100 th bithday to cell phone

History has forgotten Nathan Stubblefield, but thanks to the arrival of the 100th anniversary of his then-pioneering invention, the man's finally receiving his due. In 1908 Stubblefield had the idea to use a complicated rig of wire and large poles set up around a train track, road, or river. When a train, vehicle, or boat traveled past the wires, a transmitting device on the vehicle would send an audio signal to a receiving device in the distance using magnetic waves. A patent was granted for the device on May 9 of that year, which some are now crediting as the first wireless communications device ever. To wit, Virgin Mobile is honoring Stubblefield on the centennial of the patent with a set of web pages about the man. (Click through the photo gallery to get a better idea of how such a device worked. It's really pretty fascinating.) Unfortunately, Stubblefield's invention wasn't entirely practical. The transmitter and receiver were enormous and far from portable (see picture), and they required so much wire that it would have been considerably more efficient to simply run the wire between the two transmitters instead of using wireless communications. Still, it's nice to remember Stubblefield as a pioneer in a field that, at the time, few felt would have much of a future. History has of course shown of course that Stubblefield was on to something bigger than he knew: Harris Interactive's latest poll shows that 14 percent of adults use a cell phone exclusively at home now, sans land line. Post

MICROSOFT ON SOFT SIDE TO YAHOO. AWAY FROM BID

Yahoo's shares are expected to fall when markets open on Monday

Software giant Microsoft has dropped its three-month-old bid to buy internet firm Yahoo because the two sides cannot agree on an acceptable sale price.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer formally withdrew the offer in a letter to Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang.

Mr Ballmer said Microsoft had raised its original offer from $44.6bn to $47.5bn (£24.1bn) - $33 per share.

But he added that Yahoo had insisted on at least $53bn, or $37 a share - more than Microsoft was prepared to pay.

The software giant had wanted to do a deal to be able to compete with Google, which dominates the lucrative market for internet advertising.

Microsoft's new leadership will have to prove it can deliver a web offering that can ultimately substitute the profits generated by cash cows Windows and Office Tim Weber, Business editor, BBC News website Analysis: Microsoft with Yahoo dot.life blog Q&A: End of Microsoft's bid

This market was worth $40bn in 2007 and is predicted to double to $80bn by 2010.

'Distraction'

In his letter to Mr Yang, which has been posted on the Microsoft website, Mr Ballmer said: "We continue to believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo and the market as a whole.

"Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5bn, Yahoo has not moved toward accepting our offer.

"After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal."

Mr Ballmer also told Yahoo's boss that he would not pursue his original plan B of launching a hostile takeover battle, because Mr Yang would "take steps that would make Yahoo undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft".

Mr Ballmer told his own employees that Microsoft could achieve its goals without Yahoo, albeit at a slower pace.

Yahoo maintained that Microsoft had offered too little to buy the company.

In a statement issued after Microsoft's withdrawal, Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock dismissed the unsolicited bid as a "distraction".

Microsoft's shares closed on Friday virtually unchanged at $29.24. Yahoo's shares were $1.85 higher at $28.67 amid expectations of a higher Microsoft offer.

The BBC's Peter Bowes says analysts believe the breakdown in talks may have an adverse affect on Yahoo shares and generate uncertainty among investors about the company's management.

Disappointment

Sir Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of advertising group WPP, said his clients would be disappointed that Microsoft had abandoned its bid for Yahoo.

"A combination of Microsoft and Yahoo would have provided balance to the online advertising market place," he told the BBC News website.

However, he said that Microsoft was a "resourceful and innovative company" and might still be able to provide a challenge to Google's market dominance.

Social Networking in Plain English (Licensed Version)

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WHAT'S RSS AND HOW TO SUBSCRIBE IT?

We’re often asked for a definition of RSS feeds. Instead of listing lines of definitions and examples, we thought this didactic 3.5 minutes video from CommonCraft provides with a good answer. Nice Job!

Click To Play

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Free Stock Photo Resources-- FREE PHOTO STORE EASY AND SLIDE THEM ANYWERE

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com f you need stock photos for your website or any other reason, there are lot of websites which offer free stock photos. Below is a list of few such websites. Some of which are completely free to use whereas some needs giving credit to the creator or a link -back etc. Be sure to check out the T&C of the sites to know more. FreeFoto.com is the largest collection of free photographs (made up of 113340 images with 148 sections organized into 3198 categories) on the Internet (link back and attribution required). http://www.freefoto.com/index.jsp artfavor You can use any resources only for non-commercial projects. http://www.artfavor.com/ Palouse photography: This is a repository of stock images focused primarily on the Palouse region of the Inland Northwest of America. http://www.palousephotography.org/ Geek philosopher : Free to use, but might require a linkback from a page. http://geekphilosopher.com/MainPage/photos.htm bigfoto : You have free use of all pictures if you provide a link to the bigfoto website. http://www.bigfoto.com/ Barry's Free Photos offers over 2300 FREE Stock Photos http://www.barrysfreephotos.com/ amgmedia : All these digital photos (taken with Nikon Coolpix) are 72dpi. You may use any of the royalty free photos shown at right as long as you give credit to the photographer. http://www.amgmedia.com/freephotos/ Creating online : Premium High-Res Photos for Personal or Commercial Use http://www.creatingonline.com/stock_photos/ Gimp-Savvy The photo archive at Gimp-Savvy.com has more than 27,000 free photos and images, consisting of over 2.5 Gbytes of data. http://gimp-savvy.com/PHOTO-ARCHIVE/ Free Photographs Network: The Free Photographs Network is an online resource for royalty-free stock photographs for non-commercial use. http://www.free-photographs.net/ morguefile : Free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use. http://www.morguefile.com/ freeimages : More than 2500 original stock photos for free. http://www.freeimages.co.uk/ freephotos : Free to download, no link back and no credit required. Photographers: Publish your stock photos free and enter to win prizes! http://www.freephotos.com/ amazingtextures : Hundreds of free textures to download, high-resolution textures, images, backgrounds, wallpapers and texture maps. http://amazingtextures.com/textures/index.php BurningWell is a repository for public domain (free for any use) images. You are free to download, copy and use the photos you find here for any purpose. These free images were donated by photographers from around the world, do you have any photographs you would like to donate? http://www.burningwell.org/ freestockphotos : Free Photography for Personal or Commercial use. Read T&C for restrictions. http://freestockphotos.com/ holylandphotos : Free photos of Holdy Lands http://www.holylandphotos.org/ davidniblack : Free stock photos, images. http://davidniblack.com/imagebase/ ImageAfter is a large online free photo collection. You can download and use any image or texture from our site and use it in your own work, either personal or commercial. http://www.imageafter.com/ freemediagoo : Free stock photos. http://www.freemediagoo.com/ photorogue : You can request a picture of anything you want, and volunteer photographers will go out and attempt to actually take the picture you want. It's entirely free, although we don't guarantee that your request will ever be filled. http://www.photorogue.com/ stockvault : Over 9.000 royalty free, high resolution stock photos, templates and logos to use in your personal and educational design projects. http://www.stockvault.net/ Vintage Pixels is a large database of free historical, high quality, free-for-use images which allows people to share their archived photos. http://www.vintagepixels.com/ pdphoto : Free Public Domain Photo Database. ( few aren't Be sure to read the license under each of the enlarged pictures.) http://pdphoto.org/ Post __

Free RSS/Feed Icons

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com

If you are bored of the same conventional RSS/Feed icons, there are many different styles of buttons available which you can use for free in you site/blog. browse through the sites listed below and find the one button for you! Free Glass Style RSS/Feed Icons Web 2.0 style feed buttons Feedicons from zeusboxstudio Rss Icons Orb Standard Feed icons 30 Free Vector RSS Icons Buttons for RSS, Feeds, and XML in various styles.

FREE FREE FREE __

Microsoft developer and designer tools for free

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com DreamSpark is a Microsoft initiative wherein students can download Microsoft developer and design tools free of charge. This is what MS has to say about it on their DreamSpark page "Now, for the first time, Microsoft is giving its valuable software developer and design tools directly to students worldwide at no charge! This site enables students like you to download professional-level Microsoft developer and design tools to unlock your creative potential and set you on the path to academic and career success, by supporting and advancing your learning and skills through technical design, technology, math, science and engineering activities." Students have to verify their student status once in every 12 months. The verification process built into DreamSpark site would enable students worldwide to download Microsoft developer and design tools for free. The program is now available to more than 35 million college students in Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S and would cover more countries soon. The software available for free download through DreamSpark are :- MS Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition MS Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition MS Expression Studio MS SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition XNA Game Studio 2.0 12-month free Academic membership in the XNA Creators Club Visual C# 2005 Express Edition Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Visual Web 2005 Express Edition Visual J# 2005 Express Edition MS Virtual PC So, if you are a student and need any of these software you know from where you can download it and legally. For more details check the following links ... Microsoft DreamSpark Homepage Microsoft Press Release __

PyS60: Bluetooth GPS polling class

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com Threaded approach for reading NMEA data from a bluetooth GPS import thread, socket class BTGPSPoller(object): def __init__(self, address): address, services = socket.bt_discover(address) self.target = (address, services.values()[0]) self.active = True self.connected = False self.lock = thread.allocate_lock() self.sentances = list() def connect(self): if not self.connected: thread.start_new_thread(self.run, ()) def run(self): print "BTGPSPoller thread activated" try: conn = socket.socket(socket.AF_BT, socket.SOCK_STREAM) conn.connect(self.target) self.connected = True except: print "Unable to connect" if self.connected: try: to_gps = conn.makefile("r", 0) except: print "Failure calling conn.makefile()" while self.active: #e32.ao_sleep(1) msg = None try: msg = to_gps.readline() if not msg == None and msg.startswith("$GPGGA"): gps_data = msg.split(",") if not gps_data[2] == "": self.lock.acquire() self.sentances.append(msg) if len(self.sentances) > 10: self.sentances.pop(0) self.lock.release() except: self.active = False try: to_gps.close() conn.close() self.connected = False print "Closed and disconnected" except: self.connected = False print "Unable to close" def disconnect(self): self.active = False print "Disconnecting from GPS" def getSentances(self): self.lock.acquire() l = self.sentances[:] self.lock.release() return l __

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com

This is the second in our series of articles showing how to deploy a Bluetooth Proximity Detection system with Asterisk@Home. Part I is here. When we’re finished, your system will automatically transfer incoming calls in your home or office to your cellphone or any other phone whenever you leave home base carrying your bluetooth-enabled cellphone or your bluetooth headset. You’ll recall that we recommended the headset approach because cellphones have a nasty habit of putting themselves and their bluetooth adapter to sleep when you’re not on the phone. If bluetooth on the phone is sleeping, we lose our ability to detect your comings and goings so be reasonable and do it our way. Use a bluetooth headset. Once you remove the earpiece, the bluetooth headset fits comfortably in your pocket and isn’t much larger than a flash drive. For our purposes the bluetooth headset will be functioning primarily as an electronic key although there’s no reason you can’t also use it in conjunction with either your bluetooth cellphone, or a softphone connected to your primary Asterisk@Home PBX, or all of the above. The major difference in our approach and some of the other proximity detection systems which (still) are on the drawing boards is cost. Our bluetooth headset “key” costs roughly $30 delivered to your door. Most of the corporate dream systems require a $200 badge (to do the same thing) and then an incredibly expensive server (to do what we’re doing with an old clunker PC). So, yes, open source technology is a very good thing for all of us. And it deserves your financial support. Here’s a link if you’d like to make a contribution in any amount to the Asterisk@Home project. End of sermon.

NOTE: This article has been updated to take advantage of TrixBox, freePBX, and the iPhone. For the current article, click here.

Detect the presence of a Bluetooth device

This example shows how to check for the presence of a mobile phone. The code was based on the article 'Implementing Bluetooth Proximity Detection with Asterisk.

#!/usr/bin/ruby
#file: whereib.rb

deviceid = '00:0E:6D:29:38:EB'
devicename = 'Nokia 6600'

count = 0
while count < 1
 if `hcitool name #{deviceid}`.chomp == devicename 
   puts devicename + ' IN RANGE'
   puts Time.now
 else
   puts devicename + ' OUT OF RANGE'
   puts Time.now
 end
 sleep 7
end 

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Dell vs Apple

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com y brother has a Dell Inspiron, my sister has an Apple Macbook. The inspiron has a Dell Wireless 1390 or Intel Wireless 3945 card, while the Macbook has AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n. The other night we were all playing an online game, with mixed results. They share a DSL connection to the internet, while I measured their latency over time from my Verizon FIOS:

Looking at the box-plots for my brother, who has the Dell, he is spending about 50% of his time experiencing latencies up to twice as bad as they should be, while my sister is getting decent, consistent Wireless performance. I don’t know if it’s environmental to their home, or something else, but what’s causing such bad performance for my brother? Does Dell just suck that much?

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Micro Technologies Rolls Out ‘Software’ To Locate Stolen NBs.India’s first laptop tracking system

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com

Mumbai based Micro Technologies Ltd has made announcement about the launching of India’s first laptop tracking system, which will locate stolen laptop computers.

The newly launched software known as “Micro LNTS” (Lost Notebook Tracking System) can be installed on notebook hard drives where it subsequently works in stealth mode.

In case of theft, it permits systems to be tracked as soon as they are connected to the World Wide Wed (WWW). The users can log into their Web-based personal tracking and monitoring page via www.microInts.net in order to trace from where the laptop has been accessed.

Dr. P. Sekhar, chairman and managing director of Micro Technologies, said, “LNTS is just the incidental name. It is also a manageability tool for files and folders as well as a parental control system for tracking the online activities done by children. The system can be used to keep a check on the number of hours children spend on the Internet and what kind of websites they visit.”

The software also provides other management tools including sending out regular emails for notebook activity, hide the documents containing important data, date-wise data storage, login intimation on mobile and email, remotely monitoring of user specified URL/Document, and getting the list of installed software.

But it should be remembered that LNTS is not fool-proof like other software tools. If a thief formats the hard drive of the notebook before connecting to the Internet, the software will be deleted from the system.

The software is available in 3 different models including LNTS- Elite and Premium for individual users, and Micro LNTS-Corporate Micro LNTS. The Elite model is priced at Rs. 600, whereas the Premium costs Rs 1500.

The stock of the company, on Friday (April 11), marked its closure at Rs 277.55, up 1.1% on the Bombay Stock exchange (BSE).

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Google Developer Day US - Fast, Easy, Beautiful: GWT

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com   Google Web Toolkit (GWT) makes it easier to write high-performance AJAX applications. You write your front end in the Java programming language and GWT compiles your source into highly optimized JavaScript. Writing web apps today is a tedious and error-prone process. You spend 90% of your time working around browser quirks, and JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile. It doesn't have to be that way. High performance JavaScript. GWT produces AJAX apps that: Load faster than hand-written JavaScript apps Use smaller, more compact, cacheable code Automatically support IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera Use the browser's "back" button correctly Better development tools. Since you're writing in Java, you can use: IDEs that you love like Eclipse, IntelliJ, and NetBeans Full-featured debugging, with variable watches and breakpoints Unit tests (based on JUnit) both in a debugger and in a browser Google APIs and reusable UI components. GWT comes equipped with useful libraries: Built-in UI components serve as cross-browser building blocks for your app RPC helps with client-server interaction JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI) simplifies integrating GWT code with existing JavaScript code   __

What's new with Google Gears? A Tech Talk

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com Brad Neuberg and Ben Lisbakken of the Gears team gave a brown bag talk on some of the new and interesting features in Gears. They show a lot of examples and tools such as:

• PubTools: Brad developed this set of tools to enable offline caching of content in minutes. This is perfect if you have a set of content that you want to make available offline.
• Google Gears for Mobile: Just yesterday we launched our first Google mobile application using Gears, with Picasa
• Cross Domain Web Services: A good example using Flickr search
• Dojo Storage has just had a new release so it plays in the new Dojo 1.x land, and has a Gears storage engine
• blog.gears: Pamela Fox did a great job with this GData/Gears blogging application
• Gears + Greasemonkey = GearsMonkey

It is fun to hear some of the fellow Googlers probe with their own questions! Brad and Ben will both be at Google I/O, May 28-29, 2008, in San Francisco. We are keen to hear your thoughts on Gears and the Open Web. Permalink __

HOW VOIP WORKS? AN EASY WAY

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com

1.) Get a good, fast and reliable Internet connection To use VoIP, you need at least broadband Internet connection, sad to say that dial-up will just frustrate you. There are lots of Internet Service Providers (ISP) today who offer high speed Internet connection via broadband (DSL) or dedicated Internet (ISDN) connection.

2.) Make VoIP calls The next step is to decide what type of VoIP calls you would like to use, there are couple of scenarios about this below:

a.) Computer to Computer VoIP call

This is the “basic VoIP connection”, the caller and the called party’s computers must be online, must have headsets attached to the computers’ sound cards. The computers must be connected to the Internet and must be running VoIP software. Most VoIP softwares available today are free and allow you to connect to any computer running the same software. Skype is the best example of this free software. There is no charge for this type of call and calls can be made to anywhere in the world if you are aware of the IP address (other VoIP softwares use phone number) of the computer you would like to call.

b.) Computer to Phone VoIP call

For this type of VoIP connection to work, one party must be online, running VoIP software and has subscribed to a VoIP provider who offers PC to Phone VoIP calls and vice versa while the other party is using a phone that is not connected to the Internet (regular or mobile phone). Let say for example the caller is the one on the computer with VoIP software and the called party is the one who has a traditional phone. The caller dials the number from the VoIP software running in the computer. The call is then routed through the Internet and was received by the VoIP provider, the VoIP provider with an interconnection to Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) then routes the VoIP call to the called party’s regular or mobile phone.

c.) Phone to Phone VoIP call

You can make/receive VoIP calls using an ordinary telephone or an IP Phone. If you would like to use an analog phone, you must have an Analog Terminal Adapter (ATA). ATA is a device that allows you to use a regular phone unit to make VoIP calls. An ATA must have a valid IP address and must be connected to the Internet. If you would like to use an IP Phone (sometimes called SIP Phone or VoIP Phone), you don’t need an ATA at all, the IP Phone is connected directly to your Ethernet Hub which is connected to your ISP’s baseband or DSL modem.

d.) Analog or mobile phone to another analog or mobile phone VoIP call

“YES, there is such a VoIP call folks”, you won’t notice it but majority of the telephone companies today are starting to migrate their interconnection to other carriers to VoIP. This is pretty simple, you use your regular analog line to call another analog line, your telephone provider then routes the call over a VoIP interconnection to the destination telephone provider (assuming they have VoIP interconnection) using a special commercial-type VoIP equipment (e.g. Quintum or Cisco). You are actually connected to the called party but you are unaware that the conversation is passing through VoIP channels.

NOTE: This type of VoIP call is for telephone companies only, an SMB with a remote office can also use this to dial a number from the remote corporate PBX using their local corporate PBX to save money from long distance calls.

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Networks promise 'accident-free' cars

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com

The sensors promise to help negotiate dangerous traffic

The risk of having an accident in a car could soon be drastically cut thanks to a new approach to wireless networks.

Embedded sensor networks are designed to replace existing networks that can only share information that has already been captured and stored.

Sensor networks instead take information from several individual nodes - potentially thousands of them in different locations - in real time, and can act on it accordingly.

This means that during a journey, vehicles could monitor each other's speed and position - and therefore dramatically cut the risk of accidents.

"I think that we may, in the future, go beyond just communication to using the network to interact with the environment," Professor PR Kumar of the Convergence Lab at the University of Illinois told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme.

"For example, cars on a highway may talk to each other and find out each others' speeds. So a sensor in that context could just be the speedometer on a car, which could talk to surrounding cars.

"These cars could then co-operate with each other to avoid accidents and so on."

Changing speed

Most advanced networks currently work on an ad hoc basis - established through links between laptops, for example, which can share information between them.

But embedded sensor networks represent a shift away from computers communicating purely over a network, to sensors which communicate with each other.

And the next stage is an "actuator network" - where computers are able to act on the information they receive from the sensors. This could mean, for example, reducing speed in advance if slower traffic conditions are detected.

Heathrow's forthcoming driverless pods work using sensors

"What we really want to do is interact with the physical world, consisting of the cars," Professor Kumar said.

"Interaction is a two-way process, so I don't just want to know what speed it is; I want to change the speed.

"This gives rise to sensor-actuated networks, which are deployed over a wireless network. That could be the kind of system we are headed towards."

He said that these systems represent "the convergence of communication, computation, sensing and actuation."

However he conceded that a lot of issues remain to be sorted out before such a network could be put into practice on the roads.

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