FireFox extensions - my list

I really hate to bloat my firefox with extensions, here is my list of extensions that accumulated overtime.

All-in-One Sidebar
Adblock Plus
Adblock Filterset.G Updater
Screen grab!
DownThemAll
FireFTP
FlashGot
Javascript debugger
Netcraft Anti-phishing toolbar
and of course Google toolbar

How much time should it take to watch a tamil movie?

< 60 secs !

Yes that's all it took today for movie Rendu, what do they think when they make tamil movies, this will only stop if audience have a FF option in theater's. Whatever, here is a link to a site which holds few HQ movies, one of different ways to catch hold of divx in net.

BTW, If you have collection of divx movies, checkout Phillips DVP3040, i got one, this Thanksgiving day for $30 and it plays allmost all my formats i have, one thing to note though it doesn't have DTS decoder, but i think it is better that way and get a good HTS receiver.

Update 12/17 :- Looking for tamilgrounds coupon, one of my colleague shared the info about this v.good paysite YAMS, where you can download DVD rips of tamil / hindi / telugu movies @ $11/month, you will look no further.

Shopping for Holidays: Why not checkout google ?

Shopping for this holiday season, do check if you can get something by using the google checkout. Technically it's like old wine in old bottle with new cork. I'm sure this is not going to wipe out Amazon, i go to Amazon 'coz of low price and high quality shipping service, many-a-times free.

Hype or Not, you get $10 to $20 Orders with Google Checkout now, in many participating merchants. If you buy something closely above the set limit, that's some discount, on top of your other discounts and coupons, why waste that, i did that few days ago.

Ok now the scary part, if you had clicked that "Remember me" checkbox when you login for convenience of using any other google feature, say gmail, i see many do that; your payment information is thrown open to anyone using that computer, 'coz you just clicked on that innocent looking checkbox. WTH! With that always signed-on feature, it simply takes me to screen where i just need to click one button to buy, what was google thinking ??? I expected them to authenticate me again before getting into this final order page.

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. – Albert Einstein

Happy Thanks giving.

ASP.NET 2.0 Caching - New features

Here is a article that gives you fly-by of new caching features added in asp.net 2.0

J.P. Vaswani

Like to hear some உபதேசம், here is one which has all J.P. Vaswani's speeches. I got to know about him from my wife, and i should say anyone may like his speeches, no matter whether they try to practice them or not. Ok lets take it like this, how often we get a chance to listen to some wise words / thoughts from an elderly person amidst this fast paced life-style and isolated nuclear family system. The talk is certainly won't be one of those boring seminars; with all those short funny stories sprinkled all along the speech, anyone should enjoy the talks.

Am I Secure - Really ?

One of the colleague was talking to me on security of home computer he has, this becomes a more important topic with all those spy wares, trojans , bots and rootkits out there. Hmm, going back to the discussion with him, i found I'm bit more secure than his setup, but I'd be foolish to think i kept all doors locked, this brings up question, Am I Secure - Really ???

Here is my setup in what i have,

Firewall. No questions, everyone needs it, not that dumb WinXP firewall (looks like finally MSFT ships Vista with decent firewall features). I finally threw out the popular but most resource hogging security suite to a simple firewall, which provides blocking any incoming connection and outgoing connection (all except configured apps) . Firewall also includes Network and Host based Intrusion prevention system.

Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware. In future should be a standard OS feature, still this is more of a after-the-fact solution with signature based detection. Check out a interesting rootkit demo at TechNet Webcast.

Anti-Phishing. This I'm dead serious about, if anti virus takes me down, i may have to
spend some hours cleaning up or re-installing, But i don't want to lose out my bank acct information and i know I'm really screwed by that time. On top of Firefox 2.0 and google toolbar anti-phishing features, i run Netcraft to make sure the bank site I'm accessing is not hosted from Russia or Taiwan. I use a PG open source app to store my sensitive and ultra complex online credentials, just to throw another layer on top.
based
Network Security. Home wireless network uses WPA encryption and locked by MAC address. If you like to learn some tips on this, here is a link.

Few years back learnt how easy to write a keylogger, which later transformed to trojan with payload from a file share, though strictly for fun and knowledge, that still keeps me little bit cynical and hence backup-ed data last week. :-)

Inayithil Tamizh

"தமிழின் மேன்மை அதன் தொன்மையில் இல்லை - தொடர்ச்சியில் உள்ளது"
- long pending blog placeholder on THE oldest living language.

read books
to blog
to search 1 2 3
listen online radio's,
download tamil songs in mp3, more, more, more, more, ....
daily calendar
காற்றிநிலே வரும் கீதம்... <download>

ASP.NET Caching - Trick or Treat ?

It's a corporate internet web site which pulls content from database, idea is dynamic content but of course this doesn't change often. I was called to help with designing(!) some page so i used opportunity to learn about web performance, let me blog on what i found some other time.

As usual next thing is to cache page output, but there is a glitch (it is!), the web application also includes content mgmt logic as part of it and hence pages will be called with different querystring param for page previews.

<%@OutputCache Duration="60" VaryByParam="*" %> is ruled out for two reasons 1 it is going to cache preview page output and 2 cache duration is dynamic. So i had to cache the page output based on querystring and in the code behind

Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
If IsPostBack = False Then
If Request.QueryString("noCache") Is Nothing Then
lblTime1.Text = "page cached on " & DateTime.Now.ToString()
Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(60)) 'The duration will be dynamic
Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.Server)
Else
lblTime1.Text = "page NOT cached " & DateTime.Now.ToString()
End If
End If
End Sub

If page loads with no querystring (normal user), it will be cached for whatever duration of time it needs to. If page loads from content mgmt logic (which will now include querystring noCache) it won't be cached. When i tested with following querystring, looked like it is working as expected

http://localhost/cacheTest/tst.aspx --page was cached for 60 minutes
http://localhost/cacheTest/tst.aspx?noCache=1&param1=abc --page is NOT cached

Struck with a question what will happen in following case

http://localhost/cacheTest/tst.aspx?param1=abc

Expectation is, it will be cached for 60 mins, since it didn't have noCache query string param. May be it will maintain a cached version for this combination of querstrings. But actually what turned out is different, it was spitting out message "page cached on " as it should, but subsequent page loads fetched me current time instead of first cached time, no idea how this is happening. Need to find out a way to see if this is caching multiple versions every time i load this page.

Happy Halloween.

$0 PDA

I was listening to Soma's (MSFT) interview in Merina today, he quoted "... thing that is common to any human is *Time* ... everyone has only 24 hrs a day ...", if you think about it a bit, we can appreciate importance of time management, so here is my blog on poor man's personal organizer, IMHO pen on paper is simple and best.

With so many hifi PDA devices in the market, here is one which costs you nothing. You don't have to carry a charger, it won't annoy you with reminder chimes and best of all you don't have to write a fat check to get one. Before you decide to click the link, sit back and question yourself why you need a PDA, if you think of just a personal organizer, check these out PocketMod & D.I.Y Planner.

Ajax WTH!

For last couple of weeks i got quite a lot queries from team on Ajax. Its more of a standard response from me "use it, if it makes sense!".

IMHO one has to weigh the Ajax features against the coding complexity. Enter enterprise apps scenario, you got lot of additional things to consider, most importantly code maintainability and alternate technology options. Comparing enterprise apps against google map, google spreadsheet, flickr is like comparing apples and oranges. I'd seriously consider SmartClient if we really needed a windows feel in web.

Bottom line, page postback is not always evil !