Website, Tool and Book Reviews

Weblogs.com.pk Goes Live

Rai Umair — Sat, 20 Mar 2004 22:39:00 GMT

Now all the Pakistani Blogs have a place the can call home!

Based on the popular .NET .Text blogging tool. It’s a Free and easy way to blog.

http://weblogs.com.pk

An Introduction to WebLogs

A Weblog site contains pages comprises of the short posts submitted by the weblog authors. The posts can be of variety of types, giving the author feel of journal or a cyber diary.

The weblog space provides an author a platform to publish their words, thoughts and ideas of mind. The author can publish a technical material so others may get a benefit or something that he or she wants to show to the rest of the world.

There can be anonymous visitors to the weblog as well as subscribers. XML gives the platform and RSS is the tech word for this. People subscribe to a weblog using XML Feed/Syndicate, also called RSS feed. There are number of RSS harvesters, ranging from plug-in for Email clients (Outlook) to separate programs.

Weblog in simple is a next generation publishing and communication platform, using which the authors can feed the web his thoughts and can easily communicate with the subscribers and visitors that can be his teammates, department colleagues, company or class fellows and family members.

http://weblogs.com.pk is the ideal place for the authors and visitors whom mother land is Pakistan. This site gives you a single platform to find weblog mates and a launching pad to show the world the potential we have!

Visit How Do I Get Started page, to signup for “http://weblogs.com.pk/YourOwnWebLog “.

Happy Blogging, See you there... :)

3 .NET Goodies from Microsoft

Rai Umair — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 07:28:00 GMT

Free .NET Skills Assessment:
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/assessment/default.asp

Free .NET online training & labs:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/using/training/seminarlabs/default.aspx

Free MEA Developer Support Center Support till April 30, 2004:
http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/developers/meadsc/form.asp

3 cool resources worth checking out for sure...

Rai Umair — Mon, 15 Mar 2004 08:06:00 GMT

1. Design and Architecture get a boost in .NET, the gang of four design patterns book source code now available in C#, I even have a PDF copy of a book on design patterns in C#, but i guess the original one is the best: http://www.dofactory.com/Patterns/Patterns.aspx

2. The second resource, is some thing that I wish i get my hands on but I guess have to wait a long time before I do that, the worlds meanest number crunching desktop PC's: http://www.go-l.com/desktops/machl38/features/index.htm

3. Lastly the .NET road map in black and white from Microsoft is out last week after a revision, man it's so cool and efficient to know a year in advance of Microsoft's great plans, now thats some thing to cheer about :-):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/productinfo/roadmap.aspx

(via Ramesh)

Microsoft comes out with Prayer (Salat) Times Plug-In for Outlook

Rai Umair — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 09:38:00 GMT

Prayer Times 2003 is still in beta, it comes as a plug-in and integrates Islamic prayer times in Microsoft Outlook 2003.

Prayer Times is supposed to calculates the times according to your geographical location and the Mathab you are following and generate appointments for the five main prayers as well as for Friday prayer in your personal Outlook calendar along with your other daily appointments.

Prayer Time Program (6.70 MB) is FREE for download at:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/5/9/f593ae1f-884b-43c5-a2b4-f24916a9c220/PrayerTimes2003.exe

Mind Maps for Better Understanding

Rai Umair — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 09:25:00 GMT

Have you ever wanted that all information in your head should be available on large scale posters in a structured hierarchical form? Just the sorts of hierarchy as you have in the mind.

I have always wanted all the information like this for my better understanding and recall and I found the solution at last. Meet the Mind Maps!

Mind Maps are not formally mnemonics. They do, however, help you to lay out the structure of a topic as a clear 'shape' that you can remember easily. By seeing this shape in your mind, you can prompt yourself to remember the information coded within it.

I stumbled over this excellent software called the ’Personal Brain’ from the guys at thebrain.com which is presently helping me understand the contents of my brain.

You can download It for FREE from:
http://www.thebrain.com/registration/downloadPB.asp

The 18.54043% - Geek

Rai Umair — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 20:55:00 GMT

I just took the useless, funny and exhausting geek test at http://www.innergeek.us/main.html and was scored 18.54043% - Geek!

The test proves that I don't belong here at GeekWithBlogs.net, but hey who cares... if I am real geek or not, in my opinion the damn test is all screwed up. Hehe.

You want to take it too? visit: http://www.innergeek.us/main.html

Meet the other Morpheus

Rai Umair — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 20:34:00 GMT

You are Morpheus, from "The Matrix." You
have strong faith in yourself and those around
you. A true leader, you are relentless in your
persuit.

What Matrix Persona Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla. (via Dev Notes)

ASCII Rai

Rai Umair — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 19:45:00 GMT



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This is the me in ASCII (same image as on the right)... via text-image.com!

Image Play

Rai Umair — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 19:36:00 GMT

Have your ever seen faces, pics in ASCII collection of characters, well you can convert your online for FREE at text-image.com and what’s more you can also use the cool HTML mode too.

I understand the HTML mode only and I once created a .NET App in C#. The trick is to break the Image (Graphic Object) into all its pixels and read in the color value for the individual pixels (Picture Element) saving them in another file with a mapping of the their position in the image. I have lost the code for it but when I feel like programming for fun again I will paste it here.

You can use the GDI+ classes for this… I remember the ‘Get Pixel’ function. If any of you knows how to create in the ASCII version please share it with me, I find it very curious.

Another very interesting image based online utility I stumbled upon is the Rasterbator at http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/wizard.gas ...

As the creators say on their site and I quote “The rasterbator is a web service which creates huge rasterized pictures out of relatively small image files. The pictures can be assembled into extremely cool looking posters!”.

Another thing I noticed is that they return the Image as a PDF file, using .Text# an C# based open source project running at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/itextsharp/ (source forge).

What's My IP Address?

Rai Umair — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 19:16:00 GMT

Ever ask someone for their IP address, and they say "I don't know."? Don't want to walk them through "ipconfig"? Or are they behind a NAT, and they insist it's 192.168.0.2?

Send them to http://www.ipaddressworld.com/ or http://www.whatismyip.com/ instead.

(Via the .NET Guy)