Thursday, September 30, 2010

Aadhaar: How to get your unique ID from govt of India

India's ambitious Unique ID project dubbed "Aadhaar", which aims to give every Indian citizen a unique number mapped to biometrics, was launched on Wednesday in the Nadurbar district of Maharashtra. The Technoholik.com team got a sneak peek at the UIDAI (Unique ID Authority of India) tech centre in Bangalore, to tell you everything you need to know about the enrolment process.

The setup

The enrollment officer (EO) sits at right angles to you and enters data into a laptop. The insight of the Aadhaar team here is that the person getting enrolled must see what is being entered. Thus there's a monitor in front of you, which mirrors the enrolment officer's screen so that you can point out spelling mistakes or other errors. If the person getting enrolled is illiterate, he or she can nominate someone to accompany and verify. There's a small laser printer behind the EO's laptop and a webcam, fingerprint reader and iris scanner account for the remainder of the hardware setup. Unless, of course, you count the light bulb hanging from the ceiling and a white "roll-up" chart behind you for the "passport photo studio" effect!
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SBI opens 50 kiosk branches

Oxigen Services Pvt. Ltd and support company "Sahyog Micro Finance Foundation" today announced a unique tie-up with State Bank of India (SBI) to offer banking services by connecting directly to the SBI Core Banking System. Appointing Customer Service Points at Oxigen Retail Outlets would do this.
Speaking on the occasion, Pramod Saxena, Managing Director and Chairman, Oxigen, said: "This kiosk-based banking model will provide the necessary ease and comfort to customers in all parts of India with inherent benefits like flexi timings and reach through current Oxigen footprint of over 20,000 web enabled retailers."
"This localisation of retail banking services is much needed for financial inclusion of the unbanked population in both rural and urban India. There is also room for including our PoS (Point of Sale terminals) retailers in the future," he added.
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Friday, September 24, 2010

History of Search Engines: From 1945 to Google Today

As We May Think (1945):

The concept of hypertext and a memory extension really came to life in July of 1945, when after enjoying the scientific camaraderie that was a side effect of WWII, Vannevar Bush's As We May Think was published in The Atlantic Monthly.
As We May Think.
He urged scientists to work together to help build a body of knowledge for all mankind. Here are a few selected sentences and paragraphs that drive his point home.
Specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.
He not only was a firm believer in storing data, but he also believed that if the data source was to be useful to the human mind we should have it represent how the mind works to the best of our abilities.
Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of the systems of indexing. ... Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.
The human mind does not work this way. It operates by association. ... Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency.
Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his own shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory.
He then proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system. He named this device a memex.

Gerard Salton (1960s - 1990s):

Gerard Salton, who died on August 28th of 1995, was the father of modern search technology. His teams at Harvard and Cornell developed the SMART informational retrieval system. Salton’s Magic Automatic Retriever of Text included important concepts like the vector space model, Inverse Document Frequency (IDF), Term Frequency (TF), term discrimination values, and relevancy feedback mechanisms.
He authored a 56 page book called A Theory of Indexing which does a great job explaining many of his tests upon which search is still largely based. Tom Evslin posted a blog entry about what it was like to work with Mr. Salton.

Ted Nelson:

Ted Nelson created Project Xanadu in 1960 and coined the term hypertext in 1963. His goal with Project Xanadu was to create a computer network with a simple user interface that solved many social problems like attribution.
While Ted was against complex markup code, broken links, and many other problems associated with traditional HTML on the WWW, much of the inspiration to create the WWW was drawn from Ted's work.
There is still conflict surrounding the exact reasons why Project Xanadu failed to take off.
The Wikipedia offers background and many resource links about Mr. Nelson.

Advanced Research Projects Agency Network:

ARPANet is the network which eventually led to the internet. The Wikipedia has a great background article on ARPANet and Google Video has a free interesting video about ARPANet from 1972.

Archie (1990):(First Search Engine)

Archie.
The first few hundred web sites began in 1993 and most of them were at colleges, but long before most of them existed came Archie. The first search engine created was Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. The original intent of the name was "archives," but it was shortened to Archie.
Archie helped solve this data scatter problem by combining a script-based data gatherer with a regular expression matcher for retrieving file names matching a user query. Essentially Archie became a database of web filenames which it would match with the users queries.
Bill Slawski has more background on Archie here.
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Online Indian languages Dictionary

http://www.shabdkosh.com .This site was conceptualized, designed and implemented by Maneesh Soni in late 2003. He created this site out of passion for Hindi language and for the internet as an enabling technology. His other interests include photography, art, travel, tinkering and flying small planes. He is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India where he studied Electrical Engineering



The online English Hindi dictionary started as a small project with an aim to just make a website in Hindi. Dictionary was chosen as an application because there was no good quality online dictionary at the time and also because making a dictionary involves lot of challenge. The first version was a very simple site with about 15,000 words from the public domain dictionary compiled by Ram Narain Lal in 1936. Over time, the vocabulary was improvised and today it has tens of thousands of words. This site has grown in popularity because of its easy interface and strong vocabulary database
This site supports 9 different language  you can type word in English and get meaning in below mention language or vice versa

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Thursday, September 16, 2010

Internet Explorer 9 is the new edition of Microsoft's hugely popular web browser

Internet Explorer 9 is the new edition of Microsoft's hugely popular web browser. Building on the success of previous editions of IE with new features and a new look, Microsoft has high hopes for Internet Explorer 9.

The first thing you'll notice about Internet Explorer 9 is an overhauled interface. Making the most of the transparent graphical style available in Windows 7 and newer editions of Windows Vista, IE 9 looks sleek, smart and simpler than ever before. Like in Google Chrome, the Address bar and Search box have been merged to create a simpler, more seamless user experience.

Among the new features included in Internet Explorer 9 are better integration with the Windows operating system and a seriously beefed-up security system. IE 9 also lets you 'pin' websites to the Superbar and allows you to bookmark your favorite websites as 'applications' in your OS. The new Performance Advisor add-on identifies add-ons that are slowing Internet Explorer down (a feature badly needed in Mozilla Firefox).

Internet Explorer 9 also offers improved speed and performance, as well as better compliance with web standards and new technologies. IE 9 features decent support for HTML 5 (the new generation of media-rich websites use this language), and now finishes the Acid 3 test with a near-perfect 95/100. New features like hang recovery and InPrivate Filtering provide Internet Explorer a stabler and more secure web experience than most other browsers.

In all, the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 is faster and prettier than its predecessors - and really throws down the gauntlet to its competitors. Watch out: the browser wars just got exciting again.

Languages:

English 

OS requirements for Internet Explorer:

OS: WinVista/7

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Saturday, September 11, 2010

Get a new extra email Address for your Google Account

There are quite a few ways by which you can create multiple email addresses inside Gmail.
For instance, if your email address is test@gmail.com , any email that’s addressed to either te.st@gmail.com or te+st@gmail.com will also be delivered to your main inbox since Gmail ignores dots and anything that’s after the plus symbol in email usernames.
Therefore, theoretically speaking, you get an unlimited number of email addresses with one Gmail account. This gets even more interesting if you are using Gmail with Google Apps

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Google Instant Search

Features: Google Instant


As you start to type your search terms, Google Instant automatically shows results for a popular search that begins with those letters. If you don't see the results you want, just keep typing and the results will dynamically update. Connect to the information you need faster, even before you finish typing your search!

How it works

The basics of Google search are the same, including how results are ranked and how Google determines relevant results. What has changed is the path you can take to get to relevant results. Here's what happens when you search:
  1. Start to type. As you type a search on Google, the homepage automatically starts displaying your search results -- no need to press Enter. A list of predicted queries is generated using the autocomplete algorithm. These predictions are displayed in a drop-down menu below the search box.
  2. See results. The algorithm tries to predict what the rest of your query might be based on popular queries typed by other users. The first prediction is shown in light grey in the search box, and the search results you see instantly will be for that predicted search. If instead you want to see results for only the text you've typed, just press Enter or click the Search button.
  3. Type more, see more. If you continue to type, we'll dynamically update the search results to match the first prediction for what you've typed.
  4. Refine your search. Don't find the information or website you want? It's easy to refine your search after seeing what results appear. Here are some options:
    • If you see what you're looking for in the list of predicted queries, click the query to see relevant results.
    • Use your keyboard's down arrow key to scroll through the list of predicted queries, and see results appear for each query you pause over.
    • Continue typing your query until the results show what you're looking for. As always, you're still able to type your full query and press Enter or click the Search button.

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