QR Codes

Recently, I went to a conference where every person had a name tag,on the bottom of the tag was their own personalized QR Code which stored the email id of the person.Before,going to any of the sessions the staff would scan their code and the person would receive an email at the end of the day that presented the list of all the places they went during the conference.Pretty Amazing!! that's the flexibility of QR Code usage.

The above image also known as QR(Quality Response) Code or a matrix bar-code was discovered in 1994 by Denso Wave for  Japanese Automotive Industry mainly to track vehicles during manufacturing by using component scanning.The idea behind the code was to create a square grid with white background and assembly of black boxes that stored some information.The vertical and horizontal black boxes would then be interpreted by using Reed-Solomon  error correction algorithm until the image was interpreted correctly.

The QR Codes mainly stores two things :-

1. Error correction level.

2. BCH Code which is named after initials of creators of this code(Bose,Chaudhari, Hocquenghem).Some of the interpretation are shown in the image below where character 0 is encoded as 00,1 as 01 ,2 as 03 and so on.

Alpha Numeric Character Encoding using BCH 

Various encoding supported by QRCodes-

Numeric Encoding

7089 characters

Alpha Numeric Encoding

4296 characters

Binary/byte Encoding

2953 characters

Kanji/kana Encoding

1816 characters

Algorithm used for encryption and decryption of QR Code -
Digital Encryption Algorithm also known as DES is used for encryption and decryption of QR Code.The basic working principle of this algorithm is that  it takes a fixed length string and converts it into cipher text bit string by following a set of complicated operations.The DES also produces a key for decryption of the text,those who have the key can then convert the cipher text to readable string.

Nowadays users can create and customize their own codes by using tools like Adobe InDesignCC which can store some of  the  following information - 

1.URL

2.Text ,E-mail Information, Business Cards

3.Code Payments

4.Bank account,Credit Card Information 

Louis Vuitton QR Codes by Takashi Murakami

QR Codes are supported by almost all of the operating systems like Android,Blackberry,Apple iOS,Nokia Symbian Belle.They all provide apps or default QR Code reader that can hard link information to the QR Code,an example of such reader is Google Goggles.

Google Goggles-App for reading QRCodes

References

1.http://hypebeast.com/2009/4/louis-vuitton-qr-codes-by-takashi-murakami

2.http://www.enterakt.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/GoogleGoggles.jpg

3.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Goggles

4.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard

5.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCH_code

Professional Summary

The description below will provide information regarding some of the skills and knowledge I have acquired through job and academics.
Job -Project was to improve the performance of a previous tool.Since the tool dealt with lot of files and
text validations ;I used my knowledge of file handling,regular expression,text processing in Perl which improved
the speed by 65 Percent.
Tools used for this project were - putty,notepad++,Excel
Protocols used -ftp,sftp,ssh,LDAP
Algorithms used -MergeSort for Sorting,Regular Expression for pattern matching
Languages used -Perl,Unix
Operating System-Linux
Number of Team Members -Development -3,Testing-2,Management-3
Academic
Course name -Information Retrieval
Project Name -Search Engine on Wikipedia(Ongoing)
Protocols used -DOM
Algorithms used -MergeSort,PageRank,Intersection,InvertedIndex,TermDocumentWeighting,External Sorting
Binary Search,Regular Expressions
Tools used -Eclipse Kepler,notepad++
Operating System -Windows 7
Number of team members -2
Languages used -Java,Python
Independent -
Developing a website for San Jose State University using their tool ouCampus and Agile Methodologies.
Also acted as a phase manager for a sprint.
Tools used -ouCampus,Google Docs,Prezi,Google Analytics,Microsoft Access,Qualtrics
Languages used -HTML,JavaScript
Team Members -5
For full time and part time internships mail me at khatri.setu68@gmail.com

Blogs

Blogs are small articles also known as posts that are used by individuals to express their opinions, thoughts, experiences ,feelings by using text ,multimedia or combination of both .There is no fix categorization when it comes to  blogging.Some people might prefer to write technical blogs concentrating on single technology or field, while others might incorporate multiple topics like food,travel,technical in one single blog,to each his own.

For writing blogs, a person should first create an account on any of the blogging sites like Blogger by Google,Open Diary by Bruce Abelson,Live Journal by Brad Fitzpatrick.

Steps to create Blog on Blogger

1. Login to your Gmail Account

2.Click on the Apps button on the  top right corner of your account.It looks like the leftmost symbol in the picture below

Google Apps button(leftmost)

3.On click of Apps Button multiple options will be displayed in a drop down menu

Menu displayed on click of Apps Button

4.Click on the "More" option displayed at the bottom of the menu being displayed .Something similar to the image displayed below will be shown in your window.

On click of "More" option

5.Click on Blogger tab.

6.After clicking on Blogger tab you will be asked to select a title for your blog,try multiple titles because most of the titles are already taken ,so be creative.

7.After selecting the title,it is time to select a template for the blog,Google provides multiple templates that can be applied to your blog as it is or can also be customized according to individuals creativity.The best part about these templates is that they can be changed anytime you want.

8.Once the template is selected just click on new post,the symbol on the leftmost in the picture below 

New Post(leftmost)

9.Various option that comes up in the main menu is being displayed in the picture below.You can insert images,links,videos,make the font bold,italic by using the options provided.There is also an interesting option called "HTML" in the menu which stores the HTML code of your blog.

Main menu of Post

HTML Code looks like this 

HTML Code

10.Once the post is written click on the  preview button to see how it looks,modify it if you want to make some changes or publish it if you are happy with your work.That's it,you officially have a blog now.

My apologies for the images going out of the screen,but it was difficult to keep them visible and in the window .

References -

https://shwetashwetakhatri.blogspot.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

Usability Testing

Usability testing is a technique applied during the design phase of a project to test its usability by presenting it in front of users.The main goal of this sort of testing is to check whether the product meets the intended purpose.With the help of usability testing the product owner can prevent making changes in the later phases of the project by making sure before hand that the design is approved by the actual users.
The four section that needs to be checked are :-
1.Accessibility - If your site takes too long to load ,the font is way too small to read ,too many distracting advertisements are present, then accessibility issues can arise,which would lead the user away from your webpage.
2.Navigation - Navigation is a very important aspect of a website hence factors like clear representation of tabs,a reasonable number of links and tabs,easily identifiable links are very necessary to maintain the user's interest in the website.
3.Identity -Identity answers some of the questions like Who are you?,What do you do?,How can I contact you and so on.Hence,it is very important to provide this information in the form of company logos,contact us page,introduction page and other information pages that are necessary to identify the purpose of the website
4.Content - While writing content some of the things should be kept in mind,for example,don't use bold too much,highlight the heading,the title should be self - explanatory,don't use obtrusive ads in your main content,content should be clear and well formatted.

Technique for usability testing -

Eye tracking

A very interesting technique that is used nowadays is Eye tracking in which eyes of users can be tracked to analyse what they are looking at in on your site.This answers certain questions like  :-

• What is the first thing users look at on a page?
• What do users look at the longest on a page?
• Which parts of a page are overlooked?
• What elements are distracting users from completing a task?
• What aspects of the website can be improved?

Card Sorting

This technique asks users to divide the website content into groups and label them.In this way the sensible content can be differentiated from unintelligible one.

Tree Tracking

This technique asks the  user to identify the location of content on the website.

Heat Map Tools

Heat Map tools captures the location where users click on the website. 

References
http://www.usereffect.com/topic/25-point-website-usability-checklist
http://www.usabilitysciences.com/services/eye-tracking

Images -

 http://www.bugbash.net/comic/7.html

 http://usability.com/2013/04/dilbert-on-usability/