Windows Live SkyDrive

SkyDrive (previously Windows Live Folders) is one of the coolest services Microsoft offers for its Windows Live users. SkyDrive is a Password-protected (with Windows Live ID) online file storage that enables users to upload files & allows to keep the files private, share with contacts, or make the files public. Publicly-shared files do not require a Windows Live ID to access. Here are some of the cool features of SkyDrive as Microsoft describes....

• Easy access
  Access 5 GB of free storage from any online PC or Web-enabled mobile device. You can even drag and drop files directly from your PC to your SkyDrive with the optional upload tool (needs an ActiveX control installaation).
• Store files for yourself
  Using multiple computers? No problem. When you store your files online in Personal folders, only you can access them.
• Share with your friends
  Need to share stuff with classmates, co-workers or family? Store it in a Shared Folder and control who can see and add files.
• Link directly to your SkyDrive folders
  Each folder on SkyDrive has its own Web address that you can send in an e-mail, paste in a document, add as a favorite, save as a shortcut... you name it.

Among all the cool stuff, I found one restriction that needs more tolerance.Maximum upload file size for SkyDrive is 50MB at the moment and I hope Microsoft will increse this size when they are done with the beta testing stage...

A crowning success

As planned both Curtin & SLIIT convocations were held on 21st Feb & undoubtedly it was one of the memorable days of my life , if not the most. I had my SLIIT graduation in the morning & Curtin in the evening.. Gosh I had to wear the heavy cloaks for 12 & half hours at a stretch & next day I felt as if the world was on top of my shoulders. Photo shootings went on till 9.30 p.m & I was so exhausted that I told myself I would never do my Msc (lolz....). Whatever it is, being a dual graduate means a lot to me as it has made me a qualified IT professional & given me the licence to demand myself where ever I step into....

Things you probably never knew your mobile phone could do

I found a few hidden (but very handy) features of mobiles in one of the emails I received & thought it's worth adding a post here with what was in that mail.

• In case of an Emergency
  
  The Emergency Number worldwide for Mobile is 112. If you find yourself out of the coverage area of your mobile; network and there is an emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any existing network to establish the emergency number for you, and interestingly this number 112 can be dialed even if the keypad is locked. Try it out.
  
  
• In case you have locked your car with the keys inside
  
  Does your car have remote keyless entry? This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are at home, call someone at home on their mobile phone from your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock.Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other 'remote' for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).
  
  
• In case your mobile battery is very low
  
  This is about making use of the Hidden Battery Power . To activate, press the keys *3370# Your mobile will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50% increase in battery. This reserve will get charged when you charge your mobile next time. (This may not work in newer mobiles)

Say your prayers DVD, Blu-ray has hit the trumpet........

Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD), is the name of the next-generation optical disc format jointly developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), a group of the world's leading consumer electronics, personal computer and media manufacturers including Apple, DELL, HP, Sony, Samsung, LG, Pioneer,TDK & a few others.The format offers more than five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs and can hold up to 25GB on a single-layer disc and 50GB on a dual-layer disc. This extra capacity combined with the use of advanced video and audio codecs will offer users an unprecedented HD (High-Definition) experience.

As the name itself suggests, BD makes use of a 405nm blue-violet laser rays to read & write data on the disc.The benefit of using a blue-violet laser is that it has a shorter wavelength than a red laser (650nm) used for DVD, which makes it possible to focus the laser spot with even greater precision. This allows data to be packed more tightly and stored in less space, so it's possible to fit more data on the disc even though it's the same size as a CD/DVD.

The Blu-ray has left no choice for movie & game lovers like me, but to go for a BD player, since most of the major movie studios including Fox, Warner, Paramount, Sony, Lionsgate etc. have already decided to release their movies exclusively in the Blu-ray format. PS3 Games are already in the market on BD and it won't be too long before XBox360 also joins the club.

Since BD players support DVD/CD playback also, one single player would do the job, but what I'm really worried about is the price of a BD writer once it arrives in SL market. GOD please don't make it sky high......................

Apple unveils world's thinnest notebook

Apple unvailed MacBook Air, the world's thinnest notebook last week on 15th. It measures only 0.16-inches at its thinnest point, while its maximum height of 0.76-inches is less than the thinnest point on competing notebooks. MacBook Air has a 13.3-inch LED-backlit widescreen display, a full-size and backlit keyboard, a built-in iSight video camera for video conferencing, and a spacious trackpad with multi-touch gesture support so users can pinch, rotate and swipe. MacBook Air is powered by a 1.6 GHz or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB L2 cache, and includes as standard features 2GB of memory, an 80GB 1.8-inch hard drive, and the latest 802.11n Wi-Fi technology and Bluetooth 2.1. MacBook Air delivers up to five hours of battery life for wireless productivity and includes AirPort Extreme 802.11n Wi-Fi networking, which delivers up to five times the performance and twice the range of 802.11g.

My Graduation

Well , I don't wanna boast about my newest & so to say the biggest achievement of life so far, but I'm so glad I made it. I waited 4 straight years to earn this right and I doubt even god knows how much effort I put into it. Gosh… I never thought I’d have to kill myself for the Curtin degree like I did. SLIIT degree program was pretty easy going, apart from the final year research project. Anyway, I had a much needed break of couple of months after a 10 month marathon run this year. The convocation for SLIIT is due to be held on 21st Feb next year where as the Curtin one too could well be on the same day though it’s not been confirmed yet. I’m in the mood of doing an Msc. also, but I’ve got a lot to do before that. Now, don’t bother asking what they are …(hihi lolz…………)

I'm on Facebook..................

From what I have experienced so far, I believe Facebook is a better social networking website than hi5. It's kind of complecated to start with, but once you settle in, it's so much fun. It offers a varaity of applications to tell the world who you really are..

visit me on Facebook @ http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=729407971

I couldn't figure out a way to get direct access to Facebook profiles like in hi5. So the logic is simple. Members only.... Infact it should be friends only in my case (i.e. you have to be my friend to access my profile.) So send in a friendship request first & it'll be all fun afterwards.

Achieving Interoperability between VB.NET & MATLAB

‘MATLAB’…. Might sound bit strange to most of you, but its logic is no strange to any other popular programming language. MATLAB is somewhat a high level language written in Java & widely used to write scientific applications. Me & my team used this interesting language to develop an iris based human recognition system for our final year research project of SLIIT.
Halfway through we faced a number of issues when using MATLAB at the frontend due to its lack of support for GUI. So we opted to use VB.NET at the frontend & use MATLAB to develop the backend application. Each module was implemented as a function and called by the VB app. as follows. I believe this is the easiest method to build a GUI based MATLAB system as VB is extremely high level & doesn’t even refer to a single additional namespace to call functions implemented at the backend.

Dim MatLab As Object
MatLab = CreateObject("Matlab.Application") // the MATLAB object
result = MatLab.Execute("cd 'C:\ISSS NN'") // path where file is located
result = MatLab.Execute("match") //execute the file

Curtains rise on the final release of VS 2008

Microsoft released the long awaited VS2008 Final set of editions last Monday(19th) and is up for grabs for the MSDN subscribers. Framework 3.5 was also released simultaneously with VS2008.
As I calculated, it would probably take 17 to 18 hours to download the 3.9 GB image file with my DSL connection. But decided against it as I’m continuously running a couple of Java Projects these days which I think need a hard disk size RAM to run smoothly.
Since it’s a 90-day trail edition, the indecision is whether to go for it or use express editions & try out the new technologies until the professional edition is released. I can hardly wait to explore LINQ with C# 3.0 .
Anyway, one way or the other I’m gonna say goodbye to NetBeans soon and get on with the new VS.

The power of LINQ

LINQ has become bit of a buzz word among C# & VB.NET developers around the world with the pre-release of VS2008. So I too couldn't resist going after it to figure out how it's going to revolutionize C# 3.0 & VB 9.

LINQ stands for Language Integrated QUery and fundamentally is about integrating query operations into the .NET platform in a comprehensive and open manner. It's also about providing a unified way to query across any kind of data, despite of the data sources being relational, objects or XML.

LINQ has three major components:

• LINQ to Objects
• LINQ to ADO.NET, which includes LINQ to DataSet (originally called LINQ over DataSet), LINQ to Entities & LINQ to SQL (originally called DLinq)
• LINQ to XML (originally called XLinq)
  

LINQ to Objects deals with in-memory data. Any class that implements the IEnumerable interface (in the System.Collections.Generic namespace) can be queried with LINQ’s standard query operators (SQO), which are implemented as methods in class Sequence in the System.Query namespace.

LINQ to ADO.NET deals with data from external sources, basically anything ADO.NET can connect to Any class that implements IEnumerable or IQueryable (in the System.Query namespace) can be queried with LINQ’s standard query operators (SQO), which are implemented as methods in class Sequence in the System.Query namespace.

LINQ to XML is a comprehensive API for in-memory XML programming. Like the rest of LINQ, it includes SQO, and it can also be used in concert with LINQ to ADO.NET, but its primary purpose is to unify and simplify the kinds of things that disparate XML tools, like XQuery, XPath, and XSLT, are typically used to do.

Silverlight. Microsoft's newest web technology

Silverlight ( code-named Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere or WPF/E) is a cross-platform, cross-browser web client runtime, designed to bring the Windows Presentation Foundation experience to the Web. Silverlight provides a retained mode graphics system, similar to WPF and integrates multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime. It is being designed to work in concert with XAML and is scriptable with JavaScript. XAML(Extensible Application Markup Language) can be used for marking up the vector graphics and animations.

Silverlight supports playback of WMV, WMA and MP3 media content across all supported browsers and has no dependencies on other products such as Windows Media Player for video playback or the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 for XAML parsing.
The architecture that supports the Silverlight application is shown below. The main programming interface is the JavaScript DOM API. This allows you to respond to events raised within the Silverlight XAML (such as when content has finished loading or when an animation is complete). You can also call methods to manipulate the presentation (such as starting an animation or pausing video playback). Underneath this is the XAML parsing engine. The parser creates the in-memory XAML DOM for use by the presentation core, which handles the rendering of the graphics and animations defined by the XAML.
Silverlight aims to compete with Adobe Flash and the presentation components of Ajax. It also competes with Sun Microsystems' JavaFX, which was launched a few days after Silverlight.

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I'll be back soon....................

It's like coming home every time I type my blog URL. I've been extremely busy with my seemingly never ending studies since August this year and it’s pretty embarrassing to say that I can’t manage time to peep into my blog every now and then with something new.
Anyway my exams are due to be over by the end of this month & hope to come back with a new look to my blog. Just for a hint, It’ll be more programmer specific, while cutting edge technology will always deserve its spot in this space……

Countdown begins for Visual Studio 2008

Microsoft released VS 2008 Beta2 few days back and it's up for grab @ the Microsoft oficial site. The new VS comes under the theme "Build Next-Generation Applications", intending to give more of Vista look & feel. Since .NET Framework 3.5 has also been released lately (also under Beta2 stage at the moment) , it would most probably be the platform to be shipped with the VS 2008 final release..

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/default.aspx

Harry Potter's Last Adventure...

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book in the Harry Potter series was released globally yesterday (21st July) and I just found the list of major characters killed by the author, Rowling in her last HP episode. Good thing is that the trio (Hermione, Harry and Ron) have made it to the end, leaving all the fan doubts behind. Rowling had hinted about some major upsets in her last HP book prior to the release , but has been kind enough not to break hearts of millions world wide.

I gave up my efforts of buying a copy on the first day of release early this time as I could imagine the length of the queue outside Vijitha Yapa book shop @ unity plaza. I was one of the many disappointed who returned empty handed on the day 'Order of the Phoenix' was released.

List of characters killed

Nokia Aeon... Is the iPhone killer coming???

Nokia unveiled its revolutionary concept phone, Aeon, about 9 months back designed to highlight the company's focus on products that allow users to more readily stamp their personality on their gadgets.

Aeon, combines two touch-sensitive panels mounted on a fuel-cell power pack. The handset's connectivity and electronics are built into the panels to allow them to be used independendently. When assembled, one panel would operate as the display, the other as the keypad. Since the buttons are entirely virtual, Aeon can flip instantly between a numeric pad for dialling, a text-entry pad for messaging, or a media-player controller.

One of the mails I got recently said that there's a huge buzz going on, Nokia badly wanting to make this dream phone a reality as soon as posible. If it makes the market somehow it might need a nickname, perhaps the 'iPhone killer'...

For the first time ever, an Indian holds one of the most prestigious titles of WWE

The Great Khali, the 7 ft 3 ,420 lbs gaint from Punjab India won a 20-man Battle Royal to become the new World Heavyweight Champion at a taping of SmackDown in Laredo, Texas. The former World Heavyweight Champion, SmackDown Superstar Edge was forced to surrender his title last Tuesday night due to an injury that will keep him out of action.

Khali will have to put his new title on the line on Sunday 22nd July at the Great American Bash and his opponent will be decided by a No. 1 Contender’s Match which will determine whether it’s Batista, whom Khali had originally agreed to face this Sunday, or Kane, the Big Red Monster who was supposed to meet Edge at the pay-per-view.

I'm all set & ready to rock hi5...

I'm kind of busy these days with my final year SLIIT project and Curtin stuff. So blogging here regularly too has become bit of an issue. Anyway last week I got an invitation from one of my friends to join hi5. About a year back also I got an invitation, but i missed out somehow. This time no messing around, I got registered and built a nice profile with all sorts of css, java scripts and flash animations.

To see, about half of the SLIIT have registered with hi5 way before me and they are rocking. Geee... was I in a nutshell all this time? I could also find many of my classmates who schooled with me . Some of the images they had posted, really brought back memories of those good old days.. Those are the best days of my life by far..

All I can say is hi5 is a wonderful meeting place for guys who'd like to cherish their memories....

visit me @ http://nuwankarunaratne.hi5.com/

Bill Gates is no longer the World's Richest Man

Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim Helu is now the world's richest man, according to a Mexican financial Web site Sentido Commun which has been tracking the telecom mogul's wealth.

The Mexican telecommunications magnate is said to have displaced Microsoft czar Bill Gates from the top spot following a 27% rise in the price of the shares of his company America Movil. This spurt increased Slim's wealth to $67.84 billion. Slim also controls telecom firms Telmex and Telcel.

Bill Gates, who had been the ranked the world's wealthiest man for the last 13 years, is said to be worth $59.2 billion.

Apple releases its new iPhone today

Apple is set to release the much-hyped iPhone with AT&T today. According to manufacturer the new device uses a technology called multi-touch, which allows users to work the interface without a stylus, using finger gestures for enhanced functionality.

Other features include

• Edge transfer technology
• Bluetooth 2.0
• 802.11b/g Wi-Fi.
• A 2 megapixel camera
• Proximity sensor for using the phone near your ear
• Ambient light sensor which adjusts the illumination for use under different lighting conditions
• An Accellerometer which detects and adapts the display based upon the units orientation
• Safari based web browser
• A rich email client, Google Maps Support and Widgets

Wrestler Chris Benoit found dead

In a major blow to the World Wrestling Entertainment, WWE superstar Chris Benoit was found dead on Monday along with his wife and son at their home in Fayetteville, USA. The local police said they are investigating the deaths as a murder-suicide, adding that it could only be confirmed after the evidence is examined by a crime lab.

Investigators believe Benoit (pronounced ben-WAH) killed his wife, 43-year-old Nancy, and son Daniel during the weekend and then himself Monday. The bodies were found Monday afternoon in three separate rooms of the house, off a gravel road about two miles from the Whitewater Country Club.

The WWE canceled its live “Monday Night RAW” card in Corpus Christi, Texas, and USA Network aired a three-hour tribute to Benoit in place of the scheduled wrestling telecast.

Benoit earned his title shot at Vengence for the vacant ECW World Championship, within days after being drafted to ECW from Smakdown and pulled out at the last minute due to 'personal reasons'. His replacement Johnny Nitro, drafted to ECW from RAW, went on to win the championship beating C.M Punk with a swinging neck-breaker.