Transfer domain to namecheap in 2 steps

Transferring domains from any registrar to namecheap is quite simple and straightforward and involves only 2 steps. I am writing this to express how happy I am, on my digizol.com domain transfer experience. Before looking at the steps, let's check motivational factors behind my decision on transferring the domain to namecheap.

Motivations for namecheap

I had few motivations compared to my previous domain registrar.

1. Ease of use & great customer service rumor
   • Yes, this rumor proved true in my transfer experience
2. Username is my email address
   • Seriously! my previous domain registrar used a 7 digit number to identify me & I could never remember it. I believe it to be a security feature, but I am not happy with that approach.
3. Originally paid remaining period is carried forward
   • For my transfer, the expiry date was set including the remaining duration in previous registra. Read more details here
4. Namecheap promotions for transfers
   • With that, the cost is $ 9.02 at the time I did the transfer
5. Free Whois protection
   • This is free and saves some money but only for the first year, so I do not count this as a motivation. 

Steps in domain transfer

As mentioned above, this has only two steps.

Step 1 - Follow the straightforward UI

Search for the domain name, click transfer & follow the simple UI. I am not listing down the details as the steps are straightforward.

Step 2 - Chat with online support members

From the point you get stuck or looking for some help, simply use the support. The online chat support is extremely good, I would call it a rockstar. They will stay with you online and do all the needed configurations/changes and instructs on anything to be done on previous registrar's end. You chat will be completed only when everything is in place; at least that is how it ended for me 😄.

Disclaimer: I am not an employee of namecheap.com

Firefox: Dramatic change in release version patterns

History of Firefox starts in 2002, when a new flavor of Mozilla was released under the name Phoenix. With the release of 0.6 it was renamed as as Mozilla Firebird, but it lasted only for two releases. This most popular name "Firefox" was introduced with the 0.8 release, and it continues as of the time of this post. Initially, Firefox made a major release every two years with minor releases in between.

Two yearly
Version 0.1 - 2002
Version 1.0 - 2004
Version 2.0 - 2006
Version 3.0 - 2008

However in 2011, the release pattern completely changed which resulted in major releases within every one or two months duration as shown below.

 Monthly
 4.0 - 2011/03
 5.0 - 2011/06
 6.0 - 2011/08
 7.0 - 2011/09
 8.0 - 2011/11
 9.0 - 2011/12
10.0 - 2012/01

Particularly within first 6 months of 2013, there were 5 major releases (18.0 to 22.0).

So it is worth finding the reasons for this dramatic change in the release process. As per my understanding, this change had a direct relationship with the new comer Chrome browser in 2008. First major release of Chrome (1.0) was done few months after the Firefox 3.0 release. However in early 2010 Chrome started making major releases every few months and when Firefox 4.0 was out in 2011 March, latest Chrome release available was 10.0.

Mozilla team seems to have identified a potential problem when introducing Firefox over Chrome; release number of Chrome is way beyond Firefox (which may look as related to number years of existence by someone). So Firefox releasing pattern also seemed to follow this fact track, but the latest Firefox version 22.0 while Chrome is 30.

As a side note, I think it is worth mentioning a summary on this battle.
When Firefox was so popular in around 2006, Google funded Firefox and in return became the Firefox's default search engine. Interestingly, 2008 born Google owned Chrome became the most popular browser sending once most popular Firefox into the third position behind Internet Explorer. I personally believe Google did it perfectly, they had a great plan and won the battle well ahead where as Firefox team could not resist a lot.

Are You Leaving Office On Time or Late Continuously?

Before reading further; just try and answer the question "Are you leaving the office on-time or late continuously?" and keep the answer to yourself. Most of the employees in an organization have to follow a plan, stick to a schedule. Also there are estimates for the tasks that are pending completion. As an employee in an organization, if you are not leaving the office on time as planned, you must be spoiling the working culture of your organization. Others may feel fear to leave the office on time even if their tasks are completed. We are not discussing about getting late very rarely, but about getting late each and every day continuously.

There may be many excuses for getting late continuously. May be the estimates and schedules are not realistic, so you simply have to spend extra time to complete. May be you are not competent enough to complete those in given time frame. You may be working late to cover tasks of others since you are keen in completing the work according to the schedule. May be your house or compartment is not comfortable enough compared to the office, so you do not wish to leave soon. Or in worst case; may be you have a belief that if you leave early, the risk of getting you fired from the organization is higher.

Reasons to leave on time

Whatever excuses you make, you are harming yourself quite a lot than how much you help the organization to grow. We received a set of points regarding this from an anonymous, which is published below in blue color; with our comments in black color. Let us know if you know the author of this list so that we can give credit.

1. Work is a never ending process. You can never finish the work.
• True; however you must quantify the amount of work that has to be completed on a given time frame. However make sure that you complete what is agreed on time; if you do it, then you can consider that you have satisfied the expectations.
2. Interest of a client is not more important than your family.
• Completely agree, you should not consider the client as more important than your family at any instance. But you must know that a company must exist for you to work, and a company needs clients. So completing the promised tasks on time to keep the client's expectation is quite important; so do not let the client's expectations go down.
3. If you fail in life your boss or client will not be the person to offer a helping hand but your family and friends.
• Must be correct in many situations and organizations. However I have witnessed some organizations taking so many steps to help the employees as well as their families in need at the required moments. Your clients may not be there to help, but the organization will. Sadly if you are not in such a good organization, either try and get your organization to that state or just think a bit... there are plenty of organizations that require your service.
4. Life does not mean coming to office, going home and sleeping. There is more to a life. You need time to socialize, entertainment, exercise and relaxation. Don't make your life meaningless.
• It is better if you can read it few times and memorize. It covers almost all activities that most of you do not have time to complete. You are neglecting exercises since you do not have time; think about 24 hours of your day and see whether there is any task that you can compromise for exercising for 30 minutes.
5. A person who sits in office still late is not a hardworking person. He is a fool who does not know how to manage work within the stipulated time. Besides, he is a loser in life who does not have personal or social life.
• Staying late in office does not mean that you are a hard working person, but this statement may be false for few managers as they believe much in working late. If you have such a manager, may be it is the time to consider a switch (either the manager or the organization itself). Always keep in mind that productivity goes down dramatically when you work late.
6. You did not study hard and struggle in life to be a machine and live a meaningless life.
• An important point, if your life is like a machine where you do not have time for anything else other than your job; it is better to consider about changing the way you spend your time.
7. If your boss forces you to work late, just forward him this article. He will try to make his life meaningful too.
• Another good point, if your boss does not believe in leaving on time, it will not be easy for you to leave early. So first try to let him know the importance of leaving on time which will reflect soon on to the working culture. So consider sharing it with your co-workers including the boss.

What can you do to leave on time?

If you are in the habit of working late continuously, consider changing it by considering the above facts as reasons. Read Seven ways to leave the office earlier as a guide line in accomplishing this.

As the first step, set a reminder 30 minutes before the office leaving time, so by 5:30pm you will be automatically notified if you are set to leave at 6:00pm. After that reminder, you can consider winding up the task you are in and plan tasks for next day.

Most importantly, make sure to keep office tasks out of your head when you leave the office since you are leaving the office on time to gain time for you to socialize, entertain, exercise and relax.

Steve Jobs - Most innovative genius is no more

October 5th is going to be a sad day to technology lovers. As you all are aware; Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Inc. has passed away at the age of 56 on 5th October 2011. As common to everybody, he also did not have a smooth flow of nicely organized stages in his life; but Steve was praising that as the most important part that created the path to his innovations. One such example is the tragedy of getting fired from the Apple company which he co-founded. You already know this fact, but how would you have responded?

You will survive if you are fired from the company that you work for!! right? But what if you are fired from the company that you built from the scratch; and interestingly by the CEO recruited by yourself? Do you have the strengths to survive which Steve had?

Steve explained this situation later as;

"The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life."

Many people would explain this as "by the sadness of being a looser", but Steve said "lightness of being a beginner again".

Young Steve Jobs introducing the Macintosh

After getting fired from Apple, he founded NeXT Computer Inc. which Apple Inc. happened to buy after another 11 years because NeXT was doing so good; and Steve became the head again. At NeXT so many innovations came out; like an email where images and videos can be shared, a web framework called WebObjects which was later used in Apple applications like Apple Store. Most importantly NeXT's NeXTSTEP evolved as Mac OS X.
Under Jobs guidance, Apple created so many attractive items like iMac, iPod, iTunes Store. The revolutionary invention of multi-touch display iPhone changed the mobile phone industry dramatically.

Does "i" stand for Innovation?

According to Apple, "i" was initially used in iMac which stands for Internet. Later Apple used it for branding all consumer machines. However I prefer to consider this "i" to stand for "Innovative"; where iPhone would mean Innovative phone.
With the death of Jobs, people has started using "i" in front of the word sad (as iSad), does it make scene?

Stanford Commencement - The great speech

Let me finish this tribute with a quote from the Stanford Commencement Speech.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Since this genius is a Buddhist, may Steve attain Nibbana.

Facebook notification email settings can be customized

Facebook notification emails are received for most of the follow up events like comments on photos, tags in photos, wall comments and many more. For a regular Facebook user, it might be difficult to manage the amount of emails received; even some are a bit of less useful. Have you already started to hate these notifications? One such annoying instance is receiving notifications like "Xman commented on your friend Y-friend's image, video or status". This is useless (at least for us) if Xman is not a known person.


By identifying this fact Facebook has come up with a new feature to manage the notifications. According to Facebook team

"We're trying out a new feature to reduce the amount of email you receive from Facebook. Starting today, we are turning off most individual email notifications and instead, we'll send you a summary only if there are popular stories you may have missed."

All notification events including Photos, Videos, Links even Wall comments can be customized individually. This is not going to be too handy initially, but will be really useful later when this feature is familiar to users. To start with, there is a default-notification-list that Facebook team has created for us. This can be enabled with a check box selection at the top of notifications page.

With this Facebook users can enable/disable notifications according to individual interests while making sure the inbox contains only the important emails.

Related Article

• Gmail Multiple Sessions Alert: This account is open in 1 other location

Gmail Multiple Sessions Alert: This account is open in 1 other location

"This account is open in 1 other location at..." Gmail user interface provides this message when your account is used in multiple locations simultaneously. One of the most important and interesting security feature that any web mail service would wish to provide. I suppose Gmail is the only web mail service that has this type of security feature (let us know if any other does). Users become aware of any misuse of their Gmail accounts.

Gmail is countering the number of active sessions per account in providing this information; so "open in multiple locations" means that there are multiple active session for this particular account. Gmail also provides more details about each session making it easy to track the misuser. Access Type, IP address and Date/Time are displayed as details.

Effectiveness

All these details are visible to all web sessions including misuser's session; so the effectiveness of this feature is in doubt. For example, a misuser can sign out as soon as this information is displayed in Gmail account. However a solution for this will not be simple and easy. In the meantime, these information is not displayed in a very prominent place (shown at the very bottom of the page), only the misuser will use these information rather than actual (innocent) account owner.

Improvements

We are not highlighting the weaknesses by neglecting effort made in providing this feature. However, as an improvement; active sessions count can be shown at the top bar; so that all users will notice the multiple session usage. However this should be displayed only when multiple sessions are active.

Chrome or Firefox - which browser to choose?

Chrome is the newest baby in browser family or the next competitor in browser war. What ever it is, Google released their browser named Chrome. But Mozilla Firefox is the most popular browser in the world right now and Google was the major supporter for Firefox. Even while supporting it, they have built their own browser free and open source. Here we are looking at the two browsers and trying to compare them to decide whether to switch to the new one or not leaving our old but fascinating friend Firefox?

Interesting features

1. One Process per each tab
Tab is not another thread running inside the browser process; there is a separate process per tab. Even if one tab crashes, the rest of the tabs will be running as nothing happened; which was not available in Firefox. This is one of the most interesting features.

2. New tab is filled with useful links
For a new tab in Firefox, you can load a predefined page, a blank page or a predefined set of page links (using an extension). But you would be much happier to see a set of links that you dealt with in recent past; Chrome comes exactly with that. The new tab will show a set of links;

• Most visited pages
• Recently closed
• Recently Bookmarked

I do not think the last one will be much useful, but the other two will be pretty handy.

3. Rich Location bar
Location bar in Chrome is a combination of location bar & search bar. You can directly type a url or a search keyword, also it comes with suggestions.
Using separate location bar per each tab is also an interesting move, each tab looks like individual browser instances; while in firefox you have single location bar shared by all tabs.

4. Speed
Stephen Shankland at CNet has posted an article on speed, and it tells most of the details. However Brendan at MozillaZine has published another set of testing statistics. So we'll have to check some statistics done by an independent party to get a clear view. Anyway Chrome is starting up so fast compared to any other browser.

Some complains

Since Chrome is still in beta, this may be a good time to suggest some features or improvements. Following are some complains that we have.

1. No warning in closing
When multiple tabs are opened Firefox is used to show a warning in closing the browser, but Chrome does not and closes immediately. Since people can accidentally close the browser better to add it soon.

2. Displaying different fonts
Some of the fonts are not displayed smoothly as Firefox used to do. Above image shows how the same content is displayed in two of these browsers.

3. No XML viewer
May be it is not a must to have a XML viewer in a browser, but we are used to it. Firefox and IE both have good XML viewers, but Chrome lacks it. Similar to this Opera and Safari also do not have this feature. Many people happened to work with XML files every day and having an XML viewer in the browser is an added advantage.

4. Security issues
Chrome has exposed to a set of known security issues by using an older version of WebKit, which had already been fixed. Anyway we expect Google to fix it soon.

Main Concern

Above all of these our main concern is the lack of support for extension development. We are used to live with some great extensions with Firefox, which we are not experiencing with Chrome. Since it is still in beta version, we should wait for extension support. However no API is released for extension development, users will have to wait longer than expected to see some useful extensions. There are so many extensions that makes our lives easier and better. Few of them are;

• NoScrip
• Adblock
• Gmail Manager

What are the other reasons that you are not switching to Chrome straightaway?

Use "object" instead of "bean" in Spring Configuration XML

Spring configuration xml is used for defining the wiring between different object. It has the following format.

<beans>
    <bean id=".." class="...">
        ...
    </bean>
    ...
<beans>

Classes specified in the configuration file will be instantiated by Spring container. And those objects will be bound with each other accordingly. Any java class specified under attribute named "class" will be instantiated. There is no much limitations on the classes that can be used for this here. It does not need to be a JavaBean. It can be any POJO (plan old java object). The only requirement is that this class must be possible to instantiate.

So why does this tags are named <beans> and <bean>? This seems to be misleading.

In Spring one way of binding objects is using the beaness of java classes. But that is not that only way to bind them together, constructor can be used to bind objects. So if configuration file used tags as follows, it would be more meaningful.

<objects>
    <object id=".." class="...">
        ...
    </object>
    ...
<objects>

Seems it is used only to express that beaness can also be used in initialization. Would you agree? May be we are not seeing the exact reason. This is completely open for discussion.

Related Articles

• Firefox: Dramatic change in release version patterns
• Are You Leaving Office On Time or Late Continuously?

Is Partitioning a hard disk into multiple drives bad?

Hard disk partitioning is almost a must, according to what I have heard so far from my colleagues and other professionals (may be same for you). I am used to partition a hard disk at least to three drives; "C" for OS (Operating System), "D" for programs and "E for other files like documents, archives. But I got a chance to read some material on hard drive performance and it completely argued my partitioning practices.

When considering the speed in reading a file from hard drive following are two important points related to partitioning.

1. Files in outer tracks are readable much faster
It is a well known theory in hard disk read/writes that performance is much higher in outer tracks compared to inner tracks.

2. When partitioning a hard disk, the first partition is created in the outer tracks
In creating partitions, the first partition is created in the outer most tracks while each new partition is created in inner tracks than the previous. So the partitions in a hard disk would look as the above diagram.

These two are important point to consider. We are creating partitions in order to organize the files according to mentally created categories; like operating system in one partition while program files in another partition. But I did not organize the files in the frequency they are used (which I should have thought of). There are some files frequently used, but placed in different drives without knowing this speed factor. For example; some java projects are stored in drive "E" which I happened to use daily.

So what are the solutions we can think of, in order to achieve the best performance of the hard disk considering these facts? I can think of following two solutions.

1. Create only one partition
One option would be to refrain from creating more than one partition and storing all the files in there. Then we would have to store the most frequently used files in outer tracks while hardly used ones in inner tracks. However this is not that possible, since user is not deciding the location of a file when saving into hard drive. The only solution will be to use a defragmenting software to organize the files later according to the accessing frequency.

2. Store files on partitions according to the frequency of use
We would create a set of partitions same as we used to do earlier, but with a different intension. Files will not be saved in each drive depending on the type or categories, but according to the frequency. The most frequently used files will be stored in drive C while least used files in Drive E. But then again, memorizing the file locations will not be easy.

What is the method are you using in your computers? Do you have any experience in above mentioned suggestions? We welcome your ideas and experiences or any other suggestions.