Rackspace is down again

This is the 4th time this year and i cannot believe this.

The company i work for www.perfectforms.com is up while http://app.perfectforms.com is down. Both are hosted at rackspace.

The interesting part is i was trying to log into the customer login at rackspace that was failing to.

Last time Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier acknowledged the outages harmed the company's reputation. I don't know what he is going to say now.

Here something more he added:
"Any time we have an incident like this, it does impact our credibility," Napier said in July. "The only way we earn it back is we have to execute at a high level for a long time."


Napier, should we stick with you?

Using Javascript to Read Query string

I was kind of having an interesting problem today when trying to build something for my company PerfectForms.

I was building a form and I need to dynamically read the queryString and pass it to the embedded script which creates the form at runtime.

I was trying couple of things and searched online, nothing really kind of gave me a complete solution (Well, my lazy butt was expecting a complete solution). So I kind of placed it together from different articles which actually works.

I am placing it here in case someone needs it.


function GetParamValue(paramID){
var strToRead = window.location.search;
//Returns the URL including the query
string.paramID= paramID.replace(/[\[]/, "\\\[").replace(/[\]]/, "\\\]");
var regexS = "[\\?&]" + paramID + "=([^&#]*)";
var regex = new RegExp(regexS);
if (typeof (strToRead) == 'undefined') strToRead= window.location.href;
var paramValue = regex.exec(strToRead);
if (results == null)
return "";
else
return paramValue[1];
}

now you can call the above funtion by passing in the URL.

To get the URL use window.location.search

You can use: < input type="text" value="" id="xyz" />
< input onclick="javascript:GetParamValue('qqq');" value="Read Param Values" type="button" >
Hope this helps.

James Cameron's Avatar

The highly expected and most-hyped movie Avatar from James Cameron's is releasing tomorrow (Dec-19th 2009).

Story: In the 22nd century, wheelchair-bound Marine Jake Scully (Sam Worthington) embarks on a corporate-run, military-backed experiment in which he and a select group of academics -- led by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) -- can fully control avatars that look exactly like the Na'vi: the lean, blue-skinned native population of a distant world called Pandora. On his first outing as his AVATAR, Jake is saved by Na'vi female Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) -- and then captured by her clan. They decide to spare Jake's life as long as he agrees to learn the Na'vi ways from Neytiri. He does; but then he's told by maniacal Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) that he'll be spying on the Na'vi to make it easier to remove them from their home, an ancestral tree that's rooted above a deposit of an unbelievably valuable substance called "Unobtainium" (pun intended). As Jake becomes more and more involved with Neytiri and her people, he's forced to choose between following orders and helping the Na'vi.
(Thanks to: http://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/avatar/details)

Here is another review:
http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/talking_pictures/2009/12/avatar-3-stars.html


Time Magazine mentions in their latest 3D article that the budget for Avatar has ballooned to a “cost in excess of $300 million”, and I’m pretty sure they mean before press and advertising. To this day, the highest estimated film budget was $300 million for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. So If Time Magazine is correct, Avatar is now the most expensive movie of all time. The article has a bunch of cool tidbits. For instance, Steven Spielberg predicts Avatar will be the biggest 3-D live-action film ever. Cameron says that “every film I’m planning to do will be in 3-D.” Peter Jackson makes the claim that he believes “that almost any movie benefits from 3-D.”

Read more: Avatar’s Budget Exceeds $300 Million? Most Expensive Movie of All Time?

3 Free Tools to clean your Computers

Most of the time, my co-workers or my family members come to me calling for help to save their computers/laptops from Virus.

I would have cleaned Kamal's (my wife) laptop several times. Every time I give her a new desktop or laptop she will manage to get new virus within weeks. Finally, I gave up on the cleaning job and got IMac which has kept her away from bothering me :-)

She still uses a laptop which has windows-7 that has been pretty good until now !!!(touch-wood).Ofcourse, I have installed Avast!, a free version of antivirus.

I am pretty sure that there would be quite a few people who might need similar help. Thanks to Kamal!!, who has helped me to find various ways to clean the virus. Among them, I would like to share 3 effective steps to clean the virus.

Step 1: IOBit

IOBit will clean all your registry,cookies and Temporary files.If you want you can also de-fragment. The download is free. To download and install, click on http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html?Str=download

Step 2: Avast!
Now, run Avast! full scan on your system and set the protection level on high.It will find the most obvious ones and do a pretty decent clean. It might take couple of hours depending on the number of files you have, but just remember to run a full scan. You can download Avast! for free:
http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

Step 3: Bitdefender
Now, run Bitfinder full scan. It will ask you to install Active-X control. After installing it, start the scan from the browser. The scanning will take atleast 5-6 hours depending on the number of files you have. You can download for free - http://www.bitdefender.com/scanner/online/free.html


These 3 steps has helped me most of the time to clean the virus.If you think that the virus is not yet cleaned then try doing a Full Restore on your desktop/laptop. The only problem with full restore is that you will loose all your data.So, I would suggest you to take a back-up before restoring the system.

Hope this helps you!! Please do write to me about your comments.

I shall write about how to restore your desktop/laptop in my next article.

Interaction at its high

Microsoft is working on new Project code named "Natal" for XBOX 360. This is in relation to Jonny Lee's project which I had posted earlier (I am not sure if Johnny lee is working on this project, but yes he is working for Microsoft when I last heard). it is a complete new innovative way which is going to change the way the video games are played or how the online shopping is done.

I was speechless after looking at this video 3 months back. (yes! I was lazy to write it earlier). Check the video below -




Cool huh!!

What else !! can be done with WII remote

Nintendo claims that 60 million WII consoles have been sold worldwide as of March 2009. This significantly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales. This makes the WII Remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. It also happens to be one of the most sophisticated device. It contains a 1024x768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking upto 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly out performs any PC "webcam" available today. It also contains a +/-3g 8-bit 3-axis accelerometer also operating at 100Hz and an expandsion port for even more capability.

Johnny lee has created multiple projects/R&D with the WII remote and here is an small demo that he had done at the Ted Conference (http://www.ted.com/).



You can check all his projects on http://johnnylee.net/projects/

I also suggest you guys check other inspiring projects/videos on Ted

Cool Payment System

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and the quiet startup formerly known as Squirrel are finally opening up a bit. The company now called Square, as we noted back in October, has launched a website for its iPhone payment dongle, although it's still in somewhat private beta testing. TechCrunch managed to catch up with Dorsey, who gave a brief overview of the product and then showed it off by charging $4 for a cup of coffee -- so it goes in San Francisco. See Square in action after the break.





Article Taken from
http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/01/square-iphone-payment-system-gets-itself-a-website-showcased-in/