Genuine Tips » Technology

Internet Security

Pothi — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 02:31:20 +0000

Internet is becoming so vulnerable every day (ok, at least every year). It’s very difficult to save important information online. A couple of weeks back, experts found a vulnerability in Internet Explorer. It was the talk of the town (or talk of the digg, etc) then. It was immediately followed by a vulnerability in Firefox inwhich many people have a lot of trust.

I was a regular user of Firefox. I immediately switched onto Opera since then. I still use Firefox occasionally though. I also use Chrome and Safari in Windows. However the recent vulnerability in Safari made me think, if there is any security at all in the internet world where I spend almost 12 to 20 hours a day. It has also become very important to keep up to date with the lastest browser news.

Anyway, I’m still stick with Opera that is considered more secure than any other browser in the industry. Do share your views on this topic. Thanks.

Free Web Hosting – A Joke?

Pothi — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:03:40 +0000

I’ve been searching to find a free/cheap web hosting for nearly a month. I came across many reviews and many promises. When one can’t a *perfect* hosting even from a paid hosting package, it is silly to _expect_ perfection among the free/cheap web hosts. Until the time of this writing, I’m using a free web hosting package, though. My reason in choosing a free package is just to test drive ‘free package’ before jumping onto paid hosting.

Here are some genuine tips for choosing the right free/cheap/reliable web host…

Find out how long they are in business. (Some are very new, never faced hard times.)
See genuine reviews. (Do some research. You’d definitely feel better while signing up.)
Find out their integrity. (Genuine web hosts provide/display as many details as possible to users. Some even put up their uptime/downtime, public forum, uptime guarantee etc.)
Technical Details. (Clustering hosting yield faster page loads.)
Read their TOS. (Very important. You might find many things that you just can’t accept.)

I’m currently hosting my domain (luckweaver.net) in byethost. They _seem_ good so far. So, free web hosting is not a joke for me yet. Try it(byethost), if you have time and send me a review, if you have any issues with them.

Developer’s Tag

Pothi — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:07:55 +0000

I’ve been learning HTML for a while. I could say I’m a beginner here. But I’m sure, one fine day, I would become an expert in it. Today I came across an interesting tag. It’s ‘Base’ tag.

The advantage of base tag is ease of coding. It gives Path Information for the developers. One could create individual directories to keep similar files like HTML documents, images, CSS files and easily ‘access’ everything from the ‘base’ URI. The end user could not see any improvement in the documents that is being presented. So it’s of no use for an end user. But I bet this is the most favorite tag among developers. So I don’t have any hesitation to call it as Developer’s Tag.

Did You Like “Windows XP SP3″?

Pothi — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:19:56 +0000

I’ve been using Windows XP for ‘Office‘.

Today I had some time to ‘tune’ my laptop. I saw few reviews about Windows XP SP3, its advantages and disadvantages. I downloaded an ISO image from MS download center, burned it in a CD and was about to install it….

Suddenly I got a work that took about 5 hours of my time. So I’ve decided to install it some other day.

BTW, what’s your experience in installing Windows XP SP3?

An update: I’ve installed Windows XP SP3 lately and it’s doing well so far.

HTML Editor

Pothi — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 06:54:40 +0000

Now a days, it’s very difficult to live in this Web 2.0 era without the knowledge of HTML and a WYSIWYG editor. My favourite editor is pagebreeze. It has plenty of features and yet simple to use. Check it out. You would like that too. It was of great help for me while doing a project in oDesk. In fact, it was recommended by a oDesk buyer(James Pumfrey). Unfortunately it isn’t available for linux. I’m looking for a good WYSIWYG editor in linux. Any recommendations?

By the way, what do you use to do simple coding in HTML?

Type Effectively

Pothi — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:05:00 +0000

If you like to type effectively, switch over to Colemak.

There are many disadvantages with QWERTY. Here are a few of those,

If one happens to type for long hours (say more than 5 hours a day) using qwerty, he/she might get Repetitive strain injury (RSI), pain or discomfort.
It(qwerty) was designed to prevent the keys from sticking, without any consideration to ergonomic or efficiency aspects.
It was designed so the word “typewriter” could be typed on the top row to ease demonstrations.
It suffers from an extremely high ratio of home-row-jumping sequences (e.g. “minimum”).
It places very rare letters in the best positions, so your fingers have to move a lot more.

Do you like to watch my Colemak speed? Click here.

An interesting thing happened to me today regarding colemak. Few people came to my house for troubleshooting my laptop. They came when I was away from home. They got into windows (auto login) as I hadn’t provided admin password. They tried to find out the problem. But they couldn’t. When I came back, they were astonished to see the way I protected my laptop just by changing the layout. Thanks to colemak.

Ubuntu – Linux

Pothi — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 16:35:00 +0000

Ubuntu – The best distribution if you are using Linux for the first time.

While installing Ubuntu, you may feel it takes so much time to install.

So….

Here’s a TIP.

Create a SWAP partition first, then do the installation. You’ll see considerable increase in speed while Ubuntu is being installed.