Shafqat Ahmed's .NET Blog

Make Google Chrome Take Less Memory

Earlier I wrote how chrome is taking huge amount of memory because it is running one process for each tab (http://www.shafqatahmed.com/2008/09/google-chrome-i.html). It seems that Chrome supports other process models as well. Here are the process models for Chrome browser

1. Process Per Tab (default model)

2. Process Per Site: One process per website. For example a user with two tabs opened at Gmail and another opened at facebook will have the two google tabs running in the same process. (default model)

3. Single Process ( walla! this is what I was looking for)

All this was cleared by blogger Marc Chung at his post Chrome's Process Model Explained. Right now I am running Chrome in a single process.

At the chrome shortcut pass the appropriate command like option to control Chrome’s behavior.

--process-per-site
--process-per-tab
--single-process

Here is how you edit the shortcut to run with different process model. Open up the properties tab of the Chrome browser short cut and edit it like the image below

So here I have 3 shortcuts to Chrome in my desktop. See the picture below

So now I can run chrome anyway I want. Chrome has become my second browser of choice after Opera. Chrome will occupy less memory now.

Web 2.0 Bubble

Got this video from someone ... the perfect description of web 2.0 phenomena. I love this ... this guy has taken words out of my mouth and put in his video.

Independent Thought

The certificate of 925-201b hold questions about principles of network security and fortigate configurations. On the other hand, 70-624 certifications belong to deploying and maintaining vista client and office system 2007. E22-128 training question belongs to EMC technology fundamentals and is a very essential course. Whereas, E20-570 also belongs to the EMC technology but hold more advance questions. HH0-110 certification belongs to the Hitachi data storage foundation and person need 65% marks in order to pass the exam. EC0-350 holds all the questions related to ECCOUNCIL Ethical Hacking and Countermeasures.

New Opera 9.5 beta release on 25th

Opera 9.5 Alpha has been released and it had quite a lot of issues but it has faster JavaScript engine and a whole lot better history search. I have been using opera since version 3.00 and absolutely love this product. I still consider it to be the best browser in the world. Well ... I am a Opera Maniac.

Opera 9.5, codename Krestel will go beta on 25th October, with a large boom in San Francisco. More details can be found here. You can also follow the development progress in the Opera Desktop Blog.

One of the cool things that Opera supports now, is a tag called Canvas which is a part of HTML5 specification. Unfortunately all the idiots who still use Internet Explorer won't have this. Canvas is basically like a Java canvas element where one can draw shapes using JavaScript. How you can use Canvas in Opera can be found at this article in the Opera developer site. All the Major browers (Firefox, Safari, Opera) except Internet Explorer supports canvas. A tutorial for <canvas> tag usage can be found at Mozilla tutorial. I still can't believe Microsoft is doing such a sloppy work with the IE browser, its a bad strategy. FF has kicked IE's butt big time, still the giant is sleeping.

One cool implementation with Canvas and Javascript can be found at this site but it requires the use of Opera 9.5 beta or Firefox or Flock since Opera 9.xx version before 9.5 cannot render it properly. But its nice to see a painting application using pure html.

10 Software that I can't live without

1. Total Commander (Best file manager ever): I cant believe anyone can live without Total Commander ( previously known as Windows Commander) which I have been using for over 10 years. I have forgotten how to use windows explorer which is 10 times slower in any kind of operation. This one file manager software lets me do everything. And by everything I mean "Everything". For example it lets me do the following

    1. File Management Tasks: File and Folder create copy, delete and all other regular stuff
    2. Compress to any form of archive, be it zip, rar, ace, 7z ... name anything.
    3. Compare files and folders and edit them
    4. Burn my CDs
    5. Install uninstall any softares
    6. ftp client ( has email, rss, nntp clients but I dont use them)
    7. Start, stop, install uninstall windows services
    8. Encrypt, split files
    9. Manage processes, Edit registry
    .... there are more but I don't have the time to write it down.   

2. Opera (Best web browser): Using opera from version 3 and still hooked. Nothing comes close to it. I have recently started to use Flock instead of Firefox for the sites that run better in FF.

3. Thunderbird (Mail): Used to be a total fan of Opera mailing client M2, but recently moved to thunderbird for all the plugins. Outlook sucks big time!

4. Skype (IM): Most of  my official contacts are in skype

5. Facebook (www.facebook.com): Found all my friends from grad school in Facebook. Visit daily. I am in love with this site

6. STablauncher : A windows based tabbed launcher, most of the programs that I use daily are located in this software

7. Google : No need to say why.

8. .NET Reflector: .NET Code reflection and decompilation tool.

9. Code Project : Its the best programming site.

10. LifeHacker.com: Started to hack my life.

Amazon S3 Webservice: The best storage deal on the planet

Since I have several widgets from different sites which have images served from different websites I was worried about the download time and decided to look for CDN (Content Delivery Network) service. The CDNs have distributed servers all over the world.

Amazon has this web service called S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) which is basically a paid CDN. But Its unbelievably cheap. The service supports REST and SOAP web services. Unlike other services there is no bulk purchase, you pay for what you use. If I wanted to host some files this service and had a big bandwidth connected to my home server, the electricity cost alone would be higher than this web service. If you store 20 Gigabytes of data and have a monthly traffic of 2GB then it will cost you 3.40U$. I have a few hundred megabytes of file to store and my traffic probably will be less than 10 cents a month. Pricing from Amazon is like this:

• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
• $0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
• $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*

And the best thing is that, this is a fault tolerant, scaled, reliable, fast service at such a cheap price. I can host all my personal files here and still it would be better than hosting somewhere else. Amazon provides API with code samples for all major programming languages (C#, Java etc). Since these files are added, modified and fetched via API then how do I host my images, movies etc there without writing code? Well, the answer to that is pretty simple, create a bucket (like a folder) and put your files in there and make them public and then you can access them with http gets (read on for how to do that). The Amazon web services logo image used at this blog post is served from the Amazon S3 service.

Nice, but what else can I do with it?
You can even use the S3 service to as a web storage with JungleDisk (see the Amazon traffic rate at their site) and use it as a web hard drive, but the software costs 20 U$, so it is several times more expensive than my 1 years of traffic at Amazon S3. I am not going use it. Instead ...

I stumbled onto this Firefox extension which is like a file transfer utility to S3. You can find the extension here and also read this article at coding horror.

What do I plan to do with this service
I am planning to write a free program for Amazon S3 service which probably will kick JungleDisk out of business and store my files there. Since I have started regular office hours in office recently and stopped bringing work home, I think can manage to write this at home after work. But as I have so many unfinished pet projects to finish ... lets see when I get time for this.

Run multiple websites in Windows XP with IISAdmin.NET

The IIS in Windows XP does not let you add more than one site to the IIS. With IISAdmin.NET you can add multiple websites to your IIS in windows XP. However only one site can stay active at any time.

This article at CodeProject uses Directory services to create a web site.
If you take a look at the image on the right you can see a screenshot of how to create a site using this tool. But the site must be started from this IISAdmin application.

This is very convenient for a ASP.NET developer who needs to work on multiple websites at his own development environment and uses XP.

Once the site is created you will see multiple sites in your IIS like in the Image on the left and  it can be seen that only one site is running.

Related
Computer based companies provide internet marketing program. These companies provide many promotional programs and services including seo services. Other than these services they used to affiliate the organizations by providing web hosting service. As most of the people who are new to web design strategy feel uncomfortable in knowing different services. Then such people are provided by shared hosting services due to which they get much of experience of different web services. Some famous companies launch affiliate program which provide a platform for small firms for promotion. Few technologies like ip phones decrease the communication gap within these services and provide a cheap communication path for them.

Hack Your Router With DD-WRT

  Today I found this site where anyone can upgrade their router via firmware patch. Most normal routers can be patched and turned into this feature rich, user friendly powerful router. There is this project called DD-WRT where one can get a patch for the routers.

Unfortunately there was no patch for my router model to upgrade to. So for now I have to stick with the old router ( ASUS WL520g ). But anyway this was a really cool hack.

The facebook revolution

One could try to imagine what is behind all the facebook screaming around the world. Whats so great about it? Well ... the thing about this application is that ... its about people, its about you and me.

There are so many social networking sites ... facebook seems the like the perfect one. I found my all classmates from grad school in a matter of hour and days. I was connected in a matter of days, got to know what my friends are doing, who has how many kids, doing what, who traveled Europe this summer, got to see their traveling pics. It felt so ... good. But thats not all. They have "Privacy" implement the right way.

Facebook has a public API which exposes their user database and there are so many wonderful applications written around this API that facebook is like the best widget source. Personally I think Facebook has much better widgets than all these ajax based start pages around like Pageflakes, Netvibes, iGoogle. For example you can have a movie application in Facebook and see what your friends and family, co-workers are thinking about the movie you just rated.

Recently New you times had this article written on the Facebook Revolution. The article is titled OMG my mom joined facebook!!. A must read.

Thoughts Aside

Latest direct marketing techniques through email marketing involve electronic media. Few of the electronic marketing companies are offering cheapest domain name in order to promote their electronic services. Their main service is web hosting in which they provide different companies links. These business web hosting is now becoming more popular for marketing product and services. These websites or companies provide tools for web design that helps in designing personal websites. These companies provide backup for recovering their lost data.