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Apocalyx 3D engine includes features like rendering of sky boxes, cloud layers, lens flares, flat terrains and height fields even with reflections, infinite terrains, wavy surfaces, sprites, billboards, meshes with diffuse, gloss, environment and bump mapping, particles emitters, planar shadows …

When FireFox is used through AnalogX Proxy (a popular free proxy server) a strange error persistently happens if you have too many browser windows open.

All of your requests get strangely redirected to the last opened site. For example …

How accurate is Google Image Search? More specifically how accurate its its capability to associate appropriate meta data with an image? Lets find out with a show-and-tell.

I tried the ego example. I searched for my name (angsuman) in Google Image …

PmWiki is a popular wiki software which uses the file system to store wiki pages. We use for our intranet and to document our processes and systems. One of my rising concerns was that it wasn’t backed up at all. …

Few tips for Translator Plugin Pro users:
1. Use a caching engine. Object caching is the minimum that you can use. I would recommend that you use wp-cache 2. eAccelerator is also fine. The problem with eAccelerator is that it isn’t …

I see the word karma grossly misused these days everywhere. I thought a clarification may be in order. The word karma is derived from the Sanskrit kri, "to do". All action is karma. Technically this word also means the …

A new buttonless handset by Pilotfish and Synaptics heralds a new generation of mobiles which understands your signs and gestures and your cheek too.

Onyx device understands signs and gestures, thanks to the sensitive touch pad covering most of its surface. …

There is a minor-war going on in Sun Alumni mailing list and elsewhere where the common misconception: “Java is slow” is surfacing again and again, much to the dismay of knowledgeable Java developers who have known for ages that Java …

To day while going through javablogs, I came across an interesting article on .NET side of story from an ex-java (?) junkie - I miss Java already.. :: http://www.vibhu.info :: Be different…

It reminded me of some long discussions I had …

WordPress team has come up with yet another security fix (1.5.1.2), which fixes the fix (1.5.1.1), which fixes the fix (1.5.1), which is a fix for undisclosed security defects in WordPress 1.5.

Update: Now it should read: WordPress team has …

According to University of Washington about 10 million US citizens have diabetes without being aware of it.

Diabetes is the most insidious disease. Intially you may not get any indication of its presence, until much later, when it has already damaged …

JSF (Java Server Faces) brings applet functionality to the web on any browser with pure HTML & CSS based rendering. Applets not only provide rich set of UI components (much of which is yet to be replicated in JSF), …

Yahoo released an UI library for web applications, developed using Javascript and AJAX.

It provides some nifty components like dual-calendar, tree, drag-and-drop, slidedrs etc.

Very much worth adding to your toolkit. Personally I found the performance somewhat sluggish.

DOJO is another alternative (better?).

Link …

Sun is offering for free full-license versions of Sun’s award winning integrated development environments (IDEs) - Sun Java Studio Creator 2004Q2 (full license) and Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8 (full license).

I have used Sun Java Studio Creator and I liked …

Choongyong reports that Gmail now uploads attachments in background. So uploading attachments first before writing your email should ensure that your attachments are getting uploaded while you are busy writing.

It should speed up your time to send, esepcially when …

Let us assume that you have already setup your NFS and NIS server. Now you need to configure your clients. Here are the steps you can follow to configure them in 5 minutes or less:

Configuring NFS Client
Run:
chkconfig portmap on
chkconfig ypbind …

Lets take a look at outsourcing from a global perspective.

I have outsourced work and now provide outsourcing services.

Why? I have seen a need in the market for high quaility work done at competitive price, more so when the economy is …

I have been evaluating both Xubuntu and Fedora Core along with Cent OS (Open Source version / fork of Red Hat Linux Enterprise Edition). The key value and differences between these releases are:

Xubuntu
Xubuntu is definitely faster to use in general …

Chinese students have adopted ingenious and sometimes dangerous devices (including microscopic earphones and wireless devices) for unprecedented hi-tech cheating. Chinese students upped the ante in the high-tech battle to counter cheating during university entrance exams this month, putting some in …

List of high quality javascript compressors. Feel free to add to this list in your comments.

Online javascript compressor

Online and downloadable - ShrinkSafe …

It has been a couple of years since the release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, and now it is Harry Potter time again with the scheduled release on 21st July of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. …

It is all about iPhone firmware update 1.1.1. This new firmware update from Apple disables most of the SIM unlocking methods that were used to allow the iPhone on non-AT&T network or simply use the iPhone without subscribing to AT&T. …

Simple Thoughts was chosen as the name of this blog in distant past to highlight my approach - simple solutions for complex problems.

The name stuck over the years. However as many pointed out that Simple Thoughts is about Web …

Google has released GWT - a java window toolkit which converts your java applications (using the toolkit API) to javascript (incl. AJAX) and HTML. What follows is a brief review of the features and some thoughts. But first lets see …

James Huff (MacManx) points to comprehensive set of resources on how to effectively use Photoshop’s Extract filter and Photoshop in general. …

According to latest news flash scientists have found mice testicles can yield embryonic stem cell like cells.

A team in Germany has successfully grown mouse ESC-like cells from spermatagonial stem cells which normally turn into sperm. The ESC-like cells can be …

These are few samples of actual comments from our customers of Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro for WordPress blogs. Frankly I am overwhelmed by the positive response and support of the blogger community.

Note: Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro (features, get software) is …

We are sending the updates as we speak. It will take us few more days to complete the process. Please have patience. We are on the job. I promise you the wait will be worth it. …

WordPress just released version 2.1. We have tested Translator Plugin Pro with 2.1 release and it works perfectly out of the box.

Translator Plugin Pro is compatible with WordPress 2.0.4 and above, including but not limited to 2.0.4, 2.0.5, 2.0.6, 2.0.7, …

Chief executive Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, who turned fugitive, has been tracked down in Sri Lanka by a private investigator based on a one-minute Skype call he made from Columbo.

Alexander, aged 54, faces fraud charges over a stock options scandal involving …

I found a super-simple way to block access to external email providers like GMail or HotMail or Yahoo Mail in firewall. The process while trivial to configure has a caveat.

Why:
External web emails are a potential source of virus and malware …

Excerpt from the best spam of 2004:
In 1977, Kaplan Education LTD was sued by the Federal Trade Commission at Federal Trade Commission v. Kaplan Education, LTD, et al, 433 F. Supp. 989, *; 1977 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 15398, **; 1977-2 …

Google is asking for participants for their user studies. They will pay handsomely - 75 $ / hour. Google is a reliable company and so you can be sure that there is no scam as with many other survey offers. …

The key new features of Firefox 2.0 beta (with brief commentary) are:

Integrated spell-checker - no more excuse for poor spelling in form data
Bookmarked web site summary - small updated headlines that sites can create that display in the bookmark sidebar …

Cross-browser and cross-platform testing is a bane as well as a requirement for web applications. Consider Internet Explorer on Windows. There are two major version 6 & 7, not to mention still used 5.5. You need to either use different …

As a javascript developer using onload often you will find that other script authors too love to use onload. Unfortunately onload accepts a function name and your reassigning will prevent others from using onload. Here is a script which allows …

My first Facebook spam:

Subject: Mi Chai invited you to join the group “I’M A CHRISTIAN..AND I’M PROUD TO SAY IT!!”…
Mi invited you to join the Facebook group “I’M A CHRISTIAN..AND I’M PROUD TO SAY IT!!”.

Mi says, “Join this group! See …

Microsoft’s Windows Live OneCare security tool failed independent tests carried out by the Virus Bulletin. The security testing group found that Live OneCare missed far more active viruses than any other program tested.

To pass the tests anti-virus tools must spot …

I have opened this blog for testing. Now any spammer can get to my moderation queue. I am trapping the spam comments for our Comment Guard plugin. So all spammers are welcome to spam me!

Obviously your comment will not go …

It was fun to watch Java software companies posting videos of their product demonstration on the web. Watching them however made me realize couple of important issues.

First of all software demonstration videos on YouTube suck (for lack of stronger word). …

Scott Adams (via Dilbert) made an interesting comment - “Maybe I could save time by realizing that they aren’t raging morons who enjoy working for free”. This reply was made when when his pointy haired boss told Dilbert …

Meet Omid Kordestani, Sr. V.P. Google, who made merely $288,874,396 last year.

You may be interested to know the salaries of Sergey Brin & Larry Page, co-founders of Google - $43,726 and $35,045 respectively.

Google CEO & Chairman Eric Schmidt makes …

I recently came across an instance of Google Proxy hacking with one of my clients, which removed his index page and other pages from SERP (Search Engine Ranking & Positioning) and he lost the page ranks (went down to zero). …

View first two movies of Back To The Future series side-by-side in overlapping segments. I enjoyed it and I think so will you, if you have seen the movies before.

Found at BinaryBonsai via MacManx. …

Google Inc. said on Wednesday that it had agreed to pay up to $90 million to settle a class action lawsuit over advertising fraud by outside parties on its site, in a bid to put the controversy behind it. Read …

List of top 10 features in Java SE 6.

Web Services
You get first-class support for writing XML web service client applications (death of Apache Axis?). No more messing with the plumbing (unless you really want to). You can also expose your …

India should stop developing a gas pipeline with Iran because Iran is bad
US gives no commitment about India’s seat in UN permanent council
US will go ahead with sale of F-16’s to Pakistan desite Pakistan being a well known terrorist heaven

Pretty …

Angsuman Chakraborty,

It gives me great pleasure to announce that your Java User Group: Calcutta JUG (CALJUG) has been selected as one of Sun’s Top 50 JUGs worldwide. Being recognized as one of Sun’s Top 50 comes with benefits, such …

In order to deal with both old tag soup written to old browser quirks and new standards-compliant pages, Mozilla (and Mozilla-based browsers), Mac IE 5, Windows IE 6, Safari, Opera 7 and Konqueror 3.2 have two main layout modes. In …

We are working to change the WordPress themes in all our blogs to a consistent look and feel. We worked hard to make it much more usable than before and hopefully less cluttered.

There are tons of features and hidden niceties. …