Tips n Tricks

The other day one of the application server wouldn't start up because of a required port being used by another application. This, I am sure is of the common problem faced by many developers :)

The task manager in Windows shows only the active processes and gives no detail on the ports opened by these processes. One of the ways to find the process using a port of your interest is to use the netstat command.

The netstat command on windows can be used to list the TCP connections, ports on which the computer is listening, Ethernet statistics, the IP routing table etc.

The netsat -b option can be used to list the process name that is using a

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The camera on my old Sony Ericsson T630 was totally hopeless. Also the amount of memory was so low that after every few photos, I had to move it out to make some space for new ones. However the same is not true with my new HTC Touch. The 2MP camera doesn't take the best of the pictures but its a very handy feature to have in a mobile device. The 1GB memory does take care of storing the photos for a long time. (God! I am talking about HTC so much these days; For those who are bored with these HTC posts, please bear with me :) ) Here is a look at the HTC Camera Interface: ...

ActiveSync, a synchronization program developed by Microsoft allows a mobile device to be synchronized with a Desktop PC. Other than syncing your contacts, calendar, tasks and notes you can also sync the Emails on the Exchange server.

ActiveSync also allows you to

Copy files between PC and the Mobile Device Install/Uninstall Mobile Applications

ActiveSync can also be used to connect to a network or Internet. The connected device can use the computer's network connection as if it were its own. You can use this feature to perform tasks such as downloading non-Outlook e-mail messages or to browse the Internet.

The above feature was the primary reason I

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If you are used to a tabbed browser or a tabbed text editor you would also love a tabbed Windows console. As we all know the windows console isn't the prettiest of the applications nor its usable when it comes to selecting text or pasting text. (I am not sure if the console application has been improved on Windows Vista) The Console project on SourceForge.net is one handy application if you use the windows console a lot. Features include Multiple Tabs Text Editor like Text Selection Customizable console - You can configure the background color, image and transparency levels Keyboard shortcuts - If you are keyboard junkie, you would appreciate this feature too :) One of ...

One important feature expected from a Touch screen based Windows mobile Smartphone is the ability to quickly input text.

Be it composing a SMS/MMS or taking a note or composing a word document, a powerful keyboard application is a must on a Smartphone/Pocket PC.

I quickly got adjusted to the Touch based navigation on my newly purchased HTC Touch Smartphone, however when it came to composing a SMS using my fingers, I failed miserably !

I had to either take support from the Stylus (which I didn't want to) or I had to search for a better powerful keyboard alternative for my phone.HTC did market the Touch phone as the first touch based Smartphone, but they forgot to

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After launching the Internet browser on my HTC Touch, the first site I opened was of my own blog. The browser almost came to halt while loading the home page. When I loaded other sites such as GMail, Flickr, Google Search one thing I noticed was that all these sites had a page compatible with the mobile browser. The content fitted exactly to the bounds of the handset display. Images were kept to minimal, so was the content ! A search for Wordpress+mobile on Google took me to Alex Kings Wordpress Mobile Edition plug-in for Wordpress. The package consists of a Wordpress plug-in which detects requests from Mobile Browsers. It also has a Wordpress theme which ...

After switching over to HTC Touch, I did have a tough time configuring MMS on the handset. Matters were made worse by Airtel's "amazing" customer care service. Initially I was told that the settings would be sent to my phone and that this would avoid the pain of doing the manual configuration. The settings never came; after few more calls to the customer service, I realized that my old Sony Ericsson phone was still registered in Airtel's database and they were trying to send the wrong setting. I finally was able to manually configure the settings not with the help of Google but with little assistance from NowSMS. So if you are stuck with configuring MMS for Airtel on a Windows ...

The recent problem of spam comments bypassing the Akismet filter made me realize that its too bad to rely completely on one service. For one I spent considerable amount of valuable time deleting comments. The other problem was created when these spam comments made their way as "subscription comments" and I got many mails from users asking me the steps to un-subscribe for the comments. Here are some of the alternatives to prevent comment spam: Bad Behavior Akismet focuses only on handling Comment/Pingback/Trackback spam. Your blog might be subject to other attacks such as email harvesting, automated cracking attempts etc. Bad Behavior, conceived in 2005 as a fingerprinting method for HTTP requests, ...

Amit of Labnol suggested couple of useful sites on this post which help you to get more information about a domain. I particularly liked Whoishostingthis.com which helps you to quickly have a look at the hosting provider of a particular domain.

I would like to recommend the following 2 sites.

Whois.sc

Whois.sc was recently renamed to Domain Tools. Domain Tools has been tracking whois history for quite some time now (since 2000). The information provided by the Domain tools whois service is exhaustive.

The information is categorized into

Front Page Information - Website Title, Title Relevancy, SEO Score etc Indexed Data - Alexa Trend and Ranking Server ...

In yesterdays post on Sandisk Cruzer Micro, I was mentioning how U3 Smart technology allows you to carry your favorite PC programs on the flash drive.

Turns out that U3 is not the only technology available to accomplish this task. There is an open source project called PortableApps using which you could turn any flash drive/iPod into a "U3 smart" device.

A portable app is a computer program that you can carry around with you on a portable device and use on any Windows computer. When your USB flash drive, portable hard drive, iPod or other portable device is plugged in, you have access to your software

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