Fix Windows Problems with a Click

Is your computer unable to recognize the CD or DVD drive? Has the recycle bin suddenly disappeared from your desktop? Are you unable to start programs like the Registry editor or the task manager when you yourself are the owner of the computer but unfortunately not the administrator?

These are some common issues faced by Windows users and luckily, the solutions to most of these tiny but annoying programs are hidden inside the Windows registry and can be found with a simple “google search”.

However, if you don’t like to fiddle directly with the registry and need something more simple, check out Fixwin.

This is a free utility for Windows that, as the name suggests, can repair a few dozen Windows annoyances and problems with a single click. It works on both 32-bit and 64-bit version of Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Fixwin weighs less than a MB and it requires no installation so you can carry it on a USB drive.

Google Chrome – Behind the Scenes

Google has made some delightful video ads in the past but nothing compares their latest and very artistic video campaign that they have done to market Google Chrome.

Video A: Why is Google Chrome fast?





Video B: How Tabs work in Google Chrome?




Video C: How Themes work inside Chrome?

More about the new orkut - orkut blog

More about the new orkut - orkut blog

Microsoft Office 2010 Review - A Visual Guide to New Features of Office 2010 from Digital Inspiration.

Google Chrome OS – Video

Hey! Ho! Let's Go!

Here at Google, we believe programming should be fast, productive, and most importantly, fun. That's why we're excited to open source an experimental new language called Go. Go combines the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. Typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C. Go lets you move fast.

Go is a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing, a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, plus some cool features like true closures and reflection.

Want to write a server with thousands of communicating threads? Want to spend less time reading blogs while waiting for builds? Feel like whipping up a prototype of your latest idea? Go is the way to go! Check out the video for more information or visit golang.org.

By Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Ian Taylor, Russ Cox, Jini Kim and Adam Langley - The Go Team

Courtesy :Google Official Blog

Connect Two Computers Without a Router

Let’s assume you have two computers at home and you want to connect them together so that you can easily share an internet connection between the two machines or transfer photos, music and other files from one computer to another. How do you do this?
Connect Two Computers Directly

There are two options – you can either buy a router or, if you are looking for something more simple and don’t want to spend money on new networking hardware, you can connect the two computers using a commonly-available cable. The latter method doesn’t involve any complicated network settings and you will still be able to share files, internet connection, and even printers between computers.

Things you need:

To set up this basic wired home network, all you need is an inexpensive Ethernet crossover cable and the other requirement is that network cards* (also known as LAN or Ethernet cards) should be installed on each of you computers.

[*] This should not be an issue because network cards are available on most newer machines by default but if you are working with a very old computer, you can either attach an internal LAN card to your computer’s motherboard or go for a USB Network adapter that will turn a USB port into an Ethernet (RJ45) port.

An Ethernet crossover cable looks like a standard Ethernet cable but the internal wiring is a little different. You can purchase crossover cables at Amazon.com or from your local computer store. If you have trouble finding them, you can purchase an inexpensive crossover adaptor and that will let you use any standard Ethernet cable as a crossover cable.

Connect Computers with an Ethernet Crossover Cable

Before connecting the two computers with a physical cable, make sure that both machine are using the same workgroup*. Here is step-by-step guide that explains how you can change the workgroup of your computers.

Changing workgroup in Windows XP – From the Start menu, right-click “My Computer.” Select Properties in the drop-down menu, and then select the second tab that says “Computer Name” from the System Properties window. Now click the “Change…” button, enter a unique Workgroup name and reboot your computer.

Now that the workgroups are same for both computers, connect the two computers together using the Ethernet crossover cable. Simply plug-in one end of the crossover cable into the network adapter of Computer A and connect the other end of the cable to the network adapter of Computer B.

Windows will automatically recognize the new network, and you can now easily view files and folder that the other computer has shared. Simply open Networks from the Start Menu (or the Control Panel), and you should see the other computer by its name. You can then browse any shared files on the other computer, and can even utilize shared printers.

Share an Internet Connection Between Two Computers

There are scenarios where you may want to share the same internet connection between two computers. For instance:

Situation A - You have setup a Wi-Fi network at home but your old desktop computer doesn’t have a wireless network card. In that case, you can use the laptop to connect to the internet wirelessly and then share that same connection with the desktop over a crossover Ethernet cable.

Situation B – You have a netbook with a built-in cellular data connection. You can share that connection with any another computer at home through the crossover Ethernet cable.

Situation C – You use a (slow) Wireless USB modem with your laptop computer while your desktop is connected to an ADSL Broadband line and there’s no router at home. For any bandwidth intensive tasks, like when you want to backup photos from your laptop to an online service, you can connect the laptop to the desktop and things will happen much faster.

OK, let’s look at the steps required for sharing an Internet connection.

First, if you only wish to share internet connection and not files, both computers need not belong to the same workgroup. All you need to do is to connect the two computers with the Ethernet crossover cable, and then turn on Internet connection sharing in the computer that already has an Internet connection. The instructions vary for different versions of Windows:

For Windows XP – Select “Network and Internet Connections” from the Control Panel and click “Network Connections.”
Right-click on the network connection you wish to share (the one connected to the internet), select Properties, click on the “Advanced” tab, and then check the box that says “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection.” Click OK, and the second computer that you have connected to this computer with the Crossover Cable should have internet access now.

The Google Timeline in Video

This brilliant video animation from Google UK captures some of the important milestones in Google’s 14 year old history right from the summer of ‘95 when the co-founders first met at Stanford until 2009 when Google announced important non-search related products including Google Wave and Chrome OS.

HTTP-Watch-know-everything-when-a Webpage loads

Ever wondered what is happening back-stage when your Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox is loading a web-page?

There are lots of HTTP requests being processes, lots of scripts being executed. A lot of stuff happens. If you want to know the detail about all these background activities, you can do it free. HTTP-Watch is a free tool for HTTP sniffing which works right inside yourInternet Explorer or Firefox and will capture each and every activity of the webpage load. You can use this tool to monitor your website or any other web-site and monitor every activity during the load of the web-page. You can use this to test your websites and blogs.

To know all the details of a web page loading follow these steps :

1. Download and Install Free Version of HttpWatch

2. Now Open Internet Explorer and Click on the HttpWatch Icon to load the activity recorder

3. This will load a recorder view of HttpWatch at the bottom half of IE screen. Click on the Record Button

4. Now Open the Website you want to monitor or test, and you will see the logs flowing in this recorder as the website loads. After the website is loaded completely, save the logs in a file. It will be saved with a .hwl extension.

5. Double click on the file. It will open it with the log viewer application of HttpWatch.

Google Homepage Logo, Drawn by 9-Year Old Indian

Puru Pratap Singh, a class IV student from Gurgaon in India, has won the Doodle 4 Google contest and you can see his artwork live on the Google India homepage.

The theme of this year’s Google Doodle contest was "My India".

Dennis Hwang, who is the creative genius behind every holiday logo that you see on the Google homepage across countries, was also in Delhi for the award function.

Puru, who is just nine years old, gets a laptop computer for winning the Doodle 4 Google Competition and his school (Amity) will receive a technology grant of around $2000 from Google India.

Some 4,000 logos were submitted by school students from across India for the contest and, though you won’t see any of them on the Google homepage, some of them very extremely creative. Here are my favorite picks:

Write Your Own Name using Barcode

This image may not make sense to the human eye but if you were to show it to a barcode scanning machine, it would immediately recognize the text hidden in that image as "Google".

How to create a 2d Barcode Image

If you are excited about Google’s barcode logo and would like to generate a similar Barcode image for your own name or brand, go to morovia.com, choose "Code 128" as the Barcode format and uncheck the setting that says "Show human readable text".

How to decode a Barcode Image

Now the reverse case. Say you come across a barcode image on the Internet and would like to read the text that’s hidden inside that graphic. You can either get a barcode scanning machine, or a more easy option would be that you upload the image to ZXing.org and it will try to decode that image for you online.

You can either upload the barcode image from the desktop or simply pass on the web address of the image and ZXing will decode it for you

Microsoft Offers Web Designers Free Tools to Build and Host New Websites

Microsoft has been working hard to get their software tools in the hands of people who are starting out new ventures, and these efforts have been widely well-received.

For instance, the DreamSpark program has provided design and development tools to students worldwide free of charge, while the BizSpark program has provided licenses for the same set of tools to software startups for a mere token fee of $100.

Now there’s a new Website Spark program from Microsoft that is aimed at web professionals and small web development companies who are involved in designing websites and other web-based applications.

Eligibility Criteria for Website Spark

If you build websites for your clients and have no more than 10 people working for you (including owners and employees), you are eligible to sign up for the Website Spark program.

The only restriction is that you must launch a new website or service within 6 months of getting accepted into the program that is built using the tools that you received through WebsiteSpark.

Software Tools included in the Program

If you agree, you will be offered licenses for Visual Studio, Expression Studio, Expression Web, Windows Web Server, and SQL Server Web Edition for three years. You can purchase the licenses at the end of three years or simply exit the program.

There are no up-front costs but you’ll have to pay a $100 program fee once you decide to exit the program. In addition to software licenses, participating web development companies will also get discounts on hosting services for their websites, as well as coverage on the upcoming WebsiteSpark portal.

The WebsiteSpark program is available to web design companies around the world, so if you are planning on launching a company or currently run a small company that meets the requirements, WebsiteSpark might just help company save a ton of money in software licenses and you may also get some extra visibility through the various Microsoft portals.

Easter Eggs in Google Reader

Matt shares an Easter egg hidden inside Google Reader that turns the "Like" button into a "Heart" but to know what happens when you click this Heart button, watch the video




Hint: The key combination that will invoke the secret Ninja mode in Google Reader is Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A.

Finds Errors in your English Writing with the ESL Assistant

While the majority of international communication happens in English, a lot of these people, who communicate in English on a daily basis, aren’t very comfortable as English is not their native language.

They therefore have to sometimes struggle to express themselves correctly in English, only to be dismayed that native English speakers can immediately notice the flaws in their writing.

When English is a Foreign Language for you

Microsoft Research has created a useful online proofing tool to help people who use English as a foreign language.

This tool, called ESL Assistant, is a web service that analyzes text for the common mistakes that non-native English speakers, especially those from Southeast Asia, often make in their writing such as the choice of determiners and prepositions.

Type some English sentences into the text box and the tool will look for possible problems in your writing and indicate them with wavy green underlines.

Once it identifies possible mistakes in your writing, the tool will generate suggestions for correcting the problems. What’s even more interesting is that the tool will find you real-world examples of both the incorrect and correct usage from other web pages on the Internet using Bing.

You can just hover your mouse over the suggested phrase and the search results in the two Bing windows will change automatically.

Check Errors in your Outlook Emails with ESL

Anyone can use the ESL (English as Second Language) Tool to check their emails and other writings for errors online though the site requires the Silverlight plugin.

The other option is that you download the ESL addon for Microsoft Outlook and integrate the web service into your email program.

Google Sidewiki

Google Sidewiki is a new browser sidebar from Google that lets users annotate or put comments on any web page on the Internet. These comments (Google calls them sidewiki entries) are public and therefore other Google Toolbar users visiting that web page may also read your comments.

For instance, Danny Sullivan left this comment on the Code of Conduct page that other visitors to that page may read and even vote upon if they find the comment useful. Google also maintains a sidewiki leaderboard to highlight the top users of their product.

To learn more about Google Sidewiki, please watch the following screencast videos:

Stop Google.com To Redirect To Google.co.in or Your Country Domain

Google.co.in in the google’s Indian web site where as google.com is the US website, so you are being redirected to your country google domain so as to filter your search results and provide you better results more faster by accessing the data centers located in your country or as near possible.

But this difference will be negligible till when you are searching something on google which is not country dependent, still if you don’t want google.com to redirect then type www.google.com/ncr in your browser address bar – ncr stands for No Country Redirect. You can save the above address as bookmark in your browser to open google.com always

Icons Not Displaying Correctly

Are you facing any of the below problems:

• Icons Not Displaying Correctly
• How To Rebuild Icon Cache
• Distorted Icons Display
• Icon Not Appearing For A Particular File Extension Type.

In order to fix all of the above mentioned you will need to force Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 to rebuild the icon cache.

Manual Method To Rebuild Icon Cache:
1. Firstly you will need to show hidden files and folders

2. Now, open windows explorer and navigate to

For Vista and Windows 7

C:\Users\(You Vista User Name)\AppData\Local

For Windows XP

C:\Documents and Settings\(Your User Name)\Local Settings)\Application Data

3. Delete the file named Iconcache.db

4. now close all the process and restart your computer, at the time logging in windows will automatically re create the Iconcache.db file.

Automatically Method To Rebuild Icon Cache

There is one free utility called Icon Refresh which automatically deletes and let widows to recreate the icon cache to fix all the problems.

Download Icon Refresh

The Simplest App for Capturing Screenshots (Portable)

If you are looking for a screen capture utility for Windows that’s super easy to use and doesn’t require installation (so you can easily carry it around on a USB Flash drive), check out Screensnapr.

You press the hotkey (the default is Ctrl+1), drag the mouse to select some rectangular area of your desktop screen and voilà!

The URL of the captured screenshot image will get copied on to your clipboard that you can drop in an email message or post it anywhere on the web.

ScreenSnapr can also upload captures to your own FTP server. And if you work with multiple monitors, you can configure the utility to capture an image of both screens at once or each one separately.

ScreenSnapr.com – The utility is compatible with Windows 7 as well and it weighs just a little more than 100kb.

Virus Effect Remover

Virus infection is one such big issue for a layman computer user as it any virus infection may result in loss and corruption of important data. Even when a virus is removed form your computer by the antivirus installed on your computer the infections and other damages caused by the virus may still remain.

The infections which remains after virus removal includes invisible folder options in windows explorer, task manager still disabled, registry editing disabled and some autorun.inf files created by the virus in the root drive of each partition. In this article we will share the methods to repair such damages.

Virus Effect remover comes to rescue in such a situation as it allows you remove al most all the virus infections caused by different types of viruses, you can do a lot more with this free tool on virus infected computer, to remove the virus also it could be of great help.

Some Key Features and Functionalities include the following in virus effect remover

1. You can scan suspicious services
2. Kill virus process with this tool

3. Fix Disabled Task Manager and Registry Editing

4. Launch MSconfig

5. System File Checker

6. Show Suspicious Files

7. Enable the disabled Run prompt

Some process can be added to the blacklist so that they cannot be executed anymore, this setting could be required for the identified virus process

New Features of Firefox 3.5

This screencast video has a great overview of all the new features that are part of Firefox 3.5.

Remote Control your Windows PC with Email or SMS

It’s a long weekend and you’re happy because you’ll get to spend the next three days with your family. You left the office in an excited mood but as the cab was approaching home, you suddenly realized that you forgot to shut down the Office PC. Oops!

So what do you do? Drive back to Office? Well that’s not required - just take out your cell phone or switch on the laptop at home, send an email (or an SMS or a tweet) and that will instantly lock your Office workstation.

There’s no magic here, it’s the power of TweetMyPC utility that lets you remote control your computer from a mobile phone or any other Internet connected computer.The installation steps and commands related are all clearly stated in TweetMyPC.

It works like this. You first install the free TweetMyPC utility on any Windows PC and associate your Twitter account. The app will silently monitor your Twitter stream every minute for any desktop commands and if it finds one, will act upon it immediately. The initial version of TweetMyPC was limited to basic shutdown and restart commands, however the current v2 has a far more robust set of commands, enabling a far more useful way of getting your PC to carry out certain tasks especially when you’re AFK (Away From Keyboard).

Get Invisible in Google Talk at Desktop with Prism

Google Talk was launched on August 24, 2005. Since then it lacked in features such as Invisibility mode, Video Chat, etc which other competitors like Yahoo Messenger supported. Google has surely added these features in past year but only to its online versions of Gtalk i.e. Gmail and the desktop version is lacking behind.

Google also have a beta version which is based on Adobe Flash and is having a sky of errors. Using the Google Talk Labs Edition gets impossible at times and most users un-install it. Google seems to be slow at desktop development of Gtalk. So we came up with the following solution for invisibility in Google Talk.

In order to use invisibility at desktop, here is a short tutorial which lets you run the online version of Gtalk on your desktop.

First step is to download Prism, a product in development by Mozilla Group which integrates web applications with the desktop, allowing web applications to be launched from the desktop and configured independently of the default web browser.

Note: This trick will only work on all Windows OS as currently Prism runs only on it.

Second step is to run the prism and configure and create a Prism app (basically a Prism shortcut) and specify the Google Talk Gadget URL in it.

The Step by Step Guide:

1. Download Mozilla Prism.
2. Install the Prism.
3. Run Prism, a window will open. Paste this link ( http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/popout ) in the URL field.
4. Give it a name as “Google Talk Gadget”.
5. Configure other options as per your need as where do you want to place its shortcuts. Prism creates a shortcut for every app you create. Make sure you place atleast create one shortcut.
6. Run the shortcut you just created.
7. Re-size the window to look like a messenger by using Drag button in the bottom right of the window.

I found this as an effective way to remain offline while staying at your desktop and without launching your heavy browser. Though you get invisibility in Gtalk at your desktop but there is still a flaw in this trick. It doesn’t notify you when a contact comes online or goes offline. Also when someone sends a message, the window in Taskbar never blinks and so you have to keep a check at this window in order to know if you have got any message. So basically you get no notifications by this method. If you have any better way than this, do drop a comment below.

Run Any File of Any Format in Windows Media Player

Windows Media Player is one of the best media players for Windows OS but many people avoid using it as their main player because it supports very few formats as Microsoft ships it with Windows without much codec’s built-in. But now you can play just any file of any format in Windows Media Player by just installing a small package. Though Windows Media Player has been ignored by many but I still prefer using WMP because of its strong integration with Windows and other apps. And now you can also bypass the limitation of playing limited formats by installing a small package known as K-Lite Codec package, so you get another reason to love Windows Media Player.

Download K-Lite Codec Package

K-Lite Codec Package has different variants to suit everyone’s need from Basic to Mega and a special Corporate Edition. To find the one that best suits you, visit the CodecGuide site to download the one of your need.

Watch a Short Video Tour of Microsoft Bing

Bing is the name of Microsoft’s new search engine that expected to go live sometime next week. You can find overview documents and screenshot images of Bing here while of video tour of the Bing.com service is available here.

See What’s Popular on the Web In One Page

OurSignal is an interesting visualization that shows the current most popular stories from Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Hacker News and Yahoo! Buzz in one page.

Most Popular Tech Stories on the Web

The font size in the visualization is relative to the popularity of a story (bigger means more popular) while colors denote the trend - warm colors mean that story is increasing in popularity while cool colors indicate that the story is sliding off the charts.

What’s useful about OurSignal is that it auto-hides headlines of all stories that you may previously read in the browser. It does so by matching the web address of stories against URLs stored in your browser history and if there’s a match, it means that you’ve visited that link before and so it’s not shown in the the visualization map.

Stories on the OurSignal page are refreshed every 15 minutes so this could do as an interesting screensaver as well.

New Evolution of Web 3.0 and its Concepts

This slide neatly sums up the main differences between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.

Web 1.0 - That Geocities & Hotmail era was all about read-only content and static HTML websites. People preferred navigating the web through link directories of Yahoo! and dmoz.

Web 2.0 - This is about user-generated content and the read-write web. People are consuming as well as contributing information through blogs or sites like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc. The line dividing a consumer and content publisher is increasingly getting blurred in the Web 2.0 era.

Web 3.0 - This will be about semantic web (or the meaning of data), personalization (e.g. iGoogle), intelligent search and behavioral advertising among other things.

If that sounds confusing, check out some of these excellent presentations that help you understand Web 3.0 in simple English. Each takes a different approach to explain Web 3.0 and the last presentation uses an example of a "postage stamp" to explain the "semantic web".

The Evolution of Web 3.0

View more Microsoft Word documents from Marta Strickland.

Here is another classic video explaining the Web 3.0 concepts.

Why Web 3.0?

View more Microsoft Word documents from Sabin Buraga.

How China Censors the Internet ?

An employee of Baidu, the Google of China, has leaked a document folder that suggests in detail how authorities in China censor the Internet.

These internal documents contain information about internet monitoring policies of China, how censors can search web pages for sensitive keywords and the unique point system that is used by government to reward the "more efficient" Internet police staff.

Related: Know if your site is blocked in China?

List of Words Banned in China

Here’s a quick list of blacklisted topics and sensitive keyword phrases that are blocked on the Chinese Internet. These include:

* Chinese Communist Party, Ruling government
* Puppet government, One-party system
* Dictatorship, tyranny
* Human rights in China & Freedom of expression
* Gao Zhisheng (Chinese lawyer and activist)
* Falun Gong (Banned cult in China founded by Li Hongzhi)
* Keywords related to Military, Gambling, Brainwashing & Sex
* Kidney harvesting from live people, Organ Sale
* Tiananmen Square Massacre
* Tibet, Taiwan Independence
* Cheating in Examinations, Fake Diploma courses
* How to make bombs, counterfeit money and so on.

In addition to keywords, these documents also include a long list of web addresses that have been deleted from the Chinese web.
The full leaked folder with all the keywords and other Baidu documents is available for download here.

Inserting Images in GMail

Well, it's about time. You no longer have to use workarounds to put images into your messages or attach images when you really want to inline them. Just turn on "Inserting images" from the Labs tab under Settings, and you'll see a new toolbar icon like this:



Make sure you're in rich formatting mode, or it won't show up. Click the little image icon, and you can insert images in two ways: by uploading image files from your computer or providing image URLs.

Keep in mind that Gmail doesn't show URL-based images in messages by default to protect you from spammers, so if you're sending mail to other Gmail users, they'll still have to click "Display images below" or "Always display images from ..." to see images you embed.

How Internet Works ?

Below video shows simple & detailed way about the working of Internet and its history.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4&feature=player_embedded

Nominations for India MVP 2010

Microsoft has putted in an effort to praise the individuals who are working to make the world a better place with technology. MVP award is all about helping such individuals and providing them with a tag “MVP” so they can stand out in front of public. Microsoft also provides access to BETA software’s and many more resources which let them enhance their skills. If you have been helping the crowd either offline or online and sport specialty in any Microsoft product, you are capable of being an MVP.

MVP stands for Most Valuable Professional, and for this award you neither have to be a expert or a professional. The basic requirement is you have been actively helping a crowd in some technology field.

You can either be a author or an offline speaker promoting today’s technology. Microsoft needs the individual to nominate themselves here so they can catch up with new talents. If you find yourself capable of being one of them, nominate yourself MVP India Site. You can also check more information on the current MVP’s.

Enable/Disable iGoogle Auto Refresh

Adding ?refresh=0 to the iGoogle link will not stop iGoogle from refreshing automatically but practically it extends the time between two refresh. This is the most simplest and effective way I have discovered. This method will make iGoogle to refresh slowly..

http://www.google.com/ig?refresh=0

Free Norton Security Scan and Clean

Almost all of us get frustrated with our anti virus program installed on our computer as it my not be able to protect us from all the type of infections. Our anti virus many times does not detect and protect us against viruses in pen drive, spyware getting installed on our computer from internet and other security risks.

On the first time when you start the scan it will download all the updates required to detect and repair any virus infections found on your computer. In all this is the best program to proof check you computer for any kind of virus or trojan infections and repair them.

Download Norton Security Scan and Clean

Top free apps for iPhone 2.0

The iPhone 2.0 is out with the iTunes 7.7. A free app section can be found on iTunes Store but here is a quick round-up of the Top free really useful Apps found at the iTunes store.

Google Mobile: The original Google.com already has quite a good support for iPhone browser but this Apps get features like search as you type & quick call, etc.

• Remote: This is a wonderful app which is used for controlling your Apple or iTunes right from from your iPhone.
• Facebook: The socializing app from from Facebook. It let you set your status, watch others feed, manage your friends, chat with them, check your inbox, etc.
• Exposure: The flickr app in your pocket. Capable of browsing photos on flickr, create or read comments on pictures, see recently uploaded pictures fromyour contacts, etc.
• AIM: The IM client from AOL for your iPhone.
• Twittereffic: The twitter client for your iPhone. Do everything on Twitter from your Phone.
• NYTimes: Is there any thing better than reading NYTimes on your iPhone.
• MySpace Mobile: Another social networking app for iPhone.
• Typepad: The new way to blog, right from your iPhone.
• eReader: Read PDF eBooks on iPhone.
• Light: Turns your iPhone into a Flash light.
• To Do: For managing your tasks & notes.
• Voice Notes: Audible way of managing your tasks from your Phone.

Kosmix Search: Instant Encyclopedia

The New York Times ran an article this weekend about an emerging company, Kosmix, that takes a whole new spin on search. The article describes the Kosmix experience quite well: “For a key word or topic that a user enters, Kosmix gathers content from across the Web to build a sort of multimedia encyclopedia entry on the fly. For many queries, the results are pretty satisfying and look as if they have been compiled by a human editor, not a computer.”

My ears always perk up when I hear someone mention a search competitor to Google that shows promise. Search is a tough market that Google has pretty well cornered. But a page with dynamic, robust information from a variety of multimedia sources (including standard search results) is not a competitor so much as a suppliment, and this one is definitely worth checking out.

I’ll share a personal example to highlight the comparison between Google and Kosmix. My doctor recently sent me a letter saying my Triglycerides are slightly high - which means I need to cut back on my sugar intake (unbeknownst to you, I am possessed by a dessert vacuum that eats any and all sugary foods in sight). At first I Googled, and came up with the typical list of sites to check: WebMD, About.com and Wikipedia.

But then I tried my search on Kosmix, and rather than having to click back and forth between a bunch of links, I had whole page of information to peruse. The Kosmix page had a wikipedia summary, articles, resources, videos, images, Q&A, blogs and even tweets! I was (and still am) thoroughly impressed. It’s like an instant Encyclopedia page, but on crazy-awesome Internet steroids.

Wanna try something scary? Try Kosmixing yourself (Yes, I just used that term as a verb).

Google Summer of Code 2009

Students, want to gain real world software engineering experience and get paid? We are now accepting applications for Google Summer of Code^TM 2009, our global program to introduce university students to the wonderful world of Open Source development. For our fifth Summer of Code, students can choose from 150 Free and Open Source software projects, in technical areas as diverse as gaming to humanitarian efforts to operating system design. All accepted students will be paired with a mentor from academia or industry and will receive coaching in all aspects of software development over the course of their three month coding project. Successful students will receive a stipend of 4500 USD for their participation in the program.

Check out the program Frequently Asked Questions and the extensive set of resources for student applicants on the program wiki, then talk to your prospective mentors about your ideas. Each mentoring organization has provided an ideas list to help get your creative juices flowing and learn more about what the project needs. Our mentors are also very excited to hear from students who have their own plans for improving their code bases, so let their ideas inspire rather than constrain you.


You can find knowledgeable folks on hand to answer questions in #gsoc on Freenode and on the program discussion list, or you can keep up with our announcements on various social networking sites.


We'll be accepting student applications through April 3, 2009 at 19:00 UTC. Best of luck to all of our student applicants, and get those applications going!

RichCopy: Best File Copying Utility

RichCopy is a visual file copying utility that helps you copy or move files at a much faster rate. It has existed since the days of Windows 95 but (unless you’re working at Microsoft) you may have never heard of RichCopy before as it was an internal tool not for public use.

Microsoft has now removed those restrictions and released RichCopy as a public download though the associated license agreement (EULA) is outdated and still refers to RichCopy as an "internal tool".
RichCopy - A Better File Copying Tool

There are several reasons why you may want to use RichCopy for file copying operations on your Windows computer. First, it can copy files from multiple places (or folders) into a single location. You don’t have to run multiple copy processes for consolidating files (like music, photos, etc.) that may be spread across different directories.

And unlike the default copy process in Windows that copies files in sequence one after another, RichCopy can copy multiple files in parallel thus speeding the process.

RichCopy is especially useful when copying a large number of files or for moving big files - the tool lets you pause and resume file copy operations so if something bad happens, like a dropped network connection, you don’t have start the copy process all over again.

There’s something for geeks as well who use XCOPY on the command line. RichCopy is not just faster than XCOPY but all features available in the GUI version of RichCopy can be used from command line as well.

Backup Device Drivers

One of the major windows problem for any windows user is locating, downloading and installing the device drivers on a windows reinstall after formatting the hard drive.

In order backup all the drivers on your computer, follow the procedure given on how to use DriverBackup.

1. Download DriverBackup from here

2. Simply unzip the program to any folder and execute the program and click Start Backup to start the backup for all the drivers installed.

3. Store the backup some where on hard drive

4. That’s it Done.

You can restore the backup of the drivers any time you want, as it creates a self extracting backup.

Find Programs To Open Unknown File Types

It happens many times when you have a unknown file type, which cannot be recognized in windows with any of the program installed in your computer. In that case you have no clue about the program which can open that file, you cannot open file by double click.



OpenWith.org provides a free desktop application which lets you find out the correct program to open a unknown file type. More over it will let you download the free program alternative which can open that file.

Know New Mail notification in TitleBar

I'm often doing something on my computer and want to know if I have new mail without having to keep my Gmail window open. But if you keep Gmail minimized or in an inactive tab sometimes all you see in the browser title bar is something like "Gmail - Inbo..."

New feature to Gmail Labs called Title Tweaks that changes the order of the elements in the browser title bar to put the more important things first. Once you turn on Title Tweaks from the Labs tab under Settings, your browser title bar will display something more like "Inbox (3) - Gma...".
That way you can see how many unread messages you have even if the window is minimized.

Undo Sent mail in GMail

Sometimes I regret sending a message the morning after. Other times I send a message and then immediately notice a mistake. I forget to attach a file or email the birthday girl that I can't make her surprise party. I can rush to close my browser or unplug the Internet — but Gmail almost always wins that race.

Now you can do just that. Turn on Undo Send in Gmail Labs under Settings as shown below


Saving this setting you’ll see a new “Undo” link on every sent mail confirmation. Click “Undo” as shown in the pic below and you’ll grab the message before it’s sent and take you right back to compose.

This feature can't pull back an email that's already gone; it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. And don't worry – if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, it'll still send your message.

Unable to Open .vbs

Recently when i was playing with .vbs scripts, they didn't open. I was unable to open even a simple script in my machine. They(.vbs) were not associated with the right program. These associations were modified coz of viruses/Trojans activity. Though the virus is removed but its damages were not covered. Below is the step-to-step process of associating that program back to .vbs

Go to Control Panel
-->Folder Options
-->File Types
--> Search for Extension .vbs and associate the same with the program wscript.exe in :\windows\System32\ for GUI based scripts. However for Console based scripts you can associate with cscript.exe at the same path.

Common DOS Commands

Typing DOS commands on the Windows Command Line prompt is a most efficient and faster way of doing things in Windows XP. Here's a run-down of the most useful DOS commands available in Windows XP.

DOS Command-line tools must be run at the prompt of the Cmd.exe command interpreter. To open Command Prompt, click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.

ipconfig - Windows IP configuration
Useful for troubleshooting your internet connection. Displays the current IP address of your computer and the DNS server address. If you call your ISP for reporting a bad internet connection, he will probably ask you to run ipconfig.

fc - Free BeyondCompare in XP
FC is an advanced DOS Command that compares two files and displays the differences between them. Though the file comparison results are not as interactive as BeyondCompare or Altova DiffDog, fc is still very useful. You can even set fc to resynchronize the files after finding a mismatch.

type - open text files sans Notepad
Similar to Unix cat command, Type is my favorite DOS command for displaying the contents of a text files without modifying them. When used in combination with more switch, type splits the contents of lengthy text files into multiple pages. Avoid using the type command with binary files or you'll hear alien PC beeps and see some greek characters on your PC.

ping - Say hello to another computer
Ping network command followed by the web-address or IP address tells you about the health of the connection and whether the other party is responding to your handshake request. Ping tool can also be used to convert the web address to a physical IP address.

tree - visual directory structure
You often need to take prints of your physical directory structure but XP has no simple "visual" commands for printing directory contents. Here, try the Tree DOS command and redirect the output to a text file.

tree > mydirectory.txt
print mydirectory.txt

attrib - make hidden files visible
Attrib lets you change attributes of System files and even hidden files. This is great for troubleshooting Windows XP. Say your XP doesn't boot ever since you edited that startup boot.ini file (Hidden), use attrib to remove the Hidden attibute and edit the file using EDIT dos command.

assoc - which program will open that .xyz file
The assoc DOS command can be used to either isplay or even modify the file name extension associations. The command assoc .htm will quickly tell you the name of your default web browser (see picture)

move - more flexible than copy-paste
Say you got a lot of XLS and DOC files in you MyDocuments folder and want to move only those XLS files that have their name ending with 2006. In XP Explorer, you have to manually select each file and then cut-paste to another folder. However, the DOS move command make things much simpler. Just type the following at the command prompt:
move *2006.xls c:\2006Reports\

find - advanced file search with filter
Find is the most powerful DOS command and even more useful than the Windows Desktop Search tool or the Windows Find Wizard. The find command searches for a specific string of text in a file or files. After searching the specified file or files, find displays any lines of text that contain the specified string.

To search your hard disk to find and display the file names on drive C: that contain the string "Google" use the pipe (|) to direct the results of a dir command to find as follows:
dir c:\ /s /b | find "Google"

Quick tip - Drag to avoid typing: When your command acts on a file or folder, you must type the path to that folder after the command. You can save typing time by dragging the file or folder from Windows Explorer into the command window.

To view help at the command-line, at the command prompt, type the following:
CommandName /?

Adding FileNames in Command Line

If your work requires extensive use of the Windows command line, this is a useful trick to improve your efficiency. When you drag and drop files to the command line window, it automatically fills in the complete path of the file.

Note that the existing text also remains intact, so if you drag and drop after typing “cd “, the file or folder name is appended to it - “cd C:\test.txt” for example.

This trick works on all versions of Windows - from 95 to XP, but not on Windows Vista.

IT firms see low or flat salaries for 2 more years

Friends a very sad news for all those Soft. geeks

Mon, Mar 9 11:15 PM

Against expectations that the job market and compensation levels might begin to show signs of recovery by next year, senior executives in the country's top information technology companies expect compensation levels to remain low over the next two- to three years. "The market is cold and there are fewer jobs, for the next two or three years, salaries will be low," T.V. Mohandas Pai, member of the board and director of human resources at the nation's second largest software exporter Infosys Technologies, told Hindustan Times.

The economic slowdown has adversely affected all sectors, including information technology, which relies heavily on demand in the West, especially the United States, which is India's largest market. "Good people will not be laid off but the key challenge is compensation," Pai said.

Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest software exporter which employs over 1,00,000 people, is also eyeing a scenario where wage hikes will not be significant. "We expect salaries to remain flat in financial year 2010 while demand for specific skill sets will drive salaries over the next two-three years," a TCS spokesperson told Hindustan Times.

However, experts at staffing firms, interpreting industry statements, say IT companies probably do not want to set high expectations for their employees amidst uncertain economic conditions and that the job market might well improve by the end of the year. "We expect the market to improve by the end of the year and organisations probably do not want to raise their employees' expectations," said Rohit Ramani, director at staffing firm EmmayHR, part of the Dutch Randstad group.

Ruchi Hajela

Courtesy : Yahoo.com

How To: Display The Shutdown Menu When Your Computer’s Power Button Is Pressed

By default, your Windows XP will shut down when the Power button is pressed. It’s a good idea to change it so that the shutdown menu is opened instead, especially if you have little kids running around the house.

It’s quite easy to change it:

Step 1:
Go to your Windows XP’s desktop and right-click it. Select “Properties” and the Display Properties window will appear.

Open the “Screen Saver” tab and look for the “Power” button near the bottom of the window. Click it.
Step 2:

In the “Power Options Properties” window that opens, go to the “Advanced” tab.

There is a dialog box in the “Power Buttons” section. Choose what you want Windows to do when the power button is pressed.
“Ask me what to do” will make it open up the shutdown menu.

Step 3: Click “OK” and restart your computer. From now on, pressing the power button will open the shutdown menu, letting you decide what you want to do.

Remove / Delete Boot.vbs Autorun Virus

Boot.vbs is a virus which is from the family of W32/Autorun.worm.h worm which attempts deploy itself to the root directory of all the drives by creating the autorun.inf files. Autorun.inf files in the root directory of each drive will execute the virus when ever user opens that drive.



Boot.vbs virus comes from W32/Lsetspy-C worm which also creates the following files on your computer as dxdlg.exe, wscript.exe and kinza.exe. Its located in windows at the following locations:

* C:\Windows\System32\dxdlg.exe
* C:\Windows\System32\boot.vbs



Here is the removal procedure to remove boot.vbs virus completely in 5 minutes.
In order to remove boot.vbs virus you will need to end the primary process of the boot.vbs virus named dxdlg.exe, wscript.exe



Normally for removing this worm you will need to boot in safe mode but with we will tell you the procedure to remove this boot.vbs virus without booting in the safemode


1. Again our Process Explorer comes handy. This will be helpful in our virus removal journey.Download this here

2. Run process explorer and Locate the following process, right click and select Kill Process or press Del key and Enter to end the process named dxdlg.exe and wscript.exe

3. Press Window + R and type msconfig and press Enter, click the startup tab



4. Uncheck the entries containing the names dxdlg.exe, wscript.exe and click OK



5. Now, Search for the following files on your computer and delete them from any where found in your computer.

dxdlg.exe
wscript.exe
boot.vbs
kinza.exe



Note: Also delete all the autorun.inf files in the root directory of the drive using autorun eater tool here. Now you need to remove the registry changes done by the virus in the registry



6. Open Start Menu >> Run, type regedit and press Enter.

Navigate to the following path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon



7. In the right pane, double click the edit the value of Userinit and set the value as “C:\windows\system32\userinit.exe” there should be nothing else written with this value mentioned.



8. Close registry and restart your computer, boot.vbs virus will be gone.

Mobile as a remote monitoring camera

MultiEyeVision, a Pune based company has launched a tool called Observer that turns mobile phones into remote monitoring cameras. The camera’s images can be viewed from any internet connected device. You need a GPRS enable smartphone for this, or you can buy a pre-configured mobile phone from them.You have to start the Observer application on the mobile, and place it where you want and login to your secure account from anywhere in the world and view the image stream over the internet Control the capture settings of the Observer from the Internet itself.

The Observer is a regular mobile phone that is pre-configured to perform the additonal functions of image capturing and streaming on demand. In order to view the images being grabbed by the Observer, the user simply needs to log-in to our secure web-portal on the internet with his/her username and password.

Because of the limitations of GPRS speed, it is presently not possible to send video (which requires higher transfer speeds). However, Observer can capture and transmit image streams upto a rate of 3 images per minute, which is adequate for the applications discussed here.The default resolution of captured images is 320x240 pixels. The high resolution captures are 640x480 resolution.The images can be stored for viewing later or even get emailed to you at specific times.


It works on Nokia S60, S40 (3rd edition) camera phones whereas recommended models are Nokia 3500 Classic, Nokia 6300, Sony Ericsson W810.For using the software with your own phone, you’d need to pay 2.5K INR.

Opening IE in Firefox

Firefox has bundle of advantages when compared to IE but people tend towards IE due to its better ability in Script handling.

So how would be the idea of opening IE as a separate Tab in Firefox. Download this add-on below and its all done.

IE Tab

Remove Ahsan Computer Virus | Kill Ahsan Virus

Recently my desktop was infected with this Ahsan computer virus, the virus came from mobile phone memory card. I was quite happy as after a long time I had to deal with this virus called Ahsan Virus which was quite easy to remove. I removed this virus without any anti virus in around 5 minutes only.

It was not as much fun as this ahsan was quite easy to remove even with out any help of any antivirus. Let’s see what are the most common symptoms of ahsan virus on a windows computer.

Ahsan's-Computer

Ahsan virus renames My computer to Ahsan’s Computer, renames Recycle Bin to G. W. Bush

, disables registry editing and don’t allow you to show hidden files and folders through folder options.



Let’s discuss the full step by step procedure to remove ahsan virus, and you don’t have to boot in safe mode to remove this ahsan virus

1. Download process explorer from here, extract the .zip archive and run it by clicking procexp.exe make sure to kill all the process with name Firewall.exe , CSRSS.exe shown in process explorer.

ahsan-virus-process

Ahsan's-virus-process

2. Now, download Everything search tool from here, and find and delete all the files with following names.

Type these files names in the search tool and delete all the files.



Note: Delete csrss.exe files found outside C:\Windows only and autorun.inf files in C:\Windows and in the root directory of all the drive like C, D, E drive and your removable pen drive etc

system.exe
csrss.exe
Home video.avi.exe
autorun.inf



3. Go to Start >> Run and copy and paste the following command given below and press enter.

REG add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v DisableRegistryTools /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f



4. Now go to Start >> Run and type regedit and press enter,

Search and delete all entries with name "Ahsan" , site 110mb.com and Bush.



5. Navigate to the following registry path and delete any key value names with NoFolderOptions

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer



6. Navigate to the following registry path

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced. Find the value "Hidden" .

Right click it and modify it to 1. If Key value hidden is not present there then you will need to create it and close registry

7. Again open Start >> Run and type msconfig and press Enter.

Locate the startup entries by ahsan virus and uncheck these entries and also make sure you remove any thing suspicious in Start Menu >> All Programs >> Startup Folder

msconfig-Ahsan-virus

Uncheck the entries named CRSS and A.M.K.B_Pk and click apply and Ok.



8. That’s it done, restart now.

Hide Drive in My Computer

This setting allows you to control which drives are visible in My Computer and Explorer. It is possible to hide all drives or just selected ones.

Open your registry (press win+r and type regedit , hit enter )
goto

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]

and find or create the DWORD “NoDrives” there by right clicking on explorer -> NEW -> DWORD value .

The “NoDrives” value uses a 32-bit word to define local and network drive visibility for each logical drive in the computer. The lower 26 bits of the 32-bit word correspond to drive letters A through Z. Drives are visible when set to 0 and hidden when set to 1.

If your not happy working in Hex, add these decimal numbers to hide the drive(s):

A: 1, B: 2, C: 4, D: 8, E: 16, F: 32, G: 64, H: 128, I: 256, J: 512, K: 1024, L: 2048, M: 4096, N: 8192, O: 16384, P: 32768, Q: 65536, R: 131072, S: 262144, T: 524288, U: 1048576, V: 2097152, W: 4194304, X: 8388608, Y: 16777216, Z: 33554432, ALL: 67108863

For example to hide drive A and drive D, you would add 1 (A) + 8 (D) which means the value should be set to “9″.

To disable all the drives set the value to “67108863″.

Restart Windows for the change to take effect.

Note: These drives will still appear in File Manager, to remove File Manager, delete or rename winfile.exe.

Registry Settings

User Key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\
Explorer]

System Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\
Explorer]

Value Name: NoDrives

Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value)

Find Invisible Users on YahooMessanger

In the recent times, this site is very helpful in finding those hiding buddies in Yahoo Messenger. :-)

It also facilitates you in searching their profile along with photo..

Check this out : http://www.yahootracer.net/

NotePad Tricks

Notepad as Diary

In daily life Notepad is a very small app comes along with each Windows Version.
This is real cool tip for people who use notepad to write down any info on a day to day basis...
In Notepad

* Create a blank text file with .LOG (CASE SENSITIVE) as the first line of the file, followed by a carriage return. [ Enter ]

* Save and close the file .

* Double-click the file to open it and notice that Notepad appends the current date and time to the end of the file and places the cursor on the next line.

* Type your notes and then save and close the file.


Each time you open the file, Notepad repeats the process, appending the time and date to the end of the file and placing the cursor below it
It simply serves as a virtual diary !

This app can break

I was too amazed by this try it out.

1. Open Notepad

2. Type the following:

this app can break

3. Save the file and Close.

4. Again Open the file and See the Magic


**NEW :
The same thing can be observed for following statements.

Bush hid the facts
Andy can not Flirt
Abhi can not flirt

actually any sentence of 4-3-3-5 sequence generates the same output.
Try out as many you want.

Hide Drive in My Computer

This setting allows you to control which drives are visible in My Computer and Explorer. It is possible to hide all drives or just selected ones.

Open your registry (press win+r and type regedit , hit enter )
goto

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]

and find or create the DWORD “NoDrives” there by right clicking on explorer -> NEW -> DWORD value .

The “NoDrives” value uses a 32-bit word to define local and network drive visibility for each logical drive in the computer. The lower 26 bits of the 32-bit word correspond to drive letters A through Z. Drives are visible when set to 0 and hidden when set to 1.

If your not happy working in Hex, add these decimal numbers to hide the drive(s):

A: 1, B: 2, C: 4, D: 8, E: 16, F: 32, G: 64, H: 128, I: 256, J: 512, K: 1024, L: 2048, M: 4096, N: 8192, O: 16384, P: 32768, Q: 65536, R: 131072, S: 262144, T: 524288, U: 1048576, V: 2097152, W: 4194304, X: 8388608, Y: 16777216, Z: 33554432, ALL: 67108863

For example to hide drive A and drive D, you would add 1 (A) + 8 (D) which means the value should be set to “9″.

To disable all the drives set the value to “67108863″.

Restart Windows for the change to take effect.

Note: These drives will still appear in File Manager, to remove File Manager, delete or rename winfile.exe.

Registry Settings

User Key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\
Explorer]

System Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\
Explorer]

Value Name: NoDrives

Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value)

What is Microsoft Groove ?

Written by Ray Ozzie, the author of Lotus Notes, now Chief Architect at Microsoft, you could call it version 2 of Lotus Notes and it's opposite in many ways. It is a more powerful, collaboration tool, but also easy to install, needs no servers or IT administration, and is cost effective for even the smallest user in a small town with nothing more than a phone / internet line.

1. Microsoft Office Groove 2007 creates dynamic workspaces to hold all digital information related to any Task, this could be a software project, a board discussion, or even a virtual classroom.

2. Each workspace is populated with only those members who have a need to know that information. Nobody else has access to it and even the roles and permissions allowed to each member can be set by the workspace manager.

3. All members in a workspace have all information automatically synchronised. No cc's and no acts of ommission or commission permit information to leak out or be forgotten. Groove is both identity and device secured, so leaking of a password means little, and data cannot just be copied and restored on another Groove account.

4. Groove guarantees not just security but also reliability of the information passing through the workspace. Once posted, you can be assured that ALL members WILL get that data - even under battlefield conditions, certified by the US DoD, Interpol and other security conscious organisations from GSK to KPMG to the UN.

5. Finally it is a viral product, that just grows in usage and benefits organically. It the best catalyst to innovation within any company, because it brings people together into a real time virtual world, just like being in the same room with the others. It cuts out fritter, speeds up decision making and improves team efficiency by at least 40%.