Llovizna

So this is my first post under the new name "Llovizna". With these few changes, I feel this blog will be more attractive.

By the way, getting more hits to blogs?
some tips!

1. Attractive and glamorous titles to the blog entry.
2. Write a blog post on how to get more hits and share it on social networks. :D

And most importantly, a sexy title to the blog itself, even if it is technical. A good example would be 'Llovizna'.. ;) 

'Llovizna' means 'drizzle' in Spanish. I picked 'Llovizna' as the blog name on 6th of January, 2010, as it gives a sexy appeal to my then mostly technical oriented drizzle of thoughts. 'Llovizna' discusses the projects that I got involved, the coding fun that I had elsewhere, and some general thoughts on Information Technology, or even some of my random thoughts.

Llovizna is neither a pure technology blog nor an entertainment blog, though it may have both and more. It is just my personal blog. Llovizna contains a range of posts from the technology posts such as Auto Scaling With Amazon EC2 to posts like how to ignore someone you love, which are completely random. I also use Llovizna to document my past and recent travels.

Llovizna by Pradeeban Kathiravelu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.


Analytics of Llovizna.

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Image: Llovizna (telenovela)

Llovizna was a popular 1997 telenovela from Venezuela. Llovizna means drizzle in Spanish. 

The blog's title image is Llovizna waterfalls, which is also from the same country.

 

Association Rule Mining with Extended Vertical Format Data Mining

We, the team of Mooshabaya (De Alwis.K.D.B.C, Malinga.A.S, Pradeeban.K, Weerasiri.W.A.D.D.) chose "Association Rule Mining with Extended Vertical Format Data Mining" as our Advanced Database CS4420 module research project. The project proposal can be found here. The research paper we submitted is given below.

Abstract

Analyzing the data warehouses to foresee the patterns of the transactions of the businesses and scientific infrastructures often needs high computational power and a high memory space due to the huge set of past history of data transactions. With the fragmented data along with the current trend of distributed systems, most of the fundamental algorithms that are initially proposed to find the association among the itemsets in the data warehouses are inefficient either in throughput or the utilization of the resources.

Apriori algorithm is such an algorithm which was proposed to mine the data warehouses to find the associations. Apriori, though being the mostly learned and implemented algorithm for data mining, it is generally not an optimized algorithm. More variations, improvements, and alternatives have been suggested to overcome the inefficiency of Apriori algorithm, either as a whole or to a particular specific set of data. In either case a fraction of improvement in the algorithm often improves the mining considerably. Vertical Format Data mining is one of the efficient alternatives to Apriori algorithm. In this paper we are proposing an algorithm as an alternative to Apriori algorithm, which will use bitmap indices in conjunction with vertical format data mining. The implementation of the proposed algorithm is benchmarked with an implementation of Apriori Algorithm against a chosen set of benchmarks, which is supposed to be more efficient than its predecessors.

Initial Paper: PDF.


Update as on 18th Dec: We further worked on the algorithm and published a paper ("Horizontal Format Mining with Extended Bitmaps") on this. Slides with explanation on the algorithm can be downloaded here.

Mooshabaya Meetings at Research Lab

October 27th, 2009 [Dr.Srinath/All members/CSE Research Lab] : Updates on the project. Eventing component issues and masup deployment and authentication issues. Discussed about the upcoming first formal presentation.

November 19th, 2009 [Dr.Srinath/K.D.B.C.De Alwis, A.S.Malinga, K.Pradeeban/CSE Research Lab] Demonstration of the project update using a screencast. Design and development issues, further updates, and the potential usage of the ongoing project on transferring Extreme! Labs projects from using XSUL to Axis2 were also discussed.

December 14th, 2009 [Dr.Srinath/All members/CSE Research Lab]
Discussed about the eventing module integration into carbon to call the eventing module methods from mashup server. Project Draft Report and the upcoming project schedule was also discussed.

December 15th, 2009 [Mrs.Vishaka Nanayakkara/All members/HoD Office]
Discussed about the draft report with the project's internal mentor Mrs.Vishaka Nanayakkara. Suggestions for potential enhancements and improvements to the draft report were given.

Open Source Viruses!

Back Orifice (Currently known as BO2K) (often shortened to BO) is a controversial computer program designed for remote system administration, well known for its launch as an open source project. This program can effectively control your computer from a remote location once your computer has become a client. As BO2K server can be installed without the user's interaction, it can be distributed as payload of a Trojan and hence listed into the virus database by Anti-Virus programs, neglecting its legitimate use as an administrative tool.

It is often discussed whether 'open source virus' is a concept in practice or just a myth. Murphy's Law: Sometimes, an Open-Source Virus is Just a Virus - Views mentioning a virus/malware can never be considered to be open source, as it is not installed with a user agreement, as a reply to the post "Why virus writers are turning to open source". Another post focusing the Back Orifice developers - "Transatlantic Cable : Could the Cult of the Dead Cow be your friends?"

"Behind the scenes of online fraud" discusses about the online frauds along with some precautions. We were discussing more about Ethical hacking, malwares, and the behaviors of crackers during one of our recent CS4050 module lectures (Hence got the idea of a small research on Open Source Viruses ;)). From the discussions we had, it seems online fraud has become a popular hobby. Computer Crime, Act, No 24 of 2007 published by the Parliment of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka discusses the identification, investigation, and prevention of computer crimes. Online crimes are no more considered a fun that is tolerated!

Learning and Fun

Even very serious stuff can sometimes be fun, if it is mentioned in the proper way. Recently got to know a nice blog post thanks to my pal Sach. It explains the encryption in a very nice manner, using stick figures. Seems a good learning resource on computer security.
Moserware: A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)