Autorun Manager

Autorun Manager

I came across an elegant tool from SysInternals enlisted in Microsoft website called Autoruns. This enumerates and lists all the programs that are used by Windows Explorer in startup etc.

Check out Autoruns from here.

Heartbeat -- Maintaining the HeartBeat of IIS 6/Windows Server 2003

Heartbeat -- Maintaining the HeartBeat of IIS 6/Windows Server 2003

Lot of times maintaining a Windows Server 2003 shared hosting is an headache. My friend is managing a web host company. One fine day, he started to get complaints from his customers regarding sluggish behavior of thier websites. Eventlog, Profilers and all debugging tools were running down the drain and were giving no clue. Finally a search in Google led us to this HeartBeat.exe which does the work. Resetting the priority of W3WP (ASPNeT_WP in Windows XP /IIS 5.1) to Idle.

Check out HeartBeat from here.

Share Code and Get Paid in DotNetSpider

Share Code and Get Paid in DotNetSpider

Dotnetspider, the premiere .NET technology resource website from India has brought in a novel concept to encourage .NET developers. This they call it as 'Code Factory' Best chosen code are also awarded to the tune of INR 10 to INR 500 besides active contributors are awarded regular monthly surprise gifts and Spider Professional awards in the website.

Get started and share your knowledge in Dotnetspider.

Types of Software Testing

Types of Software Testing

Testing and software and quality assurance of the same is a skilled profession. Yesterday while travelling in the bus, I saw one guy was reading through a document which was a manual for some testing examination, that he is preparing for. The manual was really good and it was enumerating through the various tests with explanations to it. I would try collect and compile the same over here.

For now, I am giving a brief document on the various testing from a different URL, which I searched and found.

Play with a Fly on your Windows Screen

Play with a  Fly on your Windows Screen

A Fly is always infectious and a vector for all viruses similar to mosquitoes. But this little fly from DinitSoftware makes an interesting play for you and making you to try catching it as it moves fast from one location to another on your Windows Screen.

Try catching it by downloading your copy of Windows Fly here.

DeskTools -- Effective DeskController

DeskTools -- Effective DeskController

Very many times we may need to have an application to be always on top but the application might not support it. This and many other features are now available to any application thanks to DeskTools from DinitSoftware.

Download your copy of Desktools from here.

Blog Engines -- Template Resilence

Blog Engines -- Template Resilence

This follows closely our discussion on Blogger Homepage login bug. If you have closely observed Blogger and WordPress blogging engines, there is one distinct difference in the way the templates and the blog posts are rendered. Lengthy texts normally break the template layout and the right hand side gets abnormally disrupted in Blogger. While Wordpress automatically clips the overflowing text and the template sanity is restored.

While blogger emphasizes the content significance over template layouts, the latter seems to be focussing in the reverse order.

Snap Website Preview on my weblogs

Snap Website Preview on my weblogs

Today I got some free time and in this, I just updated my weblog templates to have a simple Snap Website Preview. Now you can find a cool preview on all my weblogs as follows:

1. Personal Gossip
2. Tech Discussions
3. Sri Vaishnava Network

Self-linked pages do not snap preview only external links show up with a preview. Send me your comments, feedback, suggestions and/or criticisms for further enhancements.

Cookie Tester

Cookie Tester

We use cookies and most of the websites use cookies to persist little information from our webpages.  And most of the sites that use cookie carry a link to a webpage that describe cookies in brief. But the downside is that these sites explain cookie in thier own terms that beginners (both users and developers) would get confused.

The purpose of this post is give link to the cookie specification from Netscape and a simple online Cookie Tester from Chami.com, the makers of world-famous HTML-Kit, the best IDE for web development in the planet.

1. Cookie Specification: HttpCookies in Netscape Documentation
2. Online Cookie Tester (You can actually set and get cookies, also see how the web browser erases the old cookie from the domain after the domain limit of 20 is exceeded).

Online Image Splitter

Online Image Splitter

A picture is worth a thousand words. But a heavy picture or an image on the websites choke the Internet pipeline of both the webserver and the site surfer. Sometime back we had the Eight Second rule, which stipulates that a webpage should load within eight seconds to satisfy the user. I have read somewhere that current situation has even halved this further. Read this discussion here.

With such things in place, we ought to seek a good strategy to display and render images. We need images for our website and at the same time ensure that they render quickly giving best user experience. When I was a module lead in my previous organization and during the course of development of a website for SBG India, we learnt this trick of image slicing which is available in Paintshop Pro. But I am sure for personal use, Paintshop Pro is pretty costly.

Fortunately, there are web-based solutions available and one such solution is from Chami.com, the makers of world-famous HTML-Kit, the best IDE for web development in the planet. Check out the Online Image Splitter over here.

Enhancing ALT+TAB of Windows XP

Enhancing ALT+TAB of Windows XP

One of the most highly used key combinations in Windows is ALT+TAB to jump between applications.  While ALT+TABbing or SHIFT+ALT+TABbing, how much seeing a preview of the window instead of just the icon of the application.

ALT+TAB replacement powertoy for Windows XP achieves this and can be downloaded from here.

Windows Virtual Desktops

Windows Virtual Desktops

Our Windows Desktop is the most used view of our systems and we keep all frequently used files and shortcuts there. As time progresses, the desktop gets so cluttered and we really get ourselves tensed. Normally, I experience this problem and sometimes I feel that there should be scroller in desktops like a horizontal or a vertical scroller to view the files. Now, I have minimized the extreme (mis)use of my desktop and keep in internal folders.

However, there is a little good tool, which I found as Windows XP PowerToy, which facilitates us with four desktops. So we can assign each desktop a functionality and keep each one for designated tasks. You can download Virtual desktop PowerToy from Windows XP from here.

Google Blogger Div Opens Only After Two Clicks

Google Blogger Div Opens Only After Two Clicks

Don't know whether my mouse click speed is incorrectly calibrated or it is a problem with Google Blogger. The 'New Blogger'/'Old Blogger' link Google Blogger homepage only opens up the login textboxes after two times I click it. Between the clicks, a white patch of DIV is also displayed.

The migration of Blogger to Google Accounts has brought in several improvements to Google Blogger. I hope, Blogger Team, would also address this user-friendliness issue of the DIV.

Blogging is now a breeze with BlogDesk

Blogging is now a breeze with BlogDesk

Now you can get the comfort of blogging even while your PC is not connected to Internet in an environment that simulates a connected realtime blogging. Once all the topics have been drafted, BlogDesk,  automatically connects to the weblog site and publishes the post.

BlogDesk supports most of the famous weblogs like Wordpress which support MetaWeblogAPI or MovableType interface.

Check out Blogdesk here and download your copy today.

Web-based Unicode Editor

Web-based Unicode Editor

Webpages in regional languages and native dialects are a great welcome step for any service/product website in its region. This post of mine was inspired while searching for a good Unicode Editor for Tamil. I would here compile a list of online Unicode Editors that are available.

Readers If you know a Unicode editor of a language, please feel free to share as comments:

1. Unicode Tamil Editor from TamilAnjal

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Test your Typing Speed

Test your Typing Speed

We are glued to our keyboards all 24 hours right? I found a little nice website that helps us to determine the speed of our typing. Check out this Typing Speed Test website here. Ensure that you start the clock before typing and stopping it immediately after typing finishes.

Quick and Easy FileSplitter

Quick and Easy FileSplitter

Huge files often present the problem of portability from one place to another. Not all emailservices support huge attachments. Even when they support they run into serious transport related problems like lot of time,network congestion etc.

While we can compress and zip these files, there is a limit or percentage and only till that you can compress; the limit being stipulated by the compression algorithm that is being used. The most famous algorithms that are used are PkZip, RAR, TAR, Gunzip, Bunzip.

The other solution, I normally, prefer is to split the file and send the splits by email or sharing them to Rapidshare or other file hosting. Normally the split tool also creates an EXE or a batch file to combine the segments to a single file by the recipient. I prefer DekaByte FileSplitter to be very versatile file split and join tool. Check out the website for details and even there is no installation required. Even the splitter exe you can keep in your inbox and carry with you along with you.

Default Browser Settor Utility

Default Browser Settor Utility

When you install a new web browser or a web browser wrapper like MyIE2 or Avant, it sets itself as the default browser. While restoring the previous one (Internet Explorer) is straight-forward, sometimes, I have experienced an issue that makes the restoration process very difficult.

I came across this nifty little tool called SetBrowser which makes the browser settings selection a breeze. Check out SetBrowser here.

Scheduled Tasks for Web Applications

Scheduled Tasks for Web Applications

Hosted web applications also sometimes need some processing activities which needs to be run periodically at defined time intervals without any user intervention. But Http being stateless in nature, there can not be persistent processes running on the webserver. For example, you can have some thread in ASP.NET which keeps ticking a non-stop timer.

Fortunately, there are a lot of options or workarounds available to address this gap.

1. Windows Scheduled Task or a NT service to be installed which keeps ticking and then invokes appropriate methods in the web application.
2. Commercial components like the ones described in DnZone website.
3. The points (1) and (2) however requires, desktop access and privileges on the webserver. If our hosting account is shared, then most probably, our web host might not allow to run scheduled tasks on the webserver. There is some good news for those underprivileged as well.
   
   Hosted Scheduler Services
1. Web Service Scheduler
2. Web Cron
3. HostedCron