Current Site IP
WebDamation is pleased to offer a new Firefox Add-on, Current Site IP, developed by our own team which should be a useful tool for any website developer.
This new Add-on gives you an advertising-free, direct way to get a website IP address you need when working on site development.
No doubt you, like ourselves, work with many different internal and external sites during development, and find it difficult to remember which website uses which server. We thought it would be convenient if there were a Add-on that would display the current IP address as you were working on a page.
AUDACITY
If your job needs audio editing and you are looking for the right tool that will not only suffice your needs but also suit your pocket, then your search ends right here, right now! Today I will discuss about Audacity, the digital audio editor. Well, if you are still not sure about if it fits your bill then let me tell you that it is free. Yes you have read it right it is free as it is an open source program.
This cross platform digital audio editor is available for Windows, Linux, MAC OS X and BSD. It has a clean interface that keeps the toolbar and work space uncluttered and makes it easy to use. It supports 32 bit floating point audio and has excellent features and built-in effects including noise removal, bass boost. It can import and export all file formats that are supported by libsndfile library like WAV, AIFF, MP3 etc. Though for MP3 files you need to download the LAME encoder. Audio files can be easily edited by its Cut, Copy, Paste functionality. Another interesting feature is that you can perform unlimited “Undo” operations while editing an audio file. Audacity also allows you to change an audio’s pitch without changing it’s speed. Likewise it’s ‘tempo’ functionality allows you to make adjustments to the speed of an audio track while keeping the pitch same and in turn helps you to synchronize the audio with the video. It has multi track mixing features with a large array of digital effects and plug-ins. With audacity you can also convert cassette tapes or records to digital tracks as it has the ability to automatically split one wav track or other supported type tracks into multiple tracks. Its latest release includes features that support direct sound device for Windows.
Piwik as your web analytics software!
I know, you would probably argue with me on Google Analytics being the best of them all, but what’s the harm in knowing about this new web analytics tool on the block? Piwik, as its website claims, is an open source alternative to Google Analytics.
Piwik is a PHP-MySql based program. In order to get started, you have to first download this software from their website and get it installed on your own web server. It just takes as less as 5 minutes to set things up and get going. At the end of the set up process, the software generates a javascript code. You just need to copy and paste this code onto the web pages that you would want to track. There is also a plugin that would automate this process for you! Simple?
Okay, you would still probably argue that Google analytics is the most popular amongst all and that Piwik is just no big deal. However, let me mention here that alternative open source web analytics solutions have their own advantages:
The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)
On the information superhighway or what is most commonly known as the “internet”, there is a superfluity of data that is constantly being produced or consumed. Information exchange seems to be the buzzword of most modern web services under development and your service should be able to “talk” to other services in order to produce desired results. Architecture is no more standalone with respect to the fact that a particular web service may require data that is produced by another web service and this idea may be extended across web services.
The moment you talk about information exchange across different web services, the first thought that probably strikes you is compatibility. For example, consider two web services, where one web service is running on a Microsoft IIS Server and the other on an Apache Tomcat Server with ASP.NET and JSP scripting respectively. How do these services communicate with each other?
Earlier, before the advent of the use of SOAP, such mechanisms were achieved by the XML-RPC, which was not a very safe and secure mode of communication. SOAP provides an optimal solution to this problem.
What is Microsoft Thinking? Some Thoughts on the Microsoft Commercials
Reader DjCarbon pinged me this morning with an interesting bit of news. Above you see the first two entries for the search “i’m a PC” in Google - Apple has essentially hijacked the dialogue about personal computers, forcing Microsoft to take a stand through their new commercials. The “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” commercials are odd and insidious but, as we see here, Apple has distanced itself from the profit-averse desktop PC market and created a new category. It’s not a PC you’re buying, fanboi, it’s not a beige box with a keyboard and a crappy LCD. No, you’ll never have to open the case, Mac-lover. You’ll never have to upgrade the operating system. When you walk into the Apple store you aren’t shopping for a PC - a personal computer, to reengage that acronym’s original meaning. You’re buying something much cooler, right?
Shockweb aggregator Fark.com feeds our link lust
A friend of mine asked me to write about Fark.com, the famously shocking news aggregator that has even more loyal followers now that they don't include porn links. I usually avoid the site, not because of the shock value, but because I don't want to burn up an hour learning about the so-called Obama race war, violent crime rates in Detroit, and the abysmal US economy. And those are the more serious links. Usually, headlines are more like "Ike survivors may have to wait weeks for baths. France shrugs" which is just cheeky enough to get you to click on it, even though the actual report has nothing to do with France (a pet topic for the site owner). It's what I call a force-pull headline, one that you just can't help clicking on.
Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld Microsoft Commercials
A lot of people seem to be confused about the commercials. I see a lot of blog posts complaining about them, but this is exactly what Microsoft wants. They want people to start talking about Microsoft again.
For the longest time there was no Public Relations effort from Microsoft. Out of Sight, Out of Mind. Now ...
