Technical

Check out the New Experts Exchange

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Tue, 8 Nov 2011 16:49:00 -0800

Check out the New Experts Exchange

CloudCourse: An Enterprise Application in the Cloud - Google Open Source Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Wed, 26 May 2010 22:10:00 -0700

CloudCourse is fully integrated with Google Calendar and can be further customized for your organization with the following service provider interfaces (replaceable components):

Sync service - to sync CloudCourse data with your internal systems
Room info service - to schedule classes in your locations
User info service - to look up user profile (employee title, picture, etc)

CloudCourse has been developed in Python, using the Django web application framework and the Closure Javascript library. Deploying CloudCourse on App Engine is a breeze, and should take less than 5 minutes.

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Sat, 22 May 2010 08:00:00 -0700

Google announced their new Font API yesterday, including a font directory and preview tool. They teamed up with TypeKit, to build and open source the WebFont Loader.

I quite like how they have done it. You just hotlink the CSS right from Google and then reference the font names in the CSS. It’s really easy — view source on this demo.

Why do this? Isn’t this just @font-face? Yep it is just @font-face, which you can do yourself without Google’s help. But there are advantages:

Bandwidth savings (weight is on Google)
Caching speed (same font used on multiple sites, browser cache kicks in)
Speed in general (Google’s CDN is faster than your site)

Loading the extra CSS file is an extra HTTP Request though, but you could hotlink the font file no support for iPhone/iPad. instead. You may also want to download the font and create your own SVG version, because the Google stylesheets aren’t serving that up, and hence

So what is this WebFont Loader then? It’s a bit of JavaScript which handles the loading of fonts. It’s use is totally optional, but offers some advantages. For example, Firefox will display a font further down the font stack until an @font-face font is loaded, and then flip to the @font-face font when it is ready, causing reflow and general weirdness. It’s called FOUT (Flash of unstyled text). The WebFont Loader can help fight this. This link helps
http://paulirish.com/2010/details-on-the-new-google-webfont-api/

Safely remove hardware icon missing.. How to restore using command line

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Mon, 17 May 2010 03:40:00 -0700

The safely remove hardware icon is missing from my system tray when i plug in the USB drive

This command at the run dialog box will show you the eject hardware dialog

%SystemRoot%\System32\RUNDLL32.EXE shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

Windows XP Tweaks

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Mon, 17 May 2010 03:19:00 -0700

Following is a list of some important restrictions, which can be made in Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008 and 7. For example, you can restrict Display properties, Taskbar properties, folder options, etc.

All tricks are based on Registry editing, you just need to open Registry Editor by providing regedit command in RUN and then create the mentioned key and set its value as given below:

NOTE: If you want to remove the restriction, simply delete the DWORD value or set its value to 0

1.) Restrict Display Properties:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\System

create DWORD value NoDispCPL and set its value to 1

2.) Restrict Taskbar Properties:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoSetTaskbar and set its value to 1

3.) Restrict Folder Options:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoFolderOptions and set its value to 1

4.) Restrict Locking/Unlocking the taskbar:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value LockTaskbar and set its value to 1

5.) Restrict Active Desktop:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoActiveDesktop and set its value to 1

6.) Restrict adding/deleting items from Toolbars:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoToolbarCustomize and set its value to 1

7.) Restrict adding/deleting toolbars:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoBandCustomize and set its value to 1

8.) Restrict right-click in Start Menu:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoChangeStartMenu and set its value to 1

9.) Restrict Desktop Cleanup Wizard:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoDesktopCleanupWizard and set its value to 1

10.) Restrict notification at low disk space:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoLowDiskSpaceChecks and set its value to 1

11.) Restrict Taskbar Context Menu:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

create DWORD value NoTrayContextMenu and set its value to 1

12.) Restrict Programs to run:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer\DisallowRun

create String value with any name, like 1 and set its value to the program's EXE file.

e.g., If you want to restrict msconfig, then create a String value 1 and set its value to msconfig.exe. If you want to restrict more programs, then simply create more String values with names 2, 3 and so on and set their values to the program's exe.

13.) Restrict Registry Editor:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\System

create DWORD value DisableRegistryTools and set its value to 1

14.) Restrict Task Manager:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\System

create DWORD value DisableTaskMgr and set its value to 1

15.) Restrict Writing to USB Drives:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Current Control Set\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

Create DWORD value WriteProtect and set its value to 1

16.) Restrict New option in context menu:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenu Handlers\New

And delete the value of Default, e.g., empty it.

17.) Restrict Send To in context menu:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenu Handlers\Send To

And delete the value of Default, e.g., empty it.

18.) Restrict Balloon Tips:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer\Advanced

Create DWORD value EnableBalloonTips and set its value to 0

19.) Restrict Users to enable New XP StartMenu:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

Create DWORD value NoSimpleStartMenu and set its value to 1

20.) Restrict Command Prompt:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\System

Create DWORD value DisableCMD and set its value to 2

21.) Restrict Drives in My Computer:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

In right-side pane, create a new DWORD value NoViewOnDrive and change its value as following:

3 : To Restrict A and B drives only.
4 : To Restrict C drive only.
7 : To Restrict A, B, and C drives only.
8 : To Restrict D drive only.
F : To Restrict A, B, C, and D drives only.
03FFFFFF : To Restrict all drives.

And if you want more specific restrictions, like you want to restrict a combination of other drives, then you can use decimal no. instead of hexadecimal no. Following is a list for all drives decimal no.:

A: 1
B: 2
C: 4
D: 8
E: 16
F: 32
G: 64
H: 128
I: 256
J: 512
K: 1024
L: 2048
M: 4096
N: 8192
O: 16384
P: 32768
Q: 65536
R: 131072
S: 262144
T: 524288
U: 1048576
V: 2097152
W: 4194304
X: 8388608
Y: 16777216
Z: 33554432
ALL: 67108863

So if you want to disable a combination of drives, just sum their numbers and give the same value to NoViewOnDrive. e.g., for restricting C, D, E and F drives, give the value: 4+8+16+32 = 60

NOTE: You can also hide the drives using NoDrives DWORD value. The location and its value remain same as the above trick.

22.) Restrict RUN in New XP StartMenu:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

Create DWORD value NoRun and set its value to 1

23.) Restrict Control Panel:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer

Create DWORD value NoControlPanel and set its value to 1

Next Gen PHP frameworks

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Tue, 6 Apr 2010 22:50:00 -0700

With the release of PHP 5.3, PHP released the most significant capabilities in years. Specifically the addition of Late Static Bindings, Lambda Functions and Closures, and Namespaces has changed everything. These new features open new doors for solutions previously impossible. As a result in recent months there has been a flood of new frameworks and libraries taking advantage of these new features. Effectively we are approaching the third wave of PHP frameworks.

The first wave included Seagull and Zoop Frameworks back before frameworks became a buzz word.

The second wave followed the massive buzz factory Ruby on Rails generated. CakePHP, Symfony, Zend and a slew of others followed. These frameworks were developed after PHP 5 became standard and took advantage of the new OO features provided.

This third wave is largely due to the release of PHP 5.3 and all the new languages features and structures that accompanied it.

The space is really heating up. Here’s what’s happening…

Zend Framework just announced a fork for ZF 2.0 strictly 5.3 and above.

The former lead developer of Cake PHP has started a new framework for 5.3 and above called Lithium.

Doctrine 2.0 is in the works and is 5.3+. It is a significant upgrade from the 1.0 branch and takes advantage of the features provided in PHP 5.3.

Zoop Framework has a stable but not feature complete 2.0 branch which is 5.3 and above.

Symfony just announced their 2.0 alpha release which you guessed it, only runs on 5.3 and above.

Fat-Free Framework is a brand new framework which, as the name indicates, is very VERY light. It is further along in development than all the other frameworks listed (read stable), but also far less ambitious in scope. If you are developing a small application FFF would be a solid choice, though I have doubts that without a lot of external development it would make sense for a large application.

While all these frameworks/libraries are rather early in their development process, many are quite usable and show really smart design. It’s great that the community has embraced this and is willing to re-engineer existing solutions to utilize the benefits of PHP 5.3.

Using ROLLBACK with MyISAM

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Mon, 5 Apr 2010 23:13:00 -0700

Using ROLLBACK with MyISAM is useless. A ROLLBACK command is used to undo any DML that occurs during a transaction (i.e. START TRANSACTION and COMMIT). The MySQL default storage engine MyISAM does not support transactions.

It is easy with the SHOW GLOBAL STATUS command to see if your application code uses ROLLBACK. By performing two samples you can look at the delta over time. The statpack utility is one product that provides a human friendly display of this delta. As seen below, the use of ROLLBACK in combination with the read/write ratio and the my.cnf –skip-innodb indicate unnecessary database work.


====================================================================================================
                  Variable    Delta/Percentage         Per Second              Total
====================================================================================================

                                       Statement Activity
====================================================================================================

                   SELECT:        1,135,589                 1,309.79              189,279,510 (49.62%)
                   INSERT:            6,171                     7.12                  431,987 (0.11%)
                   UPDATE:            4,800                     5.54                  334,620 (0.09%)
                   DELETE:              312                     0.36                   17,910 (0.00%)
                  REPLACE:                0                     0.00                        0 (0.00%)
        INSERT ... SELECT:              121                     0.14                    4,042 (0.00%)
       REPLACE ... SELECT:               11                     0.01                      109 (0.00%)
             Multi UPDATE:                0                     0.00                       30 (0.00%)
             Multi DELETE:                0                     0.00                       28 (0.00%)
                   COMMIT:                0                     0.00                        0 (0.00%)
                 ROLLBACK:        1,154,987                 1,332.16              191,382,775 (50.17%)

If the ROLLBACK command doesn’t do anything you may be tempted to consider this doesn’t do much harm, think again. In the following example of statements analyzed via TCP packets, the ROLLBACK attributed to 21% of the execution time of all SQL in this sample.


# Profile
# Rank Query ID           Response time    Calls R/Call   Item
# ==== ================== ================ ===== ======== ================
#    1 0x4ED092EFA577DAB7     0.0106 24.8%     1   0.0106 SELECT p
#    2 0xC9ECBBF2C88C2336     0.0102 23.8%    52   0.0002 SELECT r_c
#    3 0x19C8068B5C1997CD     0.0092 21.6%   138   0.0001 ROLLBACK
#    4 0x448E4AEB7E02AF72     0.0091 21.3%    52   0.0002 SELECT r_t
#    5 0x56438040F4B2B894     0.0015  3.6%     2   0.0008 SELECT h_c
#    6 0x164962ED9B451586     0.0012  2.9%     9   0.0001 SELECT r
#    7 0x8FDE1484818AAACE     0.0008  1.9%     8   0.0001 SELECT p_c

In a well tuned system, the greatest time to execute an SQL statement is not the running of the SQL inside the MySQL kernel, it is the network latency of making the call, and the time taken to return the resultset requested.

In this extreme case on a production system, 1/2 the statements executed where unnecessary.

Uncovering this issue was three commands and less then 5 minutes of my time. The statpack report uncovered 4 additional red flags at the same time.

A Complete List of Positives and Negatives of the iPad From Hands-On Reviews

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Mon, 5 Apr 2010 03:35:00 -0700

Reviews from the three major publications who were able to get their hands on iPad have rolled in (NY Times, USA Today, WSJ).

Like many Apple connoisseurs (ok, fanatics) out there we’ve given the articles a good read but also decided to summarise all the positives and negatives for you in a neat list.

This should give you a good idea of what the iPad’s standout features are and what’s currently lacking.

Positives

Sleek, light, silver-and-black
As an e-book or digital periodical reader, it works brilliantly (better than the Amazon Kindle in Mossberg’s opinion)
Runs all iPhone apps 150,000+ of them.
Large screen allows much more functionality than you initially imagine.
If you’re mainly a web surfer, note-taker, social-networker and emailer, and a consumer of photos, videos, books, periodicals and music—this is for you.
Pogue: The iPad is so fast and light, the multitouch screen so bright and responsive, the software so easy to navigate, that it really does qualify as a new category of gadget.
The iPad is thinner and lighter than any netbook or laptop Mossberg has seen.
It boasts a big, bright color 9.7-inch screen that occupies most of the front
It has a decent speaker, and even a tiny microphone.
iPad’s battery life great, Mossberg found it to be even longer than Apple’s ten-hour claim (He played movies, TV shows and other videos back-to-back until the iPad died). Lasted 11 hours and 28 minutes. “I was able to watch four feature-length movies, four TV episodes and a video of a 90-minute corporate presentation. All with wi-fi running and email downloading in background.”
Overall speed of the iPad, “wicked fast”
Typing accurately and quickly on the iPad’s wide on-screen keyboard was perectly comfortable and fast.
The Web browser also works beautifully.
Watching videos, viewing photos, listening to music, reading books and playing games was “satisfying and fun”.
Generally the iPad apps are much better than their iPhone equivalents, but more expensive, but some free.
The photo app is striking, and much more like the one on the Mac than the one on the iPhone. The device can even be used as a digital picture frame.
Reading the news on iPad was the “best implementation of the newspaper” (WSJ) Mossberg has ever seen.
iBooks is superior to the Kindle, and encountered no eye strain says Mossberg. (but heavier)
You can search text in iBooks and it will open to a specific page
The simple act of making the multitouch screen bigger changes the whole experience. Maps become real maps, like the paper ones.
there’s no contract. (By tapping a button in Settings, you can order up a month of unlimited cellular Internet service for $30)
It gives portable game machines from Nintendo and Sony a run for their money.
Apple expects more than 1,000 iPad-specific apps to be available at launch,

Negatives

The Apple iPad is basically a gigantic iPod Touch says Pogue.
No physical keyboard
no Webcam
no USB ports
no multitasking.
No headphones with the device
Not as good for writing or editing longer documents
Not good for anything that requires Flash.
battery is sealed in and nonreplaceable
Memory, also sealed in and nonexpandable (ranges from 16 gigabytes to 64 gigabyte)
no stand but $39 iPad case works well.
iWork works well, a “serious content creation app”, but exporting to Microsoft’s formats (which only Pages can do) doesn’t work so well.
No Weather, Clock and Stocks apps.
iPad heavier than Kindle
Most people need two hands to use iPad
The iBooks app also lacks any way to enter notes, and Apple’s catalog at launch will only be about 60,000 books versus more than 400,000 for Kindle.
email app lacks the ability to create local folders – email app doesn’t include rules for auto-sorting messages
email app doesn’t include group addressing
No tabs in Safari
Wifi only version lacks GPS.
Wide screen view can be awkward. Either you have black bars in wide screen view or you get some of your image cut off in fill screen view.
There’s an e-book reader app, but it’s not going to rescue the newspaper and book industries says Pogue
At 1.5 pounds, the iPad gets heavy in your hand after awhile (the Kindle is 10 ounces)
You can’t read books from the Apple bookstore on any other machine — not even a Mac or iPhone.
When the very glossy 9.7-inch screen is off, every fingerprint is grossly apparent.
You can’t read well in direct sunlight
Pogue: “When the iPad is upright, typing on the on-screen keyboard is a horrible experience; when the iPad is turned 90 degrees, the keyboard is just barely usable (because it’s bigger). A $70 keyboard dock will be available in April, but then you’re carting around two pieces.”
Pogue: “The bottom line is that you can get a laptop for much less money — with a full keyboard, DVD drive, U.S.B. jacks, camera-card slot, camera, the works.”
The new iBooks e-reader app is filled with endearing grace notes.
Apple says that 150,000 existing iPhone apps run on the iPad but many appear or small and dead center on the screen — or, with a tap, doubled to fill the screen, a little blurry.
Skype (even voice calls, through its speaker and microphone). Just no video
Pogue: The iPad is not a laptop. It’s not nearly as good for creating stuff.
Pogue: It’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it — books, music, video, photos, Web, e-mail and so on.
You will have to buy into the iTunes ecosystem, of course, to watch movies, read e-books and sync up the apps.
You have to purchase a $29 iPad Camera Connection Kit, which lets you connect a USB camera or import photos via an SD card.
Baig: “Many people will still need a more traditional computer. You can’t edit video on an iPad. And the virtual onscreen keyboard that pops up when needed is fine for e-mails or scribbling notes, but I wouldn’t want to regularly write articles using it. “
No coverflow in iTunes

Quotables

Baig on USA Today: “Apple has pretty much nailed it with this first iPad, though there’s certainly room for improvement. Nearly three years after making a splash with the iPhone, Apple has delivered another impressive product that largely lives up to the hype. ”

Pogue on NY Times: “It really does qualify as a new category of gadget. Some have suggested that it might make a good goof-proof computer for technophobes, the aged and the young; they’re absolutely right. the iPad is not a laptop. It’s not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it — books, music, video, photos, Web, e-mail and so on. For most people, manipulating these digital materials directly by touching them is a completely new experience — and a deeply satisfying one. ”

Mossberg on WSJ: “If people see the iPad mainly as an extra device to carry around, it will likely have limited appeal. If, however, they see it as a way to replace heavier, bulkier computers much of the time—for Web surfing, email, social-networking, video- and photo-viewing, gaming, music and even some light content creation—it could be a game changer the way Apple’s iPhone has been.”

Videos

Great Video Review from PC Magazine

PCMag: Apple iPad video review from PCMag.com Reviews on Vimeo.

Unboxing Video:

Original title and link for this post: A Complete List of Positives and Negatives of the iPad From Hands-On Reviews

Improved comment collapsing for Google Buzz posts

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Sat, 3 Apr 2010 03:46:00 -0700

Official Gmail Blog: Improved comment collapsing for Google Buzz posts: "Any Google Buzz post can turn into a lively discussion. Sometimes these conversations can gather lots of new comments very quickly, turning them into 'skyscraper' posts that can dominate your entire screen, especially if you don't check Buzz for a few days. We've heard from many of you that these big posts can be a lot to skim over."

The NOSQL databases

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Wed, 3 Mar 2010 02:25:00 -0800

What is NoSQL?
NoSQL is a kind of database that, unlike most relational databases, does not provide a SQL interface to manipulate data. NoSQL databases usually organize the data in a different way other than tables.

NoSQL databases are divided into three categories:

column-oriented
key-value pairs
document-oriented databases

SQL based relational databases do not scale well when they are distributed over multiple cluster nodes. Data partition is not an easy to implement solution when the applications use join queries and transactions.

NoSQL databases are not new. Actually, there were key-value pair based databases before relational database became popular.

List of NOSQL databases

Wide Column Store / Column Families

Hadoop / HBase
Cassandra
Hypertable

Document Store

CouchDB
MongoDB
Riak
Terrastore
ThruDB

Key Value / Tuple Store

Amazon SimpleDB
Chordless
Redis
Scalaris
Tokyo Cabinet / Tyrant
GT.M
Scalien
Berkeley DB
MemcacheDB
Mnesia
LightCloud
HamsterDB

Technical123 : Google buys Picnik

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Mon, 1 Mar 2010 18:25:00 -0800

Google welcomes Picnik

Official Gmail Blog: 2 hidden ways to get more from your Gmail address

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Mon, 1 Mar 2010 07:43:00 -0800

Official Gmail Blog: 2 hidden ways to get more from your Gmail address

Twitter plans to move out of MYSQL to Cassandra database

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:05:00 -0800

Twitter plans to move from MySQL to the Cassandra database. San Francisco-based Twitter currently uses a cluster of MySQL servers with a memcached caching system that "is quickly becoming prohibitively costly (in terms of manpower) to operate.

Twitter hopes that deploying the Apache Software Foundation's Cassandra database will improve the Uptime

GreenSQL – Open Source Database Firewall Software

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 23:51:00 -0800

GreenSQL is an Open Source database firewall used to protect databases from SQL injection attacks. GreenSQL works as a proxy and has built in support for MySQL. The logic is based on evaluation of SQL commands using a risk scoring matrix as well as blocking known db administrative commands (DROP, CREATE, etc). GreenSQL provides MySQL database security solution. GreenSQL is distributed under the GPL license.

More info here : http://www.greensql.net/

Google Labs SMS Channel

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:41:00 -0800

A free service available, only for Indian Mobile subscribers right now, enables one to subscribe to Google channels and get updates on various services like blogger, reader or any RSS feed. There are quite a few channels available at present giving updates about NEWS, weather, sports, tech trends, fashion, etc.

What is a Channel exactly?

A channel is just like a magazine which you can subscribe to and get the content on your mobile. The content can be subscribed by the channel owner or also by all the subscribers based on the channel settings. A channel generally fetches information from Google services like groups, reader, mails and also from any type of RSS feed.

As a subscriber you can subscibe to channels and thats not all, you can create your own channels and invite others.

Technical123 has its own channel which will keep you updated of all the posts that come of technical123 blog. Subscribe to the service today

For more information visit : http://labs.google.co.in/smschannels/help?cr=in#create_channel

Boosting MySQL Performance and Scalability with the InnoDB Plugin

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:17:00 -0800

This doc provide technical overview of the MySQL pluggable storage engine architecture used by the new InnoDB Plugin, including the features, performance and scalability gains users can expect to see when enabling the InnoDB Plugin in MySQL 5.1.38 or later

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B0O_BgcxiZJsM2RlOTVhZjUtZDhlYi00ZmEwLTg5M2YtN2IzYjBjMTgzOGE3&hl=en

Browsers other than chrome and firefox

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Fri, 5 Feb 2010 11:31:00 -0800

There are quite a few interesting and useful Graphical Web browsers for Linux.

Flock

Based on Firefox, Flock is branded the “Social Web Browser,” and includes a number of features for using social networking sites like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, that aren’t included in Firefox.

Swiftfox

Speaking of performance, Swiftfox is a browser that’s near and dear to the performance junkies in the crowd. If you’re familiar with Firefox, then Swiftfox is going to look really familiar.

Epiphany

Epiphany is the default browser for the GNOME desktop. Back in the day it was based on Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine, but has switched to WebKit in recent releases. It’s small, fast, and simplified compared to Firefox and integrates well with the GNOME desktop.

Google Ajax Api Playground

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:13:00 -0800

Google has introduced for developers a new way to try their ajax api's here : Google AJAX API Playground.

The Google AJAX API Playground is built on Google App Engine, and the code is open-sourced under an Apache 2.0 license

http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/

Creating a Rich User Experience with Ajax

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 12:05:00 -0800

Presenters -- Web Guild

Incorporated AJAX is enabling the creation of applications with better functionality, usability, and an overall better user experience. This panel will discuss how desktop-like applications can be delivered via the browser with Ajax, the efficiency of developing such applications, and the importance of the GUI. They will also share their thoughts on highly successful applications and the shortcomings of using Ajax.

How to break web software(Video)

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:59:00 -0800

What Every Web Programmer Needs To Know About Security

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:56:00 -0800

Contains
Foundations of Security
secure design principles
common web application vulnerabilities
an introduction to cryptography
and much more

http://code.google.com/edu/submissions/daswani/index.html

Linux (Google code Documentation)

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:53:00 -0800

Basic Linux Commands
Linux Ownership and Permissions
Text Processing with Grep

Software Configuration Management

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:49:00 -0800

This tutorial covers a tool commonly found in industry to support the software development process
http://code.google.com/edu/tools101/scm.html

MYSQL (Google code documentation)

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:44:00 -0800

Software engineers are most effective when programming with the assistance of tools, such as debuggers or IDEs. Below you will find tutorials that introduce some well-known and indispensible tools:

http://code.google.com/edu/tools101/mysql.html

Unix Tips And Tricks from developerworks

noreply@blogger.com (Jayadev Neduvachalil) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:04:00 -0800

Adopt 10 good habits that improve your UNIX command line efficiency
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-badunixhabits.html?ca=dgr-twtrCMDL-Tips-P1dth-A&S_TACT=105AGY83&S_CMP=TWDW
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-unixtips/index.html?ca=dgr-twtrCMDL-Tips-P1dth-A&S_TACT=105AGY83&S_CMP=TWDW