Panda Online Virus Scanner
Panda Antivirus has launched an online antivirus scanner which supports the following features:
You are required to register at the website to proceed with the scan. Check out the ActiveScan website here.
Translation between English and Hindi is now a breeze...
I was just wondering to translate a piece of stuff in Hindi to English and stumbled upon Google Translate website. I just learnt that they have enhanced the translation engine to cover Hindi as well.
I have just put a small test sentence like "Google Translate now works between English and Hindi too. " and it works sweet. Check it out here.
With a greater amount of Hindi (Indian Language) software coming out now, I am sure that this is a great news for developers.
XAML Fest -- Exciting Two Day WPF Event at Houston, TX
I was just trying to find out tech events that I can attend in my current region and found out an exciting WPF, Silverlight related event that is scheduled for October in Houston, TX.
I just thought of sharing the same with other interested developers so that more people can register and benefit from the program.
It is a Level 300 two day program in Houston, TX targetting architect and developer tracks.
Check out the event page and register yourself here.
Definitive Guide for VB.NET developers coming from VB World
For VB.NET developers coming from VB World, I would really and strongly recommend the following book "Upgrading Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 to Microsoft Visual Basic .NET w/accompanying CD-ROM".
The book has an elegant coverage on the differences between the two world, seamless migration path, redesign related issues and points to be taken care with respect to the COM component.
You may also like to check out the free download of the eBook that ew discussed sometime back over here.
Check out Amazon page of ordering the book here.
VB to VB NET Migration Guide
I just came across a good download resource from Microsoft Download Center which explains about Migrating from VB to VB.NET. It is actually a free eBook with 21 chapters as a free download.
Check out the download here.
Draco .NET :: CVS Based Auto Build Tool
I was actually searching for WinCVS tools for c# and came across this excellent tool called Draco .NET. This seems to be a promising tool for developers using WinCVS. It offers to run as a Windows service monitoring the CVS continously. When there are changes, the tool builds the project and emails the reports to you.
You need NANT to run this tool. Besides CVS, it is also able to monitor VSS, PVCS and a lot of more source control solutions.
The tool is licensed under OpenBSD and you can download from Sourceforge servers.
SpellServer -- Spell Checking for websites
Sometime back, we discussed about spell checking tool for Windows Forms developers over here. I just thought I would also review about a similar tool from the same vendor for the benefit of ASP.NET developers.
They offer a product called SpellServer which is oriented towards ASP.NET developers. Some of the advantages of the tool are:
Check out product homepage here for download details.
SpellText -- SpellChecker for Windows Forms
There is some good news for Windows Forms developers. Chado Software has brought out a nice elegant spell checker which helps in good and fast spell checking from within the scope of your windows forms.
Some of the quick advantages of the tool are:
The product is not free but the cost is one time but lifetime free technical support and life time free updates.
Check out SpellText website here for download and purchase details.
GhostDoc -- Visual Studio AddOn
I just came across a cute little addOn for Visual Studio, which helps us with the XML documentation comments in C#. It pulls the comments of base classes and also uses the name and type of the method on which the comment is being desired.
Advantages:
Download URL: http://www.roland-weigelt.de/ghostdoc/download05.php?version=2.1.3for2005
Internet Quiz
I just came across a cute Internet Quiz in this website. It just has some about thirty questions on basic Internet. And they score you besides giving you a nice badge to put up on your website too.
Created by OnePlusYou
QueryExpress Branch in SourceForge
Whilst casually browsing Albahari.com website, I came across the QueryExpress project having its own branch in Sourceforge now. Check out the Sourceforge project (Query ExPlus).
For those who are new to QueryExpress, I would suggest my previous review post on QueryExpress over here.
New Programming Tip Section
You would have seen a new series of posts in this category and the posts being tagged as 'programming tips'. We are glad to introduce this new section to share with everyone about valuable programming tips and best programming practices that we come across in every day life.
The following are the reasons of launch of this label (category):
A good programming block would always ensure that any variables declared would have gone through a neater and standardized way of having them initialised to suitable value. Even if it is NULL, better specify it as an explicit NULL.
This ensures a lot of advantages for everyone
Bad Bad onBlur and onFocus Alerts in Webpage Validations
I really get irritated when I see alert popup windows that come up in web pages that I browse and fill particularly following the onBlur of one textbox and onFocus of another control. Having such a flow is kind of irritating and erroneus for the following reasons:
I would recommend an elegant solution would be to buffer the validations for the submit button for the webpages or a due button click.
The Lovely C# Switch Case
One of the sweet things with a switch case statement in C# is that you have to specify the break statement or a goto statement and the fall through is a strictly no-no. The compiler would yell at you if skip the break statement.
Missing a break, continue statement is a common pitfall in switch construct is byfar the most common programming error that brings with it complicated debugging efforts and hidden bugs. With this cool power that C# compiler enforces, I think, we should also try ensuring that our programming practices in Java and JavaScript follow the same for cleaner and robust code.
When you write a program, ensure that you have a good framework being implemented to accomodate for unforeseen circumstances and unhandled conditions. Having unhandled exceptions lead to many problems. A few are:
For starting developers, I would always recommend that along with the minimum using directives, always have the first simple try catch statement and then appropriate exceptions being handled with care.
Let your code record its activities ...
These serve to enhance your memory and recall about incidents and events at a later point of time. Let us extend this habit to your code too. Your program should normally get cultivated with a practice of recording (logging) its activities lucidly without swamping the resources.
That way, we get to reap a lot of benefits. A few are:
There are excellent log frameworks available for any one to get started with minimum effort. A few are:
Career Opportunity at Photon Infotech
One of my friend who works at Photon Infotech, a fast growing IT consultancy firm in Chennai wanted me to share with others regarding their current lookout for ASP.NET technical leads.
I just thought I would share with others who might be interested towards the same.
Quick Job Profile:
They expect at least 6 to 9 years of relevant experience. If you know some one, you can check with Raajanand at +919841163836 or shoot out your profile to raajanand.r (at) photoninfotech.net
The Lovely Perl way of braces { }
In Perl programming language, it is always mandatory that even a single statement in a conditional block be encompassed within { } unlike C# and other programming languages where only multiple statements are mandated for the curly brace blocks.
But I would say, the Perl way is really excellent we should follow this strictly for other languages also. This makes our code look cleaner and neater. We know where the control starts and stops and would enable a cleaner debugging too.
Magic Numbers in the Code
When you write a code and somewhere down the line, you are using an arithmetic constant like PI, have it defined as some readOnly constant string and use the string instead of hardbinding the number value in the code. There are good advantages of avoiding magic numbers in the code:
Comment your code ...
For any programmers, it is always strongly recommended to have explicit comments to strategic sections of the code. Commenting a code is very important for many reasons:
When not to comment?
"Treat warnings as errors"
I just thought of sharing this as a good programming practice for beginners to cultivate. Compiler warnings are actually a flag for you to indicate a potential problem. It might be a simple deprecation warning or an = assignment when == is being intended.
As long as your compiler supports an option of having the warnings treated as errors, I would strongly recommend anyone to turn on this feature. That way, we can have our programs robust and resilent without any latent errors hidden anywhere.
[Book Review] The Wings of Fire
In August first week, I had a very excellent book from library which kept me really busy every moment. The book was:
"Wings of Fire :: An Autobiography of APJ Abdul Kalam"
The book is a must-read for everyone. It clearly brings out in simple terms his humble beginnings, hard work and patience. It provides us with a lucid introduction to the great works that are going on in our space laboratories.
There is also a Tamil version of the book called 'Agni Siragugal'.
Amazon Link: Check out here.
India's cheapest laptop and desktop from Zenith Computers
Zenith Computers, premiere PC manufacturers from the Indian subcontinent has ushered in another innovation of bringing cheapest laptop and desktop now.
Google Voice Search in India
Whilst casually surfing the Internet, I came across the news post about Google pioneering to bring out Voice Search in India. You can simply call a toll-free number through your mobile phone and get your search results for free. We have enough providers like JustDial in India but these folks get your mobile number in return and record them. Google promises that your mobile number would not be required to use their service.
Currently, Google project seems to be collecting voice samples in Hyderabad and New Delhi to automate the voice search services.
Source Courtesy: Telecom Tiger
Yahoo Mash Closing down
We discussed about SpotM a while back. But not many of you would be knowing that Yahoo was already having another lesser known social networking community called 'Yahoo Mash'. It had been running around for an year till now but only on a invite-only try for members.
Unfortunately, last week, Mash members have started recieving emails regarding closing down of Yahoo Mash community with this september and their mash profiles would be cleaned up after that.
Mash was actually an upgrade of 360 but this close down, according to various news source should not be affecting 360 in any way.
Source Courtesy: eFluxMedia
Yahoo Glue Search in India
Yahoo India has pioneered in bringing out one another innovative search product called Glue Pages. Unlike the traditional search, here you would be requiring to signon and as you type in your search keywords relevant search results along with Wiki/Video are pulled in to save time.
The service seems to be currently in BETA and there is also an offer to invite business entrepreneurs to be listed in their Glue Pages.
Check out yourself on the new webservice initiative from Yahoo India.
SpotM -- India-specific Social Networking website
Check out Yahoo SpotM, which is Yahoo India's latest venture of social networking site targetted at Indian communities in the age range of 16 to 30.
Check out the website and signup for a BETA invite to participate in the early offerings from the website.
Google Phone to enter India in December
It is good news for Indian techies after a long time. The much awaited Google Phone is set to enter Indian shores coming December.
Some quick bites:
Source Courtesy: Business Standard
Free Sample Chapters (eBooks) from Microsoft Press
Here is a unique opportunity to take advantage of and get a sneak preview of three great books and then to go for the purchase of the same.
Microsoft Press seems to be giving out free eBook (Sample Chapters) of the following books:
Check out the eBook Page here.
Google Toolbar making your system faster ...
I recently came across an interesting error message display in my system when the Internet Connection died out. Instead of the web browser displaying the harsh 'Can not find server' and then freezing the system with that Internet Detect ActiveX Control, the installed Google Toolbar made the experience pleasant and also offering a more flexible way to initiate a web search.
A screenshot of the error message (sample) is below:
Bookmarks (or Favorites) has been a very useful feature in the web browser (the Internet Enabled Device). But with the number of different browsers we use every day and with the number of different systems we have to keep switching and considering the amount of travel, we have the great aspiration to see if our bookmarks could also travel with us.
There are good solutions to these from a lot of websites. I was just thinking of sharing a few for the benefit of other readers:
All these are online solutions and hence should lend a great helping hand for you particularly when you are on move.
10th Birthday of Google
Visit http://www.google.com/ and you would find an inspiring link called 'Google's 10 Birthday'. Let us wish Google 'Many Many Happy Returns of the Day'.
The birthday page of Google is truly inspiring since it lists chronologically the various achievements Google has accomplished from the date of its launch.
Besides this Google Birthday Page also has a rich mention of history and various other informative and interesting news.
Quick Clip Information to your Emailbox
Despite the fact we have dedicated software like OneNote, TurboNote etc available to hold information, we still cling to having a quick note typed in our Inbox, which we find comfortable through our email client search. Many a times, we are forced to login to our web email application to send an email to ourselves with small amount of information like phone number of a friend, dinner time etc.
I just came across a good website called Note2Email, which seems to be innovative in enhancing our practice. A quick review of this webservice as follows:
Bookmark the URL and try visiting it for your day to day needs.
Iterasi -- Your Personal Web Archive
How many times we know a particular website that we used to go but reach a parked domain page or a redesigned page with the older links hitting on the big wall. Iterasi.com seems to have brought out an innovative solution to this problem. The website is all about an innovative web archive solution where you can get to offer your personal websites, in full form along with your bookmarks.
So next time you need to search the service provider website, you can logon to your personal web archive in case the vendor resource is unavailable.
Check out Iterasi here.
Historical Currency Convertor Tool
Everyone of us know about getting the currency equivalents today by just navigating to Google and typing something like 1 USD in INR (which would give how many Indian Rupees are required to purchase 1 US Dollar and similarly).
But how many of us are comfortable in getting data on historic currency conversion rates like "What was the currency exchange on 2nd March, 2008 between 1 UK Pound and 1 USD.
Fortunately, there is a very good and useful utility available from Oanda Corporation, which helps out with such requirements. They have a very good online free tool here, that helps us to convert between wide variety of global currencies.
InstantBird -- Instant Messenger Communication Tool from the house of FireFox
I was casually browsing http://www.mozilla.org/ and I found out an innovative product called 'InstantBird'. It seems to be a promising product in that it it is opensource like other products of Mozilla. The main objective of the product is to offer instant messaging support for widest range of networks including Windows Live, Yahoo, AOL, Google Talk and ICQ.
I think it would be a good tool compared to heavier shareware alternatives right?
Free Online Document Viewer from Zoho
The inherent fear and apprehension with Office documents are the following:
I feel it is time to be free of these headaches, as there are online innovations by Zoho with their launching of Zoho Online Viewer which offers to facilitate viewing of Office Documents online.
Features:
Google Indexing now includes Audio too...
If you have had a sneak peek of what Google labs is offering latest, you would be really amazed. It offers a service called GAudi, which seems to be indexing audio in its video sharing website ("YouTube").
Currently this webservice is still part of Google Labs research venture and hence you would be finding that the webservice might be constantly evolving till they announce it into a stable beta phase.
Talk Free -- Anytime and Everytime :: Technology makes Telephony Affordable
Away from home and away from your near and dear can no longer make you feel lonely. Nowadays there has been hundreds of technological innovations mushrooming to help you out in two ways:
At least, this is true when you travel to US since your near and dear can call you for free. Some of the Talk-Free gadgets that I just evaluated and found useful alongside being interesting were:
I remember AOL was providing something like a local telephone number when you signup for a Screen Name somewhere in 2007 but now I could not find out that link. If some one knows about it, feel free to share the same for the benefit of other readers.
Your movies and videos can now be powered by Silverlight Streaming ...
As promised, Microsoft Silverlight truly lights up the web. The latest offering from Microsoft as part of their Windows Live Platform is Silverlight Streaming. I just thought I would review a few features about this innovative service for the benefit of other video bloggers and artistes:
I tried a couple of small custom-created videos and they are really amazingly fast, at least in its beta stage. Check it out for yourself.
An Online Movie Creating WebService
Gone are days when you could only share static photos of your memories travelling across the globe. Now, you can sit down and gather your green memories to your near and dear as talking movies, thanks to JumpCut, a Yahoo Service.
I recently came across this webservice. Although, little restricted than what your Windows Movie Maker (on your Windows XP) could offer, they have tried their best to offer whatever should be possible from a webpage (as a hosted edition).
Check out yourself. It is free. It does require a registration to use the service. However, your Yahoo ID holds good too.
New Innovative Email Solution
With the advent of Google Mail, there had been a real revolution in email technology with a lot of innovations and players entering the arena. I recently came across an interesting provider called 'GMX.com'. I just thought I would review about a few features offered by this provider for the benefit of other readers:
Just thought I would share with other readers so that you can try out the new service if you would like it.
Let your desktop travel across the globe with you...
When you are travelling across different places, it is always a difficult thing to access your home system or work place system in a reliable and secure manner. Also, when it comes to sharing of desktops between geographically distributed locations, there are only costly solutions available.
I recently came across two elegant solutions which are offered for free for commercial use and easy to manage. I just thought I would share it with other readers for everyone's benefit:
The former does not even require any installation and you just download the program on both sides and run.
The Browser War?
Not sure whether this can be controlled by any preferences setting or a registry key, but the two big browsers across the browser camps have a distinctly opposite behavior.
Situation: Have an hyperlink in a HTML Page that has target=_blank option set.
Both the browsers give an option in the context menu for hyperlinks to open in new tab or new window. But why is the default behavior varying so much without letting the users to control the same?
I was actually casually browsing the internet in the evening and came across an interesting website called http://www.skweezer.com/. This seems to be offering promising features for mobile phones in browsing and fast searching on various results.
Besides the normal services, they also seem to be offering a number of other value added services. A few of them are:
Check out the website from your mobile (GPRS).
'Project of the Month' Section in SourceForge
I used to remember visiting http://www.sourceforge.net/, which used to be packed (jam-packed) with so much of information that you have to search for like anything. Not any more. Now they have made a very simple page and very fast loading website too.
I was actually inspired by the section 'project of the month' where they choose one project every month and feature it on the homepage. We can actually check out the 'projects of the month' here.
You may also like to check out Sourceforge 2008 Community Choice Awards post.
Sourceforge 2008 Community Choice Awards
We all visit sourceforge.net for various opensource software downloads. There is something interesting going on in SourceForge website.
Check out the 2008 Community Choice Awards programme going on here. You may like to check out the various best software that has been chosen for the awards.
It is really an exciting section of sourceforge.net that you would be inspired to contribute to opensource right?
Free Opensource Download Manager
We just discussed about Orbit Download Manager. While I could just drink some water and turn back, a little more Internet research got me into another free download manager called 'Free download manager'. I could quickly evaluate it for a while and could get the following results for you:
Free Download Manager URL: http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/
Orbit Download Manager -- The Power Premiere Download Manager
Whatever be the download ability and bandwidth capability of the internet connection, it is always recommended to go through a good download manager. We ourselves have discussed about a number of cool download managers here.
I just came across one more free one called 'Orbit Downloader' but this one seems to have added advantages of efficient video downloading from YouTube.
Some of the good elegant features of Orbit Download Manager are:
The new JavaScript Engine (v8) to rule the world
People used to ridicule when we talk too much the greatness of JavaScript. At least I recall from Chennai software industry, people feel proud of restricting themselves with little validation controls provided by the software framework that they are using and afraid of thinking forward.
We all (they all) use Google Mail and the excellent products of Google for their utility values. But we fail to appreciate the engine and life that Google breathes into each of its product -- the powerful and innovative DHTML and JavaScript.
We discussed a few days before about Google Chrome. Going by Google's help pages, they say that it is powered by V8 -- an innovative new JavaScript engine.
Some of the cool new features of V8 are:
Google Chrome -- A Revolutionary New Browser
The browser wars are going to be hotter with Google putting its new kid (Chrome) into the forefront. Just about a week back, Google seemed to have launched their innovative browser software called 'Google Chrome'.
I just thought I would try it out a bit and write a few points about the same for the benefit of other readers:
Free Video MP3 Extractor
Sometimes we get to view cool videos in public domain hosted with Google Youtube. Subject to copyright restrictions, you may be allowed to download them. But remember video files are expected to be very heavy cluttering up your hard disk and gobbling up the available space very greedily. Many a times,for devotional songs, you may like to have only the audio portion of the same but till this point, you may be left with no option other than to bear the heaviness.
Look no further. Jodix has a cool freeware called 'Free Video MP3 Extractor', which offers to pull out the audio component of major video format files and save them as MP3 file for you. I just thought I would write a brief review of the same here for the benefit of other readers:
Download URL and System Requirements can be found here.
Free WMA to MP3 Convertor
This is a sister product of RA to MP3 convertor that we discussed here. I didn't want to clutter the single post with multiple distinct software and hence chose to keep this separate.
WMA files are Windows Media Player specific. Those who are fond of lighter WinAMP and those using operating systems other than Microsoft Windows may be at loss from being able to play these files. No longer. I came across a tool from Jodix which offers to convert WMA files to MP3 and it is free to. It is called Jodix WMA to MP3 convertor.
Some of the lucrative features of
Free Real Audio to MP3 Convertor
I got a cool prayer song from one of a website download but it was in Real Audio format. For some reason, I always have a hatred for Real Audio. What are they?
I had two options to play the file in that case:
C# Basics -- Book Review
.NET is a promising technology now. Even for fresh graduates just out of college, they feel that they should take up a .NET course to get a lucrative opportunity in a good software organization. Traditionally, I always feel we should have a good book to learn about things in minute details.
I just thought I would have a quick review of Vijay Mukhi's book 'C# Basics'. Some of the good interesting features of this book are:
