Avenged Sevenfold Drummer Dead

The rising drummer of Avenged Sevenfold, James Owen Sullivan died today, presumably due to natural causes. Nicknamed Jimmy 'The Rev', he was 28.

Selected Discography:

2001 - Sounding the Seventh Trumpet
2003 - Waking the Fallen
2005 - City of Evil
2007 - Avenged Sevenfold
2008 - Diamonds in the Rough   

Get 25GB Storage FREE!

There's a way to get 25GB storage space - Free, Absolutely Free! With the launch of Microsoft's SkyDrive™ Explorer, you can store your files on their servers. Download SkyDrive Explorer here. After installation, you can see a new icon in My Computer. Login to the SkyDrive™ using your Windows Live ID.

• Change share mode and content type of the folders
• Copy folders and files into SkyDrive™
• Files greater than 50MB support
• Open files directly from SkyDrive™
• Move files and folders within storage

Kensington Slimblade SuperDeal

Amazon is selling Kensington Slimblade Media Mouse (Dark Wine) for just 19.35. Thats a 68% Discount off the 59.99 retail price. Its a fantastic thin slim mouse, a perfect alternative to the Apple's Mighty Mouse. Check it out here.

Product Features

* Unique Scroll Ball provides easy and intuitive 360-degree scrolling.
* Multifunction navigation pad allows you to control your digital media from anywhere in the room.
* Navigation pad on the media controller includes: volume control, track control, play and pause.
* Battery indicator light is green then changes to red as the battery level is getting low.
* Mouse goes into sleep mode when your notebook does to prevent power drain.

Grindstone 2 Download

Wake up slackers! Stop wasting your time and use it for some productive purpose by keeping track of your time. Grindstone 2 is a free Windows based time tracking solution. A smart new way to use your time efficiently. You can download it here.

Create new tasks, start the timer. Finish the task, stop the timer. This can help you maintain an accurate time-sheet of your work. As soon as I started using this tool on my laptop, I started using my time more productively. I sue this tool in combination with the "To-Do" app of my iPod. One good feature is the Reports tool which helps you see a breakdown of the total time recorded at the end of the week/month. Just be honest to yourself while recording the times, to get an accurate report. For managers, it can be a great small tool (size - 4.3Megs) to manage your project. Additionally, you can export the task list into an XML file.

India 3G Spectrum Auction

The acution date for India's 3G spectrum has been postponed from the scheduled date of 14 January 2009. Earlier it was to be held on 7 December'09 and was rescheduled. Well, it has once again been postponed due to uncertainty over the available spectrum and number of slots. The govt. will offer spectrum in 4 slots, with a pan price of Rs. 3500 crore ($720 mn).

Check out the region wise available spectrum:

iPhone Unplugged

Read the fine in-depth specific details on how AT&T makes a profit with Apple's iPhone.

The typical iPhone components and their prices are as follows:

• 16 GB flash memory from Toshiba - $24
• Display module from Balda AG - $19.25
• Touch screen assembly from Sharp - $16
• Application processor from Samsung - $14.46
• Baseband from Infineon - $13
• Camera from Altus-Tech - $9.55
• SDRAM from Samsung - $8.50
• Bluetooth from Samsung - $5.95
• Memory MCP from Numonyx - $3.65
  
• RF Tranceiver from Infineon - $2.80
• GPS Receiver from Infineon - $2.25
  
• Triband Antenna from Murata - $1.35
• Power IC Function from Infineon - $1.25
  
• Audio Codec from Cirrus Logic - $1.15
• Manufacturing Costs - $6.50
• Other Parts - $48

The total built-up cost comes to about $179. While the advertised price is $199 with AT&T's 2-yr contract. AT&T pays Apple subsidies over the sale of each phone.

So basically the $199 phone costs AT&T an estimated $550. To cover the subsidy, it increased the data plan rate to 30 bucks a month from the earlier 20.

Over years, the real winner from the sale of iPhones will be AT&T. It enjoys the exclusivity with iPhone, with a guaranteed continuous stream of revenue.

Microsoft-Murdoch-Google Analysis

Presenting the "Big Fight" between Microsoft and Google. Rupert Murdoch was in news recently when he decided that the News Corp websites would not allowed to be indexed by Google. Apparently the move was pushed and secretly backed by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. Lets analyse this step.

• With this move, News Corp and its websites limit the exposure to internet users, by not being indexed by Google and rather showing up on Bing.

•  News Corp would earn some quick short term cash from Microsoft as per the deal. This allows the media giant to quickly compensate for lagging internet ads+subscription revenue.

• On the other hand, Microsoft will improve its PR with media firms. This deal is very much an implicit signal to publishers, media firms etc.
  

• According to Google, the news items account for a very small percentage of the total searches all around the world.

• It is perceived that Google doesn't like copyrights much. This deal may have some impact in Google's ambitions to scan all books and information to be made available to people.

• All in all, the winner of this deal seems to be Rupert Murdoch.
  

Tomcat with Eclipse

This is a short tutorial to learn how to run Apache Tomcat server using Eclipse. Lets do it step by step.

• Install Apache Tomcat 6.0 from here.

• Unzip the zip file onto your local machine.

• Now to run the Tomcat server, you need to go to command prompt. So type cmd.exe in Run. Am using the Windows platform. In the command prompt, go to the Apache folder/bin folder

• Type in SET JAVA_HOME= The location where JDK is installed. In my case, C:\jdk1.6.0.

• Now run startup.bat

• This is the way to run the server for a single instance. The best way to avoid typing this command everytime you need to start server, is to modify startup.bat and shutdown.bat. So edit these 2 files by any editor like Notepad, EditPad or Wordpad and include the command SET JAVA_HOME=C:\jdk1.6.0

• When you run startup.bat, you see another window of command prompt opening, detailing the initializtion and starting of the server. (For instance, typically the message ends with the line - INFO: Server startup in xxxx ms, where xxxx = the time taken to startup like 4318ms or 5124ms... anything).

• To check if the server has started, go to your web browser and type in http://localhost:8080/ in the address bar. You should see a congratulations message. On the left panel of the page you can manage the server using administration tools.

• In order to manage the server, you need to have the managing rights for access. So go the installed directory of Apache tomcat/conf folder. Edit the tomcat-users.xml file and add the following command:  
  

• So far we learnt how to install the tomcat server on the local machine. Lets now see how to run it using Eclipse. There are many plugins for Eclipse. The most preferred one is the Sysdeo tomcat plugin. Download it here.
  

• After you download the zip file of the plugin (latest version is the 3.2.1), unzip it and cut/paste in the "plugins" folder of Eclipse's installed location. 
  

• Now start Eclipse.

• Go to the Window menu and click Preferences.

• In the preferences, you need to make changes for Tomcat. So choose the appropriate Tomcat version you're using. Also specify the Tomcat home i.e the exact location of where Tomcat is installed. Apply the settings.

• So this is how you can start and stop Tomcat server using Eclipse. See the following change on the menu bar of Eclipse.