The only constant thing for me in my life is change. I like to change my lifestyle, habits, hobbies once in a while so as to keep my mind fresh and active. I get bored with routines and so is the same case in my browsing activities or tools which I use. This time around my axe swayed in the direction of my age old favorite feed reader, Google Reader.
I am thoroughly satisfied with Google Reader for reading my RSS feeds but I felt its been a long time I have spent on it and it has now started to bore me a bit. So I started some search for good desktop applications which would give some eye candy and also improve my productivity while learning from the feeds.
I have found one nice solution which has relieved me to some extent and which is certainly an impressive effort in the direction of web desktop integration. Its called ReadAir. It is a really nice application for feed reading and I am impressed by its potential. The reason I liked it was because Read the rest of this entry »
A few days back my colleague asked me if I could edit one photo of his in Photoshop. I am some what good at editing photos in Photoshop but at that particular point of time I could not help him since I did not have Photoshop installed on my system. This is really common case which most of us face. We want to edit our photos and at the most needed time we do not have the appropriate tools at our disposal. What do we do in such cases?
Enter Web 2.0, and you do not have to ponder much over lost time for waiting to get hold of a tool. In this era, whatever you think of is already available online. So without fretting just google up your requirement and you would be amazed by what kind of power the internet can provide you. Coming back to the question, I responded him coolly, to use an online photo editor! He was totally baffled at the thought. If you are too, then I might as well introduce to you the best tools for photo editing online. 
Online Photo Editors
The most important thing for a photo editor is to provide the features such as, cropping, editing brightness and contrast, sharpening and blurring, resize, effects and saving in multiple file formats. In a standalone editor you are most likely to find these features. But in an online environment the features will be severely limited with regards to flexibility of usage, since they are entirely web based which make them complicated to implement. I will suggest you some nifty tools which would actually make your work easier and lot more fun. Browsing across several editors I would recommend you 3 of the most liked online photo editors.
1. Phixr
Phixr is an interesting tool which does not use Flash. It is completely Ajax based and has got the potential to Read the rest of this entry »
Did you always think about what creative stuff you can do with your photos? Well, I do most of the times and end up editing some of my most favorite ones and putting in some artistic touch. I always feel that, enriching the photos gives them a whole new dimension to look from. It might be either making it more attractive, more lovable or to enliven the sentiments you attached to them from a long time.
Whatever the reason may be, editing a photograph is no layman’s job. Sometime people give up half way through when they do not find the required results. I recently found a something which might make your spirit rise higher when you will notice the results you get out of it. The name of the tool is Picasa. Its a tool from Google. I am sure you must have used it many time to upload your photos to the online Picasaweb. But did you ever try making collages from it. Picasa can generate some really amazing collages out of your precious photos and make them really gift worthy or send it amongst friends as a memoir.
So here’s how you can make collages out of your photos: Read the rest of this entry »
BEA had invited people across India for attending their TechDays sessions of which Adobe was the event partner. I had registered for it almost a month ago. It was held on May 9th Friday at The Leela, a five star hotel in Andheri, Mumbai. The timings for the session were from 9:00 am till 12:00 pm and no registration nor event fees were taken. Here is my experience about the entire event.
The Sessions
The session was primarily held for the developers community and less for the corporate. This provided a relief as there weren’t much marketing gimmicks being played and the speakers were purely techie guys which proved to be an onus. BEA has upgraded their Weblogic Server to version 10.2 and their Workshop too. I had worked on the BEA workshop studio and Aqualogic platform for ESB earlier. So my main interests lied in what new features these upgraded products had in their offerings. After having attending this session I am now all the more excited to work in the BEA platform.
Although many people were awestruck with the features and some felt jealous for continuing to work on the older versions at their workplace, one thing was going through the minds of many including mine. The question was as to what was the road map for these BEA products since now the acquisition by Oracle has got completed. There was a slight wave of concern over this merger on the current developers as well as for those who wanted to adopt to the BEA environment in future. Would Oracle continue to support active upgradation to these wonderful products or take away the key features from them to promote its own products? The concerns were raised higher during the session when the BEA guys told us that Read the rest of this entry »
JavaWorld has published a useful research paper which discusses how to discern which design patterns and frameworks would work best for your enterprise applications, written by Chris Richardson. As a developer it is very essential to know about the different strategies one would adopt in a particular business scenario. This paper helps you in making important decisions about which design patterns would best suite a given set of requirements.
According to the research done by Chris for enterprise applications, here are some of the important points which the paper elaborates:
- Make use of the POJO approach, with lightweight frameworks like Hibernate for ORM and Spring AOP for transactional activities.
- EJB 3 makes it possible to have your business logic sit within your POJO and also make it run outside the container which makes it really usable.
- Implementing 3 tiers for an application which commonly include
- Presentation tier
- Business Interfaces for encapsulation + Business tier logic in classes
- Persistence tier for handling transactions and concurrency
- The design should involve,
- Modeling your business classes appropriately
- Code structuring principles for easier maintenance
While the above points are usually very well known amongst the developer community, it helps if you know which decisions should be taken when. Design patterns which have been established over the years play a key role in making such decisions. The white paper explains a few of the design patterns which are particularly mentioned when enterprise applications are into consideration.
I would like to enumerate here, some of the different design patterns which are Read the rest of this entry »
Knowing about different techniques of searching in Google, has the biggest advantage in saving precious time. The more you optimize your queries, the more faster you get what you were looking for and finally the more quicker your work gets done. Its a bit of ‘more’ in everything when Google search tricks are applied. If you liked my earlier articles on how to use various tricks provided by Google then here are some ‘more’ for you.
The theme for this article is “Definitive Search“. It means that, instead of beating around the bush for carrying out permutations and combinations of your search queries, why not carry out the search for exactly what we are looking for. By doing this, you would become more sure of getting the most relevant articles to your queries. Notice the ‘more’ here too!
Most of the Definitive Search tricks are obtained by using the Google Advanced Operators. I would like to specify in this article as to where the operators can be utilized ‘more’ efficiently. I was myself thrilled when I tried using these operators which lead me into writing this article.
For this article I am taking a particular case study for search query optimization. So here we go… Read the rest of this entry »
My article on 10 Most Amazing Google Search Tricks was very well received which made me realize that people have not yet seen the powerful features provided by Google. The tricks in the article were amongst the common ones which frequent searchers know. But there are still many more which a few rare search savvy people, termed “google hackers” seem to know.
The fact is that, people miss out on these tricks since they are busy finding the keywords! In order to make them aware I will be trying to put up different tricks and their usage as per the requirement so that it becomes easier for you to get the required information in an instant.
This article is specially for the movie lovers since I am one of them. I am not “crazy” about movies but when I am keen to watch a movie I make it sure that the money is well worth spent. This is the place where Google helps me to make most of the decisions quickly. Some of these decisions include finding:
- Release date
- Cast of the movie
- Reviews of the movie
- Theatres where the movie is being aired
- Checking the schedule
- Trailers
So let me reveal the 5 most fantastic Google Movie Search tricks that I frequently use: Read the rest of this entry »
