One of my colleagues had given his car for repair after it had stalled all of a sudden.

The mechanic reported that the radiator was punctured and since he had driven his car for sometime after this happened, the engine became too hot. Even the spark plugs were fused into the engine due to the heat. They mentioned that the engine might need to be replaced.
<$500 to replace the radiator
$6000 to replace the engine

If he had glanced at the temperature gauge on the car and stopped the car when it was too hot, he could have saved the engine.

I never have the habit of looking at the temperature gauge. So this is an important lesson - make sure to glance at your temperature gauge once in a while.

Many may not know about this wonderful website. I dont remember how I came across this one either. The site is:
http://opensourcecms.com/

This site has demo installations of various open source packages/applications. Before we try installing any on our own site, we get to try out these packages on this website.

Here are some categories:

• Portals (Drupal, Joomla, Mambo etc)
• Blogs (Wordpress, Lifetype etc)
• E-Commerce (osCommerce, Zen cart etc)
• Groupware
• Forums
• e-Learning
• Image galleries
• Wiki

Ofcourse, you will have to deal with some ads. But they are not so distracting.

I got this recipe from my wife’s sister. This is a tasty Indian snack (for those who dont know).

Ingredients:
Bengalgram dal -2 cups
Sugar – 2 cups
Maida -1 1/2 cups
vege Oil -1/2 cup
cadamom powder -1/2-1 tsp
kesari powder{I added turmeric powder1sp} – a few pinch( for yellow colour)
Rice flour for spreading on board
Ghee for frying

Preparation Method:
1. Boil the gram with plenty of water. When nicely cooked strain.
Again add water, boil & drain.
2. Add sugar & cardamom powder to the cooked gram & keep on low heat
till the mixture becomes semi solid. Stir constantly.
3. Remove from fire & grind to a fine paste.
4. Add kesari powder to the maida flour and with a little water, make
into a dough.
5. Pour oil into the dough & knead until it becomes very soft.Keep it
aside for 2 or more hours .
6. Make equal number of balls with the dough & the gram mixture.
7. Take a ball of gram, cover it with maida ball & turn on to a
floured board (rice flour to be used on the board) & roll out as
thinly as possible.
8. Apply a little ghee on griddle & fry (like we do for chappatis) the
boli on it.

Enjoy!

Our baby has had diaper rash couple of times. Recently, he had diarrhea and the diaper rash was bad.

The below method worked well for us in getting through this phase.

• Change the diaper frequently. We used to change it every 1-1/2 hours.
• Give lots of free time i.e. without diaper on. Our little one doesnt like staying still. We played him a animation movie (Madagascar) and lay him on his back without a diaper.
• Dry well (using a paper towel) on every diaper change.
• After drying, apply some diaper rash cream or petroleum jelly. This protects the skin from the wetness.
• If the baby is not having a diarrhea, you can put a hole in his diaper and let him sleep during the night. Make sure, there is a plastic sheet or something similar to protect the mattress. But this trick is a fast healer.
• When changing the diaper, try using paper tissue soaked in water, or even his baby wipes soaked in water. Clean gently. Rubbing might worsen the rash.

We found that air is the best healer for a rash.

Having done this a few times already, I thought of documenting this.

As soon as I get a Windows based PC, I usually install the following:

- Openoffice (alternative to MS Office)

- Filezilla (FTP client to transfer files to my websites)

- Mozilla Firefox (free and powerful browser)

- Yahoo messenger (chat software)

- Pidgin (Can do yahoo, google and other chats with this)

- Skype (Voip)

- Gizmo Project(alternative to skype)

- Cdrtfe for windows (lightweight cd writing solution)

- Izarc (alternative to Winzip)

- Context Editor (very good editor for PHP, HTML and in general)

- Revo Uninstaller (Powerful uninstaller)

Most of the above are free and open source. Also, these are proven popular packages.

I have noticed that nowadays many websites use ajax to show enlarged images. When you click on an image, instead of the image opening in a new browser window, it opens using animation and zoom. This can be used to view multiple images on a website like a gallery.

Started searching for this. I did know about lightbox javascript library. But the one that impressed me finally is called prettyPhoto. This is a lightbox clone using jQuery. jQuery is a very powerful javascript library that I am very familiar with. I love this because of its simpilcity and because of all the plugins available to extend this.

Here is the link to the prettyPhoto library.
http://www.no-margin-for-errors.com/projects/prettyPhoto/

It is very simple to add to your website. You can see this working on my website below: (Try clicking an image on the website)
http://macpup.org/

I had never heard of a free application for providing live support / live chat on a website.

One of my friends (Eric) mentioned this the other day. It is called Crafty Syntax and I am posting the link below:
http://www.craftysyntax.com/

You can use this to add live support to your website free of charge.

Also, if your site is run on Drupal, then you can refer to the below page to see how Crafty Syntax can be integrated into Drupal.
http://drupal.org/node/248920

As always, I am excited seeing free and open source. But if you want to support them, you can always donate.

I got the below from a forwarded email from a friend. I thought it is helpful. Hoping to add more as and when I come across any.

- To keep potatoes from budding, place an apple in the bag with the potatoes.

- When a cake recipe calls for flouring the baking pan, use a bit of the dry cake mix instead and there won’t be any white mess on the outside of the cake.

- If you accidentally over salt a dish while it’s still cooking, drop in a peeled potato and it will absorb the excess salt for an instant ‘fix-me-up.’

- Wrap celery in aluminum foil when putting in the refrigerator and it will keep for weeks.

- Brush some beaten egg white over pie crust before baking to yield a beautiful glossy finish.

- Cure for headaches: take a lime, cut it in half and rub it on your forehead. The throbbing will go away.

- If you have a problem opening jars, try using latex dishwashing gloves. They give a non-slip grip that makes opening jars easy.

- Don’t throw out all that leftover wine. Freeze into ice cubes for future use in casseroles and sauces.

- For cuts, wounds, dog bites etc: After washing the affected part with water, tie a bandage with crushed small onions and coconut oil. Pour water over the bandage often. The wound will heal quickly.

- To get rid of Roaches:

Boric Powder – 4 TSP
Wheat Powder – 1 TSP
Sugar – 1 TSP

Mix the above ingredients with enough milk to make balls. Sun dry these balls and keep them in the affected areas. You can also mix the ingredients to a paste and apply on the affected areas. Repeat after few months.

Once when I was asked by a friend to do their shopping site, I suggested ready made paid solutions like Godaddy.com, Amazon or even sell it through ebay. There are packages available from Godaddy and from few other websites that are paid and that give you the complete shopping cart funtionality.

But I always liked free.

Recently, I came to know from my friend about the package osCommerce. I knew about this, but had never really appreciated it. This friend mentioned that he purchased a template that is integrated with osCommerce for $160.

I started searching for osCommerce templates on google. I found many free ones. One of the template that really attracted me is called the GG9 – Free lightbox osCommerce template. It is available from the below link:
http://www.badeziner.com/2008/07/12/gg9-free-lightbox-oscommerce-template/

Actually, if you want to build a shopping site, I would recommend the following solutions:

Fully paid and payment integrated:
- Godaddy (shopping cart is available from $9 to $42 at the time of this post)
- Amazon (Search for webstore from amazon and you will find). Here is the link:
http://webstore.amazon.com/

Free solution:
- Find a good osCommerce template for free. This usually comes with the osCommerce package that is also free.

If you just want to sell stuff and dont really need a website or personalized solution:
- Amazon.com: Open an account and start selling
- Ebay.com: This is a bidding site. But you can sell products at a standard price.

Here is the link to osCommerce:
http://www.oscommerce.com/

We started finding videos on youtube and creating playlists out of them. But when playing from Youtube, the videos do not play in fullscreen continuously.

Searching on the web, I came across this code:

This is the embed link that you get from Youtube for your playlist. Put this code in an HTML page and playing this in fullscreen would play the videos continously in fullscreen. Just a tip to remember.