Contents
  

 
   Message from the E-Newsletter Coordinator, IEEE-NUCES:

 

By the grace of Allah this is our seventh e-newsletter and first in the year 2006. I am really thankful to all my team members who gave their valuable time and efforts for making all this possible and I am also thankful to those people who were not the members of e-newsletter team but helped us in any way they can because without their support things can go harder for us. People may remember the year 2005 as a year which brought tragic event of earth quake in northern parts of our country which took millions of life and saddened the nation but I think as an optimistic person 2005 will also be remembered as the year which made us united ,united for the cause of humanity. The only thing we need is to keep up this spirit in 2006 also but for our whole life so that some day we will also be known as a developed country. In the end I would like to thank our branch counselor for giving us the freedom of doing this activity.

 

Syed Faisal-ur-Rahman

E-Newsletter Coordinator

IEEE-NUCES KHI
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   NEWS :: NUCES-FAST:

 

GAZAL NIGHT:

On the evening of 10 december 2005 …FAST looked as if it had been clipped out of a fairy tale. The entire university which on regular evenings looked dark, ominous and spooky now was decorated with glittering lights . From a distance it seemed as if someone had spread sparkling stars on the surface of the earth. This entire ambience negotiated the fact that one of the most fabulous events was been celebrated in FAST. This event was GAZAL NIGHT , students which on normal days wore button down shirts and same old drab jeans were now dressed in fancy shalwar kameez or suits. Some faces looked so different that it was an arduous task to actually recognize them (specially the girls). In order to make this fabulous evening memorable a very famous ghazal singer “ MR.SALMAN ALVI” was invited . As soon as he stepped on the venue a wave of excitement broke in the air . Later on with his mesmerizing voice he created a magical effect on the entire FAST. Even though the weather was chilled with cold dry air blowing in every nook n corner of the university but it was good to see that no one actually seem to sense the cold .A local band and some good singers of the university also played a vital role in making the GAZAL NIGHT a success ,for once the students realize that there were talented enough students in FAST with voices that can spread magic in the air .Later on a very delicious Pakistani cuisine was served . Around 1:00 am the wonderful evening finally came to an end and all the university buses left the venue and look the audience towards their destination.

Written by: Novaira Malik

TLC:

TLC has always remained active in conducting activities for students and making their vocabulary strong with different types of activities. This time they came up with the “Expressions TLC” in which students were able to express their thoughts in different ways in a very organized manner. TLC committee took study area and seminars as a place for this event and they invited all students and faculty as well to participate in this event. It was organized on Wednesday 7th December. It included Painting, Sketching, Calligraphy and Charcoal design competition. Sketching and Calligraphy were organized in seminars while painting took place in study room. Apart from this music was also arranged which was played with different themes and it was decorated remarkably well with paintings, and different quotes and expressions were written with the help of calligraphic art on walls by the committee members. Students and some of the faculty members participated whole-heartedly and they expressed their thoughts in a distinct manner. Moreover Ms. Sabeen Ahmed also distributed prizes to the winners.  

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   NEWS :: IEEE:

 

IEEE INMIC 2005:

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) is the world’s largest international organization. It possesses thirty-nine subsidiaries and this technical society infuses in its members a great deal of zeal and enthusiasm for obtaining information regarding the modern inventions and technologies.

The IEEE-NUCES has recently organized its first major event the 9th INMIC ’05. Well the first question that arises is that what is INMIC and why is it carried out? Well surely the answer to this question is pretty much obvious that if you want to be in touch with the emerging inventions and technologies you cannot avoid INTERNATIONAL MULTITOPIC CONFERENCES.

When the discussion comes over to the importance of these types of conferences then we simply reply that these conferences are conducted so as to bring to the knowledge of this present age that this age brings with itself much advancement in every walk of life.

INMIC ’05 that was conducted at NUCES-FAST Karachi Campus on 24th and 25th of December 2005 will hopefully remain a memorable event for those who participated in it. Many sessions were held and authors of different intellect presented their research. Discussions were held to acquire knowledge regarding their researches and the creativity of their work.

Dignified speakers were invited from all over the world to present and elaborate on the distinct features of their research. INMIC was a success because of the organized attitude of all the departments that worked for long hours for its accomplishment under the guidance of Mr. Om Perkash Batra (Student Head) and faculty.

In all five sessions apart from the inaugural session and closing ceremony took place and in between sessions refreshments were provided to the authors and the participants.

After the welcome address by our Director and General Chair INMIC 2005 Dr. Zubair Sheikh , Dr. Friedrich Vogt, a foreign delegate from Germany, was invited to present his views and Chief Guests including Ex-Governor Sindh, Lt. General Moinuddeen Haider braced the event. Apart from these high profile guests General Manager of IBM also paid the visit in the inaugural session and he did give the keynote address to the audience and emphasize them to research on different technologies. Guest of Honor of the event was Munawwar Ahmed who is also the Managing Director of SSGCL; he also gave the brief note. As IEEE-Karachi Section was involved in the event therefore Engineer Syed Imran-ul-Haq who is the Chairman of Karachi Section also came to brace the occasion. He appreciated the different researchers, participants and whole INMIC team in inaugural session.

The following were the entitled topics of the researches of the authors that braced this memorable occasion:

* Communications Systems and Techniques

* Computer Networks and Security

* Digital Signal Processing

* Electronic Devices

* Embedded Systems

*Fuzzy Logic

* Microwave Devices and Circuits

* Modeling and Simulation

* Neural Networks

* Power Devices and Systems

* Speech, Image and Video Processing

* Gaming and Multimedia Media Systems

* Distributed Real Time Operating Systems

* Algorithms, Tools and Applications

* Artificial Intelligence/ Genetic Algorithms

* Automation and Control Systems

* Databases and Data Warehouses

* Natural Language Processing

* Programming Languages

* Software Project Management

* Local and Asian Language Computing

In the closing ceremony our Director Dr. Zubair Sheikh requested the Chief Guest Senator Nisar A. Memon to comment on INMIC ’05. The noble guest presented his views of how should the present generation come and show their skills in this modern era and also do researches regarding the enhanced technologies so as to be aware of all the scientific inventions. He also suggested that since we are the future and the future belongs to us so we should do whatever we can to represent Pakistan, rather than waste our time thinking about what the country has done for us. The PTV, HUM TV and Indus News covered this mega and flabbergasting event.

In a nutshell, you can say it was a fabulous event and it brought pride to the whole NUCES-FAST that was only due to the remarkable performance of whole INMIC team and co-operation of faculty.

By Fastian Reporters

Syed Karrar Hussain Rizvi
Syed Obaid Nasir  

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   NEWS :: TECHNOLOGY:


Critical bug found in anti-virus software:

A critical software bug has been discovered in several of the most widely used anti-virus programs. It could be exploited to take control of a computer and to steal information, according to a report produced by an independent security analyst, Alex Wheeler, who made the discovery.
This bug is found in 39 different Symantec products including its anti-virus software. It resides within the Symantec anti-virus library.
The said that a critical error occurs when the Symantec anti-virus library decompresses files from "RAR" format for analysis. During decompression of RAR files Symantec is vulnerable to multiple heap overflows allowing attackers complete control of the system(s) being protected. These vulnerabilities can be exploited by attackers to load unauthorized code onto a computer.
Symantec has confirmed the problem. It is working for a permanent solution but has released an update so the computers running its software should automatically detect and block the attempts to exploit the bug.
 

Virgin Galactic announces its first 100 space tourists:

The first 100 space tourists scheduled to take suborbital flights from the spaceport being built by Virgin Galactic were announced on Tuesday.
A confident Virgin Galactic revealed the tourists will be flying from the port near Roswell, New Mexico. The 100 people include a woman in her nineties (who learned to skydive when she was 85), and a honeymooning couple from Washington DC.
The space tourists will each pay $200,000 for a ride on SpaceShipTwo. The spacecraft is yet to be built. The construction will begin in March 2006 in California. Commercial flights are scheduled for late 2008 or early 2009.

Activists hijack public CCTV signal:

A team of Austrian computer activists have demonstrated a method of hijacking police CCTV cameras, in protest over increased surveillance of public areas in their country's capital.
A group called Quintessenz used a satellite receiver to intercept the video signal transmitted by a surveillance camera overlooking a busy square in the capital Vienna. The video had been scrambled by modifying the analog video signal but the activists were able to unscramble it using commercial video processing software. This enabled them to view everything recorded by the camera, and revealed both its capabilities and shortcomings.
Christian Moch, a spokesman for Quintessenz, says they decided to hijack the camera to protest over a law introduced in Austria in 2005 permitting police to install surveillance equipment in public places without obtaining a warrant.

Google acquires a 5% of AOL:

News reports in the fall of 2005 indicated an interest in buying out AOL.AOL was earlier merged with TIME WARNER in 2001. This year suitors like as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Comcast have had discussions with Time Warner about a possible purchase, and on December 16, 2005, Time Warner and Google announced that they were starting exclusive talks. The result of the talks was Google purchased $1 Billion in AOL stock, a 5% share.

Hubble finds more moons around Pluto:

Astronomers announced that the Hubble Space Telescope has found a pair of previously unrecognized moons orbiting Pluto. If the finding is confirmed, Pluto will be the only object beyond Neptune known to have more than one moon. Hubble found the two tiny satellites last May 15 and May 18 during a search for Pluto moons. The researchers caution that more Hubble observations, scheduled for February, are required before they can be certain that the bodies are orbiting Pluto.
However, the scientists already have some corroborating evidence. Team members identified the two objects in Hubble images taken 3 years ago. The objects show up in about the positions that would be expected if they were orbiting Pluto.

Robotic heroics at radiation lab:

The drama happened in October, at the US defence department's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Records released describe how the base's Gamma Irradiation Facility was paralysed when a cylinder containing cobalt-60 became lodged in one of the lab's air-pressure tubes.
The cobalt, powerful enough to kill a person in half a minute, got jammed between its storage area and the site where it was to be used. Once stuck, there was no way that lab staff could go near the tube, even wearing radiation suits.
After trying to dislodge the canister by upping the pressure in the tube, the team called in a 270-kilogram bomb-disposal robot from the nearby Sandia National Laboratories. The remote-controlled machine, bristling with drills and robotic arms, seemed perfect for the job. But the radiation would disable its circuits within 50 minutes, its handlers calculated.
The canister was jammed against a seesaw-shaped switch inside the tube that was stuck in the wrong direction so the robot was used to drill a hole in the tube and wiggle the switch back into position. After a string of failures, the fearless machine saves the day.
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   ARTICLES :

 

Windows Presentation Foundation
                                             By Syed Faisal


Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), also known as Avalon is Microsoft’s new presentation framework for windows vista (previously longhorn) and windows xp's latest sp.

In WPF controls and graphics are merged into one programming model giving programmers the lowest level content support which they were looking for many years. WPF's content model allows a programmer to put any image, 3d model etc into a control by allowing a control to host any other control.

WPF also has the capability to keep responsiveness into a web application by having support for asynchronous and multi-threaded programming techniques.

WPF integrates many of the previous presentation technologies such as GDI,GDI+,HTML etc and also it includes the features of DIRECTX it provides a great graphical experience for developers.

WPF's other major feature is ClickOnce technology which is to give programmers benefits of HTTP-based deployment. Previously with .Net 1.x Microsoft gave No Touch Deployment (NTD) which was a great success but having few problems such as no offline support and lacking of distribution of non .Net assemblies files. These and many other issues are solved by the new .Net 2.0 ClickOnce technology.

There is another useful feature of Microsoft latest .Net framework "XAML" ,the extensible markup language. It provides an easy way of creating WPF UI(although it is not necessary to use XAML to make WPF applications). Usually in WPF programming XAML's .xaml and C#'s .xaml.cs files are combined to make an application.

For e.g

--Faisal1.xaml file--

using System;

using System.Windows;

namespace FSlapp

{

public partial class Window1 : Window

{

public W1(){ InitializeComponent();

}

private void OnLoaded(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

Textobj.Text = "My first WPF application";

}

}

}

--W1.xaml.cs file

These files are then merged into .CSPROJ file and then compiled either by visual studio IDE or MsBuild command line environment. I hope this introduction to WPF would have created some interest in you to use this wonderful technology.

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Outsourcing market sees growth
            By Shoaib Feroz


Procurement outsourcing is growing at a rate of 30 per cent a year and will be a £220 million market in 2006, researchers claim.

Procurement Outsourcing - Annual Report 2005, published this week by outsourcing advisory firm Everest Research Institute, says the market is on the "cusp of its next growth phase" from which buyers can benefit.

It comes as big outsourcing deals were announced by IBM and Accenture this week. IBM has signed a five-year contract to manage the strategic sourcing and procurement of indirect materials and services for Unilever's North American operations. The Bank of Ireland said it had appointed Accenture to provide procurement and training services over the next seven years.

The Everest study analysed 38 global indirect spend procurement outsourcing contracts, and found that, while the market is still in its early stages, suppliers are expanding and buyers that move quickly can capitalise on competitive deals as a result.

"Buyers should be able to attract very positive deals at this early stage of market evolutions, acting as marquee clients for prominent outsourcers such as Accenture, IBM, Ariba and ICG Commerce," it concluded.

These companies represent 80 per cent of the market, but all providers are expanding outsourcing capabilities to meet demand.

Stephen Dunn, Everest's UK principal, said the growth was happening because outsourcing procurement can deliver savings to a firm's bottom line and increase its market value.

While outsourcing procure-to-pay systems can save up to 15 per cent on costs, outsourcing the entire management of an indirect spend category's sourcing to pay process can save up to 85 per cent.

"The savings in procurement outsourcing derive from smarter sourcing decisions, effective relationship management and contract compliance," he added.

Everest tracked 70 outsourcing suppliers and found procurement now accounts for almost 10 per cent of the total £1.76 billion market.

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  E-NEWSLETTER TEAM : (January '06)

 
Coordinator E-Newsletter: Syed Faisal-ur-Rehman

 

Articles:    

Syed Faisal-ur-Rehman

News:

Novera Malik

Obaid Nisar

Syed Karar

Ahmed Shoaib

Taqi Ahmed

Zoraze Ali

Munir Usman

 

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