Breaking news :New features in Goowy soon

Got a mail this morning from Alex Bard one of the founders of Goowy. Here is an extract:

I saw your posting about goowy mail. I am one of the founders and wanted to thank you for your support. We have a lot of really cool new features coming soon including resizing, updated UI and calendaring. Send us your thoughts and comments and they could soon become features.-Alex Bard

I personnaly beleive that Goowy could be an instant hit if properly marketed and made known , and am always 200% behind Rich Internet Applications , so lets wish Goowy developers all the best and try to give them a little help making this webmail client famous.

Category: Goowy, Flash, News

OpenLaszlo3.0 available for download

Laszlo has changed the name of the new version of its platform from Laszlo Presentation Server to OpenLaszlo 3.0 which comes with a number of new features.

OpenLaszlo allows you to develop RIA applications , based on an xml-formatted file which renders into a Flash SWF file . OpenLaszlo is in direct competition with rival Flex which is not Open Source technology.



Category: Laszlo, RIA, Flex ,Flash

JavaBlackBelt - Test your Java Skills

The JavaBlackBelt site allows you to test your EJB , Web Services , Core Java and other Java related skills online . Its a good way to prepare for your Java Certification.

The site has contributors who donate questions to it , you can register and keep tracks of your answers to these questions. The layout is simple and navigation is kind of easy. However the site might crash in the middle of your "exam" as following its announcement JavaBlackBelt is supporting between 500 and 1000 concurrent users.Still its worth the visit.

Category: JAVA , J2EE , Site

Goowy 100% Flash Mail Client Available

goowy mail 100% flash
Originally uploaded by baadaal.

Was expecting this for a while but the first 100% flash mail,Goowy, is finally out. Needless to say i jumped on the occasion and immediately created an account to review this wicked flash mail client.



So to start with goowy , offers 100MB free mail space , with cool features such as POP3 settings , junk filters and something really awesome SKINS!!! You can actually upload any image you want to serv as your skin (although there is a 100Kb restriction on size of your skin).



Whats interesting is as its flash based , once you got on the page and the flash is downloaded on you pc , everything is a breeze no need to wait for your page to load like in GMAIL , Hotmail or other web based HTML email clients. You mail client resides on your pc (unless you clear you cache), so its really very fast.



Its superbly simple to use , although i would have prefered a more elaborated GUI a la "Stargate" but well its a very good initiative and on top of that its FREE. So hurry up and signup , just like me hiihihihi.





Category: Mail,Flash,News, Review

Google Map available for UK

mapliverpool
Originally uploaded by baadaal.

The brits now got the UK version of the google map , which is absolutely awesome. I tried finding Mauritian restaurants in UK , and was really impressed that they already had it indexed.This is because apparently google has taken the addresses of local establishements from Yell.com which already had a list of restaurants , businesses , hotels,etc.. in the United Kingdom.

Try the following search string in the search box on the google map page:
liverpool street station,City Of London, Greater London, EC4N, United Kingdom
This will give you an idea of the depth of information that can be retrieved.

Do click on the Satellite link at the top left corner of the screen.This will give you a stallite image of the location which you have searched for. However there is a limitation to the level at which you can zoom. For very good zoom satellite pics do try keyhole which would make james bond blush (Keyhole is owned by Google).

Category: Google,Map,UK,Mauritius

Kelvir virus removal for msn

Had a few people sending me links over msn with the format:

Looks its you
pictures.php?email=[your e-mail]

Dont click on the link , thats the Kelvir virus , if you are the one sending these types of links over msn conversation , then you should download the Kelvir removal tool from symantec.

Category: Virus,Kelvir,MSN

MSN 7 news

MSN 7 now is in public release , so if you are still using your msn6.2 its high time your dump it away and try out the new version. There are a host of little improvements that make it an excellent IM companion.



Two or three things worth noting are :
1. Personal Message
2. Muggings or Dynamic Display pics
3. Search

What i like with the personal message is that at times you want to add a phrase or quote with your display name but when you write in conversations it becomes a real mess , this is where the personal message feature comes into play. You add your personal message , it appears next to your name in the title box of your conversation window , without appearing in your conversations. Also there is an option where you can have the song which you are playing in windows media player appearing next to your display name which is kind of neat.

The muggins are dynamic display pictures , when you place a smiley in your converstions , your display pictures change too (depending on which muggin you installed). To get a free muggin simply open a conversation box and click on packs you can select the top 4 packs each will install a different muggin. Else if you have a few spare bucks you get buy one from bluemountain.

With the search button in your conversation box you can perform searches without having to leave your conversation box.It returns the result in the conversation box itself after quering msn search

Category: MSN7 ,News , IM, Muggin

Buying a laptop - the right decision?

One day or another you will come up with this question "Should i get myself a laptop or a desktop?" . The answer usually depends on 2 factors the first being your budget and the second your performance requirements.



Budget wise unless you live in the US or in South East Asia the price of a laptop can be really exorbitant. In Mauritius for example the price of an Intel Centrino 1.5Ghz , 40GB ,DVD writer , WiFi-enabled laptop can be as much as Rs44,000 + Vat thats about 800 pounds (pound 1 = Rs 55 ).The same is for the UK were prices really put the laptop out of reach of low budget consumers which is a real shame.

Perfomance wise laptops are really not as powerful as desktops , actually the more you want your laptop to be performant the more graphic cards , chips , ram you need to add ,these does help to boost up the juice but the negative points being that your laptop becomes heavier , heats up more and uses more battery life.

Laptops are useful (if you have a low budget) when:
1. You're always on the road and away from your pc
2. You dont need heavy duty equipment , a simple Celeron laptop would do
3. You will use the laptop only as a secondary unit to your pc
4. You need to regularly visit your clients on-site.
5. Want to take your work back home.

J2EE programmers and all other performance hungry programming experts , you are all cursed!!! The laptop unless being a really mighty beast will never be able to satisfy our ram and power hungry applications unless you are willing to pay the price.Here the desktop should be reconsidered as a primary option. Who wouldn't have been happy to bring back his Eclipse-tomcat-jboss application home to work on it off office hours....sniff.

Its really sad that the prices never seem to drop for laptops because it would have been much more elegant to replace our common desktops with them.

Resource:
If you want to distinguish between a Pentium M , Celeron , Sempron laptops and get more additional information here is a google-group thread which explains what all these are and gives some interesting tips as to which laptop makes have the lowest/highest power consumption and performance.

Category: Laptop , Desktop , Centrino , Mauritius , UK

Running mutiple IE on WinXp

This is the nightmare of most web designers , you need to test your site on multiple versions of Internet Explorer. I happened that recently i got the same problem , so I had the option of either reformat my precious harddisk else find a way to run MSIE 5.5 (Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 ) on my WinXP.

So after some querying on my favorite search engine I got the answer to my problem on this blog .

If you want to get a quick answer this is what you should try:
1. Download the following zip file: http://downloads.skyzyx.net/ie/ie55sp2_nt.zip
2.Unzip the zip file anywhere on your pc
3.Find the IEXPLORE.exe and click it
4.Test your version of internet explorer by going on the following url: http://www.skyzyx.com/random/browser.php


Note:

1.Clicking on the about button in the internet explorer 5.5 will give you false information on the browser it will display 6.0 as browser information you need to go to the above stated URL

2. When checking browser information on multiple browsers don’t forget to refresh your page else you will get the cached page from your previous browser thus showing innacurrate information


Category: IE , WinXP , Explorer , Browser

Hacking Google to find people , mp3 , webcams , map

Google is really a powerful search engine ,over the years it has become a really essential tool to me as a developer and internet enthusiat. If ever I need to search for anything on the net I am 90% sure am gonna get what I want if I go to Google. But I am really suprised that many people dont know how to perform queries in google to get information that they need.This article is going to help them getting started in learning how to unleash the powers of Google.

Finding People
Finding people is quiet easy if you want to search for someone you should first know his/her full name or nickname. You go to google you type "Javed Mandary" (with the quotes)would return you all the pages having the name Javed Mandary. In my case however since am indexed a lot by Google if you simply type Javed would return you results on me (right now on the first page ..but that varies considerably). Of course you must hope that the person you are trying to find is someone who participates in forums or writes up articles or simply blogs , that person needs to have net presence to be found.

Finding files / mp3s
This is where the fun parts starts , why use illegal software to download music files (Kazaa , Sheraza , etc..) whilst you can ask google to find it for you. This is how i go about doing it. What you need to know is that many people share music publicly over the internet , google being such as powerful crawler can indentity these pages and return it back to you. Say you want a song called 'a day in paradiso' from artist 'phil' and you want the file in mp3 format. In google type the following commands and see the results that are returned:
"Index of" a day in paradiso ".mp3"
"Index of" paradiso phil ".mp3" "size"

Of course the example I gave above is fictionous , so i would doubt that you get a real result but you can change the artist and song title with real song information. If you want the song in wma or ogg format just substitute the .mp3 part with .wma or .ogg .

The same could be done to search for different types of files on the net may it be video , audio , pdf , powerpoint etc..

For more detailed information as to how to find mp3s please see the following article: http://www.i-hacked.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=128


Finding Public Webcams
Some webcams can be viewed over the internet as they are publicly available the following article shows how to find these webcams : http://www.i-hacked.com/content/view/81/42/

There are a host of other functinalites that can be obtained using google , for example using google map you can literally hack it into creating your own map with your own markings , add video , pictures and other multimedia information to your own customed made google map. Engadget has a walkthrough of how to do this and here is a wiki for those of you who really want to dig futher into it.

There is also a book which is out called Google Hacking for Penetration Testers which shows what can be done with the search engine.

Category: Google, Hack, GoogleMap, Mp3 , Search,Map

Papercasting or blogging on paper

You heard podcasting now comes the turn of papercasting. Some genius in blogsphere not very concerned about the depletion of our forests decided that he would invent a new form of blogging.

Here are the steps for papercasting or plogcasting as it is called:

1. Take a piece of paper and pencil


2. Write down what you want to blog on the piece of paper whilst holding your pencil with one hand


3. write in a neat way ...unless you are a doctor and your audience consists mainly of pharmacians


4. scan the end result of your work


5. put it as image on your blog


6. thats it ..ure officially undergoing regression..slap yourself hard

I personnally find it utterly stupid heres the link :
http://homepage.mac.com/packetrat/plog/

Category: Plog, PaperCasting , Blog , paper

Scare yourself out

Found a blog about a ghost hunter , called Charlyn, who is a travel writer.What she does is she goes about the US looking for ghost scoops and post the pics and the explanations around the extra-paranormal activities in her life.

Its kind of silly so if you wanna have a peek here is the link http://spaces.msn.com/members/ghosthunting/.

If you got scary blogs to share please add their url as comment.

Category: Ghost , Blog , Review

Shopping in duty free Mauritius

Its now official since the start of this week Mauritius is going to be a duty-free island. Everyone is excited and i personnally beleive that its going to be great to have products at a lower pricing than before ,on top of that it would be really interesting if we could have the same growth curve as Dubai , although we still lack the infrastructure in terms of big shopping malls etc..

So today i decided to have a closer look at how the prices had changed in shops around Port-Louis. First I went to Galaxee , there were many people inside although today is public holiday in Mauritius (...By the way happy Ugadi festival!). The main attraction was the TV sets , prices have dropped down a bit you could get a nice 29inch flat screen starting from rs12000 + VAT. I also had a look at gym equipments there but didn't notice any price drops.Prices on mobiles had dropped by about rs500 on almost all makes.

Then i went to Victoria Bus Station and jumped into Courts' showroom , there too a lot of people were looking and comparing the prices , i paid more attention to furniture items there for some reason , then i was told that there was no duty in the first place on these articles. Still i did notice some nice bedroom furniture , i might return there soon :) . But as far as electronic equipments are concerned i think Courts has yet to show the new pricings as everything is really still expensive , plus they dont have really big TV sets to display , the 29inch and 34 inches. I saw a DVD+Hifi at around rs20,000 + VAT , still expensive !!!

My last stop was at Cash&Carry Computer Gallery as usual it was packed full. Whats funny with the place is that there are just about as many clients as salespersons. And given that its a small shop , you kind of get pushed around which is annoying. On top of that you always have a sales guy in you back , which is something i really dont like. So i would definitively give a big zero as to customer relationship is concerned.On the other side the shop does have big tv-sets at reasonable prizes what caught my attention was a JVC 29inch flat screen TV set which was at rs17,000. Lots of mobiles too were on sale with considerable price reduction ,e.g the Samsung E800 which is being sold at rs16000 . But in the computers department , there is absolutely no change the price of an Intel Centrino 1.5 Ghz , 512 MB , 60G HD laptop is still around rs43,000. Anyways there were more people in the home electronics section than in the computer section.

I will definitively have a look around tommorrow (if i can) or latter next week to see how the prices evolve and will take some photo shots (added to TODO list).

Category: Mauritius,Duty-free, Shop

Blogging after 11th of April

Due to me undergoing a heavy training session I be able to blog only after the 11th of April but i will still give away Yahoo 360 invites , in the morning and the afternoon.

By the way those having GMail accounts , have you noticed that that GMail Space is now 2.06GB ... mondo cool!

Category: Blogging

BugMeNot.com dont register ever!

BugMeNot.com is a website that stores passwords of users to access common websites where registration is required, such as if for example on theserverside.com you need to provide a password to post a comment and you dont want to lose time registering , you just go to bugmenot.com and enter the url for theserverside.com . This will return you the password of another user who has previously stored his password on BugMeNot.com thus saving you the time of registration.

But do note that passwords for critical or sensitive information such as your email or online bank account should not be stored in BugMeNot.comelse everyone would gain access toit.

Category: Password , Review , Site

My GMail Space just Grew

Surprise Surprise! Instead of having less space on my GMail account , my mailbox size is actually growing it was at 1000MB now its at 1115 MB i.e 1.1GB . Wow the guys at google are really too generous.

Am currently using still only 7% (80MB) of my total mailbox and that too after having all my mails from several accounts (8 accounts) forwarded directly into one gmail account , it will probably take months or even a year or two to fill up my mailbox at this rate.

Plus now you can have rich formating for your gmail texts which is something which was really lacking before. So its getting better and better.

Category: Gmail, google, Mail

Google for a Taxi

The newest service from Google labs is called Google Ride Finder , basically what it does is that you seach a location where you would like to take a taxi , limousine or shuttle service and google returns back a map with the real time location of your taxi for example.

The vehicules are represented in terms of blue balloons , when you click on these balloons you get the contact information of the taxi,limousine or shuttle service. This includes phone number and name of the service. As usual , this is reserved on to 11 cities currently and needless to say that most of them are in the US.

Category: Google , Taxi , Googlelab , New

Aprils fool by Google !

Maximimse your surfing efficiency by having a fresh refreshing Google Gulp! It comes in 4 different flavours beta carrott, glutamate grape , sugar free radical and sero-tonic water.




Using Auto-Drink technology , the tip of the bottle scans your DNA to optimise your drinking efficiency.

If you want to learn more try the official Google Gulp webpage.

My advise for you guys is to enjoy it the most but still do remember that Google Gulp is still in BETA phase!!!!

Happy Aprils fool day... :) !

Category: Google,Aprilfool, Drink

Yahoo 360! Full review

Yahoo 360! start page

I finally got a Yahoo! 360 invitation yesterday. So how has my life changed since then...well not so much. The first impressions that you get when you enter your Yahoo! 360 degree homepage is that something is missing...ads! There are absolutely no ads on this service, maybe because its in beta but for the moment is completely ad free.

The inteface is a bit dull which is not going to help things i suppose. So basically this service is supposed to bring you closer to your community of friends , relatives ,etc... so to this effect there are a number of tools which are available to help you socialise.


Yahoo 360! Search

Various searches are possible from the search menu (as you can see from the picture), however when i made a search for people in mauritius i found only 2 person , me and the other one being a friend i invited to test the service, i think for the socialising part we will have to wait for Yahoo 360! to fill up a bit.


yahoo 360! blog

The blog has all the features (or most of them) for making you a happy blogger. Above is my attempt to conquer the Yahoo! blogosphere.There is a neat blogroll feature and ability for you to moblog (blog from your mobile).Your entries will be published in RSS 2.0 feeds format.


Yahoo! photo

Above is a screenshot of Yahoo!Photo , to share your photos with your friends , frankly speaking i do prefer hello over Yahoo!Photo.

To sum up Yahoo 360! does not live up to the expections what I would have had , msn spaces is definitively more interesting that Yahoo 360!. I didnt come over any new or innnovative so I'm not very impressed with it. But the service is still in beta , so maybe with more people joining and more features are added , it can be more interesting.

Win a Yahoo360! invite
If you are interested in getting a Yahoo360! invite please add a comment as to what you are going to do with it.I would like to give invites to everyone but given the rate at which people are asking me , i won't have many left (..80 invites left), so hurry.....!!

Category: Yahoo, Blog, Mauritius, Photo, Invitation