Enjoy Google and Wolfram Alpha together

Now, one can enjoy the coverage and ranking of google with the preciseness of Wolfram Alpha at the same time, for the queries that Wolfram Alpha answers very well.

All one has to do is to download this excellent firefox add on available here.

The addon, throws the same search to Wolfram Alpha as well in addition [...]

Wolfram Alpha disappoints

Had a first look at Wolfram Alpha and got disappointed. The search engine which had so much of euphoria built around it did not deliver to my expectations. Here are the results of the test drive.

Search 1:Number of internet users in India. 

Wolfram gives a number (80m) which seems higher than the number that we had [...]

Move over microfinance, microtelecom is here

Have you heard of microtelecom? I hadn’t till upto 15 minutes ago.
Microtelecom is all about optimization of telecom infrastructure for a very specific application: serving low-income, hard-to-reach communities in rural areas. As with all industries and all early movers, the company pioneering the concept has gone ahead and coined this term.
But what a wonderful idea [...]

Information Technology Act (Cyberlaws) 2000 Simplified – Part 2

Continued from part 1 …
Regulation of Certifying Authorities

Central government may appoint a controller of certifying authorities, and also deputy controllers and assistant controllers
Lays down the functions of the controllers, especially certifying the public keys of the certifying authorities themselves and the form and content of the digitial signature certificate and the keys
Lays down procedure for [...]

Information Technology Act (Cyberlaws) 2000 Simplified – Part 1

Part 1 of my attempt to put the Indian Information Technology Act of 2000 in simple words, without legaleseDigital Signature

Recognizes digital signature and approves that electronic records can be authenticated with digital signatures. Also empowers the government to decide and modify rules around digital signatures

Electronic Governance

Allows for exisitng laws to recognize electronic documents at par [...]

Safely Remove Hardware?

Lack of patience has often resulted in all of us, at one time or the other, just yanking off the USB drive fom the port of our laptops, without due respect to “Safely Remove Hardware” feature that Windows provides. So, how unsafe is unsafe hardware removal really? Devices use the USB port for 2 main [...]

Experiments with im bot programming

All of today, I was trying to explore more on programming an im bot for gTalk. Most of the things work out of the box, if you are using a library for xmpp, like smack, with the exception of file transfer. I did end up spending a considerable time on trying to send a [...]

Business Applications on instant messaging (im bots for business)

Have been thinking through on the scope of creating business applications powered by instant messaging. The roots are few years old. In 2002, I created a suite of enterprise applications on a jabber powered server.
For few years in between, there was limited or low activity on the world of gtalk/yahoo bots; I recall a certain [...]