Back to the past - Chemistry

Long back, when i was in my 11th and 12th, preparing for IITs,NITs and all other Ts, my dream was to become a chemical engineer. Chemistry was home turf for me , especially the organic part. My dreams revolved around the Benzene rings , the H2O2 and the likes of HexaMethylene Tri-Acetides (Does it exist??). All I could see were elements and compounds around me waiting for me to tinker with. And some of the most horribly gone wrong experiments in my life involved chemistry(there are others involving physics and magnetism too, but all about that later).Once

• when I tried creating hydrogen from water ( was pretty dangerous and dumb too)
• and when for the sake of human kind , I ventured into home based Methane production.It was a failure on a grand scale.

The lessons learnt ? - That water is a good conductor of electricity and that trash kept for a long time stinks.

So when i saw this article in sciencenews.org about Nitrogen-Nitrogen bonds all that terrible memories came flooding in.
The article talks about a new method of breaking N-N bonds to create carbon-nitrogen bond.
Facts that I learnt in school about N2.

Nitrogen is the element that makes up the largest percentage of the atmosphere, about 80%.But still we need nitrogen fixing bacteria to bring it to soil. For fertilizer production the N2 has to be bonded with Hydrogen and converted to ammonia to form a carbon-nitrogen bond,because N-N bonds are one of the toughest bonds found.

Why don't you just read the rest here - article

Domain woes - resolved

I found this site http://everydns.com where poor chaps like me who can't afford to rent a server can find solace. Just go there and you can add your domain name and configure the so called A name, CNAME , whatever whatever. Essentially, my point is , you need not own a server to point your domain name to your blog or for that matter even for creating a subdomain.

The step by step procedure on how to go about it is given in Google itself. https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=76049

P:S - my domain is http://autumn.co.in and the www is kept parked as of now and http://sarathainside.blogspot.com will automatically redirect to http://blog.autumn.co.in

Pagination

As part of my office research time (read, there is absolutely nothing to do at office) and as a part of my ongoing study of oracle (learning!!, I need it for my survival ) , I was pondering how to retrieve a set of rows from MIN_ROW_NUMBER through MAX_ROW_NUMBER. I was looking to replicate the functions of "head" and "tail" commands in unix.

The word might be hard to swallow, but the concept in plain english is digestible like a banana. I am talking about Oracle pagination - put in simple terms, the process of getting a set of rows between a specified min and max rows. Say , we need to get all the rows between 3rd and 5th including them both. How do you go about it? It is basically used in web pages for displaying a set of fields, say set of rows from 10-30, and user can click next to view resultset 30-50 or click the previous button to view another set of rows.

Solution , you gotto use the magic column "rownum". Read it in detail here - http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/07-jan/o17asktom.html
(rownum is an oracle specific field, please find your own solution for other DBs like MySql)
Here's the query i came up with .

select * from (select * from "tablename" where rownum <=5 order by rownum desc) where rownum <=3;

the only issue here is that the retrieved set is inverted,that is you get from 5 to 3 , rather than 3 to 5 as you were expecting. Workaround is to introduce a seperate column, populate it with rownum and orderby that.

Domain woes

My long time dream of owning my own domain name bore fruit today and as usual along with it came new and unnecessary troubles. I simply don't know what to do with it, since I don't have a hosting plan. And trying to make it point to this blog, well, I just wasted 4 hrs and is still shooting at the stars.
Another bad Bangalore day

The need to try

Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance.

Essentially , we owe it to ourselves that we try and try we must.Since It is only by trying that we learn. So why a departure from my usual posts? Well , I have had this feeling for the past few days that I've converted my own blog into some sort of a portal, instead of taking time to deliver valuable content. And also, I am becoming increasingly frustrated at how easily people are give up just because things don't happen the way they intend them to. I'm referring specifically but not necessarily confining myself to the case of

job hunting.

People look for jobs for a variety of reasons,

1. Simply because they have no other job, and job hunting is like a passion , rather an obsession for them
2. Because they are in dire need of a job
3. Or they need a job just for the heck of it.
   

Whatever be the reason, If one needs a job or forget job, if one needs something, anything, he/she must be prepared to work for it, give it 100% and even if things don't work out the way they planned, be prepared to try, until the very end, until the objective is attained. Getting a job is not that hard but the only hurdle towards getting one is lack of trying. You might not get it the first time, not the second time, maybe not even for the fifth or sixth time, But in the end, perseverance pays. All that focused work, towards a needy goal, all that effort wouldn't just go wasted, would it?

Panasonic wins control of Sanyo

Panasonic has bought majority shares in Sanyo. Both lead the market in rechargeable batteries for hybrid cars and other such environmentally sound products. with the current hype in environmentalism reaching a feverish pitch , the deal makes much sense, for the opportunities are clear and evident.
Related :
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8405757.stm
http://www.skynews.com.au/tech/article.aspx?id=404593

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Bing to index Twitter updates

Microsoft has a new weapon in its Internet search duel with Google - full access to Twitter’ tweets.Microsoft apparently outbid Google Inc. for the right to index and display the tweets almost as soon as they are posted.

But,recently i had also come across another article saying Google is coming up with a next generation search engine that indexes tweets real time. Also there are claims of Yahoo having access to twitter's data. Well, one thing that's certain is , that access to twitter , the one window to real time happenings is the apple pie that everyone wants.

And the most ironic thing is twitter is yet to make a profit.