DevTalks

I am a software developer by profession. But not many know that I am a big-time mechanics and electronics buff. I love designing cool toys that help me do things better. Very often I say - "If I hadn't been in the software industry, I'd be a mechanical engineer designing cool machines".

All of us should know that when we sneeze, on an average 40,000 liquid droplets traveling at 150kmph - 1045kmph come out of our nose. Now that is a lot of energy. And all of us end up wasting this huge amount of energy.

Since last several hundred weekends (ever since I first got to know of nano-technology), I had been working on a device that can collect this energy and make it usable to humans. Obviously, I got ridiculed every now and then by friends for working on a crazy thing which they thought would never yield anything successful.

Nevertheless, with a few committed volunteers, I continued working. After years of research and commitment, I am finally ready with the device. I call it SneezeNergy - a novel innovation that conserves the energy otherwise wasted when we sneeze.

How does it work?

The working-principle of SneezeNergy is very simple - accumulate the droplets and convert the mechanical energy into electrical energy with the help of turbines.

The real challenge was to build turbines that could fit on the nose of a human (that too without causing any twitching in the nose).

I built these nano-turbines with the help of several thousand nano-bots that I rented from a company (I can't disclose my source as it is a trade secret).

Once the electrical pulses are available, SneezeNergy creates non-turbulent electromagnetic flux spikes of low magnitude which is transfused into the human body (the person who is wearing SneezeNergy) thereby allowing reentry of the energy that was released during the sneezing process.

What does it look like?

One of my volunteers (Caty) wore SneezeNergy and I took a couple of snaps. These are the very first images of what will be known to the world as one of the greatest inventions of the 21st century.

Can I buy it?

Not yet. I am reviewing the manufacturing process and trying to train the nano-bots for mass production. You see it gets really tricky training these little beasts (I hope they don't read my blog). They are expert in hiding and often disappear trying to play pranks on me. Little kids.. can't help it!

On a serious note, I plan to start mass production by the end of 2008.

Note: Microsoft does not have any affiliation or association with the project. I'll see if I can sell it to the management though!!!

At Microsoft's Hyderabad office, we have a contest going on - Microsoft Volleyball League. We also registered our team. The team was grossly inexperienced. For most of the players, it was the very first match. Having played a match (2 sets) in my college, I was one of the most experienced players in my team :-)

The opposition was a very good team and they looked like professionals.

The results were not surprising at all. We lost 25-9, 25-5.

But let me tell you, we outplayed our own expectation. We were expecting a clean sweep something like 25-2 or 25-1. But what happened there on the court was superb stuff. It was fun.

Here is a picture that we took after the match-

[top row (l to r) - Venkatesh, Ankit, Sudhakar, Kuldeep]
[bottom row (l to r) - Deobrat (me), Nischal, Avishek]

I know It's an old news. The word went out on March 4th (just a day before MIX '08 started). Nokia, in a press release said Silverlight would be available on Series 40 and Series 60 mobile phones.

Nokia being one of the largest mobile equipment manufacturers in the world, this is a really positive deal for the future of Silverlight.

For consumers, it means that if they are using any of the Applications designed for Silverlight, they would see the same rich experience whether on a desktop or a Windows Mobile of a Symbian Mobile.

Today morning, I saw an article at Slashdot about website defacement attacks. To all the people out there who are still living with the blind belief of the "Safe Linux" myth, this must be a revelation.

The article says "Zone-H have recently posted the statistical breakdown of the collected website defacements from the last few years. Surprisingly, in 2007 more Linux servers suffered a successful attack than all versions of Windows, combined. Similarly, more Apache installations were successfully attacked than all IIS versions combined. A day after posting this data, Zone-H have questioned the appropriateness of continuing to operate the archive. Despite the valuable information that can be gleaned from the service, it may soon be lost to the world. The natural successor to the now-defunct Alldas archive of defaced websites, Zone-H's archive maintains records of over 2.6 million defaced sites but may be shut down due to the continuous accusations of impropriety leveled against them any time they disclose and mirror a reported defacement"

The original article is posted here.

Still think Linux/Apache is a better combination? Think again mate!