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There are lot of performance improving tips out there in the Internet on how to speed up web pages. Recently I came across these references and tools that will be useful.
Recently I purchased some old Tamil Movie VCDs, I wanted to copy them to my PC so that I can carry it in my Zune player or to my Digital Media Centre in my house. When I tried to play one of them, it played very well on my DVD player but not in my PC (Windows Media Player or VLC Player). In PC they played only with Nero Showtime software. After some digging, I learned these are VCDs which have been written with 800MB of data – more data than normal 700MB CDs and many applications may have difficulty in reading them. I tried copying them using XCopy/Windows Explorer/Robocopy and all of them failed. I found a free software IMGBurn from the authors of DVD Decrypter that allows copying & recording of many types of CD/DVD images to Hard Disk & recordable media. I used Imgburn’s “Read” option to read the contents from the VCD and copy it to my hard-disk. By default it copies the file as *.bin, but you can rename it to *.mpg, after which Nero Showtime can play it. You can also create image of the disc into ISO files for backup purposes. Once copied I imported the files to Adobe Premiere Elements to convert them into WMV format which created the entire 1.6GB Movie to a 1.2GB WMV file (if you want to use the movie with iPod/iTunes use the export to MPEG4 option. Disclaimer: I have given the above suggestion only for legal usage of content that you have purchased and have a right in your country for making backups. I am not active into Twittering. Frankly, I didn’t get the idea of it for quite some time after its launch – even after I created a twitter account two years back. But over the last few months I am seeing more buzz around twitter than ever before. For me it is becoming to be an interesting tool as I seeing more use for twitter as a professional business tool. Marketing agencies using it to follow it buzz around their products, business houses using it for networking and so on. Today Microsoft’s PR agency Waggener Edstrom released a tool "twendz" a new tweet-analysis tool. Few months back there was this blog post on the CEOs around the world who are twittering. With all this around, I dusted my twitter account and have started to use it. Let us see if I do it with some discipline and at least the same frequency I do my blogs (of course tweets are supposed to be quick tiny updates unlike a blog). You can follow me on twitter here. In my Windows 7 x64 machine I thought I will give Google Chrome a try. After I clicked on download, I was surprised to see Google use Microsoft Clickonce technology to download the installer which in turn installed the browser. Clickonce is a cool technology that if used correctly can reduce lot of the pain consumers have today in installing/updating applications in Windows Platform. In my opinion unfortunately it is also a technology that has generated little interest inside Microsoft outside the team that wrote it. Till date I haven’t seen a single Microsoft application including the recent Windows Live Wave “3” products (which can benefit greatly from it) use Clickonce for their installation. I wonder why? Anyways, coming back to the topic. After I installed Google Chrome in Windows 7 x64, I was unable to browse any pages. Whatever URLs I entered there was no action. After some web searching I realized this is a known issue and you need to append a switch to make it work properly. Most of the sites gave the switch as an image but it turns out the correct one is –in-process-plugins (not the two dashes in the beginning and not one). You need to right-click on the Google Chrome Icon, in the Shortcut tab, in the targer text box add this switch to the right of the chrome.exe text. Something like below: C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe –in-process-plugins (in the above line, replace the [USERNAME] with the appropriate name of your default user folder (or) easiest is to leave whatever it is till chrome.exe and append –in-process-plugins at the end) After this switch, Google Chrome seems to run fine. I didn’t find any killer feature that will make me switch to Google Chrome from IE 8 and FF 3, but Chrome does seem to load the pages faster than the competition. Next to Google search or sometimes more often than that, a website I turn to most often is Wikipedia. It has helped in resolving many arguments that I have had with my wife on who a signer for a song was, which movie Rajini acted in the 1980s and in which state is Darjeeling and so on. A good example was after we watched Mani Ratnam’s “Guru” we were curious to find out how closely the movie portrayed the original story of Sri Dhirubhai Ambani, turning to Wikipedia told us more on Sri Ambani and his life than what we could have got even from Reliance website. Especially after I bought an Apple iPhone, browsing Wikipedia for an information has become a near addiction. For last month or so I have been seeing the “Donate to Wikipedia” banner in the site and today I decided to the good deed as the first transaction in the new year. I went ahead and donated $30. Rather than putting up with Advertisements, any day I will prefer to pay to get the content that I want – but I know I am part of a minority who feel this way. How about you, do you feel the same?. Post your opinion in the comments link above.
I am working on uploading to our publishing house web site several of the interviews we made in connection with my grandfather Sri Krishnaswamy Sarma’s centenary. Initially I went with uploading the videos to Google Videos, but several users complained of heavy buffering of videos even on broadband connection. YouTube and MSN Videos were not valid options as they limit the videos to 100MB Filesize & 10Minutes in length, but our videos were larger than that. After several trials I have settled with using Adobe Premiere Elements 7.0 to convert the DVD Video to Flash Video (FLV) format, upload it our web site and serve it with JWPlayer. With this arrangement the videos seem to play out smoothly. When importing the DVD to Premiere Elements I wanted to have the project format as the same one in which the video was made. When I searched I found no way to determine this automatically, eventually I found a way. It was to open the DVD with Nero ShowTime and select the option "Show Additional Info on OSD". This displays information about the current video that is played (like the one below):
Still this doesn’t say whether the DVD Video was in PAL or NTSC. It turns out that you can figure this from the above displayed information:
Virtualization (the ability to run multiple OS simultaneously) is gaining lot of traction nowadays. In the PC world this started initially with VMWare and Virtual PC (which Microsoft acquired from Connectix) for development and testing purposes soon gained popularity in the servers. In servers virtualization is used to consolidate servers and applications into fewer servers and also used for running legacy OS and applications.
Today the entry barrier is greatly removed for Virtualization software with many of them available free (as in free beer), following is a partial list of them.
Recently few more has joined the list, they are:
Even if you have a hard disk with hundreds of GBs, you will run out of space soon. At that time you want to see what is taking most of the space. Using Windows Explorer and going to each folder is a time consuming job. Several years back I got introduced to a tool called "Tree Size" that displays chart like bars against each folder so that you can easily see the usage. Today I found a free tool to do the same thing better – WinDirStat. Apart from bars, it displays a beautiful squarisish picture of the usage based on file types. Check it out. I came across this brilliant site called "Geonames.org" – a Geographical database for download free of charge containing over eight million geographical names. The site allows you to search for any city or place or postal code and the best part is all of this is also available through a number of webservices and a daily database export. This can be useful while you are developing a website and have to get input of a city or determine a place in a transaction. Check out these examples: GeoNames was founded by Marc Wick. Marc is a self-employed software engineer living in Switzerland. Thanks to Marc Wick & the other volunteers of the site. Both in my home and work I have powerful 8GB Quad-Core Desktops running Windows Vista x64 and I love the machines. I use extensively Windows Live Writer for writing my blog posts and Live Messenger for IM. Now they come as a single install package (Windows Live Suite) easy to install. When you try to install it on 64-bit Windows the installer fails. I then found this article on how to get the individual MSI files and install the programs from C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\WindowsLiveInstaller\MsiSources. |
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Copyright © 2012 Venkatarangan Blog - All Rights Reserved.
The content of this site are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway. |
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