System Administrator Appreciation Day..

Here on this Great Day..

I got a Chance to express about My Profession.. Show  appreciation to your Sysadmin..

Friday, July 30, 2010, is the 11th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. On this special international day, give your System Administrator something that shows that you truly appreciate their hard work and dedication.

A Sysadmin unpacked the server for this website from its box, installed an operating system, patched it for security, made sure the power and air conditioning was working in the server room, monitored it for stability, set up the software, and kept backups in case anything went wrong. All to serve this webpage.

A Sysadmin installed the routers, laid the cables, configured the networks, set up the firewalls, and watched and guided the traffic for each hop of the network that runs over copper, fiber optic glass, and even the air itself to bring the Internet to your computer. All to make sure the webpage found its way from the server to your computer.

A Sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A Sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A Sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out. A Sysadmin worries about spam, viruses, spyware, but also power outages, fires and floods.

When the email server goes down at 2 AM on a Sunday, your Sysadmin is paged, wakes up, and goes to work.

A Sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work — to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.

So if you can read this, thank your Sysadmin — and know he or she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your Dear ones, the instant message from your son at college, the free phone call from the friend in Oman, and this Weblog.

Consider all the daunting tasks and long hours (weekends too.) Let’s be honest, sometimes we don’t know our System Administrators as well as they know us. Remember this is one day to recognize your System Administrator for their workplace contributions and to promote professional excellence. Thank them for all the things they do for you and your business.

Have a Great day and Happy Week end.

..One of System Administrator – TechieDreamer.

How will you type the new Rupee symbol? [Techie News ]

 

Now that the Union Cabinet has approved the new symbol for the Indian Rupee designed by Indian Institute of Technology postgraduate D Udaya Kumar, the question in everyone’s mind is how and when do we get to type the new symbol?

This isn’t going to happen overnight. Ambika Soni, in the press conference held to announce the new symbol, said it might take up to a year for the new Rupee symbol to be used throughout India and about two years for international acceptance.

For widespread usage, the new symbol has to be accepted by the Unicode Consortium’s Unicode Technical Committee that is responsible for the development and maintenance of the Unicode Standard, including the Unicode Character Database.

India is a member of the Unicode Consortium and getting an approval for the new symbol shouldn’t be too difficult. In fact the new symbol had been designed keeping in mind the ease with which it can be incorporated into the existing software systems.

The Unicode Technical Committee meets on a quarterly basis and the next meeting is scheduled for October.

Encoding in the Unicode Standard will also ensure encoding in the International standard ISO/IEC 10646 as both the organizations work closely with each other.

The symbol will also be included in the Indian Standards, viz. 13194:1991 – Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII), through an amendment to the existing list by the Bureau of Indian Standards. The ISCII specifies various codes for Indian languages for processing on computers along with the key-board lay outs.

While the Government of India can mandate hardware manufacturers to include the symbol in keyboards, it can also be accessed through assigned keyboard combination or via the operating system’s Character Map, post approval from the Unicode Consortium. Software manufacturers can include the symbol in their new updates.

But you don’t necessarily need to wait for the official standards approval to use the new Rupee symbol. Soon typographers will release fonts that include the symbol. But these fonts might not be universally supported.

Moreover, you can build your own font for the new Rupee symbol using free online font-creation tools.

[IBNLive]

Scientists unlock secret of Mona Lisa’s face [Art]

Apparently, everyone has long been baffled by how Leonardo da Vinci created such subtle shadows and light on the Mona Lisa. So much so that scientists X-rayed the painting to discover his technique.

Scientists have discovered that da Vinci used a well known renaissance painting technique known as sfumato. For the non art historians among us, Sfumato is the mixing of thin layers of pigment, glaze, and oil to create lifelike shadows. The difference with Da Vinci was just how intricate his layers were. Apparently, Da Vinci used 30 layers of paint that amazingly only added 40 micrometers of paint—that’s half the width of a human hair.

The X-ray fluorescence spectrometry used was noninvasive and allowed scientists to see each layer of paint. It’s a tool that’s so precise that it can determine the mix of pigments used by an artist. Philippe Walter, the man who X-rayed Mona Lisa:

In the case of “Mona Lisa”, Leonardo da Vinci used a mixture of maybe oil and resins, a binder with a very low amount of pigments. And with this mixture it was possible to create a very impressive aspect of the painting – a realistic, like a 3-D painting.”

But even with that fancy x-ray, scientists still say that finding brushstrokes on the Mona Lisa is impossible. No word on how hard it is to find hidden messages though. [CNN, GIZMODO]

C64 The Best selling personal computer in 1980’s

When I am reading some article, one researcher revealed about his C64 and his early days playing with that.. its really interesting to look at our Old generation computers..

Here some information about Commodore 64 ( C64 )

Type                         :Home computer

Release date            :August 1982

Discontinued            :April 1994

Operating system   Commodore

KERNAL/Commodore BASIC 2.0

CPU MOS Technology 6510
@ 1.023 MHz (NTSC version)
@ 0.985 MHz (PAL version)

Memory            :64 kB RAM + 20 kB ROM

Graphics           : VIC-II (320 × 200, 16 colors, sprites, raster interrupt)

Sound              :SID 6581 (3× Osc, 4× Wave, Filter, ADSR, Ring)

Connectivity       2× CIA 6526 Joystick, Power, Cartridge, RF, A/V, IEEE-488 Floppy/Printer,  Digital tape, GPIO/RS-232

During the C64’s lifetime, sales totaled 30 million units, making it the best-selling single personal computer model of all time. For a substantial period of time (1983–1986), the C64 dominated the market with between 30% and 40% share and 2 million units sold per year, outselling the IBM PC clones, Apple Inc. computers, and Atari 8-bit family computers.

Sam Tramiel, a former Atari president said in a 1989 interview “When I was at Commodore we were building 400,000 C64s a month for a couple of years.”

Amazing thing is The C64 is still used today by some computer hobbyists..

Source: www.wikipedia.org and  Commodore.ca

You can find most of the Oldies from 1970’s  at www.classiccmp.org