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Around 900 courses from MIT are now available for free. Materials include syllabus, readings, lecture notes, recitations, labs, exams and projects. Follow the link for details. Courses of Electronics are found in “Electrical Engineering and Computer Science” section.

Please visit the following website:
http://ocw.mit.edu/

Tired of using a mouse to control your PC? Perhaps there is another option for when your arm starts to ache: your nose. A novel PC control system lets users nudge a cursor around the screen with gentle movements of their nose. Blinking the left or right eye twice takes the place of left or right mouse clicks. The inventor, Dmitry Gorodnichy of the Institute of Information Technology in Ottawa, Canada, calls his nose-steered mouse a "nouse". In addition to giving people a change from the keyboard and mouse, he hopes it will make using a PC easier for people who have a disability.

Click to see the complete article

Biometrics (using biological "keys" for authentication, like fingerprints) has been gathering storm as an authentication technique. As a result, Microsoft is readying a release of new keyboards and mice that will also double as fingerprint scanners.
This will, in many respects, address one of the key problems with biometrics, that of the ubiquity of putting biometric-aware equipment in the hands of casual users. (Asking users outside of your company to buy a new piece of equipment just to use your website is generally not well-received.) Microsoft selling this as part of their stable of products has a real chance of making this ubiquitous--remember what happened when Microsoft introduced the mouse wheel?
Of course, there's also the Big Brother scenario questions, such as "can my fingerprint be intercepted during transmission and captured off for later reply by an attacker?" and "what happens if somebody does capture my fingerprint, how do I change it?" that are still being wrestled with. So the question has to be asked--is this a good development, or a dangerous one?

For more, read Microsoft under your thumb.

ASP.NET 1.0 was a revolutionary advance in developing Web Applications. With its fully complied, highly extensible Server-Side control model, it was one of the best applications of Microsoft’s .NET runtime. It solved many of the issues plaguing ASP developers, and kept the development-centric philosophy that made ASP such a huge hit amongst the web-client community.
With ASP.NET 2.0, the ASP.NET team has continued to lead the way in making developer’s daily lives more enjoyable. The main theme of ASP.NET 2.0 seems to be “write less code”. In this article, with homage to David Letterman, we will count down my top ten favorite features of this new runtime. (Feel free to imagine the top ten list being enthusiastically read by Bill Gates, but of course, in your imagination he will only be reading the topics themselves—I will be reading the actual explanations.)

For the rest of the article please follow:
http://www.theserverside.net/articles/showarticle.tss?id=WhatsNewASPNET

When: Registration will begin September 1, 2004
Where: http://www.topcoder.com/googlecodejam
What: Solve increasingly difficult coding problems within a set time period
Who: Sponsored by Google, powered by TopCoder

Sure, great code is its own reward...
...but a little spare cash never hurt, either.
1st Place $10,000
2nd Place $7,000
3rd Place $5,000
4th Place $3,000

Top 50 finalists will have an all-expense-paid trip to Google headquarters in Mountain View CA! where the finals will be held on October 15, 2004. See website for official contest rules and registration.

http://www.google.com/codejam/

The W3C's Web Services Description Working Group, part of the Web Services Activity, has defined a language for describing web services and the possible ways to interact with them. The WG published its WSDL 2.0 working drafts on 26 March 2004. This is a significant milestone in the progress of WSDL. In this article, the author discussed the changes that were made to the WSDL 1.1 specification and other major improvements to the service description language.

Point your browser to the following location for the details:
http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2004/05/19/wsdl2.html

This is a short guide to styling your Web pages. It will show you how to use W3C's Cascading Style Sheets language (CSS) as well as alternatives using HTML itself. The route will steer you clear of most of the problems caused by differences between different brands and versions of browsers. For style sheets to work, it is important that your markup be free of errors. A convenient way to automatically fix markup errors is to use the HTML Tidy utility. This also tidies the markup making it easier to read and easier to edit. I recommend you regularly run Tidy over any markup you are editing. Tidy is very effective at cleaning up markup created by authoring tools with sloppy habits……

For the rest of the article please visit:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Style.html

Professional Validation and More:

VAM is the second generation of ASP.NET web page validation, greatly expanding upon the concept. Microsoft's ASP.NET Validation controls are very limited, causing you to write custom code and hacks. In many cases, there is no way to enhance it to get the features you want. VAM overcomes these limitations, saving you development time and allowing you to build the best UI for your sites.

Validation involves the rules to evaluate data entry fields and a user interface that communicates errors clearly with the user. VAM handles both with great attention to detail and completeness.

Here are the advantages of using VAM:
22 validator controls. (Microsoft has 5.) Details Client-side validation on IE, IE/Mac, Netscape 6+, Mozilla, Opera 7 and Safari. (Microsoft only supports IE and IE/Mac.) Validation groups for when there are separate "forms" on the page, each with their own submit button. Details and Demo The ability to combine the rules of several validators under one error message using the MultiConditionValidator. Details Validators can intelligently disable themselves when the associated field is not in use on the page. Details and Demo Multiple formats for error messages including images with tooltips and alert boxes. No more encoding HTML into the ErrorMessage property. Details and Demo Standardize common error messages throughout the site so that page developers simply select the error message. Error messages can also be localized. Error messages can have tokens to show design time properties and runtime values. Details and Demo Validation is all about getting the user's attention. VAM can blink the error message, set focus to the field with the error, change that field's colors, and put up an alert. Details and Demo Greatly enhanced ValidationSummary control. Details and Demo Built in Required Field Marker support. Details and Demo Support for more data entry controls and page submission controls. Details Support for controls in most DataGrid types including Infragistics ASP.NET Grid (UltraWebGrid). With the Visual Input Security™ add-on (sold separately), you have a formidable defense against hackers who use SQL Injection, Script Injection (XSS), Input Tampering and Brute Force attacks. It's easy to switch to VAM on existing web applications.