Daily Bits – Page 298

Google, Now Coming to a TV Near You.

January 10, 2008 by Arun Leave a Comment

2008 has definitely started off with a bang and part of that is the latest announcement from Google regarding its entry into the TV space.

Google, the poster child of the web has always threatened established media ventures with its deep coffers of cash and its ability to churn out widely adopted services. The interesting part is that at no time does Google make an attempt to own media but only designs its business around other media.

This time, it is the television space that is seeing the mountain view company team up with Matsushita to bring YouTube and Picasa to television.

This may not sound like a field changing technology but I believe that Google must have several plans in the works and bringing service from the Web to the television are just part of the plan. Last year, there was lot of ruckus around Google’s requirement for technical experts on IPTV services. Microsoft was also very aggressively hiring in this space. Hence my bet is on several ground breaking services in this space.

The Internet enabled TV was also one of the highlights at the recent CES 2008.

A great many developments to watch out for this year.

Ribbit : A hotline from the Webpage to the phone

January 9, 2008 by Arun 1 Comment

A California based start-up is looking forward to bringing voice services to Web Pages. What sets it apart from other voice based products is that it lets developers embed fully features telephony services into Web pages.

Ribbit, the so “un-cutting-edgely” named start-up has already demoed services implemented across SalesForce.com. The demonstration lets users manage their telephony needs from the SalesForce.com interface.

The technology that connects these telephony services with the web based components is the Ribbit API integrated with the SoftSwitch developed by Ribbit. Flash and Flex are used at the front end to integrate the telephony services with the web interface.

For long, convergence has been the theme ruling the Web. From PCs to Mobiles to the next generation interfaces, connectivity is the main theme. Along with that, the new theme of “platforming” is also emerging. Essentially it means making platforms the products and monetizing on the collective development skill in the Web space.

From the social networking space to the enterprises we have seen the likes of Google, FaceBook and SalesForce.com opening up platforms to tap the collective knowledge of developers.

The new tool has wide applications for the online and the enterprise segment. Its about making the Web the portal to all media and connectivity.

17 Sensational, Free and Downloadable Graphic Novels

January 8, 2008 by Skellie 80 Comments

The web is home to a treasure-trove of free culture. Thousands of artists, writers, film-makers, poets and illustrators craft impressive creative works and share them freely online, in the interests of making their work accessible to as many people as possible. We thank them for that.

In this post, I want to highlight a booming segment of the online free culture movement: graphic novels.

Each link will take you to a page where you can download or view a high quality graphic novel or excerpt freely and with no strings attached.

There are plenty more to be found, but these seventeen are some of the best you’ll find.

1. NYC2123 is a graphic novel designed for the Sony Playstation Portable, though it can easily be viewed as an image slideshow on any PC. It’s a B&W cyberpunk story, set on a post-apocalyptic earth. There are currently 6 issues available for download.

2. Fell #1 by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith follows Detective Richard Fell, recently dumped in the roughest part of town and forced to try and stay afloat amongst the decay. Like many graphic novels, this one is heavy on the dystopia and will please anyone who likes their characters dark and morally ambiguous.

3. Crossing Midnight Vol. 1: Cut Here is a fantasy meets Asian horror story of two twins born under strange circumstances. It’s set in present day Nagasaki, Japan, and is bound to please fans of J-Horror.

4. Fables Vol. 1: Legends in Exile asks the question: what if classic fairy-tale characters were banished to present day New York?

5. Deadman Vol. 1: Deadman Walking follows the journey of a man struggling to solve the mystery behind his own death.

6. Salamander Dream is the whimsical story of a girl and her salamander spirit friend. The print version of the novel was named one of the best comics released in 2005 by Publisher’s Weekly.

7. Y: The Last Man Vol. 1: Unmanned is the story of Yorick Brown, the last man alive in a world inhabited only by women.

8. Meanwhile is an interactive comic from Jason Shiga — kinda like a much cooler version of those Choose Your Own Adventure books you read as a kid.

9. The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes, written by best-selling Sci-Fi author Neil Gaiman, chronicles the story of Morpheus, Lord of Dreams.

10. The War of the Worlds graphic novel adaptation is available freely online courtesy of Dark Horse Comics.

11. DMZ Vol. 1: On the Ground is the story of an embedded war journalist trapped in the war-zone that is now New York City.

12. Outside the Box chronicles the dangerous adventures of a bored dotcommer drawn into events much larger than himself.

13. Doom Patrol Vol. 1: Crawling From the Wreckage twists the group of superheroes stereotype on its head.

14. Indefensible Positions is a modern day story where magic and myths are real.

15. Hellblazer: Original Sins follows the early days of John Constantine, a British occultist with murky morals who is often forced to save the day.

16. Chaos PhD is a finely crafted and off-beat homage to the Silver Age of American comic books.

17. Swamp Thing Vol. 1: Saga of the Swamp Thing tells the tale of an unlikely hero: a swamp creature forced to fight against the destructive influence of a corrupt and decadent human-kind.

Getting Started with PHP: Part 4 – Integrating PHP and HTML

January 7, 2008 by Brandon 1 Comment

After the last part in this series on PHP program control structures, I got a number of requests for a post on integrating PHP and HTML. It’s actually quite simple to integrate PHP and HTML; for the most part, a PHP script can be treated as an HTML page, with bits of PHP inserted here and there. Anything in a PHP script that is not contained within <?php ?> tags is ignored by the PHP compiler and passed directly to the web browser as-is.

Let’s take a look at a very simple example of what a full PHP script might look like:

<html> <head>...</head> <body> Welcome, today is <?php echo date('l, F jS, Y'); ?>. </body> </html>

You can see that the majority of the code above is simply HTML, with just a bit of PHP that prints out today’s date using the built-in date function. Like I mentioned above, all of the plain HTML in the code above will be ignored by the PHP compiler and passed through to the web browser untouched.

Using HTML Inside of Program Control Structures

We can combine what we learned last time about program control structures to integrate PHP and HTML. Let’s see an example using an if/else block to display a holiday message on your website:

<?php if (date('n/j') == '12/25') : ?> <p>Merry Christmas!</p> <?php else : ?> <p>Welcome to my website.</p> <?php endif; ?>

The code above would display “Merry Christmas” on December 25th, and “Welcome to my website.” on every other day of the year. You may notice that the if/else structure is a little different that what I showed you last time. This is an alternative form that is a little easier to use when integrating PHP and HTML. Each of your conditional statements are followed by a colon, and you must end the if/else block with an endif (and don’t forget that semicolon!). You can do something similar with for and while loops, ending with endfor and endwhile, respectively. This method can be useful for displaying tabular data:

<table border="1"> <tr><td><strong>Row Number</strong></td></tr> <?php for ($i=1; $i<=10; $i++) : ?> <tr><td><?php echo $i; ?></td></tr> <?php endfor; ?> </table>

See how easy that is? Integrating PHP and HTML is really very simple. Just remember that at its core, a PHP script is just an HTML page with some PHP sprinkled through it. If you really wanted to, you could create a PHP script that only had HTML in it, with no <?php ?> tags, and it would work just fine.

For Next Time

Now that we’ve learned how easy it is to integrate PHP and HTML, the next most requested topic has been database access. Almost every “real” web application requires at least a small database, so learning how to query and use that data with PHP is an important topic to cover.

Fuzzy Logic to Help the Elderly

January 5, 2008 by Arun Leave a Comment

Technology improves life. While mostly it is the efficiency of our performance and our recreational domains that get a vital boost, technology also goes beyond these to aid in empowering those who are different from the mainstream.

Research at Leicester’s De Montfort University (DMU) and the University of Missouri is progressing to incorporate the advances in Fuzzy logic technology to make the lives of elder folks simpler. Fuzzy logic is that branch of mathematics that deals with computational representation of inexact values. Human beings often measure quantities in approximate degree ( such as hot, very hot etc), while computers have a hard time estimating values approximately.

The Fuzzy logic technique is being deployed in sensors that measure several characteristics about the habits of elderly people and provide vital feedback on their health. While it may seem too high-tech to be part of everyday life, the day is not very far when the benefits of miniaturization in technology become really affordable.

Sensors can be put to several uses but the importance of this latest development is the reduction in false positives and the use of sensors in an un-intrusive manner.

Will Wikia Open Search Kick Off Search Wars?

January 3, 2008 by Arun Leave a Comment

Jimmy Wales has announced that the open source Search Project, Wikia will finally open to public in coming January. The announcement is a crossfire as Wikia seeks to eat out of Google’s pie while the search giant itself seeks to grab Wikipedia’s share of attention with its Knol project.

The search front has hardly seen a big competition for several years. Google has been a clear leader followed by Yahoo, then Microsoft’s Live Search and then the plethora of other firms that take a nibble at the wide search market. Does Wikia have what it takes to dunk Google?

To answer that we need to first take it look at what Wikia has to offer. Many sites have gone on to call it human powered search and social search while it is actually an open search engine. While Digg and other social bookmarking sites let users only rate the articles, with the proprietary algorithm taking care of actual rankings, Wikia’s algorithm is going to be up and available for users to tweak. And while Mahalo, Cha-Cha and other such people powered sites let people actually sort content for relevance, Wikia is still as much about the algorithm as any other computational search engine.

Google has a lot riding on it in terms the investment made by marketers and publishers in Google’s AdSense service. In the search industry inertia of adoption is one big factor. Technology is not the only thing that matters. People don’t prefer to change habits.

Wikia’s major premise is transparency of search algorithm. While this might seem a valid argument (since we use so much information delivered via search, it makes sense to know the exact calculations that went into assessing the relevance of the links), open algorithms are an open invitation to manipulation. It is the very fact that the Google algorithm is not open to manipulation that sustains search based marketing.

Perhaps Google’s Knol project itself was played out to kill the major fuel to Wikia – Wikipedia. With the content already out there, Jimmy Wales’s focus may have been to capitalize on growing Wikia and Wikipedia in a web that moved out Google.

Wikia’s arsenal includes Grub, the company that makes distributes web crawlers, another essential component of the open search engine.

Rhetoric aside, Wikia is not expected to deliver immediate results. The search site will have to grow with its community and come to size. When it comes to search, there have been several great technologies but that alone seems insufficient to move users away from Google. While skeptics galore, it is going to be Wikia Vs Google (atleast round one) in 2008.