Mobile classrooms on various IT Skills

IT employees & engineering students are spending considerable amount of time on Highways on the way to work and back home. 

Virtual Keyboard using regular Camera

Modern home computers have come a long way, monitors have become slim, with user friendly mouse and slim CPUs. However keyboard has not changed much. Keyboard has to be wide enough to accommodate free movement of our fingers on it. Again, virtual keyboard technology uses expensive gadgets to ease typing. Hence no radical changes have happened to computer keyboards. 

We can do away with the keyboard using a simple camera and image recognition algorithm. Idea is to capture the user hand movements on a plain surface using a camera and superimpose on a keyboard image in the screen. User will automatically have a feeling of typing in the keyboard. Algorithm can be built to recognize hand movements over different keys in the image. Hardware accelerators may be used to reduce the impact on computing power. At the end, for non key operations, you can get your normal screen changed to touch screen.

Bank 'N' Shop - Money Manager driving your Shopping Cart

BankNShop can provide unique banking and shopping experience by combining the industry best practices in managing funds effectively and also in getting better deals.

Help the user in making the buying decision and there by realizing the value for the money. Online shopping can be driven by Money Manager Solutions for effective utilization of funds. Money Manager users can plan his or her buys and get the best deals for the same by building a composite applications that plugs in the features of Shopping application as well.

Your shopping plan can be captured with a rough estimate so that it can be accounted for better fund management. Intelligence can be built to bring up deals via alerts on items that you plan to buy. You will have to just choose the deal which fits your budget / future spendings.

Java program that does Permutation & Combination

Forms the unique target combinations, recursively, starting from source list that has all the positions.

import java.util.LinkedList;
import java.util.List;

import org.apache.commons.lang.SerializationUtils;

public class Combinations {
 
 private final static String characters = "abcd";
 
 private static int length = characters.length();
 
 public static void main(String[] args) {
  List source = new LinkedList();
  
  // form the source list that have all the possible positions
  for (int i = 0; i < length; i++) {
   source.add(i);
  }

  // create a target list for forming unique combinations
  List target = new LinkedList();

  combine(source, target);

 }
 
 public static void combine(List source, List target) {

  // break the recursion
  if (target.size() == length) {
   for (int i = 0; i < length; i++) {    
    System.out.print(characters.charAt(target.get(i)));    
   }
   System.out.println();
   return;
  }

  for (Integer position : source) {
   //form the target combination by selecting a position from the source
   List reducedSource = (List)SerializationUtils.clone((LinkedList)source);
   reducedSource.remove(position);
   List combinedTarget = (List)SerializationUtils.clone((LinkedList)target);
   combinedTarget.add(position);
   combine(reducedSource, combinedTarget);   
  }
 }
}

Start Your TV Channel

S/w can assist you to build a programme framework for your T.V channel i.e when to host songs, dance, quiz, etc. Empower the community to host these session by providing a plug-in to stream their audio / video to the servers. Have them to select a slot. There might be multiple users trying to host. Host can be selected based on their community rating.

F1 Circuit for Online Games

Now that Street View in map is available, online racing games can use the F1 Circuits.

Flatten the water curvature inside a capillary tube

Apparatus and materials

• Capillary tube
• Trough

Technical notes

Use clean apparatus and water. Wash in strong detergent, rinse in clean water, then in distilled water and take care not to put grease from your fingers on it.

The height of the capillary tube should be greater than the height to which water will rise inside it.

Procedure

a Fill the trough with water and place a capillary tube in it. The water will rise inside the tube, to a height 'h' above the water surface in the cup (diagram a).

b Observe the concave curvature of water inside the capillary tube. The curvature forms an angle, say 'θ', on the inside wall of the capillary tube.

c Now, lower the capillary tube such that the height of the capillary tube above the water surface in the beaker is less than 'h' (diagram b).

d Observe the concave curvature starts reducing and the angle at which the water surface meets the inside wall of the capillary tube is greater than 'θ'.

e When the tube is fully lowered to the surface level of water in the cup you will notice that the water surface flattens (diagram c).

Teaching notes

1 Water rises inside the capillary tube due to adhesion between water molecules and the glass walls of the capillary tube. This adhesion, together with surface tension in the water, produces an effect called 'capillarity', with a characteristic concave surface.

The water rises until the weight of the column equals the vertical component of the forces of adhesion.

The weight W of the water column = π r2 h ρ g
where ρ is the liquid density

θ is the angle of contact between liquid and glass
r is the internal radius of the tube
h is the maximum height of the liquid column
g is the gravitational field strength
γ is the surface tension of the liquid

The vertical supporting forces around the circumference of the liquid surface = γ cos θ x 2 π r

so

π r2h g = 2 π r γ cos θ
and h = 2 γ cos θ /r ρ g

The narrower the tube, the higher the water will rise. Nature uses this effect to carry water up from roots to leaves in plants, including trees.
Capillary action

2 When the tube is lowered so that the water surface inside the tube is at any height less than h, θ becomes larger so that the weight of the water column and the forces of adhesion remain balanced.

When the water surface inside and outside the capillary tube are level, the surface is shaped by surface tension alone.