about:blank

Moved

2006-04-10T14:02:00.000+05:30

http://doughnut.wordpress.com

About to move on...

2006-02-21T19:42:00.000+05:30

This itself is some kind of a record that I am posting the 3rd entry on the same day. However, I'll be shifting this blog soon to http://doughnut.wordpress.com.

Any comments on the name or design welcome!

And if you interested in a wordpress.com blog for yourself, beware that templates cannot be edited. Other than that everything else is *much* better.

Coding Horror Blog

2006-02-21T11:31:00.000+05:30

I too am getting into coding horror

Instant Messengers

2006-02-21T10:53:00.000+05:30

I absolutely don't like all the messenger clients hogging up system resources and precious taskbar area. The alternative till now was to use a multi-sign-in IM client like trillian, gaim or jabbers. I've also heard friends working in other organizations complain about these IM clients disabled in their network. Well, not anymore I guess. Check out the browser-based meebo, brining IM to Web 2.0. Ofcourse, it doesn't have all the additional features like sounds, emoticons, webcam sharing, etc, but good enough for one-on-one text chat. Also, recently launched is gtalk on gmail.

The Code Book

2006-02-14T15:27:00.000+05:30

On one of my previous posts, a friend recommended The Code Book by Simon Singh. I got one but being an occassional reader, it took me almost a couple of months to finish reading through it. Its a great book with an interesting account of evolution of cryptography.

With each new encryption algorithm, there is an initial feeling that its "secure enough" and not breakable practically. But through the history, we have seen most of them being broken.

Anagram Generator

2006-02-10T14:27:00.000+05:30

If you have ever played texttwist, you would know the importance of getting the anagram in less than 120 seconds. Apart from making the smaller 3-4-5 letter words, the objective is to get the 6-letter anagram correctly to keep the game going on.

It was a friend's interest to develop a brute-force crack to cheat on the game. The first task is to generate all possible anagrams with the characters and then lookup each entry in a dictonary. Ofcourse, such programs are already available on the net, but its a good exercise to build one on your own.

Generating anagrams, looked like a simple task, and actually is :), but I got lost and it took some time to finally get a recursive function ready. The actual part of finding meaningful words through a dictionary lookup is still TODO. If you are interested to have a look at the C# code leave a comment and I'll try to post it.

command prompt bar

2006-02-09T14:16:00.000+05:30

Windows, Skins, GUI is all good, but I do often find myself launching the good old command prompt for various little things. Command Prompt Explorer Bar is a wonderful little utility that adds hooks to plug-in the command prompt window right into Windows Explorer.

It can keep track of your browsing in the explorer and sync it to the path of the command prompt. Also, a set of frequently used commands are stacked up for reuse. Ctrl + M it is!!

Update 2006.02.17: Documentation of all the win xp command line tools.

ie7

2006-02-02T17:35:00.000+05:30

I've just got the ie7 beta installed; I'm liking the design and looks but too bad that I could find a couple of glitches within first 10 minutes. There must be many more bugs and I'm sure that guys at ms must be working hard on fixing them. And as with any of their product's new version, the memory footprint is huge. Here is the link to download ie7 beta 2.

Media Player 10 required Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) validation before you could download the setup files. But, I've read of reports that it was cracked (with almost no effort and in almost no time). With IE7, the WGA is built-in to the setup, so that it validates every copy of windows on which you want to install the new browser. Hmm.. just a matter till another report, i guess!!

Template Change & 26 jan

2006-01-26T20:14:00.000+05:30

Following the change of my blog's title to about:blank, here is a template change too. I did try looking up here for blogger templates, but settled for a simple default one. Ofcourse, a little customization and I like it for now.

Adding links to India Flag VML and SVG today being 26th Jan.
Kalam's address to the nation, Jai Hind...

Cleartype & FB2

2006-01-09T14:11:00.000+05:30

I've seen several people preferring to read a paper book as against an eBook. While there are several advantages of eBooks like portability, hyper-linking, animations and ability to search through the text, the choice also likely depends and what you are reading. It would not appeal me to sit in front of the computer and read a novel or a story book. The comfort of holding the conventional book and lying down on the couch, flipping through the pages can never be equated to reading on the computer screen. However, e-reading is much the way of our daily lives (This blog entry included!!) and cleartype technology is out to help Windows users. Turn-ON Windows XP cleartype fonts and tune the settings to have a smoother rendering of the screen fonts. Check the cool 6 new fonts, fontblog and the video on what's next with cleartype on Windows Vista. My new favorite is Candara.

Also worth checking out is the CoolReader download for the FictionBook format eBooks.

Sudoku

2005-12-11T01:45:00.000+05:30

This may be the worst time for an expert player, but I took 18:55 to solve my first sudoku. I thought it was a silly game and kept away from playing all these days fearing addiction; but atlast tried it out today. I must admit I liked it. Download offline playable game.

AJAX - why should you like it?

2005-12-09T01:12:00.000+05:30

AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML programming. I'm seeing increasing number of new web interfaces based on this model. Like the Personalized Google, start.com, live.com and windows live mail (signup for beta access). My hotmail inbox now looks so much cooler and feels faster and slickier to work with :). I've also been hearing about the new YahooMail beta, but not lucky enough to get the invite yet. The advantage I see is the ability of partial page refreshes; which make webpages look rich and behave responsive like standard desktop client applications.

The ASP.NET 1.x model seemed to have been extensively biased around server side programming, and even using a small client side javascript was never simple. But, its good to see things change in this area with ASP.NET 2.0.

Google Doodles

2005-11-24T20:08:00.000+05:30

Once a while you can see a cool redesigned google logo on the home-search page of www.google.com, with a theme celebrating an event or a holiday. Check out the logos for holiday (official), art, fun and other topics. Some great creativity between the six letters. Now, it never needed a hi-tech graphics designer to design them. See this to believe what I'm saying. via: googleblog

In case Google and eBay merge, what would it be called goobay!!! Meanwhile, if you want your name/text to be doodalized, follow this link logogle. Here is how the doodle for the text [search] would look!

Ready(?) Launch 2005

2005-11-22T11:20:00.000+05:30

Microsoft is coming out big with the Ready Launch Tour 2005 worldwide to launch the releases of SQL Server 2005, VS 2005 and BizTalk 2006! At Bangalore, it is scheduled at our very own Palace Grounds on the 09th December 2005, and guess who'll be here for that?? None other than Bill Gates!!

Are you Ready? Catch the excitement, Register here for the event!

Flat-panel displays

2005-11-07T12:25:00.000+05:30

Here is a nice little flash animation on how flat-panel displays are made. Reminds me of the VLSI course in my UG studies! However, if you are interested in buying a flat-panel monitor / TV, these are some things to look out for. And some general gyan on display technologies.

MIT's $100 Laptop

2005-11-03T12:03:00.000+05:30

Here is the preview of the $100 laptop by mit. Apart from the Slick design, there are a few really useful features. The hand-crank generator can charge up the laptop and the carrying strap is the adaptor & cord!

At the same time, Gates envisions the Tablet PCs as the future. He hopes that the costs come down and in reality replace the student notepads! [from this channel9 video]

Two Years...

2005-10-20T22:40:00.000+05:30

Here's another anniversary message!! Yes... its exactly two years today, since I joined Hewlett-Packard. Though I've changed workplaces from Cunningham Rd to Racecourse Rd to Electronic City, I've been working in the same team.
Prior to this, I was with ITC Infotech, mostly with the Prototyping Lab, which is no more. If I'd to say one thing about my stay there... it would be POTS. For those who have the context, they know what I'm talking about. :D

One Year ...

2005-10-19T21:56:00.000+05:30

I just realized that its just over an year since my first post on this blog. Nothing great about anything here, this is only the 28th post. Anyways to mark the ocassion... a new title about:blank. Here is a site which seems to have ^TMed this expression already, but that's it for now! till I come up with a new one. Ofcourse, I hope to post more often this year or ... may be lesser. Well... It depends !! :)

GreaseMonkey for Firefox

2005-10-18T22:35:00.000+05:30

One of the attractive features of Mozilla Firefox the customization and extensibility. GreaseMonkey is one of the many such cool extensions, that can totally change the browsing experience. It allows to configure running of a script everytime a site/page is visited. It means that... you can zap the (ugly-big-flashing) ad-banners in yahoomail or skip the raaga.com audio ads or many such things. Also, it looks quite easy to write one yourself. Finally some ad-free browsing??!!

To try the next best thing... Fx 1.5 beta2.

Who are you?

2005-10-07T15:40:00.000+05:30

Well, that's how the channel9-guy-Scoble, starts his video interviews for msdn's channel9. Interesting to see that he does the same with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer too.

A lot more of channel9 videos.

Office Office

2005-10-07T15:15:00.000+05:30

Here are some screen shots and a whole demo of the microsoft office12 UI. I'm impressed (I thought... I would not... but still... I am!!) . I like the idea of "ribbon" allowing contextual usage of the toolbar space. Currently, almost all apps allow customizing toolbar buttons, but its wonderful to have a "right set" of them presented to you at each step of your work. Guess, it'll be a a lot of fun.

At the same time, openoffice is a great open-source alternative. I downloaded 1.1.5 to check-out what's in and what's not. Though, it misses quite a few features, its quite a good for the daily basic needs. Besides, it comes free!

|\|3\/\/ P057

2005-10-03T20:58:00.000+05:30

\/\/0l\ld3r, what it is called to write text by replacing l\l0r/\/\4l characters. Hey, I'm not saying anything cryptic. Its just another way of typing in text! Here is what microsoft says and what google does about it!

Update 1: Its called l33+ err.. i'mean LeetSpeek!
Update 2: Photoshop contest If hackers ruled the world.

cyborgname

2005-10-01T20:17:00.000+05:30

bumped onto the cyborgname generator from here; anyways mine looks like this ;)

India Flag SVG

2005-09-14T21:55:00.000+05:30

Though VML is popular and rendering support is inbuilt into Microsoft Internet Explorer, it is not the recommended standard for vector graphic markup.

You may not see anything untill you install a SVG rendering plug-in for your browser.

If you are using Firefox 1.5 Beta you should be directly able to see the flag here without any additional plug-in requirements.

Related Links: SVG source in zip format Amaya Web Browser and MIME spoofing

bcp online

2005-09-13T11:55:00.000+05:30

bcp... for this time... is not for bulk-copy. Its bangalore city police. Was pleasantly surprised to find that they have a website running. There is a form to submit complaints online, information page for foreigners and ... a most wanted list! Ofcourse, also available in ಕನ್ನಡ

for the record, these are websites of Mumbai Police, Delhi, NYPD, LAPD, LondonPD, CBI, FBI

India Flag

2005-09-02T22:50:00.000+05:30

I wanted to post this on the 15th August. Below is the tiranga... our flag. Its NOT an image but made up using Vector Markup. More samples and a tool here.

* mostly not visible in Firefox. is there a VML renderer available for FF somewhere?

(re)discovering ... C# on VS.NET

2005-08-31T20:15:00.000+05:30

Its the same .NET and visual studio that I've been using for years! But (re)discovering these little features/tips make working with it more interesting. Here are a few.

The tweak for single instance of an application is cool, but I remember seeing another code snippet elsewhere that brings into focus the existing instance.

* (re)discovers... thanks to Sanjay for the title

And now... google talk

2005-08-25T17:46:00.000+05:30

Got to know from GS that Google is coming up with Google Talk and IM text plus Audio chat utility. Its still beta, nevertheless looks impressive. You can get it from here .. http://www.google.com/talk/index.html

I don't like to switch between messenger clients and was happy to see support for google talk using other IM clients. But the client is not big and not a RAM-hogger either!

Anyways, happy chatting!

MIT weblogs survey

2005-07-19T15:12:00.000+05:30

If you are interested and have the time to take a survey on weblogs by MIT:

Vertical guides in VS.NET

2005-07-12T18:20:00.000+05:30

Unlike the earlier days of Fortran - COBOL where positioning and length of lines of code were strictly defined, C# or VB.NET allow free styles of writing code. However, if you are from those good old times of 80 char wide screens and interested to avoid horizontal scrolling, here is a hidden registry entry to help you.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.0\Text Editor]
"Guides"="RGB(128,0,0) 80, 120"

7.0 = VS.NET 2002
Red vertical guides at columns 80 and 120

...from here

File security @ XP home edition

2005-07-10T06:15:00.000+05:30

Being very used to the professional editions of the desktop OS, I found a few things very unfriendly with XP home edition, like no IIS!, no file security! etc. Ofcourse, some of these "silly" XP home limitations can be worked around.

For testing out the file security with the scesp4i.exe, I had inadvertantly locked out a whole drive to all users accounts! And it first looked very clumsy to get back the ownership and reset the access to each folder and every file in it. But hey, we have xcacls.exe to modify the ACLs in a batch recursively.

Alternatively...

2005-06-22T12:03:00.000+05:30

For those who don't like having too many media players for each multimedia file format, here are the alternatives... Quicktime ALT and Real ALT. Add a good codec-pack like this, and you should be able to play almost any media file with the default windows media player.

Interestingly, Farmers from chattisghar have an alternative for the expensive pesticides!!! (via)

My rot13!

2005-05-12T15:07:00.000+05:30

I wrote a javascript to do rot13. Getting to show up this as a post in my blog seemed difficult than writing the script itself! Anyways, here it is now:

Linux

2005-05-09T18:04:00.000+05:30

Though all of my work is around Microsoft stuff; I know what Linux is!! Not very extensively, but have tried my stunts around with some flavours of this OS. After the free CHIP RedHat7 CD and before I knew about VirtualPC, I felt distributions that could be run off the CD are cool. Then, I was searching for something that could be carried over my 256MB USB flash drive. Some sites list out the distributions and you can find the best one for you.

Smartphones support linux (they had to... right?); but now, the new cool thing seems to be running linux on a iPOD or on a nintendo! Way to go... penguin!!??!!

its not just web search

2005-05-04T15:30:00.000+05:30

If you haven't seen it already; there is the all new improved search at msn. More stories at the msnsearch blog. Now, its not just about text searching the web anymore. The engines are going beyond this and offering interesing new features.

msn's got a toolbar suite for desktop search and other features, encarta answers to solve math and also to give free access to encarta web for 2 hrs. On there other hand, google looks innovative as always with local and map searches (not effective when in India?!) and the search history to search your searches !!!

and finally this

What kind of blogger am I?

2005-05-02T20:20:00.000+05:30

You Are a Link Blogger!

Your blog is more about cool links than thougtful posts.
Better to be entertaining and breif than longwinded and boring!

What kind of blogger are you?

Yahoo! Photos

2005-04-25T12:19:00.000+05:30

I like Yahoo! because of the many services it provides. I don't have to create a new account somewhere else for each service. Yahoo photos was good untill I noticed that full-size image access was not available [link], even to the owners!!. The standard size is 480x360 px, which almost looks like a thumbnail in today's desktop resolutions. This made me look for other options to migrate to - webshots/imagestation. Then, what about images already stored in yahoo?? I want to get them back... in full-size.

Some google, and there was someone already there with a "fix". Try to print using the print-at-home button, we get the full size image. And then, its just digging it out from the temporary internet files folder.

---
Inspired by this, this and also a lot of other things, I am trying to post-in more frequently.

SQL Server clients

2005-04-18T12:08:00.000+05:30

I work quite a bit with Query Analyzer & Enterprise manager and guess these are the most popular tools to access the SQL server 2000 databases. There are other/better tools. The all new SQL Server management studio 2005 by microsoft is impressive with some right things at right places. (no more switiching between QA and EM). The free low-end downloadable alternative is the express manager.

There is also a TOAD for SQL server!! I thought TOAD was only available for oracle, but great to see this one for SQL server.

One more is Essqeulle, which is generic and can be used with any database brand! Its developed by a good friend sid and is available here.

Of course, sometimes the all simple and powerful command-line utility - osql is just perfect.

Unccl arj lrne!

2005-01-13T18:12:00.000+05:30

Cypher-encrypted wishes for the new year. info rot13 option1

Security and encryption have been my interests from long time. Incidentally, I was also doing stuff on this at work recently. SQL injection one more attacks seem to be the biggest threats to applications now-a-days.

Another thing talked about is XSS - cross site scripting, don't have much idea on this yet. May be you can tell me if you already know.

Google++

2004-12-17T18:43:00.000+05:30

It started with I getting to know about deskbar.google.com [thanks to S]. Its actually so cool to have the google search right in the taskbar.

There is also the google desktop search that i'm trying now-a-days. more at google.com/options and labs.google.com; you may find something interesting for you there. and there is gmail, orkut info. ,

interesting to know that google is upto more things than web search.

[*** update:] Also found this cool hack around gmail GMailDrive

my hash table

2004-12-14T13:51:00.000+05:30

[Read bottom-up]

Connecting to a SQL server instance running on non-default port (other than 1433)
I got to this problem only while trying to use SQL Server 2005 express manager. One way is to configure an alias in the Client network utility. However, the syntax for specifying the absolute instance name is "protocol:servername\instancename,portname", e.g tcp:northwind.apac.hp.com\uat,2048
[20-Dec-2004]

Specifying the version of .NET framework for each WebApplication
aspnet_regiis.exe utility lets me view and assign the .NET framework version to each individual web-app. This way my quickstarts can be running on Fx 2.0 and the my Project on Fx 1.0.3705.6018 (this corresponds to version 1.0 with SP3)

Tab-completion in Windows 2000 command window
This feature allows you to begin entering in a long filename from the command prompt, and to press the Tab key to have the rest of the long filename automatically completed.

Navigate: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\CommandProcessor
Name: PathCompletionCharData
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 9

Select rows as a single value
If you ever had a requirement to select a concatenated-delimited string of few string data in few rows of a table, here is the SQL for it.

declare @list varchar(255), @delimiter char(1)
set @delimiter = ','
select @list = coalesce(@list + @delimiter, '') + title_id from titles
select @list as RowsAsSingleValue

Somethings that I've come across and want to remember.

RSS ?? ...

2004-11-25T10:02:00.000+05:30

As if it was not enough stuff already on the internet, people around (me too!!) have started blogging. Some of these blogs are very active and people check them regularly (and post comments too). I had often seen the XML/RSS icon on the blogs, but never really went any further to find out more stuff about this. I happened to notice a new menu option Feeds on my avant browser 10.0, and then started to try out. And thus, accidently got to know more stories about RSS, syndication in general and other feed types.

Its not just content from blogs that you want to syndicate. There are news feeds that you can subscribe to (rediff gives it out). There is also a lists of most-subscribed-to RSS feeds! Yahoo now allows you to add feeds, so that you decide what you get on your myYahoo! homepage. It seems that a lot more can come up around this idea? ....want more??? ......how about Gmail on your feed reader??

Somehow, I feel this way you are going to have a little more control on what you want to see out of the big bad web. The new web is going to be same as the old web!!

All this said, this is the feed of my blog http://kalyankrishna.blogspot.com/atom.xml :)

hic hic hurray!!

2004-11-17T07:03:00.000+05:30

Ever wonder why one gets high with alcohol? I didn't; untill one day when I looked for this at www.howstuffworks.com.

This page was interesting in the entire article http://science.howstuffworks.com/alcohol5.htm

As guessed...

2004-11-03T14:36:00.000+05:30

had forgot totally about this thing. Went through the forgot password way to comeback here and write this.

Anyways, spent sometime @ www.orkut.com yesterday. World is indeed a small place. Could locate a few friends already in there.

The First Post

2004-10-15T03:15:00.000+05:30

Well, have been hearing about a lot of people blogging these days. So just thought, why not me give a try? Wonder if I'll be as interested as I am today about blogging. Anyways, first step taken and a blogspot created. Let's see how it goes.

Hello World!