This is going to be Fun

Style detection post from windows live writer.

Blat - Command Line Emailer saves me time

I was reading this blog post on hanselman.com/blog. It really is a lifehack. If you are using REMEMBER THE MILK, popular online todo manager, this can be really helpful.

RTM provides you a kind of inbox email address, you can find this in your RTM setting > info section. Note down your Inbox email address and use Blat to send it to the service.

Thanks Scott for handy tip.

Source: Blat - Command Line Emailer saves me time
Originally published on Wed, 28 Feb 2007 10:16:13 GMT by Scott Hanselman

JProbe Suite

We are trying to get JProbe working on our J2EE App. It seems like a very useful tool set. I am excited to find out what it can do for our application. Basically, I want to find out how good is our code? I will post more information when I have little more grasp over JProbe and has done some work.

Tools:

• JProbe Profiler
• JProbe Memory Debugger
• JProbe Coverage

Firefox Extensions I use

Ever since Firefox has launched, It has changed the way we think of browser and things it can do. Firefox has shown to world that good quality software can come from non-profit (open source) organizations. Firefox’s open architecture and vast development community has given us lots and lost of extensions. I have tried lots of extensions. I usually install new extension and try to use in my day in day out activity. If it does make my life easier any way then I use it more frequently. Every 2 weeks there is a cleanup period on firefox extensions, in which I go through the extensions, I haven’t used in a while and think that I am not using enough to keep them around. Those extensions get disabled. After 2 weeks, if not needed those extensions get uninstalled.

 

Following is the list of extensions that are currently active and used regularly.

• Adblock Plus
• Adblock Filterset.G Updater
• All-in-One Gestures
• All-in-One Sidebar
• Auto Copy
• Colorful Tabs
• Compact Library Extension Organizer (CLEO)
• del.icio.us Complete
• Download Statusbar
• EverNote Web Clipper
• Fasterfox
• Firebug
• Firefox Extension Backup Extension (FEBE)
• Flashblock
• FlashGot
• Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
• Gmail Manager
• Greasemonkey
• OpenBook
• PDF Download
• Restart Firefox
• Stylish
• Web Developer

Until the moment, I wrote this I didn’t realize that this list has 23 extensions.

Download all the extensions in .xpi form

Cell Phones - Mobile Phones in India

Cell/Mobile phones launched in India around end of 1998 and start of 1999. Within last 7 years India has emerged as a fastest growing cell phone market in World.

There are lot of factors working underneath to make this happen.

Population - India is second largest country in whooping population around 1,095,351,995 people.

Significant part of Indian population is middle income earning class. When cell phones first launched in India, the prices where not at all appealing to consumers for middle income earners. It was target for high income earners. Due to this first couple of years we didn’t see as much growth in cell phone subscribers. After understanding that fact, Cell phone providers have adapted their price plans which are more inline with middle income earners. This was one of the biggest factor in driving cell phone growth. and It still is.

Cell Phone carriers are providing prices so cheap that it is viable to keep cell phones rather than traditional land line telephone connections.

Cell Phones are more convenient for most of the people in India. Even students going to 10th standard sometime has cell phone on them. sometimes you will see that some families will have cell phone for each member of the family.

Cell phones have become active part of the culture in India. It is hard to spot a person without cell phone in any town.

For your information:

As Per, Telecom Regulator Authority of India end of July 2006 Cell Phone subscribers are 111.23 Millions in India. Not bad of a no in 7 years.

 From Wikipedia

India

The country has 101.8 million subscribers in total, or a 9.29% penetration rate. [113] (June 2006)

Rank	Operator	Technology	Subscribers (in millions)	Ownership
1	Airtel	GSM, EDGE	23.07 [114] (June 2006)	Bharti Tele-Ventures, Singapore Telecommunications (30.84%) and Vodafone
2	RIM	GSM, CDMA	22.52 [115] (June 2006)	Reliance Industries Limited
3	BSNL	GSM	18.3 [116] (June 2006)	State-owned
4	Hutch	GSM, EDGE	17.5 [117] (June 2006)	Hutchison Whampoa
5	!DEA	GSM	8.5 [118] (June 2006)	Birla (Tata Group)
6	BPL MOBILE	GSM	3.61	Hutchison Whampoa
7	TATA MOBILE	GSM, CDMA	3.61	Tata group
8	Aircel	GSM	2.4	Maxis Telecom
9	MTNL	GSM	2.17 [119] (June 2006)	State-owned
10	Spice	GSM	1.52	Spicecorp and DISTACOM
11	Fascel	GSM	1.51	HFCL, Shinawatra, Bezeq and Kotak Mahindra

Reading Material:

India adds 3.2 mln GSM subscriber in June

How Cell Phone Works - from How Stuff Works

Cell Phone Subscribers by Countries

Next Installment on more features offered by cell phone provider in India which we don’t have available here in North America.

Windows Live Writer - Offline Blog Editor from Microsoft

Microsoft has jumped into Offline Blog Editor market at last with Windows Live Writer(Beta). So far it looks like a good editor overall with some bugs. (Beta remember). This has some unique features if improved and positioned correctly, has potential of becoming a good editor in the space. It is so much like BlogJet.

I will be watching this editor as I am always open to new option for my blogging.

Good to know that Microsoft is not dead in creating good software for everyone to use.

Download this from here

TechCrunch has a review of Windows Live Writer Here.

A-PDF Split - PDF File spliter Review

Recently, I have started to teach ASP.NET to group of College students. I had a huge file from ASP.NET certification 70–315 Amit Kalani. I wanted to give the students this book as a reference so they can go through the material on their own. But as most college students have habit of scanning through all the whole book and get distracted by other topics so I wanted something which would split the whole e-book in by chapters.

After finding lot of other option I decided on A-PDF split PDF by Affordable PDF Tools. There were other choices which I looked at are PDF Split-Merge by VeryPDF.com, ARTS PDF Split & Merge.

You have difference choices in how you want to split the pdf file.

• You can specify Page start – Page End No.
• You can split by Each Page
• You can split by Bookmark in the PDF File. This has one more option to select multiple layers of bookmarks.
• You can split by ranges like 10–20,21–32,34 etc
• You can also specify the output directory for the resulting PDF files and Base Name for resulting PDF files.

Overall, A-PDF Split is a great tool. It comes handy and provides wide range of choices for PDF split. You won’t have to look furthur for PDF split solution after this.

What do you think? If you are using any other tools let me know. Post the comment here or email me.

Are you Bored at Work ?

If you are at the point in your life that you have decided to terminate your employment, Should you really write well prepared Resignation Letter or Not ?

We all will face this question one day or another. After working at the same place for a long time, there are not enough challenges to tackle. You know in and out of the business process and you are the as high as you can go, Guess what do you next. Quit !!

Surprised ! Most of the Employment Advisors from any consultant firm will give you that answer. Over the weekend, I heard a interview of a employment consultant over the radio (I don’t remember the name, but I will find and post here so you don’t think that I am the one creating these things up ), there are some symptoms you can observe to find out that if you are ready for new employment.

• If you have dread going to work on Mondays.
• Whole week, you look forward to and count hours to Friday 6:00PM
• If your skills are not being challenged enough.
• If you think, you have become stagnant in your career progress and career goal.
• If you are not motivated enough

You are ready for a change in your employment. This employment can be within the same company working in different role or entirely working with different company.

Now a days, employers recognises that employees are the biggest assets for the business.

Some food for thoughts: Good for your morale

Attitude Isn’t Everything, But It’s Close

Also, I’d like to Thank the supply Clerk..

Remeber The Milk: API’s More and Ta-Da Lists

Remember The Milk

If you have been reading my blog, you would already know that I have been using Remember the Milk as my To-do list application. So far I have been pretty impressed with RTM overall as a useful application. I can’t say enough good things about this application.

Features Liked Most:

• Broad range of key board short cuts for mostly all the tasks – Great Feature
• Ability to email task to your inbox via private email – Great Feature
• Receive reminders on my skype and Cellphone via SMS – Sometime Life saving Feature
• Able to create new lists as needed. This feature extends the application if need be. – I use this feature to create new list for a new project I am working on as per GTD. When I am done, I can replace this list with new list as new project comes. – Easier Product adoption

Features Need to become undisputed champion in To-Do list market (Bit extreme title)

• Google Desktop Gadget / Google Homepage Module / Yahoo Widget / Desktop application easier access without opening browser (similar to Ta-Da List Mac Widget)
• Need more API Development Kits like Java, C#, VB.NET. C API kit is good but need to have broader range to trigger wider development on third party widgets/gadgets. If .NET API’s available, I will be more motivated to create a widget like Ta-Da List Mac Widget.

Ta-Da List

Ta-Da list is a second To-Do list application which appeals me most. It is a part of 37 Signals set of online tools. This is a very clear-cut application. It is not at all bloated. Nice and simple To-do lists. Ta-Da list has a great Widget available for MAC, available at http://www.keeganjones.com/widgets/tada/

Following are the screen shots of the Widget.

 

LifeHacker Survey: Desktop Blog Editor Comparision

LifeHacker has done a survey on Different Desktop Blog Editors. Following is the outcome of the surveys. Interesting findings.

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Desktop blog editor comparison

Our recent blog editor poll revealed just how many editors there are out there.

Though the majority of people use an online editor, the most voted desktop editors were the Performancing for Firefox editor, followed by w.bloggar and Ecto. Also, many commenters said that they used BlogJet.

Not all of these editors are free, not all are cross-platform and not all are WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).

The Performancing extension scored as the highest desktop blog editor on our poll. Performancing is a free Firefox extension which allows you to draft and publish posts. It has support for del.icio.us, Technorati, pingbacks/trackbacks and FTP. Performancing is convenient due to the fact that it runs inside Firefox.

w.bloggar is a freeware desktop blog editor for Windows. w.bloggar isn’t a WYSIWYG editor, meaning you have to write the HTML (or use the buttons to do it for you), instead of writing a post in a way you would write a Word document. Interestingly, w.bloggar lets you either choose to preview through a Mozilla-based preivew, or an Internet Explorer based one. w.bloggar supports trackbacks, pingbacks, FTP and most blogging platforms. Also, it colour codes the HTML.

Ecto is a shareware desktop blog editor, costing $17.95, for Windows and Mac. It, like w.bloggar, is not WYSIWYG. The features of the editor vary based upon the operating system. One useful feature both have is the thumbnailing of images, this saves a lot of work messing around creating them manually.

BlogJet is another piece of shareware, for Windows, costing $39.95. BlogJet is WYSIWYG, and integrates with flickr, web browsers, and various media players. Also, BlogJet allows you to add audio attachments to posts and transmission over OpenSSL.

There are other blog editors: Qumana, Zoundry and Flock’s built-in blog editor are examples. Also, the next version of Microsoft Word allows posting to blogs. — Joe Anderson

Topix.net - Great News WebSite you didin’t know about

TechCrunch has featured a news site called topix.net. After techcrunch review of topix.net I went to the site to review the site. Great feature with this site is it gives you local news aggregated from your local news sources. In last couple of days of using this, I am impressed with this. I am changing from google news to topix.net from today.

On a side note, topix.net has 10 times bigger news item index than google and 7 times bigger than Yahoo News. That’s gotta change you mind too. This is a creation of a great team from  who created a biggest open source human edited directory of sites. DMOZ is frequently used by Google Search Crawlers and Yahoo Search Crawlers and lot of others.

Give this a shot. I am sure you will be sold on topix.

 

Visit to Barrie over the civic holiday weekend

We visited Barrie over the weekend. It was fun. We had a very less traffic on way to barrie. It was fun going on with windows rolled down and enjoying the weather. We have been to barrie numerous time before. We have our favourite beach place on beach. It was great weather. High Wind though. High winds was attracting Wind Surfers to the beach. There were some great wind surfers and some people learning. Sometimes, It was funny so see how people wanted to start wind surfing and wanted to catch a wave. I saw a guy 55 years old, with white beard, jumped on the surf and started going like 25 years old. It was so much intimidating….. May be I should start doing wind surfing.

Near to City Marina, there was a festival going on with around 300 vendors selling lots of stuff for home decoration to technical stuff. It was fun. One thing I like most was hammock. http://www.greenmountainhammocks.com

Payal, My wife, really liked this one.

 

You can see Live Barrie Web Cam here

Barrie Location: http://www.city.barrie.on.ca/Content.cfm?C=2386&SC=1&SCM=0&MI=198&L1M=38

We will defiantly going to barrie to explore the downtown and some Tourism points rest of the summer or next summer.  

Creative Job - Commute Helper

Creativity of some people never seize to amazes me. As a old saying goes “Where there is a will ( not William, but “want to do it with your full heart”), there is a way”. This guy in San Francisco has made a living being a commute helper. Do you ask huh ? What is that ?

It is pretty simple. It is what it says. A guys stands near a exit of freeway with a sign in his hand saying I will sit in your car for  $10 and you can use Hight Occupancy Vehicle lanes to get to your destination faster. Very Creative ! wouldn’t you say? Definitely. Read on the full article at Personal Financial Advice site. There are ways you can make money, only thing you need to do is Think out of the box.

Toronto is not that busy as SF but give it couple of years and then a original commute helper guy can franchise his idea here too.

Personal Finance Advice » Blog Archive » Creative Job - Commute Helper

This is what happened. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, the commutes in certain sections are absolutely horrendous. This guy was sitting in a traffic jam one morning watching all the people in the car pool lane drive by while he was moving at snail’s pace. He decided that he needed to get someone else in his car so that he could get to work in a timely manner using the car pool lane, and at first thought that his only option was to start a car pool.

Personal Finance Advice » Blog Archive » Creative Job - Commute Helper.

Top Ten Reasons Why Peopel Quit Their Jobs

This survey by Greg Smith sheds a light on some very good points. If you are manager, you should look at this point and make sure that even by mistake you are not encouraging these pointed behaviours.

If you are employee, you should use this 10 reasons to find out if this has been going on with you. If yes, I would suggest you find a better job.

Logoworks Small Business Newsletter » Blog Archive » Top Ten Reasons Why People Quit Their Jobs

There are many reasons why good employees quit, most are preventable. From my years of experience as a consultant, I’ve identified a “Top Ten” list of reasons why people leave jobs:

1. Management demands that one person do the jobs of two or more people, resulting in longer days and weekend work.
2. Management cuts back on administrative help, forcing professional workers to use their time copying, stapling, collating, filing and other clerical duties.
3. Management puts a freeze on raises and promotions, when an employee can easily find a job earning 20-30 percent more somewhere else.
4. Management doesn’t allow the rank and file to make decisions or allow them pride of ownership. A visitor to my website E-mailed me a message that said, “Forget about the “professional” decisions—how about when you can’t even select the company’s holiday card without the President rejecting it for one of his own taste?”
5. Management constantly reorganises, shuffles people around, and changes direction constantly.
6. Management doesn’t have or take the time to clarify goals and decisions. Therefore, it rejects work after it was completed, damaging the morale and esteem of those who prepared it.
7. Management shows favouritism and gives some workers better offices, trips to conferences, etc.
8. Management relocates the offices to another location, forcing employees to quit or double their commute.
9. Management promotes someone who lacks training and/or necessary experience to supervisor, alienating staff and driving away good employees.
10. Management creates a rigid structure and then allows departments to compete against each other while at the same time preaching teamwork and cooperation. Interesting, isn’t it — that all ten factors begin with the phrase “Management….” Interesting, too, just how many of these high-turnover factors are preventable? My retention survey confirmed the truth of the saying, “Employees don’t quit their companies, they quit their bosses.” Thirty five percent of the respondents answered yes to the question, Was the attitude of your direct supervisor/manager the primary factor in your quitting a previous job?

Data Backup Tools

I have a confession to make. I don’t have a back up of my critical hard-drive. On my dell inspiron 8600 I have 40 GB HD space. I have external 160 GB which hold most of my data. I recently bought 250 GB Maxtor 7200 RPM Hard-drive and plan to back up all of my 160 GB of data over this weekend. I am not sure which tool to use to get this data backed up faster and safely. Today I will be doing some research on tools for faster data backup.

I will post more details here as soon as i have them.

High Tempratures in Toronto

We are getting record breaking high tempratures in Toronto these days. Today tempratures are going to be breaking 51 years old temprature record.

It is so Hot that you can cook an egg on car roof with in 10 mins. No I am not kidding. Some one already done that today here. If these continues for couple of more days, I will be praying for winter soon. And I don’t like winter that much. !! I was down with the flu for couple of days. I think I have lost my tolerance to heat. Living outside of india will do that to you. City of Toronto has opened some cooling center through out the city to help people who don’t have access to AC.

Sorry I have to go and drink some frozen drinks now.hehe.

Tags: Toronto Heat Wave

Screen Protectors for PocketPC

For screen protection on my Pocket PC, I was using the default protector came on when I bought it. Tell you the truth, It wasn’t even a screen protector, it was just a plastic stuck on the screen. I was putting off to order more usable screen protectors due to my laziness.

After researching a bit for screen protectors, I came across lot of choices on market. Some are just plastic with adhesives and some comes with glue stick to stick it on your screen. I really hated a plastic one (my friend had that) which would have air bubbles in the middle of the screen.

The I ordered a Clear Touch. It was bit thick than other screen protectors. We have been using it for 10 days now. No scratches yet. Let’s see how it goes. I am pretty pleased with this so far. I will post if something horribally goes wrong with this. otherwise consider me a happy customer.

Remember The Milk - To Do list

I have started using remember the milk as my to do list application. So far I have been really impressed with Remember The Milk. You can use this system as a Getting Things Done Tools easily with some configuration. As I have previously stated in post, I have been reading GTD by David Allen. So this seems like a great tool to implement the concepts and strategies from GTD.

Some Great Features Remember The Milk

• Great list of predefined lists
• Great list of keyboard shortcuts to make your user experience great.
• You can specify Priority, DueDate, Repeat, Time Estimate, Tags, URL, Notes etc. This feature set will take care of your needs.
• One impressive feature is that you can send task using your private email address given by RTM. with Email you can add Task, import tasks. RTM gives you iCalendar Service and Atom Feeds for your Tasks.
• You can share the task between the users and send task around a team. This functionality can be used by a team greatly.
• You can get reminder Email, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, GoogleTalk, Jabber, ICQ, Skype, GaduGadu.
• You can get reminder on your mobile/cell phone as text message. Countries supported includes Australia, Canada, UK, USA, Germany, Japan etc.

Great Tool So Far. I will post the review after a month or so.

PortableApps.com - Great Resource for Everyone

In last couple of months, I have come across mulitple mentions of PortableApps.com on blogosphere. As name says it is a collection of all the apps you can directly run without ever need of installation. You can carry around some useful apps on USB drive and you get the goodness of just about any apps on any machine. I would suggest you check this out.

The application categories includes audio & video, Development, Games, Internet, Office, Operating Systems, Photos & Design, Utilities. http://portableapps.com/apps
You can have your basic apps with you all the times.

Have Fun.

PS: You can get Firefox, GAIM, FileZilla, VLC Media Player, Portable OpenOffice, Thunderbird in portable formats.

“Getting Things Done - David Allen” - Good Post by Merlin Mann

Merlin Mann has a great post on Getting Things Done. For those who already know what it is, this will server a refresher and who doesn’t know what it is well You will be pretty thankful to me to pointing you in the right direction.

Back to GTD: Do a fast “mind-sweep” | 43 Folders

Back to GTD: Do a fast “mind-sweep” Whether you learned GTD from the book or heard it from The David himself (via one of his excellent seminars), you know that the vital first stage of Getting Things Done is Collection.