Chrome Beta for Android!

Google Chrome Internet browser is now available on Android Market but for only for selected countries (see the list here). 

The main feature of Android version Chrome browser is that it supports synchronizing your open tabs, bookmarks, history, and omnibox data from your desktop version of the browser. There is also Chrome to Mobile option which allows sending web pages from your PC to your mobile device. Among other interesting options there is USB Web Debugging, allowing debugging web pages from Chrome Desktop via USB. 

Market link.

Installing MongoDB as a Windows Service

In the past, posts with title like this were a real treasure. They usually meant that installing some new technology on a production machine and configuring it to run properly were a real pain. Not to mention performance, stability, and security issues.

Well, seems like those days are well and truly done with. MongoDB natively supports being installed as a Windows service and can easily be done from the command line by passing correct command parameters to mongod. It is as simple as:

mongod --install
mongod --service
mongod --remove
mongod --reinstall

There are additional parameters for setting up service name and credentials but that is really all there is to it. Setting the database path and other options can simply be added to the command line that installs or runs the service, like

mongod --logpath d:\mongo\logs\logfilename.log --logappend --dbpath d:\mongo\data --directoryperdb --install

or

mongod --logpath d:\mongo\logs\logfilename.log --logappend --dbpath d:\mongo\data --directoryperdb --service

For more details check http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Windows+Service

Google+ to Twitter

The last service I used for posting Google+ messages to Twitter stopped functioning but, fortunately, there are others that are active and well. I have now linked Google+ and Twitter via

http://manageflitter.com/plus

Free Online MongoDB

MongoLab has a free startup account with up to 240MB of storage with MongoDB. Great way to get started with cloud hosting of the data storage.

More details: http://mongolab.com/about/pricing/

Agile Atlas

http://agileatlas.org/

Agile Skills Project, from the members of the Scrom Alliance. Great overview of Scrum, reference card, etc.

Android nears 50% in the U.S.

Android is nearing the 50% market share in the United States. Apple also on the way up but still on the distant second place. All the others are on the way down. The period compared is from August to November 2011.

http://www.gsmarena.com/android_nears_50_mark_in_the_us_comscore_reports-news-3594.php

Google URLs

Some Google services, like Tasks and Contacts have initially been integrated with other services like Gmail but now can be accessed directly. URLs are sometimes not so obvious, so I'm listing some of them here.

• Tasks - https://mail.google.com/tasks/canvas
• Contacts - https://www.google.com/contacts

Push-to-Talk

A huge number of people is using Internet for voice communication, to talk about business or catch up with their dearest. And it sucks when the connection quality is not top-notch because cut-offs in conversation appear, distortions in voice, etc., missing on parts of conversation and so on.

Lately I experienced these problems when talking to multiple parties and it is really annoying. I monitored the network connection while the conversation was taking place and noticed that download was going OK for a few seconds and then dropped for a few. Most popular voice chat programs, like Skype or GoogleTalk, stream the voice continuously while connected. This is probably OK when the connection is good. The amount of data transmitted is pretty good. But the problem is that the channel between the two parties needs to be uninterrupted. 

This led me to look for a solution in line with my childhood experiences with radio-amateurs, where you need to push a button to talk. It made sense that, in conditions of poor connectivity, a better quality of voice communication would happen if we could control when to transmit. That way only the actual speech would get sent, rather than the silence periods, which take quite some time. Burst transfer versus continuous transfer. 

So I found Loudtalks (http://loudtalks.com/). They have application for Windows and Android. The first test went quite well. It seemed a bit annoying to have to push the talk button every time but the fact that no parts of the dialogue got lost was more important. Then I thought how good it would be to have the transmission voice-activated and looked through the options. And it was right there - voice activated transmission with threshold settings was built in but not activated by default. Now this seems like a decent chat solution. Will have to test this in the coming period and in the longer conversations.

A really good thing about LoudTalks is that it keeps a history of voice messages, something like text chat, so you can listen to previous messages sent or received.

If you decide to use LoudTalks, the shortcuts (easy to find in Options dialogue) are: F7 = speak, Ctrl+F7 = hands-free (voice activation), Shift+F7 = repeat last message.

Internet Explorer Starts with Automatic Updates

Finally, Microsoft is moving the route other browsers adopted earlier and will start to automatically update Internet Explorer web browser on client machines. The main "excuse" mentioned for the decision was security but I find it more important being able to roll out new features and compatibility support for upcoming HTML 5.

This was the missing link as there are throngs of people still using old versions of Internet Explorer, making a huge barrier to adoption of HTML 5 as a platform. Fortunately, the share of old IE browsers on the web is dropping continuously, as seen on StatCounter's global stats.



Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16214912

Proxy Switcher

Nice and simple two-clicks proxy switcher for Windows. Freeware.

http://www.proxyswitcher.com/download.html