iPod Video Rocks!

Bought an iPod Video and i'm in love with. Its so small and delicate it almost makes you not want to touch it. Black looks so good on it.

There are a few irritations like you don't have a Giffin iTrip transmitter for a video iPod yet. You can substitute a iCarTrip which charges and tunes your video iPod but guess what?! The channel selection for the tuner starts from 88.1 FM and unfortunately in Dallas 87.9 is the only free channel ..uuugh! It does work on 92.3 with a bit of noise. I wanted to rip out the antenna on my Accord but i couldn't find it and settled instead for a much saner option:
I went and bought a tape adapter from RadioShack and it plays out of my car stereo it plays with awesome clarity and i'm so happy with it. Today i ordered a skin from a vendor called iStyles, i'm sort of surprised that Apple's ipodstore does not have skins for the video iPod yet.

Another thing that i found was tough to do was trying to copy music from my friends iPod to mine. I did not have permissions to play any song that he had purchased on iTunes on my iPod. iPod organizes all the music on its harddisks on wierd folders which look like f02, f03 and so on and does not order them from by playlist. I had to copy over 10 GB of music from my Friends iPod to his laptop to my iPod and then had to access my iPod through my itunes and drag and drop songs that i needed onto playlists on my itunes and sync them up to my iPod !!!!! Really cumnersome huh! Wonder if there is an easier way to do this.

Well once these initial things are sorted out, i must admit i just cannot live without an iPod. I now interface it to my car, my amp and use it like a normal mp3player and have it on me all the time. The photo slideshow is awesome. I haven't figured out much use for the video feature yet.
All said and done iPod video black Rocks!

20 Fun Things to do before you turn 30!

I just came acros a list of 20 fun things to do before turning 30. Really interesting!

1 Visit Copacabana beach in Brazil
2 Take a ride in a Hot Air Balloon
3 Go Base Jumping
4 Travel on the Darjeeling train route
5 Drive down GT Road across India (1600 Miles)
6 Do a cross country drive on a Harley across United States
7 Climb Mount Everest
8 Visit the Edge of the American continental plate, known as the crack in the earth at Pingvellier.
9 Camp in a Rain Forest
10 Take a trek to see Mountain Gorillas in Rwanda
11 Vizit Mozart's Salzburg
12 Go Sky Diving
13 Go Base Jumping in Idaho
14 White water Rafting in the Ganges
15 Go Snorkelling in the Bahamas
16 Fly a Mig 29 in Russia
17 Tango in the Streets of Buenos Aires
18 Go Trekking in Ladakh
19 Visit an Active Volcano
20 Bungee Jumping in Ottawa - The Great Canadian Bungee Jump

I'm a Sun Certified Java Associate!

Never thought much about certifications, till i gave this one and received all the Bling bling on passing the certification. Its sort of tempting to hang such stuff in your cubicle, besides sun's color combinations for certificates rocks!

Passive Optical Networks - Coming Back to Light

INTRODUCTION

The last mile, local loop, access network, these are various terminologies used to qualify that part of a telecom network, which provides broadband services to business and residential users. It’s this last mile that remains a potential bandwidth bottleneck between a high capacity LAN, a home network and a backbone.

There has been a deadlock kind of a situation between consumers, content providers and network operators. More bandwidth requires more revenue from the consumers. Consumers don’t want to pay for more bandwidth because they don’t receive any service that requires more bandwidth; the Service Providers are not providing any new services because there is no network infrastructure to support these kinds of services and Network Operators are not willing to provide services, because consumers are not paying for bandwidth!!

There has been a resolution to this problem as far as long haul networks are concerned with the advent of optical backbones on the long haul networks leading to incredibly high speeds of transmission and more available bandwidth, but when it comes down to the local exchange, copper still prevails because it’s the cheapest option. Thus the consumers are not able to enjoy the benefits of high bandwidth access. The solution to this dilemma is seen in the form of optical access networks called “Passive Optical Networks”.

THROWING LIGHT ON PASSIVE OPTICAL NETWORKS

A Passive Optical Network is an optical network, which takes optical fiber right to the customer premises instead of copper. The idea of an Optical Access was conceived in 1995 by a consortium of carriers and vendors called the Full Service Access Network. (FSAN) This group now comprises of companies like Alcatel, BellSouth, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, Fujitsu, SBC, Lucent, NEC, British Telecom, French Telecom and so on.

A Passive Optical Network is called so, because it does not use any Active electronic components (devices consuming power), from the central office to consumer’s premises. The network carries a single strand of fiber, which undergoes a multiway way split to serve 32 consumer installations. This splitting is achieved by means of a passive electronic device called a splitter. The entire process is illustrated in the diagram below.





Source: SBC Communications inc.

This single strand of fiber is capable of carrying network traffic at a rate of 155.52 Megabits per second! , Which is way beyond what existing services (like DSL) offer, thus making this, such an attractive option.


THE BANDWIDTH POTENTIAL

The reason people keep rhapsodizing about the bandwidth factor, is because of potentially wide range of services that it can generate to the consumers. Capitalizing on higher bandwidth access can make the Internet a more viable business place. A few ideas that would have run for the Oscars in the sci-fi category (if there was one!) could become a part of day-to-day life! A few services that consumers could hope to have would be:
a) Video on demand: To watch your favorite blockbusters or TV shows on demand and you would be paying only for what you watch, and the providers would gain by advertisements.
b) News Reports on demand: You would have the choice of which news feed you would like to hear from an array of reporting services
c) Video Conferencing: Colleges would be able to use video conferencing as a tool for distance education.
The major paradigm shift that a higher bandwidth could initiate is a migration from the traditional push technology to a pull technology. The consumers will now have the option of choosing the service that they would like to receive and need not be constrained by what is dished out to them. In turn content service providers could provide a more eclectic blend of services, and the network operators would stand to gain by providing the necessary infrastructure, that hold so much promise. Does this not break that deadlock that we were looking at earlier?!

LIGHT AT THE END OF THE FIBER?

Communications Industry researchers inc, (http://www.cir-inc.com/) have forecasted the following revenues for the US PON Market by 2004.
Fiber to the Home 69.3 Million
Fiber to the Curb 468.5 Million
Fiber to the Building 225.1 Million
Leading to a gross revenue estimate of 762.9 Million dollars.

Passive Optical Network Technology is a part of an evolution, and has all shades of being a viable alternative to the Last Mile Bottleneck at the access layer. There are a lot of hurdles this technology has to overcome, for example the lack of availability of fiber in the access networks, lack of vendors, distance limitations imposed by the lack of amplification or regeneration on the fiber. Barring these few limitations, Passive optical Network is currently the most Hip Hep and Hyped, access layer technology in the wings.


REFERENCES

At UT Arlington there are currently two courses offered by the department of computer science that provides valuable research experience into the fields of access and metro networks and optical networks in general. These courses are Telecom Network Design (CSE 5347) offered by Prof Kalyan Basu and Optical Networks (CSE 5392) offered by Dr Gergely Zaruba.


There are lots of interesting resources available on the net which offer lot of information on passive optical networks, a few of them are:
http://www.lightreading.com/: Carries a lot of articles on optical access technologies
http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~kramer/: Research on PON by Glen Kramer of UC Davis
http://www.terawave.com/: A company that is currently providing Optical Access Solutions.

SCJA Exam Breakup

This post from Javaranch is sort of helpful in understanding the structure of the exam

http://saloon.javaranch.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=84&t=000067

SCJA - Fundamental object oriented concepts 1.1

In my next few blogs i'll be preparing notes on each objective in the Sun Certified Java Associate Beta exam, which i'm planning to take on July 1st.

1.1)Describe, compare, and contrast primitives (integer, floating point, boolean, and character), enumeration types, and objects
____________________________________________________________________

The first important step is to break down the classification of integral types:

---------Integral -> (Integer)byte, short,int,long(Character) char
Primitive Types in Java -----------Float ->Float,Double
---------Boolean --> boolean

Primitive data types represent a range of values in the programming language. If you want to represent these types as objects, then there are corresponding wrapper types viz. Integer,Float,Long etc.

The range of primitive data type is worth memorizing, (I used the table from Mughal and Rassmussen)

ENUMERATION TYPES:

The enumerated type is a new introduction in J2SE 5.0 . Its a type whose legal values consist of a set of constants:

Eg: enum cars(MCLAREN,RENAULT,FERRARI,TOYOTA,BMW,HONDA,SAUBER,JORDAN);

You would use enum types whenever you would want to represent a fixed setof constants (known to you at compile type). Unlike C++ enum in Java is a Class!! Not convincing enough right?! Ok Check this out:

public enum FormulaTeams{
MCLAREN (Raikkonen,Montoya);
RENAULT (Alonso,Fisichella);
FERRARI (Schumacher,Barrichelo);
TOYOTA (Trulli,Schumacher);
BMW (Webber,Heidfeld);
HONDA (Button,Sato);
SAUBER(Villnueave,Massa);
JORDAN (Karthikeyan,Montiero);

private final String driver1;
private final String driver2;

//Note that the constructor is private, it has to be!
FormulaTeams(String driver1,String driver2)
{
this.driver1=driver1;
this.driver2=driver2;
}

public String d1() {return driver1;}
public String d2() {return d2;}

}

public static void main(String args[])
{
for(FormulaTeams f: f.values()){
System.out.println("Standings at the End of 2005");
System.out.println("Driver 1"+f.d1()+"Driver 2"+f.d2());
}
}

Pretty cool huh? try doing the same in 1.4 (I know you'll be using a data structure from java.util.*) . Ok you'll find a better more Object Oriented example here:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/vmspec/2nd-edition/html/Concepts.doc.html#24465


}




A Few Caveats:

a) Integer datatypes are signed integers and are represented by their 2's complement.
b) character values are all unsigned integers that denote 2^16 characters in the unicode character set.
c)Floating point representation can be 32 or 64 bit in width, due to size for representation being finite, most results of floating point computations are finite. To ensure consistency for these approximations across all JVM implementations you can use the "strictfp " modifier.
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/vmspec/2nd-edition/html/Concepts.doc.html#24465
d)There's one limitation of enum types: although enum types are classes, you cannot define a hierarchy of enums. In other words, it's not possible for one enum type to extend another enum type (That wouldn't make sense anyhow)

Random Playlist

My recent Playlist:

Boulevard of Broken Dreams - Greenday
American Idiot-Greenday
B.Y.O.B-System of a down
Sittin here waitin wishin- Jack Johnson
Learning to Fly-Foo Fighters
Somewhere only we Know- Keane
Speed of sound - Coldplay

Data Dictionaries and Metadata:

Its amazing how many J2EE companies these days are building on the concept of Data Dictionaries generating components, the paradigm always existed in .NET and preceding object based technologies released by Microsoft. These data dictionaries seek to capture most of the UI elements that would be required on an application, into the database. These UI elements would include Lookups, Dropdowns, Typeahead lookups, Text Feilds, Users, User Roles from LDAP/AD, Labels and so on. Now if i develop a huge enterprise J2EE application which is not hosted but deployed at different locations, it makes sense for me to persist definitions for these commonly used UI elements and other Business objects on the Database and sort of call it the metadata, generate components from them and have a CRUD interface to edit this metadata and customise these components. This reduces application development to a Metadata editing process. This approach helps a lot of organizations that develop apps like CRM, ERP and so on which are based on J2EE. The engineering team can develop applications and let loose professional service people to generate their applications by editing the metadata and bringing these components to life.

Well the biggest drawback to this widely used approach? More complex the application, more humongous will be the Metadata/Data Dictionary, Plus since its assume to be a simple CRUD operation, I haven't seen engineers impose any rules to configure the metadata based on some Grammar. This creates a huge burden on the person trying to edit the compoents through the metadata in trying to build the application.