Archive for category Reviews

Best Free Website Uptime Monitor

I came across a post on Mashable about an article on 10 Free Website Uptime Monitoring services, out of that I have analyzed and found 2 of them the best free solution out of all. One is UptimeRobot and another one is pingdom. Whether you have single website or multiple, if you want to check and monitor uptime of your website to verify the reliability of your web-server or hosting company then you should deploy up-time-monitoring service for your website/web-application. If you are running critical application than one should consider buying or using one for monitoring them.

Let me give you some idea about both the services:

UptimeRobot

UptimeRobot

UptimeRobot is completely free service for monitoring websites.

# of websites you can monitor per account: 50
Check Interval: 5 minute
Alert by: email, sms, rss, twitter

UptimeRobot looks at your site header’s status codes every five minutes and if the code comes back with a problem, does further checks. Then, if there are still issues, it lets you know about it pronto. According to about-us, they will try to keep this service free as long as possible.

pingdom

pingdom

pingdom is commercial monitoring service but it has a free sign-up with limited # of monitor. Basic free account let's you monitor 1 website. It comes with free iPhone application and monthly summary report as email.

# of websites you can monitor per account: 1
Check Interval: 1 minute
Alert by: E-mail, SMS (up to 20 per month), push alerts via iPhone app

I like that it allows you to select the time interval between 2 checks and the big deal is that at minimum you can select interval to 1-minute. The configuration is great and you can configure URL by HTTP/S or custom HTTP/S where you can set the PAYLOAD. We can choose between HTTP, TCP Port/Ping/DNS/UDP, SMTP/IMAP/POP3. See URL configuration screen below: Read the rest of this entry »

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Acronis Disk Director 11 Home Worked for me..!

Acronis Disk Director Home 11

Acronis Disk Director Home

This week Monday late evening I came to know that my hard-drive has encountered some problem which was working well till last Sunday evening somehow. What all I remember which might have caused this could be my successful experiment to shift one of my extended partition to primary partition to increase the primary partition size. That time I have just Googled-up to find out a free-software to help me out for that. I Googled-up and found Partition Wizard Home Edition Free which can do the job for me. Not to say I had partitioned my 400GB partition into 8 partitions and just with the help of Partition Wizard HE - Free I pumped 50GB more into my primary partition C-Drive. Which was okay for several days but after few days I got dumped.

My partition-table was corrupted and while booted Monday I came to know that no other drive except C -Drive was visible. I was 99% sure that I will get my data back but was just looking for the Right-Tool to do that. After downloading several tools and tried all of them but not much luck. I was ready to spend some dollars but could not find the right tool. My old favorite PC Inspector File Recovery was not able to help either. Then one of my colleague Girish Parmar suggested me to use Acronis for the job. I knew that Acronis is there and I have used it few years back in the time of Partition Quest Magic 8 but it was history now.

I have downloaded Acronis Disk Directory 11 Home and initially I thought it won't work. But then I got another HD plugged in took a risk to Initialize my old HD again and after that tried using Acronis Recovery Expert again and w0000t! it just worked for me. I was able to recover all my partitions in several trials in two go. Read the rest of this entry »

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New Digg is here..! It’s Monster.. But What’s new?

New Digg - The Monster

New Digg - The Monster

Okey, the wait is over. New Digg is here..! Oh I just got this email last night which I have checked today.. and when I saw that new Digg is here out of their beta. I can't wait but went out to try it all and signed in to my existing account.

What I saw is it really is cool. What you will notice is that it is going the twitter way.. You can choose people you follow and others can follow you..! It's kind of more or less what almost every other social-blogging or micro-blogging website is being built on top of...

What I have noticed on the first view is:

New Digg Logo

New Digg Logo

  1. New Logo & UI theme/design: Digg has got little Web 3.0 styled logo and new design. Looks pretty much nice though UI design is on top of classic design but has got that punch.
  2. Find Friends to Follow and make Followers: As I said find friends to follow and let them follow you. It has got Google, facebook and twitter connect. Once you login first time in a new digg it lets you choose accounts you can follow based on your taste. Then let's you find friends on other social-networking or micro-blogging websites you might be using.
  3. New way to submit link: Now posting link is simpler (damn simple..) and faster. It's not crawling through it's database to find duplicates now..! Which has saved up huge time. It' really fast and I am loving it.
  4. Auto-Submit Stories: Go to Settings > Import Feeds > [ Enter Your Website ] and choose a topic. It's that easy, it will require you to copy paste a key in your blog post to verify it's yours. That's it you're done. I loved this feature. Not just one you can have multiple blogs, as long as you can claim yours.
  5. Easily share your story: You can easily share your stories on twitter or facebook.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Open Source – Web Office: OpenGoo

OpenGoo is a open-source Web Office software built with PHP and MySQL. It uses extJS as Javascript framework and it's gadgets for presentation layer, which makes it's look and feel great. Though it is bit heavy when transferred on the wire. But can serve as an alternate to Zimbra or Google Docs and office applications.

It's PHP & MySQL and so would be easy to deploy on any environment while for Zimbra you have to use RedHat or CentOS as a platform. It is very feature-rich with lots of feature listed below here from the official website FengOffice. Read the rest of this entry »

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Writing better (performing) code..! What is that?

What is good code? The one which is following best programming patterns or the one which just does it's job simple what is required?

Better Code

Writing a better code everyday is every programmer's job and dream. A Programmer should learn from his past projects and experiences every time he start or initialize with something new. Whether it is using Patterns to solve common problem or be it writing reusable generalized code.

When it comes to writing generalized code/solution the programmer/developer has to think from wide perspective about the problem and divide the solution in a way that it could be used in other alternate situations which are not seen as of yet but could arise in future.

As programmer gains experience he learns from his experience what works out and what not in various situations. Experience teaches a Leader/Programmer by problem. The more no of problem one faces it helps him learn faster by solving them. It highly depends on the kind of work/project (enviornment) one is dealing with..!

Performance Tuning

Recently Vance Lucas wrote on his artical that early performance benchmarking is a disease but actually it is not really. I believe it depends on the kind of project you are dealing with. Although his post has targeted my one of the PHP Performance Tips artical which was related to "Writing better code with PHP... although some of them might not be useful with newer PHP versions but it does really matter.

But the question is if you/clients are more concerned about the performance which in most cases will be than it is good to start thinking about Performance from the day one. I know about firms/companies or clients looking at the Language/Tool/Framework benchmarks before taking decision on which tool/language to choose for the Project. This approach is better than crying after spending time, efforts and money on it.

Actually no one likes build a software which is great by architectural design but when it comes to performance it is real dull.

Conclusion:

Although this artical dosn't provide any tips to improve code in any language but in the end I can say that evaluating any code to Bad/Better/Best Code is relative and depends on the criterias and cases you are evaluating with. Work quality is relative to demand. As anytime we can't have good, cheap and fast all together.

Ultimately the Good code is which performs it's job perfectly and is easy to maintain in future. (It includes writing test cases and following proper commenting and everything..)

Readers' comments and thoughts are welcome as I would like to hear from you as well.

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OpenOffice.org 3.0 released

OpenOffice.Org 3.0 is released this monday and it's doing well. As I have seen early this week that due to unexpected download their engineers got to work on their website to manage the load. When I am writing this the website is back to it's normal and they have openoffice.org has recovered from the crash. They managed to allow download open office even when the site was down.

Now when it comes to features I am not able to try much with it but yes I have upgraded from 2.4 to this new release 3.0.

  • There is new start center with various applications grouped up.
  • Calc can have 3 times more columns then 256 in previous versions (1024 now).
  • Microsoft Office 2007 file format support: So now we can open *.docx files from Microsoft Office 2007..!
  • Solver and new theme in Calc.
  • Native tables in Impress.
  • Pretty Notes in the Margin and multiple page views in Writer

I have never tried with XML forms or ODBC connection for database previously but I got connected with my Sybase db and I was able to check all my tables and views from there. It was cool although procedures and triggers were not available but it was nice that we can even design forms in Open Office Database.

More on this.. may be this weekend..

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Paying the bills.!