My Tech Thoughts and articles

Google Calendar on its way

2006-03-29T06:09:00.000-08:00

http://ihearttheg.blogspot.com/

enjoY!!
Also, for people who believe that 8hrs sleep is necessary or less sleep leads to short life or problems in your near future (go to hell!!). Others, Read these:
1) SleepLess
2) Is Getting Less Sleep Better Than using Sleeping Pill?

Kosmix - search against Vivisimo

2006-02-08T08:56:00.000-08:00

and Google as some are saying.

Kosmix, is a world class search engine that lets people search less, and discover more great stuff. There are billions of pages on the web that are useful, but never see the light of day through a standard search engine. It want to help you find those great pages, and make it easy and fun to do in the process.

Kosmix (currently providing search results only for Health, Travel and Politics) is search engine built on the lines of Vivisimo (except that the categories are pre-defined, in which results are clustered to.)
[In the remaining of this article, whenever Kosmix is termed, it means Kosmix health]
The first page of results are quite similar for both of them. While kosmix only provides the results which are hightly relevant to category (with poor categorization results sometimes), Vivisimo clustering algorithm is much more better and dynamic than kosmix, since all the pages are cateogorized to "appropriate categories" and user can drop (neglect ;-)) the irrelevant categories.
The categories of the Kosmix are predefinded for eg. in case of health, the category listing is.

All Results
Basic Information

Causes
Symptoms
Treatments
Definition

Fitness
Message Boards
Alternative Medicine
Expert Information

Journals

Clinical Trials

Guidelines

Case Studies

Babies & Kids
Blogs
Medical Organizations
Diet & Nutrition
Women's Health
Men's Health

Now, each of the result (if possible) will be categorized into one of the above categories. But the categorization is highly efficient in terms of relevancy of the search term.
This is over all the search results, the relevancy of the search results to the search term is highly efficient. With efficiency + good categorization finding the relevant information becomes quite easy.
Also, 2 categories which I couldn't find in most of the vivisimo results were medicines and the blogs (latter is quite understandable since blogosphere was not so popular and vast at that time).

But, the results of Vivisimo are quite better in the end. I searched for these terms:

Horner Syndrome - Kosmix only provided 391 results with just 3 categories while vivisimo returned 81339 results with categories including congenital, pain , daignosis etc.
Dysentery - Kosmix returned 1823 results with categories being basic info, alternative medicines, message boards, fitness and expert info while vivisimo returned 3,62,400 results categorizing them into different type of dysentry'es, conditions, outbreak, definition etc.

Also, the definitions for the searched terms in Kosmix are always from fixed urls (as it seemed to me), some being:

www.emedicine.com/oph/topic702.htm
www.healthcentral.com/encyclopedia
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?
www.ehealthmd.com
www.medterms.com/
www.cancer.gov
www.health.nih.gov
www.lrp.nih.gov
www.genome.gov
www.mentalhealth.samhsa.gov
www.healthcentral.com
www.ghr.nlm.nih.gov
www.cdc.gov
www.medicalcenter.osu.edu
www.radiologyinfo.org

which are highly technical in medical science terms, while the results of vivisimo even contains the definitions from dictionary.com (if possible, of course), which makes it easy to understand even for lay man.

My Conclusion: Kosmix is just better in the terms of the relevancy of the documents returned and when one wants to study a topic with proper organization as they give results. Otherwise, some specific information can even be looked up in google :-)

Categories in Blogger -- labelr

2006-01-31T13:21:00.000-08:00

labelr (though beta release) is here ..
Finally you can have categories in blogger also. Amit has developed the labelr application which allows you to integrate categories in your blogger template with nearly no effort. ("nearly" because you got to add some lines somewhere in your blogger template :-) )

Once registered, you can add any number of categories to your blog. You can also categorize your existing posts into the new categories. And woah!! you are done. You can look at the sample cases either here or at Amit's site.

labler is easy to use and even provides categorized rss feeds. Unlike Wordpress, labelr provides the ajax-enabled quick and fast view of posts in a given category making going back quite easy ;-)

Checkout this much awaited necessary feature of blogger. Since, labelr is in its beta release, for using it you gotta contact here.

Network Traffic Analysis

2006-01-16T09:15:00.000-08:00

Sometime back I read the book, "Intrusion Signatures and Analysis" (by Mark Cooper, Stephen Northcutt, Matt Fearnow, Karen Frederick). I was very much impressed by the approach authors has devised with the crucial loopholes in typical analysis techniques. They divided the work into following parts:

Probability the source address was spoofed.
Description of attack
Attack Mechanism
Correlations
Evidence of the active Targeting
Severity
Defence Recommendations

Their are enough examples given with most crucial threats analysis. A must read for network security guys.
Sometime then, I was thinking that one can even use IDS engine over these traffic dump to get the alert data and then work over alerts BUT with complete ruleset of snort alert logfile is so huge, that situation is equally combursome as if someone analyzing the traffic dump. [with additional chances of missing new attacks if any since snort is an pattern matching engine]. Some say, why not use correlation engines to decrease the amount of work tobe done on the alert data. But what about the attacks/intrusions which are new (not caught by snort, ofcourse they are very few but new vulnerabilities always keep coming :-().
Ofcourse there are anomaly detection tools like Lancope etc. (even snort has preprocessor plugin namely spade for that) but some issues exists with these tools also.

Recently, I read this article "Structured Traffic Analysis" in (IN)SECURE magazine by Richard Bejtlich (october 2005 issue). The article is simply superb describing 13 step procedure to analyze traffic dump using a lot of "simple" opensource tools including tcpdstat, argus etc. These steps mostly includes generating traffic statistics from various perspectives including traffic protocol distribution, total number of packets, session analysis, IP informations etc. And in the last the snort was used for further analysis of alerts (optional step).
But what was really nice about it was that, it is an approach of "unsupervised anomaly detection techniques" with simple tools in simple steps. May be u can add more tools like tcptrace etc. to get more information but at the abstract level, this was kind of "offline (passive) traffic analysis" to detect anomalous traffic in dump capture. Anomaly detection techniques deploy machine learning/data mining approaches on traffic dump getting stats for the "feature set" from the data. Commonly used "features" are:

no. of distinct sessions created in a time window.
protocol distribution
no. of ack/syn packets

etc. There's a large list of feature set which can be found in research papers. Author here has analyzed few of them very simply, with easily available, known tools (most of them).

Google - Past, present and future

2005-12-09T08:55:00.000-08:00

Google (1998):

Google(2005):

Google(2010-15):

Google(2084):

Source:
web.archive.org
www.google.com
www.nytimes.com [last 2 images]
(edited 22 Jan, 2006)

Issues with pattern matching in Network Intrusion Detection Systems

2005-11-21T12:12:00.000-08:00

Other than Pattern matching “algorithm” decision, there are a lot of other issues that also needs to considered before choosing any one of them. Of course, fast matching is the natural need for the decision but there are some other issues to be kept in mind like fighting false positives example in some cases it is possible that payload contains a pattern for buffer overflow attack via telnet application protocol but what if there was no active telnet session between two hosts. Then, other issue can be what if pattern is split over multiple packets? Some of issues with respect to choice of algorithm and limitations of signature matching has been stated below.

Memory vs Speed
Signature format
Session-Based and Application Level Signature Matching
State Holding issues in-cases of pattern extending over multiple pkts
Packet Fragmentation Issues.
Getting packet dumps or testing data set? (other than attack tools and DARPA set.)

While one always needs to compromise between memory requirements vs speed available. As we can see in the existing algorithms itself, Aho/Corasick provides O(1) time pattern matching but requires quite large memory for the storage of the state machine. While the other string matching algorithms such as Boyer-Moore can lead to O(mn) time requirements in cases of algorithmic attacks. One must need to payoff one depending upon the constraints.

Most of the IDS’s except a few use the byte or character based string as the patterns presentation format. While this is also needed as the most common algorithms used are Boyer-Moore, KMP etc. But if State-machine matching is being deployed then regular expression can provide a better pattern which can be more informative and will be more unique to the attack it is identifying. Other than these, most of the Snort rules do contains multiple patterns with different offset and depth values which can be very well expressed in single regular expression with the usage of basic regex patterns like . and * etc. [1] provides some examples also. Also, Bro contains patterns in regex (regular expression) format itself.

Then, [7] also discusses about the statesful packet matching where IDS stores the information about the context of the traffic between two peers providing more efficient pattern matching results but the overheads involved are the massive because of the information that needs to be stored specific to content of the traffic for large amount of the flows. While over this, one can also provide application level pattern matching to provide even better results.

One of the most important issues with IDS systems is the state holding issue which can be explained as the amount of the information that needs to be stored for each flow flowing
through it. Incase of pattern matching over individual packets, this is not of much concern since this does not even comes into picture. But with the invent of attack packet split over multiple packets, pattern matching has gone to name packet stream matching since now packet needs to be matched over multiple packets, demanding more memory for storing information about session flows and packets flowing, the partially matched patterns, other flow specific data structures etc. Although there is Snort preprocessor for counter-attack to this issue namely Stream4, but these issues are with this plugin also. For how much time, does the information needs to stored before dropping the information, (it should not be the case that IDS declares timeout and drops the session information while the destination host still keeps waiting, or vice-versa). Then, what is the number of maximum sessions that can be stored, since information that needs to be stored can vary from flow to flow.

Continuing the above discussion, issue of fragmented packets [2],[3], [4], [5] even complicate the situation more. Since, some of new issues comes into picture like

Out-of-order arrival of TCP segments
Re-transmitted segments
Overlapping TCP packets hence issues with reassembly
Missing of fragments in between or losing the state of the connection while connection is still alive?
How much data should be buffered (TCP window)
Varying TTL of the fragments for evasion of NIDS. If the NIDS believes a packet was received when in fact it did not reach the end-system, then its model of the end-system's protocol state will be incorrect. If the attacker can find ways to systematically ensure that some packets will be received and some not, the attacker may be able to evade the NIDS.

While Authors in [6] has examined the character and effects of fragmented IP traffic as monitored on highly aggregated Internet links. They had shown the amount of fragmented packets in normal internet traffic and their characterizations, classifications as per the statistics, protocol and application layer. They show that the amount of “fragmented packet” traffic at internet links is less than 1% but there are two cases first they are talking at internet level with good connection speeds and secondly, but what if traffic is fragmented attack specific. These issues pops up some new questions other than existing ones like because different operating systems have unique methods of fragment reassembly, if an intrusion detection system uses a single “one size fits all” reassembly method, it may not reassemble and process the packets the same way the destination host does. An attack that successfully exploits these differences in fragment reassembly can cause the IDS to miss the malicious traffic and fail to alert. While much of these have been solved in existing tools heuristically. The above mentioned papers themselves have discussed few of them. Snort even contains a preprocessor plugin i.e. Frag2 for most of these issues with some assumptions like if next few fragments doesnot arrives in next 30 seconds, it will be dropped, then one can/needs to specify the end hostsystem OS so that specific reassembly is done for that session. Some tools even use bifurcating analysis [5], what it means is if the NIDS does not know which of two possible interpretations the end-system may apply to incoming packets, then it splits its analysis context for that connection into multiple threads, one for each possible interpretation, and analyzes each context separately from then onwards. Some other methodologies has also been discussed in the same paper.

Then, one of the major issue we have come across is the testing of existing approaches. While there exists MIT DARPA Datasets but there are two issues with them, firstly they contain very few attacks and secondly they are of 1998-99 period and since that attack technologies has advanced a lot. Even the attack tools are too specific for producing individual attacks rather a generic traffic in-between including attack packets. While recently,[7] has designed a new tool for IDS testing namely AGENT which takes other than producing ”pattern strings”, also generate other type of traffic like the ones has been described in [5], but then always its also synthetic.

[1] Sommer, R., Paxson, V.: Enhancing Byte-Level Network Intrusion Detection Signatures with Context. In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Computer and Communication Security, Washington, DC (2003) 262-271.
[2] C. A. Kent and J. C. Mogul. Fragmentation Considered Harmful. Computer Communications Review — Proceedings of SIGCOMM’87, 17(5):390–401, August 1987.
[3] Thomas H. Ptacek and Timothy N. Newsham. Insertion, evasion, and denial of service: Eluding network intrusion detection, January 1998. http://www.insecure.org/stf/secnet-ids/secnetids.html.
[4] Judy Novak, Target-Based Fragmentation Reassembly, WhitePaper from Sourcefire Inc., April 2005.
[5] Mark Handley, Vern Paxson, and Christian Kreibich. Network Intrusion Detection: Evasion, Traffic Normalization, and End-to-End Protocol Semantics. In Proceedings of USENIX Security Symposium, August 2001.
[6] Colleen Shannon, David Moore, K. Claffy. Characteristics of fragmented IP traffic on internet links. Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet Measurement, 2001.
[7] Shai Rubin, Somesh Jha, Barton P. Miller: Automatic Generation and Analysis of NIDS Attacks. ACSAC 2004: 28-38

search engines

2005-10-11T02:08:00.000-07:00

uff.. not again!!
Search engines, one of the most discussed topics when it comes to internet :p. And yes am going to discuss on it again with state of the art in it.

Google not the poineers in it, but still poineers in the way of organizing the web in a way that one can search to get what (s)he wants. Yahoo, MSN, askjeeves are other big names in the same field. With ever increasing internet growth, everyone of them is trying to cope up with the large number of web pages build everyday. Everyone is building more tools, incorporating more features into their search facility to attract more users like toolbars etc.

In this feat, Yahoo sometime back said that the pages they are searching are around 19 billion i.e. arnd 2.5 times the google engine shows on their homepage. Google in reply to this removed the no. of pages they are querying from their main page and said that what matters is the quality of results and not quantity (and even if one considers the quantity then one can always match the no. of results returned on yahoo vs google).
MSN on the other hand is trying to beat the google with the way we discussed earlier, and even talks are going on. Here is link to earlier article (i lost a newer one :( )

While big players in this market are fighting for attracting more users via these _useless_ ways rather than trying to improve the quality of search results and providing the users what he wants and not what these engines want to give. Rather than some context based optimizations (or SEO's), I have not read any article since long that anyone of them is working on "invisible web" or even trying to ways to access or crawl it or anyone has some cutting edge technology for the context based search. There are some new startups in search field providing context-based search results but the result list is so small that one cannot rely on them fully.
Vivismo which is their since long, a automatic categorization tool organizes search results into meaningful categories without requiring any preprocessing of documents. Didnot got much success because of the small number of the results that are returned to the user. The categories formed here are more less depend on the various meaning of the search word and/or the various attributes the search phrase may have.
Then, their is KartOO a flash based online search tool which provides a new and interactive kind of experience dividing the search results into various categories. Interesting part is categories are formed based on the categorization of the results rather then some pre-defined taxonomies or meanings.
Grokker is another engine in the market that uses yahoo search power with java technology to categorize the search results in small circles inside a big circle (representing the whole set). Here small circles represents the subsets with some results belonging to that category. The results here are combination of the above two approaches. Where the process is sort of recursive when u enter one of the categories u choose.

The problem with last two is that they provide very few results, so can be used only when one wants some specific information about some topic or field.

But there is new search engine in the market namely, Wink, which is an folksonomy based search engine. Folkosonomy (tagging in lay man langauge) is current approach of categorization showing high acceptance in web 2.0 era. Wink other than using google search API's allows users to tag and rank the search results as per the their choice and then when someone else search for "similar" keyword other than google results, these user driven results are also shown to users.
you can even rank (0-5) and tag the results. I think these options were also used to be there in early search engines. Anyways nice work and cool interface.

Social event management..

2005-10-05T15:59:00.000-07:00

I think this should be in continuation of my previous post :P. But here there are some other minor players also.

Yahoo acuired Upcoming.org, which lets people manage their social calendars, share information about upcoming events like local concerts and festivals, and post events calendars to their own Web sites.

"Upcoming.org is a collaborative event calendar, completely driven by people like you. Enter in the events you're attending, comment on events entered by others, and syndicate event listings to your own weblog.
As Upcoming.org learns more about the events you enjoy, it will suggest new events you never would have heard about."

Upcoming is an interesting tool. The main aim is providing the "local-content offerings" to the people. Google has been working on this long (with the ongoing establishment of Googlenet, google ads, google wifi). Back to social networking, Google is not behind too.. Orkut is there since long and now checkout Calendar.google.com. And yes!!!!!! you are redirected to www.google.com, means there is another tool from google soon.

These are not the only ones. Event managements may be personal, social, commercial or corporate, there is another web based software company 37signals in it. But What I know about them is the basis of their technology is Ruby on Rails whose basis is MVC software architecture (this is new one other than client-server,P2P, OOPs with modular approach, SOA etc.). Some of their current tools,

Tada list, is simple personal todo list. Manage the works u need to do online with a lot of features providing sharing and marking of done work in list.
Then their is backpack, providing a hell lot of features like Organizing do lists, notes, images, and photos, Planning personal or business trip, Collaborate on a new business idea, Gather information for a research project, Build a For Sale page etc..

Also, there is basecamp or Project Management Utopia as they call it :). Providing major benefits like
1) Web-based & hosted — no install/IT
2) Centralize internal communication
3) Gather & archive client feedback
4) Schedule milestones and due dates
With easy setup, blog like simplicity ;) simple permissions, web-based and XML technology its the future of web based software as some call it ;)

Backpack, Ta-da List, and Basecamp (and associated logos) are service marks of 37signals (if it sounds arbit, there is smthing called 43folders also)
Lately(1-2 days back), 37signals also launched wordboard, As site says, Writeboard makes it easy to... Write without fear of losing or overwriting a good idea, Compare different versions of a document, Collaborate with colleagues on copy, proposals, memos, etc. and easy integration with Backpack. Best for business use and of course personal if you are single working company like journalist, blogger, researcher etc.

While upcoming.org is more into social kind of networking, while 37 signals is more into corporate or personal networking. But lets wait for calendar.google and see what ups with google next? But google will have upper hand since its adsense business is already on its best, while yahoo has just launched it smtime back with not even public release as of yet.

Meanwhile, fighting here with yahoo on social networking, Google is fighting with Microsoft on Office tools, joining hands with Sun to provide online office.google.com soon. Google wants to same for web that microsoft did with/for desktops and PCs in end 90's. Waiting since long for Microsoft to show something!!! :-w :-s (more on this sometime later)

I am the best

2005-09-30T11:51:00.000-07:00

"I am the best, I am the best", everyone of google, microsoft and yahoo trying to cope up with each other with new innovations day by day. Ofcourse there is search (keyword, context based, images, videos blah blah) but lets not see to it since one aspect of it involves much technical knowledge while the other one that whose results are better everyone knows which one to use when:)

So, lets start from mail
Hotmail was the first email service and the at the time it was launched, it was the best one can thought of. With a lot of features and 2MB mail space, hotmail was the buzzword at that time. sometime later, Yahoo mail came. Providing a faster experience and a lot of features for playing with text and images. But just few days after the OddPost launch, Google launched its much rumoured mail service Gmail. Based on AJAX and a whole javascript engine, it provided the pine type fastness with same GUI (some think its even better) as yahoo or hotmail.But in the meantime Yahoo bought Oddpost and promised to provide the desktop mail experience to its mail users and it even did it. Read here
But one thing was common in all of them was Advertisements. While they provided free mail services but they were full of side or top banners or google ads.
Hotmail is sort of out of mail except the old users. While the battle has narrowed to yahoo mail vs Gmail. While Google search feature in emails is superior to Yahoo's but the image browsing or even playing with images in Yahoo is incomparable.

Then came the instant messengers (IM's)...
Google with the launch of Gtalk has joined the long battle of MSN vs YM. So now its MSN vs YM vs GTalk.GTalk provides very few features but the simplicity, low CPU usage and Voice over IP feature simply rock in it. YM with the latest release of YM with voice provides VOIP feature with a hell lot of features similar to MSN. But AFAIK most people still use MSN, then comes YM and lastly is Gtalk.

Then are the Maps and earth's (:P)..
All three are boating here too. Yahoo while is only in the field of maps with Maps.yahoo.com
Google and Microsoft are into earth too. While google's earth is awesome and the view it provides is simply superb, MSN alternative is not bad too (may be an underdog, lets wait and see). Look at some images and the features it will be providing here.
Google - maps.google.com, earth.google.com
Yahoo - maps.yahoo.com
MSN - virtualearthinfo.msn.com, mappoint.msn.com

While Personalized Homepages or so called "My" space/yahoo/blog etc..
Google was first to launch blogging with blogger. Yahoo was first for providing My yahoo kind of stuff where one can add a lot of other features and a lot of facilities too. But lately all 3 of them provide the complete package of Personalized pages inbuilt with image managers (even blogging too), rss readers and anything build in with attracting and easy to use GUI's (even with drag and drop features).
Google - http://www.google.com/ig, blogger, hello, picasa
Microsoft - Msn spaces, start.com
Yahoo - yahoo 360, my.yahoo.com

Other Innovations
1) Toolbars - everyone of them has their own toolbars nearly providing the same features.
2) Yahoo Mindset - still a research project at yahoo, ranks the results on 2 basis namely research and market. Then depending upon the ratio of two selected by the user the results are displayed.
3) Google Suggestions and Google I am feeling lucky - While the former one provides the suggestions displaying some auto completions in drop down box, the latter directly takes you to the first result page.
4) Yahoo Instant searchresult - One can think as combination of google suggest and am feeling lucky. Since it shows the first result as dropbox with the link and a short description using AJAX.
5) MSN toolbar + Intellitext - This one provides the 2 features. first context based search on the basis of other opened files and browser windows and secondly secure search ( this sounds interesting since google search is not secure :( ).

Koders vs Codase

2005-09-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

Sometime ago someone told me about Koders, I was happy that code can now be easily searched for and sometimes it helped too especially when u specifically know the function you want to implement and then u can get good results in Koders using the operators like "and", "*" etc.

And the site too says, "A significant portion of application development involves a process of find, copy, paste, and integrate. This process can be greatly accelerated when you can find existing source code that provides a solution to the task at hand."

But I think, this statement should be made by Codase, since Koders do just the normal text search in code rather "context based search". Curently Codase is available only for C,c++ and java. But they are planning to extend it to other languages sooner. Some quotes from site-

Codase is the leading source code search company with advanced source code understanding and xml index/search technologies. Rather than treating code as text, Codase understands programming languages, and treats code as code, the way it's supposed to be. This unique and syntax-aware approach provides the most accurate and detailed search results with fine granularity levels of controls. With Codase, one can search functions, classes, strings, constants, macros, comments and other programming language constructs.

Codase hosts huge amount of open source codes providing a much better coverage, as it covers codes usually hidden inside compressed files and source control repositories, where general search engines fail to find and index. In addition, Codase only indexes and searches high quality codes with every line of code literally validated and compiled by intelligent and powerful source code analysis engine.

Codase is a privately held company based in silicon valley, founded by Dr. Huihong Luo and other veterans. We are a group of innovative and passionate professionals with diverse technologies, business background and proven track of records. We are committed to make Codase the world's best search engine for source codes in terms of features, quality, performance and code coverage. If you are a developer, you may find Codase useful, since improving your coding productivity is our goal.

But the search options like search for method call, method definitation, class definition, class field, variable, field reference and finally just text wise search.

While currently the number of results in Codase are quite small as compared to koders. (for eg. "hello world" search(free text) in Codase resulted in 42 results while Koders resulted 1027 results. But "Codase offers much more than simple text search, in order to take full advantage of its powerful features, you should be familiar with certain programming language concepts. Basically, codase breaks a stream of codes into meaningful programming language constructs, consisting of classes, methods, fields, constants and variables, each of which in turn has definitions and references." making it much more superior than Koders anytime.

Google Wifi

2005-09-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

Another way to access user data :(. After

Google Web Accelerator
Google Desktop Search (in some ways)
Google Mail

Its Google Wifi. While as expected earlier during the making of GoogleNet, that google soon will be offering free Wifi to all. While this is still only available at certain hotspots in San Francisco Bay Area as site[1] says. And of course it works with your corporate VPN (as site[1] says).
All data will pass through google servers, hence they know what are you searching or doing on internet. Localising and improving the advertisements and hence increasing their revenues. But I donot understand how its _free_ until they are not _exploiting_ that information or user data is _secure_ from google.
Some other interesting Facts from [2]:
1) A Google engineer developed the service after recognizing that ``secure WiFi was virtually non-existent at most locations,'' the company Web site says.
While, Google is not the first to offer secure WiFi access. Companies such as JiWire and HotSpotVPN do the same.
2) But the company said on its Web site that ``Google is careful not to store any of that information except as noted here.'' Exceptions include ``some information from your Web page requests.''
"We do this to understand how Google Secure Access is being used and to improve our services,'' Google's privacy policy states.

I think this is another way of increasing their revenues via banners and google ads. And people think google is supporting free and open source technology :-s ??

[1] https://wifi.google.com/faq.html
[2] http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/sv/20050922/tc_siliconvalley/_www12702921

Microsoft way to kill google?

2005-09-24T06:42:00.000-07:00

Last time in my article, Google Beating Microsoft, I discussed the Google approach and the web technology coincide. Hence, how google has a chance of beating of microsoft.

This time its the opposite. A discussion thread, How Microsoft can 'kill' Google at Channel9, dicusses the possibilities of Microsoft kicking Google with cutting a major percentage of their advertising revenue.

One estimate suggested that Google would lose as much as $380m of
advertising revenue if AOL dropped its search engine and took on MSNs. That would cut Google’s profit by something like 25 per cent, potentially giving its huge share price something of a tumble. No wonder Google is thought to be entering the bidding to partner with Time Warner on AOL instead of Microsoft.

Quite Interesting read.

Video Search Giants++

2005-09-19T22:51:00.001-07:00

Much of the search world is trying to provide search features in different vertical segments - classifieds, jobs, blogs, news, images, audio, newsgroups, tech papers, local areas, certain geographical locations and so on - so that the end user may get the most relevant information of his/her interest.
You imagined being able to search for audio content online. You got that via the connection, podscope(for podcasts) etc.
Now, imagine being able to search for video content online. Well, imagine no more.

Truveo[4] is launching a Web crawler that one analyst called “a step ahead” of what Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. have accomplished in video search.
Truveo's "Visual Crawler" is designed to identify the visual apects of a Web application and not just text, as a human would. Using this approach, the company said the crawler is able to locate video that is normally invisible to standard crawlers like google, yahoo and many others .

Truveo claims that its Visual Crawler technology produces more comprehensive and
more up-to-date video search results than competitors.

As expected, Truveo derives its revenue from ad sales and licensing the engine to other destination sites.
Truveo’s advisors and investors include Microsoft Corp. senior researcher Gordon Bell, who developed the minicomputer; Stanford University’s Rajeev Motwani, a technical advisor for Google; Raj Reddy, former dean of Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science department; and Vince Vannelli, former senior vice president of Inktomi.

More Here..
[1] Start–up Truveo enters video search field
[2] Vying to be Captain Video , By Eric Hellweg
[3] Truveo unveils visual video search engine
[4]Truveo

Google beatng Microsoft ?

2005-09-10T03:01:00.000-07:00

In blogging, there is an important debate going on the topic "Why Google Cant beat Microsoft”

Phil made some comments[1] in this topic:

Microsoft wants everyone to have a rich desktop experience; Google wants everyone to have a rich Internet experience.
Microsoft's business model depends on everyone upgrading their computing environment every two to three years. Google's depends on everyone exploring what's new in their computing environment every day.
Microsoft looks at the world from a perspective of desktop + Internet. Google looks at the world from a perspective of Internet + any device.
Microsoft wants computers to help individuals do more unaided. Google wants computers to help individuals do more in collaboration. In the Internet age, who wants to work alone any more, when all the unexplored opportunity is in collaborative endeavor?
In a few year's time, who's going to still be working at a desk anyway?

Agreed that Web 2.0 is more into internet experience rather desktop, but one always needs a “rich” desktop and applications to work on and develop applications and internet.

For his second point, Tim at O’reilly Radar[3] supports this point from the Web 2.0 era’s perspective.
In his second point, he says that Microsoft “demands” the hardware upgradation, while what I see this as with so much advancement in hardware, if we don’t make applications worth those hardware whats the use of hardware. Its not that their applications donot work for old hardware, if that would have been the case then u can certainly kick such statements. They are harnessing the computing power to max providing “new” and “richer” with the benefits of “non-aided” experience of working.

I agree to third point of author. While for the fourth point, Agreed that open source is not expanding but exploding with a large user base and easily available technical help for most tools and products. But then too most of this information is not properly organized and many questions (especially for support) are still unanswered.
Hence, Microsoft is not out and now supporting some Open standards and making some of their technology open source, they are trying to cope up with open source community.

Randy Holloway[2] makes another important point in his reply to Phil’s post which author forgot, i.e. no one still likes to share his data with Google. Rather it’s not about liking; it’s about the data security and user privacy. People are not sure whether their data is “secure” with the products like GMail and Google Web Accelerator.

While Scoble[4] thinks the question should rather be “How do you thrill audiences?". Supporting his arguments, he says MSN has already done it with Windows 95 and Halo2 and there are more to come for the Web 2.0 era, others are talking about.
Lets see what Microsoft has to unleash next?

I will support Robert’s argument that only difference between google and Microsoft is that Microsoft looks at the world from a perspective of desktop + Internet while Google looks at the world from a perspective of Internet + any device.
Both of them do provide thrills in their respective fields with “proprietary” work and both provide tools/APIs to access their services.
Both with times keep thrilling users with their technologies like MS does with windows, Hotmail , AOE, Xbox etc. and Google does with Google search, Gmail etc.

[1] Phil’s Blog on “Why Microsoft can't best Google” http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=13&part=rss&tag=feed&subj=zdblog
[2] Randy Holloway on “Why Microsoft can best Google”
http://www.clrsql.com/archive/2005_09_08.html#000617
[3] Tim Blog on same topic http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/09/why_microsoft_cant_best_google.html
[5] Robert Scoble on “Beat Google? Wrong question” http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/09/09.html#a11079

Gtalk - part2.

2005-08-26T12:34:00.000-07:00

28-08-2005
Google Talk Tweaks .. a lot of them including shortcuts, addign buttons and games to Gtalk.

27-07-2005
Eweek in their article on IM and VoIP fight between skype, google, aol and yahoo (even microsoft[1]) said that market gonna see more in near future.
What I liked in it was future google plans, i.e.

Google said it will soon use the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). Once that capability is in place, the company will enable interoperability with VOIP services including EarthLink Inc.'s Vling and the Gizmo Project by the SIPphone team.
In addition, Google is providing an open API.

While WALTER S. MOSSBERG, the Wall street journal writer has crearly mentioned that google is outlining the above mentioned vendors from the the competivtive products even though the features in gtalk are quite a few. With the launch of google desktop software2 and gtalk google is trying to become online user's best friend.

In the meanwhile, Akonix Systems Inc.[2], the San Diego provider of instant messaging security, compliance and management services said its Akonix security appliance now supports enterprise users of Google Talk, the new instant messaging service introduced today.

REFERENCES:
1) Microsoft has an VOIP product for professionals, codenamed "Istanbul' and client named "Office Communicator 2005." The client requires Service Pack 1 for Live Communications Server 2005 in order to provide the enterprise messaging, VOIP and web-conferencing functionality that Microsoft rolled out last fall. Microsoft has already unveiled an upgrade to its Live Meeting web-conferencing service, dubbed Live Meeting 2005.
(Source: Microsoft Watch)

2) Akonix's products enable organizations to use public IM services like Google Talk, while enforcing corporate policies, blocking unauthorized use, protecting against security risks, and logging and archiving IM conversations to comply with various corporate, industry and government requirements and regulations.

Google Talk Unleashed

2005-08-24T13:50:00.000-07:00

May be I am too late to post some reviews or comments on google talk, but anyways I would like to post the complete picture and some reviews about it since launch till now.

News.com broke the story yesterday and you can get a full review with lots of screen shots here.
The Google intro on an invitation I received from a friend said:

Google Talk is a downloadable Windows application that lets
you send instant messages to your friends and make free phone calls over an internet connection. Google Talk offers excellent voice quality and works with any computer speaker and microphone.

Google Talk, a simple, ad free, non complex IM client is what most people i talk to want, Google has accomplished this with their client on top of the jabber server. Open source at its finest, with no fancy stuff to get in the way.

Google Talk, Google's long-expected entry into the IM and VoIP market, is a full-fledged IM client based on the open Jabber protocol with VoIP thrown in for good measure. It offers:
1) Basic IM capabilities,
2) high-quality and easy to use VoIP,
3) complete integration with Gmail, and
4) A simple, ads-free interface.

OTHER COOL FEATURES:
1) Google IM's memory usage, 10MB. Yahoo and MSN cannot compare, light apps are surely welcome, shows that programmers took their time on making sure it was efficient
2) When you have multiple IM windows open, they show up in a neat sliding interface which you can dock to the buddy list, "roll up," or tear away. The whole affair is the picture of simplicity and intuitiveness we've come to expect of Google, and is downright attractive to boot.
3) The VOIP quality of Google talk is about that of gizmo, which is better than skype. Best of all it doesn't require ports, MSN messenger does.
4) It has signal indicators like your cellphones do! You need at least 1 level in the signal indicator for the voices to be transmitted across. And of course, the stronger the signal is, the better the quality is.

What it does not provides?
1) No emoticons :(
2) Skype has recently improved tremendously its voice quality. Google Talk currently allows you to make PC to PC calls only, but it's just a matter of time before they expand it to PC to phone.
3) Google Talk, which is being released in a beta test version, works only on PCs running Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Eventually, the company plans to release a version for Apple's Mac OS X.
4) Voice chat requires that both the caller and recipient have speakers and a microphone hooked up to their computers. It does not currently offer an adapter to which regular phones can be connected.
5) One key piece of information here is the fact that Google’s Jabber implementation doesn’t currently support encryption. From their website:

Google Talk currently does not encrypt chats or calls. But we are working hard
to make many improvements to Google Talk while it is in beta, and we plan to
fully support encryption of chats and calls before our official release.

Source: http://dmiessler.com/archives/474

Geeks in particular might notice that the Google Talk service runs on the open XMPP protocol.
Since, Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is the IETF's formalization of the base XML streaming protocols for instant messaging and presence developed within the Jabber community starting in 1999, so it could bridge some of the divisions among chat clients, but first AOL, Yahoo! and MSN would have to agree to open up their software.

So even though many people will log on using Google Talk, you can also use iChat, GAIM, Trillian, Adium, Psi, or another one of the many great XMPP clients out there.
Google is keenly interested in keeping the protocol open, and in fact you can access Google Talk's servers with any Jabber-compatible client like Trillian, Gaim, Adium X, and iChat. (If you have one of these, I'm told you can connect using server talk.google.com and port 5222.)

Future GTalk Plans
"Google tells us that SIP support is coming soon and are in talks with Skype, AOL, and Yahoo! concerning interoperability.
Another big feature they're working on is "joint search," which would allow two or more Google Talk buddies using Google and surfing the web together. This would be a natural segue to the fabled Google Browser, but there is as yet no confirmation from Google.
Google also tells us that they don't yet have solid plans on making money with the service, but plan on using it to drive users to Gmail. "
-- http://www.downloadsquad.com/2005/08/23/googe-talk-review/

But, AOL's messaging program has about 41.6 million U.S. users, followed by Yahoo Messenger with 19.1 million and MSN Messenger with 14.1 million, according to ComScore Media Metrix's July report (http://www.kron4.com/Global/story.asp?S=3757295). Lets see how much these stat changes after Gtalk.:D

LINKS:::
Google Talk:
http://www.google.com/talk/
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/08/google-gets-to-talking.html

Using Google Talk with Gaim:
http://rjdohnert.blogspot.com/2005/08/using-gaim-with-google-talk.html
Using Google Talk on MAC:
http://www.tuaw.com/2005/08/23/how-to-set-up-google-talk-on-your-mac/

Others:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/08/google-gets-to-talking.html
http://www.kron4.com/Global/story.asp?S=3757295
http://www.google.com/talk/developer.html

Reviews:
1) http://www.downloadsquad.com/2005/08/23/googe-talk-review/
2) Google Talk vs Spkype = http://www.start.com.my/blog/?q=google_talk_vs_skype

Lets see whats next with Google?
(http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=104005)

Controlling Speed of Light after 100 yrs of E=MC2

2005-08-22T15:43:00.000-07:00

In an recent post at Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (http://www.primidi.com/2005/08/20.html#a1280), their has been good discussion on the new research by researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, who claim that light can travel faster than light!.
Their are even comments from the author's of the paper which has been published in Applied Physics Letters in its August 22, 2005 issue under the name "Optically controlled slow and fast light in optical fibers using stimulated Brillouin scattering" (Volume 87, Issue 8, Article 081113).
Author also says, "I just want to mention that what we have just reported experimentally was already predicted theoretically and fully explained during the 1910s by Leon Brillouin and Arnold Sommerfeld. Nothing new and no paradox, there is nothing magic behind and no theory needs to be revisited."
And this experiment doesnot voilates The Einstein's laws of relativity. which is celebrating its Hunderedth Anniversary.(http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/18/1935225&from=rss)
As tribute, NOVA has gone live this month with a Web site that features exclusive content and podcasts from ten of the worlds top physicists providing much useful content on the given topic and Einstein.
Site Link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/
One of the Intersting quotes by Einstein (picked from above site)

what I Often Wondered,
"Why is that nobody understands me, and everybody likes me"

The First Peer-to-Peer Geolocation Service

2005-08-21T02:55:00.000-07:00

A New-York-based start-up company, Navizon, with its peer-to-peer wireless positioning system which relies on dynamic databases always up-to-date to provide location-based services (LBS). Users need a free piece of software and a GPS device or a WiFi and/or Cellular enabled Pocket PC PDA. When you're walking or driving, you're able to get your exact location in real time, and companies can send you messages about a restaurant of a film opening near the place where you are. The beauty of this plan is that the company doesn't need any support from big telcos or Wi-Fi providers. The company, which started the service last week in New York, Toronto and Miami, expects to be profitable soon.
Original Post:http://www.primidi.com/2005/08/15.html#a1274

Now the catch here is, this is quite similar to what google's long term plans seems to be as Business analysts told some days earlier. If google is in same lane,then this company will be bought by Gooogle too and very sooner. Lets wait and see!!

raksha bandan pic

2005-08-19T14:34:00.000-07:00

Fundoo pic named by the author as "heroes of Raksha Bandhan". Nice photo blog. checkout http://www.abhishekthakkar.com/flavours/

GoogleNet with local area Ads and search results

2005-08-19T06:36:00.000-07:00

Google in its quest of buying companies bought Android, a cellphone software company, telling the people that they, "acquired Android because of the talented engineers and great technology.”

On the other hand, in an article (Get Ready for GoogleNet) at Business2.com, analysts says "google is aiming a technology capable of targeting advertising to a user’s precise location?".

What google seems to aiming is the firstly, offering Wi-Fi signal availability to consumers. Then using their own Internet connection (no need to pay to ISP's any more) and WiFi location tracking technologies (adding up with new startup technologies namely Feeva and Andriod) provide the customers following:

free "local" search facility from anywhere (can be done via cell also via sms.google)
Using Adsense for "local ads".
Using Google earth to map locations and may be "maps.a9.com" to provide the "pictures" for the local addresses.
Bringing people together with "free" services.
Using tools like "orkut" and "dodgeball" for emphasizing on social networking.

Some serious work is going on behind the scenes at google. Below listed points will throw more light on it.

1) Business 2.0 reports that they’ve learned from “telecom insiders” that Google is hard at work on a nation-wide high-capacity data network, buying up unused fiber lines and cheap backbone access to really flesh out their capacity.
Could Google really power not just Internet search, but a sizable portion of the Internet?
Link: http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000853054453/

2) http://sms.google.com/
How cool is this: With the new Google SMS service, you can do basic Google queries from any SMS-capable phone (which is darn near all of them) by sending text messages to 46645 (GOOGL). Results usually come within a minute, and are text-based only - no links or other craziness that could screw up an SMS. So far, you can get local business listings, product prices and comparisons, dictionary definitions, and more is planned soon (or already there and they just haven’t told us about it yet). So, for instance, enter something like “Starbucks 10016” and you’ll get a response with nearest place to get burnt-tasting, overpriced coffee. Well, near us, anyway, unless you change the “10016.” Give it a go and let us know how it works for you. So far our results have been positive.
Looks like this may be happening for driving directions sooner than later. As MobileTracker reports, sending a “directions” message to Google SMS (46645, or GOOGL), returns “Looking for driving directions? Unfortunately this feature is not yet supported.”
Link: http://www.engadget.com/entry/8423209320818510/

3) Google Buys DodgeBall
Whats DodgeBall -> It’s like Friendster all over again: we’re being barraged by requests to add people to our Dodgeball friends list. Anyway, Dodgeball is a new service which can tell you which of your friends are within a ten block radius of where you are. Once you’ve signed up and registered your cellphone number with them, you can “check-in” by sending a text message to Dodgeball with your location (it only works in NYC, Boston, LA, Philadelphia, and San Francisco right now, which is already two more cities than we’re likely to be in anytime soon), and then if anyone on your friends list (starting to sound familiar?) has also checked-in and is within range, you both get a text message.
Links: http://www.dodgeball.com/aboutus_dball_google.php?DBSESS=bef4592202ba34715c11edf188404583
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000590043059/

4) Google Buys Feeva
Location-tracking hotspot firm Feeva, has already been pilot launched in San Francisco serving up Google Local-based ads.

5) Google buys cellphone software company-Android
We only have the faintest idea why Google just bought Android, a stealthy startup that specializes in making “software for mobile phones,” Google’s keeping quiet about what they’re working on, they would only tell BusinessWeek that they, “acquired Android because of the talented engineers and great technology.”
In a 2003 interview with BusinessWeek, just two months before incorporating Android, Rubin said there was tremendous potential in developing smarter mobile devices that are more aware of its owner's location and preferences. "If people are smart, that information starts getting aggregated into consumer products," said Rubin, co founder of Android
Links: http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000780054854/ Business Week Article

6) Google invests in power-line broadband
Current Communications Group, which offers broadband Internet service over power lines, said Thursday that it has received investment money from Google, Hearst and Goldman Sachs.
Links:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-5777917.html
News.com article Broadbands power-line push

7) Google wants ‘dark fiber’
"Dark fiber" refers to fiber-optic cable that's already been laid, but is not yet in use. Thousands of miles of dark fiber are available in the United States, but there have been few takers because of the high costs of making it operational.
Links: New.com Article- google wants Dark Fiber

8) Google wants more money
Despite gaining billions of cash last year with the IPO, Internet search company Google Inc. on Thursday filed with regulators to sell up to 14.16 million more shares of class A common stock, which would be worth $4.04 billion based on last night's closing prices.
Its shares fell as much as 4 percent in preopening trade on Inet after it announced the news.
Shares of Google traded at $273.99 before the opening after closing at $285.10 per share on Wednesday on the Nasdaq.
Links: Eweek Article

Lets see where google leads to Internet and search?

Cool tools

2005-08-17T09:34:00.000-07:00

Know Everything about your network and computer network configuration -- Cool tool, since long I am watching the application which tell the domain to IP mapping, IP to area mapping and then "whois" tells the complete info about the administrator and manager of one's network.

Then this tool, named BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times).

In the FAQ of the same site I found the answer to question which most of us want "I want to create some fake accounts but I need a valid email account." :D :D
checkout => http://bugmenot.com/faq.php#12

Really cool "secure" stuff to peep into others not allowed knowledge base and information :)

EDITED: 22 August, 2005
Here is one more namely, GVisit - a superb tool which tells the location of last "20" (or more in case you are ready to pay) visitors to your webpage with time using GoogleMaps.
A good GUI is there to make it better. Technology doesnot seems much hard/tough. Just needs the IP of the person accessing ur SITE which can be known peacefully, the map it using existing Databases to the location. and using Google Maps to present it.
But getting the idea first time and building a good worth using tool is an art.

Cute Imagination

2005-08-16T22:46:00.000-07:00

An example of Premature baby sculptures -

"Vancouver artist Camille Allen sculpts one-of-a-kind premature-baby dolls.
Incredibly lifelike and adorable!" --
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/16/premature_baby_sculp.html

Original Link - http://www3.telus.net/camilleallen/camilleallen/index.htm

Video enabled Ipod or VPods.

2005-08-16T22:19:00.000-07:00

Ipod and podcasting the two buzz words in the tech market. With those growing at rapid speeds, yesterday MS and TI said video Ipods[1] will be avaialble in market by january, 2006.

Within one quarter after launch of iPods, apple show 666% of revenue increase bcoz of iPod and podcasting features their Ipods provides.
Since the launch of podcasting, a lot of internet sites has been launched to exploit the features and spread podcastign including odio[2] (for searching) , podscope[3](for searching within the podcast files), podshow[4] (allows you to share and sell your own files) and a lot more.

Waiting for vPods.

1) http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000840054686/
2) http://www.odeo.com/
3) http://www.podscope.com/
4) http://news.com.com/Podcast+start-up+scores+8.85+million+in+funding/2100-1025_3-5834879.html?part=rss&tag=5834879&subj=news

Playing with Images and API's

2005-08-16T07:24:00.000-07:00

Amazon yesterday launched image mapping software, which maps the given address search string to image of that locality or block of that area. It can be used from http://maps.a9.com

Another tool to play with images and rather constructing usual stuff from images. The work started of with simple image search. Then came the tools like Flickr, Picasa, Hello for sharing personal images with your friends or with internet friends.

Most of the tools use these tools itself to create valuable stuff for people like
1) Mappr. - Mappr is an interactive environment for exploring place, based on the photos people take. By adding geographical information to the wealth of photographs found on Flickr, it allows new ways of looking at spaces and images. Mappr adds place to pictures.
2) Word-images- http://metaatem.net/words maps alphabets in your given word to images like this is my name :D

Everytime I refresh the page i see my name with different alphabets ;) ;)

Cool app.. what say.?
3) Vox Delicii - a cool flash based application which displays the most widely discussed links and topics in new format using the del.icio.us tags database.
4) A lot exists from google Maps eg. http://transit-maps.com/, Cheapgas

Google downloading warez

2005-08-10T16:37:00.000-07:00

and other stuff. Anything you want, just anything..

checkout
Finding warez using Google
HAcking with Google

Must reads.

IBM search engine

2005-08-10T03:57:00.000-07:00

Search concepts, not keywords, IBM tells business, the article at Reuters, shows the new plans of IBM in corporate search, after IBM marched in this field on 18th may in alliance with google. (read article here).

And this tool will be available open source via Sourceforge.While simple but powerful keyword searches have revolutionized how Internet users locate and retrieve information, IBM is looking to transform how office workers sift through the piles of data stored inside organizations.Also, IBM plans to openly offer other software developers its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), a technology that can analyze text within documents and other media to understand latent meanings, relationships and facts.

While they say search is based on context or "concepts" as they call it. It seems quite similar to one of the search engines Vivisimo which categorize the search results based on the different possible meanings or concepts of that word.

Eagerly waiting for it, lets see what new they are offering?

WaterProof Paper

2005-08-09T06:57:00.000-07:00

Ya you read it right.. and even the content still remains even if kept submerged in water for long time. Accidently formed at Ecology Coatings, the technology will be available in market after arnd 1.5 t o2 years. The good point about is it can be incorporated in other products also peacefully. Hence lowering the existing cost prices since Manufacturers today produce waterproof labels, but it requires embedding polypropylene fibers in paper. The process is expensive but also makes the paper waxy and tough.

The new technology-
Ecology is somewhat vague on that. The coating is a version of the company's UV-curable material. The lab apparatus affects the material in such as way that the coating actually permeates the paper, rather than just forming a layer on top, like a typical coating.
"The apparatus sort of hurls it into the paper," said Ramsey. "It gives the drops some interesting momentum."
Complete Article
Waiting to see it soon.

Mobile Search

2005-08-08T17:00:00.000-07:00

Mobile search is the new black: a roundup a recent article at Engadget.com lists all the latest mobile search technology. Thisis the list from post and comments.

Google SMS — basic Google searches via SMS, includes local search
Google mobile web — searches only sites formatted for mobile devices
Yahoo SMS —
Yahoo mobile — mobile version of the Yahoo portal, with web, image and local search
Nokia
AOL Mobile Seatch
Technorati mobile
4info.net — local info, stock quotes, sports scores, movie times
http://www.zypd.com
MSN Mobile Search (works on Palm's just fine)
CNET Mobile
Get your Gmail on your Mobile

Add more if you have some :-?

Human Markup Language (Human ML)

2005-08-08T11:19:00.000-07:00

Information technology (IT) that mankind devises is merely means to accomplish the task of sharing their thinking, coordinate, work together to accomplish things, leave a legacy of knowledge and wisdom gained, entertain each other, and socialize.Human markup language (HumanML) is one possible technology for addressing some of these critical aspects of communication by providing machine processable subtext through the use of extensible markup language (XML).
HumanML is a new specification being developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

"Some of the questions that the use of HumanML could hopefully address are: Is the retrieved document informational in nature? Is it intended as policy, as advertisement, propaganda or some other purpose? At the point in history of document creation, what was the unstated motivation to create and publish it? What was the author's attitude toward the subject? When extracting or quoting short sections for citation or comment, how can this context be carried forward without the need to include long background passages? How to avoid accidental release of protected information by ignoring or forgetting to include external markings? How to avoid distortion of original meaning or intent whether intentional or not? How to understand cross-culturally and interpret specialized lingo such as "governmentese" in current layman's terms and in the current context?"

Goals of HML:

Providing a standardized means to convey and establish contextual meaning is intended to allow authors a chance to rise above the chaos described below and permit researchers more opportunity to timely pull valuable nuggets of information and knowledge out of that same chaos.
Another goal of HumanML is also to provide document markup standards that permit adjustment of the human computer interface (HCI) to the system users' most effective modality.

Author clearly says, "beyond etymological meaning of words that dictionaries and related technologies provide is semantic meaning of words in their context - something addressed by natural language processing (NLP) technology and the Semantic Web, which are just now beginning to emerge from the domain of cutting edge research. It is in this environment that HumanML is to find its niche."HumanML complements other semantic based technologies by providing for inclusion of human related context in the form of standardized markup.

A must read article HumanML: The Vision. Just after I reading it I remembered the state of blogosphere post at http://www.sifry.com/alerts/ where the statistics clearly show that one blog is created every second. And context based mining as used in yahoo search. Hoping for some context based and symantic analysis soon in other search engines.

Assuming most of people know about PMML,(Predictive Model Markup Language),
http://www.dmg.org/, which is an XML mark up language to describe statistical and data mining models.

I think sometime these two and blogosphere will combine to give better results on text mining and helping the internet to bring people more closer to each other by better symantic analysis using human pschology ontologies, text mining algorithms (semantic analysis and statistics).

Sarkar - review

2005-07-03T01:27:00.000-07:00

Watching sarkar was gr8 and exciting experience. Me and my friend went to buy tickets (for 5 people) for next day 9:30 show but we luckily got 2 tickets and we went then itself.
Movie started with statement "I was deeply influenced/inspired by 'The Godfather'. and this my tribute to it. - Ramgopal Verma"
While it is not even near either to the Novel by Mario Puzo and 1972 movie "The GodFather" which is still at #1 in all times(check out www.imdb.com).
While it started with the story as per the novel but very soon lost the track. the Rediff review of the movie is exactly right.
one of the best statements of review, "For Sarkar, it's not business, it's personal."

But if not compared to the novel or the original english version, the movie is quite good. the direction, script and the acting are good. Overall I liked the movie. And is worth watching in theate. (Plz dont set the anology with original)

War Of The Worlds- review

2005-07-03T01:20:00.000-07:00

One of the "poorest"/"bad"/"terror" movies I have ever seen. My second english movie in the theatre and it was such a bad exprience that I got totally frustrated. Never expected such a bad story and direction from Speilberg.
I gave all the abusive dialects i know to speilberg and movie both :P :P.
Movie is the just the real picturization of Half-Life 2 aliens and their machines. Was very excited when they comeout down from earth but then as the movie proceeds, i start feeling sleepy and frustrated. Even 'Tim Robbins' (Shawshank Redemption, Mystic River etc) did such a bad and short role.
Just one recommendation, watch "anything" but DONOT watch "war of the worlds".Not even worth watching on Computer or Television.

Swami Vivekanand

2005-06-28T02:20:00.000-07:00

Swami Vivekananda attended the World Parliament of Religions at Chicago from 11th September 1893 to 27th September 1893.
These are transcripts of his speeches.

(1) WELCOME ADDRESS - Chicago, Sept 11, 1893

Sisters and Brothers of America,
It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of the mother of religions, and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.

My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: "As the different streams having their sources in different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."

The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita: "Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me." Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.

(2) Why We Disagree
15th September 1893

I will tell you a little story. You have heard the eloquent speaker who has just finished say, "Let us cease from abusing each other," and he was very sorry that there should be always so much variance. But I think I should tell you a story which would illustrate the cause of this variance. A frog lived in a well. It had lived there for a long time. It was born there and brought up there, and yet was a little, small frog. Of course, the evolutionists were not there then to tell us whether the frog lost its eyes or not, but, for our story's sake, we must take it for granted that it had its eyes, and that it every day cleansed the water of all the worms and bacilli that lived in it with an energy that would do credit to our modern bacteriologists. In this way it went on and became a little sleek and fat. Well, one day another flog that lived in the sea came and fell into the well.

'Where are you form?'
'I am from the sea.'
'The sea! How big is that?
Is it as big as my well?' and he took a leap how one side of the
well to the other.
'My friend,' said the frog of the sea,
'how do you compare the sea with your little well?'
Then the frog took another leap and asked, 'Is your sea so big?'
'What nonsense you speak, to compare the sea with your well!'
'Well, then,' said the frog of the well, 'nothing can be bigger than my well; there can be nothing bigger than this; this fellow is a liar, so turn him out.'

That has been the difficulty all the while.

I am a Hindu. I am sitting in my own little well and thinking that the whole world is my little well. The Christian sits in his little well and thinks the whole world is his well. The Mohammedan sits in his little well and thinks that is the whole world. l have
to thank you of America for the great attempt you are making to break down the barriers of this little world of ours, and hope that, in the future, the Lord will help you to accomplish your
purpose.

(3) PAPER ON HINDUISM
Read at the Parliament on 19th September 1893

Three religions now stand in the world which have come down to us from time prehistoric - Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism. They have all received tremendous shocks, and all of them prove by their survival their internal strength. But while Judaism failed to absorb Christianity and was driven out of its place of birth by
its all-conquering daughter, and a handful of Parsees is all that remains to tell the tale of their grand religion, sect after sect arose in India and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to its very foundations, but like the waters of the sea-shore in a
tremendous earthquake it receded only for a while, only to return in an all-absorbing Hood, a thousand times more vigorous, and when the tumult of the rush was over, these sects were all sucked in, absorbed and assimilated into the immense body of the mother faith.

From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu's religion.

Where then, the question arises, where is the common center to which all these widely diverging radii converge? Where is the common basis upon which all these seemingly hopeless contradictions rest? And this is the question I shall at- tempt to
answer.

The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the Vedas. They hold that the Vedas are without beginning and without end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual relations between soul and soul and between individual spirits and the Father of all spirits were there before their discovery, and would remain even if we forgot them.

The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we honor them as perfected beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of the very greatest of them were women.

Here it may be said that these laws as laws may be without end, but they must have had a beginning. The Vedas teach us that creation is without beginning or end. Science is said to have proved that the sum total of cosmic energy is always the same. Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where was all this manifested energy?

Some say it was in a potential form in God. In that case God is sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic, which would make Him mutable. Everything mutable is a compound and everything compound must undergo that change which is called destruction. So God would die, which is absurd-Therefore, there never was a time when there was no creation.

If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and creator are two lines, without beginning and without end, zoning parallel to each other. God is the ever-active providence, by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run for a time, and again destroyed. This is what the Brahmin boy repeats
every day:
'The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and the moons
of previous cycles.'

And this agrees with modern science. Here I Stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive my existence, 'I,' 'I,' 'I', what is the idea before me? The idea of a body. Am I, then, nothing but a combination of material substances? The Vedas declare, 'No' I am
a spirit living in a body: I am not the body. The body will die, but I shall not die. Here I am in this body; it will fall, bull shall go on living. I had also a past. The soul was not created, for creation means a combination, which means a certain future dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must die. Some are born happy, enjoy perfect health with beautiful body, mental vigor, and all wants supplied. Others are born miserable; some are without hands or feet; others again are idiots, and only drag on a wretched
existence. Why, if they are all created, why does a just and merciful God create one happy and another unhappy, why is He so partial? Nor would it mend matters in the least to hold that those who are miserable in this life will be happy in a ôare one. Why should a man be miserable even here in the reign of a just and
merciful God?

In the second place, the idea of a creator God does not explain the anomaly, but simply expresses the cruel Rat of an all-powerful being. There must have been causes, then, before his birth, to make a man miserable or happy and those were his past actions.

Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted for by inherited aptitude? Here are two parallel lines of existence - one of the mind, the other of matter. If matter and its transformations answer for all that we have, there is no necessity for supposing the existence of a soul. But it cannot be proved that thought has been evolved out of matter; and if a philosophical monism is inevitable, spiritual monism is certainly logical and no less desirable than a materialistic monism; but neither of these is necessary here.

We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity, but those tendencies only mean the physical configuration through which a peculiar mind alone can act in a peculiar way. There are other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused by his past actions. And a soul with a certain tendency would, by the laws of affinity, take birth in a body which is the fittest instrument for the display of that tendency. This is in accord with science, for science wants to explain everything by habit, and habit is got through repetitions. So repetitions are necessary to explain the natural habits of a new born soul. And since they were not obtained in this present life, they must have come down from past lives.

There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted, how is it that I do not remember anything of my past life? This can be easily explained. I am now speaking English. It is not my mother tongue; in fact, no words of my mother tongue are now present in my consciousness; but let me try to bring them up, and they rush in. That shows that consciousness is only the surface of mental ocean, and within its depths are stored up all our experiences. Try and struggle, they would come up. and you would be conscious even of your past life.

This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the world by the Rishis. We have discovered the secret by which the very depths of the ocean of memory can be stirred up - try it and you would get a complete reminiscence of your past life.

So then the Hindu believes that he is a spirit. Him the sword cannot pierce - him the fire cannot burn - him the water cannot melt - him the air cannot dry. The Hindu believes that every soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere but whose center is located in the body, and that death means the change of the center from holy to body. Nor is the soul bound by the conditions of matter.

In its very essence, it is flee, unbounded, holy, pure, and perfect. But somehow or other it finds itself tied down to matter and thinks of itself as matter. Why should the free, perfect, and pure be thus under the thraldom of matter, is the next question.
How can the perfect soul be deluded into the belief that it is imperfect? We have been told that the Hindus shirk the question and say that no such question can be there- Some thinkers want to answer it by positing one or more quasi-perfect beings, and use big scientific names to fill up the gap. But naming is not explaining.
The question remains the same. How can the perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the pure, the absolute change even a microscopic particle of its nature? But the Hindu is sincere. He does not want to take shelter under sophistry. He is brave enough
to face the question in a manly fashion; and his answer is: 'I do not know.' I do not know how the perfect being, the soul, came to think of itself as imperfect, as Joined to and conditioned by matter.' But the fact is a fact for all that. It is a fact in
everybody's consciousness that one thinks of oneself as the body. The Hindu does not attempt to explain why one thinks one is the body. The answer that it is the will of God is no explanation. This is nothing more than what the Hindu says, 'I do not know.'

Well, then, the human soul is eternal and immortal, perfect and infinite, and death means only a change of center from one body to another. The present is determined by our past actions, and the future by the present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting back from birth to birth and death to death. But here is another question: Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the next, rolling to and from at the mercy of good and bad actions – a powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing,
uncompromising current of cause and effect - a little moth placed under the wheel of causation, which rolls on crushing everything in its way and waits not for the widow's tears or the orphan's cry? The heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of nature. Is
there no hope? Is there no escape? - was the cry that went up from the bottom of the heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words of hope and consolation came down and inspired a Vedic sage, and he stood up before the world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad tidings: 'Hear, ye children of immortal bliss!
even ye that reside in higher spheres! I have found the Ancient One who is beyond all darkness, all delusion: knowing Him alone you shall be saved from death over again. 'Children of immortal bliss' -what a sweet, what a hopeful name! Allow me to call you, brethren, by that sweet name -heirs of immortal bliss - yea, the Hindu refuses to call you sinners. We are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. The divinities on earth - sinners! It is a sin to call a ma. so; it is standing libel on human nature. Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are not bodies; matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter.

Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination of unforgiving laws, not an endless prison of cause and effect, but that at the head of all these laws, in and through every particle of matter and force, stands One, 'by whose command the wind blows, the fire burns, the clouds rain and death stalks upon the earth.'

And what is His nature?

He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the All-merciful. 'Thou art our father, Thou art our mother, Thou art our beloved friend, Thou art the source of all strength; give us strength. Thou art He that beareth the burdens of the universe; help me bear the little burden of this life.' Thus sang the Rishis
of the Veda. And how to worship Him? Through love. 'He is to be worshiped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next life.'

This is the doctrine of love declared in the Vedas, and let us see how it is fully developed and taught by Krishna whom the Hindus believe to have been God incarnate on earth.

He taught that a man ought to live in this world like a lotus leaf, which grows in water but is never moistened by water; so a man ought to live in the world - his heart to God and his hands to work.

It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or the next world, but it is better to love God for love's sake; and the prayer goes: 'Lord, I do not want wealth nor children nor learning. If it be Thy will, I shall go from birth to birth; but grant me this, that I may love Thee without the hope of reward - love unselfishly for love's sake.'

One of the disciples of Krishna, the then Emperor of India, wag driven from his kingdom by his enemies and had to take shelter with his queen, in a forest in the Himalayas and there one day the queen asked how it was that he, the most virtuous of men, should suffer so much misery. Budhishthira answered, 'Be hold, my queen, the
Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love them. They do not give me any- thing but my nature is to love the grand, the beautiful, therefore I love them. Similarly, I love the Lord. He is the source of all beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only object to beloved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love. I do not pray for any- thing; I do not ask for anything. Let Him place me wherever He likes. I must love Him for love's sake. I cannot trade in love.'

The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the bondage of matter; perfection will be reached when this bond will burst, and the word they use for it is, therefore, Mukti - freedom, freedom from the bonds of imperfection, freedom from death and
misery- And this bondage can only fall off through the mercy of God, and this mercy comes on the pure. So purity is the condition of His mercy. How does that mercy act? He reveals Himself to the pure heart; the pure and the stainless see God, yea, even in this life; then and then only all the crookedness of the heart is made straight. Then all doubt ceases. He is no more the freak of a terrible law of causation. This is the very center, the very vital conception of Hinduism. The Hindu does not want to live upon words and theories, If there are existences beyond the ordinary sensuous
existence, he wants to come face to face with them. If there is a soul in him which is not matter, if there is an all-merciful universal Soul, he will Rota Him direct. He must see Him, and that alone can destroy all doubts. So the best proof a Hindu sage gives
about the soul, about God, is: 'I have seen the soul; I have seen God.' And that is the only condition of perfection. The Hindu religion does not consist in struggles and attempts to believe a certain doctrine or dogma, but in realizing - not in believing, but
in being and becoming.

Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle to become perfect, to become divine, to reach God, and see God; and this reaching God, seeing God, becoming perfect even as the Father in Heaven is perfect, constitutes the religion of the Hindus.

And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection? He lives a life of bliss infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect bliss, having obtained the only thing in which man ought to have pleasure, namely God, and enjoys the bliss with God.

So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common religion of all the sects of India; but then perfection is absolute, and the absolute cannot be two or three. It cannot have any qualities. It cannot be an individual. And so when a soul becomes perfect and
absolute, it must become one with Brahman, and it would only realize the Lord as the perfection, the reality, of its own nature and existence, the existence absolute, knowledge absolute, and bliss absolute. We have often and often read this called the losing of individuality and becoming a stock or a stone.

'He jests at scars that never felt a wound.'

I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness to enjoy the consciousness of this small body, it must be greater happiness to enjoy the consciousness of two bodies, the measure of happiness increasing with the consciousness of an increasing number of
bodies, the Rim, the ultimate of happiness, being reached when it would become a universal consciousness.

Therefore, to gain this infinite universal individuality, this miserable little prison - individuality must go. Then alone can death cease when I am one with life, then alone can misery cease when I am one with happiness itself, then alone can all errors
cease when I am one with knowledge itself; and this is the necessary scientific conclusion- Science has proved to me that physical individuality is a delusion, that really my body is one little continuously changing body in an unbroken ocean of matter, and Advaita (unity) is the necessary conclusion with my other counterpart, Soul.

Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as science would reach perfect unity, it would stop from further progress, because it would reach the goal. Thus chemistry could not progress farther when it would discover one element out of which all others could be made. Physics would stop when it would be able to fulfill its services in discovering one energy of which all the others are hut manifestations, and the science of religion become perfect when it would discover Him who is the one life in a universe of death, Him who is the constant basis of an ever-changing world, One who is the only Soul of which all souls are but delusive manifestations. Thus is it, through multiplicity and duality, that the ultimate unity is reached. Religion can go no farther. This is the goal of all science.

All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long run. Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science today; and the Hindu is only glad that what he has been cherishing in his bosom for ages is going to be taught in more forcible language and with further light from the latest conclusions of science.

Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to the religion of the ignorant. At the very outset, I may tell you that there is no polytheism in India. In every temple, if one stands by and listens, one will find the worshipers applying all the attributes
of God, including omnipresence. to the images. It is not polytheism, nor would the name henotheism explain the situation.

'The rose, called by any other name, would smell as sweet.' Names are not explanations.

I remember, as a boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach to crowd in India. Among other sweet things he was telling them was, that if he gave a blow to their idol with his stick. what could it do? One of his hearers sharply answered, 'If I abuse your God, what can He do?' 'You would be punished,' said the preacher, 'when you die.' 'So my idol will punish you when you die,' retorted the Hindu.

The tree is known by its fruits. When l have seen amongst them that are called idolaters, men, the like of whom, in morality and spirituality and love, I have never seen anywhere, l stop and ask myself, 'Can sin beget holiness?'

Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is worse. Why does a Christian go to church? Why is the cross holy? Why is the face turned toward the sky in prayer? Why are there so many images in the Catholic Church? Why are there so many images in the minds of Protestants when they pray? My brethren, we can Do more think about anything without a mental image than we can live without breathing- By the law of association the material image calls up the mental idea and vice versa. This is why the Hindu uses an external symbol when he worships. He will tell you. it helps to
keep his mind fixed on the Being to whom he prays. He knows as well as you do that the image is not God, is not omnipresent. finer all, how much does omnipresence mean to almost the whole world? It stands merely as a word, a symbol. Has God superficial area? If not, when we repeat that word 'omnipresent', we think of the
extended sky. or of space - that is all.

As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental constitution, we have to associate our ideas of infinity with the image of the blue sky, or of the sea, so we naturally connect our idea of holiness with the image of a church, a mosque, or a cross. The Hindus have associated the ideas of holiness, purity, truth, omnipresence, and such other ideas with different images and forms. But with this difference that while some people devote their whole lives to their idol of a church and never rise higher, because with them religion means an intellectual assent to certain doctrines and doing good to their fellows, the whole religion of the Hindu is centered in realization. Man is to become divine by realizing the divine. Idols or temples or churches or books are only the supports, the helps, of his spiritual childhood; but on and on he must progress.

He must not stop anywhere. 'External worship, material worship' ?,' say the scriptures, 'is the lowest stage,' struggling to rise high, mental prayer is the next stage, but the highest stage is when the Lord has been realized., Mark, the same earnest man who is kneeling before the idol tells you, 'Him the sun cannot express, nor the moon, nor the stars, the lightning cannot express Him, nor what we speak of as fire; through Him they shine.' But he does not abuse anyone's idol or call its worship sin. He recognizes in it a necessary stage of life. 'The child is father of the man.' Would it be right for an old man to say that childhood is a sin or youth a sin?

If a man can realize his divine nature with the help of an image, would it be right to call that a sin? Nor, even when he has passed that stage, should he call it an error. To the Hindu, man is not travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth. To him all the religions from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realize the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of its birth and association, and each of these marks a stage of progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering more and more strength till it reaches the Glorious Sun.

Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognized it. Every other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas and tries to force society to adopt them. It places before society only one coat which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If it does not fit John or Henry he must go without a coat to cover his body. The Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be realized, or thought of, or stated through the relative, and the images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols - so many pegs to hang spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for everyone, but those that do not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism.

One thing I must tell you. Idolatry in India does not mean anything horrible. It is not the mother of harlots. On the other hand, it is the attempt of undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual truths. The Hindus have their faults, they sometimes have their exceptions; but mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, and
never for cutting the throats of their neighbors. If the Hindu fanatic burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of Inquisition. And even this cannot be laid at the door of his religion any more than the burning of witches can be laid at the
door of Christianity.

To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is only a travelling, a coming up, of different men and women, through various conditions and circumstances, to the same goal. Every religion is only evolving a God out of the material man, and the same God is the inspirer of all of them. Why, then, are there so many contradictions? They are only apparent, says the Hindu. The contradictions come from the same truth adapting itself to the varying circumstances of different natures.

It is the same light coming through glasses of different colors- And these little variations are necessary for purposes of adaptation. But in the heart of everything the same truth reigns. The Lord has declared to the Hindu in His incarnation as Krishna:
'I am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there. ' And what has been the result? I challenge the world to find, throughout the whole system of Sanskrit philosophy, any such expression as that the Hindu alone will be saved and not others. Says Vyasa, 'we find perfect men even beyond the pale of our caste and creed.' One thing more. How, then, can the Hindu, whose whole fabric of thought centers in God, believe in Buddhism which is agnostic, or in Jainism which is atheistic?

The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son bath seen the Father also.

This, brethren, is a short sketch of the religious ideas of the Hindus. The Hindu may have failed to carry out all his plans, but if there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will have no location in place or time; which will be infinite like
the God it will preach, and whose sun will shine upon the followers of Krishna and of Christ, on saints and sinners alike; which will not be Brahminic or Buddhistic, Christian or Mohammedan, but the sum total of all these. and still have infinite space for
development; which in its catholicity will embrace in infinite arms, and find a place for, every human being from the lowest grovelling savage, not far removed from the brute, to the highest man towering by the virtues of his head and heart almost above
humanity, making society stand in awe of him and doubt his human nature. It will be a religion which will have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, which will recognize divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole
force, will be centered in aiding humanity to realize its own true, divine nature.

Offer such a religion and all the nations will follow you. Asoka's council was a council of the Buddhist faith. Akbar's. though more to the purpose. was only a parlor meeting. It was reserved for America to proclaim to all quarters of the globe that the Lord is
in every religion.

May He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura-Mazda of the Zoroastrians, the Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah of the Jews, the Father in Heaven of the Christians, give strength to you to carry out your noble idea! The star arose in the East; it traveled steadily towards the West, sometimes dimmed and sometimes
effulgent, till it made a circuit of the world, and now it is again rising on the very horizon of the East, the borders of the Sanpo(1), a thousand fold more effulgent than it ever was before.

Hail Columbia, motherland of liberty! It has been given to thee, who never dipped her hand in her neighbor's blood, who never found out that the shortest way of becoming rich was by robbing one's neighbors, it has been given to thee to march at the vanguard of civilization with the flag of harmony.

(1) A Tibetan name for the Bramaputra River

(4) RELIGION NOT THE CRYING NEED OF INDIA
20th September 1893

Christians must always be ready for good criticism and I hardly think that you will mind if I make a little criticism- you Christians, who are so fond of sending out missionaries to save the
soul of the heathen - why do you not try to save their bodies from starvation? In India, during the terrible famines, thousands died from hunger, yet you Christians did nothing. You erect churches all through India, but the crying evil in the East is not religion - they have religion enough -but it is bread that the suffering millions of burning India cry out for with parched throats. They ask us for bread, but we give them stones. It is an insult to the
starving people to offer them religion; it is an insult to the starving man to teach him metaphysics. In India a priest that preached for money would lose caste and be spat upon by the people. I came here to seek aid for my impoverished people, and I filly realized how difficult it was to get help for heathens from Christians in a Christian land.

(5) Buddhism: The FULFILLMENT OF HINDUISM
26 th September 1893

I am not a Buddhist, as you have heard, and yet I am. If China, or Japan, or Ceylon follow the teachings of the Great Master, India worships him as God incarnate on earth. You have just now heard that I am going to criticize Buddhism, but by that I wish you to understand only this. Far be it from me to criticize him whom I worship as God incarnate on earth. But our views about Buddha are that he was not understood properly by his disciples. The relation be- tween Hinduism (by Hinduism, I mean the religion of the Vedas) and what is called Buddhism at the present day, is nearly the same as between Judaism and Christianity. Jesus Christ was a Jew, and Shakya Muni was a Hindu. The Jews rejected Jesus Christ, nay, crucified him, and the Hindus have accepted Shakya Muni as God and worship him. But the real difference that we Hindus want to show between modern Buddhism and what we should understand as the
teachings of Lord Buddha, lies principally in this: Shakya Muni came to preach nothing new. He also, like Jesus, came to fulfill and not to destroy. Only, in the case of Jesus, it was the old
people, the Jews, who did not understand him, while in the case of Buddha, it was his own followers who did not realize the importance of his teachings, As the Jew did not understand the fulfillment of the Old Testament, so the Buddhist did not understand the fulfillment of the truths of the Hindu religion. Again, I repeat, Shakya Muni came not to destroy, but he was the fulfillment, the logical conclusion, the logical development of the religion of the Hindus.

The religion of the Hindus is divided into two parts, the ceremonial and the spiritual; the spiritual portion is specially studied by the monks.

In that there is no caste. A man from the highest caste and a man from the lowest may become a monk in India and the two castes become equal. In the religion there is no caste; caste is simply a social institution, Shakya Muni himself was a monk, and it was his glory that he had the large-heartedness to bring out the truths how the hid- den Vedas and throw them broadcast all over the world. He was the first being in the world who brought missionarizing into practice - nay, he was the first to conceive the idea of proselytizing.

The great glory of the Master lay in his wonderful sympathy for everybody, especially for the ignorant and the poor. Saint of his disciples were Brahmins. When Buddha was teaching, Sanskrit was no more the spoken language in India. It was then only in the books of the learned. Some of the Buddha's Brahmin disciples wanted to translate his teachings into Sanskrit, but he distinctly told them, 'I am for the poor, for the people: let me speak in the tongue of the people.' And so to this day the great bulk of his teachings are in the vernacular of that day in India.

Whatever may be the position of philosophy, whatever may the position of metaphysics, so long as there is such a thing as death in the world, so long as there is such a thing as weakness in the
human heart, so long as there is a cry going out of the heart of man in his very weakness, there shall be a faith in God.

On the philosophic side, the disciples of the Great Master dashed themselves against the eternal rocks of the Vedas and could not crush them, and on the other side they took away from the nation that eternal God to which everyone, man or woman, clings so fondly.
And the result was that Buddhism had to die a natural death in India. At the present day there is not one who calls himself a Buddhist in India, the land of its birth.

But at the same time, Brahminism lost something - that reforming zeal, that wonderful sympathy and charity for everybody, that wonderful leaven which Buddhism had brought to the masses and which had rendered Indian society so great that a Greek historian who
wrote about India of that time was led to say that no Hindu was known to tell untruth and no Hindu woman was known to be unchaste.

Hinduism cannot live without Buddhism, nor Buddhism without Hinduism. Then realize what the separation has shown to us, that the Buddhists cannot stand without the brain and philosophy of the Brahmins, nor the Brahmin without the heart of the Buddhist. This
separation between the Buddhists and the Brahmins is the cause of the downfall of India. That is why India is populated by three hundred millions of beg- gars, and that is why India has been the slave of conquerors for the last thousand years. Let us then join the wonderful intellect of the Brahmin with the heart, the noble soul, the wonderful humanizing power of the Great Master.

(6) The Concluding Address on 27th September,1893

The World's Parliament of Religions has become an accomplished fact, and the merciful Father has helped those who laboured to bring it into existence, and crowned with success their most unselfish labour.

My thanks to those noble souls whose large hearts and love of truth first dreamed this wonderful dream and then realized it. My thanks to the shower of liberal sentiments that has overflowed this platform. My thanks to this enlightened audience for their uniform kindness to me and for their appreciation of every thought that tends to smooth the friction of religions. A few jarring notes were heard from time to time in this harmony. My special thanks to them, for they have, by their striking contrast, made general harmony the sweeter.

Much has been said of the common ground of religious unity. I am not going just now to venture my own theory. But if any one here hopes that this unity will come by the triumph of any one of the religions and the destruction of the others, to him I say, "Brother, yours is an impossible hope." Do I wish that the Christian would become Hindu? God forbid. Do I wish that the Hindu or Buddhist would become Christian? God forbid.

The seed is put in the ground, and earth and air and water are placed around it. Does the seed become the earth, or the air, or the water? No. It becomes a plant. It develops after the law of its own growth, assimilates the air, the earth, and the water, converts them into plant substance, and grows into a plant.

Similar is the case with religion. The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth.

If the Parliament of Religions has shown anything to the world, it is this: It has proved to the world that holiness, purity and charity are not the exclusive possessions of any church in the world, and that every system has produced men and women of the most exalted character. In the face of this evidence, if anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and the destruction of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart, and point out to him that upon the banner of every religion will soon be written in spite of resistance: "Help and not fight," "Assimilation and not Destruction," "Harmony and Peace and not Dissension."

While the Audio files for the same are available at
http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~nakul/swami_vivekananda_Speech.tar

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2005-05-31T04:34:00.000-07:00

Blogs..seems interesting and are easy to setup with cool themes..
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Anyone knows how to change the VMware resolution to 1024*768 .plz help
I tried everything from configuring XF86conf file to installing new nvidia driver ;)
but nothign helped:(