for those of you who want to increase ur wireless range, heres a good option

for the past couple of days, i would loose connection to my wireless connection, ceteris paribus.. i would get it back but only after 15-20 min… right when ur in the middle of doing something, ur connection looses.. really frustrating.. but the funny part was that the dumb card wont admit to that fact… the all loving windows vanilla colored pop up would just say “limited connectivity”,falsely giving some hope… i peered a lil more and found out the error message was “IP could not be renewed”.

my IP was obtained from the DHCP service running on my router… there was no straight forward reason for that error message.. so i thought that if i would change all the IP on the network to a static one, my prob wud be solved (besides i could save some precious bandwidth by avoiding the DHCP packets) .. i was right.. only partially though… heres what i did..

1. i disabled the DHCP on the router

2. i set the IP address of all the comps accessing the network to a static one.. all the above mentioned steps should of solved the prob but without the next u wudnt be able to access the web..

3. i also set the gateway and the DNS address of all the comps to the IP of the router.. this took me a while to figure out. if this isnt set, you would be able to access the network but not the web… this took a long time to figure out…

for now everthing is looking good..

go to google.com and search for ‘elgoog’ (which is google in reverse) and hit the ‘i’m feeling lucky’ button.. u’ll get a mirrored version of the result page… interesting!

im an avid believer in the greatness of the cut, copy, paste commands .. without it, developers would of been frustrated and u prolly wudnt of seen the great s/ws of today.. without it , creating a 5 or  6 page school/college essay/assignment in under 10 min , irrespective of the topic, wud of been near impossible!! i think the creater of the cut, copy, paste commands should be given “THE 19/20th CENTURY INEVITABLE” award… hee he..

the following shortcuts are actually for right hand mouse users..

ctrl+V – Paste

ctrl+C – Copy

ctrl+X – Cut

but for left hand users (not a rule of thumb, but) the shortcuts are..

shift+insert – Paste

ctrl+insert – Copy

shift+del – Cut

i always knew that adobe photoshop was powerful but never tried to learn the sophisticated things about it. i was happy with the tools in the toolbox. lately i came to the realization that filters are something that had immense potential to create some awesome graphics. today was the first time i messed around with filters. the mad graphics with swirls,liquify and electric effects u c on websites are made with photoshop filters. i came across this article on the web and tried something of my own.

i used the gradient, wave filter and played with hue/saturation settings. heres my creation

there are days when suddenly a random thought, somewhere from out of the yonder blues pop up… today was such a day.. the thought was about s/w  licenses… (i know, pretty wierd!!) so to satisfy my freakish inquisitiveness i did a lil research on licenses.. there are licenses for commercial and non-commercial products. the commercial ones generally are :

1. Named User License

A named user license allows the software to be used by one user, named when you purchase the software. Named user licenses may be installed on multiple computers but they may only be accessed by the named user, they may not be shared in any way. A named user license may not be used concurrently on different computers.

2. Concurrent User License

A concurrent user license allows the software to be used by more than one user at the same site. The number of simultaneous users to the number of licenses purchased have a limit. Eg: 5 concurrent user licenses permit 5 users to access the software at the same time. A 6th user must wait until one of the current users exits the software. A concurrent user license is sometimes called a floating or shared license.

3. Site License

A site license permits an unlimited number of copies of the software to be installed within one specified site in an organization. An unlimited number of users may access the software simultaneously within the specified site. A site is defined as all of the purchasing organization’s locations within a specific radius in miles/km.

4. OEM License

An OEM license allows third-party software developers to bundle the purchased product with their non-competitive product.

5. Global License

Softwares that have a global license can be used at any number fo sites by any number of people.the non-commercial ones vary to a wide degree.. heres a link for those of u who want to know…

SDLC = Sofware Development LifeCycle.. today i started messing around with a testing a tool called “TestComplete” from automatedQA. TestComplete is an automated test manager, with project level support for the full range of internal and UI testing. Seems complicated. I guess i’ll get a grip on it in a couple more days. Using this tool you can create a test bed consisting of essential functionalities that should work and then run a script thatll execute all the functionalities and give the results. So what does that got to do with SDLC? Well, with this new project, ive now been associated with all the stages of a standard SDLC. Analysis -> Designing-> Coding -> Testing -> Deployment. Yipee!!

DLL stands for Dynamically Linked Libraries and does exactly what it stands for.. hee he.. ok ok .. heres a small background…

ive heard a lot about DLLs when i was in college… in fact ive been hearing about DLLs for the past 5 years!! i kinda figured that it was something important and indeed it was.. i’ve even mentioned about it in my exam papers ( coz it sounded cool!!) ..but never knew what it really was until a a week ago.. i had to write a setup program that involved writing DLLs …

from what ive grasped and dealt with, DLL can be of two kinds..

1. A resource only DLL: eg: can contain mp3s, exe, gifs, etc..
2. A function library DLL: that is, it consists of functions or procedures

it is loaded into memory only when it is required.. that is dynamically loaded and linked

advantages of DLL…

1. a program written in any langauge like C#, Delphi, VB, etc can access the functions or resources in the DLL by following late/early binding conventions. ( the different calling conventions are stdcall, cdecl, register, pascal) The DLL is language oblivious. In other words, its language stupid!!

2. when working with setup programs like INNO, u have a limited number of classes to work with. u cant access win32 apis either.. so ur really restricted… but by creating a dll using Delphi or C#, ur functionality extends to the limits of the VCL (Visual Class Library of Delphi) or .NET classes…

3. modularity in programming.. u can group similar functions into the same dll..

4. the program that uses DLL has a lesser memory footprint.. it can load and unload DLLs into the memory as and when it requires….

theres a issue popularly called as “DLL Hell” which i havent really had to contend with. its basically got to do with the problems ull have to deal with if theres no dll versioning.. .net has got around it by using assemblies.. more on those later..

in summary, the DLL working is awesome.. in fact it is fundamental to the working of the windows OS.. kernel32.dll, user32.dll, comctl32.dll, gdi32.dll.. does those strike a chord?? well, if not, its the core of the windows OS.. any program running on ur system uses the functions and procedures in these dll at the lowest layer…

for a better overview on it go here…
heres a very simple Delphi DLL writing tutorial…

reached US in Jan.. started working in March.. the skills that got me a job? some C#, wee lil SQl with MS Access (shameful even to mention!!) as also lil HTML.. and 4 months after work?? delphi, remote objects, dll programming, database migration and conversion, XML and XSLT 2.0, setup programming with INNO, ISTOOLS and SCRIPTMAKER.. heavy heavy.. (a lil abt each in the subsequent posts) still cant believe i endured through it all.. and my resume? added another page to it.. congrats to me!! (*blushing*)

thanks to the smarty pans at my work place, i’ve been able to cope with the steep learning curve.. and did i like it? boy, did i find it thrilling and so satisfying to overcome the higher standards set.. i hear theres more on the way.. asp.net and 3 tier development… sounds exciting..

i had two job offers to choose from when i was about to start… i agreed to join at adaptmedia ( the guys who put up digital signs on top of taxis in nyc, boston and some other cities.. its a multi million $$ mostly jewish company.. surprisingly there was only one programmer there.. java environment) but then i got an offer from Visual Data ( more about the company in the next post) . i weighed both the offers out and Visual Data weighed out more, but not by a tonne. it was hard calling up the first guys to cancel my first ever agreement!! (the receptionist there was soo nice).. but thank God i did.. Visual Data had more learning opportunities… i think the learning curve at adaptmedia would of been just a 10 degree line and not much more..

the decisive question was… 10 degree line or a steep curve?? i prefered the curve and choose Visual Data..