April 2006

In windows xp, its easy to disable the floppy or cdrom from the Bios. Disabling USB is also possible, however it disables all the USB ports and this become difficult if you are using a USB mouse or keyboard. There is a simple registry change that will keep the USB storage drivers from starting when the system boots. Keeps people from walking up to a PC and copying data off with a USB key, but allows you to keep your scanner, keyboard, and mouse working. Just open regedit and browse to this key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UsbStor Notice the value 'Start' Switch this value to 4, and USB storage devices are disabled. Switch this value to 3, and USB storage devices ...

If you search for the "title" string (i.e. Setup your own web site) in Google, the first result you will get is of Blogger. Blogger is a free service and its very easy to setup your own blog. Even I started with hosting my site on Blogger. But I did have some bad experiences with blogger, the site was pretty slow and even the publishing used to take lot of time. Then I decided to shift to wordpress. I had heard that Wordpress was very powerful, fast and provides a host of features using plugin concept. So I had venukb.wordpress.com . It also came with a nice "importer" by which I could import all my Blogger blogs ...

Google has released Sketchup, a free version of google's 3-D modeling software. The pro version is still available at http://www.sketchup.com You can add details, textures and glass to your models, design with dimensional accuracy, and place your finished models in Google Earth, share them with others by posting them to the 3D Warehouse, or print hard copies. The tool is pretty simple, (yeah i found it little difficult to draw a nice model !) . It has basic blocks i.e Rectangle, Circle and an Arc. A "Push/Pull" tool is used to get the 3D look and feel ! Try it out ! Links: Check this link ...

I read in digg on a way to enable the Yahoo Mail Beta ! Here is the procedure explained again (in case you have not clicked on the digg link) 1. Login to your yahoo mail box 2. Go to Options -> Account Information 3. Go to Member Information->General Preferences->Preferred Content 4. Choose either of these 3 options Yahoo UK Yahoo German Yahoo France When I tried, I didn't find the UK in the list and I had to select "German". The text does change to some weird characters , but I guess you can manage if you know the UI of yahoo pretty well. 5. Logout from Yahoo and login. 6. You will be prompted to "Join the Yahoo Beta". Say yes. 7. Go back to the ...

On Saturday I attended the Barcamp Banglore ! I know many of you guys might be wondering what this Barcamp is. I too hadn't heard of this word till Tara Hunt of Riya invited me over to Barcamp Bangalore ! As usual I had to look up in wikipedia and it came up with the following description : In response to criticism of Foo Camp, BAR Camp was created as an open, welcoming, once-a-year event for geeks to camp out for a couple days with wifi and smash their brains together. Foo Camp happens every year; it is an invite-only event for technology luminaries hosted in Sebastopol, ...

As mentioned in my previous post, I  moved my blog to wordpress. However later I found that the functionality provided in wordpress.com was very limited compared to functionaly provided by wordpress.org. In wordpress.com, your blog is hosted free by Wordpress (like Blogger), but you cannot add extra themes or plugins. You can only select from the one's provided by wordpress. So in order to use the full functionality of wordpress you need to host it on your own server. From many days I was thinking of registering a domain. However the "cost" factor made me think many times. So I decided to bear the "cost" and registered my own domain www.venukb.com Also I have used wordpress.org to host my blog www.venukb.com/blog The ...

I have stuck to Blogger for blogging for quite some time. Very few people know that I have a synchronized blog at venukb.wordpress.com. Now I am seriously contemplating on a move to wordpress due to number of reasons. Wordpress is pretty powerful and allows tagging and categorizing of blogs. And again if someday I have my own domain, wordpress provides a very convienient way to move the blog to my own server. And there is a nice search feature and I dont need to rely on google. I really think this search is needed as my blog grows bigger and bigger. I guess blogger was intended for people who dont anything about web posting. I guess its pretty

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Few weeks back I blogged on "Photo Uploading" portals. Flickr was the best, however there was a upload limit in the free version and the number of albums you could create also was limited to 3.

At that same time, the google search had come up with a link to Riya. The portal boasted of a photo search based on "Face Recognition". I tried to sign up, but I found out that it was still in developement and asked for people to register for beta notification.

2 weeks back Riya sent out the beta invitation to the registered guys. Infact now Riya is open to public. This is how Riya works 1. First thing to do

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Oracle was the first company to release a commercial database Oracle8i for Linux. Today, all key Oracle products are available on Linux. Now the database giant has more aggressive plans and wants a place on the desktop PC.

To counter Microsoft Windows' dominance among corporates, Oracle revealed plans to create and sell their own Operating System based on Linux complete with all required software. In fact, Oracle even considered buying Novell, which after Red Hat is the biggest distributor of Linux.

Such a move would redraw the software landscape and open a new front in Oracle’s long rivalry with US rival Microsoft. It will also give a big boot to Linux adaption among

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Google has now introduced Google Calendar - a "Google" tool that simplifies keeping track of events, special occasions, and appointments.

Its integrated with GMail and you can add appointments directly from your Gmail messages.

More information can be found on this link

Now I can see one more features of MS Outlook being put on to web !

Next in the line might be : Google Notes

This is the only one I find missing now in GMail, and yes we definitely need a nice GMail client.