Adnan Masood's Weblog! عدنان مسعود

"From where I sit, Ruby has the language thought leadership position and is the competitor I hope AndersH is losing the most sleep over nowadays"

Don Box - Gosling on Ruby

This month's DDJ issue shares the similar thought in its article "Ruby On Rails" subtitled  "It makes development fast, agile manageable"

I'm not sure if I'm eligible to do a comparative analysis b/w C# 3.0 and Ruby but with LINQ, DLINQ and XLINQ in prospect, I'd certainly admire the advent provided in this version of C#. Being able to do this is awesome and it's just scratching the surface.

public void Linq1() {
    int[] numbers = { 5, 4, 1, 3, 9, 8, 6, 7, 2, 0 };

    var lowNums =
        from n in numbers
        where n < 5
        select n;

    Console.WriteLine("Numbers < 5:");
    foreach (var x in lowNums) {
        Console.WriteLine(x);
    }
}

Result
Numbers < 5:
4
1
3
2
0Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” - LINQ CTP (May 2006)
The LINQ Project
LINQ on Channel9
C# 3.0 Language Specification

This Method will call any phone number in the US/Canada and read the TextToSay to that phone number using the voice of Diane (voiceid: 0). PhoneNumberToDial must be filled in (They can be in any format as long as there is 10 digits).

Just called my cell and heard the bot saying the message along with IP. Pretty cool eh?

By Cdyne

"I want a baby. I want a baby which can pass the Turing Test so they believe it's real!"

-Jeff Bergman contemplating to get a baby shower for himself

Some interesting conferences are going on, following are the CFP's.

IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS Special Issue on Argumentation Technology
Submission deadline: 2 Mar. 2007

A PDF version of this the call is available here:

The theory of argumentation is a rich, interdisciplinary area of research lying across philosophy, communication studies, linguistics, and psychology. Over the last few years, formal models of argumentation have been gaining increasing importance in artificial intelligence, and have found a wide range of applications ranging from specifying semantics for logic programs, to natural language text generation, to supporting legal reasoning, to facilitating multiagent dialogue and negotiation.

Topics including, but not limited to,

• Applications of argumentation in complex-systems engineering and design
• Argument-based decision support systems
• Argument extraction from real data
• Argumentation in computer-supported collaborative work
• Argumentation in natural language processing
• E-democracy and e-government applications
• Educational applications of argumentation
• Intelligent tools for argument construction and analysis
• Legal applications
• Medical applications
• Practical argument-based multiagent systems
• Semantic Web applications

 Important Dates

Submissions due for review: 2 Mar. 2007
Notification of acceptance: 27 Apr. 2007
Final version submitted: 22 June 2007
Issue publication: Sept./Oct. 2007

PADM'06 - IEEE International Workshop on Privacy Aspects of Data Mining
December 18, 2006

Privacy is essential for the provision of electronic and knowledge-based services in modern e-business, e-commerce, e-government, and e-health environments. Nowadays, service providers can easily track an individual’s actions, behaviors, and habits.  Given large data collections of person-specific information, providers can data mine to learn patterns, models, and trends that can be used to provide personalized services…. (read more)

Important dates
===============
o July 30, 2006: Submission deadline
o September 8, 2006: Author notification
o September 29, 2006: Submission of Camera-ready papers
o December 18, 2006: Workshop

Topics
================
The workshop will seek submissions that cover aspects of privacy protection solutions and threats as they pertain to various data mining endeavors. The following comprises a sample, but not complete, listing of topics:

• Biomedical and healthcare data mining research privacy
• Cryptographic tools for privacy preserving data mining
• Inference and disclosure control for data mining
• Learning algorithms for randomized/perturbed data
• Legal and regulatory frameworks for data mining and privacy
• Privacy and anonymity in e-commerce and user profiling
• Privacy aspects of business processes and enterprise management
• Privacy aspects of geographic, spatial, and temporal data
• Privacy aspects of ubiquitous computing systems
• Privacy enhancement technologies in web environments
• Privacy policy infrastructure, enforcement, and analysis
• Privacy preserving link and social network analysis
• Privacy preserving applications for homeland security
• Privacy preserving data integration
• Privacy protection in fraud and identify theft prevention
• Privacy threats due to data mining
• Query systems and access control
• Trust management for data mining

Workshop On Uncertainty And Fuzziness In Case-Based Reasoning
Taking Place On Sep 5, 2006, As Part Of ECCBR 2006 - 8TH EUROPEAN
CONFERENCE ON CASE-BASED REASONING, Turkey

The paper submission deadline of our workshop has been extended to
JUNE 11. For detailed information, please visit the workshop website at http://wwwiti.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/iti_dke/events/WS_UFCBR.html

When started using Antlr this semester, I had to go through a learning curve to use C# as Antlr's generated language.

Following is a step by step guide I came up with for anyone interested in using Antlr with C#/Visual Studio.NET.

Happy Antlr'ing.


Antlr_C_Sharp_code_generation_using_Visual_Studio.NET.pdf (102.82 KB)

It's like an outlook with an MBA.
-From Linkedin website about LinkedIn Toolbar

So, LinkedIn is like myspace for Dilbert crowd, huh?
-Jeremy Myers

Yes, the Ping method in this API will be a two way Ping; Ping Request and then Ping Commit.
-David Gullett

I hit over 500m with my driver today, threw ball on the other side of the fence. Oh wait, ball might have actually come to our parking lot, did you see it?
-Jeff Bergman bragging his golf skills

Well, if Adnan is not going, I'll be the only one who doesn't know how to play golf!
-Joon-Shim Chua

There is one issues [sic] remaining.
-Antony Chhan

Poison cupcakes – mmmm :)
-Joanne Siegel

Beside the slick look and tabbed browsing, two of the best features I like about IE 7 is its RSS feeds handling and website thumbnails.

The clean and well organized RSS aggregator is much better from usability prospect than anything I've tried before. Import your OPML's and try it out for yourself.

The website thumbnail view tells you all about what websites are open, a live version of print preview.

and yes, its ironic to have www.ie7.com pointing to FF and Clipboard exploit (Retrieve Clipboard Text To A Web Page With Javascript) still there.

References

• IEBlog
• Internet Explorer 7: Home
• Intelligent browsing with Internet Explorer 7
• Add-Ons for Internet Explorer
• Internet Explorer Administration Kit 7 Beta 2
• Readiness Toolkit for Developers, Testers & ITPros
• HTTPS Security Improvements in Internet Explorer 7
• Finding Security Compatibility Issues in Internet Explorer 7

Thanks to my director, Andrea Kim, I've been able to upgrade from my old rickety Dell Latitude D800 to flashy mobile Latitude D610. With a 2Ghz/1.32 Bus, 2G Ram/80G HDD, it's a decent developer machine. The only down side was abandoning the wide screen so I made up by putting a 17 inch LCD next to it. With Intel Centrino processor, an approx 4 hour battery life was a big plus. One of the possible choices was D810 but its much more heavier and thicker in size than even D800, and hence disregarded.

So far, I'm loving it!

PCMAG Review Dell Latitude D610
Dell Latitude D800 review by PC Magazine
Dell Latitude D810 review by PC Magazine

I did get a chance to read The Da Vinci Code, in early 2004, long before the hype built up. Since I've also read Dan Brown's lesser known books Angels & Demons, Digital Fortress and Deception Point and knowing his writing style in prospect, I don't think movie did much of justice. It might have had some interesting artifact displays and flashbacks but yet the movie failed to deliver what made Da Vinci Code a definite page turner. I still hold that Angels and Demons is a much more interesting and well woven than Da Vinci Code but again, whatever invokes the most controversy gets to be the best seller.

During my European backpacking tour in 2003 (France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium), I took some pictures around the Louvre Museum which is shown and much discussed in the book and the movie. Especially the symmetrical pyramids. Not knowing one day they will be part of a best selling book and movie.





 


Now also, compare the cover of ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook with the picture below. Do you notice some similarity?

Forbes Magazine in its January 2006 issue ran its cover story titled “A Super Computer for your living room”. This discusses the IBM cell processor powered by eight co-processors with their own memory being used in multimedia.  This helps providing realistic imaging by realtime rendering as it states

“Cell crunches through millions of lines of topographical and photographic data per second to paint topographically accurate, photo-quality pictures at a movie quality 30 frames per second. On a similar program a pentum take two minutes to sketch a single frame.” –Forbes, Jan 2006.

Beside the chip’s power whenever it comes to large scale parallel processing, Linux is usually the first name which comes to mind. Even though Microsoft is trying to catch up, it’s seems already a bit late in the OS/hardware game. However, while assisting a friend’s Masters thesis for “Grid computing with XML web services”, I came across several decent Microsoft application frameworks and services augmenting the grid computing. Grid computing is a form of distributed computing infrastructure “that provides the ability to perform higher throughput computing by taking advantage of many networked computers to model a virtual computer architecture that is able to distribute process execution across a parallel infrastructure.” (wikipedia). Microsoft’s early initiatives on Grid are explained in this Jim Gray’s talk and the future eScience workshops have augmented the blitz. This list of services and frameworks comprises of TerraService.net which is a poster child for both eGovernment and for .NET, SkyServer.sdss.org or SkyQuery.net, windows clustered version, Web services resource framework (WSRF.NET Webcast: Grid Computing Using .NET), and last but not least, Alchemi.

Alchemi is defined as “an open source software framework that allows you to painlessly aggregate the computing power of networked machines into a virtual supercomputer (computational grid) and to develop applications to run on the grid.”

Distributed Fractal Generator is an interesting example and with a little setup, programming for a grid can be as intuitive and simple as following sample taken from Alchemi’s user guide.

  class MultiplierApplication
    {
        static GApplication ga;
        [STAThread]

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("[enter] to start grid application ...");
            Console.ReadLine();
            // create grid application
            ga = new GApplication("localhost", 9099);
            // add GridThread module (this executable) as a dependency
            ga.Manifest.Add(new ModuleDependency(typeof(MultiplierThread).Module));
            // create and add 10 threads to the application
            for (int i=0; i<10; i++)
            {
                // create thread
                MultiplierThread thread = new MultiplierThread(i, i+1);
                // set the thread finish callback method
                thread.FinishCallback = new GThreadFinish(ThreadFinished);
                // add thread to application
                ga.Threads.Add(thread);
            }
            // set the application finish callback method
            ga.FinishCallback = new GApplicationFinish(ApplicationFinished);
            // start application
            ga.Start();
            Console.ReadLine();
      }

References & Further Reading

• TOP500 Supercomputer Sites
• Do it yourself Super Computer - Scientific American
• Supercomputer version of Windows nears release | CNET News.com
• Grid Computing and a .NET-based Alchemi Framework, High Performance Computing: Paradigm and Infrastructure, Laurence Yang and Minyi Guo (editors),ISBN: 0-471-65471-X, Wiley Press, New Jersey, USA, June 2005.
• What’s next in High Performance Computing – Communications of the ACM
• Using SQL Server For Large Databases and Microsoft Grid Computing – Microsoft Research
• How Web Services are Advancing Data-Intensive Grid – Microsoft Research
• The Microsoft Perspective on Where High Performance Computing is - – Microsoft Research
• WSRF.NET: Grid Computing on .NET supporting the Web Services Resource Framework
• Petabyte Scale Data Mining: Dream or Reality?  Alexander S. Szalay; Jim Gray; Jan vandenBerg, SIPE Astronomy Telescopes and Instruments, 22-28 August 2002, Waikoloa, Hawaii,
• SciData'04 Workshop Resources
• NewsForge | Linux 'Supercomputer on a CD'
• Wired News: Linux Supercomputer Howls
• Linux Rules Supercomputers - Forbes.com
• Building a Linux supercomputer using SSH and PVM
• Microsoft and Grid Computing
• A do-it-yourself framework for grid computing
• Grid Computing Info Centre (GRID Infoware)
• What is Grid? How is it different from Clusters/P2P?
• IEEE Task Force on Cluster Computing
• Alchemi - Plug & Play Grid Computing
• GridFTP
• IEEE Distributed Systems Online
• Access Grid
• Condor Project Homepage
• SETI@home
• Artificial Intelligence techniques for distributed workflow management
• Webcast: Grid Computing Using .NET
• Webcast: Using .NET and Web Services to build an e-Science Application: Looking for White Dwarfs
• Jim Gray Microsoft Research summary home page
• Dmitri Ilkaev, Stephen Pearson, Analysis of grid computing as it applies to high volume document processing and OCR, Technical Report, Tier Technologies, USA, 2005.
• F# on virtual super computer, Understanding Grid Computing- .NET Developers Journal