October 20, 2008
PamFax Plugin for Skype
This would be useful. Never used it but worth trying as it can use your Skype credit to pay per page
http://www.pamfax.biz/
Posted by rdivecha at 04:26 PM | Comments (0)
January 16, 2008
Adobe Brio (Connect / Breeze)
BRIO is the codename for the next version of Adobe Connect (Breeze) being developed using the revolutionary Adobe Flex framework. It is easy to signup for the beta and use the Beta hosted on Adobe's servers to conduct web-meetings with upto 3 people.
I tried the tools in isolation and it has all the features one would imagine and the look and feel are more enamouring than Centra or WebEx. The UI elements are Flash and the requirements are Flash Player 9. Not bad at all in terms of a solo flight. Now I will see if some folks might be interested in going for a short test drive.
(Image from RIAPedia
Posted by rdivecha at 09:42 AM | Comments (0)
August 28, 2007
Less Messy Computer: Vista, Ubuntu over XP?
So why will I upgrade from Windows XP (Tablet PC edition) to a dual boot of Ubuntu and Vista? Several reasons:
-- I have battled a Windows Update memory leak which sucked the juice out of my computing experience without respite. Every 2 or 3 minutes, wuauclt.exe will execute, eating up 99% of CPU. I had to kill the process and it would start up in a blink of an eye. Finally when I safe-mode started Windows and deleted the wuauclt.exe and wuausrv manually, svchost.exe came up as the hungry monkey. I went Bob Dylan:
"How many times does a man have to kill
wuauclt.exe before he can compute?"
Anyhoo, it seemed like an endless blackhole. Even worse, Vista refused to update on my TC4200 HP Tablet with Windows XP Tablet PC edition. I had to reformat the HDD before I could re-partition.
Would all of this be avoidable? Yes, if only HP would leave unallocated space on the HDD. The factory default is that the entire HDD is allocated to "C:\" which cannot be resized without destroying the current data. I pity the average users and "medium-power-users" like me.
Anyways, Vista is installed and Ubuntu is on its way. I have 4 beautiful partitions on my HDD, thanks to my sacrifice of wiping out my HDD (important stuff backed up on a Firewire HDD).
Here were some rude shocks:
-- Windows Movie Maker (Vista) refuses to work in Vista unless I get a fancy display card. Now that is not possible for everyone, so I guess for quick and homely video editing, I will have to run Windows Movie Maker (XP 2.6). I was actually surprised that Vista did not grumble about me installing a XP application.
-- HP's website does not list Vista Ultimate as an option for driver upgrades. Only Business and Enterprise (and Venti, hehe).
Ubuntu is installing on a 10G partition, just for fun. Hopefully it will not mess up my Vista installation and I will have a nice dual boot system. Lets wait and watch. I still have 1 Vista installation pending for this computer. Hope it works.
Now I formatted the entire 60G hard-disk on my Tablet and
Posted by rdivecha at 01:12 PM | Comments (0)
April 04, 2007
Widgets will change your life
If you like AJAX, but hate coding or simply don't have time, widgets can bring you great stuff to configure and place anywhere online.
I have been using them for the following applications: Slide-show of blog-posts from an RSS feed (widgetbox.com); blidgets (convert a blog into a nice snippet: e.g. This blog's blidget on ruthvickdivecha.com's sidebar)
The cool advantage is - once the widget is placed on your webpage or blog, you can infinitely tinker and tweak from the widget-building website, in my case widgetbox.com
And did I mention that it is free? Coooool, infinitely.
formlogix even allows you to analyze data submitted via its form using tables, charts etc. Also, the form creator is Wysiwyg: and it rocks!
Widgets have cut my development life-cycle time by 90% (without learning a new language, switching to a new platform or hiring a developer). They help me create reliable, robust and flexible web components which I can tweak to my heart's wishes. If you are a busy web professional: widgets will be the next best thing after sliced macaroni... ok, ok sliced bread.
Posted by rdivecha at 01:47 PM | Comments (0)
May 31, 2006
Quicktime Convertor
Took some time to find something to save spending $30 on Quicktime Pro
Another One (Update):
http://www.download.com/Front-End-Convert-Drop/3000-2170-10452586.html?part=winmp&subj=dl&tag=feed&jump=winmp
Posted by rdivecha at 03:16 AM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2006
Nice Film About Technology Realization - Must for CEOs
http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/overview/greatestasset.mspx
Posted by rdivecha at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)
February 15, 2006
New ConferenceXP Capabilities
University of Nebraska, Lincoln has developed new capabilities for ConferenceXP, the open source project sponsored by Microsoft. Open source and Microsoft in the same sentence? Yessir. I have seen eye brows go up at meetings at this statement from people who are far from supercilious.
(UNL)
Anyhoo, ConferenceXP is a free, opensource, conferencing product that works best in Multicast, but runs allright for clients on a Unicast network too, as we tested and established last month. ConferenceXP consists of the Client, Archive, Reflector and Venue services which are essential building blocks.
Researches are developing 'capabilities' within the open source framework. UNL has created two: Buddy Group and Question Answering. They are calling for interested parties to test these out. I can only feel that Conference XP is moving closer to Centra, which has capabilities like remote participants can 'raise hands' express approval/disapproval through icons & emoticons, have application sharing, whiteboard, pop quizzes etc.
Watch out for CXP! Become a .Net distributed application developer if you really want to make it big.
Read it all up at http://www.conferencexp.net
Posted by rdivecha at 02:57 PM | Comments (0)
February 13, 2006
Rodney McPhail of the Dept. of Biological Science, Purdue University has reviewed a product in his blog: Pod Podagogy.
The product is iPresent for Mac only. This manages creation of slideshows and managing them on the iPod for slideshow presentations. PPT, Keynote and PDFs are supported.
THIS IS NOT ENHANCED PODCASTS as my first impression was. But anyways, good to learn about a new professor, a new product and a new blog at the same time.
There are other cool software at http://www.zapptek.com/index.html for making your iPod into a PDA, document tex-to-speech etc.
Posted by rdivecha at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)
January 25, 2006
Storage Space: Holographic Storage at Turner Entertainment
Step aside Blue Rays and HD-DVDs... Holographic storage will blow us away:
From a Computerworld article:
“The holographic disk promises to retail for $100, and by 2010, it will have capacity of 1.6TB each. That’s pretty inexpensive,� said Ron Tarasoff, vice president of broadcast technology and engineering at Turner Entertainment. “Even this first version can store 300GB per disk, and it has 160MB/sec. data throughput rates. That’s burning. Then combine it with random access, and it’s the best of all worlds.�
more... (useful numbers)
Some useful numebers:
Turner Entertainment:200,000+ movies
25,000+ commercials
49,000+ promotional spots
Current Storage Solution:Digital tape libraries from Storage Technology Corp. as well as a caching system of disk arrays.
Current N/W data rate capacity:The company now has 96 1Gbit/sec. Ethernet connections
Future:it plans to upgrade those to 10Gbit/sec. streams in the near future
The Vendors
DHD called 'Tapestry' by InPhase Technologies, Inc. (Longmont Colorado)
Optware corp, Japan
Raving:
Tarasoff (Turner person) said InPhase’s hardware performed flawlessly, feeding a promotional spot to its networks about as quickly as its tape library system does. “Their production version promises to be much faster than tape, but we’ve not seen that yet,� Tarasoff said.
Posted by rdivecha at 02:34 PM | Comments (0)
Dell & Mediasite Shake Hands
Mediasite and a ton of other higherEd stuff is in this catalog:
Posted by rdivecha at 02:00 PM | Comments (0)
January 23, 2006
CES Show Review
Tom Bray was at CES and shared his experience. Especially, of interest to librarians would be the auto-page-turner scanner www.atiz.com
Posted by rdivecha at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)