June 2007

Of the few sports that I love watching, F1 and Tennis tops the list. Regarding the latter, its not just restricted to watching, I play the game a little bit too :).

Yesterday's French Open final between Roger Federer and Nadal was supposed to be a clash of the "titans" and I expected at least a 5 set thriller. However it turned out to be more of a one sided match. I have never seen Federer play that bad; The number of unforced errors he made were so untypical of him.

After Schumacher's exit previous year, I was not sure if I would watch Formula1 racing with the same enthusiasm. However the guy who has caught everybody's attention including me is

...

Pingdom is a service which provides tools to monitor web sites, E-Mail Servers, FTP servers and a multitude of other services.

Though I didn't find the service that useful, they do seem to have introduced a nice little tool (free) to check the page loading speed.

http://www.pingdom.com/tools/fpt/?url=www.venukb.com/blog

(Replace the "url" parameter with the URL of your site)

The Full Page Test loads the complete HTML page including all objects : images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.

The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars. It will help in finding the culprit script/image which is probably

...

Contrary to what most people think, deletion of file on windows does not mean permanent loss of the data. 

When the file is deleted, its not "shredded"; Instead, the table of contents that points out the location of the file is erased.  To put in more simpler words, the attribute of the space used by the deleted file is changed from "occupied" to "available".

Eventually, the hard drive will write new data over the area where the old file is located.

File Recovery utilities take advantage of the fact that the deletion of file in windows is reversible.

Active@ File Recovery is a powerful software utility, designed to restore accidentally deleted files and directories. 

...

PixelBeat has nice compilation of some of the commonly used Linux terminal commands. The commands are also categorized and should help in finding the right command/command usage for the task at had.

Link: http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html

Also note the comment in the above page:

Examples marked with • are valid/safe to paste without modification into a terminal, soyou may want to keep a terminal window open while reading this so you can cut & paste.

Don't forget to Bookmark it for future reference !

Backup in the world of Information Technology refers to the process of making copies of data. This copy of the data would be useful in the event of a data loss. 

Virus attacks, hard disk failure or accidents are the primary reasons for data loss. Most of the PC users have one PC at max and the data is generally stored in a single hard drive.

The most common way of backing up data is to either write it to a CD/DVD or to copy on to a secondary hard drive/USB drive. If you have a hosting space you can backup data even on to this server. One of the problem

...

Eclipse.org always amaze me with the kind of tooling that they go on adding to the Eclipse Platform. Few months back when I was browsing the different projects in Eclipse, I stumbled on Remote System Explorer (RSE)

Remote System Explorer is part of Target Management which in turn in a subproject of Device Software Development Platform (DSDP).

The purpose of the Target Management project is to creates data models and frameworks to configure and manage remote systems, their connections, and their services.

Remote System Explorer helps in

Creating connections to remote Linux/Unix Servers Exploring the remote file system Editing and saving remote files ...

In recent times Videos, especially streaming videos are becoming extremely popular. There are hundreds of video sharing sites that want to become the Flickr of online video world.

Most of the videos on these sites are encoded in Flash and if someone is interested in downloading the videos, he has to start searching for a video downloading software.

Also if you want to copy this video to your iPod or to your mobile device you need to search for a video converter.

Movavi Video Converter is an easy-to-use, powerful software that lets you convert video files to different formats in no time!

User Interface

The following snapshot gives a pretty good

...

The other day I was reading about the popular Desktop search tools on a popular technology site. The 3 tools featured were

Google Desktop Search Microsoft Desktop Search Yahoo Desktop Search

I was immediately keen to know as to how Google, Microsoft and Yahoo display their respective desktop search products on their search engines.

Search on Google

Google puts its own desktop search product ahead of Windows and Yahoo. However it should be noted that it puts in the Microsoft product ahead of Yahoo Desktop Search.

Search on

...

The RSS subscribes for this site is tracked using the Feedburner service. From the past week I have been observing an change in the way the feed count is reported/calculated. I am not sure if I am the only one seeing this change.

The site had an average reader count of around 130 feed subscribers. On one Wednesday it suddenly fell to 75 (almost 50% reduction). I thought that there were a bunch of guys who got bored with my posts :D

The day I wrote a post on Windows Live Writer, the count again shot back to 137. Yesterday I didn't write any post and the count is back to 70's.

...

Microsoft's Windows Live Writer is a powerful desktop based weblog client and is currently the only product I like from Microsoft's stable. The initial beta had lot of interesting features which made it a must have for any blogger.

Review of Windows Live Writer Beta 1

There are lot of free and licensed desktop weblog clients including Qumana but not a single client is as powerful and feature rich as Live writer. Beta 2 version of Live writer is now available and there are lots of new features added into the new version.

Feature Highlights:

Inline Spell Checking - From now on you no longer need to manually run the spell checker. Inserting/Editing Tables - You can insert and edit tables. Nice add-on Support for excerpts - "Split Post" option now allows you to insert the "more" tag in the posts. Previously this could be done only via the HTML Code view Better integration of local and online edited posts. New look and feel