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

Data is the key to unlock Humanities Riches!

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.

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..

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

Creating a HTML 5 Game !!

More Here

Internet Explorer Beta 9 For Developers