Archive for the 'Tools' Category

Google is again on the roll! The latest product from Google named Chrome is a very fast and compact web browser. From the first impressions, it seems that Chrome may attract a sizeable pie of the browser market in the coming months. Needless to say, this is surely will heat up the browser wars and Internet Explorer is going to feel most of it!

The Google Chrome initial installer is under 500kb and rest of the installation is done by downloading other components from the initial installer. On my 2mbps broadband line it took under 5 minutes for complete installation. The configuration took just the following step,

The Chrome user interface is simple, elegant and extremely fast. It is very unobtrusive, just what an ideal browser should look like.

Google Chrome is built from ground up and hence is able to address a lot of issues plaguing current browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Here is a summary of major Chrome features,

1. Single text field for URL and Search - Type in the URL if you know it, else search the Web. The default search engine obviously is Google, but you can easily change it.

2. Browser tabs as separate processes - Instead of threads, Google Chrome uses separate processes and hence provides greater control of each tab and preventing possible crash of the entire browser due to a problem in a Web page in a single tab.

3. Enhanced developer features - This includes JavaScript debugging and control features, a task manager and a JavaScript console. The JavaScript console even provides auto completion. I guess this will be an area where we can find tremendous improvements in coming versions. Firefox Firebug, beware!

Why is Google going after the Browser market?

The majority of Google revenue comes from search and there is a risk that browsers such as Internet Explorer will try to divert users from it. Already IE sets Windows live as default search engine. The best way to fight this is to fight Internet Explorer itself!

Secondly an advanced browser provides an ability to roll out advanced features to Google products. Google can provide a degraded behavior to other browser users for their advanced product features. This enables Google spreadsheet and document editor applications to compete with Microsoft Office etc.  Hence Microsoft can expect intense competition in this area.

My Verdict

I think it is too early to say how Google Chrome will evolve. But one thing is sure, it will soon take up a substantial pie of the browser market. Also I think in the long run, Chrome has the potential to host complex Web applications taking over a lot functionality currently provided by operating system and desktop applications. And for the Web developers, it may become a very good development tool for advanced Ajax based applications.

Further Resources

• Download Google Chrome
• Get Google Chrome Comic (Very Informative)
• Complete Google Chrome feature list

Rapidshare is a popular free/premium file sharing service. There are a lot of files available on Rapidshare and not all of them are legal. But what many don’t know is that there are two different sites which run with the Rapidshare logo. The original one is rapidshare.de and the new recently started site is rapidshare.com. Same people are behind both these sites.

But unfortunately if you take an account on rapidshare.com, it WON’T WORK on rapidshare.de and vice versa! Even the account pricing is different between these two sites. For example, rapidshare.de charges 9.90 euro for one month’s service while rapidshare.com charges 6.99 euro for one month.

So before you signup to rapidshare, decide which one you need. If you are looking for a lot of old files, rapidshare.de account is the one you need. But rapidshare.com is where all the new files are added!

Rapidshare claims that they have 220gigabit/s bandwidth and can host upto 5 petabytes of data!

Due to obvious reasons(rapidshare doesn’t support file meta data to avoid copyright issues), rapidshare doesn’t provide any search facility. But there are a couple of third party sites which allows rapidshare search. These sites store the meta data related to rapidshare uploaded files separately. Following are some of the tools you can use to search rapidshare file database.

Rapidshare search engine - This is a web crawler which collects rapidshare links. Not perfect, but useful enough for most searches. Supports ajax search.

RapidLibrary - This is much more precise than rapidshare search engine. Files are indexed from user submissions and also from web crawling.

I recently came across a high speed domain search called 10xwhois. This service shows the domain availability as soon as you type in the domain name. You can also save a list of favorite domain extensions and can also bookmark favorite domain searches.

From the author’s site,

10xwhois has support for keyboard shortcuts and you can also save your domain searches in a favorite list. This tool is a Java web application and is hosted on a dedicated server. It is designed to handle high volume requests and is probably the fastest domain search service on internet.

I am still working on a couple of enhancements such as domain suggest and 10xwhois widgets…

This tool also is a demonstration of the effectiveness of Ajax Web paradigm.

Recently I came across InstaCalc, an online calculator. Initially I thought - “what the heck, who will start a site on a calculator?” But after using it for sometime I quickly realized that it is infact a brilliant idea!

Here are a couple of things that makes this unique,

1. Ultra fast calculator with immediate preview of results. You can also create and use equations.

2. You can create complex calculations and share them. For example, check out the Youtube Analysis.

3. You can embed calculations to a blog/site. InstaCalc can also generate charts and graphs. Embed feature is not yet available for graphs.

For more details on this cool tool, check out the InstaCalc feature tour.

Small.DAM, a variant of Small, is a Trojan that arrives on the system as attachment file to spam emails. Small.DAM loads a malicious service named “wincom32″ in the affected machine.

Check out the following video on F-Secure’s WorldMap Live showing an outbreak of malware named Small.DAM.

This shows how many people are still ready to click on suspicious attachments in emails!

I use w.bloggar to post to this blog. This desktop tool allows me to update my blog fast, without logging onto the wordpress console. The only problem is that w.bloggar doesn’t support creation of new categories (which I don’t need very often, but if you are using categories as tags you will find it a problem).

Here is a list of free desktop based blog publishing tools. Most of these atleast support Wordpress and Movable Type platforms. Please note I haven’t included any commercial or trial versions (for example, ecto).

Are you using one of these tools? Please let me know if I have missed out anything.

Free Desktop blogging tools for Windows

• Bleezer
• blogBuddy
• BlogDesk
• BlogED
• JBlogEditor
• IMHO
• Lycos-Qumana



• PowerBlog
• Post2Blog Express
• PostXING
• Qumana
• RocketPost Basic (Remember it is really basic!)
• Semagic
• SharpMT
• Slug
• Tanjunka (no longer available since domain expired!)
• w.bloggar
• Zoundry

Free Desktop blogging tools for Linux

• Bleezer



• BloGTK
• Drivel
• Gnome Blog
• JBlogEditor

Free Desktop blogging tools for Mac

• Bleezer



• BlogED
• iJournal
• JBlogEditor
• Lycos-Qumana
• Qumana
• Xjournal

What are sitemaps?
Sitemaps are a standard way of informing search engines about your site content. Sitemaps facilitates and speeds up search engine crawling of your site. This means that new content on your site will appear pretty quick on the search engine results.

Sitemap is nothing but a simple XML file which lists URLs on your site. It also includes URL meta data such as the date when it was changed, frequency of change and how important the content is for your site.

Till last year, there were different specifications for sitemaps. But now there is only one specification supported by Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. At last they agreed on something! Following a sample sitemap XML.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>
</urlset> 

How do I create a sitemap for my site?
If you are hosting account with a webhost then you can use Google’s sitemap generator. Please note that this requires Python support on your webhost and you should be able to run Python scripts on it. Google also gives a list of other sitemap generators.

If you are using a blogging tool I suggest you use the plugins that are available. This ensures that as soon as you post a new entry, sitemap is updated and Google is notified about the change. On my Wordpress installations I use Arne Brachhold’s Google sitemap generator for Wordpress which offers hassle free generation of sitemap.

There are a couple of online sitemap generators which can generate a sitemap for an existing website. But most of these free versions have a limit of 500 URLs.

Sitemap restrictions
A single sitemap should not be more than 10MB and is limited by a maximum of of 50,000 URLs. If your sitemap file is more than 10MB, you should break up it into multiple sitemaps and then provide a sitemap index file which lists the sitemap files.

Sitemap tips
Every time a search engine is informed of a change in sitemap in your site, it will download the entire XML. Hence for large sites you should compress the sitemap to a zip file.

You can submit your sitemaps to Google and Yahoo. Both these services require you to sign up. I prefer Google webmaster services since it offers additional features such as page ranking of your URLs. Following is how this site appears on google sitemaps,

References
Sitemaps official site
Google sitemap generator
Arne Brachhold’s Google sitemap generator for Wordpress

Recently I was trying to install Rational Application Developer, a popular Java software development platform. During installation I got an error saying that integrated Websphere application server installation failed. The installation did continue and I was able to use RAD, but without the built in WAS server. But to do anything useful I needed WAS server!

I looked at the logs generated. The rad_install.log file under logs folder of RAD installation contained the following error,

(Jan 4, 2007 12:37:20 PM), Install, com.ibm.rational.cdi.common.CustomExec, err, Operation timed out: connect
(Jan 4, 2007 12:37:20 PM), Install, com.installshield.wizard.RunnableWizardBeanContext, err, java.lang.NullPointerException
STACK_TRACE: 5
java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.ibm.rational.cdi.common.CustomExec.parseConfigurationFile(CustomExec.java:444)
at com.ibm.rational.cdi.common.CustomExec.execute(CustomExec.java:294)
at com.installshield.wizard.RunnableWizardBeanContext.run(RunnableWizardBeanContext.java:21)

To resolve this I used the following hack. I still don’t know the root cause of the problem.

1. Uninstalled RAD.
2. Installed RAD again, but kept the install integrated WAS 6.0 button unchecked.
3. From the disk4 folder, I have manually installed WAS server. Selected custom install and then choose the directory for installation as [RAD directory]\runtimes\base_v6. The base_v6 folder was manually created.

When I started RAD again, voila! the integrated WAS server was enabled.

My Machine settings
Windows XP service pack 2 with all latest patches.
All hard disks were NTFS formatted.

References
IBM on the WAS issue in RAD
Similar problem listed on IBM forum without any solution

WSAD from IBM is one of the best tools available out there for enterprise Java development. It is a perfect IDE where everything in Java (EJB, servlets, JSP, webservices etc.) can be developed with ease. Here are some WSAD tips which my fellow programmers find quite useful.

How do I change the workspace in WSAD?
Normally when you start WSAD, you get an option to change workspace. If you had checked the “Do not show this dialog” option, you will not get get this option again. To enable workspace selection again,
Right click on WSAD shortcut and insert -setworkspace in the target field of the shortcut. In my case it is “D:\Program Files\IBM\WebSphere Studio\Application Developer\v5.1.2\wsappdev.exe” -setworkspace

Why is VSS plugin not working in WSAD?
To enable VSS plugin with WSAD 5.1 modify “wsappdev.ini” in WSAD working directory and comment VMArgs=-Xj9, for example #VMArgs=-Xj9

Why is my JDBC settings not working in WSAD?
You need to add classes12.zip to the classpath of the JDBC provider.

Can I install WSAD 5.1.2 on Windows 2003?
Yes you can! But you need enable compatibility mode for the installer. Right click on the installer and then select properties->compatibility->compatibility mode for windows 2000.

Which shortcut keys you use in WSAD?