Microsoft Bing: Much better than expected | Webware – CNET

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Scientific American 10: Guiding Science for Humanity: Scientific American

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Hubble’s final servicing mission – The Big Picture – Boston.com

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Google revealed one of their server design. Google posses one of the most efficient, reliable and secure data centers and has revealed it’s server design to help increasing problems of huge Data Centers. For details please read the detailed article at here.

I came across this excellent post on ReadWriteWeb about 10 traits of a Rockstar Software Engineer and I could not agree more. In 10 traits every thing about a software engineer is sufficed. It is a true analysis of what a software engineer must equip of. The traits are,

1. Loves To Code
2. Gets Things Done
3. Continuously Refactors Code
4. Uses Design Patterns
5. Writes Tests
6. Leverages Existing Code
7. Focuses on Usability
8. Writes Maintainable Code
9. Can Code in Any Language
10. Knows Basic Computer Science

Read them, analyze them and if you are a software engineer find how many you have from these. For more details read the complete post with description of each trait at here.

In an historic development the deposed Chief Justice of Pakistan, Mr. Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhary and other senior deposed judges have been restored by Prime Minister of Pakistan Syed Yousuf Raza Gillani in a nation wide TV telecast on morning of March 16th, 2009 a historic day and beginning.

It took two years of extreme, painful and long struggle of the great and brave Lawyers of Pakistan and their leaders and I salute to their struggle. Lawyers and their leaders Mr. Aitezaz Ahsan, Mr. Ali Ahmad Kud, Mr. Munir A. Malik, Mr. Tariq, Mr. Athar Shams and all other rocks, I would say that this is the only historic moment and movement of our times in Pakistan that has glorified our history to real extent. In end it was Political Parties like PML-N (Sharif brothers and their workers and other leaders), Pakistan Tehreek Insaaf (Imran Khan), Jamat-e-Islami(Qazi Hussain Ahmed, Liaqat Baloch) and some other small parties, who really brought masses on roads especially. Hats off to them (Y). Also a salute to brave officers who did their duty and some courageous who even didn’t obey orders and went with masses.

The Long march’s last day on which Lahoris have to show their vigor and vibrancy and had to move decisively, it’s again proved that Zinda Dilan Lahore can do any thing. I have at-least seen nothing like this. The bravery of masses and leaders and the strength of crowd was amazing, all the time it sounded in my mind that this is historic, this is historic and it should win! I once read in a history book that Lahore decides the decisive fate of movements, yesterday we saw this with our eyes that this is so true. Hundreds and thousands came on roads for a cause and in end we can say that WE DID IT!!

I know some would have many theories, reservation and disappointments over it. Like CJ wont touch NRO or missing people or Musharraf and there are other theories that some superior powers and army is there, and political parties have their own benefits associated but the bottom line is People, Civil Society, Masses, Lawyers and Political Parties stood for a cause and achieved it well, so we all proved that Pakistan and Pakistani Rocks!! and time is changing, though a lot more needs to be done and a long long way to go but still now we have a beginning.

Perhaps I will write detailed views and analysis later and I wished I could also be part of this, but as a Pakistani still I feel very happy and proud. Long live Pakistan.

For more details read here and here.

TED continues to prove to be the best meeting place for innovators and geniuses. Here is another brilliant video on Sixth Sense. Well though naming it sixth sense sounds a bit odd but video is superb!

FamousPeopleOnePhoto

The above photo shows around 100 odd famous people of history in one photo. It’s really an awesome picture and worthy to view.

Check here to view a 1474 MegaPixel picture created by David Bergman. Taken in USA at Innaugural Address of President Barrack Hussain Obama. It is a combination of 220 images which made up a file of 1474 MP or 1.5 GP image.

Today I am going to write about three wonderful talks on TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design).

Number 1: Bill Gates unplugged at here on solving biggest problems of world and these are not technical btw .

Number 2: Barry Schwartz’ passionate plea for practical wisdom, a standing ovation talk best in 2009.

Number 3: Technological wonderous in nature. Digital blocks with computational ability. MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables — cookie-sized, computerized tiles at here.

The last one is specially awesome to watch.

Dr. Stephen R. Covey the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People will be live in Pakistan via video satellite link. For more information visit Franklincovey Pakistan.

Regards,

It’s heartbreaking that how educated, moderated and secular world is remaining sinfully silent at what Israel is doing in Gaza. Do we need useless United Nations any more? Is there any doubt that America even all of other stronger countries are a big Hypocrat? If we keep all the religious and sentimental views aside, does logic allow us to do this? Comon, world we should try something to stop this otherwise this will happen to any one. Please come forward and stop this mass scale assassination of poor and innocents.

Just to have a look at the brutality look at: Gaza News Photos – very disturbing photos.

Regards,

A nice post on All Things Pakistan at here and the article can be read at here.

I came across measuring complexity of a piece of code, which is really tricky one. Following is the code,

void function( int n)
{
while(n > 1)
n = sqrt (n); // assume sqrt returns square root of any number and ignore the complexity of square root
}

If any one wants to try this do try and post your answers.

Wandering through the walls of my office I came across this interesting small puzzle, it is stated as:

Question: If it were two hours later it would be half as long until midnight as it would be if it were an hour later What time is it now?

Please post your answers in the comments section..

Recently one of my senior colleague was faced with a problem of launching executables from Web Services hosted in IIS. Following is the problem he was faced with (as is email),

“I am working on a dotNet web service that needs to launch an executable (.exe). I have used System.Diagnostics.Process to launch the process. When I run through VS2005 test environment, web service triggers the executable and its UI is displayed (e.g., launching notepad). But when I deploy the web service under IIS, the web service does launch the process but UI does not appear.

Can someone shed some light on what is happening and suggest a solution to this”

After searching on the internet I found the following solution and it worked fine.

According to Microsoft following are the reasons for this

1.    By default, ASP.NET runs its worker process (Aspnet_wp.exe) with a weak account (the local machine account, which is named ASPNET) which don’t have permission to interact with desktop.
2.    By default, IIS Admin Service won’t allow its application to interact with desktop.

These can be resolved by:

1.    Allowing worker process(ASP.NET) to run in SYSTEM account.
This can be done by editing the machine.config file which is located at (C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG. Open the machine.config and find the ProcessModel tag and add the following attributes to it,

userName=”SYSTEM” password=”AutoGenerate”

2.    Enable IIS Admin Service to interact with desktop. To configure this, follow this steps.

a)    Open Control Panel and follow these steps:
For Windows NT: click Services.

For Windows 2000, Windows XP, and .NET Server: click Administrative Tools, and then click Services.
b)    Double-click IIS Admin Service.

c)     On the Log On tab, select the Allow Service to Interact with Desktop check box.

d)    Stop and restart the IIS Admin Service.

3.    Sometimes ASP.NET account does not have enough privileges to access certain WMI namespaces. So to resolve this do the following

a)    Open the Computer Management Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in.
b)    Expand Services and Applications, and then select WMI Control.
c)    Right-click WMI Control, and then click Properties.
d)    In the WMI Control Properties dialog box, click the Security tab.
e)    Expand Root, select CIMV2, and then click Security.
f)    In the Security dialog box, click Advanced.
g)    In the Access Control Settings dialog box, click Add. Select localMachineName\ASPNET, and then click OK.
h)    In the Permission Entry dialog box, make sure that Apply Onto is set to This namespace and subnamespaces.
i)    Make sure that the Allow ‘Enable Account’ and Allow ‘Remote Enable’ check boxes are selected.
j)    Click OK in each dialog box until you return to the WMI Control Properties dialog box.
k)    Repeat steps 5 through 10 for other WMI namespaces that your application will access.
l)    Restart IIS. To do this, run IISRESET from the command line.

Information obtained from:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;317012
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555134

Regards,

This post will be about enabling the folder options, taskmanger and registry editor after they are disabled/not visible. These kind of things are usually consequence of viruses specially “Brontok” trojan which can be deleted by anti-virus. I am writing the solutions, but chances are if these things are caused by virus
really then after restart, these options(folder options, task manager) will again be disabled so use a good anti virus like NOD32 (preferable) or AVG and remove the virus. And then enable
the options as I am telling.

For restoring the folder options do the following.

1. Write regedit at run and open the registery editor.
2. Now locate the following key,

HKEY_CURRENT_ USER\Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentV ersion\Policies\ Explorer

or

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentV ersion\Policies\ Explorer

And in right-side pane, check whether a DWORD value named NoFolderOptions exists or not? If it exists then either change its value to 0 or delete it.

I hope this resolves your problem of Folder Options in tools menus.
Btw we can access it from Control Panel also.

-If registery editor is also disabled or locked do the following.

1. Write gpedit.msc at run and open the groups policy editor.
2. In the left side tree view locate the User Configuration node and expand it. Now locate the Administrative Templates and expand it also. Now locate System. Now don’t expand it and clicking on it look for the
options in the right view. Locate the item “Prevent access to registry editing tools”. Edit it’s properties and change it to disabled.

If task manager is disabled do the following.

1. Write gpedit.msc at run and open the groups policy editor.
2. In the left side tree view locate the User Configuration node and
expand it. Now locate the Administrative Templates and expand it also.
Now locate System and find Ctrl+Alt+Del Options in it. Left click it once and look for the options in the right side list view. Double Click the option Remove Task Manager and change it’s current setting to Disabled. If it’s already disabled you still have to change the setting to any other value and than change it to Disabled just to refresh it. Be sure to refresh the windows and task manager will be enabled.

I hope this much helps. But I will seriously recommend to scan and clean the system completely with some anti-virus.

Cognition Technologies a Semantic Web company (wow Aleem Khan just think a ‘Semantic Web’ company – for those of you who don’t know Semantic Web was our final year project) is announcing the largest Semantic Map of English language. In simple words, they will be “enabling” search engines to understand what we have typed in the search box and retrieve contextually correct results.

The company is also going to fulfill one of my ambitions (to build a Semantic Web – Web 3.0 based search engine). So this is going to be advent of Web 3.0 hopefully.

References: ReadWriteWb.com on Cognition Technologies

ZDnet on the Topic

CNET News on the same

To view Semantic Web already in action check out: Cognitive Wikipedia

With reference to my previous post, my friend Adil Akhter Mir sent this informational email on Pakistani Contribution in the world’s greatest physics experiment – The Large Hadron Collider.

Here is the e-mail as is..

Large Hadron Collider is a Physicist’s dream come true. Being world’s biggest science apparatus ever built this is a show of science on how far have we come to in our mental and analytical evolution. Today with the LHC we are at brink of understanding the existence of ours from the very basic ground up.

This time we are not even looking at the DNA, neither we are exploring the fossils, we have even gone beyond all that. We are today finding how the Big Bang happened. And there especially to know about that first particle (infamously called, the God Particle) known as Higgs boson.

This LHC spans over an area of 27 KM underground setup spanning over the Swiss-Franco border, with support from thousands of Physicists, scientists and laboratories from over eighty-five countries. It is housed in the same tunnels which were dug in 1989 for Large Electron-Positron Collider, with of course some new specialized construction. With an estimated cost between €3.2–6.4 billion, this machine successfully fired itself up on 10th Septemeber 2008, whereas the full high intensity firing will be done by 21st October. Yet already it has made sensational news world wide.

With reports of people filing a petition against it, to an Indian 16 year old girl who committed suicide as she thought once LHC is fired it will bring end of the world (refer to as Doomsday), to continuous circulating emails and forum postings calling relating it with playing God, to finally sending death threats to some of the leading involved scientists. World has gone paranoid it seems to the frenzy the LHC’s elaborate marketing has caused. Doomsday prophets have suddenly popped out everywhere. Just only tragedy would be that majority of them don’t even know what are they talking about!

In order to help explain the whole process to the common people, perhaps even those who have gone paranoid, a scientist working at the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) has even released her own rap! Honestly, if you follow it carefully it explains it way better than most of the texts you will find about it online.

Pakistans Contributon:

Coming back from a brief introduction to the LHC, lets talk about the contribution of Pakistan it. Its a matter of pride for me at least at the moment as a Pakistani is that LHC has been assisted in this by Pakistani wonderful scientists too. Pakistan has a long history of participating with CERN and has a long tradition of wonderful physicists who are working around the world.

A prime example would be Dr Abdul Salam himself who sadly was forgotten by Pakistan just because of his religious preferences. Dr Salam was the first man to be accredited with all the collaboration with CERN which continues till todate when he convinced CERN to give Pakistan stacks of nuclear emulsion exposed for further study of pions, kaons and antiprotons in 1960s.

In 1997 Ishfaq Ahmad (special adviser to the prime minister of Pakistan and former chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission) was able to sign a contract between PAEC and CERN after elaborate discussions an in-kind contribution worth one million Swiss francs for the construction of eight magnet supports for the CMS detector.

In 2000, CERN signed another agreement which doubled the Pakistani contribution from one to two million Swiss francs. And with this new agreement Pakistan started construction of the resistive plate chambers required for the CMS muon system. While more recently, a protocol has been signed enhancing Pakistan ’s total contribution to the LHC programme to $10 million.

Pakistan with all these efforts is already hoping to become an observer state at CERN.

All in all, Pakistan has contributed the LHC in numerous ways including some of the following in particular:

1. Detector construction

2. Detector simulation

3. Physics analysis

4. Grid computing

5. Different mathematical software developments

6. Manufacturing of mechanical equipment

7. Alignment of the CMS tracker using lasers

8. Testing of electronic equipment

9. Barrel Yoke: 35 Tonn each feet made in Pakistan

10. Assembling of CF Fins for the Silicon Trekker’s TOB

11. Out of the total 300 chambers of CMS 245 were made in Islamabad , out of which 226 are already installed at CERN.

I wonder how many Pakistani news channels picked this positive news coming from Pakistan ? Did you know at least? Why not tell others why you feel proud as a Pakistani on it?

References:

• Wikipedia: Large Hadron Collider
• ZDNet Government: LHC scientists get death threats
• Science & Technology Facilities Council: Countries Collaborating in the LHC Project
• Cern Courier: CERN and Pakistan: a personal perspective
• CERN Bulletin 31/98; 27 July 1998 Route Salam
• GulAftab Blog: Pakistan Contribution in CERN
• NCP: Grid Technology Workshop (October 2003)
• The CMS experiment at LHC Guido Tonelli University of Pisa/INFN/CERN – Pakistan’s contribution [pdf file]
• CERN Courier  Aug 31, 1999 Pakistani physics
• The resistive plate chamber system for the CMS experiment at LHC
• Reuters: Doomsday fears come with territory

Wow, it sounds amazing. The Large Hadron Collider has started working, and there is no black hole yet , and world is still intact and we are alive. Read the details here and watch the video on working here.

This is no ordinary machine or experiment. It’s world biggest, and most costly experiment ever, costing around £ 5 billion. This experiment will help in creating almost the same conditions as that were just after the Big Bang.

This historic experiment can help in understanding of particles that made the matter. This experiment can help in understanding the universe, the darkness and why everything looks like it is. So eventually it can help in understanding the theory of everything or the commonly called string theory. This experiment will help in demystifying most of the mysteries about creation of universe and earth.

This experiment is also expected to find Higgs Boson. The only sub-atomic standard model (god’s particle) which is not yet observed , which gives any matter it’s mass. So the great Professor Peter Higgs is also expected to win a Nobel Prize as a result. But legendary Professor Stephan Hawkings doesn’t think so and he has put up his famous bet also (they both has a rivalry over the matter:)). Stephan, though claims that if any small black holes are created out of the experiment then he himself may win the Nobel Prize as his theories will be validated then.

But whatever we get out of experiment, it’s sure it will increase our understanding of universe and that’s for sure.