To Day or Not to Day!

Every passing moment is very significant as life can change within a split second. I was surprised when came to know through newspaper that March 20 is World Sparrow Day. It increased my curiosity to know about other days and what are the significant of it. So, peeping through some of it but not all.

January

          Day of Silence- January 3

          World Braille Day - January 4

          Laughing day – January 10

          Street Children's Day – January 31

February

          National Girl Day – February 2 (India)

          World Cancer Day – February 4

          Valentine's Day – February 14 – This must be celebrated as all fools day, because love is something that cannot be restricted by a day or a week. The named by which each days are known in The VALENTINE WEEK also sounds very idiotic.

          International Mother Language Day – February 21

          Thinking Day - February 22

          National Science Day – February 28

          Days of The VALENTINE WEEK

                   Valentine week is from February 7–14 every year

                             Rose Day - February 7

                             Propose Day - February 8

                             Chocolate Day - February 9

                             Bagels and Lox Day - February 9

                             Pizza Pie Day - February 9

                             Teddy Day - February 10

                             Promise Day - February 11

                             Kiss Day - February 12

                             Hug Day - February 13

                             Valentine's Day – February 14

March

          International Women's Day – March 8

          Pi Day – March 14

          World Consumer Rights Day – March 15

          World Happiness Day - March 21

          International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination – March 21

          World Poetry Day – March 21

          World Tuberculosis Day - March 24

April

          April Fools' - April 1

          World Health Day - April 7

          World Parkinson's Disease Day - April 11

          Day of Silence; Day of Dialogue - April 15

          World Heritage Day - April 18

          Earth Day - April 22

          International Jazz Day - April 30

May

          May Day - May 1

          World Press Freedom Day - May 3

          International Midwives' Day - May 5

          International No Diet Day - May 6

          World Red Cross Red Crescent Day (Henri Dunant's birthday) - May 8

          International Nurses Day - May 12

          International Day of Families - May  15

          International Missing Children's Day - May 25

          Mother's Day – Second Sunday of May in many nations

June

          National Cancer Survivors Day - June 1

          World Environment Day - June 5

          World Refugee Day - June 20

          International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking - June 26

          Fathers’ Day – 3^rd Sunday of June

July

          World Population Day - July 11

August

          International Friendship Day - August 5

          Indian Independence Day – August 15

          World Mosquito Day – August 20

          World Fashion Day – August 21

September

Teachers Day Celebration - September 5

          Engineer's Day – September 15

          World Contraception Day - September 26.

October

          Mahatma Gandhi Birthday/International nonviolence Day - October 2

          World Animal Day – October 4

November

          All Saints' Day – November 1

          All Souls' Day – November 2

          International Exchange Students Day - November 8

          Veterans Day – November 11

          International Men's Day - November 19

          World Fisheries Day – November 21

          Children's Day (India) – November 14

          Day of Road Traffic Victims- November 22

          International children's Day- November 22

December

          World AIDS Day – December 1

          Wildlife Conservation Day - December 4

          International Volunteer Day December 5

          Reflection Day (think about how life's a gift) - December 29

It is not a great idea to dedicate a day for a special purpose and I believe that anyone hardly remember these days by the event it meant for. Everyday is a unique one and should be treated by its merit only once we pass through.

!!!A day to remember when, the new dawn should be stand on the preceding one and give a solid foundation for the following.!!!

Developed or Dumb & Dumber?

The hype around doomsday was generated by some fools and supported by some useless TV channels. No wonder there some TV channels surviving only for spreading rumour and creating panic. Finally, we got over it and I think 21^st, 2012 was as good as it gets. When the urban Indian took it quite coolly, people from some of the so-called developed countries were having petty immature approach towards it. The precaution taken by some of them were so ridiculous that you only doubt about their sanity. The doomsday bunkers, the ship (Noah’s Ark) and many more that we have seen or heard during past few days or rather almost a year.  Every civilization left some footprint behind and it was same with the Mayan. The Mayan never invented the calendar was in question but they developed it further and still used in some of the Mayan countries. The calendar is over 5000 years old and ended on 21^st December, 2012. The Mayans never predicted the end of the world.

Mayan Calendar

The Maya kept historical records such as civil events, their calendar and astronomical knowledge. They maintain a distinctive set of traditions and beliefs due to the combination of pre-Columbian and post-Conquest ideas and cultures. The Maya and their descendants still form sizable populations that include regions encompassing present day Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador and parts of Mexico. The essentials of the Maya calendar are based upon a system which had been in common use throughout the region, dating back to at least the 5th century BCE. It shares many aspects with calendars employed by other earlier Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Zapotec and Olmec, and contemporary or later ones such as the Mixtec and Aztec calendars.

Designed

The Mayan Calendar consists of three separate corresponding calendars, the Long Count, the Tzolkin (divine calendar) and the Haab (civil calendar). Time is cyclical in the calendars and a set number of days must occur before a new cycle can begin.

Tzolk'in

The tzolk'in  or tzolkin is the name commonly employed by Mayanist researchers for the Maya Sacred Round or 260-day calendar. The word tzolk'in is a neologism coined in Yucatec Maya, to mean "count of days". The various names of this calendar as used by precolumbian Maya peoples are still debated by scholars.

Haab'

The Haab' was the Maya solar calendar made up of eighteen months of twenty days each plus a period of five days at the end of the year known as Wayeb'. The five days of Wayeb', were thought to be a dangerous time. Maya had customs and rituals they practiced during Wayeb'. For example, people avoided leaving their houses and washing or combing their hair.

The Long Count

The Long Count is an astronomical calendar which was used to track longer periods of time, what the Maya called the “universal cycle”. Each such cycle is calculated to be 2,880,000 days (about 7885 solar years). The Mayans believed that the universe is destroyed and then recreated at the start of each universal cycle. This belief still inspires a countless of prophesies about the end of the world.

The Mayan calendar completes its current “Great Cycle” of the Long Count on the  December 21, 2012, hence the innumerable of doomsday prediction was surrounding on this date.

Doomsday’s fear is all in the mind of a person and only for those who are having a very weak frame of mind.

!!!I In due time Life will die its own death, fear cannot prevent it!!!

A Few Good Fella - Dennis Ritchie!

It is difficult to think a day when I am not using a computer and specially not writing a source code. When writing any program it is a challenge to do it totally different, with a simple logic and shorter than others code. I am doing it last twenty-six years. Some software that I was using then are lost its way like COBOL, PASCAL, FORTRAN but there is one still surviving, going stronger by days and used all over the world. I am talking about 'C'.

After Steve Jobs, Computer world lost Dennis Ritchie the father of 'C' on 12 October. My page is dedicated to the genius who lived and died quietly but his legacy will go on.

Dennis Ritchie

Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York. His father was Alistair E. Ritchie, a longtime Bell Labs scientist and co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits on switching circuit theory. Ritchie graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. In 1967, he began working at the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center, and in 1968, he received a PhD from Harvard under the supervision of Patrick C. Fischer. Ritchie was best known as the creator of the C programming language, a key developer of the UNIX operating system, and co-author of The C Programming Language, commonly referred  to as K&R (in reference to the authors Kernighan and Ritchie). Ritchie worked together with  Ken Thompson, the scientist credited with writing the original Unix; one of Ritchie's most  important contributions to Unix was its porting to different machines and platforms.

The C language is widely used today in application, operating system, and embedded system development, and its influence is seen in most modern programming languages. UNIX has also been influential, establishing concepts and principles that are now precepts of  computing.  Ritchie was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988 for "development of the "C" programming language and for co-development of the UNIX operating system."

C & UNIX

To help make UNIX portable, Ritchie created a new programming language, called C, in 1972. C used features of low-level languages or machine languages and features of high-level languages. However, because C combined functions of both high- and low-level languages and was very flexible, it was not for beginners. C was very portable because, while it used a relatively small syntax and instruction set, it was also highly structured and modular. Therefore, it was easy to adapt it to different computers, and programmers could copy preexisting blocks of C functions into their programs. These blocks, which were stored on disks in various libraries and could be accessed by using C programs, allowed programmers to create their own programs without having to reinvent the wheel. Because C had features of low-level programming languages, it ran very quickly and efficiently compared to other high-level languages, and it took up relatively little computer time. C was also popular because it was written for UNIX, which, by the early 1990s, was shipped out on over $20 billion of new computer systems a year, making it one of the most commonly used operating systems in the world. Apart from C and  UNIX he also worked on  ALTRAN, B, BCPL, Multics

Dennis Ritchie was found dead on October 12, 2011 at the age of 70 at his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey where he lived alone. First news of his death came from his former colleague, Rob Pike. The cause and exact time of death have not been disclosed. He had been in frail health for several years following treatment for prostate cancer and heart disease. His death came a week after the death of Steve Jobs; although Ritchie's death did not receive as much media coverage.

Computer historians such as Paul Ceruzzi said his influence was comparable and I agree with him. I cannot think a computer world without 'C' and 'UNIX'. He will live with us in our program and every moment Unix.

Some Quotation :

"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity."

"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."

!!!    #include <stdio.h<

       #include <conio.h<

           void main()

              {

                  int i;

                  clrscr();

                  for(i=0;i<=infinity;i++)

                      {

                         printf(“\n\nRIP Dennis Ritchie, we will miss you”);

                      }

                  getch();

              }  !!!

Power of Knowledge

There was a time knowledge was limited to print media and reading was the main option. It was books, News Papers and Magazines. I was a member of couple of libraries and frequency of my visits were exceptional. Once I was a avid reader, today I hardly go though any books rather than computers. Apart from books other device which we used to stick to was our good old radio. Every bit of knowledge we acquired that time was with lots of effort. This effort is still working, specially while calculating I hardly use a calculator. There was  some print media available that time but it was out of our reach. We envied the people who was having the series. It was Encyclopedia, specially The one from Britannica.

Once having the volumes of Britannica was a status symbol and I knew many of them those having these series in their bookshelf but never scanned through a single page in their life. The oversized volume, printed by Koberger shortly after Columbus discovered America, was a history, atlas and almanac with biographies and news items - an encyclopedia

What is Encyclopedia

An encyclopedia is a book or series of books that contain general information about many topics or areas. The world encyclopedia comes from the Greek enkyklia paideia, which means "a general knowledge." The word has been in use for at least 500 years, and used in print for the first time in Encyclopedia, or Knowledge of the World of Disciplines, which was published in 1559.

The first encyclopedia was written in the first century BC by Pliny the Elder with the help of his nephew. The work consisted of 37 volumes and covered everything from anthropology and human physiology to agriculture, painting, and pharmacology. An encyclopedia is often confused with a dictionary, although they are inherently different.

In the 20th century, the Encyclopedia Britannica has become the standard for encyclopedia works. Topical encyclopedias have also become more popular, and cover topics as varied as economics, bioethics. Many encyclopedias are now being published in CD-ROM form, with the most notable example being Microsoft's Encarta other encyclopedias are now entirely available online, with no print version, like Wikipedia.

Some of old and popular Encyclopedia

Pliny the Elder

One of the earliest encyclopedic works to have survived to modern times is the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder, a Roman statesman living in the 1st century AD. He compiled a work of 37 chapters covering natural history, art and architecture, medicine, geography, geology and all aspects of the world around him. He stated in the preface that he had compiled 20,000 facts from 2000 different works by 200 authors, and added many others from his own experience. The work was published circa AD 77-79, although he probably never finished proofing the work before his death in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD.

The Britannica

The Britannica  is the oldest English-language encyclopedia still in print. It was first published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh, Scotland as three volumes. The encyclopedia grew in size, and by its fourth edition (1801-1809) it had expanded to a well known 20-volume set. Its rising stature helped recruit eminent contributors, and the 9th edition (1875–1889) and the 11th edition (1911) are landmark encyclopedias for scholarship and literary style. Beginning with the 11th edition, the Britannica shortened and simplified articles to broaden its North American market. In 1933, the Britannica became the first encyclopedia to adopt "continuous revision", in which the encyclopedia is continually reprinted and every article updated on a schedule.

The Encyclopædia Britannica, published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert contributors. It is regarded as one of the most scholarly of encyclopedias.

The size of the Britannica has remained roughly constant over 70 years, with about 40 million words on half a million topics. Although publication has been based in the United States since 1901, the Britannica has maintained British spelling.

Microsoft Encarta

Microsoft Encarta was a digital multimedia  encyclopedia published by Microsoft Corporation  from 1993 to 2009. As of 2008, the complete English version, Encarta Premium, consisted of more than 62,000 articles,  numerous photos and illustrations, music clips, videos, interactive contents, timelines, maps and atlas, and homework tools, and was available on the World Wide Web by yearly subscription or by purchase on DVD or multiple CDs. Many articles could also be viewed online free of charge, a service supported by advertisements.

In March 2009, Microsoft announced it was discontinuing the Encarta disc and online versions. The MSN Encarta site in all countries except Japan was closed on October 31, 2009. Japan's Encarta site was closed on December 31, 2009. Microsoft continued to operate the Encarta online dictionary at dictionary.msn.com until 2011 when they discontinued the dictionary making Encarta discontinued altogether.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia - This one is a cracker and proud to have an account with them.

Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free-content  encyclopedia project based on an openly editable  model. The name "Wikipedia",  wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information.

Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles, except in certain cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism. Users can contribute anonymously, under a pseudonym, or with their real identity, if they choose.

The fundamental principles by which Wikipedia operates are the Five pillars. The Wikipedia community has developed many policies and guidelines to improve the encyclopedia; however, it is not a formal requirement to be familiar with them before contributing.

Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia  has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference websites, attracting 400 million unique visitors monthly .  There are more than 82,000 active contributors  working on more than 19,000,000 articles in more than 270 languages.

!!!Source of unlimited Knowledge just under our finger, go grab it.!!!