Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

September 28, 2007

OpenDisc: Collection of open source software for download

Filed under: Computer Software,Interesting Sites,Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 8:15 PM

All regular visitors of this Blog know that I like Open Source Software (OSS) and whenever I get the chance I like to spread the word about them. Today I found out about OpenDisc which is a high qualiy collection of open source software (OSS) for the Microsoft Windows operating system (Most of them are available on Linux also) that can be used instead of propitiatory software.

You don’t have to download the entire CD if you just want a few particular programs, This section of their site lists all the programs they have on the CD and links to sites where you can download them directly.

Check it out. The less pirated software you use, the less the chance of getting your computer infected with a virus/trojan. If you are paying for legal software then this will save you a lot of money. Most propitiatory software on my system has been replaced with OSS alternatives so I can vouch for most of the software.

– Suramya

August 8, 2007

OpenProj: An alternative to Microsoft Project

Filed under: Computer Software,Knowledgebase,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:51 AM

Do you use MS Project to schedule your projects but dislike the costs? Or perhaps you would like to use it but are discouraged by the >$1,000 price tag. Well, the open source community has just gotten a great replacement to MS Project called OpenProj from Projity.

OpenProj is a free, open source project management solution that is a complete replacement of Microsoft Project, and other commercial project solutions. OpenProj is ideal for desktop project management and is available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows even opening existing Microsoft or Primavera files.

Check it out if you are interested in saving some money.

– Suramya

PS: I haven’t tried it because I don’t need a project management solution yet. But when I do I know what to look for.

June 24, 2007

Getting a 404 error in asp.net when the file exists on the server

Filed under: Computer Software,Computer Tips,Knowledgebase,Tech Related — Suramya @ 1:25 PM

Hit this issue recently on a web server that I was setting up on Windows 2003 server using IIS. Now everything was installed correctly and I had copied all the files to the server, then I created a virtual directory for my asp.net application and when I went to http://localhost/Test it would show me the directory listing (Yes I had enabled that so that I could debug). However when I clicked on the service.asmx file it would tell me that the file didn’t exist and I would get a 404 error. Now I knew that the file was there and I could see it in the directory listing but for some reason the IIS refused to show it.

The problem was caused because the server was running the 64 bit version of ASP.NET 2.0 while we were expecting the 32 bit version. Yes, it took me a couple of hours to figure that out. To fix it basically what you have to do is tell IIS that you want to use the 32 bit version for this particular Virtual Directory by changing the Script Map. The steps to change this are:

  • Open the IIS management console.
  • Expand the local computer node, expand Web Sites, and then expand Default Web Server.
  • Right-click the folder for the application, and then click Properties.
  • On the Directory tab, click Configuration.
  • The Application Configuration dialog box appears.
    On the Mappings tab, select an ASP.NET application extension, such as .asmx or .aspx.

    The Executable Path column of the dialog box lists the path to the ASP.NET ISAPI extension used by the application. By default, the ASP.NET ISAPI extension is installed in the following location:

    %system root%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\versionNumber. Browse to the appropriate directory and select the aspnet_isapi.dll file.

  • Click Ok and exit
  • Finally Stop and Start the webserver for the changes to take effect.

Now you should be able to access the files on the server without issues.

BTW, also make sure that the user IIS is running as also has permissions to read files and execute scripts in the directory where you have copied your files.

Hope fully you found this helpful.

Source for the steps to change the mapping: How to: Configure ASP.NET Applications for an ASP.NET Version

Thanks,
Suramya

June 15, 2007

Microsoft Vista WOW factor…

Filed under: Computer Related,Computer Software,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 1:30 PM

A lot of must have seen the advertisements on MS Vista where they talk about the wow factor. Well today I used it on a clients machine and it certainly made we go wow. Read on for the details…

I had a 90 MB file that I needed to extract on their system (224 MB uncompressed), so I copied the file to their system,right clicked and chose extract. Then came the wow factor. Vista told me that it out need ~13 hours to extract the file. Waited for a few mins and it didn’t go down. It really was going to take it 13 hours + change to extract it. Certainly made me go wow.

I didn’t take a screen shot of it at the time, but then as I was telling my cousin about it, I decided to blog it so needed to take a screen shot. When I took the following screen shot it was telling me that it would take 5 days to extract. I waited for a couple of mins in case it was just exaggerating like Windows XP and it would show the correct time in a few mins. But alas it kept showing me the same time.

So here goes:


MS Vista WOW
MS Vista WOW!!!

BTW, just as a comparison, my Windows XP system on a 1 GZ system with 512 MB of RAM takes ~2 mins to extract this file. Haven’t timed it on Linux yet. And this vista install is a running on a new machine thats pretty powerful. And i am not the only one who saw this. Another guy was complaining about it on one of the forums that I visited. His file was taking ~15 mins to extract on vista while on Linux it took about 11 secs to extract.

Ah well. I think I can do without the wow in my life. Pretty happy with Debian and XP for my systems. Don’t think I will be upgrading to Vista anytime soon.

– Suramya

May 31, 2007

reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books

Filed under: Computer Software,Interesting Sites,Tech Related — Suramya @ 9:50 AM

I am sure that you have heard of Captcha by now, if you haven’t then I guess you are not in the technology field. Captcha’s are those annoying images with text that you have to enter before registering for most forums and posting comments in some blogs.

Captcha’s work because they can’t be read by computers so a human is required. Here’s a website thats using this necessary evil [1] and putting it to a good use. Basically what it does is uses captcha’s to convert scanned books to text.

Why do we need to do that, Can’t we just use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to convert the books to text you may ask? Well its like this, OCR is not perfect and it has a lot of trouble with certain kinds of words e.g. clot might get read as dot etc. So what reCAPTCHA does is that it uses sending words that cannot be read by computers in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher and then saves the converted text. So with a lot of usage books that were previously inaccessible would slowly become accessible.

If I used captcha’s I would definitely use this as it is a good cause but I don’t use Captcha’s as they don’t work with text browsers. After I had to spend 20 mins trying to download a file that was protected with a captcha on a server to which I only had ssh access (I got around it by saving the image file to the computer, copying it to my local system, viewing it and then entering the code… ) I decided that I will not use it on any of my systems/sites.

Anyways, Check out reCAPTCHA and if you have to use Captcha’s use this one instead.

– Suramya

April 1, 2007

Installing Debian without burning CD’s

Filed under: Computer Software,Interesting Sites,Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 3:40 PM

Do you want to install Debian on a system thats running Windows but doesn’t have a working CD-ROM (Like my current laptop)? Earlier you had to try to install it using floppies and other methods that didn’t always work but now there’s an easier method:

You can now download a “Debian-Installer Loader” from their project site which is basically an exe file which you can run as a regular exe file. Once you run it, it will work for a few moments and then it’ll ask to reboot your PC, at which point you’ll be given the option to run Windows or Debian. Choose Debian and you will end up in a regular Debian installer interface.

Here are some Screenshots of how the installer looks like.

I haven’t tried it yet so I can’t personally verify how well it works but so far I have heard only good things about it. If you try it out let me know how it works out.

Thanks,
Suramya

March 1, 2007

Open Source Alternatives

Filed under: Computer Software,Interesting Sites,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:09 PM

Using open source doesn’t mean that you have to run Linux. Its just that Linux has sort of become the flagship of the Open Source Software (OSS) and whenever a person talks about OSS the general perception is that you need linux to enjoy/use OSS. But thankfully this is not true. Even on my Windows system most of the applications I use are open source. e.g. OpenOffice for word processing, Firefox for browsing, GIMP for image manipulation etc.

Now a major problem which newcomers have is that its difficult to figure out what Open Source alternatives are available for a given popular commercial software. The Open Source Alternative website attempts to solve this issue by giving a listing of the various OSS alternatives available for a given proprietary program.

Check it out, you might find some software that replaces the current program you use thus saving you a lot of money.

– Suramya

November 15, 2006

Open Source Freeware list

Filed under: Computer Software,Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 2:59 PM

Good list of Open Source Freeware. Most of these software work on both Windows and Linux desktop systems.

Check it out..

Thanks to nixcraft for the link.

– Suramya

November 13, 2006

Getting flash working in Firefox in Linux

Filed under: Computer Software,Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:32 PM

The past few hours I have been trying to get Flash to work on my Linux system using Firefox. Specifically I wanted to be able to listen to music at Pandora.com. I tried everything I could think of including installing different versions of the Flash plugin. I even installed gnash , which is a free version of the flash player but nothing seemed to work.

The funny part was when I tried accessing the swf file directly it would open it and I would see the player initializing but since it needed info from other sections of the page it wouldn’t play anything. Finally I thought that maybe one of my extension’s was causing problems so I tried shutting off Adblock and that fixed the issue.

So now I could start the Pandora music player, but I still didn’t get any sound. The fix for that issue was thankfully simple, all I had to do was:

  • Install alsa-oss by issuing the following command as root: apt-get install alsa-oss
  • Edit /etc/firefox/firefoxrc and add the following line to it:
    FIREFOX_DSP=”aoss”
  • Restart Firefox

After I did this I can now enjoy music from Pandora without any issues. Well, almost any issues. For some reason when I play music from Pandora Firefox memory usage goes upto 70%. I am running Firefox 2.0 on a Debian Unstable system. If any of you have suggestions on how to reduce the CPU usage please let me know.

Well this is all for now. Hope this helps someone else also.

– Suramya

July 28, 2006

Behaviour : Using CSS selectors to apply Javascript behaviours

Filed under: Computer Software,Interesting Sites,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:26 PM

This is really cool stuff. It lets you use AJAX (asynchronous javascript and xml) without cluttering your HTML code with javascript tags. So essentially you are separating javascript and html making it easier to maintain code. The best part is that the process looks really simple to use. I am thinking of trying it out for a couple of test pages and see how it works.

Check out Behaviour’s Extended Demo page to see an example of what all you can do with it.

The main problem I have with 100% javascript controlled pages is that if the visitor has JavaScript turned off all your flashy jazz is of no use to him. Plus with all the new hacks/exploits that are coming out that use javascript more and more people are browsing the net with it disabled… So no I won’t be converting suramya.com or my photogallery to something javascript driven or flash driven anytime in the near future.

Check it out: Behaviour : Using CSS selectors to apply Javascript behaviours

– Suramya

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