Monday, November 23, 2009

Feedburner-yahoo pipe issue got resolved


It seems Feedburner-yahoo pipe issue was resolved.
I am not sure whether it was resolved by Google or resolved by Yahoo.

You can share the details thro' comments if you know more details about who resolved this issue and how they resolved it.

Anyway, our news services/channels are working properly once this issue got resolved.

If you still face any issue in seeing the News, you can inform us at qualitypointmail@gmail.com


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Saturday, November 21, 2009

print_r() Versus var_dump()


PHP is having various functions for debugging a variable. Seeing values stored in an array or in any other object is important for doing any troubleshooting in a code.

Let us see some of them such as var_dump(), print_r() and var_export().

The var_dump function displays structured information about variables/expressions including its type and value. Arrays are explored recursively with values indented to show structure.

print_r() displays information about a variable in a way that's readable by humans. array values will be presented in a format that shows keys and elements. Similar notation is used for objects.

Refer the below sample array.


$obj = (object) array('qualitypoint', 'technologies', 'India');

var_dump($obj) will display below output in the screen.

object(stdClass)#1 (3) { [0]=> string(12) "qualitypoint" [1]=> string(12) "technologies" [2]=> string(5) "India" }

And, print_r($obj) will display below output in the screen.

stdClass Object ( [0] => qualitypoint [1] => technologies [2] => India )



And it seems var_dump($someobject); shows only public properties , but
print_r($someobject) shows all properties (explicitly identifying protected/private properties)






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Friday, November 13, 2009

Water on the moon - Official confirmation from NASA



NASA has announced that it had discovered water on the moon.

It was announced by project scientist Anthony Colaprete
"I'm here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit; we found a significant amount" -- about a dozen, two-gallon bucketfuls, he said, holding up several white plastic containers.

Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, said the latest discovery also could unlock the mysteries of the solar system.

We can see the images from LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite)

NASA found water on the Moon by analyzing the impact data gathered by 'bombing' moon using LCROSS.


"We've got more (water) than we thought, maybe a lot more than we thought, so we're really quite excited about that," said Luke Sollitt, assistant professor of physics.
The big question to answer next is how water is distributed on the moon.

Sollitt said he envisioned sending an unmanned lunar rover to dig in the soil for better data on how much water is there. "We have a whole new branch of science that we can start to explore," he said.
Astronauts could use water on the moon for survival in space and to make rocket fuel at a lunar base, he said.

Telegraph
explains the significance of this discovery as below.

Nasa has been so keen to find water on the Moon because it brings the dream of a permanent lunar base one step closer. If water exists in the quantities that Nasa now believes, it could be drunk by astronauts, turned into oxygen to make stations inhabitable and – most excitingly – converted into fuel. The Moon could then become the space equivalent of a service station – acting as a staging post for manned missions to Mars.


"The presence of significant quantities of ice on the lunar surface catapults the moon from an interesting waypoint to a critical launching pad for humanity's exploration of the cosmos," said Peter Diamandis, CEO and chairman of the X Prize Foundation, which is running a $30 million contest for private moon rovers.


According to danamackenzie.com, LCROSS found lots of other volatile elements in the debris plume and/or the vapor cloud released by the impact.
These may include:
  • carbon dioxide
  • methane
  • methanol
  • ethanol
  • ammonia
  • other organic molecules

There are lot of discussions and arguments going on about this announcement by NASA, whereas Chandrayan I of India already has informed about Water on Moon. Actually a US-built instrument on the Chandrayaan-I spacecraft already detected traces of water on the lunar surface.

Water on the moon could boost Marshall Space Flight Center programs to explore the lunar surface, asteroids or even Mars.




Find below some comments/opinions/discussions from people.

After teaching middle school science students for years that there is no water on the Moon, I am only too happy to apologize for my error!


This is probably the most expensive water we've ever found. But, if we go to the moon, it could turn out to be among the most valuable as well.


Any dollar spent on setting up a permanent colony on the Moon is of course better than a dollar spent on occupying Iraq.

Discovery of frozen water in the moon's permanently shaded polar craters could open the door to human colonization of the moon and beyond. more..

i'm not happy about this plan to bomb the moon. could we reallocate the money to instead come up with creative ways to use water more wisely on earth? just saying...

Could this also mean (since water contains oxygen) that we possible could breath without space suits?


This is indeed intriguing. All this talk about the Indian's discovering water and then some saying the American supplied the instruments for Chandrayan. The ISRO mission discovered tangible evidence for water in some locations on the moon. The following U.S mission narrowed in and confirmed it. It was a team effort. That's the problem with people in South Asia these days they are so embroiled in promoting their selfish agendas they ruin it for the few that actually put humanity as a whole in front of their personal interests. Just calm down and be glad that we are making progress as a planet.


Chandrayan saw water only along the thin surface layer of the Moon. It detected water bound to particles. LCross kicked up measurable water vapor and unbound amount. This indicates ice. Chandrayan and LCross complements each other and NASA acknowledges publicly as such.

This is very typical of US news, India's ISRO program had found the existence of water first. Yet when NASA takes a lot at it and says they found water on the Moon, it becomes their discovery because of the way the information is distributed by news sources. This could also be a part of the reason why many foreign people hate the US

The probe on the ISRO craft that found the water WAS made by NASA, so obviously NASA had reason to claim credit for it's own discovery. Get your facts straight before accusing them of deceiving the public.

I got news for you, Chandrayaan mission already found water on the moon. So what's the difference between Chandrayaan-1 and Nasa mission? Is Nasa grabbing the spotlight from the Indian mission that was done last september? Don't tell us what we already know.

How many hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars are to spent on getting people on an airless rock or a low-gravity, toxic-atmosphere desert rock with 300 mph duststorms? To what end? Before you plan on having a purely curiosity-based waystation on the path to Mars, perhaps you need to figure out how to sustain a population of billions on Earth without destroying the biosphere of Earth, first.

The use would be to obtain water, oxygen and hydrogen for drinking, breathing and generating power respectively for further space exploration, because the moon has 1/6 the gravity that earth has and therefore launches from the moon would require less propulsion than from earth.

I think both NASA and Obama think we need another mission because a current mission to the moon may reveal alot of very embarrassing lies and deceptions. None of this adds up. These knuckleheads are trying to get us to buy that they need to "reinvent" the wheel to get to the moon. Nonsense.

Can we PLEASE stop littering across the universe and calling it discovery? Its like humans have this desire to throw aluminum trash throughout space.

OK, so there's water, and where there is water there are fish. Alien fish. Now we all know that the Icelanders and Japanese are going to say that this stuff is more than 200 miles "offshore" but I, for one, will not stand idly by while lunar whales are harvested for so-called "scientific purposes" while actually being used to manufacture ineffective aphrodisiacs. And yes, I know perfectly well that whales are not fish, but you know perfectly well what I mean. So lets all stop bickering among ourselves and do something about this imminent biological catastrophe before it's too late.

79 Million worth it? You bet!!! How some people are against space exploration i don`t know. Far Better then giving 700 billion away. These kinds of research missions certainly should have been done more then decade ago. Just imagine the 700 billion spend on our first US Mission to MARS. You want to stimulate the Economy, Instant success. And what about building Telescopes large enough they could take the first quality pictures of Earth like Planets. With the knowledge and experience gained the Human species would never be the same. Space Research & Exploration FTW!!!

Wake up you people, this is the USA seeking ownership of the moon. should they discover there is oil on the Moon, you can bet they can lay claims to owning it. How come though, that if they supposedly landed on the moon back in 1963, that they haven't done so since then. It is one of the biggest lies told.

NASA needs to have its entire upper management replaced and needs to have the national space technology mission defined for it as Earth-focused.

well, you can make a moon base there, and from there you can do lots of things, besides looking for life. and here's a list : helium-3 extraction for fusion, space tourism, all sorts of research, mythbusters special editions, space paintball, alien treasurehunts and so on and so forth

Who cares if there is water on the moon? Or on Mars? Or anywhere else? How is that going to be of any value to anyone? The space program is one of the biggest wastes of money.

From an economic point of view, water on the Moon is the equivalent of finding “gold in the hills of California.” ...more

Forget about sending people to the moon to drink the water there, and instead spend the $3 billion a year on improving the drinking water here on earth. ...more

Didn't we land on the moon a while back? How did we miss "significant" amounts of water? I'm just wondering how accessible it is.

Mars has water. Various moons in the solar system have water. Water isn't that uncommon. And nothing says water = life.

US is pretty good at repeating discoveries done by other countries (especially developing like India) in the name of testing and then tagging them as DISCOVERED BY US. The same happened with this one.

This is huge. I repeat, HUGE. With several hundred kilograms of water observed in the ejecta, who knows how much more is below the surface? Congratulations to the visionary scientists and engineers at NASA.

Yeah how about you get me a cup of moon water...then you get your stinkin peace prize.

If water is just like any other water (H2O), why are there so many kinds of bottled water?

There's water on the moon, does it really matter if there's water on the moon?


Lastly, ask yourself what the first letter A in NASA stands for and then ask yourself what NASA has done for that A. Zilch in my view.

Doesn't matter if you can extract oxygen for atmosphere if:
1. The moon doesn't have enough gravity to hold an atmosphere.
2. There isn't eight nitrogen molecules for every oxygen molecule. (Most of our atmosphere is nitrogen)
The hydrogen and oxygen would be useful for fuel. We're talking about rockets from the moon to other planets here, not breathing. We can already artificially recycle air to breathe.

Beyond water, the moon is suspected to be packed with natural resources which could be used locally, or even brought back to Earth if of high enough value. ...more

I mean, come on, everyone. Humans live on Earth. Remember? We don't live on Mars. We don't live on the Moon. We don't live on a moon orbiting Jupiter. We live on Earth. And we always will, and it is probably best to focus our political and economic initiatives on making that a longer-term proposition than it currently seems to be.

Isn't all that water polluted ;-)

Some people are considering this as Bad news.

Even some people started writing poem about "Water on the Moon".

Water on the moon.
Blood on the earth.
Tears on the Throne.
We are not alone.
...Read full poem


It seems Chandrayaan discovers Magnet also on the Moon. Let us wait and see whether NASA confirms this new also.


physorg.com explains how Moon produces its own water as below.

The Moon is a big sponge that absorbs electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. These particles interact with the oxygen present in some dust grains on the lunar surface, producing water. This discovery, made by the ESA-ISRO instrument SARA onboard the Indian Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, confirms how water is likely being created on the lunar surface.


Google celebrates discovery of Water on the Moon by showing Google Doodle representing Water on the Moon on home page of Google.com.

You can follow @nasa to get updates as tweets from NASA.

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Thursday, November 12, 2009

Fourth Standard Student's Doodle will feature Tomorrow (November 14) on Google India home page.


Google has selected a fourth standard student's doodle for showing on Home page of Google India (http://google.co.in)

Google has selected this Doodle by arranging Doodle competition for the Indian school students studying from Class 1 to Class 10th.

The contest was judged by a panel of judges that comprised renowned cartoonist N. Ponnappa, artist Raghava K.K. and the faculty of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.

The Winning Doodle was drawn by Puru Pratap Singh, a 4th standard student living at Gurgaon.

Theme of his Doodle is "My India- full of life".

He has explained his Theme as below.

India is a country which has a blend of thousands of traditions and all religions like Hinduism, Christianity, Sikhism and Islam. It has developed a lot in the past few years. The discovery of water on the moon by the Indian scientists is a proof to this fact. The Indian culture is as vibrant as the colours of the peacock. Kashmir, the crown of India, is as serene as the peace bird and as pure as the lotus. We, the Indian citizens are also trying to fulfill Mahatma Gandhi’s dream of educating each and every Indian child.

Find below his Doodle. Let’s open up the Google home page on Tomorrow(November 14) with this doodle.



Besides having his doodle featured on the Google India homepage all day on Children's Day, Puru Pratap Singh has also been awarded a laptop computer and a t-shirt with his doodle. And, Google provides Rs.100,000 technology grant for his school.

Google India MD Shailesh Rao said, "This was first ever Doodle competition in India. This is the first 'made in India' Doodle."




Dennis Hwang, the Master Doodler says "India is a land of creative minds. For centuries, Indian art has continued to fascinate people from across the globe. It was amazing to see how young kids could come out with highly creative Doodles that truly define the culture and tradition of this incredible country. Choosing the successful entry was not easy as every Doodle depicts India in a unique manner."

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Why IP based Rate Limit for making yahoo API calls?


We are providing Inbound link checking using yahoo site explorer API.

Last few days this php based program was not working.

After doing more analysis I came to know that this issue is due to the Rate Limiting for Yahoo! Search Web Services.

It seems yahoo is imposing limit based on IP address. And, it looks like the IP address of the server which hosted our program exceeds the limit as it is a shared hosting. Someone else also might have made yahoo api calls.

In the yahoo developer site it has been mentioned as below.

Our service rate limits are imposed as a limit on the number of API calls made per IP address during a specific time window. If your IP address changes during that time period, you may find yourself with more "credit" available. However, if someone else had been using the address and hit the limit, you'll need to wait until the end of the time period to be allowed to make more API calls.

I am just wondering why they are doing this ineffective way of limiting the API calls.

Actually, they are providing appid for every user to make the API call.

I think they can manage limiting of the API calls effectively using this appid. I couldn't understand why they are considering IP address instead of this appid for limiting the API calls.

Anyway, there should be some solid reason for doing IP based restriction which I couldn't understand currently.

If anybody knows the reason you can share it here thro' comment section.

To solve this issue I have changed the hosting server as it will change the IP address time being. Now our inbound link checking program is working correctly.
But anyway it may face issue later as this server is also a shared hosting server. Please let us know (qualitypointmail@gmail.com) if you face any difficulty in using this inbound checking program/service.

You can enter the URL in the below input box for getting inbound links.







If you are having any suggestion for improving this program you can mention it here thro' comments.

Fewdays before I have mentioned about Yahoo pipe blocking ip address of Google feedburner. These type of behaviours from Yahoo remind us that yahoo is going to be merged/partnered with microsoft.

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Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Google has introduced new programming Language "Go".




Google has introduced a new system programming language named as "Go".

It is open source language. You can see more details about this language at http://golang.org/

Google is saying that Computers are fast now but software development is still slow. So it has taken this initiative of introducing this open source experiment language which combines the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++ and the compiled code runs close to the speed of C.





You can read the "Go" Tutorial here.


Google says "so far Go has not been used in any of Google's publically available applications". Still it is in experimental stage only.

Google's Go began as a group 20% project in 2007, and full-time work began on it last year.

Find below sample code written in "Go".

5    package main


07 import (
08 "os";
09 "flag"; // command line option parser
10 )


12 var omitNewline = flag.Bool("n", false, "don't print final newline")


14 const (
15 Space = " ";
16 Newline = "\n";
17 )


19 func main() {
20 flag.Parse(); // Scans the arg list and sets up flags
21 var s string = "";
22 for i := 0; i <> 0 {
24 s += Space
25 }
26 s += flag.Arg(i)
27 }
28 if !*omitNewline {
29 s += Newline
30 }
31 os.Stdout.WriteString(s);
32 }



You can read the discussion about "Go" here.

Find below the presentation by Rob Pike.



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Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Twitter has added ReTweet (RT) feature in its web interface.


Twitter has added the ReTweet (RT) feature in their web interface.

The below screen is appearing in Twitter after getting loged in.

It seems this feature in still in Beta only. And it is available only for some users only.

Just I assume that currently Twitter is providing this feature only for the users whose followers count is greater than following count. But I am not sure about it. If you know more about it you can share it thro' comments.




It is showing new icon for identifying reweets.



It seems some people are not satisfied with this feature, still they are willing to use third-party applications only.

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Sunday, November 8, 2009

Posting this message from email using Mail2Blogger.


Blogger is providing an option for posting the articles thro' email.
This service is called as Mail2Blogger. For enabling this option you have to specify a secret word  in your blogger settings.

i-e you have to navigate  settings->Email&Mobile to get an email id by  specifying the secret world for (Also known as Mail2Blogger )

Once after enabling this service we can post the articles just by sending email to this email id.

First time trying this option, and I am posting this article from my email.
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Friday, November 6, 2009

Feedburner is not able to access Feeds generated by Yahoo pipe



We are displaying News in this blog using Yahoo pipe and Feedburner.

Today, I have noticed that the News in our blog was not updated.

I could successfully run the yahoo pipe for getting updated News as RSS Feed. When I tried to reSync this RSS feed in FeedBurder, below error message was shown.

Error getting URL: 999 - Unknown

After searching the Internet, I came to know that many people faced this error/issue few months back also.

It seems this issue is related with migration of Feedburner accounts into Google accounts. And, it seems yahoo pipe is blocking the ip address of Google/Feedburner.

Google Group discussion suggests to use atom feed instead of rss feed. But, I think yahoo pipe is not having an option to get atom feed.

So, as of now we are displaying our Tech News using some workaround. So, it may be little slow. We will put the news using feedburner, once Google or yahoo resolves this pipe-feedburder issue.

From Yahoo message board discussion, we can understand that many people are facing same problem/issue.

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Thursday, November 5, 2009

Blogs of Note


Blogger is selecting interesting and worthy blogger blog (i-e blogspot.com blog) on each working day and display in their blog at http://blogsofnote.blogspot.com/. The blog will list the blogs of note starting from year 2001 to till date.

It seems all the blogs listed in this list are really interesting and useful.

You can see below some of the latest selections. If you like these blogs you can book mark this page. It will be updated daily.

If you are new to our blog, you can bookmark this blog for further reading, or you can subscribe to our blog feed.




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Press Alt + PrtScn for capturing Screenshot of Active window


As I mentioned in the Software Testing Best practices, Providing Screenshot of error message and screenshots of each step for reproducing bug will help to fix the bug easily.

PrintScreen Key will be useful for taking screenshots. You can simply press this button to capture the image of screen and you can paste it in your word document or paint program.

But it will take the entire image of your screen. i.e It will include screenshots of all windows in your computer screen.

It will be nice if you take screenshot of only the Active window.

It can be easily done by pressing Alt key along with the print screen key.


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Wednesday, November 4, 2009

How to Reset/restart autonumber in ms Access database table?


Autonumber column/field in MS-Access database table will be automatically incremented when adding any new row of data.


Assume that you are having some set of rows in a table, and you are deleting those rows and willing to add new rows. In this scenario, the autonumber column of the new rows will not be restarted. They will continue from previous set of rows.

If you want to reset or restart the autonumber column you can follow any one of below approach.

After deleting the old rows, we can click Tools->Database Utilities->Compact and Repair.. for reseting the autonumber column.



Or alternatively, after deleting the old rows in a table we can copy and paste the table as a new table with "structure only" option.



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