This article describes in detail what it takes to build a LAMP application that understands Unicode. That is, an application that allows for the input, processing, storage and display of Unicode characters. Many developers are aware of what Unicode is, and some apply it on a regular basis. For long, I’ve been in the category of developers who can get away with not knowing about Unicode at all. When you’re working in a controlled environment with a fixed audience and corporate standards for language and character sets, Unicode is less relevant. However, as I started development on Project JungleDragon, a global web application, Unicode instantly became relevant. In a global web application, you surely do not want to alienate a large portion of your audience by allowing them to input latin characters only.

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Posted under Open Source

“Employers around the world who rely on mission-critical product development and building out their IT infrastructure have spoken,” said oDesk CEO, Gary Swart. “Open Source technology, led by PHP and MySQL, is by far the skill set in highest demand today.”

oDesk reports that worldwide demand specifically for PHP programmers is nearly double the next closest skill set. At almost 2,000 PHP jobs posted per month, PHP accounts for over 20 percent of all jobs posted by businesses on the leading preferred marketplace for both buyers and providers.

“PHP is superior to any other coding platform. It’s free, flexible, and offers a massive support community,” explained Nicholas Pregeant, owner of Innovative Web Solutions of New Orleans, and an active oDesk customer. “Plus, the extensive Open Source library of proven PHP and MySQL scripts are customizable, portable, and scalable for almost any web application.”

“oDesk offers screen captures of work in progress that virtually guarantees vendor accountability, and oDesk handles the payments,” said Pregeant. “Because I don’t have to worry about the trust- or back-office issues, I can concentrate on the project. oDesk is the only service that meets my needs.”

Top jobs list by programming skills (jobs per month):

PHP — 2,000
Flash — 1,000
Ajax - 600
ASP — 500
Java — 300

PHP Developers by Country:

India — 2,183
U.S. — 857
Ukraine — 420
Russia — 348
Pakistan — 324
Philippines — 239

Posted under news

Adobe has released the very first alpha version of a 64-bit Flash Player for Linux. This move is part of the company’s broader plans to provide comprehensive 64-bit support for the widely-used browser plugin. Adobe expects to release 64-bit versions for all three platforms with the next major version of Flash Player.

Although Adobe decided to start with Linux, the company says that 64-bit builds for all three major platforms will be released simultaneously with the next major version of Flash Player. Adobe chose Linux as the starting point because 64-bit software is supported pervasively in the Linux ecosystem and because Linux users have expressed the most demand for 64-bit Flash.

Flash on the Linux platform has traditionally lagged far behind Windows. Adobe has steadily been closing this gap and has publicly committed to making Linux a fully-supported first-tier platform alongside Windows and Mac OS X. During the Flash 9 development cycle, Adobe reworked the player to make it fully cross-platform compatible. Since then, they have mostly provided feature parity between platforms and have consistently made new versions available under Linux. Adobe has also improved Flash performance on Linux with version 10 of the player.

Despite Adobe’s efforts to improve the quality of the Flash Player user experience for Linux enthusiasts, the lack of a proper 64-bit version created significant problems. In the early days, 64-bit Linux users had to run 32-bit browsers inside of a chroot jail or use a 32-bit browser linked against a full set of 32-bit libraries. Eventually, nspluginwrapper emerged and provided cross-architecture support for 32-bit browser plugins in some browsers. It worked, but it was a suboptimal solution with a lot of problems.

Flash support in most modern 64-bit Linux distributions is mediocre at best. On my 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04 desktop, I frequently encounter serious Flash bugs that either crash the browser or force me to restart it. This seems to be common—Mozilla’s crash report system shows that Flash is the number one cause of Firefox crashes on Linux. Some of these problems faced by Linux users could soon become a thing of the past. The new 64-bit Flash Player works as a native plugin and does not require nspluginwrapper.

“Furthering Adobe’s commitment to the Linux community and as part of ensuring the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player, a pre-release 64-bit Linux version of Adobe Flash Player 10 is now available,” the company said in a statement. “This offers easier, native installation on 64-bit Linux systems and removes the need for 32-bit emulation.”

I downloaded Flash Player 10 64-bit on my Ubuntu system and tested it with the latest Firefox 3.1 nightly build. The plugin is distributed as a single .so file that is compressed in a tarball. All I had to do was decompress the tarball and put the .so file in the Firefox plugin’s directory. It seems to be working reliably so far, and I was able to use it to run several Flash 10 demos, including one with 3D graphics.

Native 64-bit support for Flash Player on Linux is a major win for the Linux community, and it represents Adobe’s expanding commitment to treating Linux like a first-class citizen. Additional work remains before the Linux version of Flash Player has full performance parity with the Windows version, but Flash on Linux has clearly come a very long way and is finally starting to feel like a native part of the platform.

The binary is available for download from the Adobe Labs web site. For more details, see Adobe’s 64-bit Flash FAQ.

Posted under Technology, product

BANGALORE, INDIA: DivX, Inc., a digital media company that creates, distributes and licenses digital video technologies has filed a lawsuit against Internet company Yahoo! related to an advertising deal signed between the two companies.

The lawsuit has been filed in California Superior Court in Santa Clara County. DivX has said that this decision would hurt their results for 2008 and 2009.

The company in a statement said, “Yahoo!’ s decision to breach is unjustified given DivX’s fulfillment of its obligations under the agreement.”

According to various media reports, the Yahoo-DivX deal was worth at least $5 million for this fiscal year.

According to the agreement it would have offered consumers who downloaded DivX video software tools a co-branded version of the Yahoo Toolbar, along with a Yahoo services-loaded version of IE 7.

Meanwhile media reports quotes Yahoo spokesman, Adam Grossberg, saying the companies had been trying to rework the terms of the deal but “could not come to an amicable resolution.”

Yahoo is “disappointed DivX decided to pursue legal action” and that company will “defend itself vigorously”, he said.

Posted under news

Web 2.0 is here to stay. Ideas like social networking are seen as a convenient way to keep in touch with colleagues and exchange ideas between peers. But can a sector like the BFSI, which is so touchy on security issues, ever open to the idea of a social networking site, exclusively for them?

According Gaurav Gupta, manager (trade finance) of ICICI, as financial industries increase the use of web 2.0, the tendency to use social networks to further share information and collaborate both internally as well as with peers will increase. Different banks have different usage of utility. The success of social networks for financial industry will depend on how secure the TSU will be he said.

Analysis and strategies can also be shared with peers since this will be a closed circuit social network site. Pradeep Kumar, VP (treasury) for Axis Bank agreed that executives from the BFSI sector would feel more comfortable sharing information on a site dedicated solely for the BFSI sector.

P.K. Nayak CGM of RBI said, Besides interaction and sharing of ideas the site could prove a good source of information on credit worthiness credit reports and market information.

According to P. Mahapatra, chief manager of Central Bank of India, the network could be used to integrate society with financial institutions and for developing rural economy. But there are even more potential benefits. As C. Sahu, chief manager (systems) of SBI puts it, Social networking offers many more benefits, apart from staying in touch with colleagues. It can be used to reach a wider audience, share thoughts, and also for product reviews.

source :click here

Related links:
Social Networking Needs Well-Defined Purpose

Posted under Uncategorized

Today there are millions of assets which are untraceable and whose locations need to be tracked. Tracking of an asset proves to be even more beneficial when an asset contributing highly to the overall revenue has gone missing. The concern is not always the cost of the asset but the cost of not knowing where the asset is located in an endeavor to use it efficiently.

Active RFID tags are used to track assets over long-range. They have their own internal power source and are more effective in RF challenged environments. Orizin Technologies has released a new tag that has read-range of 20 meters and dimensions of 26mm*23mm*7.3mm. This makes it the smallest active RFID tag in the world,a ccording to the company. priced at $8 for more than 5k quantity.

It can be used to tag assets like laptops, servers, routers, switches, vehicles and others in industries like Defence, IT, healthcare, manufacturing, etc.

Suresh Rao, CTO of Orizin said, “The optimum size, range and cost are the result of more than 18 months of R&D effort which has gone into development of our Active RFID tags and readers. We will continue to invest in developing solutions that the markets demand”.

The tags will be priced at $8 for more than 5000 units.

Related links:
RFID to Trace Laptops

Posted under Technology

ffmpeg is a wonderful library for creating video applications or even general purpose utilities. ffmpeg takes care of all the hard work of video processing by doing all the decoding, encoding, muxing and demuxing for you. This can make media applications much simpler to write. It’s simple, written in C, fast, and can decode almost any codec you’ll find in use today, as well as encode several other formats.

to know more click here or
here

Posted under Technology

With more than 100 million downloads, MySQL is the world’s most popular open-source database. MySQL’s popularity is indicative of the growing adoption of open-source software. Developers are using open-source software because it offers them a reliable and low-cost alternative for developing their applications. This adoption trend extends to middleware too. For example, open-source servers are replacing proprietary servers in many enterprises. Case in point: GlassFish, an open-source, enterprise-quality, Java EE 5-compliant application server, enjoys significant popularity. With more than seven million downloads since its release in May 2005 and more than half a million downloads a month, GlassFish has a widespread and growing community of users.

The reasons that so many people download and use MySQL and GlassFish are compelling. In addition to being open source, MySQL and GlassFish are fast, reliable, and easy to use. Though attractive individually, MySQL and GlassFish when used together provide an excellent solution for quickly developing and deploying web applications that are not only secure and reliable, but also scale to meet increasing demand and are highly responsive to user requests.

This article, the first in a series of articles, covers the advantages of using MySQL with GlassFish and illustrates why the combination is a perfect choice for developing and deploying web applications. In future articles in the series, you’ll see how easy it is to build web applications that take advantage of MySQL and GlassFish features.

Although various versions of GlassFish and MySQL are available for download, this series of articles focuses on GlassFish v2 Update Release 2 (UR2) and MySQL 5.1 Community Server.

Posted under Open Source, product

4

Mr. Unknown Calls

Ted slept peacefully that night and got up later than usual the next day. He got ready and went down to the hotel cafeteria to have his breakfast. As he was having his special grilled cheese sandwich, Arthur came over and joined him.
“Did you sleep well last night?”
“Tom isn’t here is he?”
“Why? Do you miss him?”
“No, it’s because I wanted to say that I slept like a log. If he was here, I can’t imagine what he would say.”

At this, both started laughing. There no doubt that though Ted had liked Tom’s company throughout the tour, he had not enjoyed the conversations with him. The conversations, though humorous in the beginning had begun to start irritating him for quite some time. More..

Previous Chapter Click Here

Posted under The Humorous Adventure

The good folks at Mozilla are trumpeting a new report by global analytics service Net Applications that documented a 20% global market share for two out of four weeks in October. It’s a new high bar of popularity for the 2nd most popular browser in the world.

Firefox is safe, standards compliant, extensible…and not made by Microsoft. That’s what most people like about it and the number of fans is growing. Can you guess what percentage of ReadWriteWeb visitors came here using Firefox last month?

Posted under Open Source, product