All-in-one style web-based file and unit converter. Quickly convert between:
- measurement units: size, area, distance, time, velocity, mass, etc.
- file formats: documents (.DOC, .PDF, …), images (..JPG, .GIF, …), audio (.MP3, .WAV, .AAC, … ), and video (.WMV, .3GP, .AVI, …) formats.
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Thursday, July 31st, 2008 11:26 pm GMT +8
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July 31, 2008 11:26 pm
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11:02 pm
from gigaom…. To summarise,
- It’s not secure. Certain companies and industries have to maintain strict watch on their data at all times, either because they’re legally obligated to or because they’re super paranoid.
- It can’t be logged, required for compliance purposes.
- It’s not platform agnostic. If you need to support multiple platforms, as most enterprises do, then you’re looking at multiple clouds. That can be a nightmare to manage.
- Reliability is still an issue. Even inside an enterprise, data centers or servers go down, but generally the communication around such outages is better and in many cases, fail-over options exist.
- Portability isn’t seamless. The so-called “cloud” is in fact made of up several clouds, so getting your data from one to another isn’t as easy as IT managers would like. The platform issues (above) can leave data in a format that few or no other cloud accepts, and there are bandwidth costs associated with moving data from one cloud to another.
- It’s not environmentally sustainable. As a recent article in The Economist pointed out, the emergence of cloud computing isn’t as ethereal as it might seem. Moving data center operations to the cloud and off corporate balance sheets is kind of like chucking your garbage into a landfill rather than your yard; The problem is still there but you no longer have to look at it.
- Cloud computing still has to exist on physical servers. The data still resides on servers somewhere, and the physical location of those servers is important under many nation’s laws. For example, Canada is concerned about its public sector projects being hosted on U.S.-based servers because under the U.S. Patriot Act, it could be accessed by the U.S. government.
- The need for speed still reigns at some firms, but data in the cloud means problems with latency inherent in transmitting data across the country or globe.
- Large companies already have an internal cloud. Many big firms have internal IT shops that act as a cloud to the multiple divisions under the corporate umbrella. Not only do these internal shops have the benefit of being within company firewalls, but they generally work hard — from a cost perspective — to stay competitive with outside cloud resources, making the case for sending computing to the cloud weak.
- Bureaucracy will cause the transition to take longer than building replacement housing in New Orleans. Big companies are conservative, and transitions in computing can take years to implement. A good example is the challenge HP faced when trying to consolidate its data center operations.
9:05 pm
On-Screen Keyboard Portable is a handy way to bring your settings for the Windows’ built-in On-Screen Keyboard with you from PC to PC. It will remember your hover preferences and other options and provides an easy way to launch it right from the PortableApps.com Menu. For earlier operating systems that lack a built-in on-screen keyboard (Windows 95/98/Me) it even includes a simple virtual keyboard that, while lighter on accessibility features, is still useful.
Please note: While on-screen keyboards offer protection against hardware keyloggers, they do not offer protection against software keyloggers (which are far more common). They are primarily intended as an accessibility tool or for alternate means of text entry (pen-based computing, etc).
July 29, 2008 12:41 pm
If you reformat / reinstall your windows operating system, one of the chores is looking for and downloading drivers….
So what if you had a copy of all your drivers on a USB stick ?
Run Double Driver and copy your drivers off your machine to a USB stick and then restore them right back into your fresh new system. Microsoft supply a program to do this for printer drivers, but no others. However, combine these two small apps with the Windows Files and Settings Transfer Wizard and you have yourself a powerful tool kit.
From AskTheAdmin
9:55 am
Most feed readers let you import and export subscriptions using the OPML format. For Google Reader, you find this option in Settings > Import/Export. But what happens if you want to export the feeds from a single folder so you can share them with a friend or upload them to a site? Google Reader lets you export the feeds from a Public folder:
http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/USERID/label/FOLDER i.e. http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/00907783891347362261/label/humour (you should replace USERID with the appropriate userid number and FOLDER with the actual name of the folder)
This can also be used if someone shares a folder with you and you want to obtain the list of subscriptions from that folder. If someone shares a folder:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/13577231804381328821/label/googlers, then you can easily obtain the link to the corresponding OPML file by replacing shared with public/subscriptions i.e. http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/13577231804381328821/label/googlers
8:43 am
If you are having problems with a Microsoft Office program, you may be able to use User-Initiated Safe mode to make it possible to run the program. Some situations in which this can be helpful include:
- You need to view a file and the Microsoft Office program that you are using is crashing before you can do so.
- You are trying to resolve a problem with your Microsoft Office program. You may need help from a technical support representative to do this.
To start a Microsoft Office program in User-Initiated Safe mode:
On the Microsoft Windows Start menu
- Click Start, point to All Programs, and then point to Microsoft Office.
- Press and hold the CTRL key, and then click the name of the Microsoft Office program that you want to run.
In the Command Prompt window
At the command prompt, use the /safe option when you start the program.
To stop User-Initiated Safe mode, exit the program, and then start it again normally.
What User-Initiated Safe mode does
The following restrictions apply when you start a program in User-Initiated Safe mode. (Some items listed below do not apply to all Microsoft Office programs.)
- No templates (template: A file or files that contain the structure and tools for shaping such elements as the style and page layout of finished files. For example, Word templates can shape a single document, and FrontPage templates can shape an entire Web site.) can be saved.
- In Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, the last used Web site is not opened.
- Toolbar or command bar customizations are not loaded, and customizations cannot be saved.
- The AutoCorrect list is not loaded, and changes are not saved.
- Recovered documents are not automatically opened.
- Smart tags (smart tags: Data recognized and labeled as a particular type. For example, a person's name or the name of a recent Microsoft Outlook e-mail message recipient is a type of data that can be recognized and labeled with a smart tag.) are not loaded, and new tags cannot be saved.
- All command-line options are ignored except /a and /n.
- Files cannot be saved to the Alternate Startup Directory.
- Preferences cannot be saved.
- Additional features and programs are not automatically loaded.
- Documents with restricted permission cannot be created or opened.
Work with Office safe modes – Outlook – Microsoft Office Online.
July 25, 2008 2:08 pm
A brief history of the Coca-Cola Fiasco that was new coke.
In many ways, the Great Coke Debate revealed something about the current state of the American psyche. In a world of ceaseless change, people cling desperately to the known and the given. The old Latin Mass is gone, the phone company has been broken up, Walter Cronkite is no longer on the evening news. Throughout those changes, Coke was always there, a misty memory from childhood, a rock of ages.
Coca-Cola’s decison, on Wednesday, July 10, 1985, to declare that old Coke would return to supermarkets was given the sort of coverage reserved for major news events.
2:40 am
from ghacks:
This one is indeed a center with pretty broad scale of issues dealt with in the wide selection of collected links to tutorials. It’s no use giving examples of categories since you can hardly think of any application that would be left out (at least of the best known ones). Submitted tutorials are examined to make sure only the high quality ones make it to the list.
Tutorialvault’s focused on graphic and coding tutorials which are hand-picked and split into just several main categories, basically those most often sought after like Photoshop, Flash, PHP, CSS ones and a few others. Although Adobe apps apparently lead the chart here, the other categories are nicely filled as well. So far over 2300 pieces and counting.
This collection of screencasts only deals with issues related to web development in its heavier form and contains videos providing useful hints about different technologies and programming/scripting languages used to propel websites – RoR, ASP, PHP and more. The number of published screencasts is not that high but their quality seems pretty good to me.
I couldn’t resist adding this one at the end, although this resource is purely aimed at the OS vector graphics editor Inkscape and graphics made in it. I must admit I haven’t used Inkscape much so far but after seeing what these guys can do in it, I knew I had to give it more attention, perhaps as much as GIMP deserves. Should you be a designer or just someone who deals with graphics in their free time, you definitely don’t wanna pass this valuable screencast.
Related posts
July 18, 2008 12:59 pm
from jeff jarvis at Buzz Machine:
Jon Stewart was, of course, brilliant in his defense of satire and The New Yorker:
July 17, 2008 4:17 pm
Many firefox users know that typing about:config in the location bar provides access to user preferences, that can’t be changed any other way.Some fun and useful (occassionally, anyway) Firefox about: links.
- about:
- about:blank
- about:bloat
- about:buildconfig
- about:cache
- about:config
- about:crashes (only Firefox 3)
- about:credits
- about:logo
- about:kitchensink
- about:license
- about:mozilla
- about:plugins
- about:robots
Either type the links in your firefox location bar or selct the links if you are curious about their purpose.