Recently google has been all over the news - online, print and television, atleast here in the US; and why not, with their IPO and everything, lot of people are hoping this would kickstart the recovery of the economy. I have been toying with a few other search engines for a few months now. These have also been highlighted in the media recently alongwith the google hype as a potential threat to google....
This reminds me of a few weeks ago when during one of my IM sessions with my buddy Karan I was bashing up Linux (which from those who know is not really me). This lead to (atleast that is what I think) a frantic call from him - all the way across the pond - and we yapped like a pair of teenage girls for close to an hour +. The crux of that debate… err....
Bill Venners has an interesting article on Abstraction and Efficient. He says that Abstraction is a mechanism to understand things. A good analogy he lays out is in Mathematics. Where expressing a solution means we really did understand the problem and not write up some code to try a “special case“. Also states that it is important to generalise and see one particular problem as a example of the class of problems....
If you did not hear, then google recently launched its <strong>Personalised Web Search</strong> feature which is still not Beta (its on their lab page). Here you can go and setup you interests (essentially your scope) and then you can narrow down your results to only within the context of that scope. Quite interesting when you are looking for something which is also very generic or a completely different topic.
A friend’s (Phil Kerkel) laptop recently got infected with HackerDefender which cost him about a day’s worth of work. Now this seems to be harmless, but something like this invading the system is scary, especially when you have all your data and not to mention in most cases a lot of our client’s data! Basically, these guys use the FTP services installed on Windows machines running on high speed networks (such as DSL/Cable, or University campuses) to they can use that fat pipe to distribute copyrighted material such as films, games and software etc....
Karan found this and you can read about all of it in his blog. But I checked and he is right! Gmail does not show me the time of the “origin” of the email only when gmail got it. So taking Karan’s scenario: Retrieve from external pop3 mailbox 250 new messages Import 250 Messages look at inbox, and you have 250 messages received at the same time (1 min ago) Oh wow!...
I suddenly started getting an error during boot up on one of my machine and could not figure out what it was, after spending a fair amount of time on google, I found this listing of error codes that I feel was very helpful. You can bookmark this post and use it as your reference. Code Description 01x Undetermined problem errors 02x Power supply errors 1xx System Board Errors 101 System board error - Interrupt failure...
So, somehow I was one of the “dudes” to get a gmail account. Since I have been travelling a lot (on work), I don’t get the time to be online as much - if you have me on one of the IM’s, you know that - since I am online only about 50% of the day. But the point I am getting to, is that I have not had a chance to play with gmail all that much....
OSnews and Aspire were running a <strong>competition</strong> for writing a Development Article where I had submitted an entry on Exception Management in .NET. To my surprise I <strong>won</strong> that (even though there were not too many entries). You can read the article <strong>here</strong> . I will be posting here also probably this weekend.
After my <strong>recent post</strong> on spyware, there is an interesting <strong>story</strong> being run by BBC where 90% of technology managers say that there is some kind of “spyware” running on their employees PC to track their browsing habits with 29% of those being installed surreptitiously. The interesting number to me was that about 6% of users believed that the machine they use had been infected by such software. So I guess you should stop reading this now and get back to work....
<strong>ICP DAS USA</strong> has a new PLC coming out that is running on Windows CE.NET 4.2 on a Intel Strong ARM CPU. It can run PC based control software developed with higher languages such as c#, vb.net and embeded c++. This offers the best of both the worlds - PC and PLC. If you like ladder logic you can use ISaGRAF and TraceMode. It also has a builtin VGA, Ethernet, CompactFlash, USB, Keyb and mouse ports (phew) and can use a regular monitor (or touchscreen) to view its HMI....
Karan pointed this one out to me, but <strong>seems</strong> like google is into Mirrors now. <strong>Check</strong> out what “eerhab tima” returns. :)
First of all here are the sys. requirements: Macromedia Flash Player 6 r79 IE 6 compatible browser with Javascript enabled The IT manager - overworked and underappreciated. You know the story. Back in school, always the last to be picked for football, but the first one they ran to when they accidentally deleted a homework assignment. Not much has changed since then. But the fact is it takes a special skill set to manage an IT department....
Yes it is true and it is very cool! <strong>Mainsoft</strong> has a product called Visual MainWin for both J2EE and Unix and Linux platforms. You can have your ASP.NET applications (using ADO.NET) deployed on a single J2EE platform. Please note, this is not really “calling” any web services that are running on Java. How does it work? Well for one you can check out <strong>this</strong> flash movie (and it surely is amazing!...
Incase you did not know, but this blog runs on .Text with minor tweaks to the code. When I run this in the <strong>W3C Validator</strong> , I get 61 (wow!) errors back. If you examine the <strong>results</strong> of the validator some interesting things emerge. Here is a listing of the issues I found: “End tag for element not found” - If you look at the source you will see that there is an open element and this is the corresponding end tag....
Though, this has been possible by google for a bit, most people did not know all the power of google. Here are some of the things you can do: <strong>Area Code Maps</strong> Package Tracking ( <strong>FedEx</strong> , UPS, USPS) <strong>Flight Tracking Info</strong> <strong>Vehicle Info</strong> <strong>Patent Search</strong> <strong>FAA Plane Registration</strong> <strong>UPC Codes</strong> [FCC Equipment IDs]( http://www.google.com/search?q=fcc B4Z-34009-PIR) There is also a <strong>calculator</strong> which in addition to the simple things (such as addition, multiplications, etc) can also calculate the sqrt, trigonometric functions (sin, cos, etc....
Ergodex has made what it dubs as the “ <strong>The World’s First Totally Personalizable Input System</strong> ”. They have a pad with a sticky surface that connects via usb to a computer. You can then stick the keys to the surface as you like. You can “record” macros and assign them to keys and can be executed at one touch. Now, looking at it, my geek factor thinks it cool, but when I put on my practical hat, is it really worth almost the $150 bucks?...
<strong>This Is Broken</strong> , run by Mark Hurst , in my opinion has an excellent way to popularise the customer experience on the web. Not only is it “lmao“ funny, but it also tells you which products and companies to avoid! Kudos to Mark!
Many people have come to me asking what the heck does the Blog name mean? I have the same as my handle on MSN Messenger also and I get the same question there. For the non-techy folks, it is quite interesting that the first thing that comes to their mind is that there is a virus. Hmm, have we rooted this fear so deeply in them now? If so then probably we have failed, but thats another story....
A bunch of my friends asked me, what is all the “gibberish” on the test posts that I had submitted to ensure that everything works. I was quite surprised to hear these - especially these are friends who are into custom development on various platforms and technologies. The thought that they have never seen this “gibberish” was quite astounding. So, the “gibberish”, is basically Lorem Ipsum which is sample or dummy text originally of the printing and typesetting industry, but now is used by the Information Architects in all product companies (that I know of)....
These guys show you how to fit a fully functional PC based on a VIA M10000 EPIA board . They went onto fit it into a Red Hat box and then using a sensor told the boot-loader which OS to run based on which box it is in. Now thats cool! Also check out the <strong>other neat projects</strong> they have done.