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Broadband access, a legal right in Finland »

While France declared that internet access is a basic human right, Finland went a step ahead, by making broadband a legal right. Sounds like a cliche,  but internet has made the world flat. What interests me is the way different countries embrace this internet revolution. While some countries are trying to regulate internet access, some are trying to make it more open. In less than a decade, we will see a significant difference in these countries – the rate at which their children acquire knowledge, the efficiency of their businesses, transparency in the government etc.

While it is true that not-so-developed countries, do not have the luxury of making internet access a basic right, they should, however, see the long term benefits in mind and act accordingly. Who knows,  internet might further change the way education system works in the future. Not too far away, children probably won’t have to go to schools for as many years as we did, carrying heavy school bags and doing tons of home work. Hopefully, they will get more quality time and learn things quicker!

First Look at Microsoft Surface in India »

I attended a Microsoft ISV Executive Briefing Session yesterday at the Microsoft Signature Building, Bangalore. Surprisingly, they allowed us to take a peek at Microsoft Surface. It really was cool to see a computer reacting to hand gestures, instead of the mouse and the keyboard. But what surprised me was the size of it. It looked like a big black box with a glass on top of it. So, I am not sure if it can be wall mounted. It is more like a center table.I guess it had cameras or some thing inside the black box.

We were told that it is running on Vista with 4 GB of RAM. Anyway, I am glad that there is some innovation at this end. The UI was really great.

PHP redirection to HTTPS SSL »

If you wish to redirect one of your pages to HTTPS, even when user enters HTTP in the URL, you can use the following lines of code before you load your PHP page.

if (empty($_SERVER['HTTPS']) || ($_SERVER['HTTPS']!=”on”))
{
$redirect= “https://”.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
header(“Location:$redirect”);
}

Daily Motion’s Another Bubble Rich Man on the Internet »

Here is a very funny video from Daily Motion.

New OS from Google – Google Chrome OS »

The web is the platform! Google is introducing a new OS based on the Linux kernel, primarily “designed for the web”. And you are wrong, if you think that we are talking about Android here.

Google is launching a new OS, called Google Chrome OS and this is not targeted at the mobile market. Well, we all know that Google is pretty obsessed in moving our applications to the web. And what else could be a better way than building an OS, that is specifically designed for the web?

Google Chrome OS, from ground up, is built to be secure and fast. Aren’t there times where checking for new emails is quicker and easier on a mobile phone than booting up your laptop? Well, that’s what Google seems to be addressing with Google Chrome OS. It wants to keep the OS lightweighted, so that the boot process does not take too much time.

Before you start wondering on where to download, note that it is not yet PC ready. Google plans to open source the OS later in this year and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Well…I do like this development. I am sure I will set up a boot loader, which will boot the Google Chrome OS as the default option. This will make all web based things easy and quick to load. If I really want to load Windows, I could do that too, but it would then be as often as I go to the BIOS…only when I really need to go there!

Sending data between JavaScript and PHP using CodeIgniter, jQuery and JSON »

I am sure you would have had many situations, where you had to pass large amounts of data from PHP to JavaScript. This is a very common need, especially when you are using Ajax. I have seen code where developers would send a comma separated string and parse it out in JavaScript. While it works, the code looks ugly and you can run into many issues if the data you are passing uses the delimiter (comma). A more cleaner approach, of course, is to send data through XML. But parsing XML on the client side might be an overkill for mundane tasks. A quick, clean and simpler approach is to pass data in JSON format.

If you wonder what JSON is, here is what the JSON website says, “JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate.“.

The bottom line is that it is easy for ever one!

Making an Ajax request:
jQuery comes with JSON support and even lets you use it with Ajax calls. Let us say, you have an onblur event which makes an Ajax call to get data for the rest of the fields, you would do the following in your onblur event:

url = “http://www.domain.com/mycontroller/” + isbn;
$.getJSON(url, function(json){
document.book_form.publisher.value = json.publisher;
});

For those of you, who have used jQuery before, the above code looks plausible. For the rest, the above function is making an Ajax call to the URL and the second argument, function(json) is a callback function, that gets kicked off when the browser receives the response.

JSON can pack multi dimensional arrays too; the above example is just returning a row of data back to the client.

Check out iVirtual at Silicon India Start Up Event on June 6th 2009 »

Please do stop by at the iVirtual Stall on June 6th, 2009 at the Silicon India Start Up Event. iVirtual is getting good response from Engineering college principals at Vizag.

To know more about iVirtual, click here.