Wednesday 24 November 2010

WPF Open Type Fonts!

I was always overly excited for the Open Type Font support that WPF had and was actually looking forward
for rendering the following in WFP.
ಕನ್ನಡ
हिंदी बे
గుల్తే ను
WPF 4.0, 3.5 adds Open Type Font Rendering support for a pletora of Indic Scripts. Check this out
WPF 3.0 had limited support.
Good work Microsoft!

A good read on WPF Globalization and Localization

WPF provides globalized design features, including automatic layout, satellite assemblies, and localized attributes and commenting.  Check this example for more

Friday 19 November 2010

Google, When can i get Indic Font Support on my HTC Desire ?

HTC_Desire_multiview_h1

It is such a shame that at the time of writing this, Google has not officially enabled Indic Font Support on Android, Guess??, Limited multilingual support from Android. What a shame!!!. I tried a hack to get around this by installing a kannada TTF font. You can expect the obvious, glyphs are not rendered correctly.

I was of the opinion that the TTF fonts were missing, NO, the fault is with the rendering mechanism on android ?, Wondering could it be because some of the Indic Fonts also require custom rendering support from the OS. I STILL Can’t believe Google missed Indic Font Support. Google needs to add Indic font support soon, It’s going to loose out big time in Indian markets!., C’mon, There is a dev lab in Bangalore, India!!!

Wake up Google!!

Issues

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4153

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5925

Energy Prices–How are they calculated ?

 

Ever wondered how the energy prices are calculated in the United Kingdom, Read this.

Orb TV

This is really impressive stuff. Install Orb TV on your computer and share your media with a lot of devices, Stream it live!. There is also a free app for the iPhone/iPod Touch, So You can enjoy watching ‘your’ media on the TV whilst controlling the entire thing from your iPhone.

More, Here

Thursday 18 November 2010

Data is the key to unlock Humanities Riches!

illusion
This statement could be so taken for granted !
Well,
I was reading NY Times today and couldn’t stop thinking about the possibility of making sense of this all.
What could be a bigger scientific experiment than exploring the humanities ?
‘Members of a new generation of digitally savvy humanists argue it is time to stop looking for inspiration in the next political or philosophical “ism” and start exploring how technology is changing our understanding of the liberal arts. This latest frontier is about method, they say, using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized materials that previous humanities scholars did not have.’ -  More Here
The two key words i was after were ‘Quantification’ and ‘Interpretation’. Quantification will make much sense for a computational scientist (like me) However, it can be argued that proper Interpretation also plays a vital role., for which an enormous computing infrastructure mainly centred around data crunching will be absolutely invaluable!
It’s worthy to note that ‘The humanities and social sciences are the emerging domains for using high-performance computing’.
Ancient to modern languages, Logic (the next thing which comes to my mind) , Literature, Law , History, Philosophy, Religion, Visual and Performing Arts, Music, Anthropology, Linguistics, Cultural Studies. Now, that’s an ennnnnnnnnormoussss list!. I don’t think an entire lifetime is enough to quantify and interpret that sort of an experiment!!, But with advances in distributed computing, This is merely a truth proposition.
799px-SwansCygnus_olordeepavalidostoevskyDurgasthamaanagodfatherhampi1imagesSHANKARACHARYA0shringeri1sringeri_vidyashakaraveena
Questions which could be answered.

  • Did the ‘Fountainhead of Indian ‘Logic’ Intellect come from its cultural roots’ ?
  • Did Pythagoras come to India to learn ‘Logic’ ?
  • How were the ragas born ?, Are the ragas mathematically a complex hash function of frequencies ?, How did such complex mathematical function get rooted into a  seemingly divinity biased Carnatic music ?
  • How did western musical instruments evolve in India ? Violin , Saxaphone ?
  • Why is divinity the epicentre of music, atleast carnatic music ?. Can Athethists play carnatic music with same passion  ?
  • What Influenced the development of Lipis ? Was the spoken language invented first before Lipis or was it the other way round ?
  • Do the Sanskrit proverbs actually interpret as Formal ‘Logic’ ?
  • Was Shakaracharya an Atheist before he proposed ‘Aham Bramhaasmi’ ?
  • Is Ayn Rand’s ‘Objectivism’ practised more by Indians than Americans ?
  • Do Europeans exhibit ‘Existentialism’ traits than people from any other continent ?
  • I want to stop now..Sky is the limit!! Endless possibilities..

Sunday 14 November 2010

Requirements Engineering with TFS

 

Some of the best practises from codeplex community can be found here.

My Previous post on RE

Code Branching and Merging with TFS 2010

Distributed development efforts involves working cohesively with geographically distributed teams and working by minimizing the impact of introducing ‘bugs’ or worse breaking the existing code base when new pieces of functionality is checked in.

Now, you all know that with TFS you can

1] Shelve the pending changes

2] Have a code reviewer policy set up on your TFS to avoid the above situation etc.

3] Take out the existing ‘Greatest and Latest’ code to a separate ‘Branch’ and write your code inside this branch, satisfy the requirements with Unit Tests and merge your changes from the separate branch into your main branch (aka production code).

The Codeplex community has put together a branching guide to make this simple and straightforward. I recommend it as a must read for developers.

Links

Visual Studio Team Branching Guide 2010

Tuesday 9 November 2010

VNC For Android!

logo

 

 

This is one of THE most useful applications for remotely controlling your computer / remote system administration /  and lot of fun remote VNC sessions for the Home User!!!. You can realize the potential straight away, YES!! controlling a remote computer from your android phone!!

Now, I take absolutely no responsibility for this post but i would like to share a very quick way of configuring a remote computer to allow incoming VNC connections on a port and then use the ‘VNC for Android’ application to connect to it. (from anywhere in the world Winking smile)

The indented audience are home users / geeks and enthusiasts.

1] Download Ultra VNC Server from here and Install it.

2] Download the ‘VNC For Android’  Application to your android phone. (Don’t start it just yet)

3] Configure you VNC Server. Set Passwords , Ports and User Impersonation. My advise is to use ‘A’ random port from the range and not just use 5900. (Although 5900 works completely fine, It’s anybody's guess when it’s comes to how secure your open ports are to the outside world ), because soon you will discover that you might have to open the port in your router to allow the communication via VNC.

vnc viewer

4] Login to your Router’s administration page and forward the port no (which you just configured in step 3) to the machine which has the VNC Server application running on it.

5] Find your IP (WAN) from here, or your router’s administration page. (still better if you know it by heart). Note it down.

6] This is the best part..Open the VNC Viewer for Android application now on your android phone, and follow these steps

config

(Image Courtesy –x)

Add a ‘Nickname’  - This is only to identify your connection.

Add the password of your VNC Server (Step 3)

Add the IP address of your VNC Server (Step 5)

config2

(Image Courtesy –x)

Choose a Color Format ( If you are on WIFI, Choose the 24-bit Color, If you are on 3G Select a lower color depth for performance )

This should be enough to get you started. Press the ‘Connect’ button, Wait for handshake  (default of 10 seconds) and authentication from your VNC Server and Voila, You’re done!!

Fore more, you can dig here.

Enjoy Remoting from you phone !, and if this helped you configure your device, post a comment below! Smile

Windows Live Writer 2011

Yes, I am using the new windows live writer 2011. I don’t particularly like the year part in this software, don’t know why..2011 sounds like a strange figure to me, Strange for Microsoft software!. Visual Studio 2010, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010…………………you know what i mean ??, Anyhow, I like this version of the live writer and it has a bunch of improvements around UI and bits of bobs of functionality. Until later version, I’ll definitely be using Live Writer!

Friday 5 November 2010

Enter the Cloud!

I’m migrating some of my test web applications a.k.a simple concept web apps to the windows cloud, a.k.a ‘The Windows Azure Platform’. I'm all excited to share my experiences with Windows Azure, SQL Azure and App Fabric.

I encourage you to download the Training Kit from Microsoft and give it a go.

The tools you might need to get started are

Either

1] Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio

or  Install Visual Web Developer 2010 Express.

or if you have another development language (Java,PHP,Ruby), try

2] This

JS Trick

Ever wondered how to close that damn browser window without getting a warning from the browser ?.

Well, I've gone through that many a times before when trying to close a window(subject)  from either the main window or any other window which did not create the subject.

and…and i remember the solution, which i had devised for IE. (not sure about other browsers and I'll leave that for you ).

You have to remember, the window.open method creates a reference to the window.opener ??    (Hint, Hint! )

function CloseWindow(){

//removes the previous window.opener reference and

//tricks the browser not to display the annoying warning message.

window.opener = ‘fake’;

window.close();

}

Winking smile