With the advent of digicams, photography for amateurs(like me) is about click, preview and keep/delete. But at times there is need to share those high resolution pics via email. And with most of us using ADSL, which means slower upload speed as compared to download speed, sending across pics can be bit painful. Thankfully there are loads of batch resize tool available to help us cut down the size of image while maintaing most of the image quality. One of the tools which I personally use and find quite adequate is Visualizer Photo resize (http://www.freeimagebrowser.com/resize/). Just point to the folder which contains all the pics, the desired size of the new pics and yes you are done. All your photos are resized in one click . It simple. But then it means not too much of configurations…for me it works fine. And yes its FREE.

On another note, for those in India , if you ever suspected u were missing belonging from your airline baggage, this might be just what you have been thinking. Certainly for me, its just the tip of iceberg. The fact that complaints almost fall to deaf ears, probably calls for deeper investigation. Anyway herez the most recent news about the issue…. Finally at least somewhere culprit is caught…..[ http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/subcontinent/2007/June/subcontinent_June433.xml&section=subcontinent&col=

]

I wonder if they cant use security tapes available to investigate the claims of its customers instead of shooing them away……long live customer care.

How Fiery is your Firewall!!!!

Yes, I am talking about the software based firewall which most of us use .... free or paid...
And most often than not, the decision of a particular firewall is based on its price and recommendation by our "friends", but then have we seen any comprehensive tests of these... something which would test each firewall for vulnerability...?

I came across one such study in the always useful Scott's Newsletter. You can get a copy of the same at http://www.scotsnewsletter.com/91.htm . Yes, its free . Its amazing how someone can write such a useful stuff, which obviously takes up loads of effort and maintain good quality and yet keep it free.

Coming to the discussion, Scott Newsletter pointed me to quite a comprehensive lists of tests done for personal firewalls. yes, it includes the seemingly popular firewalls , Zone Alarm( free and Pro versions tested separately), McAfee, Norton Internet Security, Sygate and lots of others and it ranks them. You will be surprised by the results of the effectiveness of your firewall and perhaps your "sense" of security might change once you go through the results.

Here is the link to the full report,
http://www.matousec.com/projects/windows-personal-firewall-analysis/leak-tests-results.php#firewalls-ratings

Or take a look at the firewall effectiveness at this website:
http://www.firewallleaktester.com/tests_overview.php
(Click View results to see the results comparing different firewall products).

Well, though it has been stressed in tests, but its a point worth noting that the firewall tests were carried out after "disabling" the antivirus. The raw strength of firewall defence was used to asses them. But in a real world, there is generally an antivirus running on user's pc, hopefully with latest definitions and engines. These antivirus can block some of the attacks , but then quite few and not really a great alternative to firewall's own strength to catch them up.

Hope this helps in choosing the firewall, more on rationale.

Bad web site design, products - Bajaj Allianz, Rediff

Life makes you wiser. It has been probably in one of my wiser moments that I had been trying to get some insurance policies in India and was trying to search(aka google) for the different policies on the web. And then it struck me, how badly these customer attracting sites are designed. Either for most of these players , the website dont exist or if they exist, the way they are designed serve little purpose. For example take the website of Bajaj Allianz. It is one of the leading player in the insurance market. Take a look at its website (www.bajajallianz.com).

Being inquistive about their products, I would really want to know what they have to offer along with the price . If that interests me, well it would be really nice, if i Can get their contact info or can leave my name and number to be called up.

But then some things are different. You need to mandatory include your first name, last name, email address and mobile number before u can view any information. Even the products or their rates. Yes, they are so concerned about ur visit , that they wont let u view their products until u get them ur full details. Too bad they didnt ask for my salary, permamenet addresss and credit card info too....and yeah searching for information.....get ready for the mess ahead.....oops dont expect a site search.... people dont seem to beleive in it.

I fail to understand how can such a big company, with such good credentials in the market can afford with such a website design. Certainly a case of overzealous and overconfident designers/planners. But then this is defn not an isolated case.. but irritating enuff for a corporate website....at least for me.
As for me, I am still looking. Provided some dummy information on their website

And then there is rediff . Excellent website with loads of info and features focused on Indian community. I suspect , they copy yahoo in terms of their features and business models. But then at least on email... i would give them a big zero. Even with a "unlimited storage" account, i can hardly use it. Rather I am unable to use it. Perhaps this email service provider forgot the bulk mail option. To be true, there is a BULK mail folder, but then all the spam gets into inbox. No message into bulk mail.

Why am i writing all this.... well because i felt this is my private space and i could write about something, which I am unable to comprehend. Perhaps it makes some business sense to them. But to me, it doesnt.

And yeah.. a small disclaimer... These are not the only sites which seem bad to me, but these do trouble me. These are only my personal opinions. Your comments are welcome.

I generally browse some of the techie blogs from blogs.oracle.com or dzone.com. Since am yet not much into blogging ,am still on lookout for the new and interesting blogs. Any suggestions to the same would be welcome.

Speaking of something interesting, came across this piece of nicely written blog from Jonathan Gennick. I wasnt aware that a query which had been running fine in versions before 10g, might suddenly fail, with far-reaching impact to some of the apps.

As I read through the article, I found it really intriguing and scary. As a matter of fact , it seems that given the new built in intelligence of the much publicised "CBO" from oracle, migrating from other versions to this new version would need a rigorous amount of testing maybe with the live data set and analysing the tables (as in this case).

Dont get me wrong. I am not against CBO. But sometimes it seems to be overdoing things.
I have been working on 10g for sometime and my experiences with it have been mixed. Had a near fatal experienceonce thanks to 10g. I wasnt aware that 10gR1 doesnt like the index rebuild to go online while the data is being loaded in direct path mode. It corrupted the whole damn index!!!!!!! Thankfully the system was still in trial.

And speaking of CBO, its way too dynamic and would certainly not recommend it if you are dealing with VLDB. My experiences with it havent been too great. Oracle certainly needs to take new steps in parallelism, if it wants scalable ETL tools to be built using PL/SQL or OWB. They have moved forward, no doubt, but yet some of the basic parallelism is still tough to implement. Take the simple case of unloading data from two tables going in parallel. Most of the ETL tools would run two threads and unload the two tables in parallel, almost by default. But I am not sure if thats the case with OWB . Pl/SQL makes it tougher to implement. It canbe done, but there isnt a simple way to do this yet. (Any ideas/suggestions welcome).

The diwali weekend. Its celebration time and holiday time. It was supposed to be same with me. But due to some personal reasons and the fact that am away from home(read no holidays) , this was a diwali I would like to forget, but perhaps would not be able to quite easily.

Once again, I marvel how close this e-revolution has brought us, at least in terms of keeping in touch(nah, I aint new to this… just keep getting fascinated). Its always nice to have frndz you can speak to.. talk nuisance without worrying too much about the impression thats going to make…..and yahoo(just my preferred example) certainly makes that task lot easier.

Thanks everyone for bearing with me.

And yeah, I spent some time googling for “boring diwali” and it did threw up some interesting , nice to read blog. Otherwise, it was just another weekend, shopping for the necessities, cleaning, and most part of the day: online, surfing and chatting.

Speaking of search, I do try some search engines from time to time and have almost always found google on top. The searches from MS simply didn’t match in terms of quality . But guess the new live.com is different. Unlike previous MSN search , which I considered to be the worst, live.com provides quite impressive search results.

It would be interesting to see the clash of titans in the search industry. For me, google is the preferred option and likely to remain so . Its just the simplicity and the comfort factor it provides with the search that awes me. Its email service though is one area where it can take some tips from Yahoo.

And yeah, every time I sit for lunch and dinner, it just reminds me that cooking is not my forte. I can cook good enough to survive, and have been doing so almost an year. But then, I feel like I have almost forgotten how good food tastes like and the different dishes you can cook. Maybe I am just lazy.

Had mentioned the performance benchmarking about my notebook and its unexpectedly low results. Have been doing a bit search on this and then using my friend’s working DELL power adapter, re-ran the tests. The results… Phew… amazing.

Apparently, the SpeedStep technology of the Intel, which varies the processing power, when running on battery (in my case the faulty adapter) , was causing the low benchmark for my notebook. The Speedstep doesn’t interfere with the processing speed when running on AC power or if it has been explicitly disabled from the BIOS.