Saturday, July 25, 2009

Bingtweets


Twitter a word now known by many net savvy people. A site simple but known by all and one can think that its heading towards the 1 billion target. Using twitter is very easy and simple no complicities their. Its like keep it simple.

Moving further it join hand with the bing so that when ever you search on the bing you get all the tweets regarding that search. It allows to see the tweets on bing !!! Its in beta but still very cool.

Open bingtweets search the topic and see the tweets having the word. Once you do searching you can tweet or share too. It also displays current trends. Overall a good experience to use and again its simple.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Google Chrome : Incognito mode (private browsing)

Today i think many people are using the Google Chrome as web browser. It not only gives a new interface but also fast browsing.

It have auto speed dial to remember the pages you visit, so that next time you simply click to move their. It have so many of features one is Incognito mode.

Incognito Mode also knows as private browsing. It allows you to browse without leaving the trace in history, cookies, on your computer after you close this.

To activate press Ctrl + Shift + . The new window will appear with the spy kind of icon on left corner. Rest everything remains same in interface.

Change locale in ubuntu

Sometimes we need to change the locale for some testing purpose or general shift to new. To change the locale in Windows is accomplished by Control Panel -> Regional Settings.

To change the same in the Ubuntu there are set of commands available.

To see current locale open terminal and run command 'locale'

If you know the locale you want to change to you should do following steps

1.add the locale in /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local
Eg : en_US.UTF-8

2. Regenerate the locale
dpkg-reconfigure locales

3. update locale using
update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Reboot the machine and again check the locale. It will be changed.

If you want to see the lost of supported locale
open /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED

We can make all the locales. Open terminal and run following commands

xyz@local: sudo su
root@local: cat /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED > /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local
root@local: dpkg-reconfigure locales
root@local: update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Reboot the machine and we are done.

Note : It will change the language of the PC so be careful Don't use this unless you are sure what you are about to do. In any case you can again set your locale to default and reboot.



Sunday, July 19, 2009

Web Application Development : Google Apps

What is Google App Engine ?

It lets you run your web application on Google Infrastructure. For more Detail move to google.

What make it out stand :

1. The best part is that it support Java and Python both.
2. You pay for for what you use.
3. No setup costs and no recurring fees.


Lets try our hand and built a very simple page.

Move to Google APP. You need to have a google (gmail) account.

Here come the first screen showing the button Create Application as shown.


Click on Create Application. And the follwing screen will come which will ask for the mobile number for confirmation.

The next screen will be asking for the application details.



Fill the application identifier (must be unique).




Give it a title. So that its easily understood. Press Save. A new screen saying application registration sucessfully will come.

So now all set. Download GoogleApp Engine toolkit. You have two option to go for java or python based on all type of machines.

I did with python as i have python installed :) . A zip file will be thr. Extract it.

If you are on linux make sure you have right permission for the folder.

Now create a directory with some suitable name.

Add three files
1. app.yaml
2. main.py
3. index.html

Add following lines to main.py

from google.appengine.ext import webapp
from google.appengine.ext.webapp.util import run_wsgi_app
from google.appengine.ext.webapp import template
from google.appengine.ext import db
import cgi
import os
class Table (db.Model):
element = db.StringProperty()
class Index(webapp.RequestHandler):
def get(self):
template_values = {}
path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'index.html')
self.response.out.write(template.render(path, template_values))
application = webapp.WSGIApplication([('/', Index)],
debug=True)
def main():
run_wsgi_app(application)
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()

Add following code to app.yaml

application: [your folder]
version: 1
runtime: python
api_version: 1
handlers:
- url: /.*
script: main.py

Add some content in the index.html. Put text like
"My First Page using Google App Engine"

Now time to test the application on browser

Move to yourGoogle App Engine (SDK) folder that you extracted earlier (Using Terminal, cmd)

Run following command and replace [your app] by your folder name.
./dev_appserver.py [your app]

Open the browser type http://localhost:8080

BINGO !! You made the application using Google Apps :)

For more details visit :



Worth watching : Give it a look

The 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon : 20 July. There are many websites writing on this.

WeChooseTheMun.org the site worth watching. It will create the event minute by minute.

To viw the refurbished video by Nasa visit here.

Very Impressive one :)

Saturday, July 18, 2009

ZFS - A new approach new system

A file system used by OpenSolaris provides simple adminstration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability.


ZFS Features:
  • Pooled Storage Model
  • Always consistent state
  • Protection from data corruption
  • Live data scrubbing
  • Instantaneous snapshots and clones
  • Fast native back up and restore
  • Higly scalable
  • Buit in compression
  • Simplified adminstration model
Lets see what it means

ZFS presents a pooled storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions, provisioning, wasted bandwidth and stranded storage. Thousands of file systems can draw from a common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it actually needs. The combined I/O bandwidth of all devices in the pool is available to all filesystems at all times.

All operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. There is no need to fsck(1M) a ZFS file system, ever. Every block is checksummed to prevent silent data corruption, and the data is self-healing in replicated (mirrored or RAID) configurations. If one copy is damaged, ZFS detects it and uses another copy to repair it.

ZFS introduces a new data replication model called RAID-Z. It is similar to RAID-5 but uses variable stripe width to eliminate the RAID-5 write hole (stripe corruption due to loss of power between data and parity updates). All RAID-Z writes are full-stripe writes. There's no read-modify-write tax, no write hole, and — the best part — no need for NVRAM in hardware. ZFS loves cheap disks.

ZFS provides unlimited constant-time snapshots and clones. A snapshot is a read-only point-in-time copy of a filesystem, while a clone is a writable copy of a snapshot. Clones provide an extremely space-efficient way to store many copies of mostly-shared data such as workspaces, software installations, and diskless clients.

ZFS backup and restore are powered by snapshots. Any snapshot can generate a full backup, and any pair of snapshots can generate an incremental backup. Incremental backups are so efficient that they can be used for remote replication — e.g. to transmit an incremental update every 10 seconds.

There are in ZFS. You can have as many files as you want; full 64-bit file offsets; unlimited links, directory entries, snapshots, and so on.

ZFS provides built-in compression. In addition to reducing space usage by 2-3x, compression also reduces the amount of I/O by 2-3x. For this reason, enabling compression actually makes some workloads go faster.

In addition to file systems, ZFS storage pools can provide volumes for applications that need raw-device semantics. ZFS volumes can be used as swap devices, for example. And if you enable compression on a swap volume, you now have compressed virtual memory.


New Os : Opensolaris


When we talk about os the first thing come to mind is windows unless and untill you are open source geek. For such geek the fist answer is Linux (Red Hat, Ubuntu, Fedora , Centos etc...).

When some one say about Solaris we feel not for the normal user. But thats not the fact now. Opensolaris 2009.06 is very user friendly with some nice features beating other very hard.

It has a simple graphical interface like gnome as its to built on Unix. It is also available on Live CD which means you can simply use it without installing (like ubuntu).

The main fetaures or points that make it ousstanding are :
1. Aguided Code base
2. ZFS
3. DTrace
4. Stability and backward comaptibility
5. Software Support
6. Image

It comes with firefox , thunder bird , Net beans and many other.

To download click here.

To view screenshots jst google in images with opensolaris.

For more details log in to opensolaris.org

Playing music and video on your PC with Mobile Phone

Bluetooth is now a days very common in mobile phones. All laptops now a days are equipped with the bluetooth.

We normally used bluetooth as a medium to transfer the files between two devices. Mobile phone can also be use as remote control of the pc/laptop when connected with the bluetooth device.

Remote Control feature is inbuilt in many mobile phones through which one can play music , videos, slideshow presentation.

Connect your mobile with pc/laptop using bluetooth and check for the remote control in your mobile (normaly under entertaintment section). Open powerpoint presentation on pc and run (f5) n now you can control it using mobile phone. Amazing !!!

Creating own social network site

Now a days we can see the internet is flooding with the social network site. They have community blog and many more .

If you want to have a such site - a social networking site what will you do ? Will think of PHP and all. No need the ning.com come with a solution 2 mins and you are ready with your own social networking site. Isn't it amazing !!!!

Lets Start here Open the ning.com


Enter the name you wish to have for your network and the web address that will be suffix by ning. And click create and the next screen (below) will be thr for few details of yours

Fill and click the next. A mail will be send for the verification so give correct id ;)

Adjust the look and go on with next

Select the appearance and you are done .. BINGO !!! You have your own social networking site.

To see what i have made click http://kittyabad.ning.com/

New OS Google Chrome OS

After the launch and success of chrome browser google announced the new os Google Chrome OS.
Google says the chrome was designed for people who live on the web. The operating system that vrowser runs on were designed when their is no web. And hence they are coming with new os which will be extension to the google chrome.

The new Os will be open source , light weight and will be using Linux kernel. Its seems to be promising many new things a major is fast access to every thing .

Ref : Google Blog

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Drop Down terminal for Linux

The power of terminal is known to one who use Linux and know the real power of commands. So for such geek people who often have to move to terminal again and again Tilda is the right option.

Tilda is the drop down console that appears on the top of the screen. Just press a key and console is thr.

Installing tilda

1. Using Synaptic Package Manager (Ubuntu)
2. In terminal run command sudo apt-get install tilda

Once install Press F1 key and u will see a hanging terminal use it and press F1 again to hide. Isn't very simple.

Changing the preferences can be done at the right click of the console (Pressing F1).

Ease a life to great extent.

Enjoy tilda.