A Software Engineer's Diary...

  Are you an  IT worker ? If not, then better understand what that techie, geeky friend of yours toil so hard for - ensuring the bank works 24x7, your systems are always on, your mobile network never goes down et al.  It might sound cool, but the  IT jobs  call for professionals to be always available, always accurate and always work at peak capacities to keep everything clicking.  Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson released "The Most Always-On IT Jobs," a report on the most  demanding IT jobs . The report, based on a survey of nearly 800 IT professionals in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the US that sought to determine the degree to which they have to be always available, always working at peak capacity and always accurate.  It is expected that technology, like smart phones and websites, will be always-on and available, 24/7, in this hyper-speed, hyper-connected world. But what about the people who support that technology? Do they hav...

Google has done the unthinkable -- the creation of an 'artificial brain' from 16,000computer processors, with more than a billion connections. The team led by Google's Jeff Dean then fed it random images culled from 10 million YouTube videos - and let it 'learn' by itself. Surprisingly, the machine focused in on cats. "We never told it during the training 'this is a cat'," said Dean. "It basically invented the concept of a cat." "Contrary to what appears to be a widely-held intuition, our experimental results reveal that it is possible to train a face detector without having to label images as containing a face or not," says the team. "We also find that the same network is sensitive to other high-level concepts such as cat faces and human bodies." "Starting with these learned features, we trained our network to obtain 15.8 per cent accuracy in recognising 20,000 object categories from ImageNet, a le...

Union Minister Kapil Sibal on Tuesday officially unveiled the Indian government's ambitious ultra low-cost Aakash 2 tablet PC at IIT Bombay. As expected, the next generation of Aakash tablet PC comes with host of improvements including a faster processor, capacitive touchscreen and larger battery life. The Aakash 2 tablets will initially available for engineering students across the country. The  Aakash 2 tablet  has an 800MHz processor, as compared to 366 MHz processor of the original Aakash. The resistive touchscreen has been replaced by a capacitive one. The 2,000mAh battery has been replaced by a 3,200 mAh one, which is rated to deliver three hours of backup. The improved Aakash 2 tablet PC has been priced at Rs. 2,263, down from Rs. 2,276 of the  original Aakash . The announcement of the Aakash 2 comes three months after IIT-Bombay took over the project from IIT-Jodhpur. According to reports, IIT-B has already developed apps for the ultra low-cost tablet and...

Facebook just gave out new @facebook.com email address to anyone who had not previously signed up for the service, which includes me. The email address, which looks like a string of numbers and "@facebook.com" at the end until you customize it with something better, shows up by default on your Facebook page or Timeline publicly. Want to delete it? You can't! All you can do is change the settings to make the new email address hidden from Timeline or your Facebook page, or visible only to you. The inability to remove it riled me up, to say the least. So what is this email address, really, and where does mail sent to it go? I fired off a quick test message and dug through some of Facebook's help guides to figure it out. There's both good and bad news in what I found. What is the New Facebook Email Address and Where Does It Go? Messages sent to your newly mandated @facebook.com email address only pop up in your Facebook messages account. They don'...

Does your internet connection feel slow? Well, most probably it is. A report by Akamai, which manages an internet content delivery system used by hundreds of major websites across the world, reveals that despite3G rollout in 2011, the overall state of internet connections in India continues to be poor with average speed of just 0.9mbps. This puts India at 114th position in the list prepared by Akamai on the basis of average internet speed in quarter 4, 2011.  In India all 3G connections are sold with a promise of an internet connection with a speed of at least several mbps. But it seems the reality is different. And with the growth in wired internet connections lagging behind, the average internet speed in the country remains poor.  In comparison, China is 86th on the list with the average speed of 1.5mbps. Brazil has an average speed of 1.8mbps. For Asia-Pacific, Akamai said "India remained the only surveyed country within the region that has an average con...

It's a dream come true for 22-year-old Swapnil Jain, a computer science graduate from IIT-Delhi. Swapnil, who hails from Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, has been offered a job by micro-blogging website Twitter - at a whopping package of  R s.  80 lakh per annum. He is moving to California in October to start his new job. "Twitter has offered me a software engineer's job during the placement in IIT-Delhi. It was my dream to work for companies like Twitter or Facebook. I have worked very hard and my efforts have paid off," he said. Swapnil says this is the first time in the last two years that Twitter has hired someone from India. And he is thrilled. "I want to represent my country and hope that I'm able to make my family and city proud," he said. Swapnil credits his success to his family, especially his parents. His grandfather, Babu Lal Jain, is a well-known lawyer in Vidisha and his father has a jewellery showroom. "I am very happy. He made this pos...

Google CEO Larry Page remains silent about coming Google attractions, not because he refuses to speak but because he can't. During the company's annual shareholders meeting Thursday, Executive Chariman Eric Schmidt announced that Page has lost his voice and will be unable to do any public speaking for at least a month. That means Page won't speak at next week's annual Google I/O developers conference in San Francisco or during the company's quarterly earnings conference call next month. "That said, Larry will, of course, continue to run the company," said Schmidt, who is stepping into Page's shoes as the voice of Google for the time being. Google has not released information on Page's medical condition, described the cause of his loss of voice, or said when he will return to public speaking events. The  39-year-old CEO  will communicate via email and other forms of written messaging during his recovery. Schmidt quoted co-founder Se...

 Engineers in the  United States  have built a prototype gigapixel  camera  the size of a bedside cabinet that can capture an image in a single snapshot with 1,000 times more detail than today's devices. It is not the  world's first gigapixel camera , but it is the smallest and fastest and opens up prospects for improving airport security, military surveillance and even online sports coverage, its developers say. A pixel is a small light point in a digital image, concentrations of which together form a picture. Today's cameras capture images measured in megapixels -- a million pixels -- normally between eight and 40 for an average consumer device. A thousand megapixels make a gigapixel, which is thus comprised of a billion pixels. Most of today's gigapixel images are made by digitally merging several  megapixel  pictures. "Our camera records a one gigapixel image in less than a 10th of a second," project member David Brady told AFP of the proj...

  In today's world, privacy has become a thing of the past as whatever you write in an email or a message, anything you say in a private or public conversation, can easily end up plastered all over the Internet.  As for social media sites like  LinkedIn  and Facebook , say or write the wrong thing and you can lose your job or destroy your career.  A classic example of this is the the 45-minute instant message rant by Keith Block, Oracle's executive vice president for North America, about the company's hardware products,  Oracle co-president  Mark Hurd , and all sorts of other things that seemed to get under the sales executive's skin.  The IM came out during an ongoing court case between Oracle and  Hewlett-Packard . Block had apparently been travelling for five weeks and was probably just passing time on a flight by venting to Oracle's VP of human resources, Anje Dodson.  Blowing off steam or not, Block said some things he shouldn't ha...

This is a quick tutorial for implementing graph data structure with adjacency list representation. Once I was  looking on the web to have a simple introductory tutorial on graphs, but unfortunately couldn’t find one  simple enough. So I decided to write this. In the adjacency list representation, è All the vertices are stored in an array of structure containing ‘data’ and ‘link’ fields. è The linked chains represent the edges of a vertex with its neighbors. In the figure, there are 6 vertices, represented by the array of length 6, and the chains represent the edges. Below is another example: Let us first define the structure of a vertex in a graph. struct vertex {     int vertexKey;     struct edge *edgePtr; }vertex; The vertexKey is the data field of the vertex, and edgePtr is the edge pointer, declared next. The graph can be declared as: struct vertex graph[10]; int vertexCount=0; Here...