I came across this wonderful and thought provoking article today. Really made me think.

Here is the link to the article. I would recommend reading the full article on this link.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article4362950.ece

This might be a long post as I am trying to quote the important statements from the article.

In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.

One American study found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This, it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year.

Television was the first culprit. Tests clearly show that a switched-on television reduces the quality and quantity of interaction between children and their parents. The internet multiplies the effect a thousandfold. Paradoxically, the supreme information provider also has the effect of reducing information intake.

Now teenagers just go to their laptops on coming home from school and sink into their online cocoon. But this isn’t the informational paradise dreamt of by Bill Gates and Google: 90% of sites visited by teenagers are social networks. They are immersed not in knowledge but in “gossip and social banter”.

Teenagers are being groomed to think others can be picked up on a whim and dropped because of a mood or some slight offence. The fear is that the idea of sticking with another through thick and thin – the very essence of friendship and love – will come to seem absurd, uncool, meaningless.

They have all noted – either in themselves or in others – diminishing attention spans, inability to focus, a loss of the meditative mode. “I can’t read War and Peace any more,” confessed one of Carr’s friends. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

So what is the solution?

The brain is malleable. Just as it can be trained to be distracted, so it can be trained to pay attention. Education and work can be restructured to teach and propagate the skills of concentration and focus. People can be taught to turn off, to ignore the beep and the ping.

• Enjoy the simple things in life
• Read books once in a while
• Avoid multi tasking
• Stop listening to your ipod always

I already mentioned this in the last post. But thought of having a separate post for this as I love this application.

This is a free file synchronization software available from the below link:
http://allwaysync.com/

Here is a statement from their website:

Allway Sync is free file and folder synchronization software for Windows.
Allway Sync uses innovative synchronization algorithms to synchronize your data between desktop PCs, laptops, USB drives and more. Allway Sync combines bulletproof reliability with an extremely easy-to-use interface.

There are multiple versions available. If you are using this on a USB or using portable apps version, make sure you download the appropriate version from their website.

You can create multiple jobs to synchronize multiple directories. This is the easiest way to keep your computers at two different locations in sync.

You might have noticed that some USB sticks come with a menu similar to your start menu and also applications. I have a Sandisk U3 cruzer USB drive and this has an application called U3 that enables this kind of menu and many applications can be installed onto this.

There is another way you can achieve the same. You can download Portable apps from the below link.
http://portableapps.com/

Here is a statement from their website:
Now you can carry your favorite computer programs along with all of your bookmarks, settings, email and more with you. Use them on any Windows computer. All without leaving any personal data behind.

Once you have installed the portable apps suite, you can select various portable versions of applications like:
- Mozilla Firefox
- Opera
- Filezilla

There are SSH, Anti virus, directory sync, music players, chat clients etc available as portable apps. This is very interesting and useful.

One portable app I love is called Alway Sync. This is a free program that can be used to keep directories in sync.

The default behavior of websites is that if you dont have index.html, index.php or a similar index page, then it just displays a list of files in the directory on the website.

There are some hosting companies that disable this for security reasons, which is good. But in some cases, you just want to give the list of files to visitors for download or viewing.

Here are 2 very good and easy scripts that I have found to be useful with this.

1 – PHP Directory listing from Evoluted.net:
This is a very straight forward and simple directory script written in PHP. You can see it in action on their website too.

2 – Relay Ajax file manager:
This script requires MySQL installed on the server. This indexes all the files in the directory and its subdirectories in MySQL. This provides search feature, optional uploading, access restriction, users, virtual directory support. Also, this has a good ajax interface.

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/