Url Shortening: Tr.im shutting down

A few days back I posted a few concerns about the URL shortening and the “tiny url’s” which are now all over the place literraly.

Now another conern comes along, so what happens if the company you are depending on for keeping all your URL’s safe which you would be posting for months or years (in future) suddenly shuts down. You loose the meaning of all your life long tweets which thousands of links. A huge amount of content will be lost with millions of broken links.

That is exactly what is going to happen to the URL’s of Tr.im, the URL shortening service which is shutting down.

Using Log Parser for analyzing IIS Logs

Microsoft Log Parser is a Command Line tool to analyze and extract data from all sorts of Log Files. It is a command line tool and does not have a fancy UI but is extremely power. The most powerful feature is the use of SQL Like query structure to extract information.

Just created the following Availability Throughput report for a couple of application that we have here. It is taking the average of the time-taken field in the IIS log over the last 4 months.

See the Log parser query.

After getting the data it is just a matter of putting it in an excel and generting the graph which I did but the Log Parser tool itself can generate a graph output as an image. There is along list of input and output formats for the tool. I just did’nt had time to look into the graph switches right now.

 

Best Web-Based Email System – GMAIL

I have been using GMAIL from mid 2005 and the moment I started using it I just could not go back to Yahoo! which I was using earlier. Hotmail was not even in the league back in 2005.

Although gmail when it was first introduced was quite different in managing email replies and threads and I know a lot of people who could not just get around the management of the replies. I am not sure it was the AJAX experience which caught me or the loading speed (comapred to Yahoo at the time) but I loved the experience and got stuck to it.

GMAIL is continuously evolving and adding features which are continuously enriching the experience for the users. For example colured Labels, the in-line gTalk chat and the recently added themes are some of the few continuous improvements that have been really useful.

If you are a member of a few mailing lists with a lot of traffic, you probably know how annoying it becomes to skim through all the useless junk and focus on the urgent message which you have got from your family. The coloured labels help me do just that, focus on the messages which are important and read the rest whenever you don’t have anything better to do.

A look into my gmail experience.