From the monthly archives:

June 2007

Europa is here !

by venukb on June 29, 2007

The annual release of Eclipse code named Europa is now available for download. Like last year’s Callisto release, the Europa release is a coordinated release of different Eclipse project teams.

This year, the annual release includes 21 projects. By releasing these projects at the same time, Eclipse aims to eliminate uncertainty about version compatibility and make it easier to incorporate multiple projects into your environment.

eclipse.org

I personally will be interested in exploring the following projects other than the standard Eclipse Platform/JDT/PDE

CDT - C/C++ Development Tools WTP - Web Tools Platform ...

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Plaxo 3.0

by venukb on June 29, 2007

Plaxo is an online address book service founded by Napster co-founder Sean Parker, Minh Nguyen, and two Stanford engineering students, Todd Masonis and Cameron Ringand. I have been a loyal user of this service from some time now.

I happened to meet a person named Ghanshyam Dass in Shanghai airport (during transit), who later turned out to be the Nasdaq Director for Asia Pacific !! We exchanged cards and the next day I received a Address Update request from him.

This was when I was introduced to Plaxo (By the way this was way back in 2004) !! I immediately signed up for the service and even downloaded the Plaxo toolbar for Outlook (which was the E-Mail client used

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Walt Mossberg reviews iPhone

by venukb on June 27, 2007

Walt Mossberg of WSJ is highly regarded as one of the most influential writers on information technology. After trying out iPhone for 2 week, he has his say on this post

Checkout this video too :)

Points to note from the video:

He was able to get in terms with the virtual keyboard after 5 days of usage Access to Internet using EDGE is slow (However there is an alternative way to connecting using WiFi which is faster) The phone is locked on AT&T and if the AT&T coverage is not good, its not worth going for the lusty phone as of now. ...

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Printing online photos

by venukb on June 22, 2007

My mom still believes that that her roll film camera is much better than the digital camera that I have. The explanation that she gave was that even though digital cameras can store tons of photos on the memory card, she rarely sees any of them being printed !!

I did try to explain that photographs taken with the film fade with age and the digital ones retain the clarity and the color even after many years.

That said, if the hard drive which stores these photos crashes, you loose the photos forever, unless you have made a backup.

I use Flickr Pro account to backup my photos. The Pro account allows permanent archiving of high resolution images.

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USB Thumdrive from China

by venukb on June 21, 2007

Check this picture !

china_thumbdrive

 

Now read this story :)

Some guy went to China and bought it for very cheap. It is supposed be able to store for several GB of memory. But as much as he tried, it didn’t work so he decided to to open it up and that’s what he saw. So please if you go to China or planning to try stuff you buy even though it is very cheap. But anyway I think it’s hard to return stuff there. This is like the extension cord for the USB cut and put inside, how did they even think of doing this?

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Source Control in Eclipse IDE

by venukb on June 18, 2007

Source Control also known as Revision control or source code management (SCM) is the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information. Source Control is most commonly used in software development to manage ongoing development of documents like application source code or design documents or any electronic information which is worked on by a team of people. There are a lot of revision control software out there, the notable ones being CVS, ClearCase and Subversion. The following wikipedia page gives a complete list of the revision control software including detailed information on each of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software Eclipse is fast becoming the default IDE among developers (Thanks to the extensible ...

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Showing Top Commentators

by venukb on June 16, 2007

The sidebar now displays the list of Top commentators for this blog. This has been overdue from some time now. Nate Sanden's Top commentator plugin eased the task of showing the top commentators. It is currently shown only on the home page. In order to accommodate this list on my 2 column theme, I have also decided to move the Blogroll to a separate page. (Thanks to Shankar for pointing out the Blogroll Plugin) Note: If you are using the Top Commentators plugin, you should also have a look at the 9 options that could be tweaked by editing the plugin. (Unfortunately, the plugin doesn't come with a preference page. I especially found the following options useful:

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FeedDemon - Worth Buying ?

by venukb on June 16, 2007

As mentioned in the About Me page, till now I have paid for 2 software which I thought were really worth the price.

One was for the Flickr Pro account using which I could archive and share "GB's" of photos. Its probably the best photo sharing/management application that I have come across.

The other application that is worth paying is Mint. Its one of the best web analytics software out there and also one of the best looking application as well.

It provides real time visitor data and being a self-hosted application, it gives you complete control over your analytics data.

As

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BTIS - Bangalore Transport Information System

by venukb on June 13, 2007

Anyone who has visited or stayed in Bangalore would have definitely experienced the horrible traffic while commuting within the city.

Bangalore Traffic Police in association with Mapunity and Airtel have come up with a comprehensive urban traffic information system for Bangalore city know as Bangalore Transport Information System (BTIS)

Mapunity Information Services is a Bangalore-based developer of geographic information systems primarily for government departments, civil society organizations, and development initiatives of commercial ventures.

With BTIS:

You can get real time information about the traffic conditions within the city.

There are

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Safari - Now on Windows

by venukb on June 12, 2007

One of the announcements made by Steve Jobs in WWDC was the availability of Safari Web Browser on Windows. As soon as I saw the news (it was around 1AM IST), I was tempted to try it out.

The windows installable is around 8MB. The Browser setup optionally installs the following components:

Bonjour Networking Service Apple Update Software

According to Apple, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

Also Safari executes JavaScript up to 2.8 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox

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