Launch of TechTracer

Hi friends,
It bring me great pleasure to announce the launch of my new technology oriented site names TechTracer. The aim of this site would be to promote new technology related concepts and tools to help you in your daily activities.

The vision for this site is to bring into light important aspects related to J2EE, AJAX, Web Services and Java Certifications since I am working in these fields.

You can access TechTracer with the URL’s http://www.techtracer.com or http://techtracer.com

Hoping to have a nice jouney in the world of technology with all you who have been reading posts in this blog and supporting with your advices. Do leave your footprints out in TechTracer too.

🙂

Snapshot of TechTracer :

SCDJWS – mission accomplished

The post has been moved here.

Edit: The author has moved to http://techtracer.com
All further posts will be published at the new location.

Snap Preview in WordPress Blogs

It was not a few days ago I witnessed this thing called snap preview in some websites while surfing. In the first instance I felt it was a cool concept since the preview showed up the snapshot of the actual site to which a hyperlink was pointing to. Only a mouse hover would be enough to see how the site is. I thought for a moment “Now, that’s something cool”.I thought I should try this little cool stuff in my blog. But hey, wordpress already has enabled it in my blog!

First WordPress, now Blogger – blogging gets personal

The days of the bloggers have now started to bloom. Day after day blogging is becoming as the faster and more interactive mechanism to put updated information to the web. Now people across the globe seek constantly updated information from the bloggers blogs than resorting to websites or reading magazines. This has in turn provided an incentive to the bloggers themselves as an added advantage. This not only gives continuous feedbacks from the readers but also helps them earn their living solely by the blogs themselves. Yet another advantage is that organizations come forward to the bloggers to get their products reviewed and evaluated or in terms of sponsoring the blogging activity. You may be well aware of Microsoft’s strategy of giving away free Acer Ferrari Vista powered laptops to the popular well known tech bloggers to evaluate their latest offering – Vista. There has been much hue and cry about the ethics of the bloggers opinions after this but the fact remains that blogging has taken a high leap.

Who’re the bonds this year?

There are gonna be two bonds this year. Ask why? Hey see the year… it’s 2007
i.e. 2(007) = 2(Bonds) 😀

Yep. The names bond James Bond.
And the years, new year, Happy New Year 😀
Enjoy folks!

Lets the party begin…

Need for a good WordPress Web Host

Ever tried finding a house on your own? The first step you take in this direction you will be witnessing millions of hoardings for real estate offers for an attractive and all tailor made to suit your budget with terms and conditions (TOC) buried in the agreements and a microscopic star displayed somewhere in the hoarding. The next thing you do is avoid those and will fall straight into the hands of the hungry real estate agents who are just sitting tight waiting for a prey falling right into their traps. Surely they are no less mean than the hoardings but still they at least have options you can choose from. But hey! Those options might be sponsored from those very companies who put on the hoardings in the first place.

Battling out the hunt for a good web host is no different than the above situation and I have come across the same hoarding-and-agents scenario while I was trying to find one which suited my needs. I can now also call it as, looking for a good virtual estate! But at least searching on the web for your needs is not as tough as in the real world since there are loads of reviews, couple of handy forums, a few good comparison sites and the most important of all Google!! I bet finding anything on the web without a good search engine like Google would have been literally impossible.

Google’s acquires Jotspot, targets the WIKI

Google does it again and this time it has a different target – the WIKI. Google corp has taken over JotSpot, the first ever company to provide a wiki application for an enterprise based solution. Its been just than a week ago that Google captured the video blogging arena with the takeover of YouTube making its arms spreading its market even more in the various blogging communities. Google has made a strong web presence in its 8 years of existence by means of hosted applications which caters to the variety of internet consumers. Following the same strategy of expanding its territory over the web it has now targeted the pending zone of knowledge sharing community.

Knowledge sharing applications like wikipedia have been capturing a heavy number of internet users for sharing and maintaining information of various sorts using the concept of global collaboration. Gartner has predicted that 50% of a corporation will adopt Wikis as mainstream collaboration tools by 2009 which in earlier times had been restricted to file sharing, emails, Content management systems, etc. But in recent times, the wiki has won the bout due to the simplicity it provides to the users with the absolute separation of UI and the data. It targets primarily the users who may or may not be web aware but can provide the system with some information. Graham Spence, founder of JotSpot, has stated in the official google blog that his dream of knowledge management with collaboration on a global scale will become even more widely accepted with the joint venture with Google corp while providing the same amount of privacy as they maintained.

The main advantage of Jotspot giving in to Google will be the availability of the plethora of tools already under Google’s belt which would help Jotspot to provide more rich features considering the advancement of the internet to the user rich experience of web 2.0. But considering Google’s inherent sharing of data to its various web tools will the private information of an organisition on a hosted server like Jotspot remain secure enough and whether industries who have adopted to use wiki’s as their premier information management tools in their own confines by a local collaboration wiki-behind-the-firewall suite like Confluence provided by Atlassian will move to the Google-Jotspot based wiki in future.

New Flickr account

It’s real fun to capture some of the amazing glimpses which you see and while they last and then show them to your near and dear one’s. It definitely puts a expression worth noting on their faces be it happy, shockes, awed, or sadness. Really ! a picture is worth a thousand words and who would not like to save precious time and money in putting to text the expressions rather than showing the thing exactly embedded in your eyes!! Its really amazing experience.As promised after the enigmatic purchase of my new cell phone the brand new Sony Ericsson W810i a.k.a Neo featuring an amazing quality 2 Mega Pix camera that I would be uploading the pics here. But when someone else is providing a good service of photo management I thought why not put it to good use. Thats when FLICKR came to the rescue and I am using it to its fullest!

I tried the Flickr extension Pickup for Firefox 1.5.0.7 but that seems too heavy for my machine. So currenltly trying out Flickr’s own tool Uploader beta and that seems just fine. All I have to do is drag n drop the photos in it and uploading is done as a background process. So I guess it wont take long when soon Ill be joining the league of photographers world wide for some nice capturing business. Right now its more amaeturish but what difference does it make.? I am making my statements more clearer through some Clicks !!

Say Bon Jour to my Flickr here .

Woes Resolved

Bryan Adam had sung “Here I am , THis is me and nowhere else on earth I’d rather be” and today I am feeling to sing it cause I have atlast managed to get my PC running Windows XP Professional Edition after a struggling effort aka endeavour for almost 2 months. I had written about my woes in my earlier post. Luckily while searching for the damned XP installation problem I came accross a post written by a kind hearted soul about how to get over it. I was reluctant enough to try it in the first place since I had already running half-happy with windows 2000 professional edition with SP4 and all my required applications in it. But as my mind was adamant to work in XP I decided that lets beat it!

After the humungous amount of effort I had put in to get my system running in the first place, be it the hundreds of formatting, running over to my friends place with my hard drive , calling the so-called engineers from customer care, to purchasing a new hard drive since the earlier one went down the drain for some meagre amount of bad-sectors(now I know why people hate them !!), I had given up all my hopes and had decided that the umpteeth solution would be to get a brand new motherboard coz some faulty hardware was the root to all wrinkles on my brow which no one in my knowledge had the idea to detect what the damn it was!!!

But this little post came for me as though a fortune cookie had saved my life.Rome was not built in a day and neither was my XP installation!! Who could have imagined that one delete
would make the entire XP installation a success. Phew! It was worth an adventure in itself.

Neo – The grand arrival

Neo, the chosen one has made a grand arrival at my home. Neo? yes I have christened this little marvel as my Neo viz. The chosen one. This little tiny piece of man made machine is nothing less than a ubergizmo. An ultra high tech product from the farm of Sony. After a detailed research on the latest mobiles and required features this tiny tot won my heart and soul and I am all the more pleased to have it in my pocket now. It took for me about a month’s time only to decide which mobile I should go for considering my budget and my frenzy requirements which one perceive would not come anywhere near 30-40k. But as decided I got it for 15k which was my budget. Well exacltly it was 15.5K but it is worth every penny spent. The latest product in the mid range category Sony launched W800i in its walkman series. I had my heart on it since it only costed 14K but unfortunately Sony decided to call the production of W800i off and launched its new model W810i having the same features but a litte more advanced than W800i. Then I switched my interest towards Nokia 6681 since I was introduced to the powers of Symbian OS but it did not impress me much. But it was W810i till the end in my mind and I am thorougly satisfied with this since it is a power package which makes up for IPod, digicam, Stereo Deck.

The features:

1. Walkman with a 512 MB stick and amazing ear plugs
2. Super digicam with 2MP with autofocus,flash and 4X Zoom
3. Ultra light weight mounting to 100gm app.
4. PC speaker connectivity wich gives the same effect as though played from my PC
5. Mega Bass option for enhancing beats of songs which is ultimate.

I am falling in love with this piece. Ill be shortly posting the images I take from it coz here comes my Neo, to take over my world.