Popo Cat - Software, News, How to tutorials

The Google Docs development team has finally added one of the most requested features to the document management service. The ability to share folders – and with those the documents contained in those folders – was not given until the new release yesterday. This new feature makes it more comfortable to work with several users on a project collaboratively without having to share all documents of the project separately.

All that it takes now is to move all documents of a project into one folder and share that folder with all project members. The share functionality is added to Google Docs accounts gradually. Notifications appear on screen on the next login if the feature has been enabled.

There are several options to share a folder. It is possible to right-click a folder and select the share option or to use the Share this folder option when the folder has been selected.

Another new feature is the possibility to upload multiple documents at once to Google Docs. The usual controls to upload multiple files (holding shift or ctrl while selecting files) are available to add multiple documents to the upload queue.

These two new features should come in handy for a lot of Google Docs users.

The Google City Tours online application provides an interesting alternative to traditional ways of exploring a city with the help of travel guides or guided tours. It is basically a Google Maps application that provides three day tours for many of the world’s most popular cities. All the user needs to do is to enter the name of a city and the country. Google City Tours will then display information about the sights in the left sidebar and a visual representation on Google Maps on the right.

Each tour is taking the day the sights are visited into account to include anniversaries and festivals that might take place at one of the days of the tour. The tour overview on the left side will list the name of the sights and the traveling time between sites (only walking time, might be a good idea to check for other means of transportation).

The tour is displayed on Google Maps with the usual options of zooming in and out of the map and printing parts of it.

One interesting option provided by Google City Tours is the ability to add or remove sights from the tour. This is extremely useful if a sight is not listed in the default tour. It can also be handy to remove sights that are of no interest to the individual or group. The Google Maps service will calculate the new tour. It is even possible to remove all sights and plan a tour individually.

Google City Tours is an excellent online tool that aids individuals and groups plan city tours.

The Internet offers many people a chance to access resources and information that they could otherwise hardly – if at all – obtain. One interesting source of information is the British Newspapers 1800-1900 archive that is offered by the British Library. It allows everyone to search for topics in many newspapers of that century. Not all newspapers are included in the database which currently consists of newspaper archives of 49 newspapers of that time period.

Interested users can perform a text search which can either be broad or very specific. Advanced search parameters allow to specify a timeframe, place of publication, publication section, frequency and language among other parameters. It is furthermore possible to only search for information that are freely available. Free newspaper articles are available instantly while those that are not free require a registration on the site and the purchase of a 24-hour or 7-day pass which are good for 100 and 200 articles during that time (the website selling the passes was unavailable at the time of writing so no information on the pricing scheme)

A free search will only yield a few results compared to a full text search. Searching for Jack the Ripper will for instance displays 23 free results but 2035 free and pay to view results. All contents of the newspaper library are usually available for people in UK higher and further education and in some public libraries.

Newspaper articles can be printed and marked as favorites. The British Newspaper archive can be accessed freely by people from all over the world.

There are several programming languages that to-be programmers (or current programmers) can choose from. For first-time programmers, choosing a programming language can be difficult. There are many programming languages that are dying out, just aren’t popular, or are just generally hard to learn. It would be a shame for any first-time programmer to purchase books to learn a language to find that it is too difficult. It would also be a shame to learn a programming language that has no application at work. Ruby is a great programming language because it offers a great feature called Ruby on Rails. Rails is a web framework that can be used by programmers to speed up development.

The programming language, Ruby, was created in the mid 1990’s in Japan, by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto. Ruby is based on Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp and was written to create a programming language that, according to Matsumoto, “was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python.”

One of the goals of Ruby is to allow the simple and fast creation of web applications. The language itself satisfies this goal. Because of this, there is much less tedious work with this language than many other programming languages. Ruby is also free of charge. It is also free to copy, use, modify, and distribute. Since Ruby can be modified, programmers can make necessary changes and can code without feeling restricted. Another feature of Ruby is its mark-and-sweep garbage collection which allows programmers the ability to code without having to worry about the need to maintain reference counts in extension libraries. Also, if an operating system allows for it, Ruby can dynamically load extension libraries. Ruby currently ranks as the 9th most popular programming language in the world. There are many online guides where Ruby programmers to-be can learn how to program in Ruby.

Ruby on Rails, often simply called Rails, is an open source web application framework that was designed for Ruby by David Heinemeier Hansson and was released in July 2004. Ruby on Rails makes use of an object relational mapping layer known as the ActiveRecord. Because of this, programmers do not have to specify database column names in class definitions. Rails will retrieve this information on its own from the database based on the class name. Rails also has a testing framework built in which allows programmers to write test cases which helps them create more reliable, robust code.

Google has recently raised the attachment limit of emails that can be send and received via their email service Gmail to 25 Megabytes. The storage that is offered to all Gmail users exceed 7000 Megabytes which makes Gmail an ideal service for a variety of applications.

We have already seen that it is possible to use Gmail as a backup storage space for important files. The GPhotospace application adds another possibility. It makes it possible to create virtual photo albums in Gmail that can be shared with users. Sharing in this context means that the photo albums can be send to individual users which means they are send as an attachment. GPhotospace is provided as a Firefox add-on which offers another functionality. Users who are invited can use the GPhotospace add-on to view the galleries online as well.

Users who do not like to share their Gmail account data with another application might want to consider creating a secondary account just for that purpose. The application can be launched from the Tools menu in Firefox once the add-on has been installed. There is also a standalone desktop application for Windows that does not require the Firefox web browser.

The GPhotospace add-on offers a fool proof way of uploading photos to Gmail with the ability to invite other users to see them. It can also be used as photo backup storage although it might make more sense in this case to send the photos as attachments directly to the Google Mail account.

Sending large attachments via email is a big no-no unless the recipient is aware of the email’s size and has given the ok. There are other means than email to send large files to recipients. It would for example be possible to upload the file to one of the myriads of file hosts that offer hundreds of Gigabytes of free storage space.

Gmail, Google’s popular email service, has recently raised the attachment limit from 20 Megabytes to 25. This could be interesting for users who regularly send emails with large attachments but also for Gmail users who like to backup files by sending them to their Gmail account. The attachment limit is obviously working in both ways which means that it is possible to send emails with a size of up to 25 Megabytes but also to receive emails that stay below that limit.

The new Gmail attachment limit seems to be enabled on all Gmail accounts already unlike other changes to the email service that usually get rolled out over time. It should also be noted that users need to make sure that the recipients can retrieve emails of that size. It can happen that the email provider refuses these emails as they might be over the size limit of that email service.

Some businesses host their own web site on their own server (or servers) while other businesses hire a web hosting provider or buy hosting services through an Internet service provider. Once you know the differences between virtual and dedicated web hosting, you will have an easier time evaluating cost, risk, and flexibility in order to decide which type of hosting is right for you.

You can think of web hosting as being divided into two types: virtual web hosting and dedicated web hosting. Virtual web hosting is often favored by small businesses because of its cost effectiveness. With virtual web hosting, you rent space alongside many other businesses on a server. While it sounds as if all the businesses are jumbled up on one piece of hardware, what is actually the case is that each client in a virtual web hosting environment has its own server resources blocked off from everybody else’s, including processor, memory, and disk space. This works well for businesses that don’t need a lot of disk space or bandwidth to operate their web site. It is also a great choice for clients who want to manage a number of separate web sites at a low cost.

The reason that this type of web hosting is so cost effective is that despite their unique functions, the web hosting requirements are very similar among small businesses. Hosting vendors who can offer nearly identical services to a large number of customers efficiently are able to multiply small profits by large numbers of customers.

Dedicated hosting is an option that midsize and large businesses may consider if they need the control and flexibility of having a server (or servers) dedicated to their website. This type of web hosting is expensive, but allows greater control over security, support, and maintenance. Web hosting vendors who offer dedicated hosting have redundant resources in their data center that can nearly eliminate downtime.

Dedicated hosting often means that your business can write and run custom scripts and applications, or just manage the web site and leave the upkeep of the network and hardware to the hosting company. You can buy a server and host the site yourself, but this is an expensive option and means you have to either know how to manage the hardware, software, and connectivity or you have to hire someone who does. Some businesses already have a dedicated IT staff and data center, and if this is the case, then it probably makes sense to buy and operate another server.

However, for companies without their own IT department and budget, renting a dedicated server from a hosting provider is the most cost effective option. There are many web hosting vendors who offer dedicated server packages. Once you know how much of a hands-on approach you’re willing to take, you can examine the offerings of several hosting vendors and see if their operations complement yours. Some vendors provide tools for creating and managing your site by providing a web based control panel that you can use to tweak your site. Some vendors let you use your own HTML authoring program and upload pages as you make them.

Web hosting vendors know they have to compete for your business, and most try to make your choice easy by offering services that are popular and packaging them together into specific web hosting plans. Most of the plans out there have you pay an upfront set-up fee, and then a monthly fee for your plan and any additional a la carte options (like extra storage or extra email accounts) you purchase.
There are so many web hosting vendors around that it can be overwhelming for a business to choose who they want to host their website. If you know your requirements, or can broadly estimate them, you can almost certainly find a web hosting vendor with a hosting package that is right for you and allows for your site to grow along with your business.

Network Troubleshooting can be one of the most frustrating tasks especially for the average computer user. There is always the question where to start the troubleshooting process. The Windows operating system comes with troubleshooting wizards that usually do not help at all except for the most basic of troubles that users can run into. But problems in the form of forgetting to plug in the network cable are not as common as slow or corrupt downloads, page loading errors or Internet connection drops. Those on the other hand are much harder to come by and troubleshoot.

The ICSI Netalyzr is a new beta online network troubleshooting analyzer that can analyze various aspects of a computer’s network connection. It is made up of a Java applet that has to be executed on the user’s system. The benefits of a Java Applet are that it is system independent and that it can access and analyze the computer’s hardware and other aspects of the computer system.

The analysis will take a while and an in depth network troubleshooting report will be generated and presented to the user in the end.

The network troubleshooting report is divided into two sections. The first reports on noteworthy events and is further divided into major abnormalities and minor aberrations. The second section displays the detailed network troubleshooting report that is colored for easier access. Entries with red backgrounds describe network problems while green backgrounds display unproblematic network elements.

Each title in the report is clickable leading to a short explanation of how the tests are conducted. Related articles can be found about Network Bandwidth and Network Monitoring Software.

It is pretty obvious that the developers of the Internet Movie Script Database have taken lots of inspiration from the Internet Movie Database IMDB. The website offers movie scripts that can be viewed online or downloaded as txt files to a local computer system or mobile device.

It is possible to search the database or browse the lists either in alphabetical order or by genre. A click on a movie title will open the page of that movie with basic information including the writer and genre of the movie. The link to the movie script is located on the very same page as are user comments about the movie.

Each movie script is displayed on an extra page resembling a plain text document which makes it easy to copy paste them or download them as html to the computer system. The movie script database contains a long list of popular movie scripts from Ingenious Bastards and Braveheart to Basic Instinct and American Pie.

IMSDb is a great resource for movie fans and writers who think about writing a movie script. The design could be better and it would be nice if movie script export or download options were available though.

A new version of the popular blogging script Wordpress has been released by the developers yesterday. Wordpress 2.8 is the latest stable release of the blogging platform and webmasters are encouraged to upgrade their blogs as soon as possible to benefit from the changes in that version. The update adds a multitude of features and improvements to Wordpress which are mostly noticeable in the admin area of the blog.

Some changes that Wordpress admins will notice right away are speed improvements in the admin interface and the ability to change more aspects of the layout than before. Wordpress will for instance automatically adjust the layout according to the screen size of the web browser window with options to change the amount of columns and what is being displayed on the screen.

It is now possible to remove or add information when viewing posts, pages or comments in the admin interface with the additional option to change the number of items that are displayed on the screen. It is now therefor possible to change the default number of comments that are displayed on screen which could have been achieved before only by hacking system files.

Other improvements include a new theme installer which allows the webmaster to search for and install themes right from the Wordpress admin interface without leaving the website. This is a similar feature to the automatic plugin installation that was added in earlier versions.

The Wordpress Codex contains a list of all changes and additions that have been added to Wordpress 2.8. The new version can be downloaded from the main Wordpress site.