Owner: Technacular: Home for all things technical URL:http://www.technacular.com Join Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2007 01:41:33 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: The primary things which I have thought about sharing on this blog are:
* APIs
* Mashups
* Tech startups
* Existing tech companies
* News about tech companies / products / ideas
* Health Care IT
* Any innovative tech i Site statistics:Click here
Google India: Product Prodigy Competition 2007-09-22 01:36:05 Google India
has launched a competition called the Product Prodigy
Competition. The competition is open to Computer Science students of select Engineering Colleges.
The theme of the product should be:
To organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful.
The objective is to provide an impetus for entrepreneurship in product engineering that will hopefully result in innovations that benefit the consumer in the sphere of internet and mobile services.
The team sizes can range from 2-5 students and they would prefer a faculty of the Computer Science department to be the guide.
The prize money is over Rs. 2,000,000.
You can download the registration form here. Hurry registration is only open till September.
This is a very good opportunity for students to show their talent and count on Google to promote their ideas.
Google has already help international competitions like the Google Summer of Code earlier, which brought students and open source projec Read more:Google
Poshd: Showcase Real Estate Website 2007-09-16 02:16:11 Poshd is a site dedicated to showcasing best of the real estate sites. The sites which break the mold and make the for an exciting real estate experience for everyone are the ones which qualify.
The main page features snippets of pages from the sites which are short listed and every month there is one site which is a featured site of the month (gets a banner at the top).
The users visiting the site can vote for the sites they like (voting uses AJAX, making it easy for anyone to vote)
If you feel you have a good site you can submit your site here. If your site is featured you can use the poshd badges on your site.
Technorati tags: Poshd, Real Estate
, Web sites, showcase Real Estate Sites
Demographics Prediction Using MSN Tool 2007-08-19 10:48:26 Want to know the demographics data for any web site? Just visit: http://adlab.msn.com/DPUI/DPUI.aspx and enter the URL of the web site.
Here are the demographics data (only Gender distribution) for some popular blogs:
http://www.techcrunch.com : Male (0.62), Female (0.38)
http://www.mashable.com: Male (0.60), Female(0.40)
http://www.smashingmagazine.com: Male(0.61), Female(0.39)
http://www.lifehacker.com/: Male(0.73), Female(0.27)
http://www.engadget.com: Male(0.66), Female(0.34)
http://www.boingboing.net: Male(0.56), Female(0.44)
http://gizmodo.com: Male(0.75), Female(0.25)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com: Male(0.51), Female(0.49)
http://perezhilton.com: Male(0.27), Female(0.73)
http://www.problogger.net: Male(0.61), Female(0.39)
From the list above one can see that perezhilton (a gossip blog) is very popular among women and general tech blogs are slightly inclined towards Male of the species.
Here is the result for http://www.technacular.com :
Technorati tags: De Read more:Prediction
Ten Tips on Link Building 2007-08-19 10:28:34 Links are the basis for ranking in search engines. But over the years Google and other search engines have tweaked their algorithms so devalue paid links and are continuously working on counting only links which are legitimate.
John Scott has a nice article on Link Building
. You can read it here but the 10 tips to take from it are:
Buy links from websites which exercise editorial integrity.
Vary Your Anchor Text
Buy Non-Keyword Links
Avoid Site-wide Links
PageRank Zero Can Pass Link Weight
Avoid Automated Link Spamming
Image Links And ALT Text
A Link On A Page Is Not The Same As A Link On A Page
Do NOT Rent Links
Google Tells You Where To Get Links
If interested in link building, please also refer to the article: 131 (Legitimate) Link Building
Strategies.
Technorati tags: Link Building
How to Detect Internet Explorer Memory Leaks 2007-08-08 02:37:18 With web applications pushing the technology to the limits, memory leak issues have gained prominence and need to be dealt with.
What is IE Memory
Leak?
To begin with let me clarify that memory leaks are not restricted to InternetExplorer
but it can happen in any browser. We are talking primarily about IE as over the course of my time, I have found it to cause this issue more often than any other browser.
Memory leak is a condition where your web application keeps consuming more and more memory as you keep navigating or refreshing. This causes decrease in responsiveness of the application and in situations can crash the browser itself.
Can we predict IE memory leaks?
Justin Rogers, a Microsoft employee, discusses in detail the patterns of memory leak in his article titled Understanding and Solving Internet Explorer Leak Patterns.
How can I try out and see memory leaks?
Please read Memory Leak in Internet Explorer - revisited which has code samples for you to try out and see for y Read more:Detect
, Leaks
Smart PageRank 2007-08-07 11:54:12 Google PageRank
is used by various sites as a parameter to evaluate your blog/site. Several advertisers look for pages with good PageRank value to advertise or to get a link back from. For details on PageRank, please refer to this article.
http://www.smartpagerank.com/ is a web site which allows you to enter the URL of any domain and tells you about the PageRank and also keeps track of any changes to the PageRank of that page. It shows host of other useful information like:
Estimated value of your site
PageRank from multiple data centers
Backlinks
Alexa Ranking
DMOZ links
Thumbnail of the site
The good thing is that you can enter your email and it will monitor your page and inform you if the PageRank changes.
Even though it is still in beta, it is a good service to know about changes in your PageRank automatically.
Technorati tags: smartpagerank, pagerank, google
Read more:Smart
Compress your Images to Decrease Load Time 2007-08-07 07:23:53 With increasing use of Ajax, lot of data is rendered using JavaScript and even though you have a friendly “Loading …” message for the user, it is a must to render the content fast. This is applicable even to sites which do not use Ajax but have images on them.
Recently I was working on developing a Google Maps tool which renders lot of content (including images) on the page using JavaScript. Performance was a big issue and one of the things we looked at was compressing the images for the icons.
The tool which we used was http://www.giftools.com/gifcompress.html (GifTools).
It is an online tool to which you can hand the URL of any gif image and it will give you a compressed version of the gif image.
On icons we achieved more than 50% reduction in size (remember icons are small and you can compromise on the quality of the icon without much impact visibly for the user).
The original size was around 1044 bytes which got reduced to 398 bytes.
Tec Read more:Images
Some Interesting T-shirts Designs 2007-08-06 23:55:42
A UNIX way of removing Bin Laden.
Will you also work for Bandwidth?
clueless? (SQL T-shirt)
Click on the images above to go to http://andrewhitchcock.org where he maintains several more such T-shirts.
Technorati tags: SQL T-Shirt, work for bandwidth, rm -rf
Read more:Designs
Technacular Down for 48 hours 2007-08-06 23:48:58 I apologize for my mistake which resulted in the loss of entire Technacular web files. The blog was down for around 48 hours.
The culprit was force remove command which I thought I was running under a sub directory but instead it was in the main root directory. The result, all my domains’ web content just disappeared. Unfortunately, UNIX does not have a recycle bin which gives you a second change to recover things.
One thing you should do to avoid such issues is set an alias in your .bashrc file:
alias rm=’rm-i’
Thanks to 1&1 support team, they were able to recover it from the backup.
I look forward to your continued support.
Please share with me any such experience you have had and how you dealt with it.
Technorati tags: technacular
Bangalore Bloggers Join Blogalorean 2007-08-04 10:43:41 Bloggers of Bangalore
are actively building a blogging community aptly named Blogalorean.
I have created a Feedburner network called Blogalorean and an writing this post as an open invitation to all Bloggers (blogging on any topic) who are in Bangalore to join this network.
If you are interested in knowing more about Feedburner Network then please have a peak at this their FAQ.
If you wish to join the network and you satisfy the requirement of staying in Bangalore then please leave a comment with you email id and I will send you an invitation.
You can find more details about the Bangalore Bloggers community and events here: http://bangalorebloggersmeet.pbwiki.com/
Technorati tags: Blogalorean, Bangalore Bloggers, Feedburner Network
Make Your RSS Feed Available as a Button on Google Toolbar 2007-08-01 03:22:46 For any browser on any machine which I own, the first thing I install is the GoogleToolbar
. It is a very useful tool and I like to search directly from there as well as monitor various sites, my Gmail, my Google bookmarks and of course PageRank for web sites.
Google toolbar is being used by millions of individuals all over the world. By allowing people to access your web site’s RSS feed through a button on Google toolbar, you are giving your site the ability to be exposed to millions.
I will show you a very easy step by step way to create a simple Google Toolbar
button which will allow users to view your web site content. It uses your RSS feed as the source of data (People who do not know about RSS, please visit Wikipedia to know more about it).
Steps:
Find out the RSS feed URL for your web site
Create an XML file which is like this: (you can cut and paste the text below in notepad on windows or any other text editor and replace things as per instructions below)
< Read more:RSS Feed
Why Linux is Better 2007-07-30 23:07:08 If you ever wondered why people would want to use Linux
when there is windows around, then please head over to http://www.whylinuxisbetter.net/ and Manu Cornet will give you more than a handful of reasons to use Linux.
Assuming you would be very eager to switch to Linux after reading it, or you would be wiling to give it a try, there are two options presented to you to enjoy Linux:
Try Linux without touching Windows (Linux will run off the CD, no install needed)
Install Linux (and still keep Windows) (Install Linux while still keeping Windows on the PC)
The page is available in 19 different languages so you cannot complain that you cannot read it!
Please share your thoughts on where Linux stands as a desktop OS.
Technorati tags: Why Linux Is better, Linux, Install Linux, Live Linux CD
Ask Bill Gates 2007-09-25 03:20:37 Bill Gates
in not unreachable anymore. Newsweek readers can ask Bill Gates questions. He will answer selected questions.
The last date to submit your questions is Sept. 28th, 2007. The answers will be published on Oct. 10, 2007.
Click here to send your question to Gates | Read this article on Newsweek
Technorati tags: Ask Bill Gates, Newsweek
Adding a new Sitemap page in Wordpress gave 404 error 2007-09-24 02:26:12 I installed Wordpress
2.2 version on a new blog of mine on Indian Real Estate sometime back and was trying to add a Sitemap
page to it today.
I added the Sitemap page and it gave a 404 error
(page not found). My permalink structure was set to “Date and name based”. I switched to “Default” permalink structure and the page would come up. I needed the “Date and name based” option (useful from SEO point of view) to work for me though.
I was looking at the page options (from the admin interface) and tweaked around the “Page Slug” option and named sitemap-propertysamachar instead of sitemap.
Viola! the page started coming up.
I hope this helps people who ran into this issue. If anyone knows why this would happen, then please leave a comment here.
Technorati tags: Wordpress New Page 404 Error, Sitemap, Page Slug
Interesting Insight Into Microsoft Codenames 2007-09-23 04:59:11 Mary Jo Foley, in her blog All About Microsoft
on ZDnet has an interesting video on Microsoft code names.
What is a codename?
Microsoft products start life as a project codename (e.g. Longhorn which later was launched as Vista).
Some Revelations
Let us take the Operation System Line up from Microsoft:
Code Name
Product
Whistler
Windows XP
Longhorn
Windows Vista
Blackcomb
Windows Seven (next version of Windows after Vista)
Creekside
Windows XP Starter Edition
All of them have something in common, they are all skiing resorts in British Columbia.
Coming to the development tools:
Code Name
Product
Whidbey
Visual Studio 2005
Orcas
Visual Studio 2008
Rosario
Team Foundation System
Hawaii
Visual Studio 2010 (unconfirmed)
All of the code names are islands!
You can find more info on codename on the video here.
Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of Microsoft Codenames for those interested.
Source: (here)
Technorati tags: Microsoft Codenames, visual Studio Orcas, Opera Read more:Insight
Yahoo Pipes Vs Feedburner Network 2007-10-13 00:24:22 There are several ways to combine multiple feeds into one and publish the aggregated feed.
In this post I am going to discuss two ways to do that and list out advantages and disadvantages associated with each.
The two very popular tools which allow you to aggregate feeds are:
Yahoo
Pipes
Feedburner Network
Here is a video which demonstrates how to combine multiple RSS feeds into one using Yahoo Pipes
and then subscribe to the combined feed:
Feedburner Network allows you to create a network of blogs using the RSS feeds for those blogs. It is a very effective tool to create a blog group based on certain themes. This blog is part of two Feedburner networks: India Technology Bloggers and Blogaloreans. If you have a Feedburner account (if you don’t you can create it free), you can create a network or search for a network and join it:
Here is the FAQ page on Feedburner Networks for those interested.
Yahoo Pipes are useful if you have multiple feeds of your own and
Microsoft Excel 2007 math bug and how to fix it 2007-10-11 03:06:26 On September 25th, 2007, David Gainer of the MicrosoftExcel
group did a post acknowledging a Microsoft Excel 2007 math bug involving calculations of numbers around 65,535 and 65,536.
An example bug is: 77.1 * 850 for which Excel returned 100,000 instead of 65,535.
According to David, the issue was due to change in the Excel calculation logic in Office 2007. The bug affects Excel 2007 and Excel Services 2007.
The patch has been posted here.
Technorati tags: Excel 2007 Math Bug, Excel Services 2007 Math Bug, David Gainer, Office 2007
Some nice Halloween logos 2007-10-31 12:59:11
XBox Halloween
Logo
Ask.com Halloween Logo
Yahoo Halloween Logo
YouTube Halloween Logo
Technorati Tags: Halloween Logos
Google Halloween Logo Over The Years 2007-10-31 12:48:36 I thought it would be interesting to have a peak at Google
’s Halloween
logo over the years:
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
My personal favorite is the logo from 2006. Which one do you like the most?
Technorati Tags: Google Halloween Logo, Halloween
Read more:Years
Project Manager 2007-11-16 20:57:20 I received this in an email, thought it would be nice to share:
A man wanted to buy his son a parrot as a birthday present. The next day he went to the pet shop and saw three identical parrots in a cage.
He asked the clerk, “how much for the parrot on the right?
The owner said it was $250. “$250″, the man said. “Well what does he do? “He knows how to use all of the functions of Microsoft Office 2000, responds the clerk. “He can do all of your spreadsheets and type all of your letters.”
The man then asked what the second parrot cost. The clerk replied, $500, but he not only knows Office 2000, but is an expert computer programmer.
Finally, the man inquired about the cost of the last parrot. The clerk replied, “$1,000.” Curious as to how a bird can cost $1,000, the man asked what this bird’s specialty was.
The clerk replies, “Well to be honest I haven’t seen him do anything. But the other two call him ” Project Read more:Project Manager
Effective tips to optimize the performance of your web site 2007-12-07 08:35:43 Loads of widgets, integration with third party tools using JavaScript APIs, high performance AJAX. All this is causing sites to slow down. Factors which nobody cared about, now need to be looked into to ensure that the site loads faster.
Optimization Techniques
I will present some optimization techniques in several easy to use and understand categories. This will allow you to pick and choose one category and focus on it at any one time.
General Optimization Tips
Optimization Techniques for Images
Optimize HTML on the page
Optimize JavaScript and CSS Files
Optimization tips for Documents on Websites
Tools to help with Optimization
(more…)
Step by step guide to configuring Windows Live Writer to post to Drupal 2008-02-17 19:27:14 Windows Writer
.htm">Live Writer
is my prefered blog authoring and publishing tool, same for lot of people out there.
It is quiet easy to compose and post using Windows Live Writer and I have been doing that for sometime for my WordPress blogs. But for one new site I am using Drupal
for the first time [...] Read more:step guide
, Windows
First Online Marketing Careers Conference in India and in World 2008-01-17 06:00:47 OMCAR 2008 happened in New Delhi on January 12, 2008. Hosted by OMCareers, a non-profit organization, it was first online marketing careers conference in the world.
The conference was a huge success and attracted lot of Internet Marketing
/ Search engine Optimization companies.
The sponsors for the event were:
Pinstorm: search marketing company
Naukri: job portal
OMLogic: online marketing [...] Read more:First
, India
, World
IPL Live Scorecard Widget for Bloggers and Site Owners 2008-04-27 01:57:34 If you are looking for a way to show live scores on your blog and/or website then try this Cricket Live Score Widget at widgetbox.
The widget shows all IPL Live Scores and is very easy to use. Read more:Owners
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