BLOGS@DiGiTSS » Software

Speed up PC startup with Soluto – Anti-Frustration Software

Dharmavirsinh Jhala — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 19:21:10 +0000

Soluto: Anti-Frustration Software

If you're one of those frustrated with sluggish PC startup then you should consider trying Soluto Beta. Soluto is an Anti-Frustration Software, which will help you easily view and remove unwanted items from the system startup and see what action other users in the community have taken for particular startup item.

With Soluto, we will have choose to Pause or Delay startup items, Pause will remove item from the startup still keeping in the registry, so that in future if you want you can queue them up and Delay will delay the startup item so that those services/processes will be little later after your startup which gives you quick access to the usable desktop/windows machine.

Basically their user interface is great as it shows you items in graphical way with amount of time you're saving by removing the startup items.

Soluto beta - in action

Also Soluto itself eats up few seconds during startup but it's worth as it helps removing the unwanted items. Along with that it stays there in system tray and monitors items, programs and manages delayed startup items selected.

In above screen-shot you can see the startup items divided in 3 categories 1) No-brainer 2) Potentially removable 3) Cannot be removed with Soluto (yet...). Here 1 and 2 categories are basically additional applications/software we install while 3rd categories are mostly windows operating system files. One of the purpose of keeping it in system tray is to monitor the usage of all those startup items and divide them in these 3 categories.

I would say you should try this software and here I am leaving you with some of the videos of Soluto - In action/demo.

It's one of the software in it's categories which gives you statistics of your startup time per item and I am sure if you will like it if you will try. Leave your comments if you like this recommendation.Similar Posts:

NetBeans 6.8 is out

Dharmavirsinh Jhala — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:24:12 +0000

NetBeans 6.8

NetBeans 6.8 is released last week on December 10, 2009 and it is on the door with many new exciting features. I am developing Web Applications with PHP, XML, Javascript, HTML and it has been great experience using NetBeans. Other than NetBeans I am using Eclipse for some of the projects and NotePad++ and EditPlus are handy for some quick-fixes where you don't need to open up or create a new Project.

EditPlus was my first Editor when I started my career and after that Eclipse PDT and later NetBeans has taken their place. For majority of projects I am using NetBeans while for some specific projects where goodness of some great Eclipse Plug-in drags me towards it. For anything quick I have always EditPlus on hand, which is really handy if you want to see some formatted code on your Windows Servers. The beauty of EditPlus is it's very light-weight (only 1.3MB) and damn fast. Though it is not Free you can use it for evaluation period as long as you wish if you can click "I Agree" at start-up.

One of my most most favorite feature of NetBeans is Quick File Search through File/Project Navigator Pane. It is the most beautiful feature..it's so coool one can't live without it once we get used to it. You don't need to type through live Windows file-listing, it just opens up tiny search control just as you start typing and it stays with character you input even after you pause for few seconds. I think this feature should be there in every IDE.

Now let's see what NetBeans 6.8 has to offer?

Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3 support
JSF 2.0 support with many new features
PHP 5.3 and Symfony Framework support
Additional Kenai Feature integration and Jira bug tracking support
Improved C++ profiling with Microstate Accounting indicator and I/O usage monitor
JavaFX code completion, hints and navigation improvements in the NetBeans editor

Continue reading on NetBeans Wiki for more details on New and Noteworthy features of version 6.8.

P.S.: With every version update NetBeans is coming up with exciting start-up screen when IDE starts. This time it's very energetic and damp cool. I am loving it..!Similar Posts:

Open Source – Web Office: OpenGoo

Dharmavirsinh Jhala — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 09:11:53 +0000

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.

OVERVIEW

The Overview shows a summary of management information. It displays relevant information like: schedule of coming and current activities, running tasks, overdue and pending tasks, recently added or modified documents, latest messages, comments and conversations, e-mails, and more.

WORKSPACES

Workspaces allow individuals and teams to organize their data and tasks, and share them with other people. They can be linked to Clients, Projects, Products, Services, Departments, etc. You can define many levels and sub-levels of Workspaces. Visually identify your most relevant Workspaces, quickly, by assigning different color labels.

NOTES

Notes are an easy way to register and share comments over any piece of information. They are very useful for: tracking the conversations maintained with third parties, assessing the client satisfaction about quality, tracking a physical document, etc. A note could be entered by any user, and can notify others about it by e-mail.

E-MAILS

The e-mail follows the traditional scheme with one or more addressees who exchange messages. Additionally, users have the possibility of sharing the message with others by sending the message to a shared workspace. E-mail attachments are automatically stored as Documents.

CONTACTS

The contacts module manages the information of all organizations and people linked to your company. The contact list can be filtered by a specific workspace, by tags, or in a general manner.

CALENDAR

The calendar allows scheduling an agenda of events, milestones, tasks with deadlines, and meetings. It can be displayed daily, weekly or monthly. The schedule could be shared amongst the users who have the correspondent privileges.
You can see the schedule of events in general or specifically for each workspace or tag.

DOCUMENTS

Feng Office allows you to store and share all types of documents. The system keeps record of the different versions, comments, and a controlled access to optimize the work of people who collaborate on a document. Text documents and presentations can be created or edited directly in Feng Office without the requirement of any additional software in your computer.

TASKS

You can track every task, sub-task and milestone that is part of a service, project or activity. The system provides quick access to the tasks, grouped by state (pending, behind schedule and completed), priority, assigned person, and more. Tasks can be grouped using milestones, setting common deadlines and improving project management.
It is possible to notify a person who is assigned a task by e-mail. All the information linked to a specific task is available at a single click.
You can create a template out of a set of tasks and sub-tasks, improving the adoption of standard procedures.

TIME TRACKING

The system allows the tracking of hours for each workspace, sub-space, task and user. Reporting capabilities allow to easily produce a list of hours for any time period, users and workspace.

WEB LINKS

Web-links are hyperlinks to external Websites. They can be classified by tags, linked to other information and assigned to any number of workspaces.

SEARCH & FILTERS

The information can be quickly accessed using the integrated search engine, or it can be found using the filters of type, tags or workspaces.

USER' ADMINISTRATION

You can modify, register or create new users through the user panel. You can create and modify groups of users and group or individual permissions, making available only the relevant and corresponding information to each user.

LINKED INFORMATION

All the information managed by the system can be linked, assuring no element is forgotten or goes unnoticed. One document can have messages linked to it -or a meeting can have documents- and so with every element of the system, thus creating infinite data management possibilities.

From all of them I really like Tasks (which has got milestones and sub-tasks), Calendar and Custom Reports. Web-links and other features could be still improved. Hopefully we will see lot of improvements in future releases.

Similar Posts:

Free/Open source tools for Web Masters and Web-Conferencing

Dharmavirsinh Jhala — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 04:30:35 +0000

I have been using many open source or free utilities/software which can beat their commercial contenders for sure, and I would like to share them here with you on this blog post.Best free / open source download manager: I have been using Free Download Manager since long and it's worth a try. It is great, consistent and has been up to the expectations all the time till day. I believe download manager is must have and FDM is the best. It is open source (GNU License), Ads free and what more we can ask for? Let me list down some of the features from it's latest version FDM 2.5.

Included BitTorrent support
Upload Manager
Flash Video download
Audio/Video preview
Speed selection
Site Explorer
and the most exiting Remote Control (Let's you control download from remote machine using a http client)

Free Download Manager

Best FTP / SFTP client(s)/Server:

WinSCP: It's one of the best and open source FTP program available. WinSCP is open source and it is better then commercial alternates like SmartFTP or CuteFTP. I have used many of them but now prefer to use only WinSCP. It's free and download and run executable is available as well so if it's required to download at Client's server then also no hassle.

FileZilla: This is another great piece of open source solution which is both FTP Client and FTP Server, what more we can ask for? FileZilla Client is available for all platforms while FileZilla Server is available as Windows download only.

Best Remote Help/Screen Sharing/ Meeting:

Although at Office whenever I need to Assist someone remotely or do a Web Meeting I use GoToAssist and GoToMeeting, but I have used some of the following services at one time or another or tried sometime for experimenting. Yes, I do LogMeIn regularly to connect to my remote servers when can't do MSTSC (Microsoft Remote Terminal)

LogMeIn Free: LogMeIn Free is a powerful product with very ease of use and proven technology and is being used by professionals. Even in free usage you can sign up/register unlimited number of computers in one profile. You can create multiple groups for better management under one group. This works great for Remote Assistance and one to one screen sharing, we can set speed and quality as per our requirement while working with LogMeIn.

DimDim: Works for conferencing and allows to join 20 users in a meeting/conference while using as free service. It's easy (browser based), but screen sharing quality we can't expect as much as Citrix GoToMeeting. But yes it does allow sharing of screen, documents (PPT), Websites, Whiteboard. As well as there is a option to call on conference number or attendees can communicate using Microphone and speakers. I believe they will improve quality day by day.
The big point is that it's open-source: meaning that you can download source and host your own portal for your organization, I believe it's biggest positive point because with that speed and quality will be dependant on how much Internet bandwidth you provide and your server configuration.

Yugma: Yugma is free Web Meeting and Conferenceing service. It let you invite 10 attendees while using it as free registered user. Skype and Outlook plugins are available. You can use it under Windows, Mac and Linux (beta). I believe they are improving their quality of service but it has been long time I used it now.

Please share free/open-source tools you are using.Similar Posts:

Zimbra open-source works great..!

Dharmavirsinh Jhala — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:32:27 +0000

Open Source Edition

At Meditab we are using Zimbra - open source as our mailing suite. We almost never felt 99% up-time unless there is a Internet down due to any ISP trouble. Last week I have been asked to install Zimbra on one of our machine for test as we wanted to perform some r&d out but can't perform that on live server.

I am novice to Linux and so took help of our Network guy to get over with Red Hat Server Enterprise 5 on one of the machine. The Red Hat installation went smooth and then before starting installation of Zimbra we went over with some Quick-Start guides and Administrator Guide from Zimbra itself. Samba server let's us easily access Windows shared files from the Intranet.

After downloading latest build of Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0 we started installation, the first phase was to check pre-requisites required to successfully install Zimbra. We were missing some of them like libc and gmp but got all of them from installation disk and started again. Then installation went quite smooth; we just need to answer some of the questions.
Installation went successful without any error there on and we were able to access that from network without any problem. Creation of Admin account was required before we could start creating user accounts from Zimbra Admin UI. Zimbra Wiki is great help and we were able to find How to Create Zimbra Admin account from there itself using "zmprov" prompt. In short even for newbies it won't take more than 3 to 4 hours to setup basic things to get started for more advanced setup we can always digg into online Wiki or Forum to get through.

After everything is done we can access Admin UI by typing https://SUB.DOMAIN.COM:7071 in your browser address bar. You may need to add an exception to browser security for https certificate and you must type 7071 to goto Admin Console.

We created few accounts from the Admin Console and were able to send and receive mail successfully inside Intranet. We were even able to send mail on real web-mails or live mails without any problem and receiving mail is also just a one MX record change away for our testbed.

I am planning to install Zimbra on CentOS in my VMWare machine setup as it will be binary compitable with Red Hat package.Similar Posts:

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

Dharmavirsinh Jhala — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 09:15:18 +0000

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.Similar Posts:

OpenOffice.org 3.0 released

Dharmavirsinh Jhala — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 19:21:20 +0000

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..Similar Posts: