Many people have been wondering when Daylight Saving Time (DST)  is scheduled for this fall.  Mark your calendars (if they aren’t already) for Sunday, November 1, 2009, at 2 a.m.

Daylight Saving Time

There has been some confusion about the “fall back” time for DST 2009. In the past, the time change happened on the last Sunday in October. The time change now happens on the first Sunday in November.

Remember to change your clocks, but be careful as some clocks on cell phones, computers, etc., are programmed to change automatically for DST.  Also, to add more confusion, some computers and electronic devices may have already been programmed to change on the last Sunday in October.  So double-check that your clocks have the correct time.

So what is DST? Here is a description from TimeandDate.com:

Daylight Saving Time (or summertime as it is called in many countries) is a way of getting more light out of the day by advancing clocks by one hour during the summer. During Daylight Saving Time, the sun appears to rise one hour later in the morning, when people are usually asleep anyway, and sets one hour later in the evening, seeming to stretch the day longer.

The reason DST works is because its saves energy due to less artificial light needed during the evening hours—clocks are set one hour ahead during the spring, and one hour back to standard time in the autumn. Many countries observe DST, and many do not.

Note: Between March–April through September–November, it is summer in the northern hemisphere, where many countries may observe DST, while in the southern hemisphere it is winter. During the rest of the year the opposite is true: it is winter in the northern hemisphere and summer in the southern.

Benjamin Franklin first suggested Daylight Saving Time in 1784, but it was not until World War I, in 1916, when it was adopted by several counties in Europe that initially rejected the idea.

It is difficult to predict what will happen with Daylight Saving Time in the future. The daylight saving date in many countries may change from time to time due to special events or conditions.The United States, Canada and some other countries extended DST in 2007. The new start date is the second Sunday in March (previously the first Sunday in April) through to the first Sunday in November (previously the last Sunday in October).

Nancy Drew is one of my current favorite games and the interesting thing is, I remember my family had a great affection for this brand as we had Nancy Drew books strewn around our home all over while growing up.

The fact that they have come out with a video game in itself is very cool. I love playing the game and now I am going to make public some of the tips and advice on how to – I came, I saw, I conqured – this game.

Continue Reading

July 4 which is celebrated by all the Americans as their Independence Day has another chapter added to it in the history of computer attacks. You will be surprised to know that several government websites got knocked off due to a unique widespread cyber attack. I am sure quite a few of us have experienced the problem of cyber attack at some point of time, but that is restricted to the private sites. This is one of its kind, where several official websites were down at varying points.

It came into notice when quite a few of the websites such as the Transportation Department, Federal Trade Commission, The Treasury Department and also the ones that are responsible for fighting against the cyber crime were all not opening up. As a matter of fact, there are various sites that have been experienced major problems even till Tuesday evening. This incident is being linked to the cyber attack on the government and private websites of South Korea.

Continue Reading

This particular project has been about 34 months in the making, but come tommorow the project would officially get released – Mozilla’s open source web browser Firefox 3.

As the company holds out on eager Firefox users until it is deemed software ready, as the time nears, excitement is reaching a fever pitch.

Mozilla is making the most out of its release date, including world-wide parties and the now infamous attempt at setting a new Guinness World Record for most software downloads in one day.

One thing that Mozilla is most proud of is the enhanced speed and efficiency of Firefox 3, claiming to be nine times faster than rival Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7, and two to four times faster than previous version Firefox 2.

Continue Reading

But guess what. Members from India get first preference when it comes to testing out new changes. Same was the case when Orkut changed its theme to a new CSS layout long time back or when it introduced applications like Facebook.

Its always the users from India who get to try out these changes first. Orkut knows which side its bread is buttered on.

Continue Reading

So today when I logged into Thunder bird to check my email, what do I see but a notification from Orkut asking me to verify my account or else it will be deleted.

Boo-Hoo.

Same old phishing scams which seem to be a dime a dozen these days. The email is pasted below as it is:

Continue Reading

Something interesting for the web programmers here. What does an activity diagram to describe the resolution of the response status code, given various headers look like?

For those who are more academically inclined, click on the link below to find out.

http://thoughtpad.net/alan-dean/http-headers-status.gif

WORDPRESS is a fantastic blogging platform. This free open source application can be used not only for fulfilling your blogging needs over the Internet, but also as a full fledged Collaborative Content Management System (CMS).

You can either have it running on the Internet, to reach a wider audience, or you can simply install it on your personal computer and use it accordingly.

Continue Reading

If you design website templates, do front end coding, deal with CSS, or own/manage a website, wouldn’t it be great if you could see how your website looked like in as many different browsers and Operating Systems?

Since at present there is no uniformity in browser or front end scripting standards, it makes sense to ensure that pages don’t get messed up across multiple browsers.

Continue Reading

MOST email clients like Thunderbird and Outlook have a feature which when set, notify you when your email is opened by the receiver. However the same was not possible if you sent an email from a website like lets say Gmail, Yahoo mail etc.

Now you can.

Continue Reading