February 2007

Neil Bartlett, a Java developer and a consultant specializing in Eclipse RCP and OSGi is continuing his series of OSGi articles on Eclipsezone.

In one of his latest post, he pointed to a paper titled "IoC Containers and Dependency Injection pattern" written by Martin Fowler.

It was worth a read and the articles section has a lot of interesting stuff. Check it out.

Also the interface of Eclipsezone is little clumsy and makes it difficult to find the series of articles written by Neil. To make things simpler, Neil has created a post in his blog linking all the OSGi articles on Eclipsezone.

By the way, anybody attending EclipseCon 2007 ?

GMail, Google's free webmail service is a top class service in comparison to Microsoft's Hotmail or Yahoo Mail.

GMail which was "invite only", recently opened up its service worldwide to everyone. Now all you to need to get a GMail account is to signup :)

Now Google is even running Ads to promote GMail !!

No second thoughts, GMail's spam filter is THE best and they are marketing the same via their ads.

If anyone is not using GMail as their primary E-Mail ID, its time to switch :)

Checkout this video (from Google) to get a quick overview of GMail's features

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Virtual PC is an virtualization suite for Microsoft Windows operating systems. The software was originally developed by Connectix, and was subsequently acquired by Microsoft. Virtual PC emulates a standard PC and its associated hardware. Virtual PC lets you create separate virtual machines on your Windows desktop, each of which virtualizes the hardware of a complete physical computer. Use virtual machines to run operating systems such as MS-DOS, Windows, and OS/2. You can run multiple operating systems at once on a single physical computer and switch between them as easily as switching applications instantly, with a mouse click. Thus, it can be used to run nearly all operating systems available for ...

Koders is a code search engine which enables developers to easily search and browse source code hosted on thousands of open source repositories.

Krugle (which sounds like Google) is yet another search engine focused on developers and intends to make code search easier and faster.

One of the nice features about this search engine is the additional information displayed along with the search results.

There is a section which displays Code snippets from Safari Books Online. It also displays the related Open Source Projects and related Tech Pages.

Also the links within the search page as tabs and this way you don't end up cluttering your browser.

However the search engine itself was not up to my expectation. After seeing Scoble talk high of the search engine, I took it for a test drive.

Test 1

Search Keyword : Convert String to intLanguage : JavaResults: The search results listed all files having name as Convert.java and having String in the code text

Gmail sign-ups are now open worldwide including India ! No more waiting for someone to invite you just create an account directly at www.gmail.com. Meanwhile Mark Malseed has an interesting story on Sergey Brin (Google's Cofounder)

The OSGi Alliance (formerly known as the Open Services Gateway initiative) is an open standards organization founded in March 1999. Over the past few years it has specified a Java-based service platform that can be remotely managed.

The core part of the specifications is a framework that defines an application life cycle model and a service registry.

The Framework implements a complete and dynamic component model - something that is missing in standalone Java/VM environments. Applications or components (coming in the form of bundles for deployment) can be remotely installed, started, stopped, updated and uninstalled without requiring a reboot - management of Java packages/classes is specified in great detail.

Life cycle management is done via API's which allow

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Steganos LockNote is the one of the simplest application to store/retrieve confidential data. If you want to store E-Mail account passwords, bank login details etc in a secure way, LockNote is the application to use.

It is also very secure since the information is encrypted using a password and it uses AES 256bit encryption.

There is no installation required and you can easily encrypt existing notes/documents by dragging them on to a LockNote window.

One problem with the application is that it creates a executable and hence makes it difficult to share secure notes.

Download Steganos LockNote

SearchMash as the name suggests is a mashup of a Search Engine and is created and maintained by Google itself !

Surprisingly you don't see any Google logo in the index page or the search result page. Only the TOS page seems to confirm that the site is maintained by Google !

When it was launched few months back SearchMash was a mashup of Google Search and Google Image Search.

There seems to be a lot of additions done since then and now SearchMash displays results from Google Search, Image Search, Blog Search, Video Search (Displays YouTube videos too) and Wikipedia.

However the number of search results returned

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Update: The sofa appears to be made out of hundreds of thin, flat chair-shaped silhouettes, joined together by some kind of membrane in an accordion that can collapse down into a dictionary-think chunk or be spread out for feet on end, as a divan, chair or sofa. (via BoingBoing)

RSS Readers: If you cannot see the video, click here to watch it.

ByteMyCode is an online code and tutorial sharing site which allows users to upload snippets or tutorials containing code and text.

One interesting feature in ByteMyCode is the automatic syntax highlighting which makes the submitted code more readable.

Members can not only submit and share code; they can also revise, comment and rate(Digg Style) other code snippets. Through all these actions, members earn "byte points," where they can move up the community rankings.

The community as of now is still small and so is the number of code snippets shared/submitted by the users. However the site is worth checking out :). Also if you want to search for source

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