Simply - Geniass !

Jatropha Curcas

November 1st, 2007

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Vertical Solar Farms - Tropical Zone Skyscrapers

November 1st, 2007

The shocking truth about glass buildings!

Skyscrapers hold within themselves a huge potential of becoming solar energy farms.

A typical 30 story building will have about 100mtrs * 100mtrs of surface area on each side of the building. In a country like India, where Sky scrapers are not close together, the potential of generating solar energy could be significant.

Germany has the worlds largest concentration of solar farms. The govt. buys back generated electricity from these farms @ approx 50 euro cents/kWh(Rs 25/kWh).

The CIS Tower is the second-tallest building in Manchester, England is a live example of a vertical solar farm. Constructed with a cost of £ 5.5 million generates 1,80,000 units of electricity every year.

In new Indian metropolitan cities, glass building have replaced the conventional designs. Several such building have come up in Gurgaon itself. These buildings though better looking than concrete building, are not well suited for the weather. During summers, the bright sunlight converts these buildings into heating ovens requiring 40% additional power for air conditioning as compared to buildings with concrete exteriors.

Covering the glass panels with PV cells should will be a dual benefit these buildings. Firstly to reduce the extra heat captured in the building due to green house effect caused by the glass panels will be significantly reduced if another layer is present outside the glass panels, reducing the air conditioning electricity requirements by 15-20%.

Additionally the electricity generated will be sufficient to replace 10-15% of the electricity requirement of the building which is currently being done using polluting diesel gensets.

As of now, the Indian govt. does not provided any direct incentives for multistory buildings to go solar, but hopefully someone will read this.

Lets go solar!!

thanks,
-Simply Geniass.

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Mosquito repelent for your car

November 1st, 2007

Waiting for your wife outside on the road, made simpler !

A 12volt operated mousquito repelent in your car, can make things a lot simpler in tropican countries. Theirs not much to it except running that mosquito repelent from the cigerrette lighter instead of the plug in the wall !

A 12volt to 220volt invtertor can also do the trick !

thanks,
-Simply Geniass!

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Solar powered car air-conditioning

November 1st, 2007

Turn off the car but keep the AC on !

The roof of your car is the most under-utilized area in your car. Install it with solar panel that can produce about 80 watts of energy sufficient to power your car’s air conditioner.

A medium sized saloon has about 9sqft of roof space to install solar panels. These panels could cost approximately Rs. 6,000 in India and will be sufficient to run the existing Air Conditioning unit of a Maruti Esteem.

Additionally having another layer on top of the car’s roof provides great insulation from sunlight.

It is possible to have an independent roof mounted air-conditioning unit in addition to the pre-installed unit. The roof surmounted unit should cost Rs. 13,000. You’ll also require two additional batteries and a voltage regulator.

So you have a place to sleep during power cuts, becuase a fully charged unit can run the air conditioning to 1.5 hours continuously. If used with a thermostat auto-switchoff, it could keep your car cool for 5-6 hours.

Save fuel, by reducing the load on your engine and running the AC from the solar energy.

thanks,
-Simply Geniass!

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Plot full of garbage to vehicle safe haven

November 1st, 2007

Recipe

Take a empty plot of land on rent.
Clean the plot.
Hire 24×7 security guards or become one.
Construct a boundary wall and a barricade gate.
Get a water connection or request neighbors to share their supply in return for free parking.
Provide safe parking to nearby residents.
Provide daily early morning car-wash service.

How do the residents save?

Sleep well at night, your vehicles are safe and secure.
No need to invest in expensive security gadgets.

How do all the residents of the colony benefit?

No more wrongly parked cars in the lanes.
More space to move around in the colony for pedestrians.

How do the plot owners benefit ?

The empty plot of land generates a pocket money for your kids.
If you want to move in, your plot is already neat and clean.
Your plot is safe from encroachments

How does the operator benefit ?

Charge vehicle owners per/sqft or per car, per hour.
Charge car wash fee.
Charge a bi-monthly car polish fee.

Who should be the operator?

Ideally with the numbers involved, the security guard should be the operator. An NGO or a govt body could assist the process of generating employment for locals.

What can the govt do ?

Make parking lots legal in residential areas.
Encourage and promote the scheme in media to educate land owners, prospective operators and residents to support the function.

What else can the N.G.O.(non-govt organization) do ?

Formulate guidelines to save water while washing cars.
Formulate rent agreements between operators and land owners.

Statistics

More than 60% of the residential colonies in Indian metropolitans face acute parking problems.
Most of these colonies have 2-3% empty plots that are “not being managed” or fully utilized.
Many “dirty vehicles” can be seen on metropolitan city roads.
Security guards are usually found dozing off by the morning.

thanks,
- Simply Geniass!

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Website Development

June 1st, 2007

Website development is the process of creating a website. This article discusses the non-technical aspects of Website development that should be known to customers of a website development company. A website is a collection of web pages that can be seen within a web browser. Your website is essentially your place to publish information about what you do, what you sell or what you want to “promote”.

What is a web page ?
The smallest unit or instance of internet for a internet user is called a web page. Just like the smallest instance of a book for a reader is a single page in a book. Unlike normal paperback pages, web pages have a lot more to offer.

A web page on the internet can contain text, images, videos, links, animations, resources/files or interactive components. Just like a normal book allows the reader to move from one page to another, links of web pages enable a user to move from one page to another. Links(technical term hyper links) are jump points that a user simply needs to “click” to reach another page. A link on the internet will usually contain an under line or a mouse over hover effect(hover effect means the link will flicker or change form when you fly your mouse over it.

Resources on a page may include links to download-able files , documents, software etc.

In a paperback book, you can usually read content. However, some pages in the book, may also require you to fill data, a crossword puzzle for instance. These are called interactive pages. Unlike books however, web pages are also capable of displaying results based on the data that your fill in. Such pages that “generate” data from your input are called “dynamic” pages. Dynamic pages may also read inputs from “databases”. A database is essentially a collection of data stored in a particular format. For instance, A database of books, might contain BookID, BookName, AuthorName, BookPrice, BookDescription. Information about a sinle book in a database is called a “record”. There fore a database is also a collection of records! More details on databases and their connection with website is described later in this section under the topic “database driven website”. For now, a webpage that reads information from a single record from a database and displays it on the internet browser is a dynamic page.

How does the web page know which book to display on the web page ?
The book to display is identified by a paramater which is “unique” for every record. The webpage accepts a “unique identifier” to a record and displays the information about that book. In this case, the unique identifier is the INPUT and the information about the book is the OUTPUT.

How does a web page accept input ?
An web page can accept by two means, either using “a web based form”, OR by passing the information through the URL of the page. The URL of a page is the unique address of a web page. Every page on the internet has a unique address. Just like you have a unique email ID or a unique phone number. A URL is a unique identified or a webpage. Remember that just like the BookID was the unique identifier for a book record,

What is a website ?
A website is a collection of pages of information that are linked together by “hyperlinks”. A hyper link is a clickable link, that take you from one page to another. A page on a website is called a web page which can contain text, images, videos, animations, resources or interactive components.

Static Websites
Static websites that those website where the content of the page will always remain static, which means that the page does not contain any programmatically controlled content like the one discussed in the book records example. Instead a page will change only when a website designer manually changes the content of the page.

E-commerce websites
E-commerce websites are those websites that permit financial transactions from the website itself. A shopping cart from where you may have recently bought a gift, is an e-commerce website. Your favorite website to book air tickets is a e-commerce website. An online university, that provides training to students through remote video classrooms and charges a fee using a credit card is also an e-commerce website. Your online bank account is an example of e-commerce. Essentially, a website that supports the technology to exchange money between two parties in liew of a product or service is an E-commerce website.

Exchanging money on the website is a specialized task and requires expertise and experience to prevent frauds. Some basics of e-commerce security are discussed below. If you are planning to get a e-commerce enabled website for your company, you need to ensure that your vendor pays attention to the following
Customer Account information should be stored in an encrypted format.
All money related information should travel over SSL and not plain text.
No credit card information should EVER be stored on an internet database.

A detailed explanation of guidelines of developing an e-commerce website is beyond the scope of this article, instead please refer to guidelines of developing an e-commerce website for more details.

Portal development
A web portal is a website that focuses on an agenda. The agenda can be a region, a company, an industry, a sport, an event. Another important aspect of a portal the ability to find extensive information on the primary agenda that the portal focuses on. A portal on travel industry should include information about leading travel agencies, modes of transport, business and leisure travel, destinations, travellers etc. Portals have made a lot of contribution in popularizing internet among the masses.

Website development technology

A database driven dynamic website is a must for the success of a website. Static websites are no longer possible to maintain or rely on for your business. Your website requires latest technology and technical expertise to become an effective tool for your business.
Several popular options are available to create a dynamic website, a detailed explanation of these technologies are beyond the scope of this article, but have been discussed in individual articles.

LAMP(Linux, Apache, MySQL PHP)
This is currently the number#1 most popular method of creating a website on the internet. The reason, it is cheaper, easy and quick to create a website using LAMP. However, when you want to develop larger scale applications, LAMP may not be the idle choice and you’d benefit replacing MySQL by PostGreSQL and some alternate language for development of specific utilities in other languages instead of PHP. Important to note that all components of LAMP are Open Source and FREE !!, which has also been one of the reasons for the phenomenal success of the LAMP combination.

.NET
.NET platform is a proprietary language that was launched by Microsoft as a successor to ASP technology. While .NET provides a lot of ready-made tools and components to assist developers in their work. The underlying idea of depending your whole online business on a single company does not go down very well in my personal opinion. .NET has a lot to offer to companies who are willing to risk their existence on the promoter company, but the ever growing popularity of OpenSource technologies such as PHP has created far more free support for OpenSource tools as compared to proprietary languages.

JSP and Java Struts
JSP and JavaSturts is Java’s response to development of internet websites. JSP enjoys the support of very well maintained and easy to use IDE environments. Easy availability of manpower in JSP and strusts is a key factor to their success. The syntax and

ColdFusion
ColdFusion is now the proprietary platform for development from Adobe. Earlier this platform was being promoted by macromdia(no acquired by adobe). ColfFusion enjoys support of a robust IDE from the parent company.

Perl
Perl is a time tested development language that was once the best tool to develop website. However the complex syntax of the generated code, many times makes it a very expensive code to maintain. This has been the foremost reason for the decline of the language. Perl undoubtedly remains the best language for development non-web based scripts in Linux and text parsing utilities. Wherever data parsing is required, Perl should be your first choice

Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails has been around for a few years, but recently has been receiving a lot of attention. The recent development IDE for Ruby has also been a contributor of its success. This platform still requires a better IDE and more free scripts on the internet to make it a significant competition for PHP.

Python
Python is a good choice for many web development projects. It gained more popularity ever since google started using python for development of its sub-projects. Python is very easy to write, very easy to debug and very cheap to maintain. Another major advantage of Python over PHP it that python comes with a compiler to protect source code and enhance security. A major deterrent for Python explosion has been the lack of an easy to use IDE for python. Python unfortunately does not have easy availability of manpower, which forces companies to switch to alternate platforms of development. In due course of time when training institutes start focusing on Python, it is likely to become much more popular choice.

What platform should you insist on ?

If budget is very important to your project, choose LAMP. If you expect the website to have more than 50,000 visitors / week or if you website is required to handle more than 5,00,000 records, go for PostGreSQL and PHP.
If you already have a current software in java, go for JSP or Struts.
If you want easy manpower and good commercial technical support go for .NET
If you know what you are doing and are confident of pulling it off, only then go for any of the other options.

Important aspects of website development, while choosing your website development vendor.

Security
Scalability
Search Engine Optimization
Portability
Maintenance
Administration

Security

Security is a key consideration of a website development project. A website development company should be chosen if they have experience in developing secure websites. The content of the website whereever should be password protected. A thumb rule here is no person outside the group of webmasters or administrators should be able to modify any content on the website without approval from the administrators. When you negotiate your deal with the website development company
Scalability

Your website needs to be scalable. Scalable means if your website is fortunate enough to reach the top in its category, can it handle the traffic of visitors ? Was the website development project planned with careful insight so that popularity of your website does not cause loss of potential business because the development company did not envisage the popularity. It is important for you to question your website development company to find out the limits of your website and the time/effort estimates required to scale the website to the next level.

Search Engine Optimization

A website needs to be accessible to search engines as well as optimized so that publicly accessible portions of the website driver more visitors to your website. Your wesite development company needs to understand this requirements and design website in a search engine friendly manner. You contract with the website service provider should clearly include the measures that will be taken by the website development company to ensure Search Engine Optimized pages.

Portability

Portability of a website refers to the dependencies of a website on other technologies. A website may not be 100% portable, but it should be portable to an alternate technology with minimum effort and downtime. The world of internet changes very dynamically, Operating Systems, development platforms become obsolete within a matter of months. Is your website development company prepared for such an event ? What measures have they taken to ensure that the product that the develop for you is not entirely dependent on a single entity or person.

Maintenance

Maintenance of a website is a critical component of the success of any website. A common mistake by customers is to pay more attention to the development of the website as compared to the maintenance phase. The inclusion of a maintenance phase is your website development contract is a must. Usually the maintenance cost is 20% of the development cost and includes technical support from the development company, change of labels etc. Maintenance usually does not include changes to functionality or additional features.

Administration Website administration in this article refers more to administration and management of 3rd party components that support your website. This primarily includes the upkeep of software installed on your hosting providers servers. Administration staff of the website require clear documentation on how to get the website up and running in case of an emergency or failure. The website development company must provide information on the tasklist for deployment of the website on a fresh server and restoration of website data. You as a customer need to know if the administrator clearly understand the tasklist and have been trained by the website development company to perform the same.

Terms of use

You may use, copy and modify the content of this article for your personal, non-profit or commercial use as long as you maintain a link to this page on your page which contains this article in the same or modified manner. The link text for this article should be Article on website development. The code to place a link should be <a href=”http://www.simply-geniass.com”> Article on website development</a>

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Automatic Semantic Link Builder

May 8th, 2007

Semantically most useful links for your webpage and others - Automatically !

The Automatic Semantic Link Builde(ASLB) is very complex programming algorithm that is very simple to use. The script can be installed in your .net , .php or plain html pages and left to function on its own.

The script will generate a list of URLS on your page that will be visible to your visitors as well as search engine crawlers who crawl your page. So does that mean that the script will drive out traffic from your website. Yes. It will.

But copies of this script will also bring in visitors and improve the ranking of your page.

How does it work ?

ASLB front script will publish links on your website for other pages on the internet, you will be allowed to prevent certain links from showing on your website(such as your direct competition). The links to your pages will be shown onthrid party website pages which contain data relevent to your webpage’s content.

What happens at the backend ?

The main ASLB servers continuously distribute links for website and decide on which links to show where, while doing this the following rules are applied.

No reciprocal links are generated.
Inbound is always equal to outbound.
PageRanks of involved pages play a part in the inbound:outbound ratios.
Links remain where they are for a minimum of 30 days, unless removed for spamming.
Only a single ASLB script can be installed in a webpage.
HTML header tags play an important role.

Can I use ASLB on my website ?

No. Not yet, but soon. Bookmark this page. The Automatic Semantic Link Builder is currently in its alpha stages of development and is being tested on over 500,000 webpages. The ASLB is expected to be released in the month of March, 2008 for public installations.

Is there a manual way to do such linking ?

Yes, let a SEO company help you.

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How to store passwords ?

May 8th, 2007

Passwords are secret keywords/keyphrases that are used to distinguish legitimate users from others.

Many years of research is involved in storing passwords. Here is a list of industries best practices on storing passwords. Hashing !

To establish that hashing is a good way to store passwords lets take a look at the other methods and then compare them with hashing to find out their weaknesses.

The advantage of storing passwords in hashing is that even if someone is able to extract all the hashed passwords as well as the source code. It will not be easy to crack the passwords. If passwords are stored in plain text, then stealing the database alone will allow an outsider to be able to log into the system.

If the passwords are stored in an encrypted format then an outsider will require both the database as well as the source code to decrypt the passwords and log into the system.

Hashing passwords will keep the passwords secure to a large extent even if an outsider is able to access the source code as well as the database.

What is a hash?

A hash is a unique fixed length content that is created using the original password. There are three distinct properties of a hash that make it the ideal choice for storing passwords.

Hash of a value X will always be the same.
The probability of many values having the same hash value is negligible.
It is impossible to find the original text from the hash itself.

The above three properties make a good hashing algorithm and MD#5 is currently the industries most preferred algorithm.

Storing passwords using MD#5

At the time of creating a new user in your database, allow the user to enter a password in plan text. When you fill your database with the information convert the password into a “hash” and store the hash instead of the password.

Remember that the hash is irriversible so you cannot convert the hash back into the original password. But then how will you authenticate the user the next time he/she tries to log in ?

You will need to utilize the 1st property of a hash.

“Hash of a value X will always be the same”

Calculate the hash of the password that the user enters while trying to login and compare the newly generated hash with the stored hash to find out if the two match. If they do, you should welcome the user!

Using MD#5 in PHP to store passwords

The MD#5 of a string can be generated in PHP as easily as

$hash =md5($txtRawPassword);

At the time of user registration, store the $hash into the database. Post that whenever the user tries to log in, using password $pwd, retreive the hash from the database and compare it with the md5($pwd).

if (!strcmp($hash,md4($pwd)))
{
//welcome user!
}
else
{
//send user back to login page.
}

Disadvantage of storing passwords as hash

If the user forgets his/her password, you will not be able to find the original password. Instead, you will need to create a new password for them a mail it to them at their email ID. Isn’t this what google and yahoo does ?

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The curse of patents!

May 8th, 2007

If electricity was patented, you’d be using coasters to make notes instead of PDAs !

Patents are the legal way of preventing innovation. They are created with only one agenda in mind, “No one should be able to work on the concept that we thought of first”. Furthermore, if another entity independently invents the same concept, that person will not be allowed to use it, because someone else has already claimed it to be their property.

In a bid to protect the interest of the entity who “first filed” the patent, that entity is automatically assumed to be the best entity who can improve upon it. The long terms of patents deprive other potential researchers to use the invention.

The situation is worse for bio-patents and life saving drug patents, which is less legal terms is a way of saying “Pay us or die”. Corporates in developed nations use patents as a weapon against their competition in developing countries to ensure that they never raise upto them.

The solution lies only with the Governments. If a central organization such as WTO can stand ground to decide the value of a patent in commercial terms, and the competition is allowed to pay a fixed amount to the inventor, the world can be freed of this curse that is slowing down the growth of the world.

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How does compression work ?

May 7th, 2007

Software Compression is a technique to store digital data in a format so that least amount of space on the storage media.

Consider the following example to understand how it works.
A Personal Assistant is able to write @ the speed of speech of his/her boss by using shorthand and special codes to represent long words. Compression works exactly like that. The difference is that while the assistant uses codes to increase the writing speed, compression agent uses codes to reduce space usage.

The above technique of representing longer words into codes will be efficient only if the longer words are repeated several times in the data that needs to be compressed.

Important to note that the “longer words” means that the code should be smaller than the word, and the word should have multiple instances in the data that needs to be compressed.

The scope of this article is limited to compression on textual data. Binary data requires more complex algorithms of compression and needs a complete set of articles to discuss the topic.

Steps to create your own compression script

Step 1: Read text into a string variable

$txtOriginalString =
“May Day! May Day! Some one help us on how compression works in programming world. Will this article help us share with its pearls of wisdumb ?”;

Step 2: Collect all words from the text into an array.
Count the spaces in a text and collect all material between two ” ” space characters, through out the string.

$arrAllWords = explode(” “,$txtOriginalString);

Step 3: Ensure that the array is “unique”. Eliminate duplicate words from your array.

$arrUniqueWords = array_unique($addAllWords);

Step 4: Count the number of unique words.
You will require these many codes to replace the orignal words.

$intUniqueWordCount = count($arrUniqueWords);

Step 5: Identify the length of a “code”.
If you are using 200 ASCII characters in your code set. Lets say from ASCII 45 to 245. Then, a “single digit” code is sufficient if the unique word count is <= 200.

If the word count is > 200 and all permutations of 200P2.

if ($intUniqueWordCount > 200) { $intCodeLength = 2; }
else {$intCodeLength =1;}

Step 6: Assign a code to each unique word.
6.a) Generate a new code.
6.b) Assign it to the first unassigned unique word.
6.c) Repeat process for every unique word.

Step 7: Write the new string $CompressedString;

7.a) Write the $intCodeLength into $txtCompressedString;
$txtCompressedString = $intCodeLength;

7.b) Write a Separator to $txtCompressedString

$txtCompressedString.=”###Separator###”;

7.c) Write the original words and their codes in a CSV format to $txtCompressedString, codes go after the words.

foreach ($arrUniqueWords as $key=> $value) //generate code for each unique word.
{
$txtCode = newCode($txtCode);
$arrCodeArr[$key] = $txtCode;
$txtCompressedString.=$value.”,”; //Write words to compressed string in CSV
}
$txtCompressedString.=”###Separator###”; //Seperate Words from Codes.

foreach($arrCodeArr as $value)
{
$txtCompressedString.=$value.”,”; //Write codes to compressed string in CSV.

}

$txtCompressedString.=”###Separator###”;

Step 8 Generate $codeString

8.a) Replace all occurrences of each unique word in $txtOriginalString with their assigned codes in $txtCodeString;

8.b) Replace all space characters ” ” in $txtCodeString with a blank “”.8.c) Append $CompressedString with $txtCodeString.
$txtCompressedString .= $txtCodeString;

Thats it !

Uncompressing the file…

Step 1: Read the string.

Step 2: Explode string using “###Separator###”;

$arrData = explode(’###Separator’,$txtCompressedString);

$intCodeLength = $arrData[0];
$strCSVUniqueWords = $arrData[1];
$strCSVCodes=$arrData[2];
$strCodeString = $addData[3];

Step 3: Replace codes with a space character and the original word.

Mistakes and issues unaddressed in the above algorithm.

If you read the article carefully, you would notice the following mistakes.

1) The uncompressed file will always contain the last character as a space.

2) If the first character of the file was a ” “. It will be lost !

3) What is the maximum number for $intUniqueWordCount that this script will work ?

How to tackle them ?

This is where you come into picture. Your task will be to analyze the above article and prove your geniass by…

1) Find out more errors in the above logic.

AND / OR

2) Propose solution to issues pointed out by you or others.

Multiple comments are not a problem, we’ll track them. But for each inaccurate mistake that you point out your points will get reduced and for each geniass issue you point out your chances to feature in the “Simply Geniass - Hall of geniasses” will increase !

Send in your entries now !

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Simply - Geniass !

Jatropha Curcas

Vertical Solar Farms - Tropical Zone Skyscrapers

Mosquito repelent for your car

Solar powered car air-conditioning

Plot full of garbage to vehicle safe haven

Website Development

Automatic Semantic Link Builder

How to store passwords ?

The curse of patents!

How does compression work ?

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