New Books on my shelf

I'm so excited to read these fantastic books by the end of December.

HTC HD2 vs Apple IPhone

Gadget freaks are holding their breath for the launch of the most ground breaking Windows mobile phone, HTC HD2.
For those of you who are still very much in love with your IPhone, I don't recommend you to watch this video as you might end up betraying your loyalty to the Apple and opening your heart to a new lover.


Unless you are fully prepared for a long love affair, be warned that It will not be a one-off.

Behavioral Modelling & Human Cognition

Today I came across this fantastic source on behavioural modelling of embedded systems.
Although it's way pricey on a tight student budget, I believe the extensive definition of such complex topic is worth every penny. I got hold of it for a couple of hours only, but I'm still very much impressed by it.

Behavioral Modeling for Embedded Systems By Luis Gomes, Joao M. Fernandes Link to the book on Amazon

Also, I've been reading this book for a few weeks now. It is very exciting to see how human cognition works or in other words "philosophy of the mind" and it helps to utilize some of those concepts as abstracts into designing embedded systems.

Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind By Robert D. Rupert Link to the book on Amazon

Books I've read recently

The first one is my favorite and is the most essential for those ambitious engineers who want to be project leaders and gain essential management skills.

Effective Team Leadership for Engineers By Pat Wellington and Niall Foster Link to the book on IET

A comprehensive and practical guide to the development of "hardware aware" software which meets the demanding constraints of applications based on ARM architecture.

ARM System Developer's Guide: Designing and Optimizing System Software By Andrew Sloss, Dominic Symes, Chris Wright Link to the book on Amazon

A fairly good guide on how to modularize your Java program in a fast and effective way by breaking it down into smaller, cohesive and more digestible pieces.

Modular Java: Creating Flexible Applications with OSGi and Spring By Craig Walls Link to the book on Amazon

My Recent Research Activities

A few weeks ago I could manage to deliver a surprisingly good presentation at BT labs in Ipswitch. OGC's standards which I explained in one of my posts much earlier are actually quite good in order to provide a generic way of communication for sensors in general. But the primary issue is how to integrate those standards into resource-constraint sensors.

Apart from the operating system that I personally think is meaningless when it comes to sensors, middlware has to be mainly in charge of all processing and activities within sensor platforms.

Now, what makes it more challenging is the fact that OGC's standards and middleware have to be combined together, with all those limitations in mind, regardless of the hardware specifications.

What I proposed was, instead of having all the standards together in one layer, they can be split into two categories.

This in fact sounds quite awkward and not doable, but with a bit of brain storming you'll be convinced of its feasibility.

let's get cracking:

There are seven types of encoding for the SWE standards.

1. O&M
2. SensorML
3. TML
4. SOS
5. SPS
6. SAS
7. WNS

The upper three are the descriptive XML-based encoding that deal with sensors or transducers directly. Since these three don't take much processing, they can be done within the framework of my proposed middleware. The lower four are standard web services and they make it very inconvenient for the middleware to deal with these concurrently.

Therefore the upper three are in one layer and the lower ones in another.

The abstract design of my middleware looks like the above figure.

JavaOne Conference-Day 2

Today is my lucky day

I got a t-shirt from James Gosling during the t-shirt shooting contest, PLUS I won a JavaFx mobile phone which came as a surprise to everyone.
Here's the video clip

JavaOne Conference-Day 1

This morning's general session was such an amazing kick-off for this year's JavaOne. Jonathan Schwartz the president of Sun Microsystems gave a remarkable speech on how Java began to conquer mobile world and became a must-have for every mobile user.

It is interesting to know, apart from the vast invasion of Java virtual machine in every desktop, Java has significantly transformed itself into an essential part of every mobile device so that companies like Symbian, Microsoft and Palm desperately attempt to stay updated with the latest modifications in JME in order to well adapt and achieve the best performance.

He then called James Gosling the founder of JAVA programming language and Scott McNealy the former president of Sun Microsystems up on stage. It was so fascinating to see these three geniuses together, who have undoubtedly changed the way the world evolves.

The sessions I'm attending today at 8:30 am-10:30 pm are:

• The Real-Time Java™ Platform Programming Challenge: Taming Timing Troubles
• Mobile Service Architecture 2: Introducing New Features in Mobile Devices
• Real Time: Understanding the Trade-Offs Between Determinism and Throughput
• The Java™ 2 Platform, Micro Edition Mobile Information Device Profile 3.0 (MIDP 3.0)
• Building Real-Time Systems for the Real World
• Java Card™ 3 Platform: A Platform for Embedded Systems
• Asynchronous I/O Tricks and Tips
• Step-by-Step Development of an Application for the Java Card™ 3.0 Platform
• Electronic Health Records (EHR) on Java Card™ 3.0 Technology-Based Devices
• Inside the Sun Java™ Real-Time System
• Integrating Java Card™ 3.0 Technology into the Desktop Environment

JavaOne & CommunityOne 2009

Once again, JavaOne, the world's best conference for innovation is back in San Francisco

Here is my extremely specialised schedule for 1-5 June.

Congratulations to all MAN UTD Fans & the Club

Manchester United drew with Arsenal at Old Trafford on Saturday to wrap up their 11th Premier League and 18th English league title.

The fight is not over yet, let's hope the best for uefa champions league.

Well Deserved!

Persian History in the British Museum

I've been seeing the advert below quite often at London underground stations for the past few months. As I am Persian and very much interested in great Persian history, I would definitely pay a visit to the Persian section of the British Museum.

The last time I visited the British museum was roughly 4 years ago. I pretty enjoyed the proper arrangement of the different collections which nicely represented the trend of history.

April/2005

I spent hours on the Persian, Roman, Greek and Egyptian galleries. Unfortunately due to the so called irregular stance of the current government of Iran with the western world, Persian history is not being represented very well and in most cases is confused with other Middle eastern civilizations. What' s obvious is that ancient Persian civilization made a great contribution to the development of human civilization.

HaPpY PeRSiAn NeW YeAr

 

سال نوی ایرانی را به تمام ایرانیان , فارسی زبانان و همه کسانی که نوروز را جشن می گیرند تبریک می گویم و امیدوارم سالی پر از موفقیت و سلامتی و سر بلندی رو داشته باشید.

 

Wikipedia : Persian Calendar

Profound Meanings

At first look, seems to be just an advert, but with a little bit of thinking, it has a lot to say. Not only political !!!

OGC workshop by SANY at ZAMG in Vienna, Austria

Last week I attended a workshop organised by the Austrian research centres on behalf of the SANY consortium at the Austria's national weather service agency (ZAMG) in Vienna.

OpenGIS® Standards and Specifications are technical documents that detail interfaces or encodings. Software developers use these documents to build support for the interfaces or encodings into their products and services. These specifications are the main "products" of the Open Geospatial Consortium and have been developed by the membership to address specific interoperability challenges. Ideally, when specifications are implemented by two different software engineers working independently, the resulting components plug and play, that is they work together without further debugging.

In an Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) initiative called Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), members of the OGC are building a unique and revolutionary framework of open standards for exploiting Web-connected sensors and sensor systems of all types: flood gauges, air pollution monitors, stress gauges on bridges, mobile heart monitors, Webcams, satellite-borne earth imaging devices and countless other sensors and sensor systems.

The models, encodings, and services of the SWE architecture enable implementation of interoperable and scalable service-oriented networks of heterogeneous sensor systems and client applications. In much the same way that Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) standards enabled the exchange of any type of information on the Web,the OGC’s SWE initiative is focused on developing standards to enable the discovery, exchange, and processing of sensor observations, as well as the tasking of sensor systems. The functionality that OCG has targeted within a sensor web includes:

• 
  
  Discovery of sensor systems, observations, and observation processes that meet an application’s or user’s immediate needs;




• 
  
  Determination of a sensor’s capabilities and quality of measurements;




• 
  
  Access to sensor parameters that automatically allow software to process and geo-locate observations;




• 
  
  Retrieval of real-time or time-series observations and coverages in standard encodings




• 
  
  Tasking of sensors to acquire observations of interest;




• 
  
  Subscription to and publishing of alerts to be issued by sensors or sensor services based upon certain criteria.

Above is a very brief introduction to OGC and SWE derived from Opengeospatial website.

SANY-IP has developed a Sensor Service Architecture (SensorSA) with OGC SWE services used within which allows building of complete Environmental Monitoring Networks (EMNs) from standard-compliant components.

The intention of the workshop was to teach the participants which SensorSA-compliant software components are available, and how to configure and deploy them. This is part of the research in my PhD studies which will later be required for further implementation.

During the workshop I met many scientists and researchers using OGC's SWE for different European projects with various applications aimed at monitoring water quality and level, Earthquake, Weather, fire and etc.

The World is in !! DEPRESSION !!

Gordon Brown described the world financial crisis as 'depression' at prime minister's questions yesterday . It wasn't picked up by the Tory at the time, however Downing street announced that what he had meant was 'recession' and not 'depression' but had slipped up.

It caused huge concerns amongst the MPs on both sides that he might know something that the others don't.

It could have been a typical gaff for someone like George Bush, but Gordon Brown, hmm, I don't think so. He's been always not only quite careful about his words but also refusing to acknowledge the full depth of economic crisis, that's why it turned into such a big deal.

Was it deliberate or just a slip of the tongue?

Well, If I was in his position I would have said what I meant was 'DEEP RECESSION'. It makes even more sense.

But this last one aside, I personally think he wished he would have never said that famous slogan of his: "British Jobs for British Workers", since David Cameron gave him a hard time on this.

Flashplayer for Firefox & Opera on OpenSolaris

As you know OpenSoalris comes with Firefox browser, however it doesn't include Adobe flashplayer plugin so you can't see any flash-based contents like watching video clips on YouTube.

If you are a novice to OpenSolaris, here you can find basic instructions of how to install flashplayer on Opera and Firefox on OpenSolaris.

In order to install Adobe Falshplayer you have to download the Solaris version of flashplayer from Adobe website here .

If you go on the default download page like the one above you need to choose 'Different operating systems or browsers'.

Choose 'Solaris' from the drop-down list.

Choose x86 from the second box unless you have a Sparc system. Click on 'Agree and install now' and then 'save file'. Here I saved the file on my 'Desktop'.

What you just downloaded is a zipped folder with .bz2 extension. You need to right click on the zipped file and then choose 'Extract Here'. Now your files are extracted into a folder with the same name on your desktop. There are two files in that folder and we are interested in 'libflashplayer.so'.

Then go on the Terminal. login as super-user: type SU and then enter your root password if there is any. In this stage you have to copy the file (libflashplayer.so) into the plugins folder of your Firefox.

type : CP (address of the extracted file) (space) (address of plugins folder of firefox)

In this case it is:

CP
/export/home/tiger/Desktop/flash_player_solaris _r151_x86/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/

Note: Tiger is my username, you can replace that with your own username if everything else is the same.

You shouldn't get any errors and after you enter the command it should be like above.

OPERA :
Opera is also available for OpenSolaris.

Choose the latest version for Solaris which is 9.63.

The same instructions apply to opera browser but instead of the plugins folder of firefox, you need to enter the address of opera plugins folder.

ZFS & Dtrace Rock

Have you ever lost valuable data? Well, it happens to everyone...However with ZFS the probability goes down to zero..

ZFS is a new file system developed by Sun Microsystems providing a fundamentally new approach to data management . Whatever the situation, with ZFS you can always roll back to previous versions of your data or in other words 'restore' it.

With ZFS not only do you always have automatic backups but also it provides higher level of security. These are not the only features, there is a number of additional advantages which are becoming more evident to many big vendors but is out of the scope of this post.

Nowadays an ever increasing number of companies are turning to Sun Microsystems to help them achieve more reliable storage solutions and higher security.

Apart from this fantastic storage solution, Sun provides a powerful tool called 'Dtrace' which can be used on MySql to estimate or monitor the execution times of the query parsing or even to determine whether query uses query catch or not.

Tonight, Martin Brown amazed everyone by his fantastic presentation on MySql, ZFS and DTrace at Sun's customer briefing centre in London.

I Loved it..Geeks were speechless!!..and guess what?..the whole presentation was run on MAC rather than Solaris to prove full compatibility.

Microsoft Windows 7 (BETA)

Well, even though I'm not a big fan of Microsoft products since Windows XP SP3, I kind of felt tempted to give a try to Windows 7 beta after reading a number of highly positive reviews from the trusted experts.

After completing the registration process I was given a license number which apparently is valid till August 09. It's a relatively large image file (2.5 GB) which needs to be recorded onto a DVD.





But surely there is no operating system safer, smoother, faster and more reliable than OpenSolaris by Sun Microsystems. Not because I work for Sun, Nope, because it really is reliable and nothing makes me feel better more than assurance.

Haven't you noticed the paradox??

Windows Vista in the background, Visual Studio on the desktop and still nagging about Microsoft!!!

The Day After Tomorrow?

You probably remember the movie 'The Day After Tomorrow' and the fact that how climate change can lead to a disaster. Apart from the huge exaggerations which made the movie quite exciting, it was still based on some proven scientific facts. A shaft in the major ice shelves within either of the polar regions or melting the ice shelves, will result in a total climate change all over the world which all stem from a minor increase in atmosphere temperature or what we call "Global Warming".

Interestingly new studies have shown that is actually beginning to happen. Here is the link to the BBC news.

To make it short, these are the highlights which would interest you.

1. Scientists say data from satellites and weather stations indicate a warming of about 0.6C over the last 50 years.
2. The continent of Antarctica is warming up in step with the rest of the world, according to a new analysis.
3. Meanwhile, scientists in Antarctica say a major ice shelf is about to break away from the continent.
4. The Wilkins Ice Shelf is said to be "hanging by a thread" from the Antarctic Peninsula, the strip of land pointing from the white continent towards the southern tip of South America.
5. A BAS team currently on site is reporting that the Wilkins shelf, about 15,000 sq km in area, is probably about to break free.
6. "It really could go at any minute, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the final cracks started to appear very soon," said BAS's David Vaughan.
7. Last year, scientists from the UK Met Office used climate models to attribute trends at the poles, and concluded that human emissions of greenhouse gases were largely responsible for the observed warming.
8. A much bigger question is whether the new analysis of Antarctic warming heralds any major melting in the West Antarctic ice sheet, which could lead to big changes in sea level and global impacts.

Source :BBC News