Google

2005-09-21

Opera Freed

It's been a long time since I tried Opera. It was one of the first to come up with one of my favorite features of a browser: tabs! Of course, several browsers use it now and personally I like to use Firefox. However, when I heard that Opera decided to finally go free with version 8.5, I downloaded it and started testing.

I really liked what I saw. It's fast as promised and feature rich. I like the ability to cascade web pages I'm browsing. It proves useful when checking things in two different sites. One thing that bothered me is that, it does not seem to work properly with blogger.com. Images do not show up properly and some of the menus disappear (so I'm using Firefox to type this message), speaking of which, Firefox 1.07 has been released today. I hoped they ironed out these nasty bugs I was seeing in the beta version.

2005-09-15

Last (Minute) Action Hero

Oh well, no need to hide, I was never a big fan of eBay's auctions. If I want to buy something, I simply can NOT wait. BUT, now there seems to be a solution: Last-minute auction web site. Yeah, it has lost of junk too but as name implies, it tells you about the auctions that has a minute to end. Get your bids ready, fire away!!!

Originally reported by LifeHacker. Go ahead and read'em!

Web Based Instant Messaging


I just read in LifeHacker that a company called Meebo has come up with a Web Based IM that you can use to sign on to your yahoo, msn, icq and aol messenger.

ICQ already has a web based IM for quite a while. Although, it's a good idea to combine them, I'm sure many companies will block them in no time :(

Google BlogSearch

Finally! Google has now joined the ranks of daypop, Feedster, IceRocket and Technorati in searching the blogs. Yes, it's still beta and can be accessed either at http://blogsearch.google.com or at http://www.google.com/blogsearch. It does a very good job, I must add.

You can sort by date or relevance (default) and it will also give you the 'related' blogs too. Nice!

2005-09-11

vbscript saves the day

I had some mp3 tracks of an audiobook in different folders but not in succession
Disk 1 - > 01.Track.mp3, 02.Track.mp3
Disk 2 - > 01.Track.mp3, 02.Track.mp3, 03.Trackmp3
Disk 3 - > 01.Track.mp3, 02.Track.mp3

I wanted to put them all into the same directory but to do this I had to rename them so that end result would be like

Disk 1 - 01.Track.mp3, 02.Track.mp3
Disk 2 - 03.Track.mp3, 04.Track.mp3, 05.Track.mp3
Disk 3 - 06.Track.mp3, 07.Track.mp3

I googled for file-renamers but did not see one that was fit for this purpose so, I wrote a simple vbscript:

set oFSO=CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
set oFolder=oFSO.GetFolder(".")

Dim sUsage
sUsage = "Usage: cscript rename.vbs NumberToAdd"

If ((Wscript.Arguments.Count = 0) or (Not IsNumeric(iAdd))) Then
Wscript.Echo (sUsage)
Wscript.Quit
End If

Dim iAdd: iAdd = CInt(Wscript.Arguments(0))

For Each oFile in oFolder.Files
sFile=oFile.name
sFirstTwo=Left(sFile,2)
sRest=Mid(sFile,3)
If IsNumeric(sFirstTwo) Then
sFirstTwo = sFirstTwo + iAdd
sNewName = sFirstTwo & sRest
Wscript.Echo (sFile & "-->" & sNewName)
oFile.Move (sNewName)
End If
Next

Results:
C:\Disk 9>cscript rename.vbs 159
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.6
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1996-2001. All rights reserved.

01. Track 1.mp3-->160. Track 1.mp3
02. Track 2.mp3-->161. Track 2.mp3
03. Track 3.mp3-->162. Track 3.mp3
04. Track 4.mp3-->163. Track 4.mp3
05. Track 5.mp3-->164. Track 5.mp3
06. Track 6.mp3-->165. Track 6.mp3
07. Track 7.mp3-->166. Track 7.mp3
08. Track 8.mp3-->167. Track 8.mp3
09. Track 9.mp3-->168. Track 9.mp3
10. Track 10.mp3-->169. Track 10.mp3
11. Track 11.mp3-->170. Track 11.mp3
12. Track 12.mp3-->171. Track 12.mp3
13. Track 13.mp3-->172. Track 13.mp3
14. Track 14.mp3-->173. Track 14.mp3
15. Track 15.mp3-->174. Track 15.mp3
16. Track 16.mp3-->175. Track 16.mp3
17. Track 17.mp3-->176. Track 17.mp3
18. Track 18.mp3-->177. Track 18.mp3
19. Track 19.mp3-->178. Track 19.mp3
20. Track 20.mp3-->179. Track 20.mp3
21. Track 21.mp3-->180. Track 21.mp3
22. Track 22.mp3-->181. Track 22.mp3
23. Track 23.mp3-->182. Track 23.mp3
24. Track 24.mp3-->183. Track 24.mp3
25. Track 25.mp3-->184. Track 25.mp3

Overly simplistic, but did the trick :) Copy the code sniplet into the directory and give it a name eg. rename.vbs to run it.

Oh, BTW, I would strongly suggest that you take a look at a free utility named Ant Renamer by Antoine Potten who also wrote another fantastic free application called Ant Movie Catalog

[UPDATE]
I actually talked to Antoine today and told him the story. He mentioned that I could have in fact used 'Enumaration function' in the Ant Renamer to add sequential numbers in front of the filenames and then delete the old numbers using "Characters Deletion" function. Nice!

Mexico City Pictures From Above

In his W2KNews e-mail, Stu has mentioned a link to a site that has Mexico City pictures taken by a guy named Oscar Ruiz.

Oscar took these large number of impressive pictures while he was working as a helicopter pilot.

Definetely worth checking out!

Coming from a Civil Engineering background, I especially liked the creatively shaped apartment buildings like the ones on the left.

2005-09-05

Simply Fired | If You Don't Laugh, You'll Cry

I've read about someone named James Garrison being fired 'because he ate two slices of left over pizza' in Micro Persuasion Blog. He was the winner of an offbeat Internet contest that solicited stories about outrageous firings.



Of course, everything is not black or white and several people have interesting comments about the firing in the simplyfired.com forums...Funny!

Live Blog from New Orleans

I've seen the link about this blog in W2K News where Stu said the following:

directNIC is a domain name registrar in New Orleans that has employees there trying to keep the servers up. One of their employees' blog is extremely interesting. It's a first hand report on what is going on, pretty much a posting every hour...

There was also a link to 'An extensive collection of Photo's of Katrina devastation''

2005-09-04

When a Wall isn't a Wall

When a wall isn't really a wall. The French call it "trompe d'oeil".

You can search for this term on Google and get some good links too, it's an art form many centuries old.

2005-09-01

Useful Active Directory Links

Below is a collection of links from a friend at work about Active Directory...

This is a great readme and is holding up well despite its age:
Note: Firfox does not wrap the line so I introduced hard breaks
copy them to the same line:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=6&q=
http://users.skynet.be/alain.lissoir/hp/Part% 25201%2520-%2520Understanding%2520Microsoft %2520WSH%2520and%2520ADSI%2520in%2520
Windows%25202000.pdf&e=912


http://dev.coadmin.dk/Resources/ADSI%20SDK%205%20HTML/default.htm

The best is yet to come: ADSI primer parts 1-12:
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=4732
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=4818
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=4991
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=5126
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=5281
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=5456
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=5629
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=5878
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=6128
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=6188
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=7456
http://emea.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=7666
Understanding ADO Search Filters in LDAP Queries

Slightly off topic: You may also want to check out http://www.openldap.org and http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Architecture .

Combine this with http://Openfiler.org, http://samba.org, http://www.xorp.org, http://www.postgres.org, http://www.mysql.org and http://www.opennms.org/wiki/, We should all be well-rounded network experts.

I know we are still a big MS shop but a lot of this stuff is platform neutral (to a degree) and are freely available.

For those who want to mess with RHEL there are 2 very good Redhat Clones out there: http://www.centos.org and https://www.scientificlinux.org/ .

You might as well skip Fedora. For desktops, I like Centos, Memphis and Knoppix.