Archive for the ‘Techi Gyaan’ Category

Review : The iPhone 4…

August 24th, 2010

I finally got it!!! After being in a confused state for a month over which smart-phone to buy, I decided to opt for the Apple’s newest and finest cellular telephone…

I must admit I was a little wary, first because of the antennagate fiasco, then after hearing complains about iPhone 4′s flaky proximity sensor… I considered picking up an Android handset, but on getting reviews and playing with the emulator it left me unimpressed. I also thought about picking up the Palm Pre, but that device seemed a little too last-generation… Besides, that 720p video camera on the iPhone 4 was awfully tempting…

So, i asked a friend of mine to buy the “sim-free” version in UK for me, as he was going to come to India in a weeks time… which costs approximately 43,000 Indian Rupees… Yaa i know that’s hell expensive but all Apple gadgets are expensive, its a fact that we have to live with…

I’ve now had the iPhone 4 almost 6 days… How do I feel about my purchase???

Well its almost what u call “magical”… The two ultra smooth glass panels, united with a classic brushed steel band… Then the near-invisibility of the pixels, and the smoothness and responsiveness of iOS 4… It all just comes together in a way that almost makes me forget that couple of months back I was criticizing Apple’s iPhone and opted for a Blackberry… It feels like its an artistic master piece rather than just a smart-phone…

The Looks

The first thing that you would notice is its sleek redesign… The iPhone 4 is much slimmer (9.3mm), flatter, and feels like a much sturdier smartphone than the iPhone 3GS thanks to stainless steel along the edges and reinforced glass on both sides (said to be 30 times harder than plastic)… It also feels a tad heavier, by just 2 grams (now 137g). The volume up and down buttons are now metal and separated… The iPhone 4 is available only in black at this time, but a white version will be coming later this year… Maybe Apple would solve the antenna problem in it…

The Screen

Apple has been boasting about its new “Retina” display, with its incredibly high-resolution of 326 pixels per inch (ppi), four times sharper than past iPhones… This is quite evident when you’re reading text on websites and emails on the 3.5-inch screen… Even more noticeable, however, is how much better the contrast is on the new iPhone 4, with much deeper blacks and richer colours compared to the iPhone 3GS—with a screen that looked washed out when viewed side by side with the iPhone 4…

The Camera

Compared to other smart-phones, iPhones always lacked in the camera department… The new iPhone 4 takes much better pictures with its 5-megapixel camera, LED flash and a larger sensor that delivers better low-light performance… The iPhone 4 can also shoot HD video (720p quality at 30 frames per second) and despite not having good zoom, the clarity, colour and handling of motion was very impressive – especially for a smart-phone…

One of my favorite new features of the iPhone 4 is FaceTime, which can best be described as a Skype-like webcam chat between two people over a Wi-Fi connection – but both chatters need an iPhone 4 (Apple says they’ll “open up” the software in the near future so that it’ll work on multiple devices, and over 3G networks, too)…

Conclusion

Without question, the iPhone 4 is the most impressive smartphone in the market right now… Not to mention it works well with the roughly 250,000 apps already available at the iTunes App Store… The iPhone 4 stops just short of perfection, in other words, but it comes awfully close…

Something I know you would be dying to find out… YES, I can make the bars drop by gripping the device a certain way, and NO, I haven’t run into any issue with the proximity sensor… The display goes black and ignores input when I hold the phone up to my face, as it should… Frankly, I think that whole antennagate thing has been overblown… I’ll take the free bumper, though, thanks… ;)

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Features Needed on Android…

July 15th, 2010

Andriod is a great smartphone operating system no doubt… I’m sure that it is the only competitor to the iPhone and in couple of years time would definitely overtake the IPhone OS… Google hasn’t yet announced anything about Andriod 3.0 aka Gingerbread and I don’t think they are going to say anything about it as Froyo is still too fresh to be updated… Still here are some of my views that should be added to Android 3.0 for sure…

Android is great, promising and absolutely powerful if and only if they keep enhancing and updating it. Android is good but still need a lot of work and enhancements to go through the same track of iPhone, not to copy it but to provide us better features than the iPhone.

Posted from BlackBerry.

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Adobe Flash Vs. Microsoft Silverlight!!!

May 26th, 2010

“Should I use Silverlight or Flash???” Many people ask this question…

I’m not a fanboy of either Flash or Silverlight… I’m a web developer, and I choose the tools best to solve a problem…

I agree to it that both Flash and Silverlight provide a great way to program rich applications with complicated interactivity… If your web application has simple interactivity, such as filling out forms or clicking buttons to make hidden things appear, you can do that easily with JavaScript… I can sense some cringes at that suggestion… Yes, HTML, CSS and JavaScript are prone to have cross-browser cross-platform incompatibilities, but a good html person with JQuery and browsershots.org should be able to handle it… That’s cheaper than paying a search engine consultant to figure out why your all-flash website doesn’t get any traffic… Read the rest of this entry »

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How To : Hide WP Stats Smiley!!!

May 14th, 2010

As most of WordPress user’s know Wp Stats is a great plugin that displays useful statistics on your dashboard such as Top posts & Searches… However, it will display a small smiley at the bottom of your page…

The best wayt o get rid of this is by inserting a code snippet at the end of your main css file, normally called “styles.css”:

img#wpstats {
height:0;
width:0;
overflow:hidden;
}

The code above will reduce the image size to 0 and thus makes the smiley disappear. If something is still out of place in the immediate vicinity of the smiley, it is probably due to borders or spacing elements being applied to the image. Add these additional lines of codes between the “overflow:hidden;” and the closing curly bracket:

margin:0;
border: none;
padding:0;

DO NOT USE display:none to remove the smiley because that would prevent the statistics tracking from working because the image would not be loaded at all by the browser.

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WordPress Blogs Hit With Malware…

May 11th, 2010

Got a few Friends pointing out yesterday that my site was affected by malware… But on checking Google Webmaster I found no such errors there… But when i tried to login into the Dashboard today morning i got many Javascript errors… On using Firebug to debug it I found perticular javascript codes were appended to the fotter of my blog…Which mentioned various php files like…

http://www.indesignstudioinfo.com/ls.php

http://zettapetta.com/js.php

http://holasionweb.com/oo.php

I gueesd this would be coming from a peculiar looking long base64 encoded string added to many of my php files… Upon searching more on the web I came accross an article by Sucuri which explains a bit about this attack:

“We are seeing multiple reports today of WordPress sites (running their latest version) getting compromised. The initial reports today were restricted only to Dreamhost, but now we are seeing the same pattern on blogs hosted at GoDaddy, Bluehost, Media temple and other places…
One thing very interesting that is becoming a trend is that the malware is also hiding from Google. This causes the site to do not get blacklisted, making it harder for the owner to notice….”

The encoded string is decoded here…  http://sucuri.net/malware/entry/MW:MROBH:1

The main issue now is to remove this particular javascript in all the php files, and how can i remove them in a single go… Sucuri has a solution for that too.. Have a look here..

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Access MSSQL with Python!!!

April 24th, 2010

I started using Python a while ago and one of the things I need to do is to be able to connect to Microsoft SQL server from Linux servers… Its suprising that only a few projects are alive for it… One of them is the commercial MxODBC from eGenix, while the other is called pymssql… I gave pymssql a try and it worked almost at once on my Ubuntu machine…

First I installed the prerequisites: freetds and the python headers:

aptitude install python2.5-dev freetds-dev

There might be some other packages that are needed but that was the only ones I needed to install…. Then I decompressed the latest release from pymssql at sourceforge and installed:

NOTE : for me the latest package did not work so I used pymssql-0.8.0

tar -xvzf pymssql-0.8.0.tar.gz
cd pymssql-0.8.0
python setup.py install

Now you can test it out by creating your own test script and it is as follows :

import pymssql
conn = pymssql.connect(host='<hostname>', user='<username>', password='<passwd>', database='<dbname>')
cur = conn.cursor()
cur.execute('SELECT * FROM tbABCD')
row = cur.fetchone()
while row:
 print "ID=%s, Name=%s, Address=%s" % (row[0], row[1], row[2])
 row = cur.fetchone()
conn.close()

The script ran perfectly…
For more information on pymssql you can view its documentation here…

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How to install Easy Install for Python!!!

April 21st, 2010

How to install Easy Install on Ubuntu Linux

$ sudo apt-get install python-setuptools python-dev build-essential

How to install Easy Install on Windows

  1. Go to http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall#installing-easy-install
  2. Right click on “ez_setup.py” and save the file to “c:\temp”
  3. Open a cmd.exe prompt
  4. “cd c:\temp”
  5. “python ez_setup.py”

How to install Easy Install on Cygwin

  1. $ cd /tmp
  2. $ wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
  3. $ python ez_setup.py
  1. $ wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
  2. $ python ez_setup.py

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Who/What is qq829.com???

April 19th, 2010

I can see that like mine, many sites are being linked to by qq829.com… While surfing the web about it the most information I came across was from this link… The conclusion drawn is that the owners of the domain have been involved in malware and spamming in the past but there’s no real explanation for this… Many websites have been targeted regardless of whether they are big or small…

Maybe it is a way of Chinese surfers bypassing the government control of the Internet in that country??? Or it is something more sinister and possible the first inkling of a Chinese botnet or DOS attack network being put in place???

There is no answer at this moment… If all this is making you feel a little uneasy about being linked via this dubious sounding website then I would suggest that you made amendments to your .htaccess file on your webserver to block out any traffic from China… It sounds drastic but it would certainly put an end to the issue and block out these strange links…

A walk through of how you can achieve this is given here…..

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NoSQL Movement!!!

April 13th, 2010

There is a community thats been buzzing for quite a while now… Its called NoSQL…

As well all know Relational databases are a pain (you know where)… They force us to twist are object data to fit a particular RDMS (Relational Database Management System)…

Well then why use it??? Read the rest of this entry »

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Learn Flex!!!

April 5th, 2010

Adobe Flex, software for the web developer with Adobe flash’s feature…

Flex is the way to make rich Internet applications (RIAs) quickly and easily… Flex is a framework for creating RIAs based on Flash Player… Along with being a framework, Flex is also a new language… It  uses a MXML, a markup language based on Extensible Markup Language (XML), to build Graphic User Interface (GUI)… It use an ActionScript to process a function of web… Flex has an easy to learn programming architecture and Flex Builder is a development tool that can help developers becoming productive quickly…

The reason why as a developer you should learn Flex are many.. I’ll highlight a few here… Read the rest of this entry »

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