Tech et al

SEO Basics:: My guide for a SEO Noob:: Lesson 1 :: Why SEO?

2010-12-13T20:59:00.001+05:30

Before you begin reading this, please note that whatever I'll say in next few articles is strictly for beginners and if you find anything to the contrary feel free to point out.

Now, with that out of the way, lets start with the lesson:

A Little Retrospection: Part I:

Long long ago (about 15 years) the only way of reaching the masses was through advertisements in newspapers and/or through some audio-visual media like television. Back then companies used to create ad campaigns for their products hoping to spread the word and thereby create/generate sales. This type of advertising commonly referred to as "Outbound Advertising" which generally involves the above mentioned ad campaigns along with direct one on one marketing tactics like telemarketing, leaflets and so on. These tactics, although hugely successful, were, obviously, limited by factors such as cost and were, mostly but not always, geographically limited. There was also a not so slim chance of some would be customer slamming his/her phone/door in the face of the marketing executive.

A Little Retrospection: Part II:

But all this has changed since the advent of web and more importantly with the current exponential growth rate of internet penetration worldwide. This has brought the world together like never before and has also opened new doors for new methods of marketing. Now almost every company worth its name owns at least one website and tries to provide detailed information about its products and services using that website. A user can, after reading through the website and comparing it to other similar ones, make a decision about purchase of products or services of that particular company.

Marketing Challenges With Online Marketing:

The web, being what it is, has made it easier for consumers to find the right product from the comfort of their homes but, at the same time, it has made it necessary for the companies to use the right kind of tactics to reach out to the right kind of consumer. There are simply billions of websites with at least million of them trying to sell some kind of product/service.

Most of the users turn to Search Engines to find information about whatever they are looking for. These Search Engines then return results to the users based on the "Search Term" (referred to as Keyword from now on). These results are in the form of links to websites relevant to the Keyword entered. The user then, usually, proceeds to the link/website and does what he/she is supposed do once there; consume the information and make a decision about purchase based on that information.

This sounds/looks simple to layman but there are many factors to be considered for achieving sales this way. First and foremost is the fact that Search Engine displays the results in a pre-determined order of importance and arranges the results in a top-down manner. Most users dont bother to dig deeper and only the sites at the top of the heap get more visitors and thereby, probably, as there are still many other factors that might influence the buyer's decision, generate more sales and of course more profit. This simple fact makes it necessary to make efforts towards achieving good ranking position in Search Engine results (Referred to as "organic results" from now on). This is where Search Engine Optimization, commonly known as SEO, comes into the picture.

Search Engine Optimization/ SEO:

The position of a website in Search Results (referred to as "ranking" from now on) depends on certain parameters that differ from one Search Engine to another. These parameters, combined in some sort of algorithm, help the concerned Search Engine to decide the ranking pattern for any Keyword.

The process of SEO, when applied correctly, refers to optimizing the website in such way that it influences these parameters in a positive manner thereby increasing the website's chances of getting top ranking in Search Results.

SEO can be divided into

On-Page Optimization and
Off-Page Optimization

These two are further divided into subcategories like content enhancement, directory submissions etc

Note: There are many more and I'll explore those in detail as the series progresses.

Need For Search Engine Optimization/ SEO:

The traditional methods of marketing are often short term and involve, most of the times, direct communication with the consumer with or without his/her permission. Almost all of us, at some point of time, have dealt with telemarketers calling at odd hours and even odder places.

On the other hand with online marketing the scenario is entirely different. The user/consumer decides whether or not to click on any given link. This is also called as "Inbound marketing". In this case only those that are truly interested in a particular service try find the website. This is the major advantage that online marketing has over traditional methods. Other advantages also involve low cost of operating a campaign and long lasting effects. Note that I have put emphasis on "effects" and I did that to highlight the fact that these effects need not necessarily be beneficial. A bad online marketing campaign can have disastrous long term effects on your business plans.

As I have stated earlier, the job of online marketing does not end with a website; rather it begins with it. Having a good website is just a first small step towards building a successful online presence. The Search Engines account for a significant portion of the traffic that comes to any top ranking website. Hence it becomes important to rank well in Organic Results.

Higher the ranking position more the number of visitors you get, which, ultimately, results in better sales for your website. In order to achieve these goals of proper ranking and better sales it is essential to employ proper SEO techniques.

I hope this will help those interested in learning the basic of the art called SEO. If you have any questions or suggestions just drop a comment.

Random Thought:

Can the burst suggest an orchestral microprocessor?

After Instant Results, Its Time For Instant Previews

2010-11-11T20:12:00.002+05:30

As you can see in the image on the left side, Google has augmented its Instant search by adding Instant previews. The Instant Preview feature works exactly like its name impleis; it shows pop-ups containing an image (snap-shot) of the web-page requested.

For every search term the users will see a small magnifying glas icon just to the right side of the search result link. Clicking on this icon opens a pop-up that shows the snapshot of the webpage.

The image provided snapshot highlights things like the title, some related text and the URL of of the webpage. For example, if you click on the image, you will find that for the keyword "Tech et al" the snapshot contains an image of my site with highlighted snippet of text containing the searched term.

Using this feature the user can compare the results on different snippets and based on the relevence can chose the best one for his/her requitrements. If you are searching for something you have seen beofre and need to find again then, instead of clicking on every link, you can simply check the previews to see if the page is familiar or not.

According to Google blog,

Quickly compare results - A visual comparison of search results helps you pick the one that’s right for you. Quickly flip through previews to see which page looks best.
Pinpoint relevant content - Text call outs, in orange, will sometimes highlight where your search terms appear on the webpage so you can evaluate if it’s what you're looking for.
Interact with the results page - Page previews let you see the layout of a webpage before clicking the search result. Looking for a chart, picture, map or list? See if you can spot one in the preview.

Got a shiny new Domain

2010-10-01T16:12:00.005+05:30

I have been inactive for quite a long time(10 posts in two years). There were many reasons for the lack of activity(like laziness). But when I decided to come back, I felt like I needed a change and the best place to start was with Domain name.

The old domain "some-blog" has an interesting back story associated with it. When I started blogging as a n00b, I had no idea about the importance of domain name and other geeky stuff like SEO. So I was like, "Man, "some blog" sound so cool! I gotta use that. But unfortunately "some blog" was already taken and I had to settle with "some-blog". It wasn't too long before I started reading about SEO and tried to implement different methods and then I realized that the name "some-blog" doesn't really sound as cool as I thought.

That was when I started to think about getting a custom domain, but I wasn't sure if I had enough to write about and keep the blog updated regularly. So I chose another cool thing, tech et al, as the title of my blog. Its not that much better than "some-blog" but at least "tech et al" sounds and IS really cool. Meanwhile I kept looking for bargains to get a new domain as cheap as possible. The coolness factor won again and I bought techetal.in as my new domain.

I bought the domain from Dynadot.com and got a great bargain for one year plan. I am also planing to upgrade it to a 5 year plan but that can wait. The redirection thingy took quite a lot of time as this was my first time. I had to clear all the setting a couple of times and twice I changed the domain back to good, old some-blog. Finally I got it working today and here I am, writing a nostalgic story about a blog's coming of age.

PS: I'll be starting a series of SEO articles for beginners and I hope to cover all the basic points in about 10/15 posts.

Nokia, Opera side with Adobe to take on Apple

2010-05-29T18:28:00.002+05:30

The battle between Adobe and Apple over use of flash in ipad/iphone apps has just got even more fierce with Nokia and Opera announcing their support for flash.

Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder of Opera -- the maker of most widely used cellphone browser and strong supporter of open Internet initiatives -- said on Thursday his company was supporting Flash.
"It is the only proprietary part of the Web we support," von Tetzchner told Open Mobile Summit conference in London.
"We support Flash as well," said Alberto Torres, chief of Nokia's solutions business unit.
Getting the support of these two companies along with Google's android already supporting flash means a big plus for Adobe and especially flash, since it was openly criticizedby Steve Jobs "for being proprietary(that was rich coming from him), unstable, insecure, a battery hog and not at all suitable for mobile devices." Jobs went as far as naming flash the number one reason fro macs crashing all over the world.
Even though flash is the most used technology for online games and multimedia Apple does not support flash on any of its portable devices. This has resulted in a bitter war between the two companies in last two months.
It should also be noted that Nokia and Opera are not the only companies declaring their support for Adobe, Time Warner and NBC Universal have told Apple they won't spend the time and money to rework their Flash-friendly video libraries to make them compatible with the iPad.
Source:
Nokia, Opera side with Adobe on Flash

What an Idea! Airtel Launches MY Tunes service

2010-05-04T19:12:00.001+05:30

Barely a month after Idea cellular launched their Pretones service- where user can listen to a song of their own choice whenever they make a call- Airtel has also jumped in the fray. Airtel has launched a value added service for its customers called "My Tunes". The service is currently available only in Delhi.

Shashi Arora, chief executive officer, Delhi and NCR, mobile services, Bharti Airtel, said in the company statement, “Starting with the launch of Hello Tunes in 2004, Airtel has led the music on mobile revolution in India. With the My Tunes service, today we are putting the power and freedom of choice in the hands of the customer – the power to choose the content he wishes to consume along with the freedom to enjoy an unlimited music experience on mobile.”

The service when activated allows user to listen any song of his/her choice from the nation's library of half a million songs including Bollywood and regional songs as well . The My Tunes service is available at a subscription fee of Rs 15 per week or at 30 paise per minute of use. Creation of Playlist with unlimited tracks is also supported. Consumers who want to subscribe to My Tunes simply need to dial 54345 from their handset.

Keywords: Airtel My Tunes, Idea PreTones

Free upgrade to windows 7

2009-07-08T13:21:00.007+05:30

Microsoft has unveiled its "Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program" that allows free or nearly-free upgrades to Windows 7 for people who purchase a new Vista PC between June 26, 2009, and Jan. 31, 2010.
The customers who buy windows vista equipped PCs during above mentioned period will be able to upgrade to windows 7. The PCs with Windows Vista Home Premium, Business or Ultimate versions of vista will get an upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional or Ultimate when Microsoft officially introduces the new operating system. The soonest date to receive this upgrade disc is Oct. 22, the retail availability date for Windows 7. It may be weeks later, however, before many customers see those discs.
The program is a repeat of one launched in 2006 where Microsoft offered discounts for upgrading to windows vista for new windows XP PCs during oct06 to mar 07.
Microsoft has listed several computer makers, including Acer, Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba, that sell laptops that qualify for a free or discounted Windows 7 upgrade.
The FAQ regarding this program can be found here.

Keywords: Windows 7, Windows 7 free upgrade, Microsoft windows 7

Conficker has got a bag full of wonders

2009-04-14T23:09:00.006+05:30

Now first of all what is this conficker?
Conficker is a worm that is specifically targeted at windows users(another reason why you should switch to Linux). It spreads by exploiting a vulnerability in the network stack implementation of Windows operating systems ranging from XP to newly launched Windows 7 beta. It is also known as downup and downadup. It so good(or bad) that leading Anti virus companies have formed teams to see if they can find some cure for it.

What it does?
Researchers are still working to find all its "features" but here are few that are most important:

Disables access to all anti virus sites.
Disables windows update
causes congestion is LANs
Disables Microsoft services like BITS and error reporting
researches have just recently found that it also installs fake anti virus software for just $50.

How it propagates?
After infecting a PC using vulnerability mentioned above it attaches itself to system start up. Then the worm (one of its variant to be specific) generates a list of 250 domain names across five top level domain names and tries to connect with those hosts to check for any available "Updates"(cool,innit?). Its different variants use different number of hosts and tlds.
Some of its variants attach themselves with removable media so as to infect new machines.The worm is spreading so fast that right now there are around 10 million computers infected with it.

How to find if you are infected?
Just check if your PC shows any of above symptoms. For example if you can connect to anti virus sites using proxies but are unable to do so directly then you are infected.

How to remove?
The worm disables system restore so it is of no use. It also terminates anti virus related processes and hence that gets eliminated as well. Use updated versions of Bitdefender of McAfee to remove this worm. Also download and install the emergency patch issued by Microsoft from here. Another suggestion is to disable AutoRun option. Another(really important) suggestion is to turn off the Administrative shares. The worm can remotely execute on your PC if these shares are enabled.

PS: Microsoft is offering $250,000 if you can only find out who released this worm. Well..........

PPS: If you want Computer security products for free then check this out.

Keywords: Free anti virus software, Conficker, downaddup, downup virus, anti virus sites blocked, Anti virus sites not accessible, sites not opening

Choose your hosting solution with web hosting choice

2009-04-14T22:20:00.004+05:30

In good old days when internet was invented it was only used for academic purposes. But within last few years due to technological advancements and price reduction(mainly) internet use has grown like million folds. So it is not really surprising when people launch their personal websites just for the fun of it.
The first step while launching a website be it a personal or full of some ecommerce stuff is to find a good hosting solution. As you all know every website has a page called "Home" and it is related to your actual home in every sense of the word. It is your home on the internet. So while buying some place to build this home you need to take a few things into account. Things like security, space, bandwidth make a real impact on your websites success. Now while buying/building your actual home you(we all do) take advise from someone who has more experience and knowledge about it. The same is applicable to your online home as well. There are so many web hosting solutions available that it is really impossible for a novice to choose the best one. This is exactly what you need the expertise of Web Hosting Choice for. Web Hosting Choice is for all of the people who want to launch their websites. They provide a free for all research guide to help users choose the right web host for their personal or business website. On their homepage they have provided a comparison of top ten web hosting solutions. You can also read the reviews about each and every one of the providers.An in depth comparison chart is provided that makes it easier to compare one provider with another.If you just a beginner and don't want to spend too much money then you can use the cheap web hosting link. You can easily get answers to all your hosting related questions in the faqs section which is really cool because armed with that much knowledge you can easily find the best web host for you.

Keywords: Web hosting, ecommerce web hosting,

Windows 7 will allow downgrade to XP

2009-04-07T23:08:00.005+05:30

Just like the saying "once bitten is twice shy" , Microsoft seems to have learned few lessons from the Vista catastrophe. When Microsoft announced its new operating system all attention was focused on designing something that will be light weight and will run on most of the computers with any expensive upgrade.
Even though Vista was better than XP in many ways like security(remember UAC? it was the best but most ill-implemented feature) , looks etc. it needed far more sophisticated hardware to show its capabilities. Because of these problems and negative publicity the most popular feature of Vista turned out to be the Downgrade option. Many computer vendors like Dell sold Pre-downgraded machines as Microsoft had already stopped selling XP. With Windows 7 also Microsoft has made the same promises and although one look at beta version(i know there is still long way to go) is sufficient to say that this time Microsoft is really serious, it is planning to offer the infamous downgrade option with Windows 7 as well.
Presumably with Windows 7 ultimate and Business version the downgrade rights will be attached allowing the customers to downgrade not only to Vista(?) but to XP as well. In Windows 7 Microsoft is expanding the Downgrade rights program to allow PC makers to ship downgraded machines based on anticipated demand for those systems.

Keywords: Windows 7 downgrade

AMD releases ATI Radeon HD 4890

2009-04-03T01:24:00.008+05:30

AMD has released its latest graphics card ATI Redaon HD 4890. It comes with an 850 MHz core clock, memory clock at 975 MHz, 1 GB of GDDR5 memory and a maximum board power of 190 watts on a 55nm process technology, with an idle power consumption down 30% to 60 watts.
The full list of features is given below. It is expected to cost around $250 just like NVDIA GeForce GTX 275.

ATI Radeon HD 4890 specs:

956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
256-bit GDDR5 memory interface
Microsoft DirectX 10.1 support
Shader Model 4.1
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
800 stream processing units

+ Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel haders
+ Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
+ Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors

Dynamic Geometry Acceleration

o High performance vertex cache
o Programmable tessellation unit
o Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
o Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance

OpenGL 3.0 supportATI Avivo HD Video and Display Platform

o Unified Video Decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC, VC-1, and MPEG-2 video formats
+ High definition (HD) playback of Blu-ray and HD DVD video
o Hardware DivX and MPEG-1 video decode acceleration
o ATI Avivo Video Post Processor
o Two independent display controllers
o Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
+ Each supports 18, 24, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)
+ Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content
o Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
+ Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x1536
o DisplayPort output support
+ 24 and 30 bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x1600
o HDMI output support
+ All display resolutions up to 1920x1080
+ Integrated HD audio controller with support for stereo and multi-channel (up to 7.1) audio formats, including AC-3, AAC, DTS5, enabling a plug-and-play audio solution over HDMI
o Integrated AMD Xilleon HDTV encoder
+ Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
+ Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
+ Underscan and overscan compensation
o Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
o VGA mode support on all display outputs

ATI PowerPlay Technology

o Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
o Performance-on-Demand
+ Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario

ATI CrossFireX Multi-GPU Technology

Requirements:

PCI Express based PC is required with one X16 lane graphics slot available on the motherboard
500 Watt or greater power supply with two 75W 6-pin PCI Express power connectors recommended (600 Watt and four 6-pin connectors for ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode)
And of course at least $250

Keywords: ATI radeon HD 4890

Keep your PC secure for ......FREE

2009-04-01T21:04:00.006+05:30

Because of the worldwide acceptance of Windows operating systems, thousands-actually the number is far bigger than that- of viruses ,spywares and many other malicious programs have been released on the internet targeting windows user. These viruses and spywares pose a serious threat to user's data security as well as computer's functionality. As Windows is not that secure when left on its own- but don't blame poor Microsoft programmers coz even if the Redmond based company had thousands of programmers only for making Windows secure there are millions of kids out there trying to break it down- you must take a certain precautions so as to make at least an illusion of being safe and secure.

To achieve this goal you either have to invest in some commercial security solution or read on.

So now if you are still reading then I'd give a few tips so that you can secure your PC against most of the threats.

Step #1: Keep the operating system updated.

There is absolutely nothing that is more important than keeping your Windows updated as frequently as possible. My advise to you is keep "Automatic updates" on. With this your Windows installation will be updated automatically whenever you are online.

If for whatever reasons you have turned automatic updates off then follow these steps:

Open Microsoft Windows Update page at http://update.microsoft.com/windowsupdate/

Scan the PC using "Scan for updates" link to find out what critical updates and security fixes are missing.

Select, download, and install a selection of updates, especially any Critical Updates.

Restart the PC after finished(If asked).

It takes time so wait.

Step #2: Download, install, and run some good anti spyware tool to get rid of all spyware.

Spyware is any software that is installed on your PC and tracks your online behavior without your knowledge or consent. Spyware generally can

what web pages you are visiting and send these information to advertising companies. This kind of spyware is commonly called adware.

It can also record all your keystroke and send them to some remote computer without your knowledge. So obviously your passwords and bank account numbers are not safe with these beauties around.

Note: Even though WGA satisfies most of above definitions it is not a spyware.

Following are few good and free antispywares available for download use any one of these to keep your PC spyware free.

Windows defender. If you are a vista user you don't need to download this.

Spybot -search and destroy.

Ad-Aware

Hijack this.

Step #3: Download and install a good Personal Firewall.

Zone alarm

comodo

PC Tools firewall plus

Step #4: Use a good anti-virus software

Even though Kaspersky is not free i'd like to recommend it here. This is the best antivirus software currently available. Download 30 day trial from here.

Avast!

PC tools

Step #5: Install password management software

We all need passwords for like everything , you should use different passwords for each account. But remembering all these passwords is no less troublesome than forgetting them all at once. So passwords should be stored at some location which is both safe and easy to access. Thats where password managers come in.

KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. So you only have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish).

Download keepass here.

RoboForm is a password management software with Artificial Intelligence built in that can automatically fill online forms for you.

Keywallet

But as the saying goes "the chain is only as strong as its weakest link" all these security measures only work if the weakest link i.e you are careful. Do not click on anything that says you have won a 3 day free membership of some website or a $1000000 prize from some lottery you never bought. Also do not send your confidential personal information to anybody you are not really familiar with.

Office 2007 Tips and Tricks

2009-03-30T11:05:00.003+05:30

Here is a collection of Office 2007 tips and tricks. These tips are highly useful for a beginner as well as for someone who has been using it for like... months.

Create Tables to Your Own Specifications:

1. Position the cursor on the area of the document where you want to insert your table.
2. On the Insert tab of the Ribbon, click Table, and then click Draw Table.
3. Define the table size. Right-click to select the area where you want the table to appear.
4. Use the mouse to draw the internal table lines the way you want them.
To erase any lines you've drawn by mistake, press the SHIFT key, and the pointer will change from a pencil to an eraser.
It is also possible to create tables within ones you have already created.

Reuse Tables in Word:

1. Select the table that you want to save.
2. On the Insert tab of the Ribbon, click Table, point to Quick Tables, and then click Save Selection to Quick Tables Gallery.
3. In the Create New Building Block dialog box, give the table a name, classify it with some basic parameters, and then click OK.

To reuse a saved table:
1. Position your cursor where you want to insert a saved table.
2. On the Ribbon, click Insert, click Table, and then point to Quick Tables.
3. From the list, click the table you saved previously. This table will now be inserted into the document.

Pre-define the Format for Pasting in Word 2007:

In a Microsoft Office Word 2003 document, each time you paste some text or an image, you can select the format (source formatting, destination formatting, or text only) by clicking the clipboard icon. In Microsoft Office Word 2007 and Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, you can still do this manually or, more conveniently, set the default paste formatting mode. Here’s how:
Go to Advanced Options or click the Set Default Paste option when the clipboard icon appears, and then set your preferences. The pasted text and images will now be formatted automatically according to your settings.

Preview Type and Color Formatting:
You can see how formatting will look in Live Preview before applying it to the Microsoft Office Word document you're working on. Select a formatting option (for example, click Page Layout, click Page Color, and then point to a color), and Live Preview will temporarily apply it. To keep the result, just click the color, or keep browsing for alternatives.

Overprinting Watermarks on Documents:

You can easily insert a watermark into your document in Microsoft Office Word 2007. Click Watermark from the Page Layout tab on the Ribbon.

Save a Set of Quick Styles for Use in Other Documents:

1. On the Home tab, in the Styles section, click Change Styles.
2. Point to Style Set, and then click Save as Quick Style Set.
3. In the Save Quick Style Set dialog box, name the file, and then click Save. After you do, the name of your new style set will appear in the Style Set list, where you can apply it to any document.
Do not change the folder location when saving a style set, or your list will not automatically appear in the Style Set list. Also note that only styles appearing in the Styles gallery on the Home tab are included when you save a style set.

Add or Remove Styles from the Quick Style Gallery:

The Styles gallery on the Home tab in Microsoft Office Word 2007 includes several built-in paragraph and character styles by default, such as Normal style, Heading styles 1 and 2, and Title. However, you can customize that gallery for any document or template to include just the paragraph and character styles you need to access most quickly.

To display the Styles pane, click the dialog launch icon in the lower-right corner of the Styles section (or press CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+S). To remove a style from the Quick Style Gallery, right-click the style name where it appears in the gallery, and then click Remove from Quick Style Gallery.

To add a style in the Styles pane to the Quick Style Gallery, right-click the style name, and then click Add to Quick Style Gallery. (Note that, if the style is already in the gallery, the option to remove the style from the gallery also appears here.) You can also add or remove a style from the Quick Style Gallery through the Add to Quick Style Gallery check box in the Create New Style or Modify Style dialog boxes.

Quickly Know How Many Lines or Words You Have Typed:

Right-click the status bar, and then select a parameter. Microsoft Office Word can show you, for example, line details or the number of words typed. This information is useful when you are writing a document that must have a fixed length.

For another set of tips and tricks just click on tips and tricks.

5.11 Tactical series

2008-11-30T14:31:00.006+05:30

We all rely on police, firefighters, and of course on military for our safety. But what about their own safety? Because when you are dealing with some emergency then it is essential to be extremely accurate and fast. And for that gear worn by the security personal plays an important role. This is exactly where 5.11 tactical excels.
5.11 Tactical Series creates superior products that enhance the safety, accuracy, speed and performance of law enforcement, military and firefighting professionals. The series includes 5.11 Tactical Pants, footwear, knives and almost all other safety items necessary for making our safety keepers safe. Tacticalpantsusa have since long set standards for the industry by designing products that exceed the needs of the customers with functional innovation while delivering exceptional value.
In case you are wondering about "5.11 " then its a rock climbing difficulty level as listed in the Yosemite Decimal System. With skill levels ranging from 5.0 (easy) to 5.10 (difficult), 5.11 is even more grueling. 5.11 is officially defined as, “After thorough inspection, you conclude this move is obviously impossible; however, occasionally someone actually accomplishes it.” Thats exactly what 5.11 tactical series does.

Secure your PC [part 1] : ESET Smart Security

2008-11-22T22:46:00.004+05:30

I do not think that it is really necessary explain the necessity of using a good security solution for your PC. With so many security solutions available making the choice of good one is the real problem that needs to be addressed. I will - in this and next few articles- try to cover the leading security solutions and the services provided by each.

1. ESET Smart Security :

ESET Smart Security is designed to be a complete solution in the field of computer protection against infiltrations and attacks . It is a total security solution for a PC equipped with firewall and other modules. Provides optimal protection when used at default settings and is not too taxing on the system.If all components are used simultaneously, the effectiveness of the whole program is multiplied.

key features of "ESET Smart Security :

integrated firewall and antispam module
improved graphical user interface
operating modes for common and advanced users.Common mode has all settings at default while advanced user mode allows you to configure things your way.
improved and automatised cleaning
true incremental updates

ESET Smart Security provides:

Protection:

ThreatSense technology combines multiple layers of detection protecting you from Internet threats before it is too late. The included antispam and personal firewall features provide you with a total security solution.

Precise Detection:

ESET accurately identifies known and unknown threats.

Lightweight Design:

ESET Smart Security requires less memory and CPU power and does not slow down the system while it is running in the background.

Scanning Speeds:

ESET Smart Security is a highly efficient program ensuring fast file scanning and product updates, while running quietly in the background.

ESET Smart Security is a product designed to provide comprehensive protection against a variety of threats. It features the following:

NOD32 Antivirus + Antispyware

This component is in fact an improved version of the award-winning scanning engine of NOD32 Antivirus v2.7.

Anti-malware engine

comprehensive protection against adware, rootkits, spyware, Trojan horses, viruses, worms and other types of malicious software

A personal firewall with port stealthing and advanced filtering features

An antispam filter with Bayesian filtering, whitelisting and blacklisting.

You can download the trial version or buy the commercial version here.

Mortgage and more

2008-11-11T19:14:00.004+05:30

They say the credibility of the information is only as good as its source and i have found an example that does justice to this saying. Danny Thornton has 7 (yup SEVEN) years of experience in mortgage industry and is an active blogger since Feb 2008. His Mortgage and More Blog provides readers with real information about mortgage industry and to do justice to the "more" in his blog's title he also posts pictures like one shown above(I know that's lovely).

Firefox For Mobile

2008-11-05T20:55:00.008+05:30

Mozilla has released Alpha version of their new mobile browser and it has been codenamed Fennec. This release will initially be available only to the users of Nokia N810 and N800 Internet tablet.Fennec has a new user interface that adds touch screen support and other features that are appropriate for mobile phones and other handheld devices. As this release is currently available only for two models most of us will have to wait until it is actually made available for out mobile phones. But Mozilla provides another way of experimenting (or feeling) with Fennec for,

Just choose the correct operating system and proceed with installation. For Fennec alpha walkthrough check out this demo video.

Fennec Alpha Walkthrough from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.
Fennec comes with an Awesome Bar just like Firefox 3 that combines history, bookmarks, and search. For navigation Fennec supports a full screen mode.

According to Mozilla the Fennec offers,

Easy navigation to Web content:

Bookmarks, including tags
Smart URL bar ("awesome bar")
Tabbed browsing with thumbnail images
Integrated Web search - built into the URL bar
Easy access to multiple search engines

2. Web content:

Maximize content by auto-hiding controls and URL bar
Zoom in and out

3. Security:

Instant Web site ID
Password manager
Popup blocker
Clear private data

4. Devices services integration:

Click on a phone number to initiate a call
JavaScript API to get device location
Popup blocker
Clear private data

Also:

Searchable download manager
Preferences pane

I can only hope that Fennec looks just as great with my mobile coz it has got a screen way smaller than a Nokia N810.

Free Games And Softwares

2008-11-04T14:06:00.003+05:30

While i was surfing blogosphere i found a blog thats all about "Free games and Softwares ".
The blogger has put a lot of effort into the reviews and has also provided the game snapshots alongwith requirements. If you visit this blog you will find reviews about games ranging from
pacman,crossword to arkight. The blogger also talks about other blogs where one can get useful information about things like travelling, shopping, making money online , paid bloggging etc. So hop over to http://fullcrazy.blogspot.com/ and dont forget to leave him a thanks. Enjoy!

October Sky

2008-10-18T10:16:00.002+05:30

Nearly Five years after the project was cleared by Indian Gov. CHANDRAYAAN-1 is scheduled for launch on October 22. If the "October Sky" remains clear then the spacecraft will begin its Eight day long journey towards moon traveling nearly 3,86,000 kilometers to settle in its final orbit.

Chardrayaan-1 is the first Indian Mission to the Moon devoted to high-resolution remote sensing of the lunar surface features in visible, near infrared, X-ray and low energy gamma ray regions. This will be accomplished using several payloads already selected for the mission. In addition a total of about 10 kg payload weight and 10 W power are earmarked for proposals, which are now solicited. The mission is proposed to be a lunar polar orbiter at an altitude of about 100 km and is planned to be launched by 2007-2008 using indigenous spacecraft and launch vehicle of ISRO. The mission is expected to have an operational life of about 2 years.

Spacecraft for lunar mission is :

Cuboid in shape of approximately 1.50 m side.
Weighing 1304 kg at launch and 590 kg at lunar orbit.
Accommodates eleven science payloads. Out of these Six will be Indian instruments.
Read more here.

SecureZIP Express software give-away and contest

2008-10-09T10:34:00.002+05:30

PKWARE, the inventor of the .zip standard, is giving away a non-commercial use license of SecureZIP Express and the opportunity to win great prizes in the new “Decrypt and Drive” contest!
With SecureZIP Express you can compress/decompress and encrypt files that you store or send. Compressing files is a great way to save storage space, especially on thumb drives and CD’s, and we all have files we should be securing! The software also includes a digital certificate so you can exchange files securely with others without using passwords. Only the person the file was encrypted for can open it when you use a digital certificate. The software is fully licensed for non-commercial use and has no toolbars or spyware! For years, PKWARE has given free .zip software away and wants as many users as possible to receive the benefits of SecureZIP.
PKWARE is giving away great prizes including a Honda scooter, bicycles, Wii games, gas cards, and more! Visit www.DecryptandDrive.com to play the game daily and/or download the free software. You need to have SecureZIP, and the digital certificate it installs, on the computer you play the game from. You can also get SecureZIP Express at www.securezip.com

Good luck! Hope you win something cool

person-to-person outsourcing and India

2008-05-26T09:58:00.011+05:30

Outsourcing of services by medium- and large-sized companies from US and Europe to low-wage countries like India, Russia, (also known as “offshoring”) has been going on for few years now. This trend is clearly helping the low wage countries to meet the demands of increasing population. The "aging" of developed countries has resulted in a lucrative market for "young" developing countries like India and China. With a large number of skilled workers available for relatively low wages the companies in US and Europe can drastically cut down their production costs. Indian companies like Infosys and Wipro are one of the leading outsourcing companies.
A new trend called person-to-person offshoring is rapidly catching up with these industry based outsourcing techniques. Person-to-Person Offshoring (PPO) consists of those services that can be offshored by entrepreneurs who are trying to bootstrap their new organization as efficiently as possible. With technology advances and the growth of the Internet, small offices, home businesses and even everyday individuals can utilize PPO services.

PPO includes

online tutoring
website development
graphic design
database, software(games or APIs) development
writing and translation services
accounting and tax preparation services
architectural, home and landscape design services
marketing and sales support services
creating drafts of legal documents

Different models are used for PPO.

The “individual” client signs a contract directly with a vendor in a low-wage country, whose employees (e.g., tutors, admin) work on a full-time or a part-time basis, or as sub- contractors.The payments are usually made through credit card.

Indian companies like Satellier,BluentCAD, ASE Designsoft, Exceed International and DimensionICAD ,Xpitax, SurePrep, CCH, IFR, Datamatics, OPI and kpoexperts.com are rapidly making a name for themselves in this category.

The vendors providing PPO services enroll in an online marketplace by paying a monthly subscription fee plus a fixed percentage of the revenue if they win the project through this marketplace.

Available marketplaces:

Guru.com: Guru.com, a Pennsylvania-based company, seems to be the largest marketplace with more than 700,000 registered vendors and freelance professionals. Indians contribute a large chunk of this number.
Elance.com: Elance.com, a California-based marketplace, is known for its outsourcing
solutions supporting medium to large enterprises with around 125,000 registered vendors.
GetAFreelancer.com
RentACoder.com: The vendoes registered here accept only coding related projects.

The traditional jobs available in India are not sufficiently enough to keep rate of unemployment under control. The population is constantly increasing with a large part of it formed by youngsters with higher skills sometimes well beyond the job requirements. PPO is really helpful for these people as they can work on their own terms and that too from the comfort of their homes.From economical point of view the money these individuals get through this -the "relatively low" term notwithstanding - is really good considering Indian cost of living.The growth of PPO will help to reduce the heavy numbers choosing the traditional sectors of engineering and medical which will again help in reducing the sky high prices of enrolling in these sectors.

To SOURAV and his Knight Riders

2008-05-25T23:42:00.006+05:30

They say when the going gets tough the tough gets going, and Sourav Ganguly has once again proved that he was and still is THE best. With KKR already out of the race for semifinal spot and people(read media and "fans") asking all the stupid questions (i think we sort of like it when Dada proves us wrong) today's match was always going to be played for pride.

Had it not been for Ganguly's presence in the middle i wouldn't have given KKR the slightest chance of winning after they managed a fine mess of 106/6 in fifteen overs with seventy needed of next five. But i knew that the Bengal tiger was playing a waiting game ready to pounce at the right moment.One could easily see the determination in his eyes but he was running out of partners at the other end. Umar Gul provided him the necessary support by hitting two consecutive sixes at the end of sixteenth over. In a space of 5 balls the duo put on a staggering 28 runs to change the whole course of match.After that it was everything Dada.By not taking a run off the last ball of nineteenth over Ganguly took it upon himself to score fifteen runs off last over. And the Prince of Kolkata did it in a style that suits him more than anybody else. Two mighty hits and the game was over with three balls still remaining.
It felt really great to see the proud(and handsome) man smiling and shaking hands all the way to dugout. I hope the so called fans who deserted their team and their very own Dada after a few failures, have learned their lesson for one last time and they wont repeat such a mistake again.

Improving your pagerank and site visibility

2008-05-21T09:53:00.008+05:30

As we all know Google accounts for 68% of all searches every year. So you dont really need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that to be successful online you need blessings of mother google.Here i have listed few important tips for a wannabe webmaster.

1. Link building is important:

WHY? read this.
Google considers a link to a particular site from another site as a vote given in favor of that site. So you should try to build more and more links pointing towards your site.One way is to be friendly with other bloggers and ask them for link exchange while other is by writing good content that others may find useful.

2. Link credibility:

As votes from superdelegates are considered more important same is valid for links. A link from pagerank 5 site carries more weight than 10 from some good-for-nothing sites.
Google also considers link relevance. In simple words it means that if you write about computers and get a link from a site thats all about cooking then it will count for almost nothing.

3. External links to internal pages:

Dont concentrate only on your homepage.Try to get as many links pointing to individual articles as possible.For this post exchange program for Smorty is really good.

4. Dont be a copy-paster:

Though there are millions of sites out there and hardly few subjects are left untouched (like Paris Hilton's day to day life) it is not advisable to just copy-paste the content from some other site. Google maintains a copy of each and every indexed page in its cache to provide faster searching.This also means that google is capable of detecting duplicate content.

5. Optimize your web page:

You should try to provide your visitors as much interactive interface as possible. This is the only key along with good content to built visitor loyalty. You can use google's website optimizer
for this.

6. Manage your Keywords :

It's important to choose the right keywords for search engine optimization. Use keyword tracking tools to find high ranking keywords and try to use those without crossing a certain limit. You should use keyword density checker tools to find if you are using your keywords in right proportions.

A random tip:
Use google webmaster tools to improve your site's performance. These tools are free and extremely easy to use. Keep in mind that SEO is a process which takes long time to show results.

Tips for Office 2007

2008-05-20T07:33:00.003+05:30

Microsoft Office Word:

Change the Microsoft Office Word Smart Quote Auto-correct Setting->

By default, Word replaces straight quotes with smart quotes. To change this setting:
1. Click the Office button.
2. Click Word Options.
3. Click Proofing, and then click AutoCorrect Options.
4. Click the AutoFormat tab.
5. Clear the Straight quotes with smart quotes check box.
6. Click the AutoFormat As You Type tab.
7. Clear the Straight quotes with smart quotes check box.
8. Click OK twice.

Editing in Print Preview

After you have worked on a document in Microsoft Office Word, click the Office button, point to Print, and then click Print Preview.
You can still edit in print preview mode:
Disable the magnifier by clearing the Magnifier check box on the Preview tab, and edit the document as you want.

Line Breaks Without Bullets

When you're creating a bulleted or numbered list in Microsoft Office Word or Microsoft Office PowerPoint, you might want an item to appear in the list without a bullet or without incrementing the number. You can start a new line without a bullet by pressing SHIFT+ENTER. The next time you press the ENTER key, the new line will continue the bulleted or numbered list.

EXCEL:

Copy Data from a Table in a Web Page to Excel->

If you see a data table on a Web page and you want to import it into Microsoft Office Excel:
1. Copy the URL (address) of the page.
2. In Excel, on the Data tab, in the Get External Data section, click From Web.
3. In the New Web Query dialog box, paste the URL into the Address box.
4. Select the table that contains the data that you want to work with, and then click Import.
5. In the Import Data dialog box, indicate where you want the data to appear, and then click OK.

Move the Cursor in Any Direction During Data Entry->

By default, the cell pointer in Microsoft Office Excel moves down when you press ENTER after entering data in a cell. You can, however, change the direction in which the cell pointer moves.
1. Click the Office button, click Excel Options, and then click Advanced.
2. Select the After pressing Enter, move selection check box if it isn't already selected, and then on the Direction menu, click the direction in which you want the pointer to move.

Also, when working in a document, you can make the pointer move in the opposite direction from the one you've chosen by holding down the SHIFT key while you press ENTER.

Showing Formulas in Microsoft Office Excel Instead of Their Results->

Sometimes you want to display formulas in an Excel worksheet instead of their results. Here’s how:
1. Click the Office button, and then click Excel Options at the bottom of the menu.
2. Click Advanced, click Display options for this worksheet, click Show formulas in cells instead of their calculated results, and then click OK.

For more tips and tricks read this article.

PSLV-C9 blasts off from Sriharikota

2008-04-28T12:14:00.004+05:30

Setting a world record, India's Polar rocket on Monday successfully placed ten satellites, including the country's remote sensing satellite, into orbit in a single mission.
India's PSLV-C9 blasted off into space, carrying ten satellites including the country's latest remote sensing satellite CARTOSAT-2A, from ISRO's Satish Dhawan Space Centre here on Monday.
Scientists cheered as the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, in its thirteenth flight, soared into the clear sky in a perfect lift off at 9.23 am from the second launch pad.

PSLV-C9 is carrying:

India’s latest Remote Sensing satellite, CARTOSAT-2A

CARTOSAT-2A weighing about 690 kg carries a state-of-the-art Panchromatic camera (PAN) that is capable of taking black-and-white pictures in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Indian Mini Satellite (IMS-1)
Eight nanosatellites built by universities and research institutions in Canada and Germany are also being launched under a commercial agreement with Antrix Corporation. The weight of these Nanosatellites vary from 3 to 16 kg with a total weight of about 50 kg.

No vulnerabilities are being exploited : Microsoft

2008-04-28T11:58:00.002+05:30

Microsoft Corp. late Friday denied that vulnerabilities in its Web and SQL Server software had been exploited to hack hundreds of thousands of Internet pages.

"Our investigation has shown that there are no new or unknown vulnerabilities being exploited. This wave is not a result of a vulnerability in Internet Information Services or Microsoft SQL Server," said Bill Sisk, a communications manager at Microsoft's Security Response Center, in a note posted to the group's blog.

Sisk said the post was in response to reports that over half a million pages, including some belonging to the United Nations, have been compromised by SQL injection attacks. Once hacked, those sites were modified to download malware to visitors' PCs.

Early on Friday, Panda Security said it had notified Microsoft of what it called a "security issue" in the company's Web server, Internet Information Services (IIS). However, Panda stopped short of dubbing the problem a "vulnerability."

Sisk said that the site hacks were essentially run-of-the-mill SQL injection attacks. "[They] are not issues related to IIS 6.0, ASP, ASP.Net or Microsoft SQL technologies," he claimed.

Microsoft's IIS team also chimed in to deny that the attacks were exploiting any bugs, known or not, in its software. "For end users, the investigation also shows no indication of an unpatched vulnerability in IIS, SQL Server, Internet Explorer or any other Microsoft client software, so we recommend customers apply the latest updates to be protected from these attacks," said Bill Staples, an IIS product manager, in an update posted to the software's support forum on Friday night.

And although there has been speculation that the attacks were related to a vulnerability mentioned in an April 17 advisory, Sisk said that wasn't true either. "We have also determined that these attacks are in no way related to Microsoft Security Advisory 951306," he said.

Sisk and Staples urged Web site developers to follow Microsoft's guidelines to protect their domains from SQL injection attacks.

Source: computerworld

Recycled plastic material

2008-04-21T16:19:00.003+05:30

Long ago(in 1862 to be precise) first man-made plastic was created by Alexander Parkes.But even Parkes wouldn't have imagined the different ways in which plastic has become a part of day to day life. Everything that was big and bulky was replaced by light and richly colored plastic.Being a cheap,throwaway substance plastic found many applications like bags,water bottles, cups etc.But this wide range of applications has alongwith it ,brought its own set of problems. The Plastic bottles take 700 years before they even begin to decompose in a landfill.Currently there are hundreds of billions of bottles in the landfill with more billions adding up every year.This posses a serious threat to the environment and this problem can only be solved by using recyclable plastic materials like HDPE( High Density Poly Ethylene).Due to this recyclable materials plastic can be used over and over.
HDPE has characteristics like stiffness, strength, toughness, resistance to moisture, permeability to gas. It is used for many packaging applications because it provides excellent moisture barrier properties and chemical resistance.In HDPE Film form it is used for snack food packaging and cereal box liners.General uses of HDPE include bread trays, films for grocery sacks, HDPE Milk Bottles and household chemicals and injection-molded beverage cases.
Because of its chemical resistance HDPE has many applications in industrial sector as well.

Suspicious Orkut albums will be opened to police

2008-04-18T11:58:00.001+05:30

Google is to give Brazilian police access to 3,261 private photo albums on social networking website Orkut, which may contain child pornography.

The move is part of a strategy announced by the head of the company in Brazil, Alexandre Hohagen, to a Senate Committee set up to investigate cases of paedophilia in the country.

During a hearing this week, Alexandre Hohagen and Felix Ximenes, director of communication for Google Brazil, claimed they are currently implementing more effective image filters that will detect and prevent the uploading of child pornography.

Ximenes told The Register the new filter is 60 per cent more efficient than the current technology. "But I can't tell how you it works, or we would just be telling how to fool it and throwing away months of development."

Orkut has more than 60 million users, most of them in Brazil. According to Sergio Suiama, the federal prosecutor for Sao Paulo, in the last two years nearly 90 per cent of the 56,000 complaints in Brazil about net-based paedophilia were linked to the website.

Ximenes said that until September 2007, all requests for information about users suspected of crimes such as racism or paedophilia were sent to Google US to be examined.

"But since then we have been dealing directly with that, providing the police with user IPs and navigation logs whenever it is requested. It's happened in more than 1,000 cases so far."

He said giving investigators personal information about suspects and access to their private albums "is not an issue", but conceded that Google has not yet received any official communication, so he can't say when this information is to be handed out.

Ximenes and Hohagen told the Senate panel that Orkut will keep users' navigation logs for six months, instead of the current 30 days.

However, he explained there was a legislative grey zone regarding child pornography in Brazil.

Every time abuse is reported within Orkut, the administrators must immediately delete the images, destroying the proofs.

"There is no Brazilian legislation ruling these situations, and according to US law, if we keep these images or forward them to anyone else we are committing a crime," says Ximenes. "We are only allowed to forward them to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, in the United States, before deleting them from our database."

He says the company is working on a collaboration between Brazilian authorities and the US organisation.

The private photo albums, considered by some as a safe haven for criminals, were introduced in November 2007, and allow users to block access to the pictures by anyone outside their direct network.

"We created this to protect the privacy of those who didn't want personal pictures to be seen by anyone," says Ximenes. "And it is being well used by the majority of the users."

Google apparently has no plans to disable this option. "Every technology can be used for good or evil. What we are doing is trying to stop and prevent bad ways of using this technology," says Ximenes. ®

Source: The Register

Video of Vista running 100 apps simultaneously

2008-04-16T12:43:00.003+05:30

"I'm runnin a stock Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 with 4GB of RAM. I counted 108 apps total and gave up bored after I had running anything from Photoshop, Visual studio 2008, Office professional 2007, Safari, and Media Center all the way down to that rescource hog, Minesweeper"

read more | digg story

Office 2007 tips and tricks

2008-04-16T12:18:00.004+05:30

Copying a Worksheet:

Here’s how to copy a worksheet to another place in your Excel workbook:
1. Click the tab of the worksheet that you want to copy.
2. Leave your mouse pointer on the tab.
3. Press and hold down the CTRL key.
4. Press and hold down your left mouse button and drag the worksheet that you want to copy to the left or right. Watch for the little black arrowhead that follows your mouse pointer as you drag left or right.
5. When you release the mouse button, Microsoft Office Excel inserts a copy of the worksheet where the arrowhead is pointing.

Customize Your Quick Access Toolbar

In each 2007 Microsoft Office system program where you see the Ribbon (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and parts of Outlook), you also see a Quick Access Toolbar, which appears by default above the Ribbon, beside the Office button. To add the commands you use most to the Quick Access Toolbar in each program, right-click a command on the Ribbon, and then click Add to Quick Access Toolbar. You can also click the arrow that appears at the right edge of the Quick Access Toolbar, and then click More Commands to open the Customize tab of the Options dialog box for the program you are using. In this box you can add commands that don’t appear on the Ribbon, or create a custom Quick Access Toolbar for an individual document or template.

For Microsoft Office Outlook 2007

Use Search to Find E-Mail Messages
In Microsoft Office Outlook, e-mail search helps you locate messages by keyword or phrase. You can also use search folders to find mail by type of message.

To locate specific keywords or phrases within e-mail messages:
Type a word or phrase in the Search box at the top of your Outlook Inbox. The search starts automatically as soon as you stop typing. Search results will appear in the main window of your Inbox. To return to your normal Inbox, click Clear Search (the green ×) to the right of the Search box.

You can enable search folders from the mail pane on the left of your Inbox. To expand the folders tree, click Search Folders. Outlook comes with three default search folders: For Follow Up, Large Mail, and Unread Mail.

To add new search folders, click File, point to New, and then click Search Folder.

To build a custom search folder:

1. Click Search Folder, and then either click a predefined folder name, or scroll down and click Create a custom Search Folder.
2. Click Choose, give the new folder a name, and then click Criteria to fill in the search terms.

2003 to 2007 Document Information Panel

With the Document Information Panel in Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 and Office Professional Plus 2007, you can edit document properties directly in the program.

1. Click the Office button, and then click Prepare.
2. Click Properties. The Document Information Panel appears below the Ribbon.
3. Enter the appropriate information and save the document.

Keep in mind, search engines like the ones included in Windows Vista and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 use document properties to deliver search results that are more relevant. So if you want to make something easier to find, make sure your document properties are up to date.

For Microsoft Office Outlook 2007

Choose a Signature for Different Recipients in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
If you want to use a different e-mail signature for different recipients (a different one for coworkers than for customers, for example), you can change your signature with two mouse clicks. Right-click your signature, and then click the other signature that you want to use.

Zooming to Fit a Selection

1. Select the range of cells that you want to focus on.
2. Click the View tab, and then click Zoom to Selection.

Fine-Tuning Objects in Presentations

When working with text in Microsoft Office PowerPoint, you can use the F2 key to switch between selecting text in a placeholder and selecting the placeholder itself. So the next time you've edited some text and want to reposition it on the slide, instead of clicking the tiny edges of the box, just press F2. The entire text box will instantly be selected for you, ready for alignment.

Expand your social network with 3gb.biz

2008-04-16T06:14:00.004+05:30

Missing your old friends? Sick of all those boring social networking sites?
3gb.biz community is a relatively new social networking site where you can connect with your old friends and upload your photos ,mp3s , blog about things you like.You will be able to chat with your friends and hear your favorite music tracks. The community provides excellent privacy features which are hard to find anywhere else. As a user you can keep your profile private so that only users permitted by you will have access to.A blocked user list is also provided so that you can block someone from contacting you.You can blog about anything from rocket science to your personal life,the good blogs get listed on the homepage which is really cool. So join the community and start inviting your friends.

ASUS G35: World's First Platform with onboard DirectX10 support

2008-04-14T13:27:00.005+05:30

Looks like Vista is finally getting the manufacturer support it needs.With this announcement Asus unveiled new motherboards, which are the world's first to provide an Intel platform with an onboard integrated VGA solution that features built-in support for Windows Vista DirectX 10.
"The ASUS´ Intel G35 chipset motherboards allow users to enjoy enhanced Microsoft Vista DirectX 10 graphics on a motherboard solution “right out of the box”. This series of motherboards are the world´s first to provide an Intel platform with an onboard integrated VGA solution that features built-in support for Windows Vista DirectX 10."

The Asus motherboards with IGPs supporting DirectX 10 include the ASUS P5E-V HDMI, P5E-VM HDMI and the P5E-VM SE motherboards.

The Asus P5E-V HDMI features the Intel G35/ICH9R chipset, 1333/1066/800 MHz FSB, Dual-channel DDR2 800/667/533 MHz, 12xUSB 2.0, HDMI and Intel GMA X3500 Graphics chipset with Quad VGA output support.

The Asus P5E-VM HDMI is similar to the P5E-V, but only has dual display support.

The P5E-VM SE has fewer features than the above two and only supports one display and has no HDMI.

All of the above motherboards support Intel's latest 45nm processors.

Microsoft, HCL launch world's cheapest laptop

2008-04-12T02:04:00.003+05:30

Microsoft Corporation and HCL Infosystems on Friday announced a series of joint initiatives, including launch of world's cheapest ultra portable laptop and setting up of centre of excellence, which will employ over 500 professionals.

Priced at Rs 16,990, MiLeap brand of HCL laptops with Microsoft Windows XP Home operating system is the lowest priced among the MS operating system powered laptops, the company officials said.
Source:The Economic Times

SONY ERICSSON W810i : Review

2008-04-12T01:30:00.005+05:30

SONY ERICSSON W810i:
Size:
Dimensions: 100 x 46 x 19.5 mm
Weight: 99 g

Display Type: TFT, 256K colors
Display Size: 176 x 220 pixels, 28 x 35 mm
Wallpapers, screensavers available.

Ringtones
Type: Polyphonic (40 channels), MP3
Composer, downloadable available.

Memory
Phonebook: 1000 x 24 fields, Photo call
Call records: 30 received, dialed and missed calls

Card Slot : Memory Stick Duo Pro (up to 2GB), 512 MB card included and 20 MB shared memory

GPRS :Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 - 48 kbps

HSCSD :No

EDGE :Class 10, 236.8 kbps

3G :No

WLAN :No

Bluetooth :Yes, v2.0

Infrared Port :Yes

USB :Yes, v2.0

Features

Messaging

SMS, MMS, Email, Instant Messaging

Browser : WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML (NetFront)

Games : Yes + downloadable

Colors :Satin Black, Fusion White

Camera :2 MP, 1632x1224 pixels, autofocus, video, flash

- MP3/AAC/MPEG4 player
- Video player
- Java
- T9
- FM radio with RDS
- Image viewer
- Picture editor
- Organiser
- Voice memo
- SyncML
- Built-in handsfree

Battery :Standard battery, Li-Ion

Stand-by :Up to 350 h

Talk time :Up to 8 h

Overall verdict:
Bluetooth is solid for transferring files and working with Bluetooth headsets. A 512MB Memory Stick Duo card is bundled with the phone and has the capability to upgrade to 2GB storage for photos and music.This really cool gadget with xenon flash and price less than 10000 is a must buy.

Gmail and yahoo! mail : new dens of a spammer

2008-04-12T00:46:00.005+05:30

Since the day i got my first mail ID, i have been getting spam mails. And it wasn't before long that these mails used to carry obscure(read crap) addresses as sender with no reply possible.But the scenario has changed dramatically with spammers realizing the worth of having a reliable looking address. Just before few months there was a story about some hack used to compromise CAPTCHA* (you might have seen this in action many times).This hack allowed users(read spammers) to bypass the word verification which traditionally is used to tell humans and software robots apart.

There are different antispam measures taken like blacklisting any suspicious IP so that it will no longer be useful.But most of the times these IPs belonged to someone who had no idea of the abuse.But services like Gmail and Yahoo! are highly popular,free and highly unlikely to be blacklisted a spammer gains a lot by using these.

Anti-spam filtering services such as MessageLabs have responded by throttling or slowing down the connection. "We're seeing more spam coming from Gmail and Yahoo!. Where a service is widely abused its reputation goes down and it's held back in the queue. This happens automatically," explained MessageLabs security analyst Paul Wood.

The approach, one stage in a multi-stage scanning and filtering process, is designed to make life difficult for spammers using botnets(a software robot that runs automatically) to send spam through compromised webmail accounts.

"These traffic management controls are not designed to block messages, they are intended only to slow down their transit. For messages that are subsequently blocked there should be a reason given in the non-delivery report," Wood told El Reg.

An analysis of spam trends in February 2008 (the last available monthly figures) by MessageLabs revealed that 4.6 per cent of all spam originates from web mail-based services.

The proportion of spam from Gmail increased two-fold from 1.3 per cent in January to 2.6 per cent in February, most of which spamvertised skin-flick websites. Yahoo! Mail was the most abused web mail service, responsible for sending 88.7 per cent of all web mail-based spam.

It was first thought that automated tools were used by spammers to defeat security checks and establish webmail accounts that might later be abused to send junk. More organisations are coming around to the theory, first floated by Brad Taylor, a Google software engineer, that bots are signing-up for accounts before sending the puzzles to real people.

Source: The Register

With mighty GOOGLE having registered this little problem atleast Gmail users can rest assured that it wont be long before their mailbox becomes spam free again.

*CAPTCHAs typically help ensure that online accounts can't be created until a user correctly identifies letters depicted in an image. The tactic is designed to frustrate the use of automated sign-up tools by spammers and other miscreants

The Zen of Blogging-an ebook every blogger should read

2008-04-11T19:41:00.003+05:30

Why do bloggers blog?
Thats the million dollar question.For most it is about sharing their ideas,thoughts or just ranting about things they like.For rest it is about making money and to be honest i belong to this group.But this is not as simple as it seems to be.There are just so many factors to consider like choosing the niche ,writing style etc.A new blogger like me looks up to people like Darren or Steve and try to figure out right methods for optimizing blog,increasing visitors.But every one of these established bloggers have their own style and unique way when it comes to this.So till now i was just too confused to get up and running with my blog as i had become unsure even about my niche.There were just too many questions to find answers for.Fortunately i subscribed to problogger last month and i got a real treat in my mailbox today.The article spoke about an ebook from Hunter Nuttall. When i opened it (its free you see) i was pleasantly shocked to see that this ebook wasn't that conventional "make money from blogging" ebook at all. The book answers almost all the important questions a blogger may or may not face in most funny manner i have ever read in this category.
I am quite sure that should he take to full time writing Hunter will be a serious competition to JKR. He has explained most important things like choosing niche,platform,domain names in simplest possible language that one can read this book as bedtime story.
Download the ebook from here

PS:
On sixth page he says his "vista with IE7" didn't crash even after opening many pages in tabs at a time. This just proves that he was actually dreaming about all this.

Accepting Payments Online: An ECommerce Web Site Overview

2008-04-09T15:57:00.000+05:30

There are a seemingly infinite number of choices and configurations to accepting payments online. Choices range from almost total "do it yourself" programming to turnkey packages.

You can accept online payments from an ECommerce Web site in two general ways:

1)Through your own online merchant account and/or
2)Through a third party online payment processor.

Accepting Payments Online through your own Internet Merchant Account

Accepting payments online via a merchant account puts you in control and limits your reliability on outside payment acceptance services. This approach can also seem like a jigsaw puzzle. Besides an Internet merchant account, you will need shopping cart software, a store or site host, a processor, and a secure payment gateway.

You may fit these pieces together in several different ways. On one end of the spectrum, you can choose the provider for each piece individually. On the other end, you may choose a turnkey solution, where a single provider has completed the puzzle for you.

There is no single best solution. Your choice will depend on your particular needs and experience. Among other considerations, you should factor in your own comfort with the technologies, customer convenience, providers' service levels, available technical support, reliability, costs, and time commitment involved.

Fees

There are a myriad of potential costs and fees involved in accepting payments online, making it difficult to compare different options.

Potentially, you could be charged fees by each provider involved in helping you accept payments online - application fees, set-up fees, yearly memberships, monthly statement charges, monthly minimums, gateway access fees, statement fees, fixed transaction fees, variable transaction discount rates (processing fee for each transaction), and cancellation penalties are all common.

Often, it is easy to misinterpret the fees you will owe. Rarely are all costs revealed in one place. If you are reading about a merchant account, for example, the quoted costs may not include gateway access, hosting, and/or shopping cart. Because you may be comparing "apples to oranges", options that at first appear low-cost can - upon implementation - turn out to be pricey. Similarly, expensive-sounding solutions may actually be reasonably priced.

Accepting Payments Online through a Third Party Online Payment Processor

If you are not ready to set up your own online merchant account and/or you want to offer additional online payment options, you can turn to a variety of third party online payment processors.

Third party online payment processors provide a way to accept payments online without the extra cost and obligation of a merchant account. To compensate, transaction fees and/or discount rates are significantly higher than for merchant accounts.

Each program is a little different and no single third party payment processor is right for all situations. Clickbank, for example, helps you sell digital products online. At last check, CCNow processes payment for tangible items only.

Deciding What's Best for You

Whether you accept payments online through an Internet merchant account, through a third party payment processor, or both, read all agreements carefully before committing. Do not hesitate to ask the providers questions if information is unclear or incomplete.

There is more information about accepting payments online - including explanations of merchant account fees, finding the right ecommerce providers, and third party payment processor overview - on the ecommerce information site Take-Payments- Online.com, here.

Put together the "puzzle pieces" for accepting payments online and your ecommerce Web sales will flourish!
About the Author

Bobette Kyle is publisher of the ecommerce information site http://www.Take-Payments-Online.com . She is also proprietor of The WebSiteMarketingPlan.com Network, subject-specific Web sites designed to help you find the right information for writing and implementing your marketing plan.

Earn money from home

2008-04-09T15:55:00.000+05:30

Want to earn real money online?
Yes?
Then finally you are at the right place.Just spare a few minutes and go on reading.

Since 1998, SFI has been leading the Internet income revolution with its cutting edge affiliate program that empowers even average people to earn $20, $50, even $100 per hour working from their home computer.

SFI has shown millions of men and women from over 200 countries worldwide how to cash in on the Internet. In fact, our system is so successful that OVER 8000 people join SFI every week!

SFI is totally FREE for affiliates to join. And there's absolutely NO OBLIGATION. SFI provides you with FREE Websites, a FREE course that teaches you everything you need to know to make money online ($295 value), and hundreds of exciting products to stock your online store shelves with.

Plus, SFI takes care of all orders, product shipments, and customer service for you. You just have to cash the commission checks!

Want to know more. Here is "open sesame" of your fortune.

Blogs, Podcasting and RSS | eCommerce Impact

2008-04-09T15:54:00.000+05:30

Blogs, Podcasting, and RSS Overview You probably have heard all these terms an awful lot lately. You wonder about what these technologies do? What value to they provide? If you aren't up to speed on these new applications and how they are impacting online interactions then read this brief further. Will these technologies impact you? To be honest, it's too early to tell - but awareness will drive innovation and maybe your team will develop an idea/application that utilizes these technologies to enhance a portion of your eCommerce business.

Here's the rundown: Blogs What they are: Probably the most well known of the three, blogs allow everyday people to quickly develop a website presence and distribute any type of content that they desire. Look at the metrics relating to blog penetration.

* 7% of the 120 million U.S. adults who use the internet say they have created a blog or web-based diary. That represents more than 8 million people.

* 27% of internet users say they read blogs.

* Only 38% of all internet users know what a blog is. The rest are not sure what the term "blog" means. What a "blog" actually means is weblog. In basic terminology, it's the ability for someone to update web content directly though the Internet, using a web browser as the publishing mechanism. This makes the creation of content easy and many people are using blogs to establish authority sites within unique business and hobby/interest niches. Where blogs impact online retail most is within these targeted online communities. Certain blog authors develop a large base of specific visitors, hence the site becomes a potential target market for viral marketing efforts. Many web entrepreneurs us this functionality to develop affiliate hubs within niche markets, and use search popularity to beat out larger retailers within corresponding natural search results.

By integrating your brand image within the site experience at that SPECIFIC blog, you as an online marketer are able to segment your marketing PRIOR to converting someone as a customer. It is a place to communicate with current and potential customers about current offerings/promos while boosting the credibility of the brand. Should you care: If you have a very unique value proposition, or sell to a very specific or high-value customer segment, blogs can be a great way to increase overall brand awareness. You can better connect with your customers and provide detail into the current happening within the business (ex. Current sales on XBOX 360). Potentially, one person within your organization should own the monitoring of blogs within

your vertical and look to post new content to meet the needs within the unique blog community.

Podcasting What it is: Pocasting should be just called mobile video broadcasting. However, Apple's marketing/development team did a great job with branding their device to a type of emerging media - hence the term podcasting! Similar to traditional radio and television, mobile video broadcasting delivers branded content in either a paid/free environment, on someone's mobile media player (Apple only does video currently, but that will change shortly). Retailers can potentially use this communication channel to deliver targeted content to their customer base, while integrating advertising within the video content.

Should you care: Not really. Until video podcasting penetration increases, it's still a limited channel for advertising. The best application available right now would be an online audio content segment that is digitally delivered to an opt-in list. As technology advances, you can potentially do this from your current opt-in page on your website and not from Apple's iTunes platform.

RSS RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is a method for electronic content distribution. RSS is transmitted via the internet, but what makes it unique is that no downloading efforts are needed by the end receiver of the content. The content streams instateneously within a webpage.

Advanced consumers have RSS news readers on their computers, either integrated into an email client, or utilize an aggregated web application such as News Gator. This essentially saves them time in aggregating all new and updated content that meets their interests. Already gaining steam in the travel industry and within comparison shopping engines, RSS seems to be a valuable way to push news and time sensitive offers to customers. Travel companies are able to provide a streaming supply of last minute airfare offers to their customer segments, without that customer having to open an email or visit a webpage.

Should you care: It completely depends on the nature of your business. Do you consistently offer new prices? Do you obtain new products to your assortment consistently? Do you have a customer base that is extremely loyal that you want to reach out to with messaging? If so, RSS may another channel to help build your brand. Call us today to learn more about these technologies and the potential impact they can have in reaching your customers with targeted messaging and fresh content.

About the author:

http://www.trinityinsight.com

Ecommerce Solutions Compared

2008-04-09T15:51:00.000+05:30

There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of businesses and organizations eager to assist and sell product online.

Basically, they fall into four categories:

credit card transactions,
digital cash transactions,
electronic fund transfers and telephone billing systems

The right choice for you depends upon your specific business requirements.

1. Merchant Internet Accounts.
Pros: Consumers are familiar with credit cards with credit card transactions, consumers dont have to download and install special plug-in. Credit card sales lends itself to impulse buying.

Cons: Consumers still have concerns regarding providing financial information online. This method does not lend itself well to the purchase of down loadable soft goods, such as software, art, graphics, etc

2. Electronic Cash Transactions.
Electronic money is an arrangement whereby the customer pays for the merchandise using, well, electronic money. Examples of this are the well known DigiCash, Cyberbucks, CyberCash, etc.
Pros: No credit card transactions are required. No concerns re charge backs. Lends itself well to micro payments.

Cons: Many people are unfamiliar with the concept and shy away from unknown entities. Eliminates the possibility of impulse buying, unless both customer and merchant are already in same scheme. May not be available globally.

3. Electronic Fund Transfers.
Funds are transferred electronically from the customer's bank account to yours. The best known method is the issuing of electronic checks.
Pros: No credit card worries. Available to persons who dont have credit cards

Cons :A very new technology that some perceive as being less secure than other forms of ecommerce. Many customers arent set up to issue electronic cheques; time required to make the arrangements eliminates impulse buying. May not be available to international consumers.

4. Telephone Billing Systems A very new approach, telephone transactions allow the customer to purchase an item or service, and the amount is billed to his or her telephone bill.
Pros: Eliminates worries about credit cards (for both consumer and merchant) Safeguards soft merchandise no possibility of theft or pirating.
Cons: Customer is required to download and install a plug-in. currently only available for soft merchandise but can do some limited transactions for hard goods. Currently available for sales using telephone modems and will not work for transactions over cable modems and ISDN lines.

For more information on credit card processing,please visit http://www.paynetsystems.com

Ecommerce Hosting Considerations

2008-04-09T15:49:00.000+05:30

Website hosting can be a complex undertaking. Determining how much space you need, how much transfer, finding a reliable host, and getting everything online is no simple task. Add ecommerce to the mix and things become even more complex. This article will deal with some of those additional complications to finding a host for an online store. All of the same considerations to finding general hosting can be applied to ecommerce hosting, there are simply a few additional ones that need some attention.

Basics- Disk Space and Transfer

The core states of any kind of hosting, ecommerce or not, remain space and transfer, or traffic. Generally measured in monthly increments, your space and transfer will place a crucial role in determining just what size plan you need. Ecommerce sites will, generally speaking, require more space and transfer than an equivilant sized site without ecommerce. This is due to the presence of the shopping cart upon which the online storefront is based. Shopping cart programs are installed to the account on which they operate, requiring space, and their scripts for running the store will require additional transfer to handle customers as they browse, add items to their cart, and check out. Will there be a tremendous amount of extra transfer required by the cart? That depends on how many use the cart and on the cart itself. This is why its best to start small and having a clear upgrade path to handle future popularity.

Prospective online merchants will generally have a good idea how many products they'll be selling initially. This will vary wildly from merchant to merchant, and many merchants don't put their entire stocks online. It is wise to start with a considered selection of products first, especially if you wish to initially keep your hosting plan small and upgrade as the store prospers. Those with a great deal of products need to be aware they will probably be facing a bigger monthly fee for a larger hosting plan. Once the decision is made regarding the products, attention can be turned to finding a suitable shopping cart program to contain them.

Shopping Cart

The choice of shopping cart can be a personal one. Those entirely new to ecommerce will probably not have any experience with any kind of shopping cart software. There are a number of popular choices, and most hosting companies will provide one, if not a variety, from which you can choose. It is important to find a shopping cart that suits the individual user, as attempting to change your shopping down the road can be a long process that will, most likely, bring your store down during a transitional period. Don't immediately jump at the first cart a host offers. Ask if they have demos and try them out. Be sure it's a program you can learn and use, as it is the primary way you'll be doing your online business. Even if you have a large business and have a design firm setting up the cart, a rudimentary knowledge of the cart's processes is highly recommended.

Learn as much about your prospective shopping cart software as possible. Make
sure it supports SSL, a common site security protocol that will help keep your customer's credit card numbers safe when ordering online. It will need to support your merchant account and payment gateway. In many cases a host might bundle these services, so compatibility isn't an issue. If you secured your merchant services separately from hosting, be sure they are compatible. Find out if the cart has a recommended maximum product limit and, of course, try not to exceed it. The store may slow down and perform poorly if there are too many products in it.

Finally, make sure it will do everything you want it to do. Some merchants sell services and downloadable items that don't conform exactly to the order-product-ship-product flow. If your cart doesn't support these features by default, there may be 3rd party add-ons that will provide this functionality. Miva Merchant is one such shopping cart with a very active 3rd party developer community providing a wide range of add-ons, or "modules" to extend the feature set of the original program. The merchant will have to buy these add-ons and have them installed on their own initiative, though, and the hosting company will not be able to support them.

Reliability and Support

Perhaps of greatest importance is reliability in your chosen host. Think in terms of a "brick and mortar" storefront. If someone locks the front door during business hours, then no customers can come in and nothing is sold. Similarly, if an online store is down at any hour, no customers can come in and nothing is sold. You want the most reliable hosting for such a mission-critical site. Never just take the word of a hosting company's site in regards to their uptime. Do research and look for customer reviews of your prospective host. Online merchants should always be willing to pay more for a reliable hosting company with good uptime and support. A good rule of thumb is to stay away from free or "bargain basement" hosts, since support and uptime are usually the first things to suffer with this kind of hosting.

Conclusions

Finding the right ecommerce hosting company requires a few additional considerations. Decide on your products, your shopping cart, and then shop for your hosting company. You will need more space and transfer than an equivalent site, but start small with your product selection and you can still save money on your hosting. Find a shopping cart that's easy for you to use and understand, as switching at a later date can result in downtime and a lot of work transferring your products. Finally, make sure your host has solid uptime, as an online store that's down isn't generating any sales.

About the Author

Mr. Lester has served for 4 years as the webmaster for http://www.apollohosting.com and previously worked in the IT industry an additional 5 years, acquiring knowledge of hosting, design, and search engine optimization. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers.

Must have apps for FIREFOX

2008-04-09T13:04:00.000+05:30

The best but relatively unused firefox extensions:

Fast video download:

For me this is best of the lot. As youtube does not provide any option for downloading videos the only way was to use sites like Keepvid. Fast video download solves this problem and provides an option to download youtube videos at the right corner of browser.

PicLens :

PicLens instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen 3D experience for viewing images across the web. Makes browsing through pictures a wonderful experience. The interactive 3D Wall and built-in search function, lets you effortlessly drag, click, zoom, and zip your way around a wall of pictures for an amazing viewing experience.

Snap Links

This is another great tool that saves a good deal of time by allowing selection and opening of multiple links at once.Especially useful while searching for something.

Tab Scope:

With Tab Scope you can hover over a tab to get an instant preview of the web page. The cool thing is you have real time navigation, zoom, and you can even click on links without having to switch tabs.

Reminder Fox:

This is for people like me who can never stop surfing unless made to.This cool app. allows to set reminders.

Download Statusbar:

You can view and manage downloads in a small status bar in the corner of the screen, without having that download window get in your way.

HyperWords:

This one makes a newbies job really simple.Suppose you are browsing a fairly advanced site that deals with operating system concepts then you may encounter many new terms and get stuck, with this add-on enabled just hover over the particular term and find its exact meaning

Tab Effect

It adds a nice effect to Firefox by simulating a 3D cube being turned when switching through tabs.Hot!!!!!

Cooliris Previews

Cooliris Preview allows you to surf through the web faster by giving you a small preview of the website, without you even having to click on it. Just imagine, surfing without wasting time by clicking on links and coming to realize that it wasn't even close to what you were looking for. All you have to do is just mouse over any link, and the Cooliris preview window immediately appears in order to show you the content.

Windows registry: A user's guide

2008-03-31T16:59:00.000+05:30

You might have heard about windows registry.Many of us use registry without even knowing exactly how it works.In this article i will explain windows registry with the discussion being limited only to windows XP ,as i dont care about vista(i switched back you see) and 98 is dead.

What is registry?

It is a directory which stores different settings and options.All the contents are arranged in hierarchal manner. It provides information and settings for all the hardware, operating system and currently installed programs alongwith the changes made to default system configurations.

Structure of Windows registry:

As i said the registry is arranged in hierarchal manner.It has five main branches and each can expanded into sub-branches called "Keys".Each key can contain one or more "Values".The value can be of different types such as string (_SZ), binary(_BINARY), Double word(_DWORD) or even no type(_NONE).

Where is it stored?

In windows XP it is stored in two directories depending upon corresponding "Hives". Each of these hives need support files containing its data. "%SystemRoot%\System32\Config" and "%SystemRoot%\Profiles\Username" are the directories that contain these files.

Branches:

The windows XP registry is divided into five main branches(Hives).These branches are named starting with "HKEY" and these names are then abbreviated to four letters starting with "HK".
I have listed all branches in accordance with the order they appear in XP registry.

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT:(HKCR)

This key contains all the file extension associations and COM class registration information such as ProgIDs, CLSIDs, and IIDs.
Actually this information is a compilation of registration and file extension information stored under both the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and HKEY_CURRENT_USER keys. The HKCR key provides a view of the registry that merges the information from these two sources.

2.HKEY_CURRENT_USER:(HKCU)

As the name suggests this hive stores all the data related to the currently logged-in user. You can find this as "NTUSER.DAT" in "%SystemRoot%\Profiles\Username"
The information stored under this hive includes control panel settings, system events etc.

3.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (HKLM)

This branch contains information about all of the hardware and software installed on your computer.
A list of all active hives can be found at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\hivelist

4.HKEY_USERS:(HKU)

This key contains the information related to all the users currently registered with the system.

5.HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG:(HKCC)

This branch points to the part of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE appropriate for the current hardware configuration. It contains information about the hardware profile that is used by the local computer at system startup.

Moving through the registry:

The Registry Editor (regedit.exe) is included with Windows enables manual editing as well as viewing of the contents of the Registry. To use this just type "regedit" at RUN and hit "Enter".
After this you'll see a window divided into two panes. The left side shows a tree with folders (see image for reference), and the right side shows the contents (values) of the currently selected folder (key).
To expand any branch, click on the little plus sign [+] to the left of any folder, or just double-click on the folder. To display the contents of a key (folder), just click the desired key, and look at the values listed on the right side

Editing the registry:

This can also be called as "importing into" the registry.

Manual editing:

A new key or value can be added by selecting New from the Edit menu. You can rename any value and almost any key with the same method used to rename files; right-click on an object and click rename, or click on it twice (slowly), or just press F2 on the keyboard. Lastly, you can delete a key or value by clicking on it, and pressing Delete on the keyboard, or by right-clicking on it, and choosing Delete.Few registry edits will need you to restart system to take effect.

2.Using Registration entries:(.reg files)

The registry can be edited by simply merging ".Reg" file in it. Again it can be done manually by double clicking or by using logon/logoff scripts. The examples for these can be found here and here.

Exporting:

Can also be referred as "backing up" of the registry.
Just ope the Registry Editor, select a branch, and choose "Export" from the File menu. Then, specify a filename, and press OK. The file will be saved as ".Reg" file.By opening it in Notepad (right-click on it and select Edit) its contents can be viewed.To apply it to the registry just open it by double clicking.

PS:
If you like this article and are interested in learning .reg scripts then leave a comment i'll be happy to explain in next article.

I signed up for PPP!

2008-03-29T19:06:00.000+05:30

Or is it the other way round?
When a blogger decides to moneytize his/her blog then most common and trusted way is to write sponsored reviews. Now as we all know PPP is most trusted among advertisers whenever it comes to blog reviews and most favored among the bloggers.For past one month i had been trying frantically to get my blog approved by them. I did all i can from changing my blog's layout to spamming their help boxes telling them about how good my blog is but PPP kept rejecting me without a second thought as i had more ads than posts.At last i gave up and you can imagine how happy(shocked?) i was when i saw "your blog has been approved" mail in my inbox.
Without losing a single moment i logged into my PPP account and Viola! there was an opportunity waiting for me.As if to enable me to write what i felt (and to get paid for that) it was about PPP itself. I am being paid $20 for this post and if i can get two such opportunities every week my gaming rig wont be sitting idle at the shop.

Before you apply(and start dreaming about your $s) you should consider following things:

PPP is as big as blog reviews can get and will remain so for coming years.
The blogs are approved only when they satisfy strict norms that are in place to benefit both bloggers and advertisers.
The blogs primarily maintained for making money(i.e those containing excessive advertising) wont probably get approved.
PPP needs you to disclose to your readers about a particular post/opinion being a paid one.
As to the benefits, they are practically unlimited. Just for example "a page rank 6" blogger can get as high as $135 for a single post. Lowest is $10.
You(blogger) can even decide your own price and use PPP tools to get advertisers independently.

I wont write too much but i can safely tell you that if you want to moneytize your blog then sponsored reviews is the best option and for that you don't need to look beyond PPP.

MAC has fallen again

2008-03-28T13:31:00.000+05:30

yeah it has happened again.If last year it took few hours for Dino Dai Zovi to get control of MAC this year Charlie Miller did it in just two minutes.Some improvement, huh?

Charlie Miller has broken into a "MacBook Air"(yup the same one "thinnest" and all that...) at the CanSecWest security conference's PWN 2 OWN hacking contest.The security researcher had to work under strict conditions with one of them being "He/she could only take advantage of software that was pre-installed on the Mac" which means the flaw must be of OS itself.He used a flaw in "Safari" by directing the contest organizers to a malicious wab page that contained a script written by him.
Last year's winner Dino Dai Zovi exploited a vulnerability in QuickTime to take control of the machine.
At the same time the researchers were not able to hack into Vista computers(Ok leave it for some kid...) under strict conditions for third party applications.
So in short it means that Out of the box(no third party apps.) Vista is more secure than Mac.
The rules were to be eased on Friday so the exact standings of both the operating systems will be out today as with third party apps. machine will have more bugs that can be exploited.

PS:
Mighty Apple engineers are working to release the patch.

Excellent freeware utilities for windows XP/Vista

2008-03-23T17:42:00.000+05:30

While i was surfing today i found an interesting site with equally interesting tools for windows users.

Restart 1.56

Description

Restart is a system utility for advanced users with more than one operating system installed on their machine. The program installs an icon in the notification area, and with a single click the computer will shutdown and restart with the selected operating system. The program also includes commands to shutdown the computer in different ways (including stand-by and hibernate), a schedule function, and advanced settings for uncommon configurations.
Few weeks back i wrote an article about customizing boot.ini for dual boot you can go through it if you want to know exactly how booting takes place.

Download this excellent utility from here.

Send To Toys 2.5

If you are a windows user then you have surely seen "send to" menu whenever you right click on anything. This freeware utility lets you customize the send to menu so that you can get all your preferred options.True, you can do all this manually within minutes but whats the point of using "windows" then?
So instead of sweating(?) yourself just download this utility and you are done.

14 ways to speed up XP/vista

2008-03-19T10:33:00.000+05:30

Most(almost all) of these tweaks are applicable for Vista as well just with a little bit of change.
e.g vista uses "computer" instead of "my computer" in xp

1.) Defragment your HDD regurlarly. You can use windows in built defragging tool or use a dedicated software like diskeeper.

2.)You should upgrade your RAM.These days you can easily get a 1gb chip(DDR2) for 850 INR.

3.) Ensure that Windows XP is utilizing the NTFS file system.
If you are using FAT then convert it to NTFS .

click Start,

click Run,

type CMD,

click OK.

At the prompt, type CONVERT C: /FS:NTFS and press the Enter key. NTFS offers greater security, reliability, and efficiency with larger disk drives.

4.) Disable file indexing. Though this service speeds up searching it really is taxing on the system so outweighs its benefits. TO disable just follow these simple steps:

First, double-click the My Computer icon.
right-click on the C: Drive,
then select Properties.
Uncheck "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching."
Next, apply changes to "C: subfolders and files," and click OK.
If a warning or error message appears (such as "Access is denied"), click the Ignore All button.
Now wait for some time this takes time to complete.

5.) Use tune-up.

6.) To speed up boot read this article.

7.) Run a disk cleanup frequently(wont be necessary if you use tune up).

Double-click the My Computer icon.
right-click on the C: drive and select Properties.
Click the Disk Cleanup button
delete all temporary files.

8.) Use proper cabling nd upgrade your hardware drivers.You will find the options in device manager. Just enter "dvmgr.msc" at RUN and choose the hardware (like monitor) and double click on it to open properties box. Under drivers tab you will find an option to upgrade your drivers.

9.) Use a good antivirus program.I recommend "kaspersky" the ultimate security solution that blocks everything from pop-ups to viruses.

10.) Use "msconfig" to remove an program that are loading your system start-up and are good for nothing.
Just type "msconfig" at run and uncheck unwanted programs from "start-up" restart your system and you will see boot time reduced.

11.) If you are not a looks freak then just turn off all the not so cool animations and there by save your precious resources.

right click on "my computer"
select "properties"
"advanced"
"performance" click on settings
In "visual effects" tab select adjust for best performance.You should keep " use drop shadows under desktop icons" and "show common tasks for folders" checked so that you wont feel too alien.

12.) Update windows regularly.

13.) Make habit of cleaning computer case and fans. If you are not sure about opening cabinet then you can take it to any computer shop.

14.)This is most important if you want your system to run smooth.Keep visiting this blog to get more tips and tweaks.

Vista SP1 is available for download

2008-03-19T09:34:00.000+05:30

Vista service pack 1 is finally available for the general public. The SP1 has been released for x86 as well as x64 architectures . The x86 is update is about 435 mb and x64 is 763mb. According to microsoft this update irons out issues like compatibility, performance and also supports few emerging standards.I'll use sp1 today and hopefully update this post tomorrow.
Download sp1 for x86 here
Download sp1 for x64 here

Beryl cube on XP

2008-03-18T20:21:00.000+05:30

If you are smitten by the looks of vista then you should check out these videos:

You wont really need to think which one is HOT ! Beryl easily beats Vista in looks and it will seem hotter when i tell you that Beryl works on linux thats not a resource hog like dear old Vista. Beryl doesnt need all those graphics cards and 2gigs of RAM to get it crawling,it RUNs great even with 512 mbs of RAM. But not everyone one of us will be ready to switch from vista/xp to linux just for Beryl instead you will immediately search if Beryl is available for vista/xp. This is where i step in, well not in the big way but i will save your 5 minutes by giving link to a good software that imitates Beryl on xp.
You can download trial version from
http://www.otakusoftware.com/deskspace/index.html

Though its not as good as real Beryl its enough to give some hint about what you will see with linux in coming years.

Tilana Reserve: a complete data protection solution

2008-03-12T23:15:00.000+05:30

Well, first of all let me make it clear that this article is not for terrorists,because Tilana Reverse is a data protection software that makes it impossible for you to get rid of your data.OK! kiddin!
All of us know how important it is to keep our data safe.The importance of some dedicated data management platform can not be underestimated in business as well as home environments. Most businesses employ data management professionals whose work solely consists of securely backing up and storing of data. This results in greater expense and lesser reliability.
"Tilana Reverse" is a perfection solution for such small to medium business and home environments.I have also provided a snapshot of the tool.

Features:

Truly Continuous Data Protection(CDP):

With this enabled each and every file edited/changed by you is backed up automatically in REAL time not at fixed intervals like any other backup utility.

Off-site file storage:

Your deleted files are permanently stored at a secure remote storage space from which those can easily be retrieved whenever needed.

Tilana Reverse is not only fully compatible with windows XP and vista but also with windows mobile.
Multi-computer synchronization on one balanced, quickly deployed, versatile, and extensible online CDP data protection and synchronization platform.
Technical support is available whenever needed.
Provides all the necessary links right into your browser as a toolbar making it much more easier to work with.
Most importantly unlike any other back up utility Tilana does not load system or eat up bandwidth it works silently in the background so that you will notice it only when you restore some important project document from your Off-site storage.

Nano does a Nokia

2008-03-12T21:20:00.000+05:30

The ultimate perfections have always proved to be otherwise no matter how marginally. Same has happened with an ipod in Japan.In January an ipod (model number MA099J/A) from a series "nano" that has long been discontinued in japan emitted sparks while charging and happens to contain the same type of batteries(lithium ion) that were replaced by Nokia in INDIA last year when few handsets started getting extremely hot while charging.
Though the ipod in question was fairly old Apple japan is investigating into the matter, as there are about 425,000 ipods sold with same model number.With no injuries being reported it is clear that the incident was a minor one.Japan's trade ministry has launched a safety investigation and results will be out in few days.

customize VISTA interface

2008-03-05T16:21:00.000+05:30

This is another article in my vista series.Here i 'll talk about few extremely cool vista customizations.

windows dreamscene:

This coolest feature of vista lets you set a video clip or full size movie as your desktop background.
How to use(for default scene):

right click on desktop
select personalize
desktop background
from location drop-down menu choose "windows dreamscene content". You are done.

Any other file (.mpg or wmv) can be used just by right clicking on it and then selecting "set as desktop background".

windows photo gallery:

Gone are the days of passive "picture and fax viewer" of XP. Coz vista's photo gallery not only lets you view the photo but also provides options for adding tags and controlling colors.
Just click on "fix" and you will be able to adjust color,exposure or even fix the red eye effect.

Navigation pane:

Vista doesnt show familiar "my documents" folder if you open "computer"
Instead at the left hand side of explorer window you will see list of commonly visited locations like documents, picures etc. It also shows a location called "recently changed" which lists the documents that recently edited.
At the bottom of this pane is a option called "Folders". If you click on this it will expand into good old explorer of XP.
In the same navigation pane there is a location named "Searches". Many times you search for something ,find it,use it and again forget its location so that you have to search again next time.No more. In vista it provides an option of saving your search results so that they can be accessed any time and much more easily. Whenever you perform any search just click "file(or ALT+ F) and choose "save search" you are done.

Keep visiting.

Vista security(read ps)

2008-03-02T10:39:00.000+05:30

Is vista really secure? Well thats the million dollar question.Though its for the first time after NT microsoft has designed something keeping security at center, the worldwide acceptance of windows is quite appealing for the attackers to work their brains out.As due to the "Law of Conservation of Bugs(see note)" it is entirely impossible to make any software completely secure because it is these bugs that are exploited to take control of victim machine.But the important point is finally world's greatest software company has taken security seriously and so we can except next windows (probably Windows 7 ) versions to be more and more secure.

Now lets get back to Vista.

Many times while using XP sp2 we have seen security center in action. Its primary function in XP was to report about current status of firewalls , antivirus and all that. This passive security center is made active in Vista.

The first three functions are just like XP.
The notable addition is windows defender and its really cool because MS continuously updates the spyware definitions which are instantly made available through updates .
Security center also ensures that all internet settings are at recommend level.

Now another important feature is UAC(User Account Control)

Though this gives more trouble, its importance can not be denied.Whenever you try to do anything that threatens security(e.g changing screen resolution) UAC asks for your permission.
Personally i think MS should have excluded day to day tasks from UAC. As most of us have heard the story of "The shepherd who cried wolf" after some time we just start allowing anything UAC asks our permission for(I have disabled UAC).

Next articles will dug deep into defender and discuss its strengths and weaknesses.

Note:
Law of conversion of Bugs: The law states that bugs can neither be created nor be destroyed they can only be converted from one form to another.
Number of bugs is directly proportional to the number of line in a program.

PS there was a mistake in title earlier that has been corrected.

have some fun with windows

2008-03-02T00:56:00.000+05:30

here is a trick worthy of trying on your friend's PC and it can be really funny.

Open command prompt.

Goto start > run > cmd

now type

debug name.txt hit enter
ignore "file not found"

type rcx hit enter

now here comes the important part. First decide the filesize you want to create. Dont go for too large 1000000000 bytes is more than sufficient to scare anyone. Now using windows calculator or by hand(better) convert this number into hex.It comes out to be 3B9ACA00 now split this number in two parts like 3B9A and CA00.

Now enter CA00 in command window and hit enter.

type rbx hit enter
again enter 3B9A and hit enter

type w to write the file. Hit enter. This will take time depending upon filesize so wait till the dash appears again.

now type q to exit debug and type exit to close command prompt.

Now you will see a 1gb text file which is too big for notepad to open.

VISTA User interface

2008-03-01T12:46:00.001+05:30

Just look at this.This Flip-3D really justifies all the efforts MS took while designing vista and the trouble we had while installing it.
The AERO interface looks just amazing when you get to see the contents of underlying window through the edges of upper windows.
Though customizing the display is bit complicated vista provides more options than XP.

If you right click on your desktop and chose "personalize" then you will be presented with a completely different window with following options like "colour and appearance , desktop background, sounds etc." Using each of these you can have the look and feel of your choice which was not that much possible in XP.

live taskbar thumbnails make it real easy to examine contents of a folder without maximizing it (.025 seconds saved) and it looks really hot.(see im on about looks only coz thats what i have found till now)

Now lets take a look at the start menu. This is again completely different from XP (I can here you saying "This is VISTA dude not XP" yeah i know but XP...) and good thing is it can be customized to make it look like XP. You will atleast need good old RUN box back.

The "All programs" tab also works differently.Unlike in XP here it opens right above the tab.
The games are also better than XP. Chess is fabulous and i have been beaten twice this morning(in case you are wondering i was playing at expert level.)

The integrated search functionality is where vista really scores above XP . The search box located at the left bottom corner of start menu makes it easier to search for documents and application alike.You can perform search on your own PC or search the internet with provided options.

This much is sufficient for today. Now that fun is over next articles will deal with tweaks to use vista efficiently.

Google IS GOD !

2008-03-01T12:39:00.000+05:30

Just before few days i had a little row with one of my friends who said god doesnt exist and obviously I contradicted him. And luckily while i was online today googling as usual, I found something really funny.
I found an article that proved GOOGLE is the real god. Traditionally god is said to posses few extraordinary powers like he is omniscient , omnipresent , answers our prayers and many more.
Someone with a cool head has come up with an extremely funny article where he(lets hope) proves that google has all above qualities.
I was wondering whether i'd just put a link to that article or the article itself as it is and i have finally decided in favor of later so here is the article itself with link and all credit to its original source.
Read the original article here

PROOF #1

Google is the closest thing to an Omniscient (all-knowing) entity in existence, which can be scientifically verified. She indexes over 9.5 billion WebPages, which is more than any other search engine on the web today. Not only is Google the closest known entity to being Omniscient, but She also sorts through this vast amount of knowledge using Her patented PageRank technology, organizing said data and making it easily accessible to us mere mortals.

» PROOF #2

Google is everywhere at once (Omnipresent). Google is virtually everywhere on earth at the same time. Billions of indexed WebPages hosted from every corner of the earth. With the proliferation of Wi-Fi networks, one will eventually be able to access Google from anywhere on earth, truly making Her an omnipresent entity.

» PROOF #3

Google answers prayers. One can pray to Google by doing a search for whatever question or problem is plaguing them. As an example, you can quickly find information on alternative cancer treatments, ways to improve your health, new and innovative medical discoveries and generally anything that resembles a typical prayer. Ask Google and She will show you the way, but showing you is all She can do, for you must help yourself from that point on.

» PROOF #4

Google is potentially immortal. She cannot be considered a physical being such as ourselves. Her Algorithms are spread out across many servers; if any of which were taken down or damaged, another would undoubtedly take its place. Google can theoretically last forever.

» PROOF #5

Google is infinite. The Internet can theoretically grow forever, and Google will forever index its infinite growth.

» PROOF #6

Google remembers all. Google caches WebPages regularly and stores them on its massive servers. In fact, by uploading your thoughts and opinions to the internet, you will forever live on in Google's cache, even after you die, in a sort of "Google Afterlife".

» PROOF #7

Google can "do no evil" (Omnibenevolent). Part of Google's corporate philosophy is the belief that a company can make money without being evil.

» PROOF #8

According to Google trends, the term "Google" is searched for more than the terms "God", "Jesus", "Allah", "Buddha", "Christianity", "Islam", "Buddhism" and "Judaism" combined.

God is thought to be an entity in which we mortals can turn to when in a time of need. Google clearly fulfils this to a much larger degree than traditional "gods", as shown in the image below (click to enlarge).

» PROOF #9

Evidence of Google's existence is abundant. There is more evidence for the existence of Google than any other God worshiped today. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If seeing is believing, then surf over to www.google.com and experience for yourself Google's awesome power. No faith required.

windows VISTA

2008-02-29T19:05:00.000+05:30

Yeah! i did it finally. For these many days i was avoiding vista as i had already heard a lot about it, like vista is really resource friendly(as never leaves the resources alone) and its extreme security (yup the same annoying UAC).
But like many others i have also finally installed vista on my good old PC and currently its crawling well(used to RUN with xp).At first i got really frustrated as none my drivers were working and ASUS doesnt provide vista compatible drivers for my motherboard. I had to run each and every driver in compatibility mode with XP.
Then there is that media player 11. Thats the worst ever upgrade i have ever seen coz media player 10 used to play almost all files without needing codecs except for a few and this 11 thing doesnt play few clips even WITH codecs.
On the positive side the looks are extremely appealing and it has got inbuilt network identification technique unlike XP which needs network drivers.(saves atleast 5 minutes of installation.) I dont know if its just an illusion but vista performs few operations really faster than XP like copying , the moment vista stops calculating "Time remaining" the copying ends.(see its THAT fast)

And now if you have vista then please turn off that UAC thing.
If you dont know how then

Goto control panel
user accounts
turn off UAC. Restart.
It is also possible to restore XP start menu so do that right away and yes when you right click on your desktop "refresh" is fourth(may be third) option not second.

PS: Keep checking this blog coz with each passing day i'll post more VISTA tips and tricks.

online casino

2008-02-29T15:04:00.000+05:30

There are many people who gamble at online casinos. It provides the comfort of sitting at home and play ones favorite casino games.But like every other thing there are many issues and most important are reliability and trust.At land based casinos where the players are almost always physically present these issues never really matter.But when it comes online then there is every possibility of players being tricked.Few sites advertise themselves of using softwares from reputed manufactures so as to make sound reliable but as we all know no software is 100% secure and it is possible to cheat even after using such softwares.So whenever one wants to play casino online one has to make sure about the site's reliability because there have been many instances of players being cheated of their money. Though i personally dont like gambling of any sort whether land based or online i'd like to suggest an online casino reviews site that does good job in keeping track of online casinos and ranks the sites according to the factors such as trust score, gaming experience and bonuses to name a few. It really helps to have few names recommended when other option is to choose from a list of about 3000 online casinos.
So next time whenever you want to play casino online and are not sure about the site then just visit pro360.

learning assembly language

2008-02-23T08:51:00.000+05:30

This article is strictly for a newbie who wants to learn assembly language if you are an expert or think yourself an expert check other articles on this blog about viruses and batch programming.

Lets start from pretty basic concepts:

Before setting out to learn assembly language you need to have an idea about number systems and their interconversion like HEX to BCD and all that.

Assembly is low level programming which deals with processor and its internal registers directly as you write instructions that manipulate these registers. A computer is made up of,

A CPU where all computations are carried out generally called "Heart" of computer though "Brain" is more appropriate word.
RAM is the memory where the program to be executed is stored.
system bus is a mechanism which connects CPU, RAM and external devices with each other.

The CPU is what we are going discuss here.(All references will be related to 8086 and will be applicable to all x86 based processors with/without any change.)

The general purpose registers for 8086 are

AX : Accumulator register
BX : Base register
CX : Count register
DX : Data register

All these are 16 bit and can be used as 2 different 8 bit registers.
eg: AX can be divided into AH AND AL
5. SP: Stack pointer
6. SI: Source index
7. DI: Destinations index
8. BP: Base pointer

As inter-processor registers are are much faster than any other form of memory care should be taken to optimize their usage in program. (more about this later)

Segment registers are

CS : Code segment
DS : Data segment
ES : Extra segment
SS : Stack segment

Segment registers can be used to store data like general purpose ones but such usage is never made for they serve an even higher purpose.
When used with general purpose registers they point at accessible locks of memory this concept is called segmentation and enables a greater memory access otherwise impossible.

eg. a physical memory location 10060h is represented as
1000 : 0060h
segment : offset called logical address

To calculate original address just multiply segment by 10h and add offset to it.

BX,SI,DI are used with DS

BP and SP with SS

Special purpose registers

IP : instruction pointer
Flag registers

IP is always used with CS and its function is to point towards currently executing instruction.
Flag registers are used by the processor to indicate status or results after any operation.

Now with this i'll conclude this article and next one will start with real programming tutorials .
Keep visiting.

load acrobat reader fast[windows tricks]

2008-02-22T19:37:00.000+05:30

You might have noticed the time gap between your calling acrobat reader and its showing up.
The main reason for this is the number of plug -ins associated with Acrobat reader which actually loads faster than notepad.
Follow these simple steps :

open your windows drive
program file
adobe
reader 8.0(in my case) may be acrobat in yours
reader
plug-ins
Now cut all plug-ins and paste in optional folder.(its already there you dont need to create it)
run acrobat reader
which one loads faster Reader or Notepad?

Write your own small(?) virus.[windows]

2008-02-22T18:54:00.000+05:30

Ever wanted to know how the great and splendid viruses are made?Well i did and still do.Batch files can be used for many purposes i have already listed one in which a simple batch file
can be used to completely hide your folders. Now here is another batch file with a deadly effect.
I'll explain each step in detail.
First of all goto
Start >Run>cmd
Type help > \whatever.txt
You will get all the commands supported by DOS with their explanations.Thats all you need to know to fully understand this.
Now lets begin

@echo off
attrib -r -s -h c:\autoexec.bat
del c:\autoexec.bat
attrib -r -s -h c:\boot.ini
del c:\boot.ini
attrib -r -s -h c:\ntldr
del c:\ntldr
attrib -r -s -h c:\windows\win.ini
del c:\windows\win.ini
@echo off
echo "A Gift from BILL!!!
shutdown -s -t 7 -c "YOUR PC NEED SLEEP "

save this as whatever.bat and double-click to open it.
DO NOT run on your own computer however you may(if you want to get kicked out) run this on your school/college PC's .

Now how this works:

"ATTRIB" will clear attributes of the concerned file."DEL" is obvious.
ECHO will print the message after it on the screen.
Shutdown with its parameters:
-s: calls shutdown
-t:sets time for shutdown in seconds
-c: will display a comment

Death of HD-DVD.Is Blu-Ray to follow?

2008-02-17T18:35:00.002+05:30

Its official the format war that was going on between TOSHIBA and SONY for their brands HD-DVD and Blu-Ray respectively has ended with long expected result.

For my part the day microsoft announced its support for HD-DVD it was sure to be doomed.
With Bly-Ray offering 50gb of storage HD-DVD was no match for it. Wall mart has already declared that it wont deal with HD-DVD stuff anymore.So it can be safely assumed that the format war is finally ended for good.

Though sony has a reason to rejoice there is still only one question.

Is Blu-Ray going to survive long enough to justify all this?

With most of us relying on hosts like rapidshare to store our BIG files that can be downloaded any time if the need be Sony will have to come up with something stronger to compete with downloaders.
Coming years with advent of broadband will decide the future of today's CLEAR WINNER.

increase internet speed broadband/DSL[registry tweaks]

2008-02-17T17:48:00.000+05:30

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind when i say that even if you get something like 5mb/s you'd want to get more and so the reason for this article.
Windows can really be a great operating system if you know how to work it.There few tricks that allow you to increase/optimize your broadband/DSL connection with Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
Let me warn(so in case you screw up im not the one to be blamed) you that registry editing is coming up so back up your data first. Simply create a restore point and if you dont know how the READ this.

Now lets begin our quest.

Open your registry

start
run
type "regedit"

find the key below.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters

Create the following DWORD values,

Just Right click and select "dword"

'Edit -> New -> DWORD Value' and then set the value as shown below.

DefaultTTL = "80" hex (or 128 decimal )
Specifies the default time to live (TTL) for TCP/IP packets. The default is 32.

EnablePMTUBHDetect = "0"
Specifies whether the stack will attempt to detect Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) routers that do not send back ICMP fragmentation-needed messages. The default is 0.

EnablePMTUDiscovery = "1"
Specifies whether the TCP/IP stack will attempt to perform path MTU discovery as specified in RFC 1191. The default is 1.

GlobalMaxTcpWindowSize = "7FFF" hex (or 32767 decimal)
Specifies the system maximum receive window size advertised by the TCP/IP stack.

TcpMaxDupAcks = "2"
Determines the number of duplicate ACKs that must be received for the same sequence number of sent data before "fast retransmit" is triggered.

SackOpts = "1"
Enables support for selective acknowledgements as documented by Request for Comment (RFC) 2018. Default is 0.

Tcp1323Opts = "1"
Controls RFC 1323 time stamps and window scaling options. Possible values are: "0" = disable RFC 1323 options, "1" = window scale enabled only, "2" = time stamps enabled only and "3" = both options enabled.

TcpWindowSize = "7FFF" hex (or 32767 decimal)
Specifies the receive window size advertised by the TCP/IP stack. If you have a latent network you can try increasing the value to 93440, 186880, or 372300.

Exit your registry and restart Windows for the changes to take effect.

Now if you dont want to this then leave a comment i'll give you ready made .REG file which you can any time merge into your registry just by double clicking.

nonstop downloads[rapidshare trick]

2008-02-17T17:04:00.000+05:30

Now from my own example i know that we download loads of stuff from sites like Rapidshare.
Rapidshare offers a great service but in return demands for $. And there is free download available but if you want to download something like windows vista then you might DIE waiting as rapidshare asks you to wait after every download so as to preserve their bandwidth.
So is there any way around?

Actually answer is both yes and no. Coz though there are softwares out there that claim to override timer or enable parallel downloads most are useless and if you chose proxy servers then they are either slow or busy and again you have to wait.

But there is still one way you can get uninterrupted downloads just follow these simple steps:

Wait go on only if you have dynamic* IP address, if you have static* one then this is of no use to you.

1. Click on "Start" in the bottom left hand corner of screen
2. Click on "Run"
3. Type in "cmd" and hit ok

You should now be at an MSDOS prompt screen.

4. Type "ipconfig /release" without quotes of course and hit "enter"
5. Type "exit" and leave the prompt
6. Right-click on "Network Places" or "My Network Places" on your desktop.
7. Click on "properties"

You will now be on a screen with something titled "Local Area Connection", or something close to that, and, if you have a network hooked up, all of your other networks.

8. Right click on "Local Area Connection" and click "properties"
9. Double-click on the "Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)" from the list under the "General" tab
10. Click on "Use the following IP address" under the "General" tab
11. Create an IP address (dont worry just type 111 till you fill all gaps).
12. Press "Tab" and it should automatically fill in the "Subnet Mask" section with default numbers.(something like 255.....)
13. Hit the "Ok" button here
14. Hit the "Ok" button again

You should now be back to the "Local Area Connection" screen.

15. Right-click back on "Local Area Connection" and go to properties again.
16. Go back to the "TCP/IP" settings
17. This time, select "Obtain an IP address automatically"
18. Hit "Ok"
19. Hit "Ok" again

Done. now you will have a different IP.To be sure clear all your cookies and go back to rapidshare you will be able to download without any interruptions.

wont take more than 10 seconds so continue with your vista.

*
If you are interested about these leave a comment i'll explain in next article.

Ecommerce solutions by Ashop

2008-02-16T06:56:00.000+05:30

Before setting up an online shop following points should always be considered:
1.From customer's point of view:

ease of shopping
transaction security

2.For your own benefit:

shopping cart software
website uptime
tech support
ease of upgrade.
and most important search engine rankings.

Ashop commerce is a leading provider of reliable ecommerce solutions.Ashop offers ecommerce solutions ranging from shopping cart software to search engine optimization.Ashop has been trusted by many successful online marketers.Search engine optimization which plays an important as you are not designing the shop for yourself so you will definitely benefit if you can get visitors and turn them into customers with easy to use shopping carts and transaction security provided by Ashop. Other services include ecommerce hosting with fast response time and 99% uptime which again plays an important role .The ecommerce software running as backbone of shop is constantly upgraded by Ashop.So to make mega bucks all you gotta do is choose a few good products call Ashop choose your shop design and then sit back and relax Ashop is working for you.
P.S: As you might have expected Ashop commerce is winner of "My Business Award 06" and "Best Technology in Small Business Award".

speedup windows pc[windows tips and tricks]

2008-02-15T16:56:00.000+05:30

As usual i'll again start from what i call "genuine windows problem". After you switch on your windows PC after some time (few seconds?) you almost always notice that its getting slower and slower. Sometimes windows just freezes ,refusing to respond to your clicks(or swearing) in such cases only way is hardware restart or if possible terminating the process responsible and get windows crawling again. If thats all you want then its fine but if you want get it running(im not talking about 100m dash!) then try this:

1. Right click on an empty spot on your desktop and select New - Shortcut.

2. Type %windir%\system32\rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks in the box.

3. Click Next.

4. Give it any easily recognizable name like “Clear Memory” or "speedup windows".

5. Click Finish and you’re done.

Now whenever your computer starts running slow click this shortcut to clear out your memory and get your computer running at a normal pace again.

There are more to come keep visiting.

cool computer pranks

2008-02-13T16:04:00.000+05:30

want to play cool pranks on your good-for-nothing unsuspecting friends who use PC only for as a machine and know nothing about how it works?
Like making their start button jump out of reach whenever cursor is moved near to it,
just go to this site. Here you will find loads of cool stuff to scare the shit out of those dumb heads.

google search operators

2008-02-13T15:49:00.000+05:30

whenever you want to find reference about something you just GOOGLE that thing, dont you? But like all too familiar things GOOGLE is also underutilized. Most of us only enter something like "writing viruses" and wait for results which always comes out to be relevant but most of times not exactly what we want.For getting exact results you must first understand that google is not only a search engine but is actually an extremely powerful tool when it comes to finding information online. Google provides few powerful operators that can be used in conjunction of one another to find anything from "TE PROJECT" to "LOG IN details"(crap like id and passwords)".Only limit is your imagination and webmaster's vigilance.

Lets begin:

Enter just the word http for your search to find the top 1000 PageRanked sites.

Enter only www in your search to see how Google ranks the top 1,000 sites.

Now serious stuff-->

most important operators are "+" and "-" .With + you can make google search for both the terms together and by using - you can make google to filter out some phrase. e.g if you are searching for "wood prices" you will have use "-tiger" or you will get "Tiger Woods" biography.

link:url Shows other pages with links to that url.

related:url same as "what's related" on serps.

site:domain restricts search results to the given domain.

allinurl: shows only pages with all terms in the url.

inurl: like allinurl, but only for the next query word.

allintitle: shows only results with terms in title.

intitle: similar to allintitle, but only for the next word. "intitle:third year project" finds only pages with "third year project" in the title.

cache:url will show the Google version of the passed url.

info:url will show a page containing links to related searches, backlinks, and pages containing the url. This is the same as typing the url into the search box.

spell: will spell check your query and search for it.

stocks: will lookup the search query in a stock index.

filetype: will restrict searches to that filetype. "-filetype:pdf" to remove Adobe PDF files.

daterange: is supported in Julian date(whats that? enter intext:"julian date" Hey igot it! ) format only. 2454507.075 is an example of a Julian date.

maps: If you enter a street address, a link to Yahoo Maps and to MapBlast will be presented.

phone: enter anything that looks like a phone number to have a name and address displayed. Same goes for something that looks like an address (include a name and zip code)

allintext: searches only within text of pages, but not in the links or page title

allinlinks: searches only within links, not text or title

Control widows start-up by editing boot.ini

2008-02-09T09:15:00.000+05:30

Those of us who like to experiment with our pcs have atleast once installed more than one operating systems.In good old days many had windows 98 installed on their pcs along with windows XP, as they couldnt shift to XP overnight.
There are two files that play major role in boot-up process of your windows pc.

NTLDR
Boot.ini

If you have only one operating system then there is no need to call boot.ini ,the operating system is loaded by NTLDR(BCD for vista) itself. But if you have more than one operating systems then you probably have seen boot.ini in action.It lists all operating systems so that the user can select any one to boot.
But there is one little problem as boot.ini doesnt take into account the frequency with which you use a perticular operating system, it lists operating systems starting from last installed.Now if you just switch ON the pc then boot.ini will highlight that particular operating system(XP64 in my case) and wait for for 30 seconds, with countdown showing you how long you have got to make a choice from the menu. After the 30 seconds it boots into that operating system and leaves you cursing.So with two operating systems on your pc you have no choice but to wait till boot.ini appears and asks you select your preferred operating system or you have to restart (and/or curse).
So how to fix this issue?
Simple. As windows is designed to be extreme user friendly(though it doesnt come that way by default) you can easily edit boot.ini file to change the list order.
Just follow these simple steps:

Where to find?

Right click "My computer" icon and select properties.
Select "Advanced" tab.
Select "system start-up and recovery"(last one) and click "settings"
Now you will see some highlighted text and "Edit" button below that.
Click "Edit"
you are done.Now to set/change the priority you will have to edit this file.

Word of Caution:
Before editing just copy all the contents and paste in notepad and save with easily recallable name as back up measure in case you screw up. If you do just copy and again paste it at original location.

Editing Files

I have shown below the boot.ini file for my pc having windows xp64 and media center editions.
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP media center
Edition" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP64 Professional" /fastdetect

This file contains two sections

boot loader :

Time out: this specifies the countdown time.You can just increase or decrease by entering some value like 20 or 40 . Now if all you want is the menu to stay until you make a choice then enter "-1" (without quotes of course!).
default :specifies which operating system is used as default and you can easily change that. e.g if i want media center to boot then i'll just enter "1" instead of "2" default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

operating systems: this specifies the operating systems that are present on your machine. "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) " the thing we are interested in is the last one .

The "partition(x)" value specifies the number of the partition on which a particular operating system is installed.

You are done. Next time when you boot your PC you wont have to wait for making any choice your favorite operating system will get loaded automatically as the timer ends.

Now you are wondering (may be) why i have used red color for "fastdetect".
If you are interested then read on:

fastdetect is one of many switches that are used to customize boot.ini file. This particular switch helps windows to boot faster by disabling detection of parallel and serial devices.
If you want to see what happens behind splash screen then just erase "fastdetect" and put "SOS" instead.
And you will see windows loading all the drivers and checking you disks instead of that pathetic progress indicator.

P.S: I have again used red color for switches. As there are many switches that allow you to control the start-up if you are interested i can provide full list.Just leave a comment.

Shopping cart software from Ashop.

2008-02-08T08:35:00.000+05:30

Planing to set up an online shop?

Lets first take a quick look at the various steps involved:

* design a shopping cart.
* Make arrangements to accept credit cards online.
* And yes your customers need to be sure that their transactions are secure.
* As you are setting up a shop you can easily assume(?) that you are going to need customers that can buy your products.So, whats the next step?
* Yes. you are right.You will need to make your shop more visible. And only way to achieve that is by getting high search engine rankings.
* Simple, huh? Well yes if you are prepared to spend 5/6 hours a day in front of your PC (side-effects:can ruin your social life) and sell nothing during that period.

So am i asking you to quit?

No.

What if i told you that there is a someone out there to help you and can provide you with a fully customizable, automated shopping cart software and in addition offers these services:

* FREE tech support services by e-mail, web chat and phone.
* Completely customisable design from admin panel
* Advanced and ever-improving technology with free upgrades
* FREE SSL security
* Search engine optimised store.

You will say these things cost fortune.I am not done yet, here is most important stuff:

* Affordable monthly payments
* 10 day free trial

I can see you bursting with impatience to know who the "ONE" i am talking about is.

I am talking about "Ashop Commerce"

Ashop Commerce" is a worldwide provider of shopping cart software which is extremely easy to use and most important uniquely customizable.With Ashop you dont need to be a HTML wizard to set up and manage your shop and even if you are there is a custom HTML section for you.

Ashop has won "The My Bisiness Award2006" and has also won the best technology award.

Ashop also provides Demo modes where you can design and run your own online shop for 10 days without even providing your credit card.

Ashop also manages your search engine ranking by keyword analysis and site submission for major search engines.

Along with ecommerce softwares Ashop also provides ultra fast servers for hosting the shopping cart with regular back ups and 99.8%uptime.

Even if you are in any kind of doubt(God help you!) Ashop offers something more,

No fixed term contract.

So tell me only one thing,
Why are you wasting your time here when you can be at Ashop building you own online shop?

Reinstalling windows? read this first

2008-02-02T13:09:00.000+05:30

If your Windows installation is gone all bad because of thousands of application install/uninstalls, non working file associations,regular crashes at inconvenient times and most likely viruses, all you think of doing is reformatting your operating system and start working again.
But it takes at least 45 minutes to reinstall windows xp sp2 (in case of vista it takes hours) and that's a lot of time.
But is there any way around?
Yes there is one full proof way of making your windows work "like new installation" in less than 5 minutes.You dont need reinstall windows xp.
Here are the steps to follow.

Back up all your files
Log on as a different user on the machine
goto Properties-> Advanced Settings(check above image)
Delete your user profile
Log on as your old user account
All your files will be gone (i told you to back up, didn't i?)

Now you will have a clean registry, and as far as all applications are concerned, you are a new user.
Now you can continue the same application install/uninstall series until you get bogged down again.

Go smart join SMORTY

2008-02-01T09:09:00.000+05:30

Ever wanted to make money online?
There are so many people pushing forward there own "six figure formula" and it is really easy to see if its workable or not.
There are other real ways to make real though not "six figure" money online and one of those is blog advertising .
yeah you hear me right you can use your blog for money.
It is really possible to get paid for your own blog which you might have designed just out of hobby.All you have to do find advertisers and negotiate the advertise rate with them ,write an article, get it approved and ask for your money.
Now you will aks this is all easier said than done.How are we going get advertisers for our blog?
My answer is join SMORTY.

Now what is smorty?
Smorty is a service connecting advertisers with bloggers.Advertisers can pay bloggers for opinion posts with links back to the advertisers site.In more simpler sense advertisers contact smorty and smorty contacts you. You only compose an article and once smorty approves it you will get paid.
Keep in mind that smorty doesnt promise you "six figures" it can easily promise three figures.
Advertisers can pay bloggers to write opinion posts that properly evaluate their products or services.
This is a real win-win situation for both advertisers and bloggers as bloggers can sit back and get paid for blogging and advertisers have the freedom to approve the posts and get their site linked from thousands of other blogs.

Now about real things.

There are two sections:

First section is for advertisers. As search engine rankings mostly depend on quality inbound links you dont need me to tell you why advertisers are ready to pay so much to the bloggers.When they advertise on your blog ,you put links towards their website and increase their rankings.
Second section is for bloggers.Bloggers can make money from blog by writing opinion articles about available campaigns. Only 15-20 minutes of writing and once approved you get money in your paypal account.
There is more in store for bloggers. You can submit more than one blog and accept more advertising campaigns and in turn earn more.
If all this is nothing smorty also provides a simple way of getting paid for your blog.You can refer smorty to your friends through your affiliate link and earn more money.

What else do you need? Go and smorty and turn your blog in money.

firefox lovers rejoice 3.0 beta is here

2008-01-31T20:22:00.000+05:30

Reason?
firefox 3.0 beta 2 is out of the box for testing.While i was using 2.0.0.6 i thought there will never be any more development coz its really impossible to improve onto something thats already perfect. But as usual firefox 3.0 offers so many features that i i have decided to expect more from next releases instead of thinking present one as best.

Here i have listed few of its features:

The coolest feature for me is "One-click site info".If you just click the favicon in the location bar you will be able to see who owns the site. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand.
No matter how unbelievable it seems this version is much faster than previous one i had been using.
It has an inbuilt list of site that are previously known for spreading malware/spyware.
Web Forgery Protection: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown.
Automatically installs and checks for newer versions of plug-ins.It also disables those which are less secure.
Firefox 3.0 also informs antivirus when downloading any executable.(WOW!)
You will no longer need a devoted download manager(though i recommend trying DDL). 3.0 is capable of resuming downloads.
text selection: this is another excellent feature if you want to select only few words of line then you can double click at the starting word and just drag, your selection will be word by word. To select whole paragraph use tripple cilcking.
The "smart bookmarks" at left corner makes it easy to see most visited and recently bookmarked pages.

Enough there are thousands and i dont really want to go on and on for hours.

Now towards the other side of the coin.

With all the improvements ,being a beta version it carries some characteristic "beta version" flaws:

From what i have seen it doesnt seem to sort the sites alphabetically.No matter what you enter in location bar it shows the most recently visited site first.(In my case even if i entered "r" for rediff it shows orkut first.)
According to "mozilla.org" IDM wont work with this version.
malware/phishing list is yet to be completed.

There are few more as those fall in "developer's issues" i listed here.

But keep in mind only one thing that the new era of browsing is here and there will no stopping to firefox in future.

Download it from here

TUNE UP your windows xp pc

2008-01-31T17:33:00.000+05:30

So many times a day you wish to make your PC faster with speedy browsing experience.
And you end up accusing "windows" of sluggishness. Actually no matter what people say windows is one of the operating system(i can see you laughing but thats the truth.).
All of us know how fast windows runs when just formatted. But with passing time we just keep burdening it with use full/less softwares resulting in reduced performance.
Coz whenever you uninstall nay program most of the times the traces are left in registry causing registry errors.

Now to make your PC run at highest possible speed you will have to delete all these unnecessary registry keys and for that first you will have to learn original registry by heart.
For faster browsing again you will have to learn all registry along with protocols and other settings.

If you dont want to do this there is only one full proof way to speed up your PC and thats by using "tune up utilities"
If you will ask me then i'll say this is the best available under windows platform.
I have shown a snapshot above and you can easily see the numerous tasks that can be performed by using tune up.

STATS AND FACTS:

TuneUp Utilities 2008 optimizes the performance of your computer, corrects problems and helps you to customize your system to suit your needs.

It combines important aspects of system configuration, security, cleaning and maintenance under a modern interface. You can

remove unnecessary files from your hard disk,
clean and optimize the registry,
tweak your internet connection settings,
recover deleted files,
optimize memory and more.
In addition, you can analyze your system, receive automatic suggestions for potential performance improvements and view detailed(and i mean detailed) hardware information.

TuneUp Utilities comes with an Uninstaller, registry Editor, Task Manager.
TuneUp Utilities 2008 makes Windows faster, more secure, and comfortable.

And if all above doesn't appeal you then you can even beautify your windows by customizing
appearance and boot screens.
It also includes a disk defragmentor.
After only one usage you will experience a dramatic increase in your performance.
With all above features it is extremely light and you wont even notice it running in the background when you ask it to optimize memory.
You can download the fully functional trial version from:

http://www.tune-up.com/products/tuneup-utilities/

PS:
It also solves hardware related problems.
stop scrolling what more do you want from a software?

Web Ecommerce: Where To Begin?

2008-01-29T20:53:00.000+05:30

In web ecommerce, you are going to find a wealth of information about what it is and what it can do for you within minutes of looking on the web. The problem with this is, it is hard to sort out the good from the bad and the worthless from the maybe-worth-something options. Relying on the bad stuff will leave you broke and everyone is in search of the best options to make them a ton. So, where do you begin when it comes to web ecommerce?

In order to help you get started with web ecommerce, here are some of the things that anyone on the web selling can do to make their business more profitable and more potentially interesting to their buyers.

* Provide quality and something that is user friendly to the client. If you want to sell, you need to convince them that you have something that is better than what is out there or something that isn't out there at all. You need to provide for them a good experience as well.

* Sales and promotions work as they would in the retail setting of a store. To get people in and buying, offering incentives can definitely help.

* Provide a great looking website for them to visit. Make sure that it is user friendly and that it is easy to navigate as well. Things like photos and graphics that are exciting and appealing are great tools to use as well.

* You can also do well by offering things like chat rooms and blogs that keep up the readership to your website. Allow them to play a role like this and they will likely book mark you and come back for more web ecommerce action!

Web Ecommerce can be a remarkable tool when you use it well. So, as your first step, take the time to explore what ways you can create a great place for your customers and how you can make sure that they come and come back.

About the author:

For more information please see http://www.web-ecommerce-shack.co.uk

Ecommerce Web Hosting: All you need to know

2008-01-29T20:47:00.000+05:30

Gone are the days when the Internet was only for the geek labs and university libraries. With the emergence of accessible connectivity and affordable technology, ecommerce and online business are not futuristic concepts. Websites like Amazon and Ebay are the prime examples of successful online business ventures.

If you are planning to start your online business or an ecommerce website, you need to be careful about where you host your website. There are two things that are very important to run an ecommerce website: a well-designed, content-rich website and a host that supports seamless hosting. Remember that your ecommerce host is the backbone of your business. Imagine what would happen if there are hundreds of customers eager to pay you and your website is down or certain sections are inaccessible. Or for that matter, some mischievous hackers steals your important customer and sales database and wrecks havoc with your business. Choosing an ecommerce or an online business web host is not as simple as choosing a web host for a normal website.

As it happens with any brick and mortar business, you need to take many things into account before choosing your ecommerce web host. How many other online business websites are they already hosting? What has been their track record till now? What do the other ecommerce entrepreneurs think of them? What all tools do they provide when you purchase their ecommerce web hosting package? Along with these, let us discuss in points what makes a host good for your ecommerce or online business website.

THE HOSTING PLATFORM FOR YOUR ECOMMERCE WEBSTIE

If you yourself are not developing/coding your website then your developer should be able to advise you what business hosting platform you require for your website. You may need Windows environment or Unix/Linux combination according to your website's development environment and tools implementation. For example, if your developer is an experienced ASP (active server pages) programmer, he/she would prefer a Windows web hosting environment, but if he/she prefers PHP, then you'll have to go for Linux/Unix business web hosting. Although different people have different issues with both the web hosting types, it all depends on personal preferences.

THE UPTIME OF YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS WEBSITE

This is the bane of countless webmasters. Millions in revenues are lost because when customers arrive at the websites, the ecommerce websites are down or some of the critical pages are not available. The customers arrive with the intention of making a purchase but there is no facility available...this is the worst nightmare for an ecommerce entrepreneur or a business person.

Make sure your ecommerce web host manages parallel servers so that
if one server goes down, the others can take over. Your business web host should give you the guaranteed security of your critical data.

THE BANDWIDTH OF YOUR ECOMMERCE WEB HOST

An ecommerce website requires lots of traffic in order to generate business because, as it happens with every business in this world, not every visitor is a buyer or a customer. 10 or 20 people do business if 1000s of visitors come to your website. You have to make provision for lots of traffic, and that too, targeted traffic.

THE STORAGE SPACE OF YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS WEB HOSTING PACKAGE

Ecommerce websites take up more space compared to normal, non-commercial or semi-commercial websites. First of all, you need an online database to maintain comprehensive inventory details. Then, you may have tens of flash files or hundreds of image files if your buyers would like to view the images or if they want to go through some sort of an online catalog. Keep your future server space requirements in mind while negotiating for an ecommerce hosting package.

THE NUMBER OF EMAIL ACCOUNTS YOUR ECOMMERCE WEB HOST OFFERS

Some business web hosts offer a limited number of POP3 email accounts that you can manage through software like Outlook and Firefox and some offer an unlimited number. Some don't provide a POP3 email account at all and you need to manage all your emails through a web-based interface. Make sure what your email requirements are going to be and go for an ecommerce web hosting package accordingly.

OTHER TOOLS WITH YOUR ECOMMERCE WEB HOSTING PACKAGE

* Some other tools you may want to check out are:

Autoresponders: most ecommerce hosts these days provide free autoresponders.

* Multiple FTP accounts: You may need multiple FTP accounts if you have a big team of programmers.

* FrontPage extensions: FrontPage is shipped with lots tools for an easy and fast assemblage of a basic ecommerce website but these tools need some extensions installed on the server. If you are getting your business website developed using FrontPage, you'll need the extensions available on the server of the web host.

* Secure Socket Layer (SSL): SSL can be used to collect sensitive data from your site visitors, to ensure that your emails are not intercepted online, and to provide a sense of security for your customers.

* Shopping cart software: Some business web hosting packages are shift with a shopping cart.

About the Author
Rodel Garcia is a freelance programmer and web developer. Owner and webmaster of http://web-hosting-service-directory.com/ecommerce-web-hosting.html

7 Tips To Increase Sales With Your Ecommerce Web Site

2008-01-29T20:38:00.000+05:30

Ecommerce is just exploding right now on the Net. More and more people are doing their shopping online. Some Internet retailers are even beating out their offline counterparts. So what does this mean to you? It’s important that you are taking full advantage of your web site to get your share of the billions of dollars spent online every year. In this article we are going to cover 7 tips that you can put into practice immediately to increase your sales and revenue with your ecommerce web site.

1: Introduction
Make sure to have a brief introduction on the homepage of your web site. Your introduction should be concise and clearly identify the benefits of your visitors shopping at your site.

2: Navigation
Make sure that your site has clear and easy navigation, such as a visible search box on the top part of your web site, clear categories to browse through, a FAQ page that clearly explains your shipping and return policy, and etc.

3: Gift Certificates
People love getting gifts at certain times of the year, so make sure that you have gift certificates that your visitors can purchase right on your web site.

4: Customer Loyalty
Instead of just focusing on getting new customers why not take advantage of repeat business? Why not give your customers an incentive to come back and do business with you again? You can easily do this by offering coupons and special discounts to ones who have already purchased something from you. This is a lot easier than acquiring new customers since they already know you and feel comfortable shopping at your site. You can also add more value to your customers by adding live

customer support to your site.

5: Special Offers
Make sure to have a section on the top part of your home page devoted to featuring your current special offers and sales items. In fact if you happen to have a lot of special offers you can just feature the most popular ones and then make a separate web page that shows all of your sales items.

6: Shopping Carts
People want the checkout process to go as quickly and smoothly as possible, so make sure that your visitors are always just one click away to checkout. Try to reduce the checkout process to as few steps as possible. Make sure to offer multiple payment options such as credit cards, Paypal, online checks, mail orders, and such. When you no longer have a product in stock make sure to either remove it from your site or clearly mark it as “out of stock”. There is nothing more irritating for a customer to go through the whole checkout process only to find out that you no longer carry the item they ordered.

7: Affiliate Program
Do you have your own affiliate program? The most successful web sites have one and you should too. By starting your own affiliate program you will develop an increasing online sales force where you only pay them when a sale is made. There is really no risk and it is one of the best low cost effective advertising methods that you can use.

If you put these tips into practice you will notice a drastic increase in your sales and web site revenue.

About the Author

Jordan Williams is the Owner of WebCashLink.com which gives you the resources, tools, and software to succeed with an online business.
Find jordan williams's website here.

Keep watching this place next few articles will be from most reputed authors in E-Commerce.

windows tips and tricks: CAPS LOCK indicator

2008-01-29T10:31:00.001+05:30

Atleast once a day we all curse CAPS LOCK (see i am right now) when we hit the Caps Lock key and go on typing without even realizing that we are typing all capitals.
wouldn't it be nice to set your computer up so it alerts you when you accidentally tap the Caps Lock key?

Here i will show you how to turn your computer into a signalman.

Using this tip you can make your computer beep when CAPS LOCK is ON.

goto Start
Settings,
Control Panel (or straight to control panel)
Accessibility Options
Keyboard tab,
Use Toggle Keys

now you will hear a beep everytime you turn ON CAPS LOCK.
This is a bit boring, isnt it?

Lets make it more interesting if you set properly windows can give you visual warnings when some particular predefined event takes place.(it can really do a lot of things if you just allow it to crash at its own will)

Accessibility Options
sound tab
use sound sentry
then from "choose the visual warning"
choose "Flash active window"
and you are done.

Now every time you hit CAPS LOCK you will experience brilliant beeping and flashing all around you.

GOOGLE PAGE RANK : tip 1

2008-01-28T20:46:00.000+05:30

As you are reading this i can safely assume that you have
designed a site or a blog and you want it to appear within
first few results for any related search term.
But how?
As there are billions of other sites (OK a little overboard here)
vying for top 10 positions in the page you get after
hitting "search".

To achieve top position you should consider following points:

Does your site/blog offer anything interesting?
Do you know anything about "SEO"? no no dont search you will learn it eventually.
and most important have you submitted your blog/site to google's index

In this article i will explain about the third point because thats the very first and simple
step .
As google has got a lot of other sites to index the googlebots will never voluntarily
come to your site unless you ask them to do so. Thats why you have to submit your
site to google.

How to :
submitting a site to google is a simple process that can be easily completed in about
15 minutes.

Before starting out you will need a google account.If you dont have any then you should open one at gmail . If you have any google account like orkut then you can use same username and password.
Now login to your google account. Select "webmaster tools"
At dashboard you will be asked to submit your site.(add option)
After hitting ADD you will be asked to verify your site
There are two ways in which you can verify that you are the real owner of the site.

Add a meta tag
upload an HTML file.

Now if you own this site with url like www.example.com then you should choose the second option as that will be easier.
After uploading the specified HTML file copy the address of that file(www.example.com/verify.html) and use it to verify your ownership.
But if you are submitting a blog like www.blog.host.com then you should prefer adding meta tag. All you have to do is copy the tag given and paste it below title tag in your template HTML.(for blogger template>edit HTML)
Then hit verify and you are done.
It will take some time for google to index your pages meanwhile you should keep adding more and more quality content to your site/blog.
As initially crawler visits "not too often" it is better to keep updating your site.
If crawler finds your page unchanged from its previous visit then it increase the dealy between two visits assuming it wont change again.
With more and fresh content you will definitely increase crawler visits and so you page rank.

Backtracking EMAIL Messages(read PS)

2008-01-27T10:55:00.000+05:30

Backtracking EMAIL Messages

Many times when you get some funny(?) anonymous email all you wish is to strangle the
sender hidden behind some far away computer. No i wont assist you in strangling anybody
but i can atleast help to trace his/her guilt back him/her and i'll leave rest on your own judgment.

First let me ask you how do you determine the sender of an email message?
By looking at the "FROM" header ,right?
Unfortunately this is but half truth. The "From" header is nothing more than sender's address
on a postcard(postcard? whats that?). Just as much easily the senders address can be forged.
If you dont know the sender then the header is forged as simple as that.

i know what you are thinking now.
"OK, now you have told all this and i know the header is forged,it will be really hard to trace
back to orginil sender, wont it?"

No my friends if you can type then its the easiest and most addictive thing you can do.

For that first you have to understand how email messages are put together in order to backtrack an email message.
SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) is a text based protocol for transferring messages across the internet. A series of headers are placed in front of the data portion of the message.
By examining the headers you can easily backtrack a message to the source
network, sometimes even to the source host.

If you are using Yahoo or Rediffmail you can viewing of headers from options menu.
i have shown how to for yahoo in above image.

The headers to be considered are as follows.

Return-Path:

X-Original-To:
Delivered-To:

Received: from
by mailhost.example.com (Postfix) with SMTP id
date and time
for

Received: from with ESMTP id

Message-ID:

From: "

Reply-To: "

To:

Subject:

date

X-Mailer:

X-Priority:

MIME-Version:

Content-Type:

According to the "From" header the message may be from "yahooawards@yahoo.com"
(in my case) if i just complain to abuse@yahoo.com, the reply will will be "we dont have such
service". So i will just try to find out the sender myself.

1.The header most useful in determining the original source of an email message is
the "Received header".

2.If you just look at the topmost header host "X" with the ip address of "Y" by my
server mail.yahoo.com.

3.The most important point to consider is at what point in the chain does the email system become suspicious?

4.My advise is to consider anything beyond your own email server to be an unreliable
source of information. Because this header was generated by my email server
it is reasonable for me to accept that it can be trusted .

5.The next Received header shows the remote email server accepting the message from
the host "X1" . Here is something required from your side.You should atleast be able to
determine whether an IP address is real. Thats all and here onwards only typing skills.

6. So here we have got something in our hand like a thread to pull.As usual Windows is somewhat lacking in network diagnostic tools; however, you can use the tools at to do
your own checking.

ARIN WHOIS database, is the place where you should look for that IP address.
you can also enter " ? " for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database if you are stuck so i wont get into details here.

You can also verify the hostname of the remote server by using nslookup,

SO , whois shows that "SOME ISP" owns that netblock and nslookup confirms the address
to hostname mapping of the remote server "X1".
If you add " www" in front of the domain name portion and plug that into my web browser, "SOME ISP'S " website.

Wait dont send any flame to that site.
There is nothing things more embarrassing than accusing someone who is supposedly responsible for a problem, and being wrong.
Here you should recheck remote host's IP address using two different tools (whois and nslookup) and minimize the chance of making any mistake.

Only by looking at the web site and it you will deduce that they are an ISP.
Now if you just copy the entire message including the headers into a new email message and send it to abuse@SOMEISP.com and explain them the situation they may do something
about it.

but even now you have not determined who the actual sender of an email message is?
Elementary!

All you gotta do is employ FBI and they will be able to tell you all you want to know.

After finding "SOME ISP" my advice is to rely on their discretion and hope you have
stopped some spammer or hate mailer.

PS:
one of my friends told me that he tried above and it didnt work for him.
Actually i assumed that after failing at "ARIN" you will try at "APNIC" and thats what
you should do. Coz to find some information at "www" you have to be creative.

FAT vs NTFS

2008-01-26T19:50:00.000+05:30

As we all know both of these formats are out there for ages but still there is confusion regarding which one of these is best.

For most users running Windows XP, NTFS is the obvious choice. It's more powerful and offers security advantages not found in FAT. However many novice or even experienced
keep using FAT as it is mostly precofigured while shipping.

Differences among the files systems:

There are essentially three different file systems available in Windows XP:
FAT16( short for File Allocation Table)
FAT32 (32 bit version of FAT )
NTFS (short for NT File System.)

FAT16
The FAT16 file system was introduced long long ago with MS–DOS in 1981, and it's really
about to die(actually it is dead). It was designed originally to handle files on a floppy drive,
and with few minor modifications it was made to handle hard disks, and longer file names.

The biggest advantage:
It is compatible across a wide variety of operating systems, including Windows 95/98/Me, OS/2, Linux, and some versions of UNIX.

The biggest dis-advantage(s) :
It has a fixed maximum number of clusters per partition, so as hard disks get bigger and bigger, the size of each cluster has to get larger. In a 2–GB partition, each cluster is 32 kilobytes, meaning that even the smallest file on the partition will take up 32 KB of space. FAT16 also doesn't support compression, encryption, or advanced security using access control lists.

FAT32
The FAT32 file system, was introduced in Windows 95 Service Pack 2, and is only an extension of the original FAT16 file system that provides for a much larger number of clusters per partition. obviously it greatly improves the overall disk utilization when compared to a FAT16 file system.
However, FAT32 shares all of the other limitations of FAT16, and adds an important additional limitation—many operating systems that can recognize FAT16 will not work with FAT32—most notably Windows NT, but also Linux and UNIX as well.

The Advantages of NTFS:(you see i begin with advantages umm.. biased)
The NTFS file system, introduced with first version of Windows NT, is a completely different file system from FAT. It provides for greatly increased security, file–by–file compression, quotas, and even encryption. It is the default file system for new installations of Windows XP, and if you're doing an upgrade from a previous version of Windows, you'll be asked if you want to convert your existing file systems to NTFS.
You can convert FAT16 or FAT32 volumes to NTFS at any point.
But remember that you can't easily go back to FAT or FAT32 (without reformatting the
drive or partition), and i dont think you'll want to.

So is FAT32 crap?
NO.
If you're running more than one operating system on a single computer you should format some of your volumes as FAT. Any programs or data that need to be accessed by more than one operating system on that computer should be stored on a FAT32 volume. But is no security for data on a FAT16 or FAT32 volume—any one with access to the computer can read, change, or even delete any file that is stored on a FAT32 partition.

Task manager disabled

2008-01-25T21:08:00.000+05:30

problem:

Task manager has been disabled.

reasons:

by your admin to restrict unauthorized access.
if you are admin then due to some virus.

solution:
there are three to four working solutions available for this problem.

If you dont like to edit registry yourself then download "hijack this" this is a good free tool to check unwanted registry edits. download from here Run the program and you will see many registry keys. Locate the one related to "task manager" and delete that particular key. Be cautious about what you delete though coz you may lose some important key.
Apply this fix:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
"DisableTaskMgr"=dword:00000000

just copy-paste above code in notepad and save as .reg file open and click yes when prompted.

3. Click Start->
Run -> type this command exactly as given below: (better - Copy and paste)

G add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentREVersion\Policies\System /v DisableTaskMgr /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

4. Use of Group Policy Editor:

Start ->
Run -> type "gpedit.msc" and click OK.

Navigate to this branch:

User Configuration / Administrative Templates / System / Ctrl+Alt+Delete Options / Remove Task Manager

Double-click the Remove Task Manager option.
Set the policy to Not Configured.

you are done.

imp:
if this restriction is enabled without your doing anything (most likely) then i strongly
recommend to scan your PC with best available antivirus.
Here also i recommend "Escan internet security "

fun(?) with BLUE SCREEN

2008-01-25T19:25:00.000+05:30

What is the most DREADED pre-enabled feature of any windows installations?

yes you are right the great "BSOD"

If you are one of few lucky users who havent had it for a long time then here is a way to "CREATE" BSOD if you are really missing it.

1. Launch the Registry Editor (Regedit.exe).
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters.
3. Go to Edit, select New | DWORD Value and name the new value CrashOnCtrlScroll.
4. Double-click the CrashOnCtrlScroll DWORD Value, type 1 in the Value Data textbox, and click OK.
5. Close the Registry Editor and restart Windows XP.
(do it when your friend is not looking)

When you want to cause a BSOD, press and hold down the right [Ctrl] key of your keyboard, and then tap the [ScrollLock] key twice. Now you should see the BSOD.

problem:

your(or your friends) system may reboot(shit) instead of displaying the BSOD,
and you'll lose all the fun.

solution:
disable the Automatically Restart setting in the System Properties dialog box.

how to:
1. Press [Windows]-Break.
2. Select the Advanced tab.
3. Click the Settings button in the Startup And Recovery panel.
4. Clear the Automatically Restart check box in the System Failure panel.
5. Click OK twice.

Now that fun is over(with your friend looking sick) disable the BSOD feature:

1. Launch the Registry Editor (Regedit.exe).
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters.
3. Select the CrashOnCtrlScroll value, pull down the Edit menu, and select the Delete command.
4. Close the Registry Editor and restart Windows XP.

favicon

2008-01-24T13:00:00.001+05:30

Favicon is a word made up of two words:

favorite
icon

now that you know ask me "where is it used?"
answer is just open your eyes and you shall see its everywhere.
e.g the small computer in your URL field
it is possible to give your site URL a unique look by adding a "fevicon"

if your next is how then here is the answer:

Internet Explorer 5.0 and above (firefox as well) a particular icon with your website in the bookmark. It tries to obtain that icon by first requesting for "favicon.ico" from the directory of your web page. If it cannot find such a file, it will try to obtain it from the root directory of your website, failing which, it will simply use a default icon for the bookmark.
Create an image 16X16 pixels in size. yup a small one. my suggestion is use your own pic (well if its not scary) and go to this site.
just follow the directions and you will have a good looking "favicon" ready.
now upload this favicon(.ico file) to some website of yours(i have one at googlepages its free)
You don't need to upload one to every page of your site(well if you have free hours then its ok) .
If you are a blogger here is "how to" for you:

chose "template"
"edit HTML"
scroll down to (closing of title tag)
just below that type:
whatever shown in above image(click on the image)

better copy-paste
preview and if everything goes right "save template"
you shall see a favicon before your URL

you are done.
If you are not blogger you will have to edit your root directory and the web browsers that support favicons will apparently locate it itself.

p.s subscribe to posts if you like this one, more are coming.

increase your surfing speed by 20%

2008-01-23T21:39:00.000+05:30

1. Make sure you're logged on as actually "Administrator". Do not log on with any account that just has administrator privileges.
you can temporarily assign administrator privileges for a particular task.
just right click on "gpedit"(as an example you can use this for any task)
[find it in C:\WINDOWS\system32] and select "Run as"
skip 2nd step if you use this.

2. Start > Run > type gpedit.msc (not available in home version).

3. Expand the Local Computer Policy branch.

4. Expand the Administrative Templates branch.

5. Expand the Network branch.

6. Highlight the "QoS Packet Scheduler" in left window.

7. In right window double click the "limit reservable bandwidth" setting.

8. On setting tab check the ENABLED item.

9. Where it says "Bandwidth limit %" change it to read 0 (ZERO).

10. Close gpedit.msc.

Effect is immediate on some systems, some need to re-boot.

in case you are wondering what is "QoS Packet Scheduler"

QoS Packet Scheduler is a method of network bandwidth management that can monitor the importance of data packets and depending upon the priority of the packet, give it higher or lower priority or bandwidth levels.

Actually it is designed to affect LAN traffic but you see with windows anything is possible.

Test your antivirus

2008-01-23T09:00:00.000+05:30

How do I Test My VirusScan Installation?

simple:
After installing VirusScan, you may wonder(you should), how do I know if it's working? The answer is a "test virus".
The EICAR Standard AntiVirus Test File is a combined effort by anti-virus vendors throughout the world to implement one standard by which customers can verify their anti-virus installations.

Solution:

To test your installation, copy the following line into its own file, then save the file with the name EICAR.COM.

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

If VirusScan is running and configured correctly, when you try to save the file, VirusScan will detect the virus.
If VirusScan is not running, start it and scan the directory that contains EICAR.COM. When your software scans this file, it will report finding the EICAR test file.

Actually this file is NOT A VIRUS.

The eicar test virus is available for download "here"

Creating Eicar.com: ( step by step)

1. Click on Start.
2. Select Run.
3. In the Open box type: notepad
4. Maximize the window.
5. Highlight the following on the following line of text:
X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*
6. Right click on the highlighted text and choose 'copy'.
7. Switch back to Notepad.
8. Right click anywhere inside of Notepad and select 'paste'.
9. Click the File menu and select 'save as'.
10. Change the 'Save as Type' to 'all files'.
11. Name the file eicar.com.

p.s:
in case you dont know what "EICAR" is read here.

RETSORE:back up your valuable XP

2008-01-22T13:24:00.000+05:30

well most of you people already know this but there still few out there in the wild
who havent used this a single time.
As no antivirus is 100% perfect(no matter what the companies claim), it is good
to protect yourself by backing up your valuable data. In case you get infected you
can just then restore your system to some previous date.

win XP has a really great tool for the same purpose.you dont really need any
dedicated backup utility (unless you truly welcome viruses by dozens every day).

click "start"
click "RUN"
type "restore"

a screen as shown above will appear. double click the highlighted and next window will
appear.
select second option as shown another window will appear(hence the name "windows")
enter any name you like in the box shown , click create and you are done.
do this at least once a day.

next time when you get infected just repeat above procedure till second window and there
chose first option instead of second and chose the date and time from next window.
click restore and sit back your system will restart and will be(hopefully) virus free
if it wasnt infected back then.

this is especially useful where you might need to edit registry.
just create a restore point before editing registry.

e.g changing text on start button

start button trick: change text

2008-01-22T12:59:00.000+05:30

fed up with the boring "start" button?
here is how you can use "your name" instead of "start".
there are two simple steps involved but as you have to edit registry in second step
better back your system in case you screw up something. Best way under winXP is
to create a restore point . and in case if you dont know how(great!) read this.

Step 1 - Modify Explorer.exe File

In order to make the changes, the file explorer.exe located at C:\Windows needs to be edited. Since explorer.exe is a binary file it requires a special editor.for that you will need "Resource Hacker".
"Resource HackerTM" is a freeware utility to view, modify, rename, add, delete and extract resources in 32bit Windows executables and resource files (*.res).
It incorporates an internal resource script compiler and decompiler and works on Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems.

get it from here

The first step is to make a backup copy of the file explorer.exe located at C:\Windows\explorer. Place it in a folder somewhere on your hard drive where it will be safe. Start Resource Hacker and open explorer.exe located at C:\Windows\explorer.exe.

The category we are going to be using is "String Table". Expand it by clicking the plus sign then navigate down to and expand string 37 followed by highlighting 1033. If you are using the Classic Layout rather than the XP Layout, use number 38. The right hand pane will display the stringtable. We’re going to modify item 578(change all "start" words if you like and have time), currently showing the word “start” just as it displays on the current Start button.

There is no magic here. Just double click on the word “start” so that it’s highlighted, making sure the quotation marks are not part of the highlight. They need to remain in place, surrounding the new text that you’ll type. Go ahead and type your new entry. In my case I used "onkar"

You’ll notice that after the new text string has been entered the Compile Script button has
become active. Click Compile Script and then save the altered file using the Save As command on the File Menu. Do not use the Save command – Make sure to use the Save As command and choose a name(better explorer2.exe) for the file. Save the newly named file to C:\Windows.

Step 2 – Modify the Registry

!!!make a backup of your registry before making changes!!!

Now that the modified explorer2.exe has been created it’s necessary to modify the registry so the file will be recognized when the user logs on to the system. If you don’t know how to access the registry then let me tell you its really difficult and involves complicated steps as follows:

1.click "start"
2.click "run"
3.type"regedit" (too difficult isnt it?)

now navigate to:

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

In the right pane, double click the "Shell" entry to open the Edit String dialog box. In Value data: line, enter the name that was used to save the modified explorer2.exe file.
Click OK.

Close Registry Editor and either log off the system and log back in, or reboot the entire system if that’s your preference.
If all went as planned you should see your new Start button with the revised text.

Faster Win XP boot

2008-01-22T12:54:00.000+05:30

everyone must know this. has reduced my XP boot time by 10 seconds(almost 15%)

Boot Winxp Fast

Follow the following steps

1. Open notepad.exe, type "del c:\windows\prefetch\ntosboot-*.* /q" (without the quotes) & save as "ntosboot.bat" in c:\
2. From the Start menu, select "Run..." & type "gpedit.msc".
3. Double click "Windows Settings" under "Computer Configuration" and double click again on "Shutdown" in the right window.
4. In the new window, click "add", "Browse", locate your "ntosboot.bat" file & click "Open".
5. Click "OK", "Apply" & "OK" once again to exit.
6. From the Start menu, select "Run..." & type "devmgmt.msc".
7. Double click on "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers"
8. Right click on "Primary IDE Channel" and select "Properties".
9. Select the "Advanced Settings" tab then on the device or 1 that doesn't have 'device type' greyed out select 'none' instead of 'autodetect' & click "OK".
10. Right click on "Secondary IDE channel", select "Properties" and repeat step 9.
11. Reboot your computer.

run movies in MS paint

2008-01-22T12:46:00.000+05:30

i know we all used MS Paint way back in win 98 era and its kinda useless now
but still it can be used a better way here is how:

1) Open your favorite movie palyer and play the movie (e.g .dat in wmplayer)
2) Hit "PrintScreen", keep playing the movie in the player, dont pause or stop it.
3) Open MsPaint.
4) Select "Edit>Paste" Or press "CTRL+V"
5) voila! You can watch movies in Paint!
6) But there are no Pause, Next, Previous, Stop etc. buttons
7) see how much you can do with applications like MS paint

spread this to all your little friend to show them how much you know(?) about
windows.

lock ur folders

2008-01-21T19:27:00.000+05:30

DIY folder lock:

just copy and paste this in to notepad or any other editor and save as lock.bat
now double click to open the batch file it will create a folder "locker" put all ur files i that folder and again double click to open the batch file say yes and u r done.

cls
@ECHO OFF
title Folder Locker
if EXIST "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B303

09D}" goto UNLOCK
if NOT EXIST Locker goto MDLOCKER
:CONFIRM
echo Are you sure u want to Lock the folder(Y/N)
set/p "cho=>"
if %cho%==Y goto LOCK
if %cho%==y goto LOCK
if %cho%==n goto END
if %cho%==N goto END
echo Invalid choice.
goto CONFIRM
:LOCK
ren Locker "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}"
attrib +h +s "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}"
echo Folder locked
goto End
:UNLOCK
echo Enter password to Unlock folder
set/p "pass=>"
if NOT %pass%==type your password here goto FAIL
attrib -h -s "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}"
ren "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}" Locker
echo Folder Unlocked successfully
goto End
:FAIL
echo Invalid password
goto end
:MDLOCKER
md Locker
echo Locker created successfully
goto End
:End

p.s. enter ur own password at "type ur password here" and use that to unlock ur folder

if u cant do this more simple ways are discussed here and here.

To The Agarwalla brothers

2008-01-16T12:47:00.000+05:30

in case you dont know who they are (thats really impossible) here is a short intro: The brothers, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, have expanded Scrabble into an online version called Scrabulous and put it on social networking site last year.
this is an extremely cool application which is made even cooler by the fact that these two are resident INDIANS from Kolkata (not NRI'S )
within past few months this has been grown immensely popular and thousands of people are playing it daily (including myself)

in this game you can

1. Play multiple games at the same time
2. invite friends quickly
3. be in touch with current games
4. View My Stats for all games
5. watch the "big " players
6. View Completed Games
7. you can even use on board dictionary if you must.

Now the important part:

as the game become more and more popular the word reached to Scrabble-maker Hasbro, which has sold the online rights to Electronic Arts (EA). The company has as you might have heard, served notices to the agarwalla brothers for violation of copyright act.
but as the application is immensely popular instead of undergoing any
courtroom battle with two worthy programmers who actually deserve
nothing less than applause, a settlement can be reached.
it is surely possible to officially license the product to the duo and
these firms can have their own names associated with one of
the most popular online games without writing a single line
of code.
well, thats what i'd do if i were heading the firms. coz
even if the firms win the courtroom battle they
will in turn receive only heat from
online gaming community.

hide: the simple way

2008-01-16T11:50:00.000+05:30

well if you don't want to do all i have told before, then here is a simplest way you
can achieve same result:

make a new folder
right click to select rename
now hold down "ALT" key and press "0160"
hit ENTER
you will that you have created a nameless folder
now again right click on the same and select "properties"
from the properties dialog box select "customize"
select "change icon"
scroll till you get a few blank icons as shown above
select any one of three blank icons and click "ok"
you are done

the only problem is you have to remember the location of the folder
and when you refresh the window containing this (blank) folder it sometimes shows up
momentarily.
the more secure way is here
the most secure way will be discussed in next article.

hide your precious videos/pictures

2008-01-13T20:30:00.000+05:30

for this trick to work you will need winrar
i will now assume that you have got it.
steps:

install winrar on your machine
now copy whatever you want to hide
make a new folder and paste the stuff in it.
now right click the folder and select add to archive "new folder.rar"
now create another folder and paste the rar file in it.
copy a jpeg image and paste in same folder .
rename it 1 (for simplicity) and rar file as 2
now goto command prompt :
start>run>cmd
enter the folder using cd command
now at command prompt type
copy /b 1.jpg + 2.rar 3.jpg
wait for few seconds so that 3.jpg gets created
type exit
now go back to the folder and you will see a jpg image called 3.jpg
double click to open and you will the original image
now open same with winrar by right clicking and you will see all your hidden files

i have tried to make this as simple as possible

this is all you need to know about copy command

copy:
Copies one or more files to another location.

COPY [/D] [/V] [/N] [/Y | /-Y] [/Z] [/A | /B ] source [/A | /B]
[+ source [/A | /B] [+ ...]] [destination [/A | /B]]

source Specifies the file or files to be copied.
/A Indicates an ASCII text file.
/B Indicates a binary file.
/D Allow the destination file to be created decrypted
destination Specifies the directory and/or filename for the new file(s).
/V Verifies that new files are written correctly.
/N Uses short filename, if available, when copying a file with a
non-8dot3 name.
/Y Suppresses prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an
existing destination file.
/-Y Causes prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an
existing destination file.
/Z Copies networked files in restartable mode.

The switch /Y may be preset in the COPYCMD environment variable.
This may be overridden with /-Y on the command line. Default is
to prompt on overwrites unless COPY command is being executed from
within a batch script.

To append files, specify a single file for destination, but multiple files
for source (using wildcards or file1+file2+file3 format).

if you want to know about writing batch files just leave a comment

Digital Cameras

2008-01-02T20:41:00.000+05:30

A digital camera is a camera that takes video or still photographs, or both, digitally by recording images on a light-sensitive sensor.
Many compact digital still cameras can record sound and moving video as well as still photographs.
Digital cameras can include features that are not found in film cameras, such as displaying an image on the camera's screen immediately after it is recorded, the capacity to take thousands of images on a single small memory device, the ability to record video with sound, the ability to edit images, and deletion of images allowing re-use of the storage they occupied. Digital cameras are incorporated into many devices ranging from PDAs and mobile phones (called camera phones) to vehicles. The Hubble Space Telescope and other astronomical devices are essentially specialised digital cameras

The arrival of true digital cameras:

The first true digital camera that recorded images as a computerized file was likely the Fuji DS-1P of 1988, which recorded to a 16 MB internal memory card that used a battery to keep the data in memory. This camera was never marketed in the United States, and has not been confirmed to have shipped even in Japan.
The first commercially available digital camera was the 1990 Dycam Model 1; it also sold as the Logitech Fotoman. It used a CCD image sensor, stored pictures digitally, and connected directly to a PC for download.
In 1991, Kodak brought to market the Kodak DCS-100, the beginning of a long line of professional SLR cameras by Kodak that were based in part on film bodies, often Nikons. It used a 1.3 megapixel sensor and was priced at $13,000.
The move to digital formats was helped by the formation of the first JPEG and MPEG standards in 1988, which allowed image and video files to be compressed for storage. The first consumer camera with a liquid crystal display on the back was the Casio QV-10 in 1995, and the first camera to use CompactFlash was the Kodak DC-25 in 1996.
The marketplace for consumer digital cameras was originally low resolution (either analog or digital) cameras built for utility. In 1997 the first megapixel cameras for consumers were marketed. The first camera that offered the ability to record video clips may have been the Ricoh RDC-1 in 1995.
1999 saw the introduction of the Nikon D1, a 2.74 megapixel camera that was the first digital SLR developed entirely by a major manufacturer, and at a cost of under $6,000 at introduction was affordable by professional photographers and high end consumers. This camera also used Nikon F-mount lenses, which meant film photographers could use many of the same lenses they already owned.
Also in 1999, Minolta introduced the RD-3000 D-SLR at 2.7 megapixels. This camera found many professional adherents. Limitations to the system included the need to use Vectis lenses which were designed for APS size film. The camera was sold with 5 lenses at various focal lengths and ranges (zoom). Minolta did not produce another D-SLR until September 2004 when they introduced the Alpha 7D (Alpha in Japan, Maxxum in North America, Dynax in the rest of the world) but using the Minolta A-mount system from its 35 mm line of cameras.
2003 saw the introduction of the Canon 300D, also known as the Digital Rebel, a 6 megapixel camera and the first DSLR priced under $1,000, and marketed to consumers.

super computers

2007-12-31T19:32:00.000+05:30

A supercomputer is a computer that is considered, or was considered at the time of its introduction, to be at the frontline in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. The term "Super Computing" was first used by New York World newspaper in 1929 to refer to large custom-built tabulators IBM made for Columbia University.

Hardware:

Supercomputers using custom CPUs traditionally gained their speed over conventional computers through the use of innovative designs that allow them to perform many tasks in parallel, as well as complex detail engineering. They tend to be specialized for certain types of computation, usually numerical calculations, and perform poorly at more general computing tasks. Their memory hierarchy is very carefully designed to ensure the processor is kept fed with data and instructions at all times—in fact, much of the performance difference between slower computers and supercomputers is due to the memory hierarchy. Their I/O systems tend to be designed to support high bandwidth, with latency less of an issue, because supercomputers are not used for transaction processing.

As with all highly parallel systems, Amdahl's law applies, and supercomputer designs devote great effort to eliminating software serialization, and using hardware to accelerate the remaining bottlenecks.

Processing techniques:

Vector processing techniques were first developed for supercomputers and continue to be used in specialist high-performance applications. Vector processing techniques have trickled down to the mass market in DSP architectures and SIMD processing instructions for general-purpose computers.

Modern video game consoles in particular use SIMD extensively and this is the basis for some manufacturers' claim that their game machines are themselves supercomputers. Indeed, some graphics cards have the computing power of several TeraFLOPS. The applications to which this power can be applied was limited by the special-purpose nature of early video processing. As video processing has become more sophisticated, Graphics processing units (GPUs) have evolved to become more useful as general-purpose vector processors, and an entire computer science sub-discipline has arisen to exploit this capability: General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU.)

Programming

The parallel architectures of supercomputers often dictate the use of special programming techniques to exploit their speed. Special-purpose Fortran compilers can often generate faster code than C or C++ compilers, so Fortran remains the language of choice for scientific programming, and hence for most programs run on supercomputers. To exploit the parallelism of supercomputers, programming environments such as PVM and MPI for loosely connected clusters and OpenMP for tightly coordinated shared memory machines are being used.

As you can easily guess super computers are all about speed when it comes to numeric
computations.

p.s.
japan is currently building a super computer that will dwarf today's fastest super
computers when it comes to speed . the speed of that computer will be
about 10 petaflops.
by the way today's fastest (blu genes) has speed of about 480 teraflops
just imagine.........

Search engines

2007-12-31T19:16:00.000+05:30

All of us use a search engine (Google yaar) without knowing actually how it works.
Here is some material you will find really useful.

Definition;
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information which must be consulted, akin to other techniques for managing information overload.

The most public, visible form of a search engine is a Web search engine which searches for information on the World Wide Web.

Working:

Search engines provide an interface to a group of items that enables users to specify criteria about an item of interest and have the engine find the matching items. The criteria are referred to as a search query. In the case of text search engines, the search query is typically expressed as a set of words that identify the desired concept that one or more documents may contain.
There are several styles of search query syntax that vary in strictness. Where as some text search engines require users to enter two or three words separated by white space, other search engines may enable users to specify entire documents, pictures, sounds, and various forms of natural language. Some search engines apply improvements to search queries to increase the likelihood of providing a quality set of items through a process known as query expansion.

The list of items that meet the criteria specified by the query is typically sorted, or ranked, in some regard so as to place the most relevant items first. Ranking items by relevance (from highest to lowest) reduces the time required to find the desired information. Probabilistic search engines rank items based on measures of similarity and sometimes popularity or authority. Boolean search engines typically only return items which match exactly without regard to order.

To provide a set of matching items quickly, a search engine will typically collect metadata about the group of items under consideration beforehand through a process referred to as indexing. The index typically requires a smaller amount of computer storage, and provides a basis for the search engine to calculate item relevance. The search engine may store of copy of each item in a cache so that users can see the state of the item at the time it was indexed or for archive purposes or to make repetitive processes work more efficiently and quickly.

Notably, some search engines do not store an index. Crawler, or spider type search engines may collect and assess items at the time of the search query. Meta search engines simply reuse the index or results of one or more other search engines.

Instant Messaging

2007-12-29T17:37:00.000+05:30

Instant messaging offers real-time communication and allows easy collaboration, which might be considered more akin to genuine conversation than email's "letter" format. In contrast to e-mail, the parties know whether the peer is available. Most systems allow the user to set an online status or away message so peers are notified when the user is available, busy, or away from the computer. On the other hand, people are not forced to reply immediately to incoming messages. For this reason, some people consider communication via instant messaging to be less intrusive than communication via phone. However, some systems allow the sending of messages to people not currently logged on (offline messages), thus removing much of the difference between IM and email.
Instant messaging allows instantaneous communication between a number of parties simultaneously, by transmitting information quickly and efficiently, featuring immediate receipt of acknowledgment or reply. In certain cases IM involves additional features, which make it even more popular, i.e. to see the other party, e.g. by using web-cams, or to talk directly for free over the internet.
It is possible to save a conversation for later reference. Instant messages are typically logged in a local message history which closes the gap to the persistent nature of e-mails and facilitates quick exchange of information like URLs or document snippets (which can be unwieldy when communicated via telephone).

operating systems

2007-12-28T19:51:00.000+05:30

An operating system (OS) is the software that manages the sharing of the resources of a computer and provides programmers with an interface used to access those resources. An operating system processes system data and user input, and responds by allocating and managing tasks and internal system resources as a service to users and programs of the system. At the foundation of all system software, an operating system performs basic tasks such as controlling and allocating memory, prioritizing system requests, controlling input and output devices, facilitating networking and managing file systems. Most operating systems come with an application that provides a user interface for managing the operating system, such as a command line interpreter or graphical user interface. The operating system forms a platform for other system software and for application software.
The most commonly-used contemporary desktop and laptop (notebook) OS is Microsoft Windows. More powerful servers often employ Linux, FreeBSD, and other Unix-like systems. However, these operating systems, especially Mac OS X, are also used on personal computers

Services:

Process management:

Every program running on a computer, be it a service or an application, is a process. As long as a von Neumann architecture is used to build computers, only one process per CPU can be run at a time. Older microcomputer OSes such as MS-DOS did not attempt to bypass this limit, with the exception of interrupt processing, and only one process could be run under them (although DOS itself featured TSR as a very partial and not too easy to use solution).
Most operating systems enable concurrent execution of many processes and programs at once via multitasking, even with one CPU. The mechanism was used in mainframes since the early 1960s, but in the personal computers it became available in 1990s. Process management is an operating system's way of dealing with running those multiple processes. On the most fundamental of computers (those containing one processor with one core) multitasking is done by simply switching processes quickly. Depending on the operating system, as more processes run, either each time slice will become smaller or there will be a longer delay before each process is given a chance to run. Process management involves computing and distributing CPU time as well as other resources. Most operating systems allow a process to be assigned a priority which affects its allocation of CPU time. Interactive operating systems also employ some level of feedback in which the task with which the user is working receives higher priority. Interrupt driven processes will normally run at a very high priority. In many systems there is a background process, such as the System Idle Process in Windows, which will run when no other process is waiting for the CPU.

Memory management:

Current computer architectures arrange the computer's memory in a hierarchical manner, starting from the fastest registers, CPU cache, random access memory and disk storage. An operating system's memory manager coordinates the use of these various types of memory by tracking which one is available, which is to be allocated or deallocated and how to move data between them. This activity, usually referred to as virtual memory management, increases the amount of memory available for each process by making the disk storage seem like main memory. There is a speed penalty associated with using disks or other slower storage as memory – if running processes require significantly more RAM than is available, the system may start thrashing. This can happen either because one process requires a large amount of RAM or because two or more processes compete for a larger amount of memory than is available. This then leads to constant transfer of each process's data to slower storage.
Another important part of memory management is managing virtual addresses. If multiple processes are in memory at once, they must be prevented from interfering with each other's memory (unless there is an explicit request to utilise shared memory). This is achieved by having separate address spaces. Each process sees the whole virtual address space, typically from address 0 up to the maximum size of virtual memory, as uniquely assigned to it. The operating system maintains a page table that match virtual addresses to physical addresses. These memory allocations are tracked so that when a process terminates, all memory used by that process can be made available for other processes.
The operating system can also write inactive memory pages to secondary storage. This process is called "paging" or "swapping" – the terminology varies between operating systems.
It is also typical for operating systems to employ otherwise unused physical memory as a page cache; requests for data from a slower device can be retained in memory to improve performance. The operating system can also pre-load the in-memory cache with data that may be requested by the user in the near future; SuperFetch is an example of this.

other tasks will be covered in next articles.

CHS

2007-12-28T19:21:00.000+05:30

Cylinder-head-sector, also known as CHS, was an early method for giving addresses to each physical block of data on a hard disk drive. In the case of floppy drives, for which the same exact diskette medium can be truly low-level formatted to different capacities, this is still true.
Though CHS values no longer have a direct physical relationship to the data stored on disks, pseudo CHS values (which can be translated by disk electronics or software) are still being used by many utility programs.

Definitions:

Heads

Data is written to and read from the surface of a platter by a device called a head. Naturally, a platter has 2 sides and thus 2 surfaces on which data could be manipulated; usually there are 2 heads per platter--one on each side, but not always. (Sometimes the term side is substituted for head, since platters might be separated from their head assemblies; as is definitely the case with the removable media of a floppy drive.)

Tracks

Are the thin concentric circular strips on a floppy medium or platter surface which actually contain the magnetic regions of data written to a disk drive.

Cylinders

A cylinder comprises all the tracks (on every usable platter surface) that can be accessed by the read/write heads while the actuator assembly remains stationary.

Sectors

Each usable side of a platter can also be thought of as a collection of slices called sectors. (See Blocks for an alternate definition of sector.)

Blocks

The intersection of a track and a sector is called a block. Thus, blocks are delineated by specifying a certain cylinder, head and sector. These blocks are the smallest geometrical breakdown of a disk, and represent the smallest amount of data which can be transferred to or from a disk (usually 512 bytes).
However, many PC engineers and technicians use the term sector (instead of block) as if it were also defined as the smallest geometrical breakdown of a disk.[1] The UNIX/Linux communities, however, continue to employ the term block. For example, the Linux fdisk utility normally displays partition table information using 1024-byte blocks while also using sector to help describe a disk's size with its phrase, 63 sectors/track.

CHS Addressing:

Hence, each block of data can be addressed by specifying a cylinder, head, and sector. The following formulas detail the CHS geometry and addressing scheme.
The number of blocks on one side of a platter is:

blocks_Per_Platter_Side = (cylinders_Per_Platter)*(Sectors_Per_Platter)The number of

blocks per platter is:

blocks_Per_Platter = (blocks_Per_Platter_Side)*(sides_Used_Per_Platter)

which is usually written in terms of the number of heads used:

blocks_Per_Platter = (blocks_Per_Platter_Side)*(Heads_Per_Platter)

This is usually expanded to:

blocks_Per_Platter = (cylinders_Per_Platter)*(Sectors_Per_Platter)*(Heads_Per_Platter)

and rearranged:

blocks_Per_Platter = (cylinders_Per_Platter)*(Heads_Per_Platter)*(Sectors_Per_Platter)

Since all the platters are the same size and hard drives usually have more than one platter, the total number of blocks on the drive can be written as:

total_Blocks = (Cylinders)*(Heads_Per_Platter)*(Sectors)*(Number_Of_Platters)

If the number of platters is combined with the number of heads per platter to form the single parameter Heads, the equation can be written in its final form as:

total_Blocks = (Cylinders)*(Heads)*(Sectors)

VOIP

2007-12-28T19:14:00.000+05:30

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a protocol optimized for the transmission of voice through the Internet or other packet switched networks. VoIP is often used abstractly to refer to the actual transmission of voice (rather than the protocol implementing it). VoIP is also known as IP Telephony, Internet telephony, Broadband telephony, Broadband Phone and Voice over Broadband. "VoIP" is pronounced voyp.
Companies providing VoIP service are commonly referred to as providers, and protocols which are used to carry voice signals over the IP network are commonly referred to as Voice over IP or VoIP protocols. They may be viewed as commercial realizations of the experimental Network Voice Protocol (1973) invented for the ARPANET providers. Some cost savings are due to utilizing a single network to carry voice and data, especially where users have existing underutilized network capacity that can carry VoIP at no additional cost. VoIP to VoIP phone calls are sometimes free, while VoIP to public switched telephone networks, PSTN, may have a cost that is borne by the VoIP user.
Voice over IP protocols carry telephony signals as digital audio, typically reduced in data rate using speech data compression techniques, encapsulated in a data packet stream over IP.
There are two types of PSTN to VoIP services: Direct Inward Dialing (DID) and access numbers. DID will connect the caller directly to the VoIP user while access numbers require the caller to input the extension number of the VoIP user.

Functionality:

VoIP can facilitate tasks and provide services that may be more difficult to implement or expensive using the more traditional PSTN. Examples include:
The ability to transmit more than one telephone call down the same broadband-connected telephone line. This can make VoIP a simple way to add an extra telephone line to a home or office. 3-way calling, call forwarding, automatic redial, and caller ID; features that traditional telecommunication companies (telcos) normally charge extra for. Secure calls using standardized protocols (such as Secure Real-time Transport Protocol.) Most of the difficulties of creating a secure phone over traditional phone lines, like digitizing and digital transmission are already in place with VoIP. It is only necessary to encrypt and authenticate the existing data stream. Location independence. Only an internet connection is needed to get a connection to a VoIP provider. For instance, call center agents using VoIP phones can work from anywhere with a sufficiently fast and stable Internet connection. Integration with other services available over the Internet, including video conversation, message or data file exchange in parallel with the conversation, audio conferencing, managing address books, and passing information about whether others (e.g. friends or colleagues) are available online to interested parties.