Tatana Kucharova crowned as Miss World 2006

Czech Republic student Tatana Kucharova, has been crowned as Miss World 2006.

Romania's Joana Valentina Boitor, 17, was runner up. Australia's multicultural beauty queen Sabrina Houssami has finished third at the Miss World 2006 beauty contest.

The 20-year-old university student from Georges Hall, who caused a stir in the Muslim community when she declared she was happy to wear a bikini for the contest, was one of 104 young women vying for the coveted diamond crown.

For the final night of the competition, held in Warsaw, Poland, she wore a stunning white floor-length gown trimmed with silver.

Houssami, the glamourous daughter of a Lebanese-Muslim father and Indian-Hindu mother, had ignored criticism from Muslim clerics who slammed beauty contests as a "slur on Islam'', saying she was happy to wear a swimsuit for the pageant judges because it was for charity.

Houssami said her religion was a private matter and if wearing a bikini helped her to raise money for a good cause it should not be against the rules.

So far, she has raised more than $1.2 million for charity through her pageant work. She hopes to become a television journalist when she graduates, using her profile to "raise awareness of philanthropic ventures.

Snegithane From Alaipayuthe

Lyrics

naetRu munniravil unnith thialvu madiyil KaatRu nuzhaivadhaenoa
uyir kalandhu kaLiththirundhaen
inRu viNNilavil andha eera ninaivil kanRu thavippadhaenoa
manam kalangip pulambugiRaen
koodhal neLivil ezhil koalach charivil (2)
garvam azhindhadhadi en garvam azhindhadhadi

snegidhanae snegidhanae ragasiya snegidhanae
chinnach chinnadhaay koarikkaigaL sevikodu snegidhanae
idhae azhuththam azhuththam idhae aNaippu aNaippu
vaazhwin ellai varai vaendum vaendum
vaazhwin ellai varai vaendum vaendumae

snegidhanae snegidhanae ragasiya snegidhanae

chinnach chinna aththumeeRal purivaay
en cel ellam pookkaL pokkach cheyvaay...malargaL malarvaay
poopparikkum bakthan poalamedhuvaay
naan thoongumboadhu viral nagam kaLaivaay...saththaminRith
thuyilvaay
aiviral idykkil aaliv eNNai poosi saevaigaL seyyavaendum
neeyazhumboadhy naan azha naerndhaal thudaikkinRa viral vaendum

snegidhanae snegidhanae ragasiya snegidhanae
chinnach chinnadhaay koarikkaigaL sevikodu snegidhanae

naetRu munniravil unnith thialvu madiyil KaatRu nuzhaivadhaenoa
uyir kalandhu kaLiththirundhaen
inRu viNNilavil andha eera ninaivil kanRu thavippadhaenoa
manam kalangip pulambugiRaen
koodhal neLivil ezhil koalach charivil (2)
garvam azhindhadhadi en garvam azhindhadhadi

sonnadhellam pagalilae purivaen...
sonnadhellam pagalilae purivaen
nee solladhadhum iravilae purivaen...kaadhil koondhal nuzhaippaen
undhan sattai naanum poattu alaivaen
nee kuLikkaiyil naanum konjam nanaivaen..uppu moottai sumappaen
unnaiyaLLi eduththu uLLangaiyil madiththu kaikuttayil oLiththukkoLvaen
veLivarumboadhu vidudhalai seydhu vaendum varam vaangikkoLvaen

snegidhanae snegidhanae ragasiya snegidhanae
chinnach chinnadhaay koarikkaigaL sevikodu snegidhanae
idhae azhuththam azhuththam idhae aNaippu aNaippu
vaazhwin ellai varai vaendum vaendum
vaazhwin ellai varai vaendum vaendumae

snegidhanae snegidhanae ragasiya snegidhanae
chinnach chinnadhaay koarikkaigaL sevikodu snegidhanae

Please Spare Harry Potter

JK Rowling may be glad that the Harry Potter saga is finally finished.
Rowling is currently working on the seventh and last installment of the mega-hit boy wizard series. At the meet held at New York's Radio City Music Hall, she said she was glad the saga was nearing its end.

"I feel quite liberated," she said.
"I can resolve the story now and it's fun in a way it wasn't before because finally I've reached my resolution, and I think some people will loathe it and some people will love it, but that's how it should be."

Rowling has hinted that two characters will meet their end in the last book and
fans fear that one of them is Harry. She said it was not easy writing
the deaths of the two characters. "I didn't enjoy killing the character
at the end of book six," she said, "but I had been planning that for
years, so... it wasn't quite as poignant as you'd imagine. I'd already
done my grieving when I actually came to write it. I understand why an
author would kill a character from a point of view of not allowing
another person to continue writing after the original author is dead."

Please Rowling....On behalf of fans of Harry Potter....Please do spare Harry...Please give the series with Good Ending....

How to Speed up Firefox

Pipelining is a HTTP/1.1 feature that speeds up transfers by requesting several objects at once without waiting for a response first.
Read More On Firefox Pipelining FAQs.

STEPS:

1. Type "about:config" into the address bar and click go.
   
2. Scroll down to find the entries: network.http.pipelining, network.http.proxy.pipelining, network.http.pipelining.maxrequests.(Normally
   the browser will make one request to a webpage at a time. When you
   enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up
   page loading.)
   
3. Alter the entries as follows: Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true". Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true". Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to 8. This means it will make 8 requests at once.
   
4. Right-click anywhere on the screen and select New-> Integer.
   
5. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay"(without quotes) and set
   its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits
   before it acts on information it receives.
   
6. Shut down your browser and reopen it. You shouldn't notice
   much of a difference right away. But get browsing some of your usual
   sites and you should notice a much faster connection to the site!

WARNINGS !!

• This may not work on connections that are over 1mb.
  
• Do not edit anything if you don't know what it does!
  
• Keep in mind that with using these pipelining tweaks, while it
  may seem faster at first things may slow down or have problems like
  images loading wrong. If that happens undo the tweaks.
• This preference only has an effect if you are not using a proxy. If you are using a proxy, see network.http.proxy.pipelining.
  
• network.http.keep-alive must be set to true for pipelining to work.
  
• network.http.version must be set to 1.1 for pipelining to work.
  
• While this preference will improve performance, it may cause problems loading pages from some servers.
  

Sneak Preview on Office 2007

Goals for the Office 2007 user interface was to make it easier to create beautiful output.

Microsoft introduces Tabbing feature in Office 2007.

Tabbing has been around for years on websites and, more recently, in browsers, and now Microsoft has cottened on.

Colour Themes for Word 2007

Word 2007 comes in a number of colour schemes, silver, blue and black.

Sneak Preview [Not the Final Version]



Every kind of object in Office 2007 (table, chart, picture,
drawing, etc.) has an overall gallery on its first contextual tab
which allows you to set the overall style for the object.

Tables in PowerPoint 2007

PowerPoint Tables have been given a major revision with this release of Office.



One of the other major pain points in working with tables in PowerPoint was the experience of actually moving your tabular data from outside of PowerPoint into PowerPoint. The experiences in the past with being able to
move a table from Excel to PowerPoint, for example, have proven to be problematic for users and in many cases the user would resort to pasting the table in PowerPoint as an image, rather than as an actual table. Cross-app
interoperability of tables between Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, specifically copying tables directly into PowerPoint, has been a top priority for this release.

Information will come into PowerPoint just as it was in the host application when one copies a table from Excel to PowerPoint, or Word to PowerPoint, as can be seen in the following image:






All of the basic formatting options exist, such as cell fills, border manipulation, font modifications, etc. On top of that we now have a set of effects which can be applied to a table in PowerPoint. These effects allow a person to apply a soft shadow to a table, a reflection, or to apply 3D bevels to a selection of cells within the table.

Apple Owns the Word POD

Apple thinks it owns the word pod

Apple is chasing after companies it believes are infringing on its copyright of the iPod name to get them to stop using the word “pod” in their names.

Pocastready and Mypodder have recently received cease and desist
letters from Apple because consumers could confuse them with Apple
products. Apple took the action because two companies were trying to
register the phrases themselves.

Robert Scoble already have a post on this..Check it out.

The letter said, in part, “As you may be aware, Apple has used its IPOD
mark since at least as early as October 2001. Since that time, the IPOD
trademark has become famous. Moreover, the term POD has also been
adopted and used extensively in the marketplace by consumers as an
abbreviation to refer to Apple's IPOD player".

"While Apple, of course, has no general objection to proper use of the descriptive term 'podcast' as part of a trademark for goods and services offered in the podcasting
field, it cannot allow marks that go beyond this legitimate use and
infringe on Apple's rights in POD and IPOD.”

Apple does own the rights to "iPod" and is apparently applying for the same rights for "pod" in some countries.

Rain In Singapore

Wellington Circle
Copyrights bhuvans.wordpress.com

Nature in Kodaikannal

Its been a week since i have blogged.....

When i was thinking about updating my blog....i just remembered my kodaikannal trip...

Its indeed a beautiful place to visit...

Hmm...i missed one important interest of mine....I love nature...and i love taking portraits of nature's beauty...

Following are the beautiful scenaries..and flowers...i took in kodaikanal..

Time and Money Library

I happened to come across this library and found very useful.

This will be a great boon to all banking projects. The library is very well designed.

This code library is based on
basic concepts in recurring domains such as time and money. Distilled model
concepts will yield a coherent design that is simple to use and easy to change
to fit the needs of different application development projects.

This code library is hosted in sourceforge.net under the very permissive MIT Licence, so no one should be impeded from trying it.

If you are looking forward to develop time and money calculations for any projects do look at this library before re-inventing the wheel.

Home Page of the library: http://timeandmoney.sourceforge.net/

IBM Websphere V6.0

Every J2EE project has difficulties in choosing the Application Server Containers. Even though open source Application Servers like JBoss tries to rule out the giants, still many commercial projects choose the giants as they have already made good impressions. Among the giants IBM’s Websphere and BEA’s Weblogic had equal competition. Many commercial J2EE projects still believe that their commericial product will be secure only with the giants and the downtime of the giant application servers are negotiable.

Now IBM has released Websphere Version 6 and recently I attended IBM’s in-house workshop on WAS 6. After attending the workshop, I realized that WAS 6 is going to be the primary Application Server as it provides most of the solutions to the big commercial J2EE projects.

WebSphere® Application Server V6.0 is the industry's premier Java™-based application platform, integrating enterprise data and transactions for the dynamic e-business world. Each configuration available delivers a rich application deployment environment with application services that provide enhanced capabilities for transaction management, as well as the security, performance, availability, connectivity, and scalability expected from the WebSphere family of products.

What Websphere V6.0 Offers:

1. Full J2EE V1.4 compatibility, as well as Web services support above and beyond the specification, including a native, enterprise-ready JMS provider.

2. New packaging providing full J2EE 1.4 compatibility across the board, from the base Express offering to the most robust Network Deployment, offering multiple deployment options from single server to clustered, highly available, high-volume configurations.

3. Rapid development and deployment features that reduce development cycle time and maximize the ability to use existing skills and resources.

4. Tight integration with IBM Rational tools, a highly productive development environment built on Eclipse, the open systems development environment.

5. Industry’s broadest cross-platform support.

6. Delivers an advanced, security-rich infrastructure that is extensible through a pluggable architecture.

7. Delivers a single, unified Web browser-based administration across all configuration options.

8. Offers distributed-workload and caching capabilities to intelligently optimize performance

9. Provides enhanced application availability with sophisticated clustering and load-balancing capabilities

My Observation on Websphere V6.0

… WAS 6 has pretty good Administrative Console. Administrative console is built using Struts and JSF technologies.

Hmm…we all know that Websphere Version 5 also had their Administrative Console built using Struts. So what’s special in Version 6 and why they have also used JSF?

The Good News to all of us is they have integrated Tivoli Performance monitor in the admin console itself using the JSF technology. Now all our J2EE Projects can be benchmarked easily in the console.

… They have replaced JMS C Processes with Java Process and embedded the JMS Servers in the Application Servers. In Older versions, once you start your JMS Server you can see list of C Process running in your CPU [Something that starts with ‘amq’].
If you haven’t noticed it yet, try starting JMS Server in Version 5 and look at your Process list [See Task Manager for Windows. Ps –f for Unix].


… Load balancing has improved drastically. According to their benchmarks, they claim that Websphere Version 6 can handle 10,000 Concurrent requests where as Websphere version 5 can handle only 500 concurrent requests.

… They have improved in the areas of Caching

… Websphere Version 6 has Scheduling Services. This is the one I admire the most. Because when I worked with one of the Reporting Project, the project had a module that involves scheduling architecture. And I had to learn Quartz API and write the scheduler service. Now since this is the part of Websphere, developer’s overhead in writing the services is reduced. And now the developers only need to configure the scheduler service and start using it.

… Websphere Version 6 has support for Web services.

Additional Interesting News:

Finally in the workshop, IBM mentioned about the following that seems interesting to me…

… Extended Deployment Server, which is capable of tuning the application server.

… WebSphere Application Server V6.0 delivers Services Oriented Architecture today, across all configurations. The products allows businesses to increase their return on investment and lower their total cost of ownership by reusing existing IT assets using standards based messaging and the latest Web services standards. This translated into reduced costs, reduced time to value, and increased business flexibility.

… WebSphere Application Server V6.0 provides a secure, dynamic platform for businesses. Businesses are able to do more work with less resource with WebSphere Application's scaling abilities and security features.

And Finally...I am now very curious to see the next version of BEA Weblogic.