Wednesday, July 15, 2009

SQL Server 2008 Database Engine

Architecture of MS SQL Server Full Text SearchImage via Wikipedia

SQL Server 2008 Database Engine

The Database Engine is the core service for storing, processing, and securing data. The Database Engine provides controlled access and rapid transaction processing to meet the requirements of the most demanding data consuming applications within your enterprise.

Use the Database Engine to create relational databases for online transaction processing or online analytical processing data. This includes creating tables for storing data, and database objects such as indexes, views, and stored procedures for viewing, managing, and securing data. You can use SQL Server Management Studio to manage the database objects, and SQL Server Profiler for capturing server events.

To learn more about the Database Engine, see SQL Server Database Engine and SQL Server Tools Tutorials.

To quickly get to important high-level topics for the Database Engine, go to Database Engine Documentation Map


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Saturday, July 11, 2009

Earning Through Side Projects

I was searching for PHP tutorials and manuals when i came acros cakePHP and found an interesting article on

how much money i made from side projects


Two noteable sites and and their description in the post is as follows:

PlanbookEdu.com – This is a site for school teachers, designed to make their lesson planning easier. It originally launched in January of 2003 and the new version was re-launched this past July. There are currently over 3000 registered users, with 171 paying $20/year for premium features. That works out to $3420 for 2008. In 2007 there were 84 paying users ($1680). The only marketing I did this past year was sending an email to the registered users announcing the new version.

RSStalker.com – This site gets approximately 50 hits a day from actual users…and over 50k hits a day from various RSS aggregators. Once a user has setup their feed there is no reason to go back to the site. If they buy a product using a link in the feed I get a commission from Amazon. In 2007 RSStalker sold 1049 items, generating $68,368.62 in revenue for Amazon and $3,358.20 in commission for me. The 2008 numbers are very similar: 1070 items, $76,875.06 revenue, $3,675.17 commission. Not much growth, but considering the economy that’s not too bad. Plus in 2007, two orders of 30 iPods each accounted for almost $700 in commission.


and below is the link for free cakePHP book

Free cakePHP book


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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Improving English vocabulary

{{en|Famous English people. A montage of 8 fre...Image via Wikipedia

Improving English vocabulary

This article is taken from English at Home

Having a great English vocabulary doesn't just mean that you can understand lots of words and phrases: it also means that you can use these words and phrases and that you can remember them when you need them.

This is the difference between an active and a passive vocabulary. Generally, most people's passive vocabulary is far bigger than their active vocabulary, and the secret is to try and "activate" passive knowledge.

There are a number of ways that you can activate your passive vocabulary in English, ranging from simple five-minute activities to longer periods of study. Most activities work best if a) you have a good English dictionary, and b) you keep a vocabulary notebook.


Good English dictionaries

A good English dictionary should be up-to-date (no more than five years old!) and should be easy to understand. Make sure that the definitions are written in clear English. Pictures also help you to understand some words. I strongly recommend the Longman range of dictionaries, as there is good coverage of spoken and written English, British and American English, as well as clear example sentences.

Vocabulary notebooks

When you come across a new English word or phrase, make a note of it! Look up the meaning in the dictionary, making sure you are aware of any grammatical information. (For instance, if you are looking up a verb, check to see if the verb can be used in a passive form, if it is followed by any particular preposition, and so on.) Check also for the pronunciation and use of a word. Is it particularly formal or informal, or used in certain word partnerships? For example, we say "do housework", but "make an effort".

When you find a new word, check to see if you can use it in other ways. English is a flexible language – nouns, verbs and adjectives often share the same stem. For example, a house, to house, housing policy, and so on.

When you write down your new word in your notebook, try to include an example sentence in English.

Some people find it helpful to organise notebooks into themes. So rather than having a list of words without any obvious connection, you divide your notebook into themes, with one page containing words to do with the house, another page with words to do with jobs, and so on.

Quick English vocabulary booster activities

1. An English word a day

Choose a new word or phrase from your notebook and try to use it as often as possible in one day. Think of situations where you would need to use it, and write down a couple of example sentences. Go back to this word or phrase after a week, to make sure you still remember it.

Some people find index cards useful. You can write down the word on the card and carry it around with you for a day, taking it out of your pocket whenever you have a moment and trying to put it into a sentence.

2. Review

The next time you have a spare couple of minutes, flick through your notebook. You'll be surprised how much comes back to you! Choose a page where you have already stored a number of words and expressions, cover the page, and try to remember what you wrote. Then look at the page and see how many you remember.

3. One word at a time

When you read a page of a book or newspaper, decide you will only look up one word in a dictionary. When you write it down in your notebook, also make a note of any synonyms (words that mean the same) or the opposite of the new word.

4. English word building

Take a prefix (such as "en", or "pre") and make a list of all the words that can follow. (For example, encircle, enclose, enlist; prenatal, premature, pre-war.) Here are some more prefixes you can use:
dis, il, im, ir, pro, anti, de, un, con, re

Longer English vocabulary learning activities

1. Read

Read something that interests you. It could be a newspaper, a novel, a magazine, or even an English "graded reader" (a simplified book). Working page by page, underline the words or phrases that you don't know. Look up only those that are important for understanding, or which are repeated. Use a good dictionary, and make a note in your English vocabulary notebook.

2. Blitz

Focus on a theme, such as sport. Divide one page of your notebook into three columns. In the first column write down as many sports as you can think of. In the second, write down all the equipment you need for the sport. In the third, write down the scoring systems. You might end up with something that looks like this:

tennis racquet, ball, net umpire, love, linesman

football pitch, ball, goal posts referee, offside, penalty

You can use this method for many different themes: houses (rooms of house, furniture, styles); jobs (names of jobs, places where these jobs are done, characteristics of the job) and so on.

3. Word association

Write a key word in the middle of a page and draw a bubble around it. Then draw lines out from this word connected to smaller bubbles. In the smaller bubbles you can add words associated with the main word.

For example, you could write "email" in the middle of a page. Then the smaller bubbles could contain words such as "write", "compose", "receive", "delete", "reply" and so on.

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Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Arabic Literature

Main

the body of written works produced in the Arabic language.

The tradition of Arabic literature stretches back some 16 centuries to unrecorded beginnings in the Arabian Peninsula. At certain points in the development of European civilization, the literary culture of Islam and its Arabic medium of expression came to be regarded not only as models for emulation but also, through vital conduits such as Moorish Spain and Norman Sicily, as direct sources of inspiration for the intellectual communities of Europe. The rapid spread of the Islamic faith brought the original literary tradition of the Arabian Peninsula into contact with many other cultural traditions—Byzantine, Persian, Indian, Amazigh (Berber), and Andalusian, to name just a few—transforming and being transformed by all of them. At the turn of the 21st century, the powerful influence of the West tended to give such contacts a more one-sided directionality, but Arab litterateurs were constantly striving to find ways of combining the generic models and critical approaches of the West with more indigenous sources of inspiration drawn from their own literary heritage.

Both terms in the title of this article are in need of elaboration. The use of the term literature in English to imply those writings that are susceptible to aesthetic analysis (as opposed to everything that is written) is of relatively recent vintage, and the development of a field of study devoted to it is yet more recent (with the study in the West of non-Western literary traditions being even more so). In Arabic the term for “literature” in the narrow English sense is adab, best translated by the French term belles-lettres (“beautiful letters”), which conveys the combination of the aesthetic and didactic elements found in adabmore effectively than does the English term literature. However, it is important to observe that, as is the case with many literary traditions, the origins of this Arabic term in the premodern period lie in the realms of correct behaviour (“polite letters”).

The English language, unlike many other European languages, uses several adjectives—Arab, Arabic, and Arabian—to depict phenomena of the particular region and people that are linked to the notion of “Arab,” a word that has the original sense of “nomad.” For the purposes of this article, the term Arabic will be used to refer only to the Arabic language. The sections that follow will be concerned only with literature that has been composed in Arabic; it thus excludes works written by Arabs in other languages.

The Arabic language in its earliest phases was relatively well protected from the forces of rapid change by the peninsular environment within which it developed. It is the best-preserved model of the Semitic languages. Its syntax and morphology—recorded and systematized as part of the massive research endeavour that followed the production of an authoritative version of the text of the Qurʾān in the 7th century (although this date is a matter of controversy)—provide evidence of early features of the Semitic languages. These features have since disappeared from sister languages, of which Hebrew is perhaps the most prominent. As the history of the revelation, memorization, and eventual recording in written form of the Qurʾān makes clear, the society of Arabia was one that relied to a large extent on human memory to preserve details of important events and principles and to pass on such information and artifacts to succeeding generations. That very reality makes it extremely difficult to pinpoint precise details regarding the earliest development of the Arabic language and its literary tradition. What has survived as the earliest examples of Arabic literary compositions consists of a highly elaborate system of poetic composition and a series of oratorical and often homiletic utterances, all couched in language of a variety and at a level that was to be later reflected in the style of the Qurʾānic revelations themselves. It is unclear, however, whether this apparently elevated language (perhaps reserved for special occasions, such as poetry competitions) was ever the means of spoken communication for any particular group.

Whatever may have been the linguistic environment of pre-Islamic Arabia, the rapid spread of the faith across Africa and into Asia soon created a situation in which written and spoken Arabic inhabited opposite ends of a linguistic spectrum. At one end was the language of written communication and Islamic scholarship, which regarded the language of the Qurʾān as its inimitable yardstick; from this belief developed the later critical doctrine of iʿjāz al-Qurʾān (the “inimitability of the Qurʾān”), which resulted in a written (literary) language that has undergone remarkably little change over the centuries. At the other end was the spoken language of Arabs, which from Spain (known as Al-Andalus during the Moorish period) and Morocco in the west to the Arabian Gulf and Iraq in the east displayed—and continues to display—enormous variety, hardly a surprising linguistic phenomenon in view of the great distances involved and the wide variety of cultures with which Islam came into contact.

Monday, February 09, 2009

HP Launches Compaq Presario CQ 2000 Series Desktop PC in India

HP Launches Compaq Presario CQ 2000 Series Desktop PC in India
IT News Online Staff
2009-02-03

HP has launched the Compaq Presario CQ 2000 series desktop PC in India. The sleek and eco-friendly CQ 2000 is a space-saving device designed for the modern households.
The company said the CQ 2000 can easily replace one's music system and DVD player as it doubles up as a multimedia player on which users can watch movies, play games, attach it to their LCD monitors and speakers or simply enjoy online video clips on You tube. The CQ 2000 also comes with the Compaq My Bhasha software, a communication enabler providing vernacular interface.

The CQ 2000 is stylishly designed, lightweight at 3.5 kg and fits almost anywhere. HP said that with a 6-in-1 digital media reader and USB drives, all users need to do is plug-in, sit back and do what they need to effortlessly. The CQ 2000 is also energy star certified for being energy efficient and is made from fewer manufacturing materials for less wastage.
Chandrahas Panigrahi, Country Category Manager, Consumer Desktops, PSG, HP India, said, "The CQ 2000 is a completely new category of PCs that will redefine the way desktops are viewed in terms of form factor and design. The main aim of launching the CQ 2000 is to offer an affordable PC to families, young professionals and Internet savvy people who want much more out of their PCs."
"The Compaq My Bhasha software offered with the PC, for a 90 day free trial, will not only help break the language barrier for non-English speaking users, but also make computing a truly personal experience as the users get to email, chat, socialize online and do a lot more in the language they are most comfortable using," added Panigrahi
The Compaq My Bhasha software provides an intuitive and natural vernacular computing experience through the webcam "simulated hands" interface. The 10 languages covered by the interface are Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam, Punjabi and Urdu. Users can choose any one language from the package that can be embedded in the system or installed later from a CD.
The CQ 2000 Desktop PC with a 15" TFT screen is available all across India through HP's retail and distribution network at a starting price of Rs. 18,990/- plus taxes.

Post taken from ITNEWSONLINE

Thursday, February 05, 2009

BigTable

This article is taken from IT toolbox Data Management section.

About BigTable

BigTable is a propietary scalable distributed database system from Google Inc., a well known US based Internet services company, for supporting and managing the data intensive distributed GFS (Google File System) over clustering computers. BigTable has been designed, mainly, for managing petabytes of structured data distributed over a huge number of remote servers and computer nodes, specifically for Google Products.

Bigtable is being used in over sixty Google products and projects such as Google Search engine, Google App Engine, Google Analytics, Google Finance, Orkut, Personalized Search, Writely, Google Earth, YouTube, Google Reader, Google Maps, etc.

Bigtable is capable of handling demanding workloads of various intensities, ranging from throughput-oriented batch-processing jobs to latency-sensitive serving of data to the end users, specific to a particular Google application.

Basic Architecture of a BigTable

Although some operations of Bigtable are just like any traditional database, it is not based on relational database model. Architecturally, Bigtable is designed as a sparse, distributed, persistent multi-dimensional sorted map. Each value of the map is an array of bytes which is indexed by a row key, column key, and a timestamp. Bigtable basically treats data as series of continuous strings. Tables in BigTable are multidimensional and split-able.

Data model of BigTable supports dynamic control over data layout and format. Bigtable has a number of choices for schema which can be used to control the locality of data dynamically based on particular client application. Location of data can be in-memory or directly from the disk. Also, BigTable is designed to handle serialized inputs of structured as well as semi-structured data into these strings from client applications by application of indexing mechanism used in BigTable.

BigTable supports MapReduce programming model for parallel computations over large datasets over clustering computers. BigTable uses Chubby Lock service in order to facilitate synchonizing of the distributed applications for sharing application resources.

For further information, references:-

http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html

http://www.usenix.org/events/osdi06/tech/chang/chang_html/index.html

Misquotation

Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely- read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely.
 Hesketh Pearson