Boxbe | GoodBye Email Overload!!!

This goes back to my other post a li'l while ago that covered some cool, must-use WEB2.0 sites if you want to really organize your life on the internet, be it social n/w, coding, searching, bookmarks or for that matter every damn thing you hook on to that wi-fi for (and I didn't say that you're floating on your neighbor's air-waves, got-ya!)

How many of us are now over those over-zealous spam-filters that Gmail!, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL! boast of so much? I'd say we rather take it for granted that spam is a part of life if you want to do email and buddy we can't help but sometimes go and sift thru those unwanted emails to actually see some of the important ones being junked too!!!

Well, this is Internet age; the number of innovators and thinkers grow much faster than the Moore's law would have predicted for the growth in number of transmitters on those Intel nano-scale chips...help isn't far away. Think of ways to make life better and you bet there will be someone who's gone a step further and actually done it and published it on internet for free!

Welcome to Boxbe! I won't say much here... would rather let the embedded video demo it to you.

What is Boxbe? from Randy Stewart on Vimeo.

Some highlights:
1) filters and prioritizes our email to reduce email overload.
2) Gives you an organized inbox, making it faster and easier for us to view, answer and send email.
3) It's free and it integrates directly with Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Google Apps and AOL Mail.
If you don't use these, Boxbe offers a public forwarding address.

So, try this one out and say goodbye to multiple email logins and track and organize important conversations using this service.

LLVM | compile, JIT, do run-time optimizations on C/C++ and generate byte-code

Woah!!! This is cool.

We've all known the concept of VM's and the JVM that is being virtually used in every intelligent machine, even the thinnest of a computing client (cell-phones, e-gadgets etc.)

But, we also know that no-matter how much the JVM has evolved thus far... it's a virtual machine and can still not give you the performance of the real machine as close as possible (the in-famous performance debate: C/C++ compiled code Vs. Java byte-code)

Well, here comes the LLVM... Low Level Virtual Machine, a bit more closer to the platform and one that has benefits like:
1) effective optimization at compile time, link-time (particularly interprocedural), run-time and offline transformations (i.e., after software is installed)
2) sophisticated transformations on object code, while remaining light-weight enough to be attached to the executable.
3) static back-ends for many popular (and legacy) architectures, a back-end which emits portable C code, and a Just-In-Time compilers for several architectures
4) does not require garbage collection or run-time code generation (It makes a great static compiler).

To give it a try, write some C/C++ code and then compile it from within the browser.
Observe the LLVM re-generated code, how C/C++ constructs map to LLVM and run some LLVM optimizations.

Linux power shell commands and tricks: Part I

A lot comes bundled with Linux OS these days (thanks to the FOSS revolution) and we've zillions of utils and UI's to choose from to adapt to the Linux way of life in software development!

Still, Linux encourages the UNIX thought process and the philosophy of DIY (do-it-yourself)...
A power user (developer, build engineer, admin) would programmatically configure (read: automate) his environment and do more with the console using the plain old Linux "shell"

This series (to continue in parts) is on those power shell utilities (command combinations, scripts, performance tuning tweaks) that would help a user do more with less!!!

To start with, here I post a collection of such things that I've found useful:

1) A script (collection of commands taken from Scott Croft's Oracle Tuning on RHEL tweaks) to make your own network-configuration file (using static IPv4 address).

Note:
a) Need root level or sudo access to be able to run this script
b) Tested on RHEL and Fedora.

Takeaway: you'll have a Linux machine configured to communicate over an IPv4 network, with a static IP configuration.

You can copy-paste the below commands in an ASCII text file (with a .sh extension) and create a re-usable script or you can run the commands step by step:

HOSTNAME=$(grep HOSTNAME /etc/sysconfig/network|awk -F= '{print $2}')
hostname $HOSTNAME
GATEWAY=$(ip route list |grep default |awk '{print $3}')
echo "GATEWAY=$GATEWAY" >> /etc/sysconfig/network
DEFDEV=$(ip route list|grep default|awk '{FS=" "; print $5}')
IPADDR=$(ip addr show $DEFDEV |grep inet |grep -v inet6|awk '{print $2}'|awk -F/ '{print $1}')
echo "IPADDR=$IPADDR" >> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-$DEFDEV
sed -i 's/dhcp/static/' /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-$DEFDEV
BCAST=$(ip addr show eth0 |grep inet |grep -v inet6|awk '{print $4}')
echo "BROADCAST=$BCAST" >> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-$DEFDEV
echo "NETMASK=255.255.255.0" >> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-$DEFDEV

2) Usage of "xargs", "exec" and pipe to do-more-with-less:

a) To add a new extension to all files in a dir:
ls | xargs -t -i mv {} {}.old

xargs reads each item from the ls ouput and executes the mv command.
The -i option tells xargs to replace {} with the name of each item. The -t option instructs xargs to print the command before executing it.

b) To rename a subset of files, specify the file names with the ls command:
ls *.log | xargs -t -i mv {} {}.old

c) To add a current timestamp extension:
ls *.log | xargs -t -i mv {} {}.`date +%F-%H:%M:%S`

The extension will look like ".2009-10-20-19:37:16"

d) To rename just the extension of files:
rename .log .log_archive.`date +%F-%H:%M:%S` *

This command replaces the first occurrence of .log in the name
by .log_archive.`date +%F-%H:%M:%S`

e) Find out exactly which files are eating up a big chunk of your disk space:
To find all files over 10,000KB (10MB+) in size and display their names, along with size,

find / -size +10000k | xargs -i ls -lh {}
or
find / -type f -size +10000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $8 ": " $5 }'
or, in some other Linux variants:
find / -type f -size +10000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $9 ": " $5 }'

e.g.
# find /var/ -size +10000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $8 ": " $5 }'
/var/lib/rpm/Packages: 69M
/var/lib/rpm/Basenames: 11M
/var/lib/rpm/Filedigests: 11M
/var/cache/yum/updates/filelists.xml.gz.sqlite: 57M
/var/cache/yum/updates/primary.xml.gz.sqlite: 21M
/var/cache/yum/fedora/filelists.xml.gz.sqlite: 14M
/var/cache/yum/everything/filelists.xml.gz.sqlite: 59M
/var/cache/yum/everything/primary.xml.gz.sqlite: 29M

...topics coming up next in Part II: memory, process, performance tuning and more!

Startup: Inventing Demand, chicken and egg problem

This one talks about business... captures how Steve was able to solve the Chicken n egg dilemma and launch his startup Rentoid that has picked up pretty well and is known as the ebay of Rent.

An interesting read about how Steve invented demand and created such an innovative biz.

Rentoid had a classic chicken and egg problem when it first got launched. People wont list items until we have willing customers waiting to rent their stuff. Conversely, people couldn’t rent things until people willing to rent their items put them up for rent. It’s a bit like asking two people who don’t know each other to fall in love. To solve this problem I decided to ‘Invent Demand’. This is how I did it.

I went out and got myself a copy of the Harvey Norman and all the major department store catalogs. Scan through and them and picked off what items I thought would be suitable to rent. For the purposes of rentoid that meant items that were ‘hot‘ in market (their placement in the catalogue was proof enough of that), items which had a purchase value of over at least $200, and had a low likelyhood of damage. I then proceeded to gather photos of the specific items off Google images and listed each of them on rentoid. The rental prices I placed at 5% of item value for a week, and 10% of item value for a month. The bond I made 50% of the cost. I made sure I listed items from varying categories. I did it in 3 suburbs across Melbourne (North, West & East). The listings also said ‘as new, never used’ – how true. It also assisted with our SEO because people do ‘item & location’ specific searches.
...
When people rented the items, I went out and bought them, first hunting for the lowest price on line. Then rented it to the new rentoid member in good faith and gave them an exceptional user experience.

After the rental I sold the item on ebay for around about 80% of the retail price. I pretty much re-couped my costs doing this.

Seemingly a little deceptive way to catch-the-fish, but is it really? People got what they wanted from the site and the process for both the renter and the rentee was completely transparent.

Customer Focus: Now that it's an established ebay-of-rent... look at what you get from the rentoid team when you email them:

Thanks for your curiosity!
We don't get nearly as many questions as you might imagine at rentoid. We reckon it's because our site is pretty easy to use and hasn't got a million confusing things on every page, or maybe people think we won't answer the query and some computer will.
Sure it's an automated response this time, but a real, living, breathing, person who hasn't nearly had enough sunlight will respond to your question within a day or so. We figure if you cared enough to ask something, we should care enough to respond personally.
If your question is super-urgent give Steve a call on [private number] or Luke on [private number].
Cheers,
The Rentoid team.

Steve figured a brilliant new way to build demand and momentum for his start up. A simple belief worked for him: an action creates a reaction and often people simply liking an idea isn’t enough to give a thumbs-up to a startup.
You got to take that idea forward, do a due diligence, break the rules.... beat the Catch-22 situation, create demand!!!

Cygwin on WinXP/Vista as an X Client

Most of us know cygwin as one of the best/easy Linux-like emulation on WIN/x86 platform. Cygwin also offers a graphical UNIX/LINUX client terminal (unlike putty that's just a character console).
To install/configure cygwin refer Shuva's blog on cygwin.

We can "ssh" to any X machine and open up a full fledged X console (KDE, GNOME etc. for Linux) in 3 steps:

1) From within the cygwin bash terminal, run:
$> x&
$> wmaker&
This will open up the cygwin GUI console that offers many utils as an X Client, including the XTerm.

2) Open Xterm on the wmaker console (right click and select Xterm)

3) On the XTerm command prompt run:
xhost +

4) login to the X host (the UNIX/Linux host to which you want to connect)
e.g.: "ssh username@hostIP"

5) Now that you're logged in to the UNIX/Linux machine, export its Display to your Windows machine IP (where you're running Cygwin) as:
$> export DISPLAY='X.X.X.X:0.0'
where X.X.X.X is your Windows machine IP (the character after : is "zero")

6) Start any X console, like:
$> startkde&
or
$> startX

... and voila!!! You can now see the GUI from your UNIX/LINUX host exported to your Windows client and running within the Cygwin wmaker terminal window. You may even export any other GUI utilities (like web-browser: firefox or email-client: evolution) and run/control them from your WIN client.

All said and done, this is a great, free and easy way to RDP to your UNIX/LINUX GUI console from your WIN box. But, things can go wrong sometimes with Cygwin.
Couple of usually faced issues are described below:

1) When you try to open Xterm window in wmaker (or try any other wmaker util), it doesn't open up and gives an error:
<<<
440 [main] wmaker: 1432 bash: fork_copy: linked dll data/bss pass 0 failed
>0x542000..
>0x5427F0, done 0, windows pid 1960, Win32 error 487
cannot fork a new process: Resource temporarily unavailable
fork failed: resource temporarily unavailable
>>>

Solution:
On your cygwin bash shell:

1) Check if you already have "rebase" package installed (/usr/bin/rebase and /usr/bin/rebaseall)

2) If yes, run the command:
$> /usr/bin/rebaseall
Now, try to open an XTerm window in wmaker and you should be good to go!

Note: Cygwin documents the need for a rebase/rebaseall for some packages/upgrades (like /usr/share/doc/cygwin/python-*.README)

Cygwin FAQ says:
Whether a rebase is required depends on several factors -

1) which packages you've selected (during an install or upgrade)

2) whether those packages have been compiled with --enable-auto-image-base.
The rebase is only required for certain packages, particularly
those that use dynamically loaded modules such as python or perl.

But, the fact is that running "rebaseall" does solve the above issue!

2) Cygwin bash shell (terminal) in WIN Vista doesn't open up fine; won't let you run basic commands; Permission Denied issues!

Solution:
The workaround is to run the Cygwin shell as Admin (before that, activate the real Administrator account)

a) Run Vista command prompt:
cmd

b) execute the following commands:
cd c:/cygwin/bin (or wherever cygwin is installed)
runas /user:Administrator bash

This would start cygwin bash shell with the Administrator account.
To setup the environment for Admin user properly, copy the skeleton files to admin's home folder /home/Administrator/:
execute the following command from the cygwin bash prompt:
. /etc/profile

While Cygwin, being a traditional one out there, works for most of us there are X clients like Xming that provide better GUI's and are compatible w/o tweaks with most WIN verrsions.

World E-Book fair is ON all thru-out this JULY

Folks!
What are we waiting for?
This is it, a collection of ~2 Million titles on nearly all the subjects/topics we know about (..and many that we don't)!!!

There are titles that are difficult to get from the shelf, there are ones that aren't affordable and there are some you'd just like to move your eye-balls thru w/o owning them.

So download/share/read e-books, mobile-books, e-text for your pdf-reader-gadget and
much more.
Visit the World-E-Book Fair, now!

The happening world of web2.0 services

Web2.0 seems to be the buzz around for many new services mushrooming all around the web (on a daily basis). These cater to the needs of people volunteering to fill the gap for things that range from bare necessities in a web-enabled PC user's life to just plain what if's...
Here, I've just put some of those websites I've hit (thru search or referrals or ads) recently.
EyeJot: what could be the next in emailing! Don't tell me all that Google, Yahoo and M$ have to offer with integrated search and schedulers and what not!
Well, Eyejot is different. A client-free online video messaging platform for personal and business communications.
Offers: The ability to create and receive video messages in a self-contained, spam-free environment.
Client-Free: With no client to install, start using Eyejot immediately with any browser, on any platform.

Yugma: If you're a MS LiveMeeting or WebEx user and still want more, then Yugma is the one killer Web2.0 app for ya.
It's free, and you can use it for Desktop Sharing, Teleconferencing, Presentations, Shared File Space and Session Recording.
Share your computer screen in real-time so that everyone sees what you see - regardless of the application, software or operating system you are using. With Yugma, you can accomplish any task you can in a traditional meeting.

Box: Ever thought how storage has become so important for us that now we need it on the fly, wherever we go and all the time. My laptop or an external drive can promise me some but not all the features that a web app dedicated to storage and collaboration gives us and yet again, free ;)
Box.net is an online Web storage provider. Users can store 1GB of whatever they want.
Pro Features: It provides slick-looking file-sharing widgets. Users get instant previews of images, music, and text documents. The files reside in your Box.net storage area, and as the widget owner you can even upload files through the widget.
Box.net has also launched a development platform for 3rd party sites and services to tap into it's file systems to run applications right within the file browser. Users can add these services to their Box.net accounts free of charge, and tap into them by right-clicking on files. There are more in this category out there like sugarsync that provides more sought after features like Multi computer data (music, text, video and wat not) sync and Automatic online backup (but it's a paid service app)... And the options are growing ;)

Google Reader: One of the greatest web2.0 hits from Google's stable of online apps, this one has simplified and popularized the single-window concept of getting abreast with information. Not just that most of the websites now have an RSS/Feedburner option for you to get the latest w/o re-visiting the site. With this app, users can subscribe to as many RSS feeds as they want, then browse them in a lean and simplistic two-pane story browser that feels a little bit like Gmail. Other than photos and text, Google Reader can display embedded video clips from several popular services.
It provides you features like: sharing the RSS feeds/stories with others. It even integrates your list of shared stories with buddies on Google Talk.
Works on any browser, versions available for mobile phones, the iPhone and the Nintendo Wii. Google offers iGoogle, a personalized page that can set up an RSS startpage for you and your colleagues. Netvibes is another one that offers similar features.

Mint: Don't worry, there has to be a web app for financial management services and that's where this one fits in, free.
Pro features: Interfaces directly with your bank and credit card companies to keep your accounts up to date. Not just a budgeting tool, but also a way to keep track of accounts w/o going to a bunch of different sites.
E-mail or mobile alerts. Caters to alerts like accounts dropping to critical levels, bills due, or when large purchases are made on credit cards you're tracking. Mint makes money for itself, and for you, by analyzing your spending habits and your accounts and recommending offers that will save you money. Got a high-interest credit card? Spending too much on mobile phone? Mint's advertising network will match offers from its partners to your particular situation.
Although this works only for people managing their stuff in the US currency it won't take much time for other such web apps (do I hear moneycontrol) to provide similar or better features for your localized needs.

As I write this review, there are hundreds of new web2.0 apps coming up to enable you with essential and good-to-have tools for productivity, entertainment and information search and analysis. Explore some of the best rated ones too.