“Oracle accquires SUN Microsystems for $7.8 billion”.

The Original Accusation
Sun had been suffering in past and was making every effort to make an accusation happen for it.  The Oracle-Sun deal came more than two weeks after I.B.M. ended its talks with SUN. I.B.M lowered its offer to $9.40 a share from $10 and Oracle bid was $9.50 a share.

MySql Goes to Sun and Sun Goes to Oracle

Oracles’ chief executive, said in a conference call Monday morning that Sun’s Java programming language and its Solaris operating system were the main attractions. But that might not be the case as Oracle was more intersted in MySql then any one else. In 2008 Sun Microsystem annouced a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL the worlds fastest growing open source databases for $1 billion. Which accelerated Sun’s position in enterprise IT to a $15 billion database market. Though many people looked at the accusation with a controversial eye stating that MySql could have had a bigger value then what SUN offered, Google, Yahoo & Microsoft could have paid much more. (more…)

Recording video tutorial never got much easier then this one. Screen Toaster is a free web based screen recorder utility designed to capture screen activity in real-time to create and share tutorials, demos, trainings, lectures and more. Fire up the web page your recording studio is ready to go you can also add audio, embed webcam while you record and once you are finished you can even add subtitles, choose thumbnails, add tags to your video share it with friends over social networks with privacy setting allowing you to control the access to the video you made. You can now also automatically upload HD screen casts directly to YouTube from Screen Toaster also you can download videos in .mov format for editing on your desktop. Their beta API allows you to integrate Screen Toaster into your website thus allowing your users to create / share and distribute video tutorials.

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Songbird this week finally made its 1.0 release:

What is Song Bird?
Songbird is an opensource music player build on Mozilla technology, VLC Player & SQLite. Purely based on Mozilla’s Gecko engine, the same engine that powers Firefox. Like Firefox, Songbird allows for tabbed browsing, themes and addtions of add-ons to customize the extendibility of your media player. So far packed with more then 90 Add Ons you can customize SongBird as you want.

“Songbird promises to be the Firefox of media players” according to Aaron Boodman, Greasemonkey.

SongBird is currently in its early stages but have a very active development teams, this week they released there 1.0 release, powered with an addition in features, performance according to their blog post

• Drastically Faster Search: Searching in Songbird is now anywhere from 10x faster for small libraries to 1000x for large ones.
• Reduced RAM Usage: There’s a 70% reduction in RAM usage when importing and using large (100,000 track) libraries.
• Faster Media Importing: Importing media into Songbird is now 2-4x faster.
• Reduced Startup Times: Large library users (10,000 tracks or more) will notice that Songbird startup times are now twice as fast.
• Efficient Scrolling: Scrolling through your library now uses half the amount of CPU.
• Snappier Sorting: Sorting your library is now 3-4x faster, which adds up to significantly smoother browsing when scrolling and filtering.
• Optimized DB Size: We’ve optimized the database in Songbird and reduced its size by, on average, 60%. This leads to a variety of performance improvements throughout the application.
• Fewer Crashers: We’ve worked hard to identify and fix 11 of the most common crashes in Songbird.

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Its quite frustrating when you are trying to download some stuff from a torrent or a p2p connection but your connection keeps on breaking down. Another scenario could be your VOIP call getting dropped up. You might try to blame your software or computer setting for that but the real culprit could be your ISP.

Keeping this in mind a la Comcast the electronic frontier foundation (EFF) has released Switzerland an open source Network testing tool.

SWITZERLAND indicates the data lost or modified between clients. It identifies the effected packets to the concerned user. The main cause of data loss is the interference of the ISP (Internet Service Provider) and firewall security applications. SWITZERLAND uses P2P (Pier to Pier) technology. This application can also identify the packets with a random pattern. It uses multi client functionality by which it can detect the loss data of more than one user connected to the same server. It also identifies the user to which the data belongs. SWITZERLAND is an application which is not restricted to the TCP technology in its functionality.

How to use Switzerland
How to run tests well basically any packets exchanged between Switzerland & client connected to same server are automatically tested. But to test across different server you can make use of there wiki page where there is a list of bit Torrent seeded and download.

For more info check it out.

Filezilla is a free FTP solution for client & server. A free software to make ftp connections to your web server upload / download files and manage your sites. Its a product by Mozilla Inc.  Its fast & reliable cross platform FTP, FTPS & SFTP client with features like :

• Easy to use
• Supports FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)
• Cross-platform. Runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, OSX and more
• Available in many languages
• Supports resume and transfer of large files >4GB

Personally i am big fan of the software and recently ran into a problem that involved recovering saved passwords in filezilla.

How to recover Saved / Quick Connect Passwords from Filezilla.

Well if you Google this question up you will probably land up with tons of software’s each claiming to help you recover password i tried a bunch of them and the results were pathetic also its a bit unsafe to trust such unknown software’s to recover you passwords for FTP as you don’t know if they transfer that information across the internet as well.

So the way out is quite easy and a little shocking to, shocking because its so easy that the file containing the sensitive information for your ftp access is not even encrypted. So if you want to recover the passwords all you have to do is follow the three easy steps:

1. First go to folder options and enable all hidden files
2. Two Go to ‘c:\document and settings \ [username] \ Application Data \ FileZill’ (in win XP / 2000 ) & “C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\FileZilla\” (in windows vista) or “/home/username/.filezilla/” (for linux)
3. Locate the files
   • filezilla.xml (stores morst recent server info including passwords)
   • recentservers.xml (stores all recent server info including passwords)
   • sitemanager.xml (stores all saved sites server info including password in plaintext)

Using notepad you can easily open the file and all the user / password and ftp information is displayed.

[Download Filezilla Free]

Ever wonder how to install PHP / MySQL / Apache on your local machine which could be either Windows Vista or Windows xp or even linux. One usually stumble upon such issues when we want to try out open source softwares before making a descion to deploy them on our web server  like installing wordpress or drupal or cms made simple and many more …. locally on your computer. But all these web application require PHP/MySql and Apache which if you try to install manually you will run into a night mare. So here is a list of top 5 easy install PHP / Apachie / MySql distributions setups which can simple turn you computer to a local webserver where you can install wordpress, drupal or any open source web application that is made in Php / MySql and Apache. (more…)