World Cup 2014 : Most technologically advanced tournament yet

The 2014 World Cup in Brazil is said to be the most scientific and technologically advanced football tournament ever.

This time referees will have access to a foam, water-based, vanishing spray that will be carried in special belts. When the first foul is committed and a player lines up for a free-kick, referees will be able to draw lines. This means that when a defending wall sets up to block a free-kick specialist such as Italy's Andrea Pirlo from scoring, it will be clear where they should be standing. The referee will first circle the ball before pacing out the ten yards (nine metres) required for a wall, and spraying a line on the ground. Within a minute the line disappears, letting play continue without visible marks on the pitch.

Also noticeable at this tournament will be something familiar to followers of club football: goal-line technology. It is being supplied by German company Goal Control, who use seven high-speed cameras at each goal mouth to monitor the action. More than 2,000 tests were performed in the run up to the World Cup, all of which were successful, while their managing director Dirk Broichhausen claimed it was 'unhackable' because it doesn't require a connection to the internet. This will be especially important for moments where it is unclear if the ball has crossed the line - such as Frank Lampard's infamous 'goal' that wasn't given for England against Germany in 2010.

And this World Cup will see no end to the numerous innovations employed by kit suppliers to give their players the edge, with various manufacturers battling it out to prove who is the best.Nike, for instance, recently unveiled their Mercurial Superfly boot that will be sported by Portugal star Cristiano Ronaldo, among other players.The boots use a three-knit weave to put less material between the foot and the ball, enhancing the players’ touch.The Dynamic Fit Collar around the top of the boot, meanwhile, is designed to create a better fit and make it feel more natural.A tendon-like support called a Brio cable also connects the upper section of the boot and the heel that, according to Nike, ‘acts like a slingshot that helps propel the player forward.’

Other players such as Belgium’s Marrouane Fellaini and Ivory Coast’s Kolo Toure, meanwhile, will be wearing boots designed by Wilmslow-based Warrior Global.One of their boots is known as the Gambler.This has nylon stacks positioned on the front of the boot to absorb the speed of the ball and give additional control.A revised, more ergonomic plate on the instep provides more aggressive grip and control, while the intricately designed sole gives better traction and comfort.Warrior’s other boot is the Skreamer, made of microfibres to give players an incredibly lightweight experience.Its major innovation, however, is a ‘4D Arrowbed Insole’ that actually stimulates blood circulation in the foot.

The Brazuca football which will be used in every minute of every game at the World Cup is created by six propeller-shaped polyurethane panels being themally bonded together.Between the seams the Brazuca also has a different geometry to different balls, helping it remain more stable in the air.Smoother balls, as seen with the previous Jabulani at World Cup 2010 in South Africa, are more unpredictable due to a process known as ‘knuckling’.

As air passes over the seams it can create a force that knocks or moves the ball.The Brazuca, with its multiple seams and roughness, will be less prone to the ‘volatile swoops’ of the Jabulani.

One of the big stories to come out of the build-up to this World Cup has been the scorching temperatures predicted. El Niño is expected to cause heat-related problems, with estimates for England’s opening game against Italy on Saturday in the Amazonian region of Manaus suggesting match temperatures could feel like 36°C (97°F). With this in mind, kit manufacturers have done their utmost to provide garments that will keep players cool. Nike’s mantra for the tournament, for example, is ‘Cool under pressure’. In designing their kits, such as that worn by the Brazil national team, they combined technical fabrication with thermo-regulation. Brazil’s 2014 World Cup jersey has 56 per cent more airflow than previous versions. It is also composed of 94 per cent polyester and just 6 per cent cotton - giving it the comfortable feel of cotton, but the heat regulation properties of polyester.

Adidas, meanwhile, have something even more impressive up their sleeves - literally. Called adiPower, they have designed a series of pre-cooling sleeves and vests that can be worn by players before and after matches, or during training. They are designed to help leading football players prepare for games in warm climates - environmental temperatures of 24°C and over - by reducing body temperatures and delaying the onset of heat-induced fatigue. The garments are cooled in a freezer before being worn by a player, bringing their temperature down over 15 to 20 minutes.

Aside from frozen vests, Adidas has another technology to help players during training called the Smart Ball.

Built-in sensors monitor how hard it is struck, track flight trajectories and reveal impact points for penalties and corners. It syncs with the firm’s micoach app via Bluetooth, and helps players learn and master various kicking and control skills.

Several portable Lucozade cool boxes lined the side of the training pitch, with each bearing the names of individual players and containing tailor-made recovery drinks to cater for their different requirements.Players have also been given iPads loaded with instructions on how to beat their opposite man during each match.Strikers, for example, are shown stats and positioning by their opposite defender in order to make sure they get the better of them - or at least try to.

Twitter has announced that fans will be able to support their team by using 'hashflags', by tweeting the three letter code for their team to show support (such as #ENG).

While there are plenty of technologies in and around for the teams, players as well as for the fans, there are also criticism of these technologies as well. Diego Maradona, never afraid to speak his mind, has launched a fresh attack on the the Jabulani, the controversial World Cup ball which has found few admirers among the players and coaches in South Africa. Maradona says the design of the ball makes it impossible for the tournament's best players, like Argentina's Lionel Messi, to produce their very best skill and trickery.

Newcomer arrived in storage media : Hybrid Drive

Hybrid drives are storage devices that combine NAND flash solid-state drive (SSD) with hard disk drive (HDD) technology, with the intent of adding some of the speed of SSDs to the cost-effective storage capacity of traditional HDDs.

Hybrid drives work much in the same way as the current dual-technology configurations in many gaming and power-user PCs, as well as some ultra portable laptops. Such systems have a small, discrete SSD to hold the operating system and frequently used data, augmented by a more capacious conventional hard drive for less frequently accessed data and large collections of documents and digital media.
Current hybrid drive designs, in contrast, deliver both technologies within a single physical unit, and they employ software caching algorithms (rather than relying on the user's brain) to decide which data belongs on the SSD portion and what goes on the drive’s platters.
These caching algorithms reside in the hybrid drive's firmware, not the device driver. To the computer’s operating system, a hybrid drive appears as a single unit with the SSD portion acting strictly as a large cache. The cache is nonvolatile, so the data doesn't disappear when power is absent.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2012223/hybrid-hard-drives-how-they-work-and-why-they-matter.html

When to use interfaces instead of classes

A few years ago, I started seeing developers use interfaces instead of classes in a lot of places. This is a good thing, because it has taken a long time for many developers to really understand object-oriented programming (OOP), and a lot of programmers (myself included) were disguising imperative code with just enough OOP to make things compile. Unfortunately, in many of these scenarios, the technique was being abused or overly used.

Here's a look at some of the situations where it makes sense to use interfaces instead of classes, and where is does not. But first, I'll explain what an interface is at the simplest level.

What exactly is an interface?
An interface defines common functionality across unrelated classes. For example, all sorts of classes that look nothing like each other may have the need to safely get rid of the resources they use.

The IDisposable interface (the name for it in .NET) defines a Dispose() method, which classes then implement. A programmer using those classes knows that, if a class implements the IDisposable interface, the Dispose() method is used to safely release resources.

An interface is a guarantee that certain functionality will work in a standardized way. When properly fashioned, an interface encompasses only the bare minimum for the defined functionality. IEnumerable (which is used to iterate over sequences, lists, sets, etc.), for example, does not provide for a Count property, because it is not concerned with "how many?" it is only worried about "the next one in the sequence".

APIs
I believe you get the most advantage from using interfaces as often as possible when you are writing an API. In an API, you want your code to be as loosely coupled as possible in terms of input and output; after all, you have no control over what the consuming application will need.

There may be a time when it is tempting to work with a List; within a piece of code, and then just return the List, for example. The consumers of the API usually do not need all of the functionality of List, and you can output IEnumerable; instead. This way, if the consumer wants a List, they can have it, or they can have an array of T, or whatever else they might need. By using the common denominator interfaces in your API, you free the consumers from being forced to use or convert to/from your class of choice.

Tightly coupled code
In the fantasy land of Computer Science courses and the blogosphere, developers never write tightly coupled code. In reality, tightly coupled code is a fact of life for the average developer.

You aren't going to make an abstract class and implement the Factory pattern to "future proof" yourself against changes when writing a three line of code class will give you a strong type to shuffle data around. Likewise, coding to interfaces is impractical in many situations; a key sign of this is when you find yourself writing classes that look a lot like structures.

If the only or the best way to get something done is to tightly couple code, then trying to abstract some kind of common functionality into an interface is either doomed to fail or merely more effort than it is worth.

Future proofing
Working with interfaces can give you a measure of future proofing when you are on the consuming end of things. If you are using a library that outputs interface instances instead of classes, not recasting those instances as classes can protect you from changes down the road. Along the same lines, if you only need a certain subset of functionality contained within an interface, working against that interface is better than working against the class.

Go back six or seven years before we had generic types--if you had coded everything to take arrays or Hashtables instead of IEnumerable or ICollection, then if the library ever changed to use List or Dictionary you would have a long road ahead of you to convert over.

Code clarity
Coding with interfaces can improve code readability. How? Because there are fewer "moving parts" for the reader to keep in mind. When you work with an interface, it is more clear what your intentions are and what the capabilities will be. Code is more self-documenting when working with interfaces for this reason.

Sometimes an interface just won't do
Some folks take the use of interfaces to an unworkable extreme. Avoid this at all costs. There will be times when you simply cannot boil down the essence of a variable or a method parameter (or whatever) to an interface. In fact, this is more likely than not. Don't try to force the issue; it's better to just use a class and move on with your life than to try to make things work with an interface.

Blue 2009 Bollywood Movie

A treasure lays buried deep at the bottom of an ocean. There are many people who want to get there by risking life, be it theirs or someone else’s.

‘Blue’ is touted as Bollywood’s first underwater, action adventure thriller. Directed by Anthony D’Souza , the movie is inspired from Hollywood flicks like ‘The Deep’ or ‘Jaws’, but it is not a copy.

The film is about a lost treasure, which three friends try to find undersea. Akshay Kumar , Sanjay Dutt and Zayed Khan play the respective roles.

But in this hunt for the treasure, there’s deceit and betrayal by someone in the group.

Lara Dutta is paired with Sanjay Dutt in the film. The actress did not know deep sea diving before signing the film and underwent a rigorous Scuba diving training to prepare for her role.

The movie’s second heroine Katrina Kaif doesn’t have a big role. But director D’Souza says Kat will surprise the audiences with her role. Sunil Shetty also has a brief role in the film.

Most of ‘Blue’ has been shot

in the Bahamas. Akshay, Sanjay and Zayed swam with real sharks while shooting their stunts in the film.

While shooting one such stunt under water, Akshay Kumar had a narrow escape when he accidentally hit his head against the metal of a sunken ship and began bleeding. Blood attracted the sharks, but before any mishap could happen, the actor was safely pulled above water.

To tone up his muscles, Sanjay Dutt hired the services of a special body building trainer from the US – Lawrence Gonsalves, who guided the actor on losing his former beefy body and developing a leaner physique.

Special water-resistant make-up was required for the film’s leading lady Lara Dutta. For that the producers roped in Hollywood make up artist Nikoletta Skarlatos.

‘Blue’ also feature a special appearance by Australian pop sensation Kylie Minogue who has not only sung for the film but also shot a sizzling video with Akshay Kumar.

Oscar winner A R Rahman has composed the tunes of the film’s songs. In fact, Kylie Minogue agreed to sing and dance to her song in the film because she was captivated by Rahman’s composition.

The movie apparently also has an underwater song picturized on the entire cast.

With a budget of over Rs 100 crores, ‘Blue’ is touted as Bollywood’s most expensive film to date. Made under the banner of Shri Ashtavinayak Cinevision, the movie is set to release in May, 2009.

Conficker: Experts from all over the world fail to defeat internet worm

Till now no one can even think that a worm could knock down global internet. Even tech experts have failed to conquer this deadly worm called Conficker, which has already infected five million computers, and may soon crash the internet in all countries.

So dangerous is the threat, that the world’s largest computer security companies have joined together with governments around the world in an unusual alliance to pool their resources and solve the problem. So much so, that a group (Conficker Working Group) to defeat the worm has also been created.

The worm, which was first detected in November, last year, spreads rapidly to computers through a flaw in the Windows operating system. Infected machines are co-opted into a “botnet” army, which can be controlled and used by the hackers to launch unprecedented cyber attacks.

“The general agreement in the security world is that Conficker is the largest threat that global internet is facing from a cyber crime point of view. It has proven to be extremely resilient. It’s almost impossible to remove,” Rodney Joffe, a Director of the Conficker Working Group, told Sydney Morning Herald. “The best minds in the world have not managed to crack the code behind this yet.”

Microsoft has offered a 250,000 dollars reward for information leading to the identification of the individuals – or rogue governments – behind Conficker. But so far international effort to find a solution has yielded few results.

The creators of the worm can do anything they want with the infected machines including stealing users’ banking details or flooding government servers to knock them offline. The worm has a built-in mechanism to prevent people from scanning their computers with anti-virus software, says Joffe. Unfortunately, even for those who wipe their computers clean and start fresh, if they back up any important data on a portable hard drive, the clean machine is re-infected when the drive is connected to the computer.

The worm also spreads automatically between computers on a network and infects machines without the user having to do anything other than switch their computers on. While majority of the botnets can be destroyed by disabling the server used to issue commands to infected machines, but with Conficker the location of this sever changes every day and state-of-the-art cryptography means it’s almost impossible to crack.

Chrome Frame: Google Offering plug-in to convert IE into Chrome

Google has developed a plug-in for Internet Explorer (IE) that will allow Chrome to run in IE. Chrome Frame is a new browser plug-in developed by Google which will give user a chance to feel Chrome browsing experience inside Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Many experts have claimed that IE has fairly low web standards and is susceptible to virus attacks and lacks in performance as well. Many users are turning to Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or even Apple Safari for safe browsing. But that does not change the fact that IE is still the largest used web browser (as it comes integrated with Microsoft operating system).

Many corporate houses still run IE. But after the launch of Chrome Frame things will change dramatically. Chrome Frame creates a new frame inside IE and with this frame Google packs all the essential data in a lightweight plug-in to convert IE into Chrome. Chrome Frame also injects the latest versions of Chrome’s Webkit and JavaScript engines into IE. Google claims that its goals are noble and they just want to provide users with better performance browser.

While it is true that running two browsers in one will take more resource from computer but Google says that Chrome is designed to give resources back to the machine when users are not using them with the browser.

Google claims that it won’t be explicitly advertise Google frame in IE but will use subtle methods to alert users of its existence. For example, if users browse to a Google app in Internet Explorer that may render better in Chrome, Google might have a message on the page informing about the plug-in.

Chrome Frame is still in testing stage and will work with IE6, IE7, and IE8 on any Windows-based machine. Microsoft has still not made any comment on this but there are chances that Microsoft will ban Google Frame.

How to Run PHP 5.x with Apache Tomcat 4.x or Apache Tomcat 5.x

I am going to discuss here few steps to run php 5.x on Tomcat 4.x or Tomcat 5.x. We can enable php only in one web application as well as run globally for all applications under tomcat. I assume here, you have Apache Tomcat 4.x or 5.x already installed and running in your machine.

Steps:
1. Download latest php 5.x zip file. I used php 5.0.2. You can download it from here: http://museum.php.net/php5/php-5.0.2-Win32.zip
2. Download latest pecl modules 5.x zip file. I used pecl 5.0.2. You can download it from here: http://museum.php.net/php5/pecl-5.0.2-Win32.zip

Note: PHP version and PECL versions should be same. If you want to try with some other version get from here: http://museum.php.net/php5/

3. Unzip php zip in C: drive(I used C: for my installation, you are open to try new things)
4. Copy php.ini-dist, in c:\php, as php.ini in c: drive
5. Uncomment the line (remove semi-colon at the beginning) in php.ini:
;extension=php_java.dll
6. Extract php5servlet.dll from pecl zip file to c:\php. Ensure that the file is actually present in c:\php (maybe you can't see the php5servlet.dll file in pecl archive, it means you are trying this with newer versions of php)
7. Now create a directory under webapps in your Apache Tomcat installation. Lets say it is named test.
8. Create WEB-INF directory under test
9. Create lib directory under WEB-INF
10. Create web.xml under WEB-INF with the following contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE web-app PUBLIC
"-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"
"http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd">
<web-app>
<servlet>
<servlet-name>php</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>net.php.servlet</servlet-class>
</servlet>
<servlet>
<servlet-name>php-formatter</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>net.php.formatter</servlet-class>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>php</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>*.php</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>php-formatter</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>*.phps</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

11. Extract php5srvlt.jar from pecl zip archive and extract or unjar (jar -xvf c:\php5srvlt.jar ) it under c:\
12. Modify both the files reflect.properties and servlet.properties to change the line library=phpsrvlt to library=php5servlet and save them. This indicates the file name of the dll file which is loaded by the Java application to serve the requests.
N.B.: This has no connection with the name of the jar file which can be anything. you may get this error “java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no php5servlet in java.library.path” for any mistake in this step. Please check the two properties file, whether there are any blank spaces. There should be only one line, and no blank spaces.

13. Re-create the jar file with the following command
(jar -cvfm php5srvlt.jar c:\META-INF\MANIFEST.MF -C c:\servlet\ /.), assuming you extracted the php5srvlt.jar in c: drive
14. Copy the jar file to WEB-INF\lib directory created earlier.
N.B: If you want to run PHP for one web application then do step 14 only but if you want to run php globally for all applications under tomcat then copy the php5srvlt.jar into commons/lib directory as well
15. Add c:\php to your System or User Path in Windows environment (Hint: Right-click and select Properties from My Computer -> then go to advanced tab -> click on environment variable)
16. create a new system or user variable PHP_HOME with value c:\php
17. Create a file index.php under test with the following code:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

18. Restart Tomcat
19. Restart your machine(it is not required but though as we have added system variable so there is no harm doing a restart)
20. Start tomcat server again.
21. Open your browser and go to http://localhost:8080/test/index.php(if you set your port to some other port than 8080 please specify it in the place of 8080)
22. Ensure that there are no errors displayed. Instead you get an informative screen with php version information and whole lot of details.

Hope this helps. Have fun!!!
http://aurosblog.com/?p=481
http://gogetauro.com/blog/?p=143

Modding MOTOROKR E6/E6e/A1200

For the growing interest of how to mod your MOTOROKR E6/E6e/A1200 i have published a article How i moded My MOTORKR E6 edge aka E6e. I have also published Short tutorial for flashing your E6/E6e.

See this and let me know about your progress and never hesitate to post if you face any kindof problem.

Happy modding!!

My MOTORKR E6 edge

Hi Guys!! For since somedays i was busy with my newly bought MOTOROKR E6e aka E6 EDGE. I was too curious to mod it by as you know for modding and installing apps you have to flash your firmware to some firmwares which supprt modding. Like I have 22P firmware installed by default and these firmware is only available in indian phones, as far as i know. So i was eagerly waiting for the 22P firmware to come on internet as i have the alternate way if it doesnt work. After i got the original R535H10_G_11.87.22P aka 22P firmware. Now what should i do. To know more go here.

How to Stop Windows XP from telling you about updates?

Your annoying windows update yellow baloon text will never appear after this. Want to do the trick rite now... more