I started my career working in Linux and continue to do so. I recently bought a laptop with Windows 7. I like windows 7 for bringing back the performance which was lost in Vista.

I am so much used to writing code in vim and using shell for doing all development that I felt I need to look around for making windows 7 my development box.

You might argue I should use cygwin, I wanted to use native applications.

Search is ON

Command Shell:

I looked around for possible shell for windows. Windows comes packaged with cmd.exe and powershell. Powershell seemed like it will fit the bill for my requirement. My major requirement is to run python, vim, mercurial and any other software needed for development.

Editor:

I have been using vim for past 7 years and could not think of using any other editor for development. I searched whether I can get vim for windows. There are multiple versions available for Windows and found vim for win32 console, just what I wanted (http://www.vim.org/download.php#pc).

Add the editor to the PATH.

If you use some other editor, I am sure it would have been ported.

Other utilities:

Other unix utilities like grep, awk, sed, less, tee, tar and more are used in day to day work. I thought basic development environment will be complete only after I have those in my laptop. Fortunately, most everything is ported to windows and is available @ gnuwin32.sourceforge.net. If you are lazy to download packages one by one, there is another project in sourceforge which takes care of automating the download process (http://getgnuwin32.sourceforge.net/). All you need to do is download one package, extract it and run download.bat and install.bat found. Voila, all command line utilities are in your system. Check readme file for further information.

Thanks to everyone who worked on porting these software to windows, I have a workable environment in windows!

I am not claiming that this setup can replace a development environment setup on linux. This setup helps me do what i wanted to do. I feel at home if i use shell thats all .

IBM presented at December 2009 the Solution Edition for Cloud Computing, a solution offering for large enterprise customers providing the automation and management framework necessary to get started with cloud computing. This solution provides the key components for cloud computing:

# A foundation for the cloud offering massive virtualization, resiliency and security capability provided by IBM System z
#  Automation and management capability for the lifecycle of cloud computing services provided by IBM Tivoli software

This solution offers customers a framework for cloud computing, but in order to realize true value a cloud computing workload is desirable.

Yahoo has just released a new application which brings their location-aware platform Fire Eagle to Facebook’s social network. The new app called “Friends on Fire” lets you easily share your current location with a set of trusted friends. Fire Eagle users can also share short, Twitter-like posts with each other. These are quick updates and tips tied to your location and displayed on a map within Facebook. In addition, the Fire Eagle team has also introduced a FireFox Extn that lets you update your location with just one click.

Friends on Fire

When you click the “Get Started” button in the Friends On Fire Facebook application, you’re redirected to Yahoo’s Fire Eagle page where you have to sign in with a Yahoo ID. If you don’t already have one, then you’ll need to create one here – an extra step that may be a bit off-putting for new users.

Once you’ve signed in, you must provide an email address for receiving important updates from Fire Eagle. You then must also specify at what intervals you want to receive an email that asks if you’re still comfortable sharing your location. The choices you’re given are “once per month,” “once every 3 months,” and “don’t bother.” Finally, you have to accept the terms of service and give the Facebook app access to your location.

Back in Facebook, you’ll be shown the other Fire Eagle users among your friends and given the opportunity to connect with them. You can also configure additional settings like how exact the location updates are, who can see them on the map, and whether or not the posts update your wall.

[Read More]

Mozilla announced it will dump Version 3.1 as the name of the next edition of Firefox and instead call it Version 3.5.

“As recently proposed, the version number of the Shiretoko project will be changed to Firefox 3.5 before the upcoming fourth beta release,” said Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s director of Firefox, in a brief entry to the company’s developer blog.

The name change has been under discussion for several weeks, prompted in part by calls from developers who thought that the “3.1″ moniker didn’t properly reflect the amount of new features and changes from last June’s Firefox 3.0.

“The increase in scope represented by TraceMonkey  and Private Browsing, plus the sheer volume of work that’s gone into everything from video and layout to Places and the plug-in service make it a larger increment than we believe is reasonable to label ‘.1,’” Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, said in a message to a company forum last week. “[Firefox] 3.5 will help set expectations better about the amount of awesome that’s packed into Shiretoko.”

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Google today finally announced its pricing plans for its App Engine service. Google’s App Engine allows developers to run their web applications on Google’s infrastructure and, until today, was only available in a free, but restricted, version. The free version currently gives developers up to 500MB of persistent storage and CPU power and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month. Starting today, however, developers will also be able to purchase additional resources, which will enable them to scale their apps beyond these free quotas.

Some of the most popular apps that are currently using Google’s App Engine are BuddyPoke, Lingospot, Best Buy’s Giftag.com, and Mental Floss.

Pricing

Here is the new pricing scheme according to Google’s blog post:

• $0.10 per CPU core hour. This covers the actual CPU time an application uses to process a given request, as well as that for any Datastore usage.
• $0.10 per GB bandwidth incoming, $0.12 per GB bandwidth outgoing.  This covers traffic directly to/from users, traffic between the app and any external servers accessed using the URLFetch API, and data sent via the Email API.
• $0.15 per GB of data stored by the application per month.
• $0.0001 per email recipient for emails sent by the application

Google first announced that it was planning to offer these pay-as-you-go resources to developers last May, and today’s prices are at the lower end of the ranges that Google announced back then.

In general, Google’s prices seem to be slightly cheaper and less complicated than Amazon’s pricing schemes for using its EC2 and S3 service. It should be noted, however, that Amazon offers a far larger feature set than App Engine. App Engine only supports the Python programming language, while EC2 gives you access to a complete, remotely hosted, on-demand operating system.

[Source via readwriteweb]

Google has unveiled a new feature in Google Labs section of GMail. It allows for saving your mails for reading it offline. This is built over Google’s Gear framework and requires Google Gears plugin to be installed on your browser.

The syncronization will update the online and offline copies, but Google will use an algorithm that will determine the messages downloaded on each sync. US and UK english users will have this feature enabled.

Check your Google Labs setting in GMail to see if it has been activated for your account.