06.26.04
How to buy a laptop
This is a guide where you can find excellent tips to choose a good laptop.
06.14.04
Sony’s Clie discontinued!
Sony decided to discontinue its Clie PDA in American Market. It will only continue its market in Japan. Which company would be the next??
Anyway, I think Sony made the best PalmOS based PDA in the market.
07.08.04
Don’t miss Maxthon!
I was surprised by the new release of MyIE2. It’s been renamed to Maxthon, a better and clear name. In case you don’t know what Maxthon is, it is an IE based browser. Technically it is a shell for IE, a browser created by IE Control. This is one of rare replacement applications I am using for more than awhile and I like it so much that I didn’t dare to look back to days I used IE!
Now what’s so new in Maxthon? From my taste, the most amazing *new* features that makes Maxthon different from any other Browser out there is:
- When you click on a link which opens a a new popup window, besides its better management of ad blocks, it opens the the new page in a custom sized window. In the previous versions formerly named MyIE2, it opened the page full size like any other tab page based browsers, so it doesn’t mess up the page anymore.
- It has tons of free plugins, skins and sidebars.
And compared to its old versions, it now supports Unicode. This is what I wished to be in my favorite browser.
You can see the full list of features in Maxthon web site.
04.30.04
skmMenu: An open-source ASP.NET menu server control
There are lots of useful projects in www.gotdotnet.com community. From those, I found skmMenu useful, which is an open source menu server control. Even though I didn’t use the control yet, it sounded very well designed and nicely documented to me (Looks like he documented the control with NDoc, more on this tool in a future posting from me). The items of menu is being fed by Xml data, which means that you can change the menu without touching and recompiling your source code.
And hey! I just found out that this control has been created by Scott Mitchell, the founder and first contributor of 4GuysFromRolla.com! In case you don’t know this web site, it is one of the best web sites on ASP and ASP.NET articles, tips and tricks and resources. Now I’m getting more interested in this control! I’m a big fan of his articles.
04.23.04
Project Management Software
A friend of mine (Shayan Mashatian) asked me if I know a good open source or free web based ticket management software. As usual, I said that I would try to find one. After a few googling, I came up with a short list of softwares, but my definite answer to him was dotProject. This application is primarily a powerful project management tool. This is some of the features you can find in dotProject:
- User Management
- Email based trouble Ticket System, (Integrated voxel.net’s ticketsmith)
- Client/Company Management
- Project listings
- Hierarchical Task List
- Gaantt Chart View
- File Repository
- Contact List
- Calendar
- Discussion Forum
- Resource Based Permissions
The only missing feature of this software is defect tracking module which I hope they add it soon, but this doesn’t boil down its versatile functionality and features. dotProject is written with PHP and primarily uses MySQL to keep data. There are additional modules which dozen of localized modules (including French, German, Chinese…) as well as backup and journal modules.
In its web site, there’s a live demo version that you can try before installing. I set that up on my machine at home and was very pleased to see such nice software lives out there for public use, open source and for free. Shayan started using it immediately as a project management tool (although he was looking for a ticket manager software) and was very happy with it too.
By the way, if you continue using it, don’t forget to support them by donating; since this is the only way to appreciate and support these type of software and tools.
04.20.04
Free Firewalls
Everybody loves free software, including me! So for those who love free software, here’s a nice website refering to firewall software for Windows, Mac and Linux.
04.18.04
Sysinternals
“Which freaking process locked this file again?!“ you shout. Go and find it if you can… Sometimes you have to restart Windows because you cannot find the process or application that locked a file or directory.
Well, Handle can handle it. This is one of many utilities written by SysInternals. Handle is a command line utility, however Process Explorer which is GUI based version of this utility is there as well. Amongst these tools there’s a registry monitor tool which keeps track of registry keys that are changed. There are some source codes available in SysInternals web site too.
And after all, these great tools are all free! Enjoy.
04.15.04
AWStats - Web site statistics
I was looking for a good, reliable and of course full featured site statistics web application for a while. There are a lot out there on Internet you can pay for, but you cannot basically find a cheap one with reasonable features. Some others like www.nedstat.com, www.stats4all.com or www.bravenet.com have java script based free versions, but very limited in information they provide and you cannot hide it from users of your website.
Surprisingly, I found AWStats which is an open source perl based stat system. This stats system has tons of features and very easy to setup and configure. It can use the log files of your web server (IIS, Apache…) to make its database. It doesn’t need an RDBMS and stores its stats information in text files in its own directory. It can be used for analyzing web, ftp or mail server. Frankly, it functions like one of those expensive stats applications! Obviouly you need to have a perl runtime interpreter like ActivePerl on your web server.
03.24.04
No spam. Not anymore!
What would you say if I told you that you can have a spam free mailbox? Say it!
A nice free and open source application called SpamBayes is able to filter all spams out of your mailbox. It’s a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook.
The way it works is that after you install it, you can train it either by feeding it with two folders: A good spam free folder and a folder filled with spams. It will analyze the folders and starts to build its own internal ruleset for spams. If you don’t have such a folder (or you don’t have enough time to do it), you can start by an empty database and train it whenever you get spams. But remember: the more spams you give it, the better it can filter spams for you. Did you ever imagine that a folder full of spams would be such a nice source of information? 
Address of the web site: http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/
Link to SpamBayes page for Windows: http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/windows.html
03.22.04
Bookmark Mania
I really missed Yahoo Bookmarks in MyIE2. I was looking for an alternative for online and centralized bookmarking system and I’m happy that I found the one:
www.sitebar.org: This looks and works great and is even compatible with MyIE2, IE5+, Netscape and Opera. It has import/export functionality, which is a must. So now, I do not miss Yahoo Bookmarks anymore!
There are a lot more that are web based, which are hard to use, because unlike Yahoo Bookmarks and SiteBar you need to open another browser, login to that web site to add bookmark. See how tedious this could be!
MyIE2
Boy, could anything better than this happen to Internet Explorer?!
MyIE2 has tons of features you always wished to be added to IE. http://www.myie2.com
Here’s a summary of features I borrowed from MyIE2 web site:
Tabbed Browsing Interface
Mouse Gestures
Super Drag&Drop
Privacy Protection
AD Hunter
Google Bar Support
External Utility Bar
Skinning
and a lot more…
And it’s all FREE with no adware or spyware and it’s still IE! So what are you waiting for? Go grab it. Frankly, I don’t like to open IE since I installed MyIE2. (Does this sound more like an ad? Gosh, I better go sell vacuum cleaners door to door!)
Anyhow, I see some minor defects in it. It cannot display international text in title bar and tab page titles and it cannot support latest Yahoo Companion Toolbar so far (who cares? I do! I’ll tell you why in my next post.)
Enjoy
07.30.04
Gosh I hoped everybody knew this about n-tier development!
Don’t assume that you are a simple developer and this is just for more experienced developers and masters. Learn now and avoid the mess! I have seen many of developers that declare their code as the cleanest and the most perfect, but they manipulate database from ASP.NET (or even ASP) pages, don’t know what code-behind is, put ASP.NET controls’ event calls and declerations in aspx pages, and don’t even create a ShoppingCart class for their e-commerce application.
I feel better now!
07.23.04
Visual Studio 2005 Product Line
I was wondering what is the difference between Visual Studio Express, Professional and Enterprise Editions. So I asked it when I saw the news in Vs2005new’s WebLog about release of its Beta 1.
Kent Sharkey answered my question and you can see the comparison chart here. Well, not very surprised, but disappointed that Express edition is not good enough for a seasoned developer as it lacks lots of cool features of Pro and Ent editions. I hope Microsoft would do a smart move on pricing unlike what they did for 2003.
06.10.04
Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks and XML!
In case you didn’t notice in my last post, based on Wiki concept there is a cool reference web site Wikipedia which contains a lot of free information including an encyclopedia, Dictionary, Books and more.
Amongst books I found something interesting that may be in your interest too: XML, A technology for managing data exchange. I took an overall look into it and found it useful.
05.27.04
ZVON - The Guide to the XML Galaxy
zvon.org is a site loaded with tutorials by example in different languages and formats (xml with css / xslt, pdf…) for XML and all related technologies. You can find a lot of online and downloadable references there too.
05.09.04
Scott Mitchell’s web log (Scott On Writing)
I didn’t know that Scott Michell has a weblog besides www.4GuysFromRolla.com web site. Well, frankly, I visited his weblog already, but I didn’t know that it belonged to him! I believe that his weblog is as useful as 4GuysFromRolla.com.
04.26.04
Quality Tips for Webmasters
I found a good link from w3c that contains valuable tips and tricks for webmasters. So if you have a web site and want to have a “quality web site“, increase hit and have more visitors; or even if you are a web site designer or developer these tips can add up to your knowledge and help you avoid some common mistakes in creating web pages.
Some tips are:
<title>: the most important element of a quality Web page
\Don’t use “click here” as link text
Use standard redirects: don’t break the back button!
…
04.07.04
Test Driven Development is not about testing
If somebody asks you in an interview: “How many oranges can I fit in this room?“, you better answer: “with or without us standing in it?“
Read this useful article that describes what Test Driven Development is about. click here.
06.08.04
WikiWiki! What is Wiki?
First let’s see what Wiki is. In simple words, Wiki is a collection of web pages that allow everybody to contribute writing and adding content to them without password or permission.
So let’s say you start a Wiki about Investment. You can setup different pages, one about Stocks, one Mutual Funds and so on. You start adding content adding definitions to each page. Everybody who visits your pages can add content and their opinions to it by switching to edit mode, adding text and then save it. This is just a very basic suggestion of practical use of Wiki.
You can find even more comprehensive information about Wiki in Wikipedia.
Now that you know more about Wiki I feel more free to refer to a few sites I adore which has pure contents and are based on Wiki. However this doesn’t mean you need to learn ins and outs of Wiki to read web sites based on Wiki. Just wanted you to learn more!
