Monday, February 2, 2009

India working on Ayurvedic and herbal cure for HIV/AIDS

Scientists from India and Japan are attempting to develop Ayurvedic and herbal formulations to treat HIV/AIDS, according to the former Indian president.

Speaking at the Southeast Asian conference on Tuberculosis and Chest diseases, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (an eminent scientist himself) said scientists are working with nearly 60 plant species and have found that 16 of those have the properties to fight AIDS.

Kalam also said that Army Medical Corps are also working on formulations based on Ayurvedic Medicine to cure HIV/AIDS. However, he did not specify which plant species were involved or where the research was taking place.

India currently has 2.5 million HIV/AIDS patients with over 700,000 of those being children under 14 years-old.

"Herbal medicines are part of our age-old traditions and we should work on them to treat diseases," said Kalam.

APJ Abdul Kalam's, The Supreme Boss of Thumba!

Scientists at the Rocket launching station in Thumba, were in the habit of working for nearly 12 to 18 hours a day. There were about Seventy such scientists working on a project. All the scientists were really frustrated due to the pressure of work and the demands of their boss but everyone was loyal to him and did not think of quitting the job.

One day, one scientist came to his boss and told him - Sir, I have promised to my children that I will take them to the exhibition going on in our township. So I want to leave the office at 5 30 pm. His boss replied - O K, , You are permitted to leave the office early today.

The Scientist started working. He continued his work after lunch. As usual he got involved to such an extent that he looked at his watch when he felt he was close to completion. The time was 8.30 p.m Suddenly he remembered of the promise he had given to his children. He looked for his boss,, He was not there. Having told him in the morning itself, he closed everything and left for home.

Deep within himself, he was feeling guilty for having disappointed his children. He reached home. Children were not there. His wife alone was sitting in the hall and reading magazines. The situation was explosive, any talk would boomerang on him.

His wife asked him - Would you like to have coffee or shall I straight away serve dinner if you are hungry. The man replied - If you would like to have coffee, I too will have but what about Children??? Wife replied- You don’t know - Your manager came at 5 15 p.m and has taken the children to the exhibition.

What had really happened was the boss who granted him permission was observing him working seriously at 5.00 p.m. He thought to himself, this person will not leave the work, but if he has promised his children they should enjoy the visit to exhibition. So he took the lead in taking them to exhibition

The boss does not have to do it every time. But once it is done, loyalty is established. That is why all the scientists at Thumba continued to work under their boss even though the stress was tremendous.

By the way, can you hazard a guess as to who the boss was????????

Watch former President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam views on Indo-US Nuclear Deal

There are still many people in India who are confused about Indo-US deal, they do not know that Nuclear deal is in Indian interest or not. All these people can watch these views expressed by Indian former President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, who is also associated to rocket and nuclear science. According to him, Nuclear deal is in Supreme interest of India and India will benefit lot from this deal.

Ajax Disadvantage in Web Development

  • Pages dynamically created using successive Ajax requests do not automatically register themselves with the browser's history engine, so clicking the browser's "back" button may not return the user to an earlier state of the Ajax-enabled page, but may instead return them to the last full page visited before it. Workarounds include the use of invisible IFrames to trigger changes in the browser's history and changing the anchor portion of the URL (following a #) when AJAX is run and monitoring it for changes.
  • Dynamic web page updates also make it difficult for a user to bookmark a particular state of the application. Solutions to this problem exist, many of which use the URL fragment identifier (the portion of a URL after the '#') to keep track of, and allow users to return to, the application in a given state.
  • Because most web crawlers do not execute JavaScript code, web applications should provide an alternative means of accessing the content that would normally be retrieved with Ajax, to allow search engines to index it.
  • Any user whose browser does not support Ajax or JavaScript, or simply has JavaScript disabled, will not be able to use its functionality. Similarly, devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, and screen readers may not have support for JavaScript or the XMLHttpRequest object. Also, screen readers that are able to use Ajax may still not be able to properly read the dynamically generated content. The only way to let the user carry out functionality is to fall back to non-JavaScript. This can be achieved by making sure links and forms can be resolved properly and rely not solely on Ajax. In JavaScript, form submission could then be halted with "return false".
  • The same origin policy prevents Ajax from being used across domains, the W3C has a draft that would enable this functionality.
  • The lack of a standards body behind Ajax means there is no widely adopted best practice to test Ajax applications. Testing tools for Ajax often do not understand Ajax event models, data models, and protocols.

Ajax Advantage in Web Development

  • In many cases, related pages on a website consist of much content that is common between them. Using traditional methods, that content would have to be reloaded on every request. However, using Ajax, a web application can request only the content that needs to be updated, thus drastically reducing bandwidth usage and load time.
  • The use of asynchronous requests allows the client's Web browser UI to be more interactive and to respond quickly to inputs, and sections of pages can also be reloaded individually. Users may perceive the application to be faster or more responsive, even if the application has not changed on the server side.
  • The use of Ajax can reduce connections to the server, since scripts and style sheets only have to be requested once.

AJAX Programming in Web Development

Ajax, or AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a group of interrelated web development techniques used to create interactive web applications or rich Internet applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. The use of Ajax has led to an increase in interactive animation on web pages. Data is retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object or through the use of Remote Scripting in browsers that do not support it. Despite the name, the use of JavaScript and XML is not actually required, nor do the requests need to be asynchronous The acronym AJAX has thus changed to the term Ajax, which does not represent these specific technologies

Data Base Technology in Web Development

In practice, many web developers will also have interdisciplinary skills / roles, including:

The above list is a simple website development hierarchy and can be extended to include all client side and server side aspects. It is still important to remember that web development is generally split up into client side coding covering aspects such as the layout and design, then server side coding, which covers the website's functionality and back end systems.

Looking at these items from an "umbrella approach", client side coding such as XHTML is executed and stored on a local client (in a web browser) whereas server side code is not available to a client and is executed on a web server which generates the appropriate XHTML which is then sent to the client. As the nature of client side coding allows you to alter the HTML on a local client and refresh the pages with updated content (locally), web designers must bear in mind the importance and relevance to security with their server side scripts. If a server side script accepts content from a locally modified client side script, the web development of that page shows poor sanitization with relation to security.

Web Development Server Side Coding

However lesser known languages like Ruby and Python are often paired with database servers other than MySQL (the M in LAMP). Below are example of other databases currently in wide use on the web. For instance some developers prefer a LAPR(Linux/Apache/PostrgeSQL/Ruby on Rails) setup for developmen

Web Development Client Side Coding

  • AJAX Provides new methods of using Javascript, PHP and other languages to improve the user experience.
  • Flash Adobe Flash Player is a ubiquitous client-side platform ready for RIAs. Flex 2 is also deployed to the Flash Player (version 9+)
  • Javascript Formally called EMCAScript, Javascript is a ubiquitous client side programming tool.
  • Microsoft Silverlight Microsoft's browser plugin that enables animation, vector graphics and high-definition video playback, programmed using XAML and .NET programming languages.

Web development

Client and server-side programming. Covers JavaScript, Perl and ASP.


Topics in Web development

JavaScript

Covers JavaScript, the most popular browser scripting language, and some clever tips & tricks.

Perl and CGI scripting

Learn the Perl programming language and discover how to write CGI scripts such as form mailers, guestbooks and dynamic content scripts.

ASP

These tutorials take a look at the basics of programming classic Active Server Pages. This server-side technology, like CGI, lets you produce dynamic web pages such as forms and database-driven web sites.