“From our perspective, a hacker is a person people express admiration for his/her work, skills, creative edge, cleverness, uniqueness, intelligence, etc,” said GnuCitizen founder Petko D. Petkov in a blog post.

The network is built on Ning, a site allowing the creation of ad-hoc social networks, and programmers can create customized add-ons using the Google-backed Open Social API. GnuCitizen is famous for finding out various security concerns in various products including the Gmail’s security threat. GnuCitizen is encouraging businesses to use the site to seek out security researchers for jobs or particular projects

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(Via Google Operating System )

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Productivity

43 Actions - Advanced to-do list and Getting Things Done (GTD) organizer for Apple’s mobile platforms, including the iPhone and iPod touch. Quickly add new actions, organize in contexts and projects, set due dates; get your daily or weekly agenda by email; add new actions via Jott.com, Twitter.com or by email; mark active/next actions; check off and archive finished tasks; customize the color scheme; export a backup (in XML-format) for safekeeping.

Taskr - Dead simple task management. Easily manage your task list from virtually anywhere! An Offline notes/ to do list! Load the page on your iPhone once and you can use noter offline!

noter
  - An Offline notes/ to do list! Load the page on your iPhone once and you can use noter offline and now Account Synchronization! Type up notes, store offline and sync any time with your dB element account. You can retrieve your notes on any computer or iPhone. Make changes, send to your account and retrieve anywhere.

iZoho - One of the conveniences of the iPhone is being a good device for business use. Zoho, one of the best office suites on the web, is being used by more businesses every day. Docs/spreadsheets/presentations on iPhone? iZoho. Three applications available currently in iZoho - Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show which lets you view your documents, spreadsheets and presentations in Zoho. Currently you can view and edit your documents, but you cannot edit your spreadsheets and presentations (you can only view them).

Gaming

Avalanche - Avalanche is another addictive iPhone puzzle game. The goal of the game is to rid the screen of all of the blocks by picking 3 or more connected blocks of the same color. Faster decisions give you more points.

iChess - You can use a drag and drop or a point and click selection method to move and the game supports different difficulty levels. Right now, it seems like there is a problem with computer response speed that the developers are working on.

Social Networking

Picasa Web Albums Mobile - Google’s online photo sharing service, providing users a simple, powerful way to share/view photos. Flip through your latest photo albums and view any photo stored on Picasa Web Albums. Pictures are re-sized for small, fast downloads. 

iPhlickr - Flickr + iPhone = Awesome Photo Browsing, Anytime, Anywhere. No, it really is that cool, you know, for those times you need to look up what a Crotalus Oreganus snake looks like.

Twitter Alerts - Get alerted by email when someone on your twitter timeline enters a specific terms.

Facebook -An iPhone application for Facebook lovers.
  Facebook on iPhone and iPod touch allows you to do it all: Get the latest news from your friends, Upload and share photos, Send and receive messages

iTookThisToday - Shoot. Share. View.

IM+ for Skype - Enabling voice and text communication with other Skype users and providing cost-effective calling to stationary and mobile phones. Call Skype users to their PCs, Chat with other users who are logged in with their Skype accounts on PC, Make cost-effective calls to any destination.

Utilities

eBay for iPhone – eBay search tool for iPhone.

TranslatorMAX - Translate from/to many languages.

SpeedoMeter - Measure the average velocity over a given distance. 

Reverse Cell Phone Tracer - Discover who owns any cell phone number with this instant search tool. Just type the number and reveal their details. Instantly search a database of millions of cell phone records including the owner name, address and background information.

iConvert
  Converts multiple measurement units. Currently includes 322 units in 40 measurements. Can save as data-URL-bookmark to use offline. 

Sci-Calc - A basic scientific calculator for the iPhone.

News

Google Reader - No doubt one of the exciting things with phones these days is being able to get information right there and then. And the Google Reader application by David Cann takes your RSS reading to a whole new level.

iPhoneDigg - For the avid digg user with an iPhone, this is a must. It has a really easy to use scrolling interface to maximize the small space available and shows you the current Digg count on the articles you are reading.

YouTube - YouTube on iPhone? Like Steve promised. You are welcomed by a list of featured videos just like on its big brother site. There is a search feature, a featured list, a recently added list, most viewed, and the usual stuff. Watch away!

Wikipedia - Read and browse Wikipedia articles in any language, formatted perfectly for your iPhone or iPod Touch.

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Penzu is super cool, as it does provides the basic features such as

• inserting images
• inserting hyperlinks
• normal text edit
• indentation
• text search
• journal kind of side tabs

You don’t need all the super-duper features provided like GDocs or Zoho to just to manage and track the simple texts that you want to write and store. Before signing up you can even try out how penzu look and work. And the good thing is the entire service is free. Penzu have listed a lot more features than a normal online document service.

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Image: CNET

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Let’s first look at what is generally believed as Encapsulation? Ask your teacher, “What is Encapsulation?” You teacher would promptly say “Hiding data“. Try googling, you find just 10% of the sites will be giving you right information about Encapsulation where most of them tends to miss out the important glitch. When one of my friends was speaking about Encapsulation, he was right in quoting the proper definition i.e. “Hiding Information”, but his understanding was not correct. If you are one of them who doesn’t understand about Encapsulation, then this article is for you.

So, what exactly the encapsulation means bro? Ok. Let we have some coffee, and we continue discuss about Encapsulation.

Cool, the coffee vending machine has given tasty brewed coffees. Nice coffee! Back to our discussion, here is a simple question I’d like to ask you. Why don’t you give a thought on how did this coffee vending machine worked?

You dropped in the coin, and the coffee came out of the machine in a beautiful coffee cup. So, why didn’t you see how the where the coffee beans, how it is prepared? You really don’t know (unless you are the one who designed the machine ;-)) how things are made inside the machine, but finally you get a coffee!! Yeah don’t you see a sense of Encapsulation? So, here what is actually hidden? The Coffee beans? No, the way how the coffee prepared is hidden.

So, Encapsulation is hiding of process; hence you hide the data. Not the vice versa.

From the definition, Encapsulation is “Information Hiding”, the information is how something is happening inside an object? It’s just a mere data hiding concept (though it includes data hiding).

So, when you model this coffee vending machine, you don’t want to show out the way how a coffee is made. Isn’t it? So, you don’t want to show where the coffee beans, milk and the sugar are. Right?

So, in the CofeeVendingMachine class, prepareCoffee() is hidden and getCoffee() is made public, so that you will be able to send a request to the machine.

Since you have hidden the process, you don’t have any need to show how the coffee & milk are mixed and how it’s been brewed. If you need a stylish design, even you can show that.

The Coffee Vending Machine encapsulates the internal process and the ingredients (data) used in the process.

Object Oriented Languages provides encapsulation via modifiers such as “private”, “protected”. Sometimes, volatile and transient also acts as encapsulating modifiers, but they are language specifics.

Encapsulation doesn’t stop just with OOP languages. The concept extends itself to the latest technology such as Webservices, Service Oriented Architecture. If you closely watch, any real world object has encapsulation in it, which the Object Oriented Programming tries to model.

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In OOP ( Object Oriented Programming ) , Abstraction facilitates the easy conceptualization of real world objects into the software program.

Abstraction lies everywhere! What ever you see, do and live are all full of abstraction.

In mathematics, multiplication is a kind of abstraction. The symbol “x” is an abstract symbol that can do multiplication of any two elements.

2 x 3 = 6

3.5 x 3.7 = 12.95

(a + b) x ( a - b) = a^2 - b^2

In Art, Abstract Art is a kind of art, which depicts the distilled form of the world.

Courtesy: RegiaArt

So, what exactly an Abstraction is?

Abstraction facilitates the easy conceptualization of real world objects, by eliminating the unnecessary details of the object. Unnecessary details? Yes, all the similar objects when you generalize, you will drop the uncommon details about the objects.

E.g., when you model a generic prototype for CRT Television & a Plasma Television, you look for details like Type of screen, Height, Width, thickness etc.; these are necessary details for a Television. But a Television object doesn’t need to have details of what kind of Electron it will bean to power the CRT, what kind of liquid plasmas it will use to power the Plasma TVs. These kinds of details are unnecessary details.

Let’s take mobile phone as the real world example. Look at the below mobile phones.

What do you feel about them?

• Firstly, everything is Nokia Mobiles
• You could see Slide, Flip and Bar models
• You could see Music, Business & 3G Mobiles
• You could see QWERTY , Basic and No keypads
• You could extra music player button on music edition.
• The Color, Size, Weight, Look etc…
• And even more…

So, for better understanding I organize the mobile phones in the below format.

Basically, all the mobiles belong to Nokia.

Still need a better classification, I drill down to its features and conceptualize the mobiles in more general way. So, you could categorize the mobiles as

• Music
• Business
• Gaming
• Normal
• 3G

As a layman user, you will feel its weight, color, style. As a music lover, you will check for the memory, type of media files it supports, and type of communication between devices (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi etc). As a business person, you will check for the memory, type of business application etc.

Now, you have got the details of the each and every mobile. It’s time to extract the most essential details of these mobile categories. Here I use an Abstraction filter, which abstracts out the essential details. So, essential details, here I mean is the most common properties of the mobiles.

So, now the conceptualization of mobile has still got finer. Now you can still go deep and get a finer concept to model a generic / abstract mobile, which can be turned into a beautiful mobile of your kind.

Now, you have extracted out the necessary details for each category of mobile. You still fine grain it to get a mobile phone’s basic property with the Abstraction filter.

Now, here comes your basic design of the Nokia mobile phone. You have learnt how you will abstract properties from the real world objects. Now the question is how you do it in the programming language. In the Object oriented principles, abstraction is achieved via Inheritance (a widely used design pattern)

The class diagram for the Nokia mobile using Inheritance look like below

You would have missed to understand the abstraction in the computer science. Here are few places where you could see how the abstraction works

• Network Layers – OSI Model
• Database Architecture – Data Abstraction ( Physical, Logical , View )
• Polymorphism – Abstraction of Actions / Methods
• Templates in C++ or Java – Abstraction of Common Objects
• Data Structures – Abstract way to store & retrieve the data
• Many more…

One important thing you need to remember is ‘Abstract objects’ never exists in real world. It is just the concept that we build to understand the working of real world objects.

E.g., There is nothing is called a Television, you have CRT Television (this is known commonly as TV), Plasma TV or LCD TV.

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Big Code - Good Code

Big Code, a Good Code? Sounds awkward? A Good code I mean here is a code which runs quicker than other solutions for the same problem.

if T(Sol1) < T(Sol2) Then, Solution 1 is a Good code., Where T is Time function , measures Time Taken

( though there are various other constraints involved, for time being let not discuss them )

Hardcore programmers are always tries to write short programs. They couple few lines of code into one and show that they have done a great coding.  But, things are not always the way it looks. Short is sweet, but not always !

Look into this code, 3 solutions for one simple problem.

Problem: Find the greatest of two numbers a, b

Million Dollar Question

Which code runs faster? If you have chosen the A’s code as faster. You have correctly made a wrong decision.

The fastest program is the B’s program. So, 3 lines of code, still fastest code? Ok.

In the A’s code,  consider if a < b, two operations should be performed.

• Compare ‘a’ , ‘b’
• Branch to Else if ‘a’ < ‘b’
• Return the expression ‘b’

But in B’s solution, we have already assigned a value to ‘x’. Only job is to compare and Assign. So the second operation is saved.

In such a small code, you won’t find a big difference. But think of a macro system with MLOC ( Million Lines of Code ).

I will explain you by solving a bit complex problem, come on join me.

Problem: Given number ‘N’ , split into ‘k’ integers, such that N = k1 + k2 + k3 +…kn and k1 * k2 * k3 is maximum.

You can try various solutions. One simple solution is

Great code, you would be proud to write one line solution of such great problem. But wait, is your code is faster to run for N > 10^10, K > 10^5?

Consider the optimize solution

More optimised

The last code works much faster than any other. Try looping it for million times with various values of ‘N & k ‘. and measure the time it takes to complete the million time execution.

How to write a speedy code?

So, this is yet another million dollar question. Take a look at the above three solutions. You will find a resemblance.

Solution - 1 is a generalized form of other two. Solution - 3 is more detailed form of Solution - 1.

So, what is been detailed in the Solution 3. If you look at more closely, you will find that Solution-3 has checks for ‘Boundary Conditions’.

Boundary Conditions are very important scenarios in any Logical System. You prove that system works perfect for boundary conditions, you prove the system to work for any values between it. Similar to Mathematical Induction. So, this applies for programming too.

If you are able to identify the boundary conditions, and make the appropriate formula for those conditions, then you will skip unnecessary computations.

We will look what have save the computational cycles.

Lets assume, the Input are N=10, K = 2

Using Solution-1:

residue = 0, mid = 5

maxProduct = Math.pow(5+1,0) * Math.pow( 5 ,(2-0) ) = 25

Operations performed:

Note: costs are just for calculation, not exact one

• Math.pow
• Addition - (5+1)
• Math.pow
• Subtraction - ( 2-0 )
• Multiplication

lets assume the cost for each operation is

Using Solution-3:

The code will branch out to the 1st if condition ( residue == 0 )

maxProduct = Math.pow( 5, 2) = 25

Operations performed

So, you have saved more than 55% of the computational cycles by covering up the boundary conditions.

So, Why you need a Speedy code?

Everyone in life loves speed. Speed bike, Speed cars ( that’s why you would love F1 ), A speedy 2 GB - Core 2 Duo Powered Machine.

Because Speed makes you feel Good !! So does a Speedy Code will be a Good code.

But, to achieve something you have to compromise with other factors, like I mentioned earlier.

If you need a 2 GB - Core 2 Duo Powered Machine, you should not consider the Money factor.

Similarly while you code, there are lot of other factors like

• Memory Management
• Security
• Transaction Isolations etc.,

This is just a introduction, will start covering up other topics soon.

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1. Change or Update Folder

Click open each feed and update the folder in which it wants to reside.

But this is just good only if you have about 10+ feeds. But as feed count goes on increasing you will find it more difficult and you might feel getting rid of the Google Reader

2. Bulk Organising

You can do bulk organising of the feeds in the settings mode.

Go to Settings -> Subscriptions, you will find all the feeds listed. This panel gives you a way to do bulk organization!

3. Quick Organising

Here is our trick that I want to explain. Google reader provides you a Drag n Drop facility to organize the feeds in the reading mode.

You keep your drag any of the feeds and move it across your folders and drop it, viola, that’s it. That’s really a faster and quick way or organising the Google Reader feeds.

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You can get the movie details for the next 3 days starting from current day.

You can make Google sort the results based on the distance, film popularity and film title. This lists down which movie is so popular and it could tell you the index of movies running in a city with the theatres

You could see google tells you which movie is so popular , so that it runs in most of theatre & multiplexes.

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