Do you want Free Software ??

Lifehacker has posted a post about a cool new site for downloading free software giveawayoftheday. Read "Free software" it is not shareware, not freeware but commercial software which you should normally pay a fee to use is available to download freely. I am not sure how this business model is going to work. The website claims that it will pay the company money to make the software available for free download. The site is in beta now and I think it has been functioning only for few weeks now, but I haven't seen any sensational softwares available free over there.. But I certainly dont hope to see Vista or Age of Empires over there anytime soon. But would be nice to get some really nice free softwares.. so keep watching !!

Cool tool for Remote Logging - LogMeIn

This is the coolest tool I have found in a long time. Check it out in Logmein. This is very useful if you want to remote login to one computer using a browser. I just tried it out by installing it in my home laptop and logging in remotely from my office laptop. Now I can take a look at any file/code in my home by using this tool and all I need is an internet connection to access them. I am not sure about the security of this application. But I am sure the developers who thought about this kind of an application would have put in decent thought about the Security aspects of it. You have pay if you want to sync files between the computers. But you can always use foldershare which is a better tool to sync up files between different computers.

I would strongly recommend this to be installed in your parents PC and you can troubleshoot any issues easily from anywhere as long as they are connected to the internet. WOW !!

The last few days have been really fun trying to check out the interesting tools that I have missed out for some time.

Portable Applications - How far will they go?

Have you heard of this term "Portable Apps" ?? When I heard of this term for the first time I thought it was some kind of application which is written in Java which can be easily ported to other platforms.. ;) But that's not the case.. The definition goes something like this

"portable - carried or moved with ease
app - a computer program like a web browser or word processor
A portable app is a computer program that you can carry around with you on a portable device and use on any Windows computer. When your USB flash drive, portable hard drive, iPod or other portable device is plugged in, you have access to your software and personal data just as you would on your own PC. And when you unplug, none of your personal data is left behind."

from the site PortableApps.

It's funny that oneside world is moving towards bigger machines with GBs of RAM for hosting faster/bigger applications and on the other side we have started looking for applications with small footprints that can be carried in a USB drive mainly to minimize the security theft of our data. I think employers should start forcing employees carrying sensitive data to start working with PortableApps thereby reducing the chance of data theft that has been happening recently with the reports of lost laptops with sensitive customer data.

I am surprised to see so many utilities/audio/video/games available for portable apps. I think one good outcome of this will be the shift in the developer mindset to develop applications with smaller footprint which has been lost in the past decade b'cos of the availability of huge storage spaces.

History of Computer Programming Languages

I came across this cool web page showing the history of computer programming languages in this diagram. Someone must have spent quite a lot of time to comeup with this pictorial representation. It's a common saying that "A picture is worth thousand words" and that's exactly true when you see this picture you get the whole idea of the history of Computer Programming languages

Site of the Day - BetaMarker

I came across this cool site - BetaMarker it has an extensive collection of shareware/freeware tools/utilities for various areas like System Utilities, Audio/Video..etc.

I was looking to download a password manager for a long time to use in my system, since it was becoming real difficult to remember/cut & paste passwords from the text file I used to maintain. So I downloaded "Roboform" from BetaMarker will write another blog entry to say how roboform has been helping me maintain my passwords. So far I am happy with it.

Cool New Site - Zamzar

I came across a cool new site probably it has been around for a long time, but I came across it today. Zamzar is a site which provides you the functionality to convert your files to different formats without downloading any utility in your computer. They have multiple options for converting doc, video and audio files. I will use it going forward when I am having tough time especially for converting between various video file formats.

Removing Special Characters from a column in SQL Server

Recently I got an interesting SQL Server puzzle from one of my collegues. The question goes like this. There is an existing table containing UserId and password and we need write a query to remove any special characters from the UserId columnin the table. My first instinct was to write a cursor to acheive the same. But obviosuly cursors are always associated with performance issues so we need come up with someother solution. So I started writing some code and googled for some ideas. Then I cameacross a neat trick in a website (I forgot the link but I would like to appreciate whoover wrote this piece of code)

Declare @TmpTable table (UserId Varchar(30))
Insert Into @TmpTable values ('pr_()em%')
Insert Into @TmpTable values ('r*^#am)')
Select 1
While @@Rowcount > 0
Update @TmpTable Set UserId = Replace(UserId, Substring(UserId, Patindex('%[^a-zA-Z0-9]%', UserId), 1), '') Where Patindex('%[^a-zA-Z0-9]%', UserId) <> 0
Select * from @TmpTable

I am sure anyone who has been working in SQL server for some time would this piece of code :). Check out how cleverly @@rowcount has been used to run the update statement recursively in a loop.

Move to a new company

Having worked in healthcare domain for the last 3 years I decided couple of months back to move into a different area. After some serious thinking I landed in a company providing financial solutions. I just attended thier 3-day induction program and the line of products they offer is pretty interesting. I was always interested in knowing more about how electronic transactions happen from the time a member swipes his card in the ATM/Point of Sale (POS) device. I think I am in the right place to know the answer.

Still trying to get adjusted to the new place/collegues :) after seeing the same familiar friendly faces for the last 3 years. I sure miss my old collegues a lot but that's the way life goes...

Cool Expensive Headphones

I came across this website when I was reading a blog. Ultimateears is supposed to be one of the best headphones out in the market. Their custom fit ear phones looks completely wierd and the price is expensive.. a cool 900 $ ( yup I meant Nine Hundred dollars). I hope to try these headphones one day just to see is it really worth the money :)

Web 2.0

Here's a nice collection of all the best 2.0 web software that are currently available on the net.

http://web2.wsj2.com/the_best_web_20_software_of_2005.htm

I was really happy to see one of my favourite sites del.icio.us noted as one of the best social bookmarking sites. I am going to try all the other cool sites (mainly voo2do and calendarhub) will present my thoughts on them as a blog entry soon.