13BIT IT news Blog

Recently, the need for space has become immense. Files have become increasingly larger, there are more things to download and so on. Personally, I run out of space on multiple drives all the time. Maybe you are trying to get a file sent to someone, but it’s too large for an attachment on your email. Possibly you want to backup some files to download later or multiple times. That is why there are file hosts.

I have found numerous different file hosting companies, many of them that supply users with an extremely small amount of space or limited features. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Filedropper - Filedropper is amazing.   All you need to do to upload a file is click “Upload” and select a file.

Many free file hosting sites give users the option to upload file of up to 100-150MB, yet Filedropper allows users to upload an amazing 5GB!

When you finish uploading a file, Filedropper gives you the link and the source code to add to a website, if you like.

2. Fileqube - Fileqube is another free file hosting site. It has an awesome site design that definitely shows it’s intentions. It is also extremely fast. When you upload a file, a link is provided to download the file, a link to remove the file, and HTML code to add to a website, etc. Unfortunately, Fileqube only allows for uploads of up to only 150MB, yet most certainly one of the best.

3. MyFreeFileHosting- MyFreeFileHosting has an interface similar to MediaFire’s. It includes the option to send an notification email to someone to tell them of the upload, tags to categorize the file, etc. Of course, after one uploads the file, links are given to allow for download and distribution. The maximum file size allowed is 100MB.

4. Fileden - Fileden is one of the most useful file hosting services. Users are allowed to upload files, without an account, of files up to 100MB, yet you are allowed to register an account for free as well and receive unlimited diskspace, unlimited bandwith, the option to create projects, the ability to replace files, file statistics, project statistics, etc.

5. Easyshare - Easyshare adds even more features to file hosting. Registering and uploading files occur quickly, with accounts allowing for downloading files multiple times. Unlike other free file hosts though, Easyshare pays users for their uploads. If your upload gets downloaded 10,000 times, you’ll apparently receive $20. If you have a personalized toolbar on your website, you can receive money from their uploads through that toolbar and if you refer another person to Easyshare you’ll receive 10% of their earnings.

Another neat thing about this site is the upload options. You can upload on the site from your computer, upload using an FTP server, upload using their free software, or use a remote upload from another server. The maximum file size for a free account is 100MB.

6. FileFactory - Filefactory is similar to all of the previous file hosts, except it supports the option to send a notification email to a person of an uploaded file. Unfortunately, Filefactory contains a large amount of ads if you do not receive the premium service. Yet, unlike the other file hosts, the maximum file size is 300MB which is a large amount per file in comparison. Similar to Easyshare, users are paid for each download they receive from a certain file.

7. Badongo - Badongo is an exceptionally neat file host, and I would most certainly rate it as one of the best. As a unregistered user, you are allowed to upload up to 4.8GB a day and as a free, registered user, 12GB a day. To make it similar to Filedropper, Badongo allows users to upload files of a maximum size of 1GB. When you register with Badongo you even receive an account that stores all of your files of course, but also allows users to create picture albums out of the pictures they store. This brings even more wonderful features to this awesome site.

More features include the option to create an MP3 player on your website by pasting code from your account, the ability to create slideshows from pictures with multiple effects, a file widget tool to place on websites, a desktop application for uploading files quickly, etc.

Now that you have seen some of the top web hosts, tell us what you use to upload and store your files online.

• Damn Small is small enough and smart enough to do the following things:
• Boot from a business card CD as a live linux distribution (LiveCD)
• Boot from a USB pen drive
• Boot from within a host operating system (that's right, it can run *inside* Windows)
• Run very nicely from an IDE Compact Flash drive via a method we call "frugal install"
• Transform into a Debian OS with a traditional hard drive install
• Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram
• Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at how fast your computer can be!)
• Modularly grow -- DSL is highly extendable without the need to customize  

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

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When it comes to icons, web designers and graphic artists have an excellent opportunity to showcase their craft, prove their experience and explore their creativity. A sweet, nice icon set is a perfect showcase of designer’s work and a powerful instrument to build up your reputation online. In fact, designers make use of it, creating absolutely amazing icon sets and offering them for free download. More...

Declaring digital sales a success, rock veterans Nine Inch Nails have released another online album, The Slip. Unlike their last album, this one is totally free, and, according to front man Trent Reznor, is a thank-you to the band's fans. More...

Slackware 12.1 has been released, with kernel 2.6.24-5. 'Among the many program updates and distribution enhancements, you'll find better support for RAID, LVM, and cryptsetup; a network capable (FTP and HTTP, not only NFS) installer; and two of the most advanced desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.4.2, a fast, lightweight, and visually appealing desktop environment, and KDE 3.5.9, the latest 3.x version of the full-featured K Desktop Environment.

http://www.slackware.org/announce/12.1.php

On this day in 1964, the first BASIC program was run. From the Wired article:"Mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz had been trying to make computing more accessible to their undergraduate students. One problem was that available computing languages like Fortran and Algol were so complex that you really had to be a professional to use them. BASIC is still alive and well these days, from Microsoft's VB.net to cross-platform variants like REALbasic. For the old-school among us, there's always Joshua Bell's Apple II BASIC emulator implemented in Javascript.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/dayintech_0501
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_.NET
http://realbasic.com/
http://www.calormen.com/Applesoft/

APIFinder is a growing index of various application programming interfaces (APIs). An API provides a set of instructions that you can use to make new software interoperate with existing applications. This site is also a place to share ideas and advice on how to use APIs in your programming. This site grows in part through community contribution so please submit your favorite APIs as well as articles and API-related projects today!

http://www.apifinder.com/

In their ever continuing battle to 'free the Internet', The Pirate Bay has now launched an uncensored blogging service, called Baywords. The service is intended to be a safe haven for bloggers who want to be able to write whatever they want.

http://torrentfreak.com/baywords-pirate-bay-blog-080416/
http://baywords.com/

Some of them work with information you supply, letting you manipulate, track and share data, such as your schedule or your to-do list. Others, so-called mashups, draw data from different sites and reassemble it to make something new. They're all part of how the Web is evolving beyond just a bunch of point sources for information. Here are 11 examples that show what the new Web can do, from helping you organize your life to adding some personalized fun to it.

Personal assistants

GrandCentral

Ever wish you could exercise the same control over incoming phone calls as you do over e-mail? GrandCentral — now a Google operation — gives you a new phone number and forwards incoming calls to any other number or numbers you specify. More...

Live coverage of the Google App Engine launch event is here.

Google isn’t just talking about hosting applications in the cloud any more. Tonight at 9pm PT they’re launching Google App Engine (Update: The site is live), an ambitious new project that offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform. It consists of Python application servers, BigTable database access (anticipated here and here) and GFS data store services.

At first blush this is a full on competitor to the suite of web services offered by Amazon, including S3 (storage), EC2 (virtual servers) and SimpleDB (database).

Unlike Amazon Web Services’ loosely coupled architecture, which consists of several essentially independent services that can optionally be tied together by developers, Google’s architecture is more unified but less flexible. For example, it is possible with Amazon to use their storage service S3 independently of any other services, while with Google using their BigTable service will require writing and deploying a Python script to their app servers, one that creates a web-accessible interface to BigTable.

What this all means: Google App Engine is designed for developers who want to run their entire application stack, soup to nuts, on Google resources. Amazon, by contrast, offers more of an a la carte offering with which developers can pick and choose what resources they want to use.

Google Product Manager Tom Stocky described the new service to me in an interview today. Developers simply upload their Python code to Google, launch the application, and can monitor usage and other metrics via a multi-platform desktop application.

More details from Google: More...

How do I contact the owner of a website? How popular is my site on Digg or Delicious? What other websites are hosted on my web server ? Is my competitor using WordPress or Drupal? xyz.com is loading fast, what is the name of their web hosting company ? Is my blog accessible from China or Japan ?

If you got questions like these in your mind, here are some of the most useful online tools to help you know each and every detail of any website on the planet.

Just-Ping.com - Just Ping help you know whether your website or blog is accessible from different cities of the world. Unlike other online ping services that run from one location, Just-Ping.com runs the ping command on your website from 26 different locations spread across the globe so you have a better idea about your site availability in different regions.

They even have a checkpoint in Shanghai so you can easily find out if some particular website is blocked in China or not. More...

Adobe today launched a basic version of Adobe Photoshop available for free online. Photoshop Express will be completely Web-based so consumers can use it with any type of computer, operating system and browser. According to Yahoo! News, Adobe says providing Photoshop Express for free is part marketing and part a strategy to create up-sell opportunities. It hopes some customers will move from it to boxed software like its $99 Photoshop Elements or to a subscription-based version of Express that's in the works.

http://www.photoshop.com/express

Productivity

AbiWord (download)
Tired of expensive, slow, bloated word processors? Download this surprisingly powerful freebie, which includes sophisticated features such as mail merge and advanced layouts. The program handles a wide variety of document formats, including those of Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format, OpenOffice.org, and other programs.More...

SOMEONE upset with the growing size of the popular "Nero" cd and dvd-burning application decided to take matters into his or her own hands, and released unofficial "Nero Lite" and "Nero Micro" versions.

I remember the time when Nero -which seemed to come bundled with almost every decent CD-writer at some point- was a small and efficient application. It basically "got the job done", with a solid engine and decent interface. In the last few years, however, the size of the beast grew considerably, with the latest build 7.7.5.1 -released last month- being a 190MB download that does not include help files and which in addition lists "1 GB hard disk space" for a full install among its requirements. What used to be a small CD and DVD burning application now is a huge suite composed of the original "Burning Rom" plus: "Nero Express", "Nero CoverDesigner", "Nero WaveEditor", "Nero Toolkit", "Nero Vision", "Nero Recode", "Nero PhotoSnap", "Nero BackItUp", "Nero ImageDrive" and a few others I'm probably leaving out.

The "Nero Micro" installer

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(PCWORLD.com) Web apps that transcend the Web. PCs that redefine what a PC can do. And oh yeah, a certain cell phone you may have heard of. We pick 25 breakthroughs that you can get your hands on right now.
Make no mistake, the Web is taking over. Applications are moving to browsers en masse, and technology to take Web apps offline promises to smooth the road ahead. And let's not forget breakthrough devices advancing the Web-anywhere world: Apple has redefined the phone, and One Laptop per Child's sub-$200 laptop is delivering Internet-style collaboration to kids in developing nations. But innovation isn't all on the Web; the PC is evolving as well. Apple has reenvisioned backup, HP has created the first useful touch-screen PC, hybrid hard drives boost speed and battery life, and ultraportables have become even more useful. Chosen from the hundreds of products we reviewed in 2007, here are 25 that will change the way you work, communicate, and play this year--and beyond.

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Perl is a dynamic scripting language widely used in everything from Linux system utilities to Web servers to full-blown graphical enterprise applications.
Just in time for Christmas, there's a new version of perl, the first in over five years. The first update since 2002 to the "practical extraction and report language," perl 5.10 adds both new language features and an improved perl interpreter, according to community site Perl Buzz.
Perl is a dynamic scripting language widely used in everything from Linux system utilities to Web servers to full-blown graphical enterprise applications.
During its 20-year history, it gained massive popularity by assimilating the syntax from many predecessors, making it really easy to use for anyone already versed in sed, awk, grep, csh, C/C++, Lisp, and so on.
Perl's syntactical flexibility sometimes makes perl scripts challenging to read, however, and languages like python with rigid syntax structure have arguably gained ground in recent times over perl, for applications that are developed collaboratively.
Additionally, scripting languages specially-made for use on the Web, like PHP and Ruby, have eroded some of perl's once formidable share of the dynamic Web server scripting scene.

Read the full story on LinuxDevices.com: First Release of Perl in Five Years Arrives 
 

Microsoft recently purchased a company called Jellyfish.com, based in Madison, Wisconsin.  Jellyfish has done some really innovative work in comparative shopping engines.

http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2007/10/01/microsoft-acquires-jellyfish-com.aspx