Jawed’s Blog

Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a system of handling the changing amounts of daylight throughout the year. The goal of DST is to maximize the daylight hours available during typical waking hours.

The United States has planned a change to its DST observance beginning in 2007. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandates that DST will start on the second Sunday in March and end on the first Sunday in November. In 2007, the start and stop dates will be March 11 and November 4, respectively. These dates are different from previous DST start and stop dates. In 2006, the dates were the first Sunday in April (April 2, 2006) and the last Sunday in October (October 29, 2006).

The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) stores rules about DST observance all around the globe. Older JREs will have outdated rules that will be superseded by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. As a result, applications running on an older JRE may report incorrect time from March 11, 2007 through April 2, 2007 and from October 29, 2007 through November 4, 2007.

If you are concerned about application failures that may result from these DST changes, you should update your Java Runtime Environment. The following Java platform versions have correct time rules to handle the DST changes that will affect U.S. time zones in 2007. You can download any of the following Java platform versions to resolve this DST issue:

• JDK 6 Project (beta)
• J2SE 5.0 Update 6 or later
• J2SE 1.4.2_11 or later
• J2SE 1.3.1_18 or later

Read all at Sun Developers Network

Inzamam and Pakistan have got what they were seeking: they would feel that justice was done, their honour has been restored, and the four-match ban was a small sacrifice for their valiant hero who had stood up to be counted.

Inzamam refused to take the field in forth test match against England at Oval, when Darrell Hair accused Pakistan team of ball tempering and that match was awarded to England, as Pakistan forfeited the match. Read my post Darrell Hair : culprit caught again.

Ovalgate has got the resolution that most people wanted, and it was hardly a surprise. No one seriously believed the ball-tampering charges against Inzamam-ul-Haq’s team would be, or could be, proved, and everyone expected Inzamam to get some sort of a ban. A crisis has blown over, and cricket has come out smiling.

It has been seen to have dispensed justice. Dropping the ball-tampering charge would make it look fair in the eyes of fans in the subcontinent, and the punishment to Inzamam is proof that the law has been upheld. ICC chief match referee Ranjan Madugalle and adjudicator for this case said:

“Hair acted on a mere suspicion; he acted in haste (his fellow umpire wanted to wait); he could have avoided the crisis had he chosen the diplomatic route; and since there was the equal possibility of the ball being damaged naturally, the umpires were wrong in penalising Pakistan”

Everyone can now get on with the business of cricket. For good measure, it has also announced that Darrell Hair will not officiate during the Champions Trophy. That would make, apart from Pakistan, who haven’t wanted Hair for quite a while, even India, the powerful hosts of the Champions Trophy, happy.

Firefox 2.0 was originally slated to debut in August, but last-minute bugs and security issues have led to delay. Mozilla expects to issue three release candidates of Firefox 2.0 before it goes gold in October.

The Firefox 2.0 RC1 is available for download. New features in Firefox 2.0 include enhancements in security, tabbed browsing, performance, and extensions. The browser update also includes a built-in spell checking and an anti-phishing feature, much like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7. JavaScript 1.7 and improved subscribing of RSS feeds are also among the additions.

The goal of Firefox 2: Launch Day Activity is to make more people aware of the release of Firefox 2 and emphasize people have an alternative to other browsers.

Despite the delays, Firefox is making considerable strides competing against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Firefox has passed 15 percent usage in the United States, and recently topped 200 million total downloads since the browser’s 1.0 launch in November 2004. Read my post Firefox 200 Million Downloads – what it means.

Lets help firefox rule the internet.

As wordpress popularity is growing day by day and you see most of the new blogs using Wordpress. Its an obvious need to provide some sort of guidence to new commers about wordpress blogging. Like how to use wordpress in most effective way and make most out of this blog script.

I will discuss about the most common plugins, which I think you should be using from starting till end.

Wordpress Database Backup: If there is one wordpress plugin you absolutely need this is it. It gives you the ability to backup the core database tables and any other tables you specify. The backups happen on demand or on a nightly schedule. While it might be against TOS what I do is set up a dedicated gmail account for each wordpress blog. I then set this plugin to backup the tables every night and email the file to a gmail account. Viola a free daily incremental offsite backup.

Adsense Deluxe: A powerful way to control adsense from a master level on your blog, you can put adsense in your post without editing any single line of php code.

Google Sitemaps: The Google Sitemaps Webmaster Central program by Google is absolutely one of the most helpful things Google has ever put out. If you are fixing your own site or someone else’s there’s no better way to figure out what a search engine thinks about your site. This plugin updates and rebuilds the XML file everytime you make a new post and ping’s google to tell them about it. It’s especially helpful if you publish on a predetermined schedule. Warning make sure you have the file permissions set correctly or this won’t work properly.

Related Posts: Automatically creates a list of related posts, for the post you are viewing.

Math Comment Spam Protection: This plugin asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question for proving that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot, e.g. What is the sum of 2 and 9 ?. It does not require GD or any special PHP extensions. Similar to the Did You Pass Math? plugin, but can be used with any theme and JavaScript or cookies are not required.

Akismet: This one actually comes with wordpress you only need to get a liscence to activate it. Unless you have need for spam in your blog this is one the most effective tools for stopping it. Very little actually gets through and very little gets flagged as a false positive. I have never used it because Math Comment Spam Protection works fine for me.

Autometa: This plugin will automatically generate and include HTML Meta Keywords and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post.

SimpleTags: is a WordPress plugin that will allow you to easily generate Technorati tags at the bottom of your blog entries. There are several plugins already available for this purpose, but they all require you to use custom fields within WordPress. The SimpleTags plugin eliminates this need, so you can now easily generate tags with your preferred method of posting, be it by email, a blogging tool like w.bloggar or from WordPress itself.

These are the plugins that will assist you to use wordpress effectively. There are hundreds of other plugins available but I think these plugins must be there when you install wordpress. You may want to view complete list of plugins from http://www.wp-plugins.net.

If you think that there are few more can be added to this list, just place it in a comment.

A drunken Chinese migrant worker jumped into a panda enclosure at the Beijing Zoo to touch the bear. But the asleep panda startled and bit him on the legs and he bit the animal in retaliations.

Funny isn’t it, what would you do in retaliation?

Read full story