Promises that Java holds
by H S Jatana
THE notion of executable content is an extremely powerful idea with far-reaching consequences. Its basic premise is that content need not be static, but can contain programmes that will facilitate information sharing and dissemination in unheard-of ways.

Will petrol pumps ever run dry?
by Mohinder Singh
WILL petrol pumps ever run dry? The answer assuredly is a No. Technology and business enterprise, it seems, will combine to supply fuel for transportation needs far into the future.

Promises that Java holds
by H S Jatana

THE notion of executable content is an extremely powerful idea with far-reaching consequences. Its basic premise is that content need not be static, but can contain programmes that will facilitate information sharing and dissemination in unheard-of ways. While the notion of executable content has been in existence for a while, the combination of the rise of the World Wide Web and the development of new technologies has opened new and exciting avenues that will lead to a new computing landscape.

Postscript was the first language that popularised the notion executable content. Since then there have been numerous other attempts to provide similar functionalities, including Telescript, Inferno, Safe-Tcl, and Python. However, none of these languages has enjoyed the success of Java, which has benefited from a combination of technical and commercial factors.

Although Java owes part of its success to the popularity of the WWW, its widespread acceptance is also due to the many features and facilities it provides as a programming language. Languages, are like sports cars: High-performance driving machines invite their drivers to drive them and make the experience of driving a pleasure. High-performance languages invite software engineers not only to programme but also to create elegant, efficient designs and implementations.

Java has become the lingua franca of the Internet not only because it is secure, robust, and safe but also because it is a pleasure to programme with. Although in many respects Java is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, it does provide mechanisms such as object orientation, multithreading, interfaces, garbage collection and exceptions necessary for programming complex, high-performance, distributed applications.

Java evolved out of a Sun research project started six years ago to look into distributed control of consumer electronic devices. The priorities in the consumer electronics like TVs & VCRs are quite different from those in computer industry. Whereas, five years ago, our mantra was compatibility, the consumer electronics industry considered secure networking, portability and cost far more important. And when compatibility did become an issue, they limited notions of compatibility to well-defined interfaces.

One interesting phenomenon that has occurred over the past five years is that consumer electronics concern have become mainstream software concerns as the market for software in home has grown. The buzzwords that have been applied to Java derive directly from this context. In the consumer electronics world, you connect your VCR to a television, your telephone to a network. And the consumer electronics industry wants to make these kinds of networked appliances even more pervasive.

Architecture neutrality is another issue. In the consumer electronics business, there are dozens of different CPU types and good reasons for all of them in their individual contexts. But developing software for a dozen different platforms just doesn’t scale, and it was this desire for architecture neutrality that broke the C++ and -not so much C++ the language, but the standard way people built C++ compliers.

The way Java works is simple. Unlike ordinary software application, which take up megabyte on the hard disk of your PC, Java applications or “applets” are little programmes that reside on the network in centralised servers. The network delivers them to your machine only when you need them; because the applets are so much smaller than conventional programmes, they don’t take forever to download.

Java is a platform-independent language that can be used to deploy applications over the World Wide Web. It is a form of OOP that avoids the shortcomings of other OOP methodologies. Java has no pointer architecture, no overloading of operators, no direct access to memory, no multiple inheritance and no extended constructors.

But, the developers added certain vital features to the language. Java provides exception handling, which makes it easy to change the flow of programme control when some important or unexpected event occurs. It also automates so-called garbage collection, so the programmer need not concern her or himself with writing codes for the function. (a garbage collector is a routine that locates objects no longer used by the application and frees the memory they occupy for reuse. In C or C++, the programmer must do this manually, using instructions like ‘free’ or ‘delete’).

Java is a blue collar language. It’s not a Ph. D thesis material but a language for a job. Java feels very familiar to many different programmers and is a fusion of four different kinds of programming.

• It has an object-oriented flavour that derives from a number of languages — Simula, C/C++, Objective C, Cedar, Modula and Smalltalk.
• Another area is numeric programming. One of the things that’s different about Java is that we say what 2+2 means. When C came out there were so many different ways of computing 2+2 that you couldn’t lay down any kind of rule. But today the IEEE 754 standard for floating point arithmetic has won and it removes much of the complexity and clutter in numerical programming.
• Java has also a system programming flavour inherited from C that has proven useful over the years.
• But the one way in which Java is unique is its distributed nature — it feels like there aren’t boundaries between machines. People can have pieces of behaviour squirt back and forth across the network, picked up here, landed over there. And they just don’t care. The network, by and large starts to behave like a sea of computation on which you can go rafting.

As an application development environment, Java technology provides both an object-oriented language and a run time environment. It has been designed to operate in a distributed environment based on the WWW and Internet technologies. Java operates in a server-based mode, downloading applications to clients on demand.

The technology has many technical advantages over conventional client/server implementations. With Java, any application can run on any Java-enabled computer (write once, run-anywhere). Fewer versions of an application are therefore needed and applications management is simplified. Systems may also be scaled upward or downward, depending on an organisation’s needs, without the need to rewrite applications.

Java’s unique characteristics are helping overcome many of the challenges found in industrial automation. It provides a way of creating software that works on the many different types of platforms found in industrial environments, and thereby helps integrate existing networks of these heterogeneous computers.

Thin clients

You can think of this as the client learning something. It now understands a new data type that it didn’t understand before, and it obtained that knowledge from some remote repository. You can start building systems that are much more lean, that feel as though there’s this core that understands the basic business of the application.

A Web browser is a good example. It’s simple loop — a set of interfaces to networking standards, document format standards, image format standards, and so on. And other components can plug into this browser until you have this huge brick of code around which you warp a big steel band. That’s your application, and it does everything.

Much of Java was driven by the Internet, and there’s a series of deductive steps that follow from that starting point. The Internet has a diverse population, some companies’ aspirations to the contrary. If you need to avoid doing different versions for different platforms, then you need some way of distributing software that is architecturally neutral. C, by and large, has been very portable, apart from a few gotchas like what does it mean.

Java as a framework

Java is more than a language — it is a framework that comprises many components. It includes picoJava, a hardware implementation of the Java Virtual Machine; the JavaOS, an operating system implementation; and many application programming interfaces for programming a broad range of applications.

Java Beans

A hot research area in software engineering is the development of reusable component architectures that will allow large software systems to be designed by combining components from possible different sources. While many problems still need resolution, the Java Beans component architecture is a step in the right direction.

Java Beans provides mechanism to define components in Java and specify interactions among the various components. Java Beans components provide support wherein component assemblers can discover properties about the components. One of the other advantages of the Java Beans architecture is that it also accommodates other component architectures such as OpenDoc, ActiveX, etc. So by writing Java Beans components, the developer is assured that the components can also be used in these and other component architectures.

Java has profound implications on the future of software development and distribution and has the potential to eliminate fatware or software bloat, which is predominant in current software. Java can facilitate the creation of a cottage industry focussed on designing and implementing Java components that can then be delivered across the Internet on demand using distribution channels such as Marimba’s Castanet.

Another important thing about Java is its rich class library. Java itself, as a language, is pretty simple, as are most languages. The real action is in the libraries and this gives the environment a very rich feeling.

The near future promises much more. Internet screen phones that use Java technology will be available soon. Also, smart cards using the Java card platform will begin shipping in huge quantities. And in mid 1999, the Java platform is expected to begin appearing in bedrooms and living rooms on high-end TV set-top boxes built by TCI, the world’s largest telecom company. Java software running on severs in large companies monitors transactions and ties together data from existing computer systems. Think home banking, Internet shopping, entertainment, games, access to business systems far away from work — even a personal ATM that lets you download funds into a smart card via your phone.

So, how does Java feel? Java feels playful and flexible. You can build things with it that are themselves flexible. Java feels deterministic. You feel like it’s going to do what you ask it to do. It feels fairly non-threatening in that you can just try something and you’ll quickly get an error message if its crazy. It feels pretty rich. By and large, it feels you can just sit down and write code.

Will petrol pumps ever run dry?
by Mohinder Singh

WILL petrol pumps ever run dry? The answer assuredly is a No. Technology and business enterprise, it seems, will combine to supply fuel for transportation needs far into the future.

Experts have debated the fate of fossil-fuel supplies for the past 30 years. Doomsayers have been predicting, we will run out of affordable petroleum in a few years — 10, 20, or 30; a sure recipe for economic disaster. In fact the world these days is experiencing an oil glut, coupled with low ruling prices.

Today’s proven oil reserves stand at historically high levels; around 50 years’ supply at the current rate of consumption. As demand has arisen, the oil industry, with increasingly sophisticated techniques of prospecting and mining, has responded by identifying additional supplies.

How long can this go on? No one can say for sure. After all earth’s hydrocarbon deposits which took eons to form are finite resources. Yet even a slowly expanding supply will continue to meet the world demand for many decades.

And then natural gas, another versatile fossil fuel. Experts agree that natural gas supplies far exceed potential oil reserves in total energy value. Even with a progressively higher offtake, these could well last a hundred years. Many countries, including some who lack significant oil resources, have large natural gas supplies. India’s recoverable reserves of natural gas stood at 735 billion cubic meters in 1992.

Compressed natural gas can be used directly by automobiles but its storage is bulky and cumbersome. Again it is possible to convert natural gas into gasoline, but this process is currently more expensive than converting crude oil into gasoline, recent researches have identified new processes or enhanced old ones that can economically convert natural gas to gasoline and diesel. And the side benefit of a cleaner fuel, with low-sulphur emissions. Already a billion-dollar facility for it is being constructed in Qatar by Exxon. Through this technology, remote sources of natural gas can become viable; liquid fuel being transported to markets by conventional means. And experimental plants have come up to convert drill platform flare gas to liquid fuel.

Methanol, also a liquid fuel derived from natural gas, is produced by many factories around the world. Its use may increase in some areas, but methanol has a distribution problem; it cannot be transported by the same pipelines that currently transport petroleum products.

In addition, oil shale and tar sans have a potential to provide equivalent to or greater than the known oil reserves. The recovery of this resource is starting to look economically viable. Large scale commercial production awaits a rise in oil price.

Technology for converting coal, an abundant resource, into methanol through liquefication has been there for some time. Much work is going on how to make the processes more commercially viable and environmentally acceptable — mining, handling and burning huge quantities of coal can be quite polluting. The idea is to use such oil initially in boilers. Refining it for use in modern automobiles is a more complex undertaking.

Ethanol is another contender for motor fuel. It is an alcohol fuel typically made from corn, molasses or other organic substance. Brazil is the biggest producer and user of ethanol. But then in many countries there are constraints to a massive supply of biomass material.

In the last few years, deposits of methane hydrate have been discovered under the sea floor. Methane is generated when organic matter settling at the sea bottom is decomposed by bacteria. These deposits have as much as four times the energy value of natural gas.

No one has yet discovered an economical method for recovering methane (natural gas is also primarily methane) from methane hydrate deposits, but the problem has only been studied for a short time. Technology would eventually find a solution, the way it did in recovering oil from beneath the North Sea — once deemed impossible. Research on methane hydrate is particularly important to Japan, an energy-poor country.

Admittedly a day will come when all types of fossil fuel resources could run virtually dry. But this buys us lots of time to prepare for an alternate supply.

Electric-powered automobiles are an obvious alternative. And these are set to prove more promising with advances in battery technology.

Then there are the futuristic fuels. For example, you can convert a waste product or low-grade coal (carbon dioxide) into usable hydrocarbons (methane) by combining it with hydrogen from water. Or eventually mimicking what the plants do: Take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and recycle it into fuel, using electricity to generate hydrogen from water through electrolysis. Converting hydrogen into liquid hydrocarbon fuel could be the ultimate solution; something compatible with the existing infrastructure of storage tanks in vehicles and petrol pumps.

There are many potential sources of gasoline and diesel fuel for transportation. Some will take time to develop but our current fuel supply is good for decades. Of course, there may be short-term fuel shortages and spikes in prices during transition periods, but these disruptions are unlikely to be any more severe than the politically motivated ones the world has been witnessing in the past.

All this is no excuse to use motor fuel wastefully or frivolously, more so when fuel consumption carries its own environmental hazards. Yet there is no cause for alarm; petrol pumps aren’t going to run dry.

1. A scientist at Andhra University has found a new and low-cost solution to the Y2K problem (also called millennium bug), due to which all computers the world over are likely to start malfunctioning on January 1, 2000. Name this computer scientist. What is the method suggested by him called?

2. This baby boy, born on December 11, 1998, has the distinction of being born from his dead father’s preserved sperm. Name the British boy and his mother.

3. British scientists have recently discovered a method to halt the production of an enzyme in cancer cells which is the main cause of division and multiplication of these cells. Name this enzyme which does not occur in normal cells.

4. Indian scientists have now produced genetically engineered vaccinated vegetables for preventing diseases like cholera. Which vegetable is found most suitable according to Indian conditions that could be eaten raw for this purpose?

5. An asteroid about one mile in with is heading towards the earth these days. Earlier, it was thought that it would hit the earth on October 26, 2028, but now calculations show that it would miss the earth by about 600,000 miles. Name this asteroid. Name also the asteroid that came within 500,000 miles of earth on October 28, 1937.

6. As you read this quiz, billions and billions of these chargeless particles would pass through your body unnoticed by you. Which particles are we talking about?

7. All objects come down faster under gravitational pull through a curved path although the shortest path is a straight line. What is this particular path called?

8. Can you imagine how many muscles do we use while walking?

9. What is the process called by which plants make their food using sunlight? Which pigment do the plants make during this process that gives green colour to the plants? Which life-supporting gas is produced in this process?

10. A solar eclipse will occur on February 16, 1999, but the moon will be too far away to cover the sun completely and a ring of light will appear around the moon. What is such a solar eclipse called?

Answers

1. P.V.S. Avadhani; Dynamic numeric encoding method 2. Liam Stephen Blood, Diane Blood 3. “Telomerase” 4. Tomato 5. 1997 XF11; Hermes 6. Neutrinos 7. Cycloid path 8. About 200 9. Photosynthesis; chlorophyll; oxygen 10. Annular solar eclipse.

The bugging millennium

THE more trivial a problem, the more likely it is to attract widespread public attention. One such problem being discussed the world over deals with the question of the start of the new millennium.

In a way, there is no problem. The world at large has already decided to celebrate the beginning of the Anno Domini 2000 in a big way. Large-scale celebrations do not require a reason; they require an excuse. As the American astrophysicist Owen Gingerich has put it, this is like the exuberance of children “waiting for a car’s mileage counter to change from 999 to 1000”.

If there is a problem, it is not for the players who are out to have fun but for the commentators and observers who are literally counting the years.

What is it that we will be celebrating? The calendar that the world uses, the Gregorian Calendar, has its beginning with the Roman Emperor Julius Ceaser. Ceaser’s alliance with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra is well-known.The influence of Egypt on his calendar is not so well-known. Starting from 45 BC, Ceaser, assisted by an astronomer from Alexandria, Sosigenes, adopted the mean year current in Egypt which consisted of 365 days, with an extra day added once in four years,to make a Leap year.

The Julian year was a little too long.The Julian calendar was reformed in AD 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII so that now a century was a leap year only if divisible by 400, rather than four.

In between, in AD 531, the Julian Calendar was made into a Christian calendar through calculations by a monk, Dionysius Exiguus. He introduced by epoch of the Calendar by purporting to calculate the year of Christ’s birth. Dionysius’ initiative has interesting implications.

First, the era begins with AD 1. This means that a century ends with digits 99 and the new one begins with 1. If we go simply by counting numbers, the present century which began with the year 1901 will end with year 2000. Strictly speaking then the new millennium of the Christian era will begin on 1 January 2001.

The second implication of the Christian era is that its beginning is physically decoupled from Christ. Christ was not born in Jew AD. Christ was born when king Herod was still the ruler of Judia, and Herod is known to have died before AD 1. The actual year of Christ’s birth has been much discussed in scholarly literature. The general opinion narrows down to the year 5 BC or 4 BC as the year of Christ’s birth.

Thirdly, as any student of high-school mathematics knows, between numbers - 1 and + 1 lies the number zero. But there is no zero AD in the era. AD 1 is preceded by 1 BC. This creates difficulty when commemorating events that took place before the Christian era.

Returning to the question of the onset of the new millennium of the Gregorian Calendar, mathe matical and astronomical niceties are unlikely to cut any ice. Three zeroes in a year is too good an opportunity to be missed. The whole world is looking for a spectacle. As the saying goes, “jeeya jab jhoome, saavan hai” (Saavan is when the heart feels like celebrating.)

* * *

If Allah gives you prosperity, He will give you the brains to go with it.

- Turkish proverb.

Listening in on Mars

Among the instruments on the rocket sent to Mars last month is a microphone designed to whistle down the winds of Mars.

Nobody knows what it will hear, but Mars - unlike the Moon - has an atmosphere which could transmit sound, and is therefore at least potentially noisy. The Mars microphone is a double first: it will not only be the first eavesdropping device on another planet; it will be the first instrument funded by a public pressure group to fly on a mission across space.

The microphone was developed for the Planetary Society, a space lobby launched by the late astronomer and writer Carl Sagan. A second instrument, which will study the dust and aerosols in the Martian atmosphere, also makes history: it will be the first Russian-designed and manufactured instrument to fly on a US planetary probe.

Sagan persuaded Nasa that the microphone would be a good idea. ``Even if only a few minutes of Martian sounds are recorded from this first experiment, the public interest will be high and the opportunity for scientific exploration real,’’ he wrote in 1996.

And now leap year mini-bug

AS D-DAY for the Millennium Bug approaches, another computing quandary has begun to rear its head - the Leap Year Bug. Computer boffins have been aware of this wrinkle to the Millennium Bug, but it is only now that financial professionals have awakened to the fact that the year 2000 is a leap year - which presents a new collection of programming headaches.

The year 2000 will be the first turn-of-the-century year divisible by 400 since Pope Gregory’s day, and the experts say that many microchips and computer systems will regard 2000 as having only 365 days.

``In some cases, programmers have programmed [the year 2000] as if it is an ordinary year,’’ said Tony Stock, operations director at Action 2000, adding that the bug could ``occur in any software in any particular industry’’.

Mr Stock sees the biggest risk coming from computer systems that are scheduled to perform certain tasks on certain dates. Interest calculations could be a day out of synch, as could ``purchasing systems that failed to compute the correct delivery day’’.

Particularly vexing will be the confusion over what day of the week March 1 and days following will fall, said Robin Guenier, executive director at Task Force 2000. He cited the problem of safety conventions on shipping vessels. All are required to have a satellite-based distress system that sends out calls logged by day of the week. An SOS logged a day late could prove disastrous.

Mr Guenier said that many have begun working on this new version of the Year 2000 problem, but he says much work remains to be done.

One programmer managed to include a February 29 in the year 2000 calendar - but also included the extra day in each subsequent year. ``There will be significant problems in all sorts of ways,’’ he said, noting that home video recorders, which can be set to record on a given day of the week, could also be affected.

Whatever the problems thrown up by the leap year, the experts agree that the fallout from the Millenium Bug will continue well into the year 2000. ``It’s a huge misconception about the year 2000 that it all happens at midnight,’’ said Mr Guenier. ``All sorts of funny things will happen throughout the year.’’

Gene therapy for ageing muscles

SCIENTISTS using a new gene therapy have found a way to stop muscles from wasting with old age. The treatment could increase muscle strength in the young by 15 per cent, but in older patients by as much as 27 per cent, restoring the strength of young adulthood.

So far, though, the treatment works only in mice. If it works in humans it could mean a huge advance for health managers - and a headache for sports committees as athletes rush to use it, since as they age all mammals lose up to one third of their muscle mass and power.

At a recent meeting of cell biologists in San Francisco, Lee Sweeney from the University of Pennsylvania said tests on mice showed older ones were restored to the strength of young adulthood.

``We’re now looking to see whether this technique might also be used to increase muscle strength in diseases such as muscular dystrophy.’’

The scientists took a virus, removed its disease-causing genetic machinery, and ``reloaded’’ it with a gene called IFG-1 and a muscle-specific promoter to kick the growth factor into higher production. The result was injected into mice. IGF-1 aids muscle repair, and the researchers believe the problem of old age may be that repair machinery declines.

Space pollution monitor

A NEW eye in the sky is about to take the measure of a pollution problem that is literally out of this world. A US satellite launched recently will count bits of cosmic debris 500 miles above the Earth’s surface.

Some of the microscopic fragments will be stardust, left behind by passing comets. And some will be specks of paint, splinters of glass and shards of metal - part of the growing cloud of pollution from 40 years of investment in space.

There could be 150,000 objects in orbit, most between one centimetre and ten centimetres across, bits of litter left behind by the cold war and the growth of communications and navigation by satellite.

There are perhaps 10,000 larger objects - spent satellites, rocket stages and so on - systematically catalogued and tracked by radar. But the real hazards come from particles too small to see but which travel at five miles a second with the explosive power of a bullet.

Teams from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have several times had to replace space shuttle windows, pitted by flying fragments. One satellite exploded in 1995 after a hit. A splash of urine, jettisoned by astronauts long ago, was found on the skin of a spacecraft recovered from orbit.

Into the swelling cloud of rubbish, the US Air Force has placed Argos: advanced research and global observation satellite. It carries a huge number of experiments - scientists have called it a ``Swiss army knife in space’’ - and one of these is Spadus, a space dust monitor devised by the University of Chicago.

Scientists now have an instrument that can distinguish between the natural dust of space - the micrometeorites that pepper the Earth all year round - and the litter from an industry that began with Sputnik 1 in 1957.

Safe diesel

JAPANESE scientists have developed a new fuel treatment that could reduce emissions from truck diesel engines. The technology could allow vehicle manufacturers to meet new emission standards After 18 years of work the researchers perfected the liquid treatment, called Soltron. The US firm Solpower, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, has acquired North American manufacturing and marketing rights for the product. Soltron is a fuel enhancing fluid that works using enzymes. The makers claim the treatment affects molecules within liquid fuels — including diesel and gasoline —and increases the fuel’s absorption of oxygen. The enzymes destroy the damaging contaminants that degrade normal fuels. Only three ounces of the treatment need to be mixed with every 100 gallons for fuel for it to be effective.

Emission tests conducted at the Environmental Testing Corp. in Orange, California showed that Soltron reduces hydrocarbon emissions by 55 per cent, carbon monoxide by 37 per cent, nitrous oxide by 44 per cent and nitrogen chloride by 68 per cent.