Drupal and the semantic Web.

My fascination with Drupal started when I took upon the task of building an e-commerce website (No Hassle Groceries) from scratch. My interest grew steadily as more modules are being added by the ever growing and active Drupal community.

Semantic Web garnered mainly the attention of the research and the academia community. Most of it is still not comprehensible to a normal Developer. It takes lot of reading and research to know about OWL, Ontologies, RDF etc. As I observed, Drupal modules implementing these functionality and proof of concepts are in beta stage and available for download. Using these tools, the whole process of building a genuine semantic web site is simplified. Main advantage of a semantic website is that it exposes the website contents to semantic search engines like Yahoo SearchMonkey. This can improve your site search results and improve the business.

I would like to develop a Drupal based semantic website that can track various technology conferences across US. For example, if I am looking for the local .Net conferences being conducted in a particular month, than the website will connect collect all the data and organize them state wise. But the main challenge would be to feed the data into the site. I am Not sure whether the conference sites provide their site information as RSS feeds. But this would be my first Drupal semantic website, which itself is quite an interesting proposition.       

Gearing myself to turn into a pure vegetarian.

It's been for quite a while now that my intense desire to turn into a self-proclaimed vegetarian have been hanging around. Finally, I gave myself into it and decided to turn into a pure vegetarian from this auspicious day.

The best starting point, as I found out is to download a vegetarian starter kit from peta Peta Starter Kit. As I noticed that many Olympic champions and sports athletes are pure vegetarians who achieved exponential success after turning into pure vegetarians.

My advice to non-vegetarians goes here:-
1) Reasoning that consuming lower living organisms by the superior organisms (human beings) is part of a food chain doesn't make any sense and is inherently flawed.
2) Let us respect life on this earth in whatever form it may be.
3) Pure vegetarian is one of the healthiest diet ever.

Importing Windows thunderbird and firefox profiles to Ubuntu

If you have a dual boot OS with Ubuntu and Windows, this nice tweak will eliminate the pain of reconfiguring thunderbird in Ubuntu. Simply follow the below steps:-
--> First close all the firefox browser and thunderbird windows. Than open terminal and type "firefox -profilemanager" to open a "Choose User Profile" window.
--> For thunderbird the command is "thunderbird -profilemanager" at the terminal
--> Now click on Create Profile and name it as "Windows"(Can be any name)
--> Now click on "Choose folder" button to select firefox or thunderbird user profile folder. The profile folders are stored at following locations in windows:-
for firefox:- [Drive]\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
for thunderbird:- [Drive]\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles

You can now see all the bookmarks in your firefox and thunderbird working the same as in Windows!!.

A magazine entirely dedicated to Ubuntu family..

Seth, our CIS department administrator and crusader of Linux informed us about a magazine entirely dedicated to Ubuntu family. One can download all the pdf issues from here http://fullcirclemagazine.org. The development section and the FAQ's section are a must watch sections.

Favorite quote..

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it". - Buddha

Attack Graphs - a survey.

I just like to share my knowledge on designing attack graphs I am currently working on, in this entry. All are invited to give their feedback on this part of area if they have any knowledge about visualization tools. The image on the right represents nodes and edges, which are grouped in clusters ( correspond to workstations,connections and subnets in the actual network). More details at Cluster

Mulval(designed by Dr.Simon Ou) is a logic based network security analyzer which uses XSB and generates tuples representing the topology of a network and the possible attacks by an malicious user. Part of my ongoing research is to take these tuples generated from the logic engine and generate an Attack graph which is in a human readable format, which can be easily understand even by a layman. Making it user interactive is the important part of it, which I will work later on. Presently I use GraphViz tool (www.graphviz.org) for generating the attack graph.

The way how GraphViz works is that it takes a Dot file as an input Dot Language , interprets the Dot file and converts into PNG file Possible Formats. The PNG file demonstrates the topology of the network and the possible attack paths in the network. I tested for 2 sample topologies and was able to generate topology layout in PNG format. But the network seems to be aligned in some zigzag manner at present. The edges seem to overlap with the subnets in the PNG file. GraphViz supports 4 types of interpreters namely dot,circo,neato and twopi. All these 4 interpreters take the dot file as input and generates different types of layouts. But as I figured out later, only the dot interpreter among all of these 4 interpreters supports representing of subnets in a topology. I am not sure how much support GraphViz gonna give me for adding human interaction in the future. Its a research tool being developed by ATT labs and the features existing currently are tremendous given that its free of cost.

Adding human interaction to the GraphViz generated file is the hard part of it.

My first blog entry...

Well Well....since this is my first entry I want to base this discussion centered around by favorite topic "Ancient India"(people who aren't interested in history please bear with me. I promise I would make it interesting and worth reading).

The picture on the right represents the extend of Ashokan empire in the 3rd century B.C. The areas colored with green represents the areas conquered by him. Watch carefully the small stretch of land at the bottom of India represented as Dravidian Kingdoms. This small stretch of land remained elusive to all the dynasties who tried to conquer it, throughout the history of ancient India. It produced some powerful dynasties at that time such as the chola's and the pallavas. The rulers of these dynasties went on to conquer major parts of south east Asia such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia. When the whole part of northern India is reeling with attack of the foreign invaders, the rulers of these marvelous land defied all the attacks and were able to produce some excellent piece of art and architecture at that time which is truly representative of the Dravidian style. Dravidian's are believed to be the oldest tribe that existed in modern day India. They mainly occupied the southern parts of India. The Tamil brahmi script is the oldest known language which used to be the main local dialect of the ancient Dravidian's.

So if any one want to witness the true style of art and architecture of the ancient native Indians, than South India is the best place to have a look.