Twenty-Twenty-Twenty keep your eyes healthy

During a recent visit to an optician, one of my friend was told of an exercise for the eyes by a specialist doctor that he termed as "20-20-20". I thought I should share this will all of you. It is applicable to all of us who spend most of the time sitting in front of computer.

20-20-20:

Step 1:

After every 20 minutes of looking into the computer screen, turn your head and try to look at any object placed at least 20 feet away.
Why? This changes the focal length of your eyes, a must-do for the tired eyes.

Step 2:

Try and blink your eyes for 20 times in succession
Why? To moisten your eyes

Step 3:

Time permitting of course, one should walk 20 paces after every 20 minutes of sitting in one particular posture.
Why? Helps blood circulation for the entire body.

Eyes are mirror of the soul, so do take care of them, they are priceless...

Otherwise eye would be like this.....

I have written a small batch file for windows which locks my screen every 20 minutes. I will share the procedure to do the same :

Step 1:
Copy the following contents into a file, say "lock.bat" (Dont miss .bat extension)

@echo off
rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation
cls

Step 2:
Goto Scheduled Tasks
(Start --> All Programs --> Accessories --> System Tools --> Scheduled Tasks)

Step 3:

• Create a new scheduled task (File --> New --> Scheduled Task)
• Double click on that and a dialog box opens.
• In the Run option, Browse the .bat file saved.
• Check the box "Run only if loggod on".
• Goto schedule Tab. Make the necessary changes and then click on Advanced settings.
• Check the box "Repeat Task" and fill the values that suits you. (I scheduled for 20 min and duration as 24 hours).

Now your screen locks for every 20 minutes. If you dont want to lock your screen but you need to get an alert after 20 minutes the change the batch file to the following code:

@echo off
echo.
echo Turn your head and try to look at any object placed at least 20 feet away.
echo.
pause

I Know that I wrote a long article but hope it is useful. Comments are most welcome.

Browse without Browser!!!

I was always under the impression that we cannot browse the internet without the browser but this is not the case in reality. We can browse without any browser!!! and a patent has been awarded for this innovative idea!.

The method uses a telephone device to browse. It begins by connecting the telephone device to the server. The server will have a speech recognition software installed in it which will recognize the user's voice and converts it into command and searches the internet based on the input and it will give back the output which will be read to the user by another software which is able to recognize the content. This method has an option for the user to ask the server to fax a copy of the webpage to him. A detailed description of this method can be find here

Acheivements in 2007 at IBM

I spent 2 tenures in IBM during the year 2007. The first one was the internship tenure of four and a half months. It was a great experience to start my career at IBM. We were six interns who worked during this period. The problem that we were asked to solve was to find a way to host the eclipse on the server and provide a browser interface to access it. We got a very good exposure to various technologies that were emerging. Initially we did not have any idea about how to solve the problem that was given to us but we gave the name Eclifox (Eclipse on the firefox) to the project. We had no clue how to put the first step but we were quite fortunate that we had great mentors at IBM who really guided us in approaching the problem. We then slowly started to make some experiments. We got some breakthroughs and finally we succeeded in building a prototype to prove that the problem can be solved. We got some great feedbacks from managers and even criticisms but no one expected that interns' project will make so much voice in IBM. Finally our project got into alphaworks. Here is the link to our project. As per today's status it has been downloaded 609 times!

In the second half of the year, I worked as regular employee at IBM. The Internship really helped me in making my life comfortable at IBM. Currently I am project zero committer. I along with my colleague got 2nd place in hackday which is an event that takes place in IBM to encourage the employees to show their talent in various areas. I participated in another contest called Coderfest'07 which is again a programming contest internal to IBM and our team got qualified to quarterfinals which is going to start from 7th jan of this year. Among 1800 and odd participants 37 teams are qualified for quarterfinals. I took part in one of the voluntary projects which had an aim to help the freshers who join IBM and we ended up in building a nice portal which had all the necessary information for the freshers and got some very good appreciation form our directors.

To conclude, 2007 was a good year in my career at IBM. I hope I will do even better in 2008 and will strive hard to achieve that.