Computers and Internet: September 2010

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Welcome To Devils Workshop!!!

rtCamp’s bulk-hiring with refer-an-employee program!

Posted: 30 Sep 2010 12:47 PM PDT

(cross-posted from rtCamp’s official blog)

This is a quick post to all devils here who are looking for a job, specially a blogging job!

In one of our biggest hiring process of recent time, we are looking for 12 new rtCampers to join us for 8 different openings listed here.

This hiring process is bigger than all our recruitment drive in the past. Apart from number of people we are looking for there are many new things happening for the first time:

Project manager/team leader opening is new
We are hiring full-time social-media/online-marketer for the first time
We are open to hire people REMOTELY!
We never used any HR agency or refer-an-employee kind of program.

Well, we need to almost double our team strength in less than a month so we are going bit faster with hiring process this time!

About Refer-An-Employee Program

Under this program, you can refer any number of people to rtCamp for any of the openings listed above. If they manage to get a job in rtCamp, you will get Rs. 2000/- cash reward. If they manage to survive 3-months as a rtCamper, you will get another one-time Rs. 3000/- for the same employee!

As we are looking for 12 more rtCampers, you can make whooping Rs. 60,000/- in total!

To refer a friend, please submit their details through this form.

Links: Apply Now | Refer A Friend | Work Culture & Facilities

-- This Post rtCamp’s bulk-hiring with refer-an-employee program! is Published on Devils Workshop .

Gmail offers unthreaded conversations!

Posted: 30 Sep 2010 06:22 AM PDT

Gmail gave us Priority Inbox and also a redesign which more prominence to Mails, Contacts and Tasks. It was probably used to make Yahoo Mail and Hotmail users to feel more familiar with the layout. I understood the logic of Gmail but did not like the changes wholeheartedly. I mean many of us do use Gmail because it is different from other services.

One major plus point for me with Gmail is it conversation mode when it comes to emails. The emails are like threaded conversations and ideal to discuss something with a group of friends and get all their responses in one single place like you can see in the image below.

From a productivity point of view, viewing emails in this way it very useful. But I guess Gmail wants to be a bit more like other email services and has now given us the option of opting out of conversation view.

Opt out of Conversation view with Gmail

Just go to Settings while on Gmail and then under the General tab turn Conversation view on or off as you please. If conversation view is off, then the email will be shown individually like it is with Yahoo Mail or Hotmail.

Not very excited with Google trying to be a lot like other services. It focus on functionality is something that sets Google apart and I wish it does not try to ape other services which are inferior.

What are your views on Gmail Converstation view? Do drop in your comments.

Source: Gmail Blog

-- This Post Gmail offers unthreaded conversations! is Published on Devils Workshop .

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What is Microsoft Direct Push?

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 11:23 PM PDT

I have a HTC Touch 3G phone, and to increase battery life, I often go to the Communications Settings and enable/disable WiFi… depending on the presence of any nearby WiFi hotspost.

Communications settings has some useful switches for bluetooth, Airplane mode, etc…

But it has a setting that has puzzled me for a while: Microsoft Direct Push.

Since my phone is based on Windows Mobile 6.1, its not surprising that it has some Microsoft aspects.

So, my curiosity eventually got the better of me, and I decided to find out what is Microsoft Direct Push (MDP), and if it would be of any use to me.

It turns out that MDP is a method for getting notified about emails in about 15 minutes of them arriving, and allowing the new email to be downloaded… all very good in theory.

However, I find the biggest flaw, is that MDP is specifically tied to Microsoft Exchange Server.

Its good if you need to keep your Microsoft outlook synchronised between the mobile and office.

But in this day and age, I see an ever-decreasing use of microsoft server products… in favour of more common (and free) technologies that offer similar performance, and are more flexible due to not being tied to propriety standards like MDP.

In my case, I use Gmail (with the IMAP option enabled), and Google calendar (also synced to my phone), and a synced google contacts… all easy and all free, and can be used by anyone with a smartphone.

I suspect my solution will also work with iphone, and android-based phones.

So I now find there is no longer the need to go down the expensive Microsoft path, for mobile office solutions.

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Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Welcome To Devils Workshop!!!

Introducing WpNginx – our new service to put your WordPress on steroids

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 02:16 PM PDT

Before I tell you more about WpNginx, our new service, let me ask you one simple question!

When was the last time you have seen Devils Workshop down?

If you are one of our reader who frequently visits Devils Workshop, chances are seeing this site down are almost nil. Downtime you might have seen here was for scheduled maintenance few months back. In fact that can be prevented also, had we more time to invest in playing with our servers.

WpNginx – The magic behind our great uptime!

Every time, fellow bloggers contact me, wondering about which hosting we are using for such great uptime, I can’t stop myself from thanking Igor Sysoev, the man who created Nginx webserver. Nginx worked for us like a charm.

You may be get a shock to know that, we now run more than 30-sites with 50K total pageviews daily from one single VPS and going through analysis of our server logs, it seems that we can handle another 50K hits daily without upgrading our VPS plan further.

On top of Nginx, we have explored many more ways to optimize websites’ performance to the level where our rtCamp.com homepage beats Google.com homepage in YSlow as well as PageSpeed like performance metrics.

To get this kind of performance, we have worked very hard for months. All our efforts pulled together are now available as a service which every blogger running high-traffic blog/site can avail. Two of Devils Workshop’s contributors, Bapun (from SolidBlogger) and Sri Ganesh (from Symposiumz), already managed avail our service while we were in close-beta. You can read about their experience here.

You can read more about our new service here. More about why we love Nginx can be found here.

Link: WpNginx

p.s. just noticed this is my 600th post on DW!

-- This Post Introducing WpNginx – our new service to put your WordPress on steroids is Published on Devils Workshop .

How to create the Grunge Border Effect to Solid Color Box with Photoshop

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 08:10 AM PDT

In this post we are going to see how to create a Grunge Border Effect to Solid Color Box with using filter. We can see so many of Border Styles in Photoshop. I thought I will write on how to create Grunge Border Effect in a few simple steps.

First create a new file in Photoshop. Give background color like below image.

Then draw the box on the new layer. Go to Toolbar and select the Rectangle Tool (U)

This way we have finished creating a box. Here I given it a Lemon Yellow color. (see image below)

After that give it stroke of a dark shade of yellow. Just go to Layer Pallet >Layer Style > Stroke.

As you click on stroke you can see Layer Style pallet on your screen. Now keep your Stroke setting as shown in image below. Keep stroke size-1px, Inside.

You can see the solid color border to the box.

Now let’s see how to convert it into Grunge Border Effect.

Just go to Filter >> Stylize >> Diffuse. Click OK.
Now you can see the Diffuse box displayed on your screen. Just select the Normal option and click Ok.

Here we get the Grunge Border Effect Box. We create this effect by using the Diffuse Filter.

Now for some more finishing touches.

I applied Outer Glow to the image. Go to Layer Style and select the Outer glow option and keep your setting similar to the image below.

Now we have the Grunge Border Effect to a Solid Color Box with Photoshop.

In this way you can give a Grunge Border effect to the Solid Box within a couple of minutes. Do you have any alternative steps or methods with Photoshop? Do drop in your comments.

-- This Post How to create the Grunge Border Effect to Solid Color Box with Photoshop is Published on Devils Workshop .