Introduction to Windows Vista

As always CNET Tips and Tricks is doing a good job of educating and introducing users to new software. This time it offers a free course on the secrets of Vista. I peeked into the lessons offered and I vouch for it. A great and useful read.

Icons

Icon overviews gives an overview of icons and its creation.
An Ico file contains multiple size icons. By default, the Resource Editor opens the icon in default type. However, the icon may be used as other type in the application. That is why you cannot get the right icon sometimes. Use the following steps to edit an icon:

1. Double click the .ico file in Solution Explorer
2. Right click the blank area of the Editor
3. Select Current Icon Images Types -> 16 * 16, 16 colors
4. Edit the Icon and save
5. Repeat 2-4 steps untill all images are changed

Clustering based search engines

Clustering technology is increasingly used in search engines for better and organized search results. It all depends on how a person would want to view the results. If you are tired of the text-based searches that google or yahoo returns, you might want to try these engines:

Clusty

Mooter

KartOO

Webclust

On another note, Blogdigger.com is a RSS search engine, providing full-text search, as well as metadata search on RSS information. It has link search functionality, as well as searching by date, topic, title and other fields.

Macbook Freeware

Matthew Hirsch provided an extensive compilation of essentials of macbook software. Recently, Jake came up with a concise collection of free software for Mac users.

Alternative Windows applications

How nice would it be if someone gave you a list of applications that are not only free but also exert less load on your already famished Windows Operating System.
Matt compiled a list of applications that are "lighter or lighter weight" for Windows Operating System. It is a very concise list.

iTunes and Video

I had trouble playing some video files on iTunes. I followed tips from this website and disabled Direct3D video acceleration in QuickTime and restarted iTunes.
Now, it plays fine.

Uninstall Linux in a Windows XP– Linux Dual Boot Machine

I followed the following steps while uninstalling Ubuntu Linux on my laptop.

1. Use Windows XP installation CD to boot.
2. Go to recovery console and enter fixmbr
3. Restart the system. Now it should boot in Windows
4. Remove Linux partition by using the disk management utility of Windows XP.

Values of Environment Variables

To display value of environment variables in command prompt in windows use the following command

echo %variable_name%

For example to display the value of CLASSPATH variable type

echo %CLASSPATH%

Way to learn Algorithms

Excerpts from The Art of Computer Programming-Fundamental Algorithms by Knuth, Page No. 4

“...the reader should not expect to read an algorithm as if it were part of a novel; such an attempt would make it pretty difficult to understand what is going on. An algorithm must be seen to be believed, and the best way to learn what an algorithm is all about is to try it. The reader should always take pencil and paper and work through an example of each algorithm immediately upon encountering it in the text.”

Fuzzy Systems

If Approximating Nonlinear Areas, then Consider Fuzzy Systems
is an interesting read. According to the authors, based upon antecedent-consequent part of the rules, fuzzy systems can be broadly classified as follows:

• Linguistic fuzzy models
• Fuzzy relational models
• Takagi-Sugeno (TS) models

System Dynamics and Agent based toolkits

• Swarm
• Recursive Porous Agent Simulation Toolkit
• Zeus

According to this article, Swarm and Repast “deploy unsophisticated agents”, whereas Zeus “deploys sophisticated” agents. I agree with the author’s view point that software agents can model humans as well as other technological components. The author uses the term “dumb” agents to represent the technological components.

Parameterized Unit Testing

I am looking for a demonstration of Parameterized Unit Testing. This is an interesting topic. Parameterized Unit Testing with Symbolic Execution is an interesting read. But, I am looking for some free software or prototype to work on my code.

Google SketchUp

Today, I played with this 3D modeling software. I am totally falling in love with Google SketchUp. Both Windows XP and Mac OSX versions are available for download. I hope my knowledge in introductory mechanical engineering is helpful to create 3D models.

Insilico

Biology, never interested me, when I was in school.
The article, Combatting Disease with Computer-Aided Drug Design, by A S Nair interests me in Computer-Aided Drug Design.

He stresses that biology is migrating from natural science to information science.

Hamachi VPN

Hamachi seems to be a very good vpn lan setup system.

Microsoft to Macromedia

I had some pictures and wanted to send tiff files to a publisher. I created the pictures using Microsoft Office products (PowerPoint and Excel, predominantly). I had trouble converting those images to tiff files directly from PowerPoint or Excel. So, I followed the following steps:

1. Open Macromedia Fireworks
2. Copy the object from the Microsoft Office application
3. Create a new document in Macromedia Fireworks
4. Choose appropriate canvas color in the new document window
5. Now paste the object into Macromedia Fireworks
6. Change the image size or resolution by clicking on image size button
7. Open Export Wizard (File-> Export Wizard)
8. Choose appropriate purpose and finally the tiff file is created

Alternative Keyboards

I wish I had known that alternative keyboards existed when I was learning typewriting in my high school.

Today, I learned that QWERTY is not the only type of keyboards available. Dave Child compares DVORAK and QWERTY layouts.

Paste Special

Instead of using "Paste" option in Microsoft Office programs, try to explore "Paste Special" for pasting different kinds of objects, images, text.

Monthly Statistics

For the past one year so far, November month has had the highest number of visitors. This is proportional with the number of posts (November being the month with highest number of posts). But, the surprising fact is that the second highest is in March, where the number of posts is just only 3.

Wireless Cracking

I was looking for wireless tools that available for Windows platform.
Stumbverter
Cain Password Recovery Tool
I will evaluate these tools over the weekend and write about them.