Aria

An IT Corporate Beep

achilles333 — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 05:06:38 +0000

In our company, there is a tradition called Kabala Sabbath. On this event, happens every Friday, all the project-mates get together and have fun. Once, one of my colleague is discussing about the upcoming cricket tournament and he mentioned that this time there is a budget problem. Immediately, our manager said , “Don’t discuss or mention about budget man. Tell me something that doesn’t involve budget!” . Then I told ironically to my colleague, instead of uttering budget word you utter beep sound that is similar to the one we all heard in TV reality shows. All Laughs!!

Generally managers don’t like hearing these words from their subordinates: budget, funds, monetary benefits etc. These words are like the blocked vulgar words in reality TV shows. In the IT reality world, following are the frequent IT corporate beep’s we hear

“It’s hard to finish with this limited ***** ” (budget substituted with beep)

“If we have enough ***** we would have done better” ( funds substituted with beep)

“How do you expect me to work like hell without any ******” (monetary benefits substituted with beep)

Go for E-book reader or Not?

achilles333 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:15:43 +0000

Since two months, I had been thinking whether to buy e-book reader or not?

The thought to have a e-book reader came to me when I found difficulty in reading books on a laptop for a longer time. I have amassed interesting/useful books to be read. I am unable to finish my gathered books because, I Daily spend more than 9 hr in front of computer as part of job and I hate to spend another few hr in front of my laptop to read these books. Hardcopy books are nice to read but they aren’t portable(their size and weight).

Then why go for e-book reader?

Improves readability
Portability (e-book reader weighs between 200 g to 600 g)
Most important, no strain on eyes
Comfort

After much thinking and bit research, I have taken decision now not to buy e-book reader this year, Reasons are:

e-book reader, it’s hardware and software technology is in preliminary stage only.
In 2010, new players are entering this market, so we see advances in this technologies..
Increase in competition in 2010, thus reduce in price (currently 6 inch e-book cost ranges from $270 to $400)

Image Search: A Picture is worth a thousand words

achilles333 — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:09:58 +0000

“A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words”. Yes, this is exactly what Image search is designed for. The current web search technology today offers is a text-centric process. When we think of something, we imagine everything visually. So when we want to search something over internet first our brains thinks in visually but due to text web search we split our imagination into words, phrases that web text search engine understands. Depending on our search phrase the wanted result will show up in first position or last position in search result.

Few times we fail to describe what we wanted in words or phrases. At this moment, we feel there is really a need of visual search. With a full capability image search engine user doesn’t have to split the imagination into words. Search can be done on image visual content. Yes, lots of things that aren’t possible now can be done with image/visual search engines.

Earlier the image search engines offers very limited search options. And the image results are driven by how websites describe the images in tags. The results produced are random and also the most relevant result image may not be in correct position in results. The randomized results are due to the fact that the images aren’t well described in tags.

Recently, there has been a lot of improvement made by image search engines. The following tabular list shows the options provided by the three big players in image search engine.

Search Options	Google	Yahoo	Microsoft Bing
Content Types	News, photo, clip art, line drawings	Not available	Photograph, Illustration
Image Size	Small, Medium, Large, Icon, Megapixels, Custom	Small, Medium, Large, Wallpaper, Custom	Small, Medium, Large, Wallpaper
Image Color	Black & White, 12 Standard colors	Either color or Black & white	Either Color or Black & white
File Types	JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG	Not Available	Not available
Usage Rights	Available	Available	Available
Search by Domain	Not Available	Available	Not Available
People	-do-	-do-	Just faces, Head & shoulders, Other

The above three search engines also offers related suggestions for the search phrase. Though Yahoo related suggestions is better when compared to Bing and Google.

Yet, there is lot to offer from these big players. This three image search engine doesn’t have capabilities to search directly with an image and many other. TinEye(www.tineye.com) offers a reverse image search i.e. given an image it will tell where this image is found in the web.

Future Offerings

Search directly with an image.
Categorize results on given image visual content.
Search using emotions(sad, happy images)
Search modified images for the given image.

Above are few offerings what I can think. And there are will be more capabilities will be added in a long run. Image search technology has a lot of potential in e-commerce industry also.

There is lot to discuss on the capabilities but this blog space isn’t sufficient

Hello world!

achilles333 — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 08:01:48 +0000

Hi All,

This is my first Blog. In programming world the introduction is always done by the Hello world snippet. So I am also using the same title for my first post. As of now I didn’t think of what to write or what to present. This first post is just to say that I’m also blogging