Canned Atropine!!

MovableType, a Big Disappointment!!

Posted by Amit on 7 Sep 2005 in iNews | 3 comments

Well, its nothing new, MT is a big disappointment, yet again!! I thought that I’d install the newly released MT3.2 to see what they have improved that they are skipping about, so I went ahead and downloaded the FREE Personal Edition.

Downloading it required me to have a TypeKey account which I didn’t have, no problem, I signed up. I downloaded the 1.76MB ZIP package(unzipping it makes it a cool 5MB+). Now I needed to install Perl(I don’t have it since I don’t use it), so off I went and downloaded ActivePerl(weighing 8.5MB), then proceeded to install it. Then opened the Perl Package Manager & installed DBI & DBD-mysql packages, configured IIS , so the Perl was now fully setup on my PC(yuck!!).

Ruby, finally!!

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 Then I noticed that the SciTE Editor bundled with the OneClick Ruby Installer was also quite outdated, so I downloaded & installed the latest version of SciTE Editor as well. 😉

Google AdSense Print Edition?!

Posted by Amit on 1 Sep 2005 in iNews | 3 comments

Yes, it is true. After revolutionising the online advertising media industry, Google is now trying out for a share in the print media as well, the traditional advertising media, reports c|net!!

Its a known fact that almost all of Google’s revenue is generated from its ads, and now its quietly testing the print ads, in order to expand an already high revenue business. Google is doing this by buying ad pages in tech magazines like PC Magazine & Maximum PC and then reselling that real-estate in small chunks of quarters & fifths, to a select few advertisers of its AdWords program.

Search & Replace in MySQL tables!!

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.

MovableType 3.2 out & wreaking havoc!!

Posted by Amit on 31 Aug 2005 in iNews | 0 comments

MovableType 3.2 is now out in open to wreak havoc, well for the time being, its wreaking havoc on the paying customers, says TurboBlogger!! 😀

It seems that the guys at Lockergnome tried to upgrade their multi-user blog but after the upgrade, none of the authors, including the super-boss Chris Pirillo, were able to login. So they’ve reverted to the earlier MT version they were using for the time being, till the sweet guys at SixApart take apart this little “all in a day’s work” snag out!! Pretty sloppy for a company that charges an arm & leg for a blog software & claims it to be the best, that they didn’t test out the upgrade process!! 😉 Jay Allen who announced the MT release, listed “Better Installation and Upgrade” as one of the new features, well ofcourse they didn’t have Lockergnome ruining their party!! Well Jay, you guys gotta concentrate more on making your product atleast easy to install & upgrade for old bats, before thinking about anything else like loosening up bottle corks for the company President!! 😀

WinFS is Here!!

Posted by Amit on 31 Aug 2005 in iNews | 0 comments

A test version of Microsoft’s long awaited & talked about next generation file system, WinFS, was released quitely to MSDN subscribers on Monday, reported ZDNet Australia.

This new file system was earlier slated to be released with the Windows “Longhorn” Vista but Microsoft announced about an year back that it was pulling out WinFS from the next version of Windows so that the much-awaited operating system can make a 2006 release. One of the new features of this new file system will be faster file search, I read somewhere that it’ll be powered by a streamed down version of SQL Server & files could be called up just like an SQL query & can benefit a lot from indexing, whether that’s true or not, is yet to be seen. 😉

DVD War is ON!!

Posted by Amit on 30 Aug 2005 in iNews | 2 comments

The DVD format war between Toshiba’s HD-DVD and Sony’s Blu Ray is on, after talks on peace failed, reports Yahoo! News. As earlier observed, Sony showed its interest in talks to get to a solution from which both the companies can benefit but Toshiba walked out after Sony refused to agree to a jointly developed format & they won’t agree to Toshiba’s format either, meaning plainly that they want nothing but their own format, and it looks now that the talks were futile from the moment they started as Sony didn’t want to settle on anything else. 👿

Talk it like Google!!

Posted by Amit on 26 Aug 2005 in iNews | 0 comments

So?? Google is at it again!!! First it took the business away from the leading Search Engines when it was launched, then it beat up the ad-networks, especially Overture, into submission by its revolutionary Ad-Sense program that helped every Tom, Dick & Harry sell the ad-space on their feeble homepages which no other ad-network was interested in buying!! Then it kicked the leading free eMail providers like Yahoo! & Hotmail up in the a*s by launching its GMail that offered 1000 MB of free storage(at last check, my account yesterday showed 2500 MB of storage). They even brought the search to the next level, by offering a Desktop Search Tool, a move quickly copied by Yahoo! & MSN but not as successfully, to say nothing of their acquisition of the popular free hosted Blog service Blogger, which again was copied by Yahoo! & MSN, again without much success since Blogger already had a lot of users. Next was the Google Maps, an innovative new DHTML interface with live Map browsing, along with satellite snapshots, copied again by MSN without much success. This boosted Google’s revenue like mad, to say nothing of the gains from its IPO!!

Prevent AdSense from Banning you ?!!

Posted by Amit on 23 Aug 2005 in iNews | 0 comments

The Google AdSense team have put up a FAQ labelled “What can I do to ensure that my account won’t be disabled?” to tell publishers how to prevent their website from being banned!! 🙄 (via Web Dev Source)

Interestingly, the ways listed contain things like “don’t click on your ads” & “don’t encourage others to click on ads” etc.. Wow!! 🙄 I wonder why my account was disabled then, since I had sense enough to look at the website of the advertiser which interested me, in the browser status bar, & then visited the website directly, instead of clicking on ads appearing on my blog!! And my blog or website doesn’t have any pop-ups, not loaded in any pop-ups and I certainly didn’t encourage anyone to click on ads on my blog.

iTunes on your Mobile!!