Technical Solution

Disabling the USB storage device is of prime importance if you are running a firm with a number of PC's with Windows operating system. The chances are high for a PC to get infected through the USB device, especially when the installed OS is Windows. We have compiled the different steps required to disable USB storage device in a Windows PC. Two cases are under consideration here. 1: If the USB storage device is not installed on your computer and 2: if the USB storage device is already installed.

We had a query from one of our customers to help them migrate their local mail server to Google Apps. They wanted to do this because they did not have the sufficient in-house capability nor have the funds to get paid external capability to support an internal mail server. One hurdle that they were facing was that they had around 40GB of mail left on the local mail server that they wanted to migrate to the new mail accounts they created on Google Apps.

Recently we had to provide support on a Red Hat Server where there were hundreds of users and the user directories organized into hierarchies. Normally we change to a users directory using cd ~username. We had some extra time on our hands and wanted to play with the /etc/passwd file and tried to use awk to do the same thing. The following one liner will do this the hard way :-)

If you use GNU/Linux as your development environment then you inevitably has to use the find command at some point of time. A very common need while developing web applications is to search for the occurrences of a given string in files, very often with different extensions, under a given project. The command 'find' is a very powerful search utility that can be wielded according to our convenience and can be used in this scenario.

We install Ubuntu on almost all systems built at Zyxware. One common request we have heard from our customers was for a simple printed user manual that they can use to learn and start using Ubuntu. We have been guiding people to the web to learn the ins and outs of using the operating systems but this does not always work very well. As a permanent solution to this problem we are embarking on an ambitious project to create a print ready Ubuntu Manual. As the first step towards this we have created a website dedicated to compiling content that can go into the ubuntu manual. You can check out the ubuntu manual site.

We had recently been involved in a project to set up a Conference Management System for an International Conference to be conducted in Kerala sometime later this year. We had zeroed in on Pentabarf as the solution we were going to base the system on. Pentabarf is a Ruby on Rails solution that has been used for the last couple of DebConfs. Pentabarf as such is an excellent system, being a system created by programmers for programmers, but it heavily lacked in documentation both on their site and on the world wide web. We however managed to get it installed on Ubuntu with Apache, Ruby on Rails and FastCGI. We are sharing the installation instructions for Pentabarf on Ubuntu here

Matrix Screensaver is a very popular screensaver based on the digital rain shots (moving text) in the blockbuster movie trilogy - The Matrix. This is available as a screensaver in popular GNU Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian with their default installations. But the default Matrix Screensaver that comes with these distributions contains only falling English alphabets. Now Santhosh Thottingal of SMC (Swathanthra Malayalam Computing) has modified this for Indic scripts and has made it available for everybody.

Most of the web based systems that we build at Zyxware uses Drupal as the content framework. The following are the steps involved in setting up Apache, PHP, MySQL and Drupal on a freshly installed Ubuntu 8.04 system. If you follow the instructions you should be able to set it up as is but if you face problems let us know and we will try to help you.

Fedora team has been closely working with Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) team to get most of the SMC patches upstream and setting up Malayalam has been relatively easy on Fedora. Since most of the patches have gone to upstream fedora you don't have download any rpm other than Swanalekha (Malayalam transliterator) on your own to be able to read and write Malayalam on a Fedora 9 machine. Follow the basic instructions to set up Malayalam on Fedora 9.

Altair HyperWorks is an Enterprise level Computer Aided Engineering software that is widely used for rapid design exploration and decision-making. This software is supported both in Windows as well as Linux. The Linux version is tested to work with SUSE and RHEL. However with a little tweaking this can be made to run in Fedora.

Raaga.com is a very popular online music station that has a very large collection of Indian movie and classical songs. They use real media and they have a player that requires the real media player. Now the default installation of Real Media player will not allow you play music from Raaga.com and the player popup from raaga.com will stay in the 'Initializing Player, Please Wait' and 'Loading' state permanently. There is a simple work around for this situation.

We are a tech start-up firm. Our objective is to make money by developing successful web based applications for the general public. There are two ways of making money online. One is when you create a web based system and then sell rights to advertise on the website to ad-networks or directly to companies. The second is when your application becomes immensely popular and you sell the complete website to a bigger player who pays for future revenues and consolidation advantages.