December 4, 2009 0:07 am by Jal
DNS resolving is one of the crucial process of internet infrastructure that makes the web surfing possible. It works under the hood and so no one pays much attention to it. Servers associated with the process are called the DNS Servers which translates human readable commands (like a website’s name) into IP addresses. Hence, speed and efficiency of these servers come into picture. And when it’s about speed and efficiency, the internet lord is bound to mark its presence. Google has come up with their own public DNS Servers and has made its public announcement on its official blog today.
You can visit the Google Public DNS site here. This service is free and if Google’s claims are true, it’s speeds up your browsing experience along with improving security.
Use these Google DNS Servers:
Preferred DNS server: 8.8.8.8
Alternate DNS server: 8.8.4.4
Not sure, how to set up DNS Servers? Follow this guide.
“The goal of Google Public DNS is to benefit users worldwide while also helping the tens of thousands of DNS resolvers improve their services, ultimately making the web faster for everyone”, concludes the product manager Mr. Prem Ramaswami on the official blog.
December 3, 2009 7:03 am by Jal
The much anticipated
Bing Maps Beta service is up and running. As suspected, the new Bing Maps Beta relies on
Silverlight 3. I just had a quick glance of it and thought of writing the about its striking new features.
» The new Silverlight interface of the Bing Maps Beta is downright awesome.
» The navigation/zoom-pan is smooth and the maps itself are much accurate than the current version of Bing Maps. [Why Bing Maps is not accurate?]
» Streetside [New Feature] – This is Bing’s answer to Google Maps’ Streetview.
» [New Feature] Photosynth content generated by its users is now integrated to Bing Maps Beta so that you can explore the 3D Photosynth pictures of the location.
» [New Feature] Traffic data helps you keep track of traffic congestion in your city.
» [New Feature] The round up of all the new features presented in Map Apps.
With lots of improvements, the Bing Maps looks amazing and shows the potential to stand out as a solid rival to Google Maps. It will be quite a while for the final version of new Bing Maps to come out. Till then…explore the Bing Maps Beta.
December 3, 2009 1:01 am by Jal
Not a big news but yes, Bing did make some pleasing changes to its Bing US site by introducing ‘History’ on its homepage and a nice hover-over effect to the links which open up new links in a menu. Seems like some Ajax voodoo to me. Go to
Bing US site and check it out.
New set of features are being introduced in Bing and according to Neowin some of the new features may include a ‘Bing Explorer’, a Silverlight version of Bing maps and may be a Wolfram Alpha integration. We can just speculate as of now. By the way, Bing UK and Bing US have already removed the ‘Beta’ tag.
December 2, 2009 19:41 pm by Jal
I was unable to post for almost a week and there is a reason for that. A happy reason. Uptill now, TechExplorer was hosted on blogger platform and we recently made a switch to BlueHost and now using WordPress as our CMS. During the whole process I frequently dealt with online money transactions and which made this post possible. I made some apparent conclusions on what browsers one should use while dealing with sensitive online transactions.
Although most browsers have evolved themselves and are quite capable for online transactions and the security measures that come alongwith, here are the top 3 browsers one should use irrespective of what your favorite one is.
#3 – Opera 10.x
Opera is certainly one of the highly anticipated and much loved browser with great features. However, I felt the browser being a little slow while making online transactions. It takes quite a time to load a page during a transaction and urges you to hit the refresh button again (which is a terrible thing to do while the transaction is in process). Moreover, I felt that Opera is a bit tacky in handling and displaying Ajax content that reloads a specific content on your webpage. So, Opera goes at #3.
#2 – Mozilla Firefox 3.x.x
My personal favorite. Mozilla Firefox is unarguably the best browser I have used. But when it comes to online transactions, it ‘sometimes’ behaves unexpectedly. The worst thing is, you never know when. We know that Mozilla Firefox is notorious for being resource hungry and chokes your computer if lot of tabs are open or if an addon misbehaves. This can ruin your work. Otherwise, the transaction itself is a smooth process in Firefox. You just have to be a bit careful on opening multiple instances of Firefox windows and tabs while doing some important work. Hence, #2 for Mozilla Firefox.
#1 – Internet Explorer 7+
Not so happy about ranking IE as #1 but when it comes to compatibility with almost all websites, specifically the ones involving money transactions, IE is an out-n-out winner. The reason lies not in the capability but the popularity of IE. Web devs design their websites keeping the compatibility with IE at the top of their list. This is reason enough to use IE when dealing with online transactions. Moreover, it is my personal experience that certain websites of banks and financial institutions are rather shoddy and can only be used with IE if you seek a glitch free experience. Hence, #1 for IE.
Finally, it’s needless to say your browser should be up-to-date with a good antivirus running on your computer while performing an online transaction.
