What is Google Reader?

Google Reader is an online feed reader tool which allows you to subscribe to feeds (RSS/Atom)  provided by various blogs/websites. These feeds represent the latest content on the blog/site.  Instead of visiting all the Websites/blogs, you can read all the latest content from one place!

In praise of Google Reader

Google calls Google Reader as the inbox for the Web. I think that is an apt description of Google’s feed reader.

I have been using Google Reader for a month or so now. I find it very user friendly and responsive. Earlier I was using Feed Reader, which was a desktop based RSS/Atom feed aggregator.

There are couple reasons why I switched from a desktop based aggregator to online aggregator.

1. I use a couple of computers. I have one at home, another at office and sometimes I carry around a laptop. So synchronizing feeds across all these became a chore.

2. When you have a huge number of feeds subscribed, any desktop based aggregator will affect your bandwidth. I have a 256kbps link at home and it crawls when I start FeedReader.

3. I am always on the net.  I have three broadband connections and there is never a time I am not connected. So the advantage of offline reading with desktop aggregators doesn’t mean much!

4. The best thing with online aggregators is that you can read your feeds from anywhere!

Following screenshot shows how my feeds appear on Google Reader. The left side shows all the feed sources organized neatly in folders and the right side shows the feeds in the selected site.

Cool features of Google Reader

Here are some cool features of Google Reader.

1. There are two kinds of views for the feed inbox. In the expanded view, merely scrolling down makes feeds as read. This is very neat feature when you have thousands of feeds! You can just scroll down and “star” the ones which you find interesting. Later, you can read those “starred” ones and then remove star!

2. You can share interesting feeds on a single click. The “Hot Links” you see on the right side of this page are actually my shared feeds from Google Reader. This can be customized as well (Currently mine is set to 5 items).

3. Google Reader interface is fast. It uses on demand loading and hence is fast even when you have a large number of feeds.

So in summary, if you are looking for a good online feed reader check out Google Reader. It is still in “labs” stage and daily I could see improvements on it. For example, the refresh link at the bottom was recently changed to a refresh button on top left.

Three friends went to a hotel. The bill was Rs 30/- Each one contributed Rs.10/-. The waiter took the bill to the cashier.

The cashier was happy & decided to give them a discount of Rs.5/- & asked the waiter to return them Rs.5/-.

Now the waiter was confused. How to distribute Rs 5 among 3 persons?

He kept Rs 2 in his pocket & gave one rupee to each one of the 3 persons.

So initially each one had contributed Rs.10. Now as they are given 1 rupee back, their contribution reduces to Rs 9.

They all contributed Rs 9 — that is 9×3=27 & 2 rupees are in the waiters pocket.

The total becomes 29. But they had paid Rs 30.

Where is the remaining 1 rupee?.

I am a big fan of Google products. Well, I thought of writing a detailed wishlist to Google. Then I realized that there isn’t much that Google is not offering!

But even then I have two main applications I wish Google would develop soon.

1. Master Google Dashboard - I use a lot of Google applications such as Google mail, Google Adsense, Google Adwords, Google Reader, Google Analytics etc. What I need is a master Google dashboard which displays summary of everything.

For example, it should contain latest mail summary, today’s adsense earnings, adwords campaign summary and site traffic summary using Analytics. As a power user, I should be able to configure what all services I need on dashboard and what content is to be displayed on the dashboard.

I think this dashboard is something which many of us would find very useful!

2. Master Google Analytics Summary - This is actually a scaled down version of the first item. I hope Google implements atleast this one. Basically what I need is a summary tab on the Google Analytics which shows the site statistics for all the sites I have under my Analytics. This is something very helpful to those who track a couple of Websites using the same Analytics account.

I did a complete backup of this Wordpress blog yesterday. There isn’t much written, but loosing my blog entries is not something I am looking forward to! It is very important to backup your blog. I will give some reasons if you are not convinced.

First, this blog is hosted on Dreamhost. Recently many problems have been cropping up with dreamhost such as router disaster or network disaster or something like that. You never know when they will have a disk failure and it turns out that their backup tape/disk is unusable!

Secondly, Wordpress is not very secure if the recent events are any indication. The Wordpress 2.1.1 was modified by some deranged cracker. So it is quite possible that there are problems in Wordpress 2.1.2 also and if some nutcase decides to hack your site? Boom!!! - all your posts are gone..

How to backup my Wordpress blog hosted on Dreamhost?

The backup process involves two things. Backing up your blog database and backing Wordpress files which includes theme files modified by you. You must backup both.

Backing up Wordpress database - Backing up Wordpress database is very simple in Wordpress 2.1+. In earlier versions you need to install backup plugin. In Wordpress 2.1+ you can find export option under manage as shown below,

Backing up Wordpress files including customized theme files - My host is dreamhost and I will explain how the Wordpress file backup can be done very quickly. If you use Windows explorer and try to copy everything, it can even take hours! This is because the dreamhost installation contains hundreds of themes you don’t use and also transferring thousands of files over FTP is very slow.

Here is a quick backup solution. Connect to the Dreamhost shell using Putty (A secure shell client). Go to your Wordpress installation folder and type the following command.

zip -r backupall.zip *

This will create a single zip named backupall.zip which contains everything. Now this can be quickly copied to your system!

An English professor wrote the words:

“A woman without her man is nothing”,
On the chalkboard and asked his students to punctuate it correctly.

All of the males in the class wrote:
“A woman, without her man, is nothing.”

All the females in the class wrote:
“A woman: without her, man is nothing.”

While working with DB2 tables, many times we may need to limit query results. This is especially true when we just want to test out our queries. If the data volume is huge, the queries can take hell lot of time.

In oracle, the solution is to use ROWID in WHERE clause. In DB2, you can use the construct FETCH FIRST 10 ROWS ONLY. For example,

SELECT * FROM CUSTOMER FETCH FIRST 10 ROWS ONLY;

An old man lived alone in Minnesota. He wanted to spade his potato garden, but it was very hard work.

His only son, who would have helped him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and mentioned his situation:

Dear Son,

I am feeling pretty bad because it looks like I won’t be able to plant my potato garden this year. I hate to misdo the garden, because your mother always loved planting time. I’m just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. If you were here, all my troubles would be over. I know you would dig the plot, for me if you weren’t in the prison.

Love,
Dad

Shortly, the old man received this telegram:

“For Heaven’s sake, Dad, don’t dig up the garden! That’s where I buried the GUNS!!”

At 4 a.m. The next morning, a dozen FBI agents and local police officers showed up and dug up the entire garden without finding any guns. Confused, the old man wrote another note to his son telling him what happened and asked him what to do next. His son’s reply was:

“Go ahead and plant your potatoes, Dad It’s the best I could do for you from here.”

So the moral of the story is that “whatever situation you are in, you may be able to help someone in need”. Now it is a completely different question why such an intelligent fellow ended up in jail

While changing the datasource configuration in Rational Application Developer 6.0, I across the following error.

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: resolve against non-hierarchical or relative base

This turned out to be a very nasty problem. I first tried removing the datasource configuration and reconfiguring it. When that didn’t work tried deleting the server configuration. No luck!

On googling, I came across this solution.
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21218587

Solution
Open the resources.xml and find:
<cmpDatasource href=”tempworkarea.xmi#DataSource_1125683336050″ mce_href=”tempworkarea.xmi#DataSource_1125683336050″/>

The only way to fix this error is to manually edit the resources.xml. On searching under runtimes folder, I came across multiple resources.xml files. Edited all of them and removed cmpDataSource references completely.

The steps are,

1. Shutdown RAD.
2. Remove cmpDataSource entries completely from resource.xml files under “runtimes” folder.
3. Start RAD and reconfigure datasources.

It worked!