Something to Listen to - Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)

This is truly one of the best songs out there. Well, it isn't so much a song as it is good advice. If you know it, listen to it again. It's good for you. If you haven't heard of it yet, listen carefully.



The original artist for this song is Baz Luhrmann and you can get the CD here or buy the MP3 from here.

EdLog Solutions - A New Face in the Online Space

A really good friend of mine and his friends recently started a new company, which has now started an online division as well. It is called EdLog Solutions and they deal with online education / training and also website development. Now, I'm not getting paid for this post, but the only reason I'm putting this up here is because the guys behind this company are extremely bright and extremely dedicated. So, if you are in an organization that has requirements for online training, and you want to try something new, give these guys a try. What follows below is a description of EdLog Solutions, sent by them:

"You cannot ascribe cosmic significance to an earthly event. It's pure coincidence."

This dialogue from one of the recent movies got me thinking and prodded me to re-look at my career. Call it quirk of fate or coincidence, I joined my friend & college mate, and tried my hand at helping him with his training venture, which focusses on offering training programs for students, while I was taking a break from - regular, usual, you-know-what-I'm-talking-about, IT job. My interest in technology combined with the excitement I derived from the training domain led me into exploring a viable business enterprise. Voila! EdLog Solutions born.

At EdLog Solutions, we aspire to become an end-to-end service provider in the learning and development space. Our experience in developing and delivering the training programs has helped us evolve an optimum model for training and development. Through feedback and constant improvement, we have understood the key elements in maximizing training effectiveness and we are now in a position to utilize this model towards specialized training requirements such as blended learning and eLearning solutions.

While our primary service offering is training solutions, we also offer web design and development. In today's web world, establishing a web presence is critical for any organization, especially for newer ones. What better way to do this than start with a website? This service is mainly targeted at start-ups, small/mid-sized companies. That said, we also work with corporations on revamping their websites.

Please visit their site at www.edlog-solutions.com and have a look around.

Automatically Launch UAC Restricted Programs at Startup in Windows 7

Some people noticed from the screenshot for Everything in my previous post that I did not seem to use Windows XP. The screenshot was, in fact, taken from my Windows 7 machine. This led me to another interesting thought. If you have installed Everything on your Windows 7 (or Vista) machine, you would notice two things. The first is that the program does not launch at startup (meaning, it takes a few seconds to update the index each time you launch it manually). The second is that Everything wants admin access, meaning UAC comes in the way each time.

Well, those two observations are sort of related, as Windows Vista and 7 block programs from launching automatically at start up, if they require admin access. While some of you are thinking UAC annoyance, my thought is more towards “good security feature”. I actually appreciate this feature. The irritating part comes when apps that you know and trust don’t launch the way you want them to, as is the case with Everything.

Well, there is a work-around that takes a 5-minute one-time setup. But before I proceed with giving you the details, I must stress that UAC does serve a purpose and that you need to do the following only with a limited and strict set of apps that you really trust and need to launch with admin access at startup.

I am not going to list the steps one by one here, since there is already an excellent article by Greg Shultz, up on TechRepublic, where he details the steps with screenshots and explanations. He uses Event Viewer (a built-in Windows app) in his example, and consequently, in his last step (Figure F on his post), the shortcut for the app is given as C:\Windows\System32\eventvwr.msc. You would obviously replace this with the full path of the app that you want to launch (in the default installation of Everything, for instance, it would be C:\Program Files\Everything\Everything.exe). The other is that he uses Windows Vista in his example, but it works just the same in Windows 7 as well.

Click here to head on over to TechRepublic to read Greg’s post.

Everything Search Engine

If you are among the 60% of the world's computer population that uses Windows XP, you're probably tired of seeing the Microsoft animated characters doing their stuff for half an hour while you search for a file that you know is on your hard drive, but just don't know where to look. And you've probably tried to install other search clients like Microsoft's own Live Search or Google's Desktop Search and seen better results. But you're probably still jealous of folks who have the faster search built into the start menu (in Windows Vista and Windows 7) or even more so of the folks on the Mac side with the superfast Spotlight.

What if I told you there was a search app for Windows that would make even the Mac guys go whoa at the speed in which results are populated, or indexing is done, or new files are added to the index? What if I further told you that this program is so lightweight that you would never notice it running; heck the installer is less than 400kB!

Excited? The program is called Everything Search Engine and it is made by a company called voidtools. It is simple and it is small (download the installer from their site). It installs in under a minute and wait, it finishes its indexing before you can return from your bathroom break. It really is that good!

It has a really simple user interface – search box and the results window directly below.

Everything Search Window

The results start popping up as you start typing and narrow down to the files that meet your criteria once you are done. You can right click on a result and choose from all of your standard Windows Explorer contextual menu items (open, open with, copy, paste, send to etc). The only downside to this app is that it does not have the capability to search for text within a file. It simply searches by file name alone. But for most of us, that is what a file search is most useful for.

Oh, and one final thing – if you have your hard disk formatted to NTFS, make sure that the Enable USN Journal Logging option (Tools > Options >> Volumes tab) is checked. USN, for those who are interested, is a Windows file system feature that maintains a real-time log of all changes made to files on the volume.

So, go ahead, give Everything a try. It is free and it will change your life… enough to make you come back and say, “thank you, for Everything”

Fond Memories

 
It's been almost a year since I've left Cognizant - the place where I started my professional career. On my last day, I had taken a few photographs, some of which I used to put together a slideshow. Well, that's what you see above. Some fond memories, some really good friends and one helluva great fun loving team.
Originally posted on Sunday, August 30, 2009