June 2006

I was checking out the Top 10 Coolest Designer Gadgets at TechEBlog. The one which caught by eye was the Sony Ericsson Black Diamond mobile phone. Check this.. Looks cool..:) The phone is designed by Singaporean Industrial designer Jaren Goh. The coolest feature is the borderless screen :-) The latest model which I would like to own is the M600. Its a touch screen phone unveiled in CEBit 2006. But unfortunately this model is supposed to be priced at around 400-500$ I believe !! :-(

Tags: Sony Ericsson, Black Diamond, M600, Jaren Goh

Microsoft has released the Beta 3 of IE 7 Browser. I did try the Beta 2 of IE7. Most of the feature that are already there in Firefox/Opera has been added in IE7. The only feature that I liked the most is the ClearType font rendering technology used in the browser. About ClearType ClearType is a software technology developed by Microsoft that improves the readability of text on existing LCDs (Liquid Crystal Displays), such as laptop screens, Pocket PC screens and flat panel monitors. With ClearType font technology, the words on your computer screen look almost as sharp and clear as those printed on a piece of paper. ClearType works by accessing ...

Yesterday Google released Checkout, the online transaction service and was intially code named as GBuy. It was touted as a direct competitor to eBay's PayPal. However the initial focus is more on Online merchants rather than consumer to consumer payments, which is Paypal's strength. As of now, most of the merchants supporting/using this service are in US and I couldn't find any online merchant in India supporting this. Check the review of Checkout by Conversation Marketing at this link: http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2006/06/reviewed_google_checkout_payme.htm Also "checkout" the "Checkout" video tour (Confusing eh :-) ) http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-4428105074432041548

Tags: Google Checkout, PayPal, GBuy

Check out this link to learn more about Linux Command line and Shell scripting http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/linuxcommand.org/index.php The content is nicely organized and should be very useful for Unix/Linux newbies and probably even for people knowing Unix

Tags: Linux, Shell scripting, Linux Command

Trying out new things in Wordpress is really an interesting and a challenging task. Few weeks back I tried to embed videos using Extreme Video Plugin. After a lot of tries and forum digging, I somehow couldn't get it working. Today I found one more plugin called WPVideo. Installation/Activation of the plugin went on fine (This is rarely a problem with any WP plugin). However I was not sure whether I could get in running. The instruction was to use the YouTube Video URL within the video tag. Initially I tried to embed this in the HTML of the post. The WYSIWYG editor used to strip of the tag . I again went through the instructions and ...

One of the most frequent things you do after setting up a blog is posting content (Obvious you might say).

I initially started posting content using the WYSIWYG editor built into WordPress. However the editor was very slow especially when you try to edit an already existing post and this used to discourage me from making any changes in the post.

In this post I am going to run down the steps needed to setup a local version of your WordPress blog. Other than posting content easily, it helps you in trying out with new templates/themes and also play with the different WordPress plugins before you put it live on your web site.

Prerequisites

To Run WordPress,

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Finally after banging my head for a week or so, I finally got Gravatar (Globally recognized avatar) working on my site. Before I recount the story of how I got it working, a quick intro of Gravatar.

This is what wikipedia has to say about Gravatar:

A gravatar is a globally recognized avatar. They follow the user and display next to the users name everywhere the user posts on the web, assuming the website has enabled them. The users are distinguished by their e-mail address, whose MD5 hash is sent to the Gravatar server for the correct avatar to be returned. Gravatars are rated with the

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In my previous post , I asked my dear friend Vasuki to comment more on the release of Opera 9 and its features. He has left a comment on that post. So for those who are lazy to click and view the comment here is the text . Also if you are contemplating on whether to shift to opera or not do check his post at this link. Well, I installed Opera 9 today. Though I was using Opera 9 beta, I did not get any notification that the new version is released. Too bad! This is not the way to treat loyalists Now to the good things: 1) Site specific preferences - You ...

Opera 9 is out of its BETA. The new features offered includes built in Bittorrent downloader, tab previews and widgets.

Download Opera 9 from this link.

I would let my friend Vasuki to comment more on this. His post on opera did inspire me a lot, to try the browser, but mentally not able to make a shift from

Firefox, though I should agree that Opera does have a lot of appealing features.

Somehow not able to understand why Opera never caught up with people like Firefox. Opera is considered the fastest browser as of now. This interesting link has more data on that.

Other

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Yahoo has released a new version of Yahoo Messenger (Version 8) and it’s a BETA (The Beta keyword seems to have caught up everywhere) Compared to the earlier version (7.5) these features have been added: (Content Taken directly from yahoo web site) Make it yours with plug-ins Get the content you want, delivered right to Yahoo! Messenger and share it with friends while you IM. You'll find handy plug-ins for Yahoo! Music, News, Finance, and more. Plus ones for eBay, Amazon.com, and more. See what friends are up to Use the Yahoo! 360° plug-in to get alerts on — then see — the ...