Meego on Nokia N8

This is actual Meego OS runs on Nokia to called N8 mobile.

Meego (Linux mobile and Tablet) OS has arrived version 1.0

Nokia has released the first version of Meego 1.0. The reason was because MeeGo 1.0 is aimed at developers and device manufacturers - actual MeeGo netbooks are not expected until later this year. The Linux-based MeeGo operating system will be the new platform of choice for Nokia's flagship N-series smartphones
Further, this MeeGo release is only for netbooks. MeeGo 1.1 for handhelds and other touch-based devices such as tablets is promised in October, though Nokia's Valtteri Halla has said that "a kind of pre-alpha release" of the handset software is set for June 30 Nokia has recently announced that its high-end N Series will move from Symbian to MeeGo in future editions.

Stay tuned.....

Nokia E66 and E71 hacked to include Lao language

I recently cracked Nokia E66 and E71 for Vientiane Times staff to include or should I say be able to handle Lao language interface. It was a good learning experience, especially Symbian type of OS.

Lao language in the mobile has been gradually surfaced nowadays since I started to develop the first version of Lao mobile in 2006. Thanks to the operators and others for their willingness and support of their own languages on computer and mobile as a whole.

Vientiane Times IT my second article June 26th

My second article of Computers History has been published. There will be three parts altogether. This article covered many interesting events in the history making of computer scientists starting early of 1900's towards the end of 1970.

[most deleted..]

Hollerith's invention, known as the Hollerith desk, consisted of a card reader which sensed the holes in the cards, a gear driven mechanism which could count (using Pascal's mechanism which we still see in car odometers), and a large wall of dial indicators (a car speedometer is a dial indicator) to display the results of the count.

Hollerith built a company, the Tabulating Machine Company which, after a few buyouts, eventually became International Business Machines, known today as IBM. IBM grew rapidly and punched cards became ubiquitous...

Entering the Harvard Mark I computer which was built as a partnership between Harvard and IBM in 1944. This was the first programmable digital computer made in the U.S. But it was not a purely electronic computer.
.... One of the primary programmers for the Mark I was a woman, Grace Hopper. Hopper found the first computer "bug" and it was the word "bug" had been used to describe a defect since at least 1889 but Hopper is credited with coining the word "debugging" to describe the work to eliminate program faults. Around 1953 Grace Hopper invented the first high-level language, "Flow-matic" and eventually became COBOL which was the language most affected by the infamous Y2K problem. A high-level language is worthless without a program -- known as a compiler -- to translate it into the binary language of the computer and hence Grace Hopper also constructed the world's first compiler.

In 1959, the IBM Stretch computer was constructed of 33 foot length and hold the 150,000 transistors (this later became what is I called now a Mainframe).

One interesting aspect of computer comes around 1937 when by J. V. Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics at Iowa State University, attempts to build an all-electronic (that is, no gears, cams, belts, shafts, etc.) digital computer. By 1941 he and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, had succeeded in building a machine that could solve 29 simultaneous equations with 29 unknowns. This machine was the first to store data as a charge on a capacitor, which is how today's computers store information in their main memory (DRAM or dynamic RAM). Professor Atanasoff was considered a forefather of modern digital computer by most scholars.

Another candidate for granddaddy of the modern computer was Colossus, built during World War II by Britain for the purpose of breaking the cryptographic codes used by Germany.

The Harvard Mark I, the Atanasoff-Berry computer, and the British Colossus all made important contributions to evolution of modern computers. Both American and British computer pioneers were still arguing over who was first to do what, when in 1965 the work of the German named Konrad Zuse was published for the first time in English. Zuse had built a sequence of general purpose computers in Germany. The first, the Z1, was built between 1936 and 1938 in the parlor of his parent's home. Zuse's third machine, the Z3, built in 1941, was probably the first operational, general-purpose, programmable (that is, software controlled) digital computer. Without knowledge of any calculating machine inventors since Leibniz (who lived in the 1600's), Zuse reinvented Babbage's concept of programming and decided on his own to employ binary representation for numbers.....

Will continue with more recent events in the next article....

My first IT article in Vientiane, 19th June 2010

My first IT article in Vientiane Times, a well-known English newspaper, was published on the 19th June, 2010.
I will be covering topics in computer and its technology ranging from the first in the history of computers to software development in Lao PDR. The subjects should be of the computer/network/Internet securities, software for banking, software for the government and education, database development, Internet usage and its benefits, Lao software development, and last but not least, the most important one, is of the Open Source software for Lao PDR as a whole.

I welcome any suggestions or comments of my style of writing or anything that needs to be improved.I can be reached at anousak@gmail.com

History of computers (Two part series)

Computers has come a long way. Let's examine and start from the beginning and see how much we have developed since the first computer come to realized.

(deleted most of the contents, extracted some contents herewith)

Starting with and described the eariest form of computer called the abacus which used for mathematical computations. Described in 1617, a Scotsman named John Napier invented logarithms and his Napier's Bones which led directly to the slide rule, first built in England in 1632 and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo programs which landed men on the moon. Other section described the other event in 1642, Blaise Pascal, 19 years old, invented the Pascaline as an aid for his father who was a tax collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-driven one-function calculator (it could only add) but couldn't sell many because of their exorbitant cost and because they really weren't that accurate (at that time it was not possible to fabricate gears with the required precision). Few years after Pascal invention, the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (co-inventor with Newton of calculus) managed to build a four-function (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) calculator that he called the stepped reckoner because, instead of gears, it employed fluted drums having ten flutes arranged around their circumference in a stair-step fashion. Although the stepped reckoner employed the decimal number system (each drum had 10 flutes), Leibniz was the first to advocate use of the binary number system which is fundamental to the operation of modern computers. Leibniz is considered one of the greatest of the philosophers but he died poor and alone.The other change takes place in in 1801,when the Frenchman named Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a pattern automatically read from punched wooden cards, held together in a long row by rope. Descendents of these punched cards have been in use ever since. In 1822, the English mathematician named Charles Babbage has changed much of what it is in modern computing today the Difference Engine. The machine would be used to compute tables of numbers, such as logarithm tables. and the Analytic Engine. This device, large as a house and powered by 6 steam engines, would be more general purpose in nature because it would be programmable, thanks to the punched card technology of Jacquard. But it was Babbage who made an important intellectual leap regarding the punched cards. Because of the connection to the Jacquard loom, Babbage called the two main parts of his Analytic Engine the "Store" as known today as the hard drive and the "Mill", as both terms are used in the weaving industry. The Store was where numbers were held and the Mill was where they were "woven" into new results. These same parts are called the memory unit and the central processing unit (CPU) in the modern computers. At the same time an English lady named Ada Byron (19 years old) was a friend Babbage and was fascinated by Babbage's ideas and thru letters and meetings with Babbage she learned enough about the design of the Analytic Engine to begin fashioning programs for the still unbuilt machine. ... Ada earned her spot in history as the first computer programmer. Ada invented the subroutine and was the first to recognize the importance of looping. Ada programming language has been used in today computers around the world.

The next breakthrough occurred in America. The U.S. Constitution states that a census should be taken of all U.S. citizens every 10 years in order to determine the representation of the states in Congress. .. The census bureau offered a prize for an inventor to help with the 1890 census and this prize was won by Herman Hollerith, who proposed and then successfully adopted Jacquard's punched cards for the purpose of computation.

Hollerith's invention, known as the Hollerith desk, consisted of a card reader which sensed the holes in the cards, a gear driven mechanism which could count (using Pascal's mechanism which we still see in car odometers), and a large wall of dial indicators (a car speedometer is a dial indicator) to display the results of the count. Hollerith built a company, the Tabulating Machine Company which, after a few buyouts, eventually became International Business Machines, known today as IBM. IBM grew rapidly and punched cards became ubiquitous...

....continue next week.

iPhone Hacked to Run Android 2.2

Android ...Android seems to be everywhere. It is another revolution indeed. If you are stuck with an old iPhone but wish you had an Android device, there’s a way to combine the two, creating a smartphone with the body of the former and the brains of the latter.

A recent hack shows how to run the latest version of Google’s mobile OS, Android 2.2 aka FroYo, on Apple’s iPhone 3G. The mod still has a few bugs and isn’t stable enough for everyday use, but it’s a first step towards creating a hacked Android operating system for the iPhone.

Next would be Android for Blackberry...

Chrome OS Strives to Replace Desktop Culture

Google's Chrome OS is coming to a netbook near you sometime later this year. The Web-centric, Linux-based, open source platform will offer a lightweight, cost-effective alternative operating system for portable computing. Eventually, Google plans to expand the scope of Chrome OS to take on Windows on the desktop as well--a goal that requires both a solid operating system and a significant culture shift.

It is happening now...am I dreaming.

Google bans Windows OS at work

This might be a sign of of desperation. Google 'getting rid of Windows'. Google is reported to be getting rid of desktop PCs running Microsoft. Windows across the corporation to eliminate a security risk.

The Financial Times reports that the company, which has more than 10,000 staff worldwide, is now offering new recruits the choice of using computers running the free Linux operating system or Apple Macintosh computers.

The company refused to confirm or deny the reports, issuing a brief comment saying that it would not discuss "operational issues".

Microsoft, however, claimed that the move was simply part of Google's attempts to standardize on its new in-house operating system, called ChromeOS.
The shift away from Windows is claimed to have begun in January, after Google realized that the operating system had been part of a chain of weaknesses that allowed a damaging attack against some of its core systems by Chinese hackers in December.