IT Masala

The Best Employers in Asia 2007 study, conducted by Hewitt Associates and presented in partnership with The Wall Street Journal Asia, provides a definitive benchmark against which you can measure how effective an organisation is in providing a workplace that engages the intellectual and emotional commitment of its employees.

Make a video of the special thing in your pocket and share it with the world. The Video with the most number of hits will make it to the hall of fame, and if yours if judges the best of that week , you'll win a brand new Nokia N95.

Click here to participate .Win Nokia N95 

[ Win Nokia N95 ]

Nokia N95, a much-awaited smartphone with a unique handset design has started shipping in India. Nokia is never slow…their range of products is simply amazing.. Its just been 4 months in 2007 and Nokia is pretty fast ..recently it had launched N93i and now its N95.With this launch of N-95 ,the best in the hybrid N series ,Nokia is on top of the world !

Lets look at some of the features it has :

• HSDPA (3.5G) and GSM Quad-band
• 2.6-inch TFT LCD (240 x 320 pixels)
• GPRS, EDGE, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP and USB v2.0
• Built-in GPS navigation
• Symbian OS 9.2, Series 60 rel. 3.1
• WAP 2.0/xHTML & HTML support
• 5.0-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, flash and image stabiliser
• 160MB onboard memory with microSD expansion of up to 2GB (128MB included)
• 3.5mm audio output jack
• Stereo FM radio
• Office Document Viewer
• Built-in Handsfree
• Battery Life: Up to 220h (standby), Up to 6h 30 min (talk time)
• Dimensions: 99 x 53 x 21 mm
• Weight: 120g

What i liked is its navigation with its cool touch screen facility..

Some pictures :

The price of this new Nokia N95 is expected to be around 550 GBP (around Rs 48,000), which would make it the most expensive phone in India.

Surely a dream phone , but pretty expensive too..anyway..

A job well done to Nokia

via [ Nokia ] 

Adobe Systems plans to open-source Flex, its development framework for building Flash and Apollo-based applications.

What is Flex ?

Flex is one of a growing number of alternatives for building so-called rich Internet applications, which sport an interactive front-end interface. Using the development framework, programmers create an application that can run within Adobe's Flash Player or Apollo, its "player" for desktop applications. 

What the package includes:

The company said it will open-source the Flex software development kit, which includes a compiler and libraries designed to speed up development. It plans to continue to sell Flex Builder, an Eclipse-based development tool, and Flex Data Services, server software for accessing corporate databases. 

The company chose to create an open-source project for the Flex software to garner good ideas and contributions from developers outside Adobe, said Jeff Whatcott, vice president for product marketing at Adobe's enterprise and developer business unit.

The move is also meant to appeal to open-source developers who shun closed-source and proprietary products. Adobe already offers the Flex software development kit for free and provides the source code.

"For some people, (open source) is a philosophical requirement, a sign of integrity and trust in a vendor," Whatcott said. "This will close that gap and address any lingering doubts they have about our openness and commitment to community."

via [ adobe ]

European astronomers have spotted what they say is the most Earth-like planet yet outside our solar system, with balmy temperatures that could support water and, potentially, life. They have not directly seen the planet, orbiting a red dwarf star called Gliese 581.

"This one is the first one that is at the same time probably rocky, with water, and in a zone close to the star where the water could exist in liquid form," said Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, who led the study.

About the Planet :

"We have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius (32 to 104 degrees F), and water would thus be liquid."

Most of the 200 or so planets that have been spotted outside this solar system have been gas giants like Jupiter. But this one is small.

"Its radius should be only 1.5 times the Earth's radius, and models predict that the planet should be either rocky, like our Earth, or covered with oceans," Udry said in a telephone interview.

It appears to have a mass five times that of Earth's. Gliese 581 is among the 100 closest stars to Earth, just 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra.

via [ Reuters ]

Note : A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles. 

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This has some nice instant previews, lots of layout, color and gradient settings, custom header graphics and download of individual files as well as a neatly packaged zip. For all the new bloggers, here is one very good site to get your own themes rather than fighting your way with the code ..etc..

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[ WP Theme Generator ] 

Hugh MacLeod asks, if open source is so great, where are all the open source billionaires?

If Open Source software is free, then why bother spending money on Microsoft Partner stuff? I already know what Microsoft's detractors will say: "There's no reason whatsoever. $40 billion per year is totally wasted."

This, however is not a very satisfying answer, simply because it doesn't quite ring true. Otherwise there'd be a lot more famous Open Source billionaires out there, being written up in Forbes Magazine or wherever. And Bill Gates would've been ousted years ago.

Hubble celebrates its 17th anniversary and gives the world a big present—a 29,566 x 14,321 pixel image (500 MB TIFF image) of the Carina Nebula*. For those who don't feel like downloading the entire TIFF image, there is a JPEG available for download from the same site; however, it is still nearly 250MB in size(pretty big).  If you click on the image shown here in this article, you will get a  download-friendly version of the spectacular image. 

This painterly picture brings the total number of images that Hubble has taken since 1990 to nearly 500,000.

(See a photo gallery of Hubble's top ten discoveries.)

To date, the telescope has made nearly 800,000 observations of more than 25,000 celestial objects and has traveled 2.4 billion miles (3.8 billion kilometers)—the equivalent of flying to Saturn and back.

* Note: The link to the image is NOT the full size image, but a page where you can download it or wallpapers of the image. The image Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Now watch this space below for some unique viewing experience !! 

Observe the love for open source:  (pretty amazing observation )

MathRockBrock writes on arstechnica article :

Anybody else notice the Firefox logo floating out there in Image 7, "The Carina Nebula from the ground"?

Note: First image unedited JPEG (except for the box). Second image cropped and resized only from the full-size NASA TIF. Third image from my desktop.

"FON is still giving away their wireless routers for free in Germany and Austria until Wednesday — under the premise that the devices will be connected and used as FON access points.

The router, called 'La Fonera,' is a variant of OpenWRT, but locked down to prevent modification, including a signed firmware image to prevent the upload of new software. It is, however, possible to get shell access by connecting to a serial port present on the circuit board.

And now two students from Germany have discovered vulnerabilities in the CGI scripts used to configure the device, and successfully activated an SSH daemon on the device by exploiting them, giving owners a root shell on their router. They also provide a detailed description of the procedure and 'ready-to-use' perl scripts to open up your router."

The La Fonera router attaches to a Time Warner broadband Internet connection and becomes a FON Wi-Fi access point that supports 802.11b/g wireless. The La Fonera router has two separate wireless channels, one a secure channel for the owner, and the other an open channel for other Time Warner users that are part of the shared network.

what is FON ?  

According to founder Martin Varsavsky, „FON is a global community of people who share WiFi connections. We call these people "Foneros", as a tribute to our heritage as a Spanish company. In order to become a Fonero, you go to FON, to download software that you install in your router, you place your antenna by a window and you share bandwidth with other Foneros from anywhere in the world. You can also buy the FON Ready router from our web site, plug and play. FON creates a free WiFi roaming environment for those who contribute WiFi signals, namely those who have already signed up with a local ISP and downloaded our software into their WiFi routers.”

The users may sign up to FON in three ways:

they can be Bills, Linus or Aliens. Strange isn't it ? The explanation is quite simple:

- A Linus (who are called like this after Linus Torvalds) shares his/her bandwidth for free with other Foneros,

- Bills (of course named after Bill Gates) share their bandwidth for a small fee.

- Aliens who don't share their bandwidth at all.

La Fonera router is secure out-of-the-box and offers two distinct WiFi channels. One channel is for the exclusive use of its owner; the second channel is shared with other Foneros. The La Fonera increases security through an encrypted private network and Foneros decide how much bandwidth to share. Public users cannot access the private network and there is no anonymous usage.

Also see : [ Hacking the La Fonera ]