KrishnaShasankar.com

Apple Safari in Windows

Jun 13, 2007 Technology

I saw an RSS feed this morning about apple coming up with a windows version of safari. so the first thing i wanted to do when i stepped into office this morning was to evaluate it…
i got a shock when i heard about its features.

it has 12 great features … apple advertises on all these …. apple thinks that these are the features that you will need to switch from your traditional browser to safari.

here is the list from their website.

1. Blazing Performance
2. Elegant User Interface
3. Easy Bookmarks
4. Pop-up Blocking
5. Inline Find
6. Tabbed Browsing
7. SnapBack
8. Forms AutoFill
9. Built-in RSS
10. Resizable Text Fields
11. Private Browsing
12. Security

all of them seem to work great. until for one small issue….

the apple safari on windows will not render text in any form menus, dialogs, buttons, pages,etc…

here is my one feature vs steve jobs’ 12… why should i use a browser which will not render text….

have a first glimpse of safari screen from my notebook….

Tags: Tech Blogs

First Glimpse at Hannover

Mar 30, 2007 Uncategorized

I was jus browsing at ibm site to see if there are any new updates in developerWorks and Lotusphere , then i stumbled upon a link which said IBM has announced the public beta for Lotus Notes 8, (better known as Hannover in the Lotus notes user community).

just imagine… Hannover is to Lotus notes , what Longhorn or Vista is for windows….

This is the coolest and the most advertised version of Lotus Notes ever to be released… with a Extremely new UI and Functionalities, I didn want to miss a chance in evaluating the latest beta from IBM site.

I jus went ahead and downloaded the 623 MB file from IBM site and installed it on my machine.

I have given some screen shots in here, which are taken from that version.

This is the Defaluts Home Page of Hannover, you can access sametime… you can subscribe for RSS feeds. Read Feeds, Compose mail, Creadee Docs, Spreadsheets , Presentations, Databases … right from the Hoempage…. Its extremely user friendly

Mail Interface for Lotus notes: This is the coolest thing… we all are gonna have a interface thats gonna compete with other e-mail clients (MSO2007/WinMail) in UI… this is the major innovation from the Notes user prespective.

Calendar looks great with new user interface and a wide range of other options.

Creating spreadsheets and presentations can be done on the fly without the need of using microsoft office…. notes has integrated SOFFICE page built in to it… the Office package offers excellent compatibility with Microsoft office file formats , so the switch over process will be a lot easier

With the New version of Lotus Notes…. IBM is offering a big challenge to Microsoft by offering a solution which integrates the basic needs for office environments, like e-mail, instant messages, creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc…

Notes is all set to crack the market with this innovation.

Tags: Tech Blogs

Forgot Visual Basic

Mar 27, 2007 Uncategorized

Yesterday i came early home and i tried evaluvating Visual Studio 2005…. Jus thought of trying something different from the world of open-source programming….. These PHP, JS and HTML programming have very much affected my life….. i was struggling hard to write a code for showing a message box…. in Vbasic 6 it is “MessageBox” Function… but it will not work in VBasic 8 …. since the technologies behind are extremely different from each other…. I have completely forgot Visual Basic , years back i was very good at it … desktop programming was like a piece of cake…

Visual Basic has grown very much from the days of a RAD tool used for application prototyping … to a enterprise level app- dev tool… its good to hear these things… i will be evaluating the 2005 edition for web-devlopment .. will review the features in next blogs

Tags: Tech Blogs

Windows Vista vs Mac OS X

Mar 23, 2007 Uncategorized

I have some clips comparing features of Microsoft’s Windows Vista vs The OS X

NYT: Did Microsoft rip-off Apple Mac OS X in Windows Vista?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDNuq94Zg_8]

Tags: Tech Blogs, Video

Custom Apache log Formats

Mar 10, 2007 Uncategorized

Log Files. ….. he he …. i hate em…

Apache Servers can be customized to create log file to record hits of user activity on a certain website. These logs are automatically configured by default. The Default log format called as "Extended Log Format" provides you exhaustive information about User's IP , browser agent, file requested, server responmse HTTP Referral,  etc.

but the default log format is not usually compete. in the sense, the default log format wont help me to identify a user session. ( because default session tracking uses ip/user agent config. if i am browsing from my company the entire company has the same external ip and almost the same browser agent. so i cant be uniquely identified ). SO in order to provide a stong Session Tracking machanism . We will need to use a modified log format which can also track cookies. This is called the combined cookie format.

About Cookies.

Default Log Format

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" extended

Now Lets examine the Combined cookie log format

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\" \"%{Cookie}i\"" combined-cookie

So once these cookies are configured to log.

We can configure a new session tracking mechanism (Admin Console, select Web Analysis > Options > Session Tracking > add\edit a Session Tracking definition .) in webtrends to process the persistent cookie set by our apache server.

Now you can unleash the power of web log analytics. Most Reports in webtrends can be enabled with this configuration change.

Tags: Tech Blogs