Technology – Page 3 – Adnan's Den

Bangladeshi Blog Aggregator: We have none!

Blog Aggregator or Bloggers Community is utmost important for Blogosphere. Because it works as a junction point for all the blogs of a certain community. One can find out what the other people are thinking or what is the recent trends of their own community from that junction. Besides that, a blog aggregator also inspires people to contribute in blogosphere. Amateur bloggers can improve their blog by the useful comments from the expert bloggers from that community. Also one has the scope to read any fact from different views in different blogs. A blog aggregator actually represents the culture, mentality and opinions of a community.

As a blogger I am only 6 months old and I believe I am still an amateur. Whenever on net, I find a blog by a Bangladeshi origin I am delighted. But it is sure a cumbersome job to search blogs by Bangladeshi origin people. So the first thing that stroke in my brain is to find out any Bangladeshi Bloggers Community. For the last few months I’ve googled for any Bangladeshi Blog Aggregator but I found nothing! There is no community for Bangladeshi Bloggers or aggregation of Bangladeshi Blogs! I’ve found a name of Bangladeshi blog aggregator from Hasin’s blog, but for some reason it is not alive now. So the research result is “WE DON’T HAVE ANY ACTUAL BLOGGERS COMMUNITY OR BLOG AGGREGATOR FOR THE BLOGS MAINTAINED OR CREATED BY BANGLADESHI ORIGIN BLOGGERS”.

Continue reading Bangladeshi Blog Aggregator: We have none!

Bangla Typing with Avro Keyboard

Avro Keyboard Startup Splash

Like the most of the Bangladeshi people, I don’t know the Bangla keyboard layouts. Because in Bangla scripts we’ve 11 vowels, 35 consonants, 5 modifiers and numerous consonant conjuncts. To make it more complex, there are several keyboard layouts which are differ from each other. It is a quite difficult matter for me to be handy with one of those keyboards. What a shame for me! Being a Bangladeshi I don’t know how to write Bangla in IT world! But that problem was pacified when I met with Avro Keyboard.

I received several questions from my known-circles about how a complete idiotic ignorant of Bangla Key-layouts like me writes in Bangla. Actually that’s why I must thank to Avro Keyboard. Because this keyboard supports English to Bangla phonetic typing method. That means if you write “amar sonar bangla.“ it’ll show “আমার সোনার বাংলা।“ automatically. Isn’t it fantastic! See a snap shot on how your English text is converting to Bangla using Avro Keyboard.

Avro Keyboard is a free software. Any one can download it. After installing it’ll be automatically stored in your system tray leaving a small toolbar on the top of your desktop. This toolbar indexes all the options for using the keyboard. This tool bar is also very stylish in outfits. Just look it at below.

Another exciting feature is that you can use mouse for typing Bangla like the Character Map of Windows OS. For the totally newbies (who even can’t use keyboard) this is a damn good option for writing in Bangla.

Now you all know my secret of writing Bangla in the Blogosphere or in Facebook or Orkut! But to use it on your browser first you need to set up your browser for Bangla Unicode. I prefer Firefox for that job. Read my guide for Firefox users to prepare Firefox for Bangla unicode.

First experience of Windows Vista

I’ve just installed Windows Vista Ultimatum in my laptop. I got the copy from Minhaz Bhai. Then I took it just for test, as I’ve never experienced Vista before. When I first installed it, I was so much puzzled about the tools, because it was little bit difficult for me to find out where the necessary tools were as it seemed a bit hazy to me. It has a stunning visual. But I am sure who are using KDE of Linux or UBUNTU, will not be amazed by seeing the visual feature. I’ve been using UBUNTU for the last few years, and I believe that Windows Vista has nothing special or unique features which are not in Linux.

I like the gadgets that appear on the right side of the desktop. Specially the RSS Feed gadget which I think is very useful. Start menu becomes more clumsy as the sub-menus open within the main menu. The main drawback that I’ve noticed is that the driver’s scarcity. My laptop’s blue-tooth functionality couldn’t be installed for some dumb security reason! Every time I wanted to install the device from the original CD provided by DELL with my laptop, it shows the security center message, which in turns terminate the whole installation process.

Windows Vista requires more than 9 GB memory space and minimum 1 GB of RAM. It’s a high requirement. UBUNTU with the same facilities requires only 2 GB memory space with a RAM of 256 MB. I don’t know whether other software will run in Vista or they will also be blocked for so called security systems. But in the first glimpse it could not win my heart which had done by Windows XP. My suggestion is that, if you’re buying new PC’s with Vista installed in it then it is ok, otherwise the unavailability of the drivers will be troublesome. So if you’re using Windows XP, I don’t think you should upgrade your PC only just for Vista.

Voter List is in Web

For the first time Bangladesh Election Commission has published a web site containing the complete list of all voters of the country. Any one can access the site through internet. To access the information one has to provide the 17 digits PIN (printed in the back of the slip which was given after taking photograph), birth information (format has been given) and a verification code (printed on below). Take a look on the screen shot I’ve given below.

Main disappointment is there is no link of this site in the Bangladesh Election Commission’s website. As BEC is manipulating this process it is common sense that there should be a link to the Voter List site. Another drawback is that if any information is incorrect then there is no option to make it correct, except a text field which is used for Comments purpose. Probably they put the box to get message from the user for any inconvenience or mistakes. In my case, I saw some severe mistakes and I used the Comment Box to send them feedback about the mistakes. But it has been more than 10 days that I saw the informations were unmodified. I still don’t know how to resolve this.

The bright side is, the whole site is build in Bangla Language. So people will feel comfort to use the site. They also provide the Bangla font that will be required to view the page. Overall Bangladesh is advanced to the recent technical world another step. Hope the site developers will take necessary steps to make the site more matured by giving the users option to make correction in their information. Whatever this is, it is indeed a great job!

Gaming Car from SUZUKI

They named it Suzuki SXBox Xbox 360 Concept Car. It has been designed on the concept of XBOX360. From the picture two XBox 360s, 2 projectors, 2 LCD screens are visible. Also the green neon light give this car a gorgeous look. But the green rims makes it hideous. I personally prefer shimmering alloy rim. Whatever the rims look like the shape is super sporty.

For more information please visit here.

Welcome to AUSTronics

I’ve been thinking for developing such a online platform where all the AUST students as well as teachers can share their technical thoughts and knowledge with the rest of the technical world. To give this idea a sense, some of my students came forward. It was really a boiling job. To make the site more lucrative and significant, we’ve decided to collect teachers articles first. By this time we make the decision where to open the site. As we need free hosting without any advertisements, we choose WORDPRESS and BLOGSPOT. WordPress does not give privilege to edit any java scripts or DHTML, which made us to confine our idea within Blogspot.

We’ve made it at last! The AUSTronics is open for all now. Surely the credits goes to my students Arif, Kanto, Razie, Shorif, Tahseen and Asif. Asif develop the site almost alone. He added a nice menu bar at the top just below the title banner. Title banner was designed by Shorif. Today when I was leaving AUST, I found Tahseen circulating the lunching news of AUSTronics by placing flyers in the notice boards.

Dear readers, who’re reading this article, please visit the site of AUSTronics. We don’t expect you to be a technical expertise but we can expect at least you can inform others about the site. By the way to participate in the AUSTronics, you don’t need to be a technical person. Your article is techno-oriented — that’s enough for us!

Annoying SMSs from Mobile Operators

Let’s start with a story of an alien. The alien was very much excited about his new findings on a trip to Earth. “The people on Earth no longer talk to each other using their mouths,” it reports; “They now communicate with their fingers by typing into a tiny toy.” Like the other countries, SMS (Short Message Service) became more popular than the voice call in Bangladesh when the mobile operators first lunched the SMS concept.

Sometimes SMS from a friend will make you laugh or SMS from family can give you a warm comfort. SMS can lighten your moments or can give you a sudden relief. SMS from a dear one is always welcome. But what about SMS from the mobile operators themselves? Several months ago, mobile operators used the SMS service for promoting their new services. Number of SMSs sent by the operators at that time were about 5-or-6 sms/month. This number has been tremendously increased within last few months. In our home, we are using mobile services from two operators: GrameenPhone and AKTEL. In my GrameenPhone contact number, I receive almost 4 sms/day whereas AKTEL sends about 2-3 sms/day on an average. So if I receive say 7 sms/day, about 50% of that is sent by the operators themselves!

These things (to receiving operator’s SMSs) were boring before, now it becomes disturbing. And the operators are not bother this disturbances. Every time my cell gives me a SMS alert and after opening the SMS, I find that it is another promotion or advertisement of one of their new services. Now it seems torture to me. You like it or not, you have to read their SMS, at least you’ve to open it! Can’t they stop this type of rubbish activity? If they want to advertise their services they can use the media. I am pretty sure about their solvency of doing that. Why are they tormenting us? By the way I am not sure, whether only I am suffering from this disturbance or everybody like me is also suffering?

Ten blogging tips from the Ultimate Blogger.

Do you know Jorn Barger? The answer will be negative for most of you except the geeks. Well he is often called as the Father of Blogs. Barger coined the term weblog on December 17, 1997; ten years ago this week for the first time to describe the process of logging the web as he surfed. And in 2007, Blogging is now probably the most important matter for the netizens. No one can actually count how many blogs are there in blogsphere. According to the CyberJournalist, the blogosphere is doubling about once every 6 and a half months. Not only the blogs also the blog lingo like Klogs, Plogs, Vogging etc. has been grown in a large extend. So tips from the Father will obviously be helpful for all the bloggers. Just go through the tips and enhance your blogging. By the way , Happy Birthday Blogs! Original link of these tips can be found here.

A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)
You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.
If you spend a little time searching before you post, you can probably find your idea well articulated elsewhere already.
Being truly yourself is always hipper than suppressing a link just because it’s not trendy enough. Your readers need to get to know you.
You can always improve on the author’s own page title, when describing a link. (At least make sure your description is full enough that readers will recognize any pages they’ve already visited, without having to visit them again.)
Always include some adjective describing your own reaction to the linked page (great, useful, imaginative, clever, etc.)
Credit the source that led you to it, so your readers have the option of “moving upstream.”
Warn about “gotchas” — weird formatting, multipage stories, extra-long files, etc. Don’t camouflage the main link among unneeded (or poorly labeled) auxiliary links.
Pick some favorite authors or celebrities and create a Google News feed that tracks new mentions of them, so other fans can follow them via your weblog.
Re-post your favorite links from time to time, for people who missed them the first time.