ‘digg count’, blog count, comments, or any other Digg service, including by way of creating separate user accounts for the purpose of artificially altering Digg’s services; giving or receiving money or other remuneration in exchange for votes; or participating in any other organized effort that in any way artificially alters the results of Digg’s services

This shows that Digg is trying to reduce things like Digg exchange.

bbPress is safe but it’s not easy for newbies

bbPress was made by the developers of Wordpress, Matt Mullenweg being the main person behind this project. bbPress is a forum software that can be easily integrated with wordpress if it is placed in the same folder in which wordpress is placed, else integration becomes a little harder but it can be done. My forum is also powered by bbPress and it does a good job, but that does not mean it does not need more development, there are some bugs that need to be fixed.

I did a lot of searching inside the bbPress source and found that unless a code which was modified is installed on your server, there is not much to worry about getting hacked. But still there is one exploit which may come after installing Allow Images script (hey, I am just telling, I am not sure if it’ll come) and the problem that may come is cookie theft, but even if you’re cookie gets stolen, all you have to do is log out and login. If you want to be safe, be sure you install plugins only from the bbpress.org website, don’t take it from any other source no matter what it claims.

Another good thing about bbPress is that it is free, unlike other forum systems like vBulletin. You won’t have to take the software from insecure Warez sites and you won’t go to jail if you use it. bbPress is released under the GPL license, so it can be used freely for commercial purposes but you are not allowed to modify the code.

This is all the good part of this software but there is another side to it, it’s not that simple, especially while integration with Wordpress which is placed in another folder. Practically I had to do a lot of work inorder to integrate and I am good in PHP, but what about the people who have no idea about PHP? Well they will not be able to integrate these two very well. If you don’t have to integrate then all you have to do is edit the config-sample.php file and rename it to config.php (You’ll have to enter details like Mysql user name, password, database etc..).

Download bbPress

Google does not like website sponsors?

Recently there was a hype about Google tweaking it’s algorithm and reducing the page rank of many websites which were involved in activities like link exchange and link trading. As a matter of fact it looks like a true rumor because many websites like Engadget.com has seen a fall in the Page Rank, I don’t belong to the Google PR team so I cannot say what the actual reason was, but I’ve read about in the Blogosphere which is the source for my following comment.

Google is against website sponsors!

Well if web owners are not allowed to take money to place link of other websites then why will potential sponsors contact us? It is good that the guy sponsoring my other websites are kind enough to continue the sponsorship. But this tweak of Google Page Rank didn’t happen for the good of the website owners but it was beneficial for people using it’s search engine. Google has taken this step in order to improve search quality and prevent manipulation of it’s search results, but from the point of view of a website owner, this is not correct, we should be given the rights to do link trade! There is also a petition stating this in Google Webmaster Help Group.

With time, Google will understand that what they have done is wrong and will bring back the original Page Ranks. Maybe placing 100’s of links will be search result manipulation but we should be allowed to place atleast 5-6 links and Google should official announce that placing these links is allowed.

Top 5 freewares for your computer

You don’t necessarily need to pay lot of money for softwares to make your computer work well, there are many powerful freewares that can do the trick that most of the paid softwares can.

OpenOfficeOrg - Looking for a Microsoft Office alternative, then look no more. Openofficeorg has all the features of Microsoft Office (More like a replica) and it is free.

Download

VLC Media Player - It has the capacity to play any type of media (popular ones), including Flash Videos (flv) and Windows Media Videos. It’s very light and thus ideal for all purposes.

Download

Mozilla Firefox - This is one of the best and the most popular browser, it is light, now it is very secure and proxy configuration is very easy. It also has a script executing add on called Greasemonkey which is very helpful. There are many other addons for Mozilla.

Download

Gimp - It’s a free image editor tool. Numerous digital photo imperfections can be easily compensated for using GIMP. Fix perspective distortion caused by lens tilt simply choosing the corrective mode in the transform tools. Eliminate lens barrel distortion and vignetting with a powerful filter but a simple interface.

Download

AVG - This company claims that it has provided security for over 50 million computers, it is a good anti-virus solution. It can protect you from spywares, trojans, worms, virus, filters junk emails and more.

Download

LE Promote released in beta mode

Download: Le Promote

This is a plugin widget which automatically adds you into our link exchange database and hooks you up with other sites (getting you links) and you’ll be linking to other sites, without having to communicate or deal with other site owners. After install, atleast 1 hour is required for your site to get indexed in the search database and then you’ll be linked.

Every week the index is rebuilt, so frauds will be automatically removed.