Web 2.0

A buzz word in the industry web 2.0 is all about blogs, wikis, podcasting, content syndication, content tagging services, multimedia sharing services. There are some newer web 2.0 services which are quite popular :
1. Social Networking : facebook , siphs, myspace, orkut etc
2. Aggregation Services : netvibes
3. Data 'mash ups'
4. Tracking and filtering content : technorati , digg etc
5. Collaborating : squidoo , wikia
6. Replicate office style software in browser : google docs
7. Source ideas or work from crowd : innocentive
The technologies and standards used in web 2.0 are :
1. Ajax : One of the biggest frustration of traditional html based websites is the time spent in waiting for pages to reload and refresh after user has chosen an option or clicked on a link. Ajax allows a portion of a webpage to be dynamically reloaded in real-time and creates the impression of richer, more natural applications (e.g. google calendar).
2. SOAP vs REST : A further strand in development of web technology is the use of lightweight or simplified programming models (ruby, perl,php,python etc) , which facilitate the creation of loosely coupled systems. this lightweight 'ideal' is viewed in contrast to the production of more robust web services which use 'heavyweight' and formal techniques of SOAP and WSDL.
   REST describes an approach for a stateless client server architecture which provides a simple communication interface using XML and HTTP. every resource here , is identified by URI and use of HTTP lets communication using GET , POST, PUT and DELETE command requests. SOAP on the other hand is more formal and use messaging, complex protocols and WSDL.
3. Microformats: these are used bye web developers to emed semi-structured semantic information within XHTML webpage.
4. APIs : these provide programmers to make use of functionality of a set of modules without having access to source code.
The future of web 2.0 is more focused towards semantic web , semantic wikis, semantic blogging , semantic desktop etc.

Restored Fedora

Now i had two options , either to reinstall fedora or somehow restore the previous installation. since i dont have much of my important data in linux partition i usually go for installing a fresher version itself but this time i had no other option since my fedora cd's don't work anymore and there was no one to provide me fedora cd/dvd. So i thought about reinstalling grub . I downloaded the Super grub disk image and burnt it on a cd and then started this link. Here the usage of sgd was illustrated in a pretty good manner. So after following those easy steps i was able to install grub and i restored fedora back on priyanka's machine :-)

Mashups

During Extreme blue internship 2007 at IBM's pune office , I heard a lot about the Mashup and related stuff. so I tried to find out what Mashup is , and tried to create mashups.
First of all a mashup is basically a web application that gathers data from various sources , in the various formats ( map, image, text etc) , manipulates this gathered data and presents to the user in desired form. I tried to create mashup using some very smart tools available on the web like Yahoo Pipes.
Also the important resource for mashup developers is ProgrammableWeb which contains a whole lot of API's which we can use freely. some other mashup development tools are IBM QEDWiki and Microsoft's popfly. Belive me Mashup are the cool ways to develop smart applications without coding a single line. If you know about portals , you will ask what is the difference between both..well basically the difference is that inter portal communication is too difficult also the portals were not designed with ajax interaction model in mind , but JSR 286 looks to solve these problems so portal interaction will also be easier now :-) .

Compiling 2.6.23 Kernel

About some 4 days ago, through slashdot , i got to know that linus has launched linux kernel 2.6.23 so I thought why not to try my hand on this kernel and i decided to compile it. well guys in the night at around 3 am i downloaded the code ..with a cool download speed of 100kbps i was able to download it very quickly..then i followed instructions from an article available at This.
first i got confused in menuconfig , which options to select which not , but the somehow changed default configuration a little bit. After it , i issued make which took a loooooong time. then some other steps mentioned and finally i got the grub entries as per rquired in grub.conf ( thank god !).
but it was not over yet ..i booted the system and then selected the new kernel version , but oops the booting halted after saying that it could not find /dev/root . I was wondering where the hell did /dev/root came from as there was no such entry in grub.conf . Then i tried asking this question in linux forum and got some replies ..which i'll try tomorrow.