Research Bin

How long can we keep data intact? Surely a very long time..? Not necessarily! A few events over the past few months got me thinking and it turns out that keeping data over long periods of time is pretty challenging. Let's see why.

Digital editions of books are rapidly gaining popularity. While some people still find it preferable to use hard-copy, more and more people move to eBooks in favor of added functionality and usability. When it comes to a book you own, it is nice to be able to commit your thoughts on to it. Highlighting, scribbling, commenting or making notes on your copy allows a more personalized feel to your books. And it makes reference a lot easier. Unlike in printed books, the original text is not ruined by user edits on a soft-copy. Such data introduced by the user are referred to as "annotations". They are actually an overlay of information over the book print.

When it comes to recording information, multimedia files have the obvious upper hand over plain text documents. They have a solid flow with a lot of accompanying data in addition to the objective information. For example, It's much interesting to listen to a narrative as opposed to reading the same information on text form. It's not quite the same. But it is difficult to move at our own pace through an audio unlike text or an image. This can be a headache when it comes to keeping track of contents in long audio/video tracks. Let's look at a couple of features we can make use of to make life easier.

There are a couple of rating widgets for blogger for free. 5-Star Ratings, Thumbs Up-Down Ratings, Yes-No Ratings, 1-5 Ratings etc. To my knowledge, there are 4 service providers to choose from.

Cabinet files(a.k.a. Diamond files) are the Microsoft Windows Archives. These archives can store multiple files/folders into a single file with or without involving data compression. Since every Windows system is natively compatible with cab files, Windows provide enough facilities to create, extract, or rebuild cab files without requiring additional software.

When it comes to distributing a collection of files, a software, or a setup. One of the best choices is to make the distro in the form of a Self-extracting Archive( why? ). If you chose to go with this solution, you will have to use some tool to create the SFX. Ofcourse, that's no big deal; There are plenty of software which allow you to produce self-extracting archives. Winzip, WinRAR, 7zip, etc may be the obvious choice. But, have you ever noticed that the Windows Operating System holds a built-in utility for this? Strange enough, but it's true.

I'm sure most of you have dealt with data compression. The concept is shrinking the space consumption of files and folders. WinRar , 7zip , Winzip , KGB archiver are some famous utilities for this purpose. Keep in mind that its not the software, but it is the compression algorithm that does all the magic(Software are just different different implementations of data compression algorithms) Now, let's say you run a bunch of files weighing 200MB through one of these compression software and came up with a single compressed file with 150MB. Clearly we have a saving of 50megabytes here. This compressed file is literally a pack of data. If you plan for a distribution, this is the obvious choice. However...