Category: Tech Reviews

Posts filed under Tech Reviews

IDEA IntelliJ 14 is out

Yes, you heard that right! I just got notification from the asset management team at ThoughtWorks that IDEA IntelliJ 14 is out and we get free upgrades (since we have an upgrade subscription). If you haven’t seen the features already, you should check it out! It looks like an upgrade...

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Developers beware of OS X Yosemite

It’s been a bit over 24 hours of using OS X Yosemite and I’m liking all the UI sugar it’s added. So far, my regular applications work fine after the upgrade but the IDEA based IDE set (IntelliJ, WebStorm, PyCharm, RubyMine etc.) seem to have a problem which has been also reported...

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Twitter Images Not Loading

I recently moved to Pune and of course to a new ISP (Tata Telecommunications in Pune). For strange reasons, images on Twitter wouldn’t load. Also, certain other websites weren’t visible. Simple enough fix was to ensure I wasn’t using Tata’s DNS’ but Google’s. If you have a 2 level setup...

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TerraCopy: Copying files the way it's meant to be copied

TeraCopy is an amazing tool for Windows which allows users to queue up copy requests, pause them, re-order them and change copy file lists at run time. It’s got a lot of power and great integration with Windows. It’s a tool which I highly recommend. Go check it out! I...

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Trying Minefield 3.7a1pre

Ever since I started using Win7 (first public beta) I have liked one thing about Internet Explorer that Firefox couldn’t do. This was the ability to use Win7’s Aero prowess completely rendering each tab in the Aero preview for Firefox. At the time, Microsoft hadn’t come out with the Win7...

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Dell Win7 x64 sound driver updates cause system freeze

I noticed that Dell had finally released updates for some of their drivers on their support site for a Dell Studio XPS 1640 on Windows 7 x64. I immediately started downloading them and after a reboot noticed that the update for IDT sound driver causes a freeze in any application...

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Sensible Vision's FastAccess on Windows 7

Sensible Vision came out with this pretty amazing software called FastAccess that does a decent job at facial recognition. But using it on Windows 7 has given me a few issues so I thought I should just talk about it. I’ve been using Windows 7 ever since the first beta...

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VS 2010 Beta 1: User Interface

Well, I’ve been browsing through Visual Studio 2010 for a while now. I’ve not gotten into coding but did get a chance to have a look at the User Interface for this product. Here are some of the things I’ve noticed. WPF is in: Oh yes, you heard right! The...

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Is Microsoft delaying Vista SP2 launch?

Microsoft is usually eager to release updates to its products. I have been seeing Vista SP2 news and downloadable links all over the internets. Release Candidates have been around for a while now but I never got any of them because I didn’t want to spend an hour or so...

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Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4.0 Beta 1 released

Yes, they are out! You might have been hearing about the two for the past week or two around the interneticle blogosphere. I certainly did and as with every VS release, I was excited. VS is the best IDE I have seen so its no surprise that a new release...

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Small Platform Development

I guess a lot of programming lovers are into development on smaller platforms. I certainly am one of them. I usually speak of work I’ve done on actual programs when in actuality, there are a lot more smaller pieces of code that I write that never get shown off publically....

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Wolfram|Alpha up for Official Public Release

Have you heard of Wolfram Alpha (also called WoflramAlpha or Wolfram|Alpha)? If you haven’t, you best do it quickly. Its going to be brought online in about 30 minutes from now. I can’t wait! :D Wolfram|Alpha is an answer-engine developed by Wolfram Research headed by British CEO and founder, physicist...

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Windows 7: A second look

I’ve had a bit of reprieve from work here and I finally got some time to install Windows 7 on my laptop. Though my desktop has had the latest builds available to me, they have all been on a test drive. My laptop however had to wait until I was...

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Checking out Windows 7 Build 7077

I got my hands on Windows 7 Build 7077 to take it for a spin. I’ve had Windows 7 discs and keys around for a couple of months now but I never really got time to install them. Finally, I set up the latest build a couple of nights ago....

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Dell Studio XPS 1640 Issues

Once upon a time, not too far long ago, I got a Dell Studio XPS 1640. I found that the laptop was great. I knew before I got it that it had a slight heating problem so ever since I got it, I would give it some cooling space. The...

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Apple Wheel: Is this meant to be a joke?

First of all, I should say, the only source I have is this youtube video. Apple wheel is a “revolutionary” laptop with no keyboard, just a giant scroll wheel :| I kid you not, that’s what it says :-/ The guy in that video apparently took 45 minutes to type...

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Windows 7 Public Beta Serial Key Fiasco

Earlier today at CES 2009, Microsoft announced that they would release 2.5 million copies of Windows 7 for public beta (build 7000) which came out around 25th December, 2008 for all those lucky people who have MSDN subscriptions. The plan was to release the ISO around 12 CET and a...

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Browser Tryouts: Google Chrome

Having heard all the rage about Google Chrome, I decided to try it out this Friday morning before leaving for college. What’s this I see? An online install? Of course it doesn’t mean much to people who have connections which can download the 7.3MB installer in a few seconds but...

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UAC = false;

So finally I got bugged with UAC enough to switch it off a few weeks back. Not all of it though. Just the module for approval from an admin and the elevation without prompting. Here is how you can do it. Click Start > Type “local” and enter (to open...

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The Undeletables

I had to reinstall vista once and so vista copied its already existing files into Windows.old like any other decent OS does. This was of course a move to help me keep the data I already had in C drive at that time. Now that my work with it was...

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The Vista Experience

I’m on Windows Vista Ultimate right now and here is what I feel. Its a really good OS since it performs quite well if you have a good box like mine (good being an understatement to most). But the problem is its extremely freakishly irritating rights system. I haven’t really...

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