Take a look at Linutop. A system that is just suitable for surfing the net. I mean why does one need a huge desktop sitting there and occupying space and if one needs it only to surf the internet? Less physical space, yet powerful enough.

Note:- If you are new to AJAX, refer my post on AJAX

Happy Weekend!

One of the key tests on the browser for any web application is to test in the minimum and maximum resolution settings so that the application’s look and feel is tested in the most commonly used screen resolutions. One way to do it for a tester is to change the desktop settings for each resolution and test it.  But this test has to be repeated every time there is a user interface change in the application.  A couple of alternatives is available that can simplify though with a caveat. One can use browsersize.com and the other option is to use the web developer Firefox extension. These two help one to set the browser window size in different standard screen resolutions and test the application.  Now the caveat part is there is a difference in the appearance.  What these tools do is just set the window size to the appropriate width and height. The screen resolution also changes the appearance of items displayed in the screen. For example if the screen resolution is lower then the text size appears to be bigger. Nevertheless whatever the approach is taken the screen resolution test is one factor that still needs to be considered owing to the varied usage of resolution among the internet users as evident from the browser statistics in w3schools. Good part from the statistics though is there seems to be almost no one using the lowest resolution of 800×600.

This post is part of the RToon Series

Happy Weekend!

Auto Rickshaw is a common public transport in India for hire. Bangalore is the silicon valley of India, located in the Karnataka state.

Happy Weekend!

Kudos to the developers of BeleniX, it is a open source Solaris operating system that can run directly from a CD/DVD without installing anything on the hard disk. Belenix was presented and demonstrated in the 6th Annual Conference of Free and Open Source Software here in Bangalore, India. BeleniX was tweaked and modified to run from a pen drive. As storage capacity is becoming more and more indirectly proportional to the size of the device itself apparently the future seems to be to carry the entire hard disk in your pocket and plug it in wherever you are and feel at home. Here is the local newspaper article “PC software on your key chain!” that talks about BeleniX and its developers.

Those number1.number2.number3.number4 way of accessing a machine or URL or when you ping a site what you see, yeah you are right the IP address, ever wondered why that format and what it signifies and how does it work? The number is decimal representation of each byte in the 4 bytes (that is why the range of IP address can be in the combination of 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255 ) that is used to store a machine address. In that case do you think we can connect to a machine using a complete decimal representation of the 4 bytes? Why don’t we try it? Let’s try to access google.com using a decimal representation.  First get the IP address of google.com by pinging it in your shell. The IP I got was from the Google server in India ( google.co.in) which is 64.233.189.104. Let’s take each number here and convert it into binary.  Remember to pad zeros in the left if the number does not translate to 8 bits. Use scientific calculator mode in XP and it will help conversion easy. So here is the binary representation of each number.

64  - 01000000
233 - 11101001
189 - 10111101
104 - 01101000

Now combine the binary above together as 32 bits which gives 1000000111010011011110101101000. Now translate this back to decimal which is 1089060200.  Now to verify that if this number will take you to Google why don’t you click this link http://1089060200. I got the Google India search page! So each of that byte has significance and can determine the IP class. Learn more about “The IP Address and Classes“.

Can a wrong data entry create a huge loss? Yes it can if the system does not allow one to rollback or alter once the information is submitted.  Here is a reality from the recent news article in BBC “Tokyo error triggers huge lawsuit“. This reminds me of the recent newsletter “My Unexpected Reward from Best Buy” in Javalobby by Rick Ross. It is apparent from the above news that systems should be built to be more adaptive and should have some intelligence in such cases. Even a re verification and confirmation feature in the system would have reduced the possibility of such a erroneous transaction.