Apple Ready To Revolutionize The Smart TV Segment

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Monika Jha

After revolutionizing mobile technology, Steve Jobs had visioned to conquer the living rooms by fashioning an easy to use Smart TV, which would be integrated with all iDevices and iCloud. In Jobs’ vision, the TV’s simple design would do away with the need for several different remotes and would feature an incredibly user-friendly interface. Quite a lot is being articulated about the Apple TV as Steve Jobs’s ambitious project that seems to have cracked the final puzzle leading to a revolution in the TV industry. As per many reports, Apple is working on Smart TV for more than a year and those reports were firmed that Apple will be launching 32- and 37-inch versions of a dedicated Apple television set in the second or third quarter of 2012, according to supply chain sources speaking to DigiTimes on Tuesday.  Before these publish, the only proof of the news was available in the Job’s biography.

In the same way that the iPhone revolutionized the smartphone market by providing a vast amount of content, an Apple television could dramatically change television viewing by not only just just watching cable television, movies and TV shows on an iOS based Apple Television, but also by playing games, running apps, sharing what you’re watching or playing on the television and lots more. Jobs was hoping to revolutionize the television experience, and if anyone could produce a better design, more interactivity (with features like Siri, FaceTime, Apps, and iTunes), and a stellar interface, he could. It is believed that the price of Apple TV could potentially be two to three times higher than other TVs in the market. A senior executive of Apple conveyed “In our view, features such as Siri, FaceTime, the App Store, iTunes and gaming are a natural fit for a full blown Apple TV, combined with potential new features and technologies in the future”. Thus, Whatever its price, there’s no doubt that an Apple smart TV would be an instant hit with Apple enthusiasts and consumers looking for a superior home entertainment solution.

 
With the success of Smart TV , Apple’s smart TV will be a great opportunity for the company to further expand its position in the video game market. Hence, Apple will sightsee another prospect to reinvent a different product category and develop even closer ties with its customers, by greater simplicity and innovation.

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RSS parser Ruby

Posted on October 24, 2011 by piyush


require 'rss/2.0'
require 'open-uri'

open("http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml?edition=int") do |response|
ping_successful = response.status[0] == "200" ? true : false
if ping_successful
content = response.read
rss = RSS::Parser.parse(content, false)
rss.items.each do |item|
puts item.link
puts item.title
puts item.description
puts item.date
puts item.author
puts item.category
puts item.comments
puts item.full_name
puts item.source
puts item.tag_name
end
puts rss.channel.language
end
end

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Sending emails using Gmail and Ruby

Posted on October 17, 2011 by piyush


require 'net/smtp'

message = <<MESSAGE_END
From: sender@gmail.com
To: recipient@gmail.com
Subject: Sending emails using Gmail and Ruby
Wow ! This is easy !
MESSAGE_END

smtp = Net::SMTP.new 'smtp.gmail.com', 587
smtp.enable_starttls_auto

smtp.start('gmail.com','sender@gmail.com', PASSWORD, :plain) do |smtp|
smtp.send_message(message,'sender@gmail.com','recipient@gmail.com')
end

Posted in Rails Training Course, Ruby on Rails Training | Leave a comment

Steve Jobs: Life ends but legacy remains……

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Monika Jha

Three apples changed the lives..- first with Adam, second fell on Newton and third by Steve. We all would have read the journey of Apple from Silicon Valley garage started in 1976 to  a $351 billion company, one of the planet’s most successful companies. The glory of this transformation, of course goes to the Apple’s Team but forced behind the team was surfaced by the visionary and innovator Mr. Steve Jobs.  The hard- driving executive built one of the world’s leading tech companies and revolutionizes the world of mobile – computing with its extensively popular devices like iPhone, iPad, and iPod. One of the New York Times columnists Joe Nocera said in August “Steve Jobs is one of the great innovators in the history of modern capitalism. His intuition has been phenomenal over the years.” He helped change computer as a geeky hobbyist to the necessities of modern day technology world and made an integral part of our lives.

Jobs was not only a visionary, he was also a fighter, who battled cancer since 2004. The battle ended today morning; a heartrending news today flashed the end of the god of innovation. The news came a day after the launch of iPhone 4s, which got a very lukewarm reception among its customers and shareholders.    However, the cancer could only kill the physical body of  the creator of Apple, not the soul, which is left behind and would always stay in his novelties.  Steve Jobs said that the knowledge that he could die soon impacted all his life choices. A reminder to us all to live for TODAY, and he tried his best to bring a change EVERYDAY to this world. In a speech in Stanford university graduate in 2005, he told, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future, You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life”.  He has always been a good orator and through his speeches, inspired the generations.

With the demise of Mr. jobs , there is a vacuum created not only in Apple but in the whole universe , wherever personal, mobile computing and music has its existence. It is going to be extremely difficult to fill his shoes, even though steve has left behind many of his replications.

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Anna Hazare – Gandhian of New Era

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Monika Jha

We all are aware of the heat running through out the country regarding the most talked anti corruption bill- Jan Lokpal Bill. Ex- army personnel turned social activist Anna Hazare is the vanguard in the protest against the government’s proposed Lokpal bill and he managed in successfully captivating the already agitated “Aam Admi” who are fed up of malpractice – India has been rocked by a string of corruption scandals in the preceding few years. Anna has a background of fighting against corruption in Maharashtra from years and now he has taken a responsibility to exterminate corruption, not only from one state but also from the whole country.

Thousands of Protesters swelled across India ,to support the self- styled Gandhian’s fast up to death anti-corruption campaign.  This campaign is arising a hope among all Indians who want to see India as a corruption free state. Mr. Hazare’s tactics appears astute.  He and his squad have declared that this pressure on government will not be eased till the time their demands are not accepted. This fast up to death, as a form of protest is an accepted weapon since Mahatama Gandhi’s days and this anti- corruption movement is being names as the second war of freedom, which isn’t against the British rule but against the sleaze that prevails within the country. However, we fail to compare the difference in both the situations. Mahatma Gandhi used this tool under a very unique situation, when India was under a foreign rule and didn’t have a democratic set up, where as Anna and his squadron is following this protest in an Independent and democratic India where various forms of democratic mobilization and advocacy are available to them. Apart from the difference in situation, lets talk about the difference in the moralities of the supporters.  Amongst the enthusiasts who have come on the street to fight corruption, themselves have not ever followed the path of corruption? How many of them have paid their taxes on time, never taken bribe, forged documents to get compensation, never tamper with the electricity meter? What an irony, people who themselves are corrupt are fighting against corruption. First we need to sweep our inner dirt and then start scrubbing others.

We can’t deny the fact that the cause for which Mr. Hazare is fighting for is correct and if implemented the way he wants can give a rebirth to India, which can actually embolden – India Shining. However, there are many hidden ifs and buts in its success. Corruption is a complex malaise in India. It is rooted in opaque and badly run institutions that have been fostered and tolerated over the years. It is become an unavoidable part of our lives. We don’t hesitate to give Rs. 100 after breaking the traffic signal or paying Rs. 500, just to pass my verification process of passport application. There are many such incidences, where we don’t even think before heading towards the path of venality. Thus, the virus of corruption has assimilated not only at top-level officials but also in our daily undertakings. Thus a movement should start to eradicate corruption within us to list India on the top among the world’s corruption free sate. Consequently, An over-focus on the executive dimensions of the problem while neglecting the moral dimensions of it will maintain and exacerbate the existing tensions on this issue.

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My three beautiful years with Allerin Technologies

Posted on July 28, 2011 by Monika Jha

On July 28, 2008, Mumbai was all wet, rain was pouring heavily. I was waiting for rain to sojourn, as I had to start my new path towards a new career. I was anxious and nervous too, because I didn’t want to be late for my new start. I started for my office and managed to reach on time. When I entered my small but a very beautiful office and I saw my collogues, whom I was not introduced until then, had already started their day. I was edgy but excited too. Then, I saw a Compaq laptop placed at one corner of a bay.  That was my place to operate. Then the day for me actually commenced. After accomplishing with the joining formalities I was all set to roll on. Things don’t seem to be rosy and it was not actually when I started but what was easy was communicate my ideas, my suggestions to the top brass of this syndicate. I was happy because I was being heard in Allerin. I had a vast podium to innovate and then implement my innovations. I had always desired to work in an organization where I shouldn’t just carry forward the already existing system, I always desired to initiate and implement the system.

Today, on July 28,2011, I completed 3 years with Allerin Technologies. 3 years is not a big span of time, nonetheless too small also. In these three years, I got a chance to see all the shades within me. I actually experienced the mantra of Allerin that “SIMILARITY ENDS WHEN YOU JOIN ALLERIN” and with these 3 years of quality experience; I have actually progressed as a diverse person, professionally more enriched and personally more mature. In these 3 years, I discovered that my views, ideas, suggestions are being respected and treated as valuable. Allerin’s management is not convicted of monopolistic practices. Members working here are not as just another resource but they are seen as the future of this organization. It’s invigorating to work at a company where you can trust that the upper echelon is smart, hardworking, and making right decisions and the most amazing thing is if you get a chance to share the table with them. These factors worked as a magic bullet in the shaping and extemporizing my professional career. I always desired to do work with an association where my individuality is not changed but never thought do I deserve this. When I stepped in Allerin, I also understood the real significance of deserve and desire. Thus, as I started spend more time in Allerin, gradually I was very clear about what I desire and what I deserve. Today, I am a totally transformed individual than I was before wearing a crown of being an Allerian. The journey with Allerin is still not over, I have to go long way with it and contribute more in its further progression.

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HR Intelligence: An integral part of organizational growth

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Monika Jha

As we all are aware and understand that data and information, as a commodity has little importance to an organization, unless it is transformed into meaningful intelligence.  In this age of information and speed, not all data available is important. Due to the huge pool of data, it could be conflicting, incomplete, irrelevant etc. to the subject. What needed is the type of alchemy that transforms data and information into intelligence. Thus, as per the requirement, the data is fragmented, analyzed intelligently and then used. Business in all industry demands intelligent and real-time data for strategic creation, execution, organizational learning and decision-making. The systematic and ongoing process of ethically and legally gathering data and information on targets such as customers, personnel,adversaries,competitors,  technologies and the overall business environment is called Competitive intelligence. Human resource, being an integral part of an organization, is quickly heading towards being a strategic business partner and becoming a fast emerging mandate for organizations seeking strategic competitive advantage through system

The concept of Competitive intelligence was originally developed by US government i.e. NAS and CIA, and used extensively in cold war. The notion has been very enthusiastically amalgamated in Human resource professionals today. Traditionally, decisions taken by Human resource professionals were mostly influenced by hunches, trends and fads, and the popular press tend but later they comprehended that most of the times decisions taken were not appropriate. Gradually, these premonition-based approaches were overtaken by evidence-based approach whereby science and empirical evidences drive business decisions and strategies; consequently, companies are building strategic capabilities and competitive advantage through data-driven analytics and intelligence. HR professional’s battle for strategic legitimacy and to accomplish the evidence based approach, they have given rise to a plethora of methods and techniques such as balanced scorecards, HR metrics, organizational and employee surveys, selection research, multi-rater feedback systems and360-degree and benchmarking approaches. In this war of talent, our HR system should be proactive to scrutinize and correspond data using insightful people research and analytics. It’s very important for HR professional to fathom a very holistic and systematic approach, because there is no technological solution, which is going to produce a magical transformation without the usage of human intelligence and transform all HR related information and data at our disposal.

Establishing effective HR practices can also help an organizational strategist and decision makers to ameliorate their decision-making capability. If human and intellectual capital goes hand in hand, organization develops a competitive advantage. Thus, if human and intellectual capital is indeed a company’s greatest source of competitive advantage, then it is incumbent on HR to play a central role in understanding and measuring an organization’s most valuable asset: its people

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Ruby on Rails Training

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Monika Jha

Ruby on Rails- Future of web application development

Ruby on Rails is an elegant, dynamic, compact and exciting web application framework, used to develop dynamic websites.  In very less time ROR has emerged and established itself as one of the fastest growing programming languages.  However, in spite of being one of the forerunners in the technology market, it is not well known among most of the IT professionals.  It is not incorporated in our academic curriculum.  Due to this lack of cognizance among the techies, this jubilant technology is not getting much space, as it should have.  Presently, ROR is a small community, however it has a high potential to challenge many well-established giants like JAVA, ASP .NET etc.

Even after so much of reluctance and challenges of not getting required resource willing to work on this technology, many companies irrespective of their size (big, medium or small) have started working on this fantastic technology.  To full fill the demand of resources, many companies provide training on Ruby on Rails and groom their in-house resources. During the ruby on rails training, many developers apprehend the philosophy of this technology and see their career growth in this.  Developers who are acquainted  with this technology are harnessing all the possible opportunities to walk hand in hand with it, which could come up as a dominant web development environment.  While most of the development environment vying for adhesion, the ROR Web development framework is considering the emergence of a vibrant and growing ecology supporting the technology’s own growth.  Successful companies, which are benefited from the rapidity and agility of developing applications in Rails those results in amplified productivity and growth of the company, have propelled the rising demand for Ruby on Rails.

Moreover, growth of Ruby on Rails has become a debatable topic among the experts.  Some has predicted that it will flourish at a commendable rate and come up as the future of web development, whereas, some experts predict that the future of ROR is bleak and growth couldn’t be assured and it is a less efficient language than others.  It doesn’t have the capability of dwarfing the dominance of JAVA, which has almost become an eternal part of software development.  The efficiency dispute is not economically comprehensive. The vast chunk of application costs is development, training, marketing and sales.  The expense of compute cycles as a portion of overall application incidentals is minute and dwindling fast.  But for the companies where compute cost is a major distress, ROR is becoming more competent because of its latest accomplishments: JRuby, Ruby 1.9, and Rubinius.  So training in Ruby on Rails will pave an entirely new direction in the world of technology for these companies who look out for cost effective measures to grow.  With many mushrooming companies increasingly focused on delivery of information instead of delivery of physical product, many of them preferred Rails to build applications faster, at lower cost and, hence, lower risk.  These companies are leveraging ROR software developing and delivery economics in the fundamentals of their products development.

Nevertheless, as a ROR trained professionals, let us not get predisposed with any of the experts’ opinion but prognosticate based on the statistics available from various authentic sources.

Posted in Ruby on Rails Training | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Another social network is on its way- Google +

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Monika Jha

There are many reasons today for Facebook owners to be worried of, like users are getting bored of using Facebook, number of users are declining at a tremendous rate, users are complaining that their privacy are being tampered due to the available data on Facebook and it is not being properly taken care off etc., and one more is added to these reasons. Goggle has announced its latest attempt to capture social networking market with the plan to launch Google+. So  Google + is launched with an intention as “Facebook Killer”.

Apart from the features similar to Facebook, Google+ has many exciting and advanced features, which can overtake the Web’s premier social networking service provider’s market. The major difference between Facebook and Google+ is that instead of having a massive friend list, users collect each other into groups, such as family, work and friends, called “circles.” From close family to foodies, people already use real-life circles to express themselves, and to share with precisely the right folks. So Google did only thing that made sense: with the help of Google+ these circles are brought to software. Just make a circle, add your people, and share what’s new—just like any other day. It has Hangout feature, as the name suggests, this feature is all about hanging out with your buddies, virtually, or Couse. User can choose specific friends, or circles, to invite for a face-to-face video chat and anyone in the Hangout can invite others to join as well. According to Google’s demo: “Until teleportation arrives, it’s the next best thing”. We’re not sure about that – it’s basically just video calling. Sparks is another interesting feature. Tell Sparks what sort of stuff you’re into and it’ll send you things that you might be interested in that you can then watch, read or share. For example, you could type ‘Films’ into the search box and see what comes up. If you like the results, then you can click the ‘Add Interest’ button to add Films to your list of important subjects. Another interesting feature is Hurddle. With the help of this feature user can do group texting. These are the few features, which Google claim itself to be different from other social networking sites. Google+ integrates with other Google services. If you use multiple Google services, you’ll especially welcome Google+. Conversations in it show up in Gmail. You can share photos from Picasa using it.

However the main concerns with most of the social networking sites are their privacy issues. Due to the privacy issues most of the users have left using social networking sites and thus the number of users have been shrunk to a large degree. So what has Google+ done to address this issue? That will only be visible when Google+ will be usable. For now Google+ can only be accessed with a special Field Trial invitation, which Google has been sending out at random to Gmail users. But the question is, do we really need another social networking site? As in this world of social networks relationships are becoming web dependent. We are more interested in virtual relationships. We have stopped finding new friends in our neighbor or in our colony, rather we like finding new friends on Facebook, Orkut etc. and like to share our views, opinions, emotions etc with them. By this way many of us are going far one who is staying close to us and close to one who is very distant. So are these social networks bringing an emotional dis-balance in the society?

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment

Select multiple option without CTRL Click (or Cmd-Click on Mac)

Posted on June 24, 2011 by piyush


$(document).ready(function(){
customizeMultiSelect();
});

function customizeMultiSelect(){
$('.customize_multiselect option').click(function(){
var select = $(this).parents("select:first");
var option = $(this);
var option_selected = $.inArray(option.val(), select.val()); // return true if clicked option is selected else false

var option_values = new Array(); // use map to avoid iteration
$.each(select.find("option.clicked"), function(){
option_values.push($(this).val());
});

if (option.attr("class").length == 0 || option.hasClass("unclicked")){
option.removeClass('unclicked').addClass('clicked').css({'background-color' : '#316ac5'});
option_values.push(option.val());
} else {
option.removeClass('clicked').addClass('unclicked').css({'background-color' : 'none'});
option_values.splice(option_values.indexOf(option.val()), 1);
}
select.val(option_values);
});
}

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