Software Tester

Earlier this morning, I came across an email that was sent from FFO yahoo group regarding software tester. I was hilarious-ed by it. The content is just an image (refer below) that very very precisely describe the phenomena of software industry. Since I was once an intern at a local MSC company working as a tester, I agree by the picture and acknowledged that working as a tester is really a pain in the ass theoretically eventhough physically it does not require much energy as construction worker does. As the current industry suggest, software tester do get paid an average of USD60,000 per annum. That's USD5000 = RM17500 (1USD=RM3.50) per month. It significantly shows that the job is really hard in terms of ensuring reliability and credibility of a software and it's vendor respectively. Thus, being a tester means that a person must be really detail, informative, and responsible (level of responsibility is bigger than developer). Planning on being a software tester? I might interested after minusing its responsibility demand.

Ur mobile phone is a gem

Its been a long month since I write something here, so now I felt propelled to share my insights, on mobile phone. For me, a mobile phone is a must for everyone (should own 1 starting in high school). I got my first mobile phone when I was 16. It was Nokia 3310. Of course it is outdated this day. The one game I like on my first phone is the snake puzzle game eventhough its just black and gray. At first, I'm not so fuzzy about mobile phones, but being a computer science student has dragged me into knowing what it means by owning a mobile phone. The basic purpose for mobile phone is for calling and messaging, no one doubts that. But, mobile phones this day offer much more than just what I stated. A mobile phone in your hand is like holding a gem, its so precious that if you lose it, you will felt something missing in your chores. If there is ultimate mobile phone out there, it must include what I list below (based on current market, aside from making calls and messaging):

First: 3G

For those who doesn't know what 3G means, it depicts the generation of mobile phones technology. Currently, it is 3.5G. Rumours has it by mid 2010, 4G will emerge. What's the difference between the Gs? Its the speed of your mobile phones connecting to the world. At 3G, its 384,000 bits per second (fast enough for real time video streaming). Rumours also has it by 2010, more websites will be optimized for viewing on mobile phones which means more and more users will actually use their mobile phones for browsing the internet. Example of big company that has optimized their website for viewing on the phone are google mail, yahoo messenger, facebook, etc.

Second: Camera

If you have the idea of buying a digital camera (not dslr), forget it. Invest the money on buying a mobile phone with good camera. I once read on a magazine (a month ago) stated that the number of nokia phones with camera sold worldwide is more than that of digital camera. Besides, you get almost the same picture quality as conventional camera does. Take for example sony ericsson phone (the K and C series). It is cybershot technology with image stabilization, flash, face detection, etc etc that delivers the same (or more) quality as digital cameras are. So, instead of buying a RM600++ something on digital cameras, buy a mobile phone with camera (3 Mega Pixels and above should be enough). Its Many in 1.

Third: Media

Media = Pictures + games + songs + video. Very useful to loafing around than just standing like a robot.

Fourth: GPS

Finding your way in the metropolitan city will never be easier when you have the GPS transceiver built right into your mobile phone. Using appropiate software, you could be your own map director at no time.

Fifth: Wi-fi

A great features to have if you often spending your time at that mamak store, instant food restaurant, KL, and anywhere else that has internet on the air for free. Just be prepared to bring along a solar charger for extra phone energy.

Hmm, I think that is all I can list as far as my knowledge can go. It's not detailed though, but if you want to know more, just use my newly-installed IM Box at the right bottom corner to ask me instantly (when I'm onlinelah, hehe). My point here, we all need to get updated and the way to do it, grab any phone that has the features I listed above (fourth and fifth is optional, really). Be an explorer, optimized your gem to your advantage and you might get what everyone wants: unbored life anytime, anywhere, and anyway you like it =).

A must have software for machine

Hi,

This time around I want to talk about a must have software to make your computer do almost everything. Even if you use different Operating System(OS), as long as the software support it, this guide applies. I categorized the software by their functionality.

1) Internet Browser

If you use Windows OS, you probably familiar with its Internet Explorer(IE) browser and must have use it most of the time to surf the net. Although IE is good, it is not much 'user friendly and customizable' and that is why I want to suggest to you to use Firefox(v3.0.10 as to date) from Mozilla. It is a browser that is much better than IE and I'm not just saying that. Firefox came with many addons, a free tiny program embedded into firefox that can perform very interesting stuff. For example, an addons called Fire Gesture enabled you to open new tab, close windows, refresh, etc at the tip of your mouse movement. Now that is cool. You can also customize your firefox appearances to use the theme of your likings (I use theme from Personas). If you are very serious into firefox, you will soon discover a fact that you can download videos just from your firefox browser too(hint - under the about:cache) and so many other things.

2) Office Application

OK, I'll admit that almost all the machine in the world has microsoft office installed in them. But it is not free (came with the Windows OS that we pay to use). So, an alternative to microsoft office is OpenOffice developed by Suns Microsystems. It is an open source software that can be installed on almost any machine running any type of OS. If you use Linux OS, you probably has seen it. I am yet to explore what features OpenOffice has that makes it better than microsoft office version. Other than its free and updated regularly with new features, it is portable too (don't you know it) across u3 platform.

3) Image Editing

There are 2 image editing software I recommend you to use and it is both free. The first one is Paint.NET (currently v3.36)from microsof. Although it sounds too good to be true, it is free (maybe due to competition) but it is only supported on Windows OS with .NET framework 2.0 and above installed. The 2nd one is GIMP (currently v 2.6) which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Just from the words GNU, you should already know that it is free to use. Rumours said that GIMP is better than other image editing software but it is hard to get use to.

4) Video Player

This one no doubt I preferred VLC media player (latest v0.9.9). It can play almost any video format presents unlike WMP or other video player that requires codecs installed firsthand. It is very light, easy to use, and yet offer wider range of functionality. This one is a must in your machine. Did I said its free too.

5) Antivirus

1 fact you should know first: "the best antivirus program is not free :(". Oh yes, if you are serious about protecting your machine, buy an antivirus software. Although there are a wide range of free antivirus program out there, the paid one is 3x better than free one. The current one I use in my machine is Norton Internet Security (NIS) from Symantec. Norton is the fastest, low overhead antivirus program you could ever find on the planet right now. Till now, I'm not worry of having to stick any USB device to my machine or open up malicious site coz I know Norton will protect me. You should know that guys from Symantec are very expert in security, so the software developed by them is surely reliable. The cost to buy NIS is about RM200/60usd for 1 year protection(3 PC protected) and after that you should renew the license at the same cost annually.

6) PDF Viewer

In the PDF Viewer category, I'm looking for something light that load faster and easy to use. While we all famimliar with adobe reader, we shouldn't keep aside Foxit Reader (latest v3.0) which exactly the type of PDF viewer that fulfil the above criteria, it is light and easy to use. Compared to adobe reader, it flaunted.

OpenDNS

Attention to all system admin out there!

Conficker a.k.a. Downadup Virus is invading your network and what do you do to stop it? Follow this advice: change your DNS server, use OpenDNS server instead (more info). It's free, reliable, smarter, and faster. You boost your network performance at the same time as well. So, whatever ISP that you subscribe to, change the DNS server configuration (it's just a matter of changing ur dns server ip address - instruction here). Read this:

"The latest variant of Conficker is now churning through 50,000 domains per day in an attempt to thwart blocking attempts. Consider this: at any given time we(OpenDNS) have filters that hold well over 1,000,000 domains (when you combine our phishing and domain tagging filters). 50,000 domains a day isn’t going to rock the boat." source: http://blog.opendns.com.

Get going!

Buying a graphic card? Read this first...

Seriously speaking, most of us don't know what we are buying when we first purchase a graphic card. Me myself, when heard about graphic card, the first thing flashed in my mind is we need it (the graphic card) to play games, so that all the animations will look smooth and crispy. The weirder the graphic card look, the more power we thought it is. This in theory basically right and it should make sense to novice when buying their first one, but its not quite true.

Information outside the box of the graphic card is essential for us to rate whether the card we are going to purchase is on par to what we need. It is worth to note first however that the basic functions of the graphic card is to derive an image from a stream of binary bits. This deriving process mathematically is so complex that if we put it to our CPU (processor attached to the mainboard) to process it, it will consume all our computer resources. Have you ever heard the word 'rendering', it refers to the deriving process and it was very customed to those specialized in animation industry. Sometime it may takes weeks just to render an image. That's to show how complex it is. Having a good graphic card saves these rendering time.

A good overall measurement of a card's performance is its frame rate, measured in frames per second (FPS). The frame rate describes how many complete images the card can display per second. The human eye can process about 25 frames every second, but fast-action games require a frame rate of at least 60 FPS to provide smooth animation and scrolling.

Components of the frame rate are:

1) Triangles or vertices per second: 3-D images are made of triangles, or polygons. This measurement describes how quickly the GPU can calculate the whole polygon or the vertices that define it. In general, it describes how quickly the card builds a wire frame image.

2) Pixel fill rate: This measurement describes how many pixels the GPU can process in a second, which translates to how quickly it can rasterize the image.

The graphics card's hardware/specification also directly affects its speed. For example, given a specification "GeForce 7950 GX2 SLI", the corresponding hardware stats are:

Graphic bus technology : PCI Express
GPU clock speed (MHz) : 1000 (500 per GPU)
Size of the memory bus (bits) : 512 Bit
Amount of available memory (MB) : 1GB (512 per GPU)
Memory clock rate (MHz) : 1200 (600 per GPU)
Memory bandwidth (GB/s) : 76.8 (dependent on bus technology, in this case PCIe)
RAMDAC speed (MHz) : 400
Pixel fill rate (Billion pixels/sec) : 24
Vertices per second (Billion) : 2

Source:http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce_7950.html

*Scalable Link Interface (SLI) - A technology developed by NVIDIA for combining 2 or more Graphic Processing Unit(GPU) together for better performance.

So, when you want to buy one, ask the sales person about the graphic card in terms of the above specification so that you can know whether it gives value for what you paid. Keep in mind that the bigger the number(from the above stat) the better the GPU. Happy shopping..

DLNA

Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is a cross-industry standard supported by leading consumer electronics, computing industry, and mobile device manufacturers that supposedly will enable a seamless environment for consumers to share and grow new digital media content within a network area.

Works somehow like bluetooth does except that it has more area range, DLNA is a new standard covering both wired and wireless environment that will allow distribution of media content through the 2 networks environment. Since it is supported by many leading electronics goods manufacturers, it is expected to be the new crave of the technology that will give value to the consumers.

Just imagine, we buy a camera and take photos with it. Supposedly the camera adopted the DLNA standard, it will be very convenient to move photos around to another DLNA-based device such as TV or PSP just to view the image on a click effort. Examples of DLNA-based device that can be seen on the market is on mobile devices category, take for example Sony Ericsson W715.

So, in summary, I could say that DLNA will enable consumers to easily acquire, store, access, and share digital content within DLNA-based device interconnection. Who knows whats the limit and hopefully plenty of features still to come.

Types of Domain

When you first subscribe to a web hosting service, most of the hosting service provider will give you privileges to create 'extra' domain in addition to your registered domain name. The term extra is vague. It refers to 3 types of domain available for implementation. The types of domain are:

1) Sub domain

A type of domain that belongs to the original domain. Configuration can be made to the web folder that will allow visitors to visit a website by creating a new folder called either 'www.domain.com/subdomain' or 'subdomain.domain.com'. Setting up sub domain is free and you can add as many as you want (memory allocation is the limit). It was generally use to separate different functions of your website. One maybe used to login, and another for chatting. Ever see mail.google.com or mail.yahoo.com. This is the type of sub domain.

2) Addon Domain

A domain that is much like the sub domain was but the only difference is it is treated independently of each other. It can be created within your web folder and visitor will look at it as it was a usual domain that does not related to your website. For example, instead of 'subdomain.domain.com', you can publish a new domain called 'subdomain.com'. See the difference. It was completely unrelated to the original domain. Usually, web hosting provider will charge an additional fee for each new Addon domain added.

3) Parked Domain

A type of domain that redirects visitors to a predefined domain. For example, if you type 'www.somename.com' on the address bar and press enter, you will be redirected to the predefined domain such as 'www.afterredirect.com' instead of the typed domain url. Webmaster loves to do this if they have multiple domain that conveys the same information and sometimes it can be used by spammers to redirect a visitor to a forged website. So be careful. Park domain is free to implement (depends on web hosting provider).


References if you have no idea what I wrote: http://webnet77.com/webstuff/parked-add-on-domain.html

A lappy niche

Planned to buy a laptop but unsure of which and what are the best for you? You come to the right place. I recommend for those who want to buy a new laptop, buy a new one or if you buy 2nd hand one, make sure it is still covered by warranty or the owner is your close friend, not a meet once friend.

So, here are the tips on buying a laptop. I would like to credit the shop assistant of All IT hypermarket, my tech-savvy friend kaizeru, and of course the triple www for giving me the tips:

1) Processor

Based on current trend, duo core is common. But please take note that out there there are dual core processor and core 2 duo processor. Technically, core 2 duo means there are 2 processor inside while the dual core means 1 processor that was divided into 2 parts. In this situation, it is recommended that you choose core 2 duo because it is faster than dual core.

2) Memory / RAM

Easy to say, the highest the better. If you are a kind of user that lives in the world of IT (like me a computer science student), 4GB RAM is enough. It depends on the type of Operating system you use too. I fyou use windows XP, 1GB RAM is sufficient, if you use Vista, At least 2GB RAM is recommended. The usual type of RAM is DDR SDRAM. Look at the DDR number though, as if it was DDRII, it is twice much faster than DDR. DDRIII is of course much faster. Depending on the processor, DDRII is more suitable to be used with core 2 duo since it can utilizes up to 75% of the bus speed, which is typically 667MHz (bus speed is the transfer speed of data between processor, memory (RAM), and Hard disk drive ; the highest the bus speed, the better).

3) Wi-fi

There are 4 standard in place currently for wifi which are 802.11 a/b/g/n. Each standard delivers different speed (refer here for more description), but the common are 802.11g and the latest is 802.11n. Technically speaking, 802.11n has a data rate of more than 100Mbps, double of 802.11g data rate.

4) Bluetooth

Bluetooth technology are common in laptops but it is unnecessary because it consumes laptop battery. If we intend to have bluetooth, just buy a bluetooth adapter (cost not more than RM30). Bluetooth can be used to setup a private area networks (PANs) on which involved user can transfer files up to 1Mbps between each other in a 10m range. Indeed limited, there are research going on to enhance the speed and range of bluetooth that will boast the speed equivalent to that of Wi-fi by the bluetotoh special interest group (SIG). The research propose that bluetooth use the wifi channel to transmit data on 'use as needed' basis.

5) Battery

Battery lifespan is the most important thing to consider when buying a new laptop. Typically, a laptop can reach a 3 hour mark base on norm usage. If we use it at home, plugged the power adapter and remove the battery from its compartment. Fail or forgot to do so, the battery may drain. Also, only charge when the battery is about to drain, don't charge if it still has more than quarter of power. Before buying a laptop, look at the battery power specification, there is a number like 4800mAh. The highesr the number, the longer the battery can last.

Welcome to d Tech Blog

Hi,

Thank you for visiting this website. First of all, my name is abdul khafiq a.k.a. caveman and I am the admin of this blog. My objectives for creating this blog is purely to discuss about the latest technology trend out there that we as the 4G might interested into. Aside from tips related to technology, I'll also with my soon to form group members will provide previews and professional opinions as the embracer of technology on computer-related stuff. So, hold on to your cash and visit this blog first hand as it might save you valuable bucks.

Hope you find this website useful. If you have any comments or would like to be the contributor of this technology community, please feel free to email me at cs.caveman@gmail.com. Before I end this article, check out http://stuff.tv/ for the latest gadgets reviews, news, and videos.

Peace