This article needed to be written from a long time and since it was not, I almost suffered the same hiccups during the installing of MySQL on Windows XP. Every single time I had to search the internet for the solutions which I often forgot over a period of time.

So today without any procrastination, I intend to put down the simplest of the steps to configure and run MySQL on Windows XP in the quickest of the time. First and foremost, as I always tend to follow a course is, break down the task into 3 steps. They are:

Step 1: Getting the software

Download the latest version of MySQL from the community site. Unpack it into your desired folder. It is always a good practice to download the zipped archive of MySQL binary distribution since using the one click installer, you might sometimes lose the power of configuration manually.

Its also a better way to understand configuring manually since if you switch to a Unix based environment later on, you will have to carry out a similar procedure and there is usually no one click installer in such environments.

I unpacked MySQL in C:\Program Files\mysql-5.0.45-win32

Step 2 : Configuring the environment

While configuring in the Windows environment you have to do two things. One, putting a file having a name my.ini in the Windows folder of the operating system. Two, setting the path in your system environment variable. Here’s what you have to do: 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 »

The most common ways of deploying a web application to Tomcat are either straightaway copy the exploded war file structure to $CATALINA_HOME/webapps or to do the more cumbersome task of compiling the web application to a war file and then using the tomcat manager to upload it. Both ways are the most used ones. But did you know there are other ways to deploy a web application to Tomcat. If you consider production environments, then applications are deployed using the deployment commands, if at all Tomcat is used. They can be made more simpler using the ant tasks.

But I am not going to discuss the production environment over here. The topic under scrutiny is how would you deploy your web application virtually to Tomcat. For that we have to know what is virtual deployment and learn about its advantages.

What is virtual deployment?

Virtual deployment in simple terms means deploying a web application from a different physical location. In this case, you are not required to put the web application in its exploded war structure to the webapps directory. Most of the beginners, tend to develop their web applications directly in the webapps directory itself. This technique might prove the most simplest and the quickest but it is the most hazardous. This is because the moment you Undeploy the web application from Tomcat’s manager the web application gets Read the rest of this entry »

Most business in today’s open market are demanding their websites & web application to have multilingual support. This is in order to attract non-English speaking audiences to increase their customer base and make people comfortable using the application in their native language. But for this, it would require an existing business application to be customized to support native locale. The process of producing an application that can be localized for a particular country without any changes to the program code is called Internationalization.

Following are the list of things one needs to take care while making an application to implement Internationalization.

1. Producing Content in Unicode

You need to make sure that all files which contain the multilingual content are in Unicode format. By default most text editors will store your file in ASCII which does not support other language characters. So after saving any content in ASCII format and loading it, your browser might not be able to display correct text in native language. Here you need to convert the file from ASCII to UTF format.

For example, the steps required for doing this if you are using Read the rest of this entry »

Favelets are bookmarks which contain JavaScript code. The code is used in many forms either for fun purposes or for reducing routine tasks. In present times, you won’t require favelets much since browser’s have got upgraded to include plugins or come with inbuilt features. But still, if you are stuck with a browser which does not have such features or plugin facilities then favelets can be your saviour.

A couple of days ago I was in such a situation. I am addicted to Firefox and already have a lot of plugins which increase my productivity. But in those couple of days, I was left with the dreadful Internet Explorer 6.0. Life became more difficult for me when I found myself opening up the Google homepage every time I wanted to search something. I did not have the rights to download the Google toolbar. But since I knew about Favelets I quickly made some and later found that even getting stuck with IE 6.0 did not matter any more.

How to make a favelet? Read the rest of this entry »

I am writing this article for the first time using Windows Live Writer. The interface of the tool is amazing and the installation has given me a new kind of energy to get more productive. I am starting with my blogging stint from Live Writer by writing a post on how to install Live Writer on your system.

What is Windows Live Writer?

Live Writer is a power blogging tool which helps in offline blogging. If you are a regular blogger then you might have used the ScribeFire Firefox addon. But Windows Live Writer is not just an addon its a full fledged blogging platform with many blog rich features. The features are fully in synch with the Wordpress platform.

The best part of blogging in Live Writer is that, Read the rest of this entry »

What do you do when you want to show the reports of some particular analysis in your website? Some of the answers to this question would probably be:

• Use a server side framework to code in the chart
• Use a database to collect the report data and then code for the framework integration
• Insert chart image after generating a chart in a software
• Use some heavy JavaScript libraries which add to the loading time of the page

But if you had only a few outcomes and wished to show a simple chart in your web page to the readers of your website or blog then probably you would be fixed in a situation like this. The main reasons being: Read the rest of this entry »