Canned Atropine!!

Posted by Amit on 31 Dec 2005 in iDevelop | 0 comments

Yeah, looks like its Intel’s New Year Gift(you can call it a Christmas Gift as well). FedEx delivered 5 thick books from the good guys at Intel yesterday, the IA-32 Intel^® Architecture Software Developer’s Manual:

1. Volume 1: Basic Architecture
2. Volume 2A: Instruction Set Reference, A-M
3. Volume 2B: Instruction Set Reference, N-Z
4. Volume 3: System Programming Guide
5. Optimization Reference Manual

These books are also available for free from Intel’s website as PDF downloads(eBooks) but I always prefer printed books over eBooks whenever possible, the traditional way has a warmth that the electronic way lacks(& talk of warmth, its pretty cold here)!! 🙂

Posted by Amit on 28 Dec 2005 in iDevelop | 2 comments

Yes, that’s right, if you are using WordPress 1.5.2, then stay where you are, don’t be tempted by the candy that WordPress 2.0 offers you, don’t upgrade yet, especially if you are not of a techy species, that’s a bit of friendly advice from me!! 🙂

Though there’s nothing to worry about, but still, it happens sometimes with some major software upgrades, things go messy. A few things have gone awry with this WordPress release(which is a mammoth upgrade to the core) and they can prove to be too much for the non-techy users who aren’t used to the heat of applications & websites breaking down unexpectedly. I’d say that this release of WordPress can be taken on par with a nightly build, Robert posted few important things that are broken and has striked off those which are fixed in WordPress SVN(Subversion).

Posted by Amit on 18 Nov 2005 in iDevelop | 0 comments

Yes, what is open source? A lot of people will answer differently to that question and quite large is the number of people who mistake Open Source to be a synonym of FREE(as in beer, meaning free of cost). These kind of people are really annonying, especially when they make statements like they prefer FireFox over IE because the former is open source while the latter is not!! Apart from anything else, when you hear such comments from people using Windows, you’d feel like banging a big iron hammer on their head!! Apparently, its evident that they are mis-informed and consider open source to be synonym for free, but even then their comments wouldn’t make any sense since the last I knew, Microsoft weren’t charging anything for IE, it comes free with the Windows operating system along with other goodies!!

Posted by Amit on 10 Oct 2005 in iDevelop | 3 comments

No, this is not a rant about someone’s Bad Behaviour, but the Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress!! 😉

I’ve just installed it & lets hope it’ll stop the bandwidth wastage to some extent, its really getting out of hand as the domain almost used 2GB of bandwidth last month, with more than half of it going to this blog only, most of which was due to referrer spam!! :curse:

Posted by Amit on 4 Oct 2005 in iDevelop | 0 comments

If you take some kind of input from a user in an application(whether its online or offline, it hardly matters) and then perform some action using that input, then you must check if the input is empty or not before proceeding with the action, its common programming sense, unless ofcourse you also allow NULL values.

Posted by Amit on 6 Sep 2005 in iDevelop | 0 comments

Yeah, I finally started on Ruby, more than a year after I considered learning it. 🙂

Installing it was a breeze as I downloaded OneClick Ruby Installer for Windows which is an EXE file that installs Ruby painlessly. Took less than 5 minutes!! 😉

Now starting on Ruby wasn’t difficult at all. The OneClick Ruby Installer installed two editors, FreeRIDE & SciTE Editor. Any of them can be used to code & compile Ruby, & they are both good. I first tried FreeRIDE, its written in Ruby itself. It looked OK, not as cool as other editors like Zend Studio or DreamweaverMX. But then I noticed, it was quite an older version of FreeRIDE. I downloaded the latest version of FreeRIDE, it weighs almost as much as the OneClick Ruby Installer, about 14MB. Then I noticed that the SciTE Editor bundled with the OneClick Ruby Installer was also quite outdated, so I downloaded & installed the latest version of SciTE Editor as well. 😉

Posted by Amit on 31 Aug 2005 in iDevelop | 52 comments

The Webmaster’s Weekly #12 is out & the Quick Tip tells you about a simple way of doing a search-replace in a MySQL table.

Well, it might be something new for Chrispian but I’ve been doing this for ages, infact I don’t know of any other search-replace technique for MySQL when you don’t need to replace the data of the whole column of a record, but just some text from between it, like in “hello world, today is wednesday” you want to replace “today is wednesday” with “yesterday was thursday”. This is ofcourse quite a simple example which can be done with a simple SQL. The tip however says that its quite simple to just download the data as SQL using phpMyAdmin, open it in a text editor, search-replace and then upload back after saving.

Posted by Amit on 15 Jul 2005 in iDevelop | 0 comments

What is AJAX? Its a buzzword? Its a fad? Yes and No. Its cool if you know what it is, its a fad if you don’t know what it is. Possibly there’s not a single web-designer or developer on internet who’s never heard of AJAX, & thats just about it. A lot of them have heard about it quite a lot & quite often but just a few know what it really is. Though the number of people aware of the meaning of AJAX is quite less, the number of people buzzing with the word, as if they are the know-it-alls on the subject of AJAX, is quite quite high.