This is a simulation of the perturbation between the gas and dark matter components in a volume of 1 billion light years. It calculates the gravitational clumping of of intergalactic gas and dark matter modeled using a grid of  64 billion cells and 64 billion dark matter particles. This simulation has taken more than 4000000 CPU hours to complete and was generated by 148 TB of data.

Conferences are complex events which involves coordinating between individual from countries to storing of research papers to notification and registration. Taking this consideration,  Surajit Chaudhuri of a Research Area Manager at Microsoft Research has developed a Conference  Management   System. The Conference Management Toolkit  can handle many complex workflows of a conference right from the point of paper submission to the review of the papers and the selection of the best ones. It also provides rich support to the Program Committee chairs for managing the conference workflow including customization of conference properties like multiple tracks, deadlines, author submission and reviewer forms, double-blind reviewing. CMT is a free and hosted service and its functionalities are fully accessible through the normal browser. CMT is built using Microsoft technologies including Windows Server, ASP.Net, Internet Information Server (IIS) and SQL Server.

Requesting this for a conference can be done but visiting https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/cmtsrm/Default.aspx

The Solar eclipse on 15th Jan, 2010 was one of the longest eclipse of the millennium.  Luckily the sky in Bangalore was clear. Below are the snaps taken in Olympus FE 310 with at 8MP, 3x lens zoom and 5X optical zoom.

Forms are an integral part of a website or a blog. They give a new  dimension to the interactiveness . Hardly we get an app or a service to make a fluid form with less on script and more on design and flexibility. But Zoho has been an exception in this category with quick creation of forms and deploying them.

The features of Zoho Creator are :-

• Zoho Creator’s Web Form Builder helps you to create online forms easily and quickly with no installs or scrips required.
• Collected data can be viewd in 6 different formats – List , Summary , Spreadsheet, Calendar, Chart or a custom HTML page
• An option to upload the files by a user can also be given.
• Forms are created in HTML which can be accessed on mobile also.

Gone are the days one had to search for a good plugins to showcase ones photo collection on his blog.  All those tweaking and hacking to get the right combo of colors is now not required. Cooliris has brought out a new product which takes care of all the above things. Now its easy to publish ones photo collection which is on picasa,flickr, facebook and even videos on youtube onto his own website using cooliris in a 3D wall with cool Web 2.0 feel.

To embedded this kind of 3D walls follow the instructions :

1.  Go to http://www.cooliris.com/express/builder/

2. Choose the source from which the photo is to shown on the blog.

3. Select the appearance with different option for buttons.

4. Select the platform onto which this needs to be embedded and copy and embed the code .

Wired phones were the first breakthrough in reducing the distance barrier, as man began to explore he started moving far distances and had to stay in tough. Mobile helped man achieve this. It helped man become mobile.  As he still evolved, he invented a new concept called Twitter. Initially he was happy to tweet sitting in front of computer. Soon he realized that he wanted to tweet being mobile and Voila !! he found out a new service called SMSTweet.in

Having personally used it for past few weeks after the SMS war had started between the service providers, it turned out to be an amazing concept and that too a free service. Its a start up initiated by Mayank Sharma from Bangalore.  This application uses  SMSGupShup’s platform to receive and respond to users SMSes and  Google App-Engine as the server to run. With Mobile operators introducing free SMSs, its a boon for the tweetfreaks to use this service more than ever before.

You can register for this service in two ways i.e,.. OAuth or via sms .

1. Click on the ‘Sign in with twitter’ button on the front page of smstweet and click yes to allow this app to access your tweeter account details.

2. Just send an sms ‘REGISTER <twitter username> <twitter password>’to 09220092200 (Mumbai) or 09243000111(Bangalore). Once the confirmation is recieved you can start tweeting.

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WordPress is a famous open source blogging platform which offers numerous options to tweak and customize its features. One of its great USP is to install the WordPress software in sub folders (www.example.com/folder) and yet have it running in the root folder (www.example.com).

Below is a small tutorial to try this out :-
1. Install the WordPress with its famous 3 click install at www.example.com/folder.
2. Copy the index.php and .htaccess files from the WordPress directory (www.example.com/folder) into the root directory of your site.
3. Edit the index.php file with a txt editor and replace (’./wp-blog-header.php’) with (’./folder/wp-blog-header.php’). Basically it points the index file to the one installed in the folder directory.
4. Login to the Dashboard and click on “General Settings”
5. Change the Blog address (URL) from www.example.com/folder to www.example.com.

You can download the latest version of WordPress >> Download

The commonness among the humans and monkeys are well documented. In this rare encounter a monkey which had been alone and out of its herds for couple of weeks was desperate to live life & socialize its own ways. So having got an opportunity to communicate with a human who is calm, it gorges on him before its senses takes over it and makes it to behave as it would have with another of its species. It quietly finishes its job till its satisfied and moves on.

The human in the video is none other than myself and the monkey was a special guest to our college who stayed for couple of weeks feeding on the delicacies of the college canteen and enjoying himself playing the dogs (pulling its tail) and with his human counterparts .

These are a collection of rare photos of the life of Indians in early 20th century and their proud culture .

The Imperial Airways ‘Hanno’ Hadley Page passenger airplane carries the England to India air mail, stopping in Sharjah to refuel.

An aerial view of Jama Masjid mosque in Delhi , built between 1650 and 1658.

A group from Vaishnava, a sect founded by a Hindu mystic. His followers are called Gosvami-maharajahs.

Women gather at a party in Mumbai ( Bombay ) in 1910.

A rare view of the President’s palace and the Parliament building in New Delhi

A group of Dancing or nautch girls began performing with their elaborate costumes and jewelry.

The Grand Trunk Road , built by Sher Shah Suri, was the main trade route from Calcutta to Kabul .

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In 2009 Bihar saw one of the worst floods in recent history.  Crops were devastated, lives were lost. Thousands of crore rupees were spent in relief and rehabilitation. Months have gone by and people have forgotten about the tragedy. What has followed after the floods as an aftermath is a 2nd wave of destruction through poverty, malnutrition, slavery, trafficking, etc..  People have failed to understand the enormous after effects of this flood.

Farmers who had land have lost all their crop. They are debt ridden now. Most have them have lost their shelter and savings they had. This situation is creating many interesting phenomenons in social environment of the region . Milk collection centers have  registered exponential growth in their collection stats. This is more confined to the regions which were affected by floods. But it wold be Naive to bask in the glory of this fact. The reason behind this is a very sad state of affair of a poverty struck Indian family.

Families before the flood used to sell their produce and make their ends meet. They used their livestocks to fulfill their daily requirements in terms of nutritional food and milk. But now having lost all their fertile land, they are left with their livestocks to make their ends meet as well as to look after their nutritional requirements. Sadly having failed to get any jobs, they are forced to sell the milk produced by the cows and buffaloes and sell it to the distribution centers. Even though it has increased the collection, this has resulted in malnutrition of their children and the whole family. They have been forced to survive on raw rice without the opportunity to buy the  vegetables due to lack of money. This is having major repercussion in terms of   overall health index of the region. People are falling prey to the diseases and anti social elements are taking advantages of this my inciting human trafficking and slavery. When the rest of the India is couping with 9% GDP growth, this part of the region is going back to colonial times. Unless people understand the need for long term rehabilitation this unfortunate incidents will continue to take place.

These frames were captured with high exposure time and still hand. This resulted in spectacular formations of designs and colors.

His name was Fleming, and he was a poor Scottish farmer. One day, while trying to make a living for his family, he heard a cry for help coming from a nearby bog. He dropped his tools and ran to the bog.

There, mired to his waist in black muck, was a terrified boy, screaming and struggling to free himself. Farmer Fleming saved the lad from what could have been a slow and terrifying death.

The next day, a fancy carriage pulled up to the Scotsman’s sparse surroundings. An elegantly dressed nobleman stepped out and introduced himself as the father of the boy Farmer Fleming had saved.’I want to repay you,’ said the nobleman. ‘You saved my son’s life

‘No, I can’t accept payment for what I did,’ the Scottish farmer replied waving off the offer. At that moment, the farmer’s own son came to the door of the family hovel.

‘Is that your son?’ the nobleman asked.
‘Yes,’ the farmer replied proudly.

‘I’ll make you a deal. Let me provide him with the level of education my own son will enjoy If the lad is anything like his father, he’ll no doubt grow to be a man we both will be proud of.’ And that he did.

Farmer Fleming’s son attended the very best schools and in time, graduated from St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London, and went on to become known throughout the world as the noted Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of Penicillin.

Years afterward, the same nobleman’s son who was saved from the bog was stricken with pneumonia.

What saved his life this time? Penicillin..

The name of the nobleman? Lord Randolph Churchill .. His son’s name?

Sir Winston Churchill.

These are some of the frames I captured using high exposure technique at low lit surroundings.

CREDITS : Alan Becker