Opera Mini -- A Definitive Web Browser for Mobile Phones

Opera Mini -- A Definitive Web Browser for Mobile Phones

Sometime back we were researching on the GPRS features of Samsung E1410. You can find the said discussion over here. Recently I came across another elegant browser called Opera Mini which seems to be a rich and promising solution than the shipped ones like OpenWave and Samsung/Nokia proprietary browser software.

Opera Mini has a good lot of features like:

• Speed
• Skins
• Video
• Save Page
• Sync

Check out for yourself from Opera Mini website.

K9 Web Protection -- A Definitive Secure Way of Browsing the Internet

K9 Web Protection -- A Definitive Secure Way of Browsing

I just came across a good tool called K9 Web Protection from the house of Blue Coat Systems. K9 Web Protection is offered as a free download. It runs as a cool Windows Service transparently in the system. As you browse the Internet and whenever a web request is recieved, it is intercepted by the Windows Service and checks against the BlueCoat Web URL Category catalog. This is compared against the local BlueCoat settings or supervisory mode and if all things pass fine, the browser is served with the contents else the user would get an error page with an instruction to see the computer administrator.

With the growing threat of novel phishing websites and malware websites, I think, our PCs need to be equipped with K9 Web Protection to ensure that we stay protected against any perils and browse the internet safely.

Is the message-response truly blank?

Is the message-response truly blank?

Particularly in a truly time-involved message conversations to help the recipient locate the particular response quickly we normally add our responses directly into his body and optionally with some font colorization. It is customary in those cases to add a simple text like 'Please find my comments in <preferred color>' or just leave it blank with the sig alone.

I recently encountered a piquant situation with a Google Apps powered messaging system. Despite the fact that one of the original messages was colored, the messaging system still thought it was original text and hid it within the 'Show Quoted Text' color. Just a second before responding to the user that 'Your response was blank', I just gave a quick search through the quoted text to find this discrepancy of the messaging system.

Eighth Prize Winner of Community-Credit July 2009 Contest

Eighth Prize Winner of Community-Credit July 2009 Contest

I am very glad to inform that I have been winner again and more as a Eighth Prize Winner for the month of July 2009 in the Community Credit website. You can check out other winners at this page of Community-Credit. [You need to select July 2009 in the month dropdown].


Please see the points earned and prize description below (screenshot taken from Prizes page):

There is more to laurels to win and milestones to conquer. Stay Tuned!

Faster Firefox finds it amidst a steady state of bugs too...

Faster Firefox finds it amidst a steady state of bugs too...

No doubt, the most latest version of Mozilla FireFox 3.5 is an excellent web browser with a great number of features like the following:

1. Powerful and fast JavaScript Engine
2. Private Browsing
3. An ability to revive inadvertantly closed tabs
4. Smaller memory footprint

Whilst browsing a news website, I just found out that even within a week, about 55 known bugs have been published in the new version of FireFox. Check out http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/KG04Dj01.html

Renewal of Microsoft MVP Award

Renewal of Microsoft MVP Award

It was a pleasant surprise today morning to recieve an email from Microsoft MVPAward on their renewing my MVP for another year.

A few things to recall -- I have been MVP since 2003 respectively in the areas marked thereto:

1. 2003-04: .NET Framework
2. 2004-05: C#
3. 2006-07: ASP/ASP.NET
4. 2007-08: ASP/ASP.NET
5. 2008-09: ASP/ASP.NET
6. 2009-10: ASP/ASP.NET

You can find my MVP Profile being linked to from the right navigation widget of this weblog.

This Week CP Survey -- As Apt to Current Day Chennai (India) IT Environment

This Week CP Survey -- As Apt to Current Day Chennai (India) IT Environment

This week's 'The CodeProject' survey on Have you written a program for a friend or relative, and would you again? with the underlying thought like "Whether you've written something for free to help a mate, or done some consulting work for your significant other's significant other - would you do it again or should friends and work not mix?" seems to be applying perfectly for these Chennai (Tamil Nadu) IT circle environment at least with a number of people that I have met.

At least in this part of India, we can see people trying to derive maximum advantage of you, sucking blood as much they can by paying you peanuts (or even trying to avoid that to the maximum). The interesting part is that they would try visiting you again shamelessly time and again for the same benefit. I just thought I can share a few honorary circles that befit this bill and some of the good treatments/retaliations that either me and/or my friends have given them whenever they confront.

At first I just thought I would try suppressing the names but then I just thought I should narrate it diplomatically so that many other people can be saved from such miscreants trapping them.

1. Problem: There was a guy called 'Syed Albeez' who was trying to bug and pester me and a lot of friends circle harvesting the phone numbers from the job sites. He wanted us to give free software development for his organization. When my friend scheduled a visit to his office about a couple of years back, he was offering full time employment and the salary he was willing to pay was like 84 USD per month.
   
   Workaround: My friend challenged him for a business deal and he just escaped into the wild and no say from him or no email replies from thereon.
2. Problem: One of the person from my previous organization called Francis**, who worked there in the Human Resources department resigned there around 2003. I admit that he was instrumental in me joining during the 2001 recession but at the same time there is a limit to the gratitude and the help he can expect from me.
1. About three years back he was asking me some loan guarantor signature for about ten lakhs because he was starting up a new business. Till then, there was no email communication. A well-wisher strongly objected and he told not to venture such deals with him since he sounds more or less like an esoterically hysteric character and there are more chances of he running away amuck. Without being in touch with so long and contacting some one only for the sake of benefit is kind of sounding a very selfish attitude and sounds to be opportunistic. The person who guided me against helping him was perfectly true in his speculation. He didn't seem to venture into any business.
2. About an year later, he was again calling a number of guys since he was working in some US call center night shift and it to recruit .NET programmers.
   Workaround: Again, when we took the help of the same well-wisher, he just asked us to 'brush him off'.
3. About a week back, he wrote me a big message in the subject of email 'This is Francis. Can you give your contact number?'. When I wrote him back 'Why?', he was replying that he is working in some company called 'Trenchant Financial Technologies' and recruiting .NET developers again. He wanted me to do some free advertising in forums ("crop dusting forums with dirty crap about job posting for his shabby shack).
   Workaround: This time we thought we would have some summer cool fun with him besides to test whether he has some social sense. I asked him whether he can donate funds for philanthropic causes. I am associated with a few animal welfare organizations and Sri Ramakrishna Mutt. I just thought I would try to make him contribute there too. He replied furiously "What donations? I give donations to church. My father gives donations". The interesting part is that his English is so much broken. I am just trying to think, if I can gather all the entire set of conversations into a single PDF with Zoho entitled as 'Fun with Francis' and put it on Scribd so that at least readers can have some fun time reading it besides getting a social enlightenment on such crooked people.
   
   [**Name truncated or might have been changed to preserve the privacy of the person. The purpose of the post is to serve as an eye-opener for the community to be wary of bad apples and not to crib/complaint against any person.]

I hence thought I would share this topic on my technical weblog for the benefit of IT fraternity to be wary of such underworld people spread amongst us.

How easily to remember the different layers in OSI Reference Model?

How easily to remember the different layers in OSI Reference Model?

Whilst posting about "An easy way to remember Rahu Kalam", I just recalled about a simple and a similar sentence that we learnt during college days to remember the different layers in Computer Networks. It was a book titled "Computer Networks" by Andrew S. Tanenbaum that was prescribed for the syllabus.

The simple sentence was 'Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away'. Now we can remember the following layers simply:

1. Physical
2. Data Link
3. Network
4. Transport
5. Session
6. Presentation
7. Application

When I did a quick Internet Search of this statement itself, I just got a few more interesting sentences to make one remember the seven layers. Check it out here from TcpIp guide website.

A Free Online PDF Split/Merge Utilities

A Free Online PDF Split/Merge Utilities

PDF is by far the most common document formats that have been used across the world by everyone. There are cases, when we need to split a PDF document into multiple PDFs and sometimes we may need to merge multiple PDF documents into a single document. Editing such PDF documents stipulate that we Acrobat Reader and related tools, which are rather heavy and cumbersome to install.

I just found out a few quick and easy PDF Split and Merge utilities that help us in this direction. I would like to share them here for the benefit of other readers who might be looking out for a similar solution:

1. PDF Hammer
2. RPTEA Split Merge (supports even zip input)

Perhaps we can bookmark these URLs for our use later too.

A Quick Online Zipping Solution

A Quick Online Zipping Solution

We always have an easy way to zip and unzip files online with quick nifty little utilities like WinZip, UltimateZip and now starting from Windows XP, there is a builtin support to compression and decompression by way of 'Compressed Folders'. However, with all these, there are cases when we felt that if there was a webservice that would support zipping and unzipping online. One such case or situation might be if Compressed Folders does not work properly because of conflict with a bad deinstallation of another archiving software.

I just came across a cool website called NippyZip, which exactly addresses this requirement. It supports upto 5024 KB of input files and after uploading, it compresses them and streams out a zip file. Since the website does not require any registration, you are also not required to hold or give out an active email address to it anymore.

After zipping out the input files, it also provides an option to add more files to the output archive.

I just thought of sharing out this with other readers too. Bookmark this URL so that you can avail the benefits of a cool new online zipping solution on the move.

A Hosted Online Base64 Encoding and Decoding Utility

A Hosted Online Base64 Encoding and Decoding Utility

I just came across an interesting hosted utility for Base64 encoding and decoding of a string. You can check it out here:

http://www.motobit.com/util/base64-decoder-encoder.asp

Features:

1. The form supports upto 9 mega bytes of data (10000000 bytes).
2. The input can be either as a file or through a textbox given in the website for this purpose.
3. The output can be obtained either in a designated textbox or it can be opted to be streamed out as a file.
4. The output can be configured to restrict the maximum number of characters per line.
5. There is also a flexible control to control and configure the characterset.