Picasa Face Recognition Feature

I am a fan of digital photography and my favorite photo management software has been Picasa for a long time. Google has recently released the latest version which is 3.5 and it means new improvements and new features are offered. Among all of them the new "Named Tags" feature is the greatest! What it does is:
First:
Once installed, it will start scanning all your photos for "face detection" and this might take a very very long time! for me it took about 24 hours as I have an archive of 20GB pictures! The result of this is a large collection of face thumbnails it has detected in all your photos.
Second:
Now its your turn to tell the software "who" is every thumbnail by naming them.
Third:
Picasa will categorize your pictures by person but you will notice a "Question Mark" on some of your pictures which means Picasa has categorized that picture but it is not sure whether he is the right person! So this is the tuning part which we are teaching Picasa about its face recognition skills!
For those with a large collection it will take a pretty much time to fix everything!

Picasa download page: http://picasa.google.com/

Data Center Cooling

I have taken a Data Center design course recently and I am learning some great new stuff. This course has brought a lot of important things to my attention which I couldn't see before while they were in front of my eyes! Maybe that's because I am not directly responsible for the mechanical and electrical things in our data center and I just care about the servers, the network and services on our servers. This course is about the physical infrastructure which includes power, cooling, physical structure, cabling and etc. It touches on different topics but does not go much into the details so I have started googling about the topics. APC has great documents and since I am very keen on the cooling system topic I recommend the following:

• Air Distribution Architecture Options for Mission Critical Facilities
• Explanation of Cooling and Air Conditioning Terminology for IT Pros
• Ten Steps to Solving Cooling Problems
• The Different Types of Air Conditioning Equipment for IT Environments

The Mac World is Embracing Me!

I am getting crazy about MAC OS X! A company "MacBook Air" was given to me last Wednesday and my manager gave a quick tour on how MAC works and I spent two days on it to find and setup all the stuff I need to handle my daily tasks. Now I am seriously thinking of getting an iMac for home and I can not stop thinking of it!!!

Make Putty Tab Based!

Everyone knows Putty well but I always prefer to use SecureCRT because I can open different connections in a tab based manner, I can easily clone my sessions in case I need more than one session to the same device mainly for debugging or diagnostic reasons and I can save my connections into a database which easily can be backed up (Putty stores the sessions into registery!).
The good part about Putty is free, it is handy and requires no installation!
Well there are always great people out there to make things work better and thanks to Ramesh I have leaned that there is a free add-on called "Putty Connection Manager" which does all the job I pointed out earlier. You have your Tabbed based interface, You can clone your sessions and everything is stored in a database and above all it makes putty look more modern ;)
There are many other useful add-ons for Putty and you can learn about them through the following link:
The Geek Stuff » Turbocharge PuTTY with 12 Powerful Add-Ons - Software for Geeks #3:

Exinda Networks WAN Optimizer Applicance!

We are providing Internet bandwidth to different organizations and individuals and provide a variety of services over that bandwidth like Web, Email, and Voice. Customers can select from a category of services with different pricing matching their bandwidth or quality requirements and we need to make sure customer are receiving what they have signed with us.
Some are receiving Dedicated Bandwidth and some Shared Bandwidth and no matter in which of these two categories they fall, they expect good quality on delay sensitive services like Voice and Conferencing traffics which needs to be guaranteed. These policies can be imposed on DSLAMs and Routers close to the customer but not every detail can be addressed on Routers and DSLAMs besides it makes sense to have an appliance standing on top of the network hierarchy as a single point of policy enforcement.
Many vendors provide appliances which are called WAN Accelerators or Optimizers and they all optimize or accelerate traffic by features such as Compression, Caching, Changing TCP headers and enforcing QoS.
I have one of these appliances from "Exinda Networks" in my network for evaluation. It provides reporting through statistics and graphs and it does it really great! There are a variety of different report categories available such as Realtime, Applications, Hosts, Subnets, Conversations, and Application Statistics and in each category it is possible to get more detailed into a specific traffic type. All these reports help build up a network traffic profile and then develop and enforce proper optimizer policies to meet the concerns, criteria, and requirements.

Develop These IT Skills!

10 Skills an IT professional should be thinking about developing to keep on top of things in the tech world in the next five years:

1. Voice Over IP


2. Unified Communications


3. Hybrid Networks


4. Wireless Technology


5. Remote User Support


6. Mobile User Support


7. Software As a Service


8. Virtualization


9. IPv6


10. Security

Download the full text in pdf format here:
http://downloads.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=305505&tag=nl.e108

Downloads from Microsoft

Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager

Use this application to backup and restore presentation, pictures, songs and applications from and to USB Flash Drive devices and take them with you. Use USB Flash Drives to store personal data, to keep your network configuration and to share information with your friends. Microsoft USB Flash Drive .

Microsoft Time Zone

Do you have relatives that live far away? Do you work with people from other countries? Use this simple utility to keep track of the time in other part of the world. Share your ideas without waking up your buddies.

The Top 10 SANs vs. NAS Decision Factors

Storage technology is an interesting area and I always try to keep up with it. Here you can find a topic helping to make the decision when it comes to select SAN or NAS.
ONLamp.com: The Top 10 SANs vs. NAS Decision Factors

Storage Networking

Storage Networking is about connecting external storage solutions (whether IDE, SATA, or SCSI) so that they can communicate, switch between requests and route requests. Sounds like a typical IP Network but has got a different story assuming I am talking about SAN solutions!
SANs are connected over Fiber Channel (FC) with 1Gbps or 2Gbps bandwidth, using FC switches that are much more expensive and faster than Ethernet Switches which makes them the only solution when large data should travel over the network quickly and continuously or when high and expandable capacity is required. SANs have their own addressing scheme and Fiber Channel routers use these addressings to make routing decisions.
Servers should utilize FC(Fiber Channel) HBAs to join this kind of networks. HBAs are like Ethernet Adapters except that They are used to connect to Fiber Channel Switches or when only a Point-to-Point Fiber Channel Communication is needed.

Impressed by Picasa Photo Organizer

Picasa is now part of Google and can be downloaded for free!
It is really impressing :
1- Organizes pictures very well
2- Gives an overall and clear preview
3- Emailed picture are automatically resized and the default size is configurable through the options
4- Descriptions can be set for every folder and keywords for every picture and the search works on folder names, folder descriptions and picture keywords which all makes access to pictures very fast and easy
5- Pictures can directly be imported into picasa from digital camera
6- Red-eye reduction, crop, enhancing the color and contrast and resizing are included in picasa through "Edit Picture" and "Export"
7- Slide Show available and MP3 files can be set to be played when pictures are shown in Slide Show mode
8- It can also play AVE, MPG, ASF and MWV video files
9- Google experts are working on picasa to expand its technology
Picasa: Automated Digital Photo Organizer software, instant photo albums, sharing & printing: Download

So You Are a System Administrator!?

I am not a Unix System Administrator! I was just searching google for something and came to this. I like the starting part :)

"Any trained monkey can administer a system that is working correctly. Such systems rarely, if ever, need external human, or simian, guidance. The system gets some sort of stimulus or input, makes decisions, takes actions, and most likely emits some sort of product or information"

FreeBSD Ports: What To Do When Things Go Wrong

e-mail mistakes that make you look bad

This will give you some email attitude! Don't think you are anonymous when sending emails, you can be followed up by checking the header part of your email, Sending email to the wrong person in your address book can be another disgrace! Forgetting the attachment, using your personal email account instead of business account and clicking the send button to fast and ... You'd better check it yourself:
8 e-mail mistakes that make you look bad

Don't make the call: Go online for tech support

Do you pick up the phone once you come across a computer problem? Well, this might be the fastest and easiest type of action but the last one according to Monte Enbysk :

Don't make the call: Go online for tech support

Geek Style: Google Messenger

Babak has come up with some predictions about google's future services. Follow the link and join the comments if you have other ideas :
Google Messenger

Gates backs blogs for businesses

Gates talked about the benefits of blogs in business :
Gates backs blogs for businesses
blogs are not accepted as part of businesses yet but once we reach that point it would show how it can help businesses and customers. I have always thought about how blogs can help projects if every business starting a project could run a blog for that project so that the sponsors, managers, customers, contractors and business units could post their comments and ideas. This way everything is logged, obstacles can be hindered at an early stage in the project, no dispute over deliverables and ...