From SQL to NoSQL - SubhDB

It is so nice to be back home after months. Especially so that I can get my hands on my computer, God it feels so great. Been playing around for past 2 days with Document Oriented datastores like MongoDB, RavenDB, CouchDB, etc. I liked them all. Most of them required me to install them as an application on my server to actually do something really useful. Since I only own a shared hosting and not a VPS or a Cloud, it was impossible for me do it.

I wanted to play around with it on my existing LAMP stack that I was given. So, I created one Document-Oriented datastore for myself.

Please say hello to SubhDB. Abstraction of document-oriented datastore over traditional MySQL implemented with PHP.

Inspired by the diagram on the home page of RavenDB (http://www.ravendb.net/Uploads/WindowsLiveWriter/RavenDB_C707/image_thumb_1.png), I designed the datamodel for the datastore. Still it can't store array attributes yet.

You can find the source code and instructions to give it a test drive at GitHub. Please post what you feel regarding this. I searched for any existing implementations and was able to find none.

PS:

1. One day hack, which allowed me to spend some useful time in my home during the holidays. 
2. Well this is not even close to being complete or stable. 
3. No comments regarding the name of the project please. 

Measuring Blogger

I was fast asleep when I suddenly woke up, at a dream. Dream is all about building the world's biggest structured infrastructure for information retrieval. When I wanted to blog about it, I was thinking. How many blogs does Blogger (my humble blog service provider) host?

I went to Google APIs page to see if they provide me a API or any kind of means to get the list. I was not able to find anything. Not even a clue :(

So, i decided let me measure the Mr. B myself.

Here is the live stats of the counting process - Counting Blogger Blogs.

Probably what next? Counting WordPress blogs, Joomla Installations, Drupal installations, Elgg installations? What is happening to me, Oh My God!!

PS: Only counting for now.

Fuzzy Speaker

Fuzzy Speaker, is a gesture based project for giving speech to dumb people. It was mainly inspired by Sixth Sense by Pranav Mistry, and Project Un-Mute by Ramaprasanna Chellamuthu of Microsoft.

Project Description:

Its a wearable device, that can detect gesture language of the dumb and speak for them.

Authors:

Ashwanth Kumar, Gaurav Kumar, Nilesh Kumar of SASTRA SRC, Kumbakonam.

Related Papers: (Papers inspired us)

1. http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/#PUBLICATIONS
2. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=928579

Update: This project was accepted by our Dean, for sending to CENTRE FOR TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT AND TRANSFER (CTDT) for funding. Keeping the fingers crossed.

?!@#$^& :'(

Just when i thought, I'm an inch from an innovation. Technology looked at me, and said: "Aaah! Thats old news". Let me brief you, what exactly happened.

My Topic: Universal Device

Description: Change a touchscreen with pop-out display device into practically any electronic device, using it APIs. Run different apps, on a virtualized manner (mobile virtualization).

So, I did some Googling to figure out, if such researches already exist. And guess what?! I ended up in the following two pages.

• Touch Screen with pop-out displays - (http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/researchers-create-morphable-touchscreen-with-pop-out-buttons-20090428/)
• Mobile Virtualization - (http://www.ok-labs.com/solutions/what-is-mobile-phone-virtualization) and (http://www.vmware.com/products/mobile/)

God! Do we've still any innovation left in this world?

Scalable Parallel and Distributed Environment (SPADE)

Today, at around 6.30 PM i went to Nivas's house, to discuss generally about SPADE (his final year project) and sample search engine, built with it. I actually learned a lot from that, and this post is to reflect the same in words. This is basically for my own purpose, just in case. If this was useful to you by any means, please leave a comment, or say your thanks to him.

SPADE -3 Properties:

1. Object Oriented Support - full support for all data types
2. Distributed cache vs DB
3. Scalability on the fly (as opposed to the need to rewrite source, recompile and redeploy in MPI)
4. Dynamic scheduling - No barrier synchronization - no static binding of code to machine
5. Asynchronous Communication as opposed to blocking sends and receives
6. Fault tolerance - no single point of failure

SPADE Abstract can be found here: http://bit.ly/8XMeTr

I'm currently planning to work with him, on this environment to implement the Research Engine, for ThinkQuest 2011. Again, time'll answer everything. I'll keep this updated, as we progress further.

User is the King!

While browsing through Yahoo! Labs, i came upon 2 projects, which actually inspired me a lot. So, this is just a brief implication what i've got from them, and use of similar feature in my Research Engine project.

• Keystone (http://labs.yahoo.com/project/59?from=project) - new generation advertising technology. Currently under Development.

The thing that really got my eye is this, "The biggest scientific challenge in contextual advertising is that compared to sponsored search or Web search, user intent is not very clear".

My Question: How on the earth are we to find the context of the user who we don't know or can't see?
Their Answer: The Keystone system works by first extracting "essence" from opportunity - understanding what the content is about and who is viewing it.

More Info: A key difference between Keystone and other contextual advertising systems is that Keystone tries to predict and model user response based on all user context, including page content, user attributes like behavioral and geographical data, referrals to the page (how the user got there), and information about the publisher page.

Read the rest here.

Another project is Motif, from Search technologies group of Yahoo! Research.

• Motif (http://labs.yahoo.com/project/176?from=project) - lets users search for Wikipedia articles with context.

Project Motif is very similar to Keystone (which is focused on advertising), in usage of context. The thing is Motif is more concerned about Query Context, than User Context. Try out the demo here, you'll know what i mean. This is relatively easy to implement and maintain.

I really like Motif for its search relevance, and like to add a similar feature to my Research Engine Search Module. Also, Keystone methodology helps me understand user context, based on which i can search the query context to further grain my results.

Got any similar kinda stuff? Please share!