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.