Moving from one web hosting to another has become one of the annual activities. However this time around, I had totally forgot about the hosting renewal; this post after 4 months would explain why I forgot about the hosting renewal

An automatic renewal (which I had not subscribed for) was tried by Media Temple which failed and I got an email notice of the same. 

Media Temples renewal charges of 170$/year was a bit too high this time around; the first year charges were also around the same, but only that the intention of moving to MT last year was different.

Google search for “MT Alternative” resulted in WebFaction.

Unlike MT, I could not find any bad reviews on WebFaction. Also at 8.5$/year (1 year prepayment) WebFaction looked reasonable compared to MT

Note: 5 year prepayment brings down the monthly charges to 5.5$

Also unlike MT, WebFaction comes with one click installers for almost 50 applications including Django, Rails, Drupal and WordPress

WebFaction control panel UI looks user unfriendly at the first glance; however once you start using it you wouldn’t stick to the initial opinion.

Moving hosting from one provider to another is a challenge which I seem to have mastered over the past 3 years. This site has traveled from:

GoDaddy -> Dreamhost -> Media Temple -> WebFaction

In the initial years, the biggest problem was of moving the data. The best solution that I have to found to resolve this problem is:

1. Sign up with the new hosting
2. tar.gz the files which needs to be moved.
3. Once the account on the new hosting is created, you would receive the server details (IP/User Account/SSH Account etc)
4. SCP the file from the existing hosting to the new hosting. Even if the data to be moved is in GB’s, it won’t take much time
5. Unzip the archived files on the new server; setup and test the application (in my case it was all WordPress) on the new hosting. You can access the application on the new server using IP since the domain name would still be pointing to the old server
6. Once the testing is done, you can go about changing the name servers to point to the new server.

It took about an hour or so for me to execute the above 6 steps; However the DNS changes does take a day or more to propagate

WebFaction looks like a decent host and hopefully this annual activity of moving from one hosting to another will stop at WebFaction.

If you want to suggest a better hosting provider, the comments section is always open.

Firefox 3 was downloaded by more than 8 million users in 24 hours and it might well go down as the most downloaded software in 24 hours !

India’s contribution in the above 8 million was 226K  and US was the highest with 4632K.

Talking of new features in FF3, Alex Faaborg, the user experience designer who worked on Firefox 3 has a very detailed post on the new UI features here

http://tinyurl.com/yv5xp4

Below are 2 unique features in FF3, which I haven’t seen in hundreds of posts that cover the new FF3 features.

Scrolling using Spacebar

If you are keyboard junkie, I am sure you too will love this feature.

Till now, If you intended to scroll a web page, you either had to enable the Caret Mode (F7) and then scroll the web page or use the keyboard Page up and Page down key.

The first option isn’t that straightforward and the second one for some reason wasn’t always working reliably on FF2. Even in FF3, scrolling via Page keys doesn’t work properly.

However in FF3, you can easily scroll using the "Spacebar"

Spacebar - Scrolls the page down
Shift + Spacebar - Scrolls the page up

Reopen/Undo Closed Tab

Tabbed browsing keeps your taskbar clutter free and also makes you more productive.

However you might also end up closing tabs (browser pages) which you did not intend to !

FF3 has a new feature using which  you can quickly reload a closed tab. All you need to do is press Ctrl + Shift + T

Ctrl + Shift + T - Reopen closed tab / Undo Close tab operation

The shortcut is also kind of easy to remember since Ctrl + T is used to open a new empty tab.

Also FF3 does not just reload the last closed tab; in fact it maintains the history of closed tabs.

If you continuously press the Ctrl + Shift + T, you can reopen all the closed tabs in the session (the most recently closed is reopened first)

For the complete list of Firefox 3 shortcuts, check out this page

http://tinyurl.com/5hucpj

Web Analytic tools are must have for anybody running a website since they give interesting insight into your site’s traffic patterns.

Woopra Web Analytics was mentioned/reviewed by so many sites that I had to give it a try.

After signing up for Woopra, I immediately proceeded towards the downloads page. I installed the Desktop Client (for which I had to upgrade the JRE on my system to 1.6) and also installed the WordPress Plug-in.

Only after installing the WP Plugin did I realize that I had to have an “Invitation Code” to use Woopra !

Without an code you need to wait till Woopra inspects and approves your site !

I don’t understand as to why Woopra lets users download the software even before the user has added a site and has a valid Website ID! 

I let out my frustration on Twitter and looks like someone at Woopra has been tracking tweets on their application. My site was immediately approved ! (It might have been just coincidence as well )

Woopra Client

Woopra Client application has been written in Java and does make extensive use of the Image4J library to render the pretty looking UI.

The combination of Blue, Green, Yellow and White colors on the UI does manage to create an optical illusion !

Not sure as to what prompted the Woopra team to use this as the default color scheme. The other color schemes included in the UI are also of not much help.

What I liked ?

• Live traffic view including the Geographical view. It lets users see the active users and the number of pages they visited on your site.
• Starting a conversation with the “online” visitor (Some visitors might find this annoying )
• Visitor Tagging
• Geo Overlay on the Analytics Tab
  

What I did not like ?

• The need to install the client software on every other system
• The UI Color Scheme
• The Dashboard view
• A scrolling bar status bar which is so annoying and yes there is no option to disable it or pause it !

Also the visitor count data displayed by Woopra was only 75% of what I saw on Google Analytics or Mint. Not sure on the kind of visitors being dropped by Woopra !

Till Woopra fixes the above issues and improves the UI of the client I would recommend anyone to try out Mint Web Analytics.

I am a big fan of this app for a number of reasons including

• Ability to view the Analytics data on a Single page
• Live Traffic Data
• Best looking user interface
• Filtering/Analysis of data by third party Pepper’s
• Ability to host on your own server

Have you tried Woopra ? What is your view on Woopra ?

What analytics software do you use to track your site visitors?

Firefox has been the default browser on my PC’s from quite some time now. Firefox for some reason has always been able make its way back every time I try to adopt a different browser !

Flock and Safari were the two browser which gave serious competition to Firefox !

From the past few weeks I have been using the RC1 release of Firefox 3. I haven’t explored all the new features in FF3, but it does look faster compared to FF2 and does have a lot of UI enhancements.

The final release of FF3 is going to be some time in June and Firefox is aiming to set a new Guinness Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours.

I already pledged my support and if you are also a Firefox fan,  you should definitely head over to this link to pledge your support !

Don’t forget to spread the word around

Cell Broadcast also know as Short Message Service – Cell Broadcast (SMS-CB) is a service designed for delivery of messages to multiple users in a specified area. Unlike SMS Point to Point which is manly a one to one service Cell Broadcast is a one to many service.

Some mobile operators use Cell Broadcast for communicating the area code of the antenna cell to the mobile user (via channel 050), for nationwide or citywide alerting, weather reports, mass messaging, location based news, etc. The service might not be supported by all the operators; even some of the handsets don’t have the capability to receive Cell Broadcast messages.

One of the readers on my earlier post on HTC Touch wanted to know whether the Cell Broadcast service could be enabled on HTC. The service can be enabled easily on a Nokia or a Sony Ericsson phone and isn’t so easy to configure on HTC.

Steps to enable Cell Broadcast on HTC Touch

1. Navigate to the following screen on the device

   Start -> Settings -> Phone -> More

2. Check the “Enable” box under the Broadcast Channels

   

3. Click on the “Settings” to bring up the following screen

   

   -> Check “Receive channel list”
   -> Set Language to “All Languages”
   -> Create a new item with any name and channel number set to 050 or 50

4. You should immediately see the Cell Broadcast messages being displayed as message alerts.
5. Cell Broadcast messages as message alerts are annoying and if you want the same to appear on the home screen, install the BatteryStatus application. Once installed, the application has an option to display the Cell broadcast messages on the “Today” screen
   You can even optionally set the alignment for the broadcast messages.
   
6. Once the above setting is done, you should see the Broadcast messages on the home screen as shown below (The message is next to the battery status)

   

Note: The display of Broadcast messages is a battery sucker ! As you can see from the above image, the battery was fully charged before I enabled the broadcast feature. Within a day, the battery drained to 18% ! Every time a message is received, the display light is turned on and this is one major battery drainer.

Twitter is a web service which helps you to communicate and stay connected through quick exchange of messages. Its supposedly one of the fastest growing phenomena on the Internet.

Until few days back, accessing Twitter service from iPhone was possible only via the safari web browser. Following are the 4 web based Twitter Clients for iPhone:

Twitter Mobile

Twitter Mobile is the official version of the mobile client. The User interface is basic (hence loads faster) and it lacks a lot of features available on normal web based client.

The following snapshot shows the only 4 options available on the mobile client.

Pocket Tweets

The user interface of PocketTweets is pretty good with buddy icons and the available timelines. However the good looking interface took a toll on the loading speed. It was amazingly slow even when I used the client over Wi-Fi

Hahlo

Hahlo has a much better user interface compared to PocketTweets and it also loaded up pretty fast. The home page is kind of not that user friendly and would have liked if it could directly showed the friends timeline.

iTweet

iTweet has all the features but not the right user interface. I found it too difficult to use; only a few tweets are displayed and the application menu itself took a lot of space on the screen.

Following are the 2 native twitter clients available for iPhone:

Mobile Twitter

MobileTwitter is a native twitter applications developed by Nicholas Pike and is available on the STE source. The native client loaded the tweets pretty fast and unlike the web clients you don’t have to enter the login credentials again and again.

The only issue with this client is the positioning of the options menu with respect to the iPhone keyboard which pops up while posting a tweet. Many a times I ended up clicking on an option rather than typing a character !

Features:

• Your timeline (you + those you follow)
• Direct messages
• Replies
• Everyone
• Updating your Twitter status
• Reply directly to tweets from MobileTwitter
• Open Tweets in MobileSafari (handy for clicking on links..)
• Direct message authors of tweets
• TwitPic.com integration
• Manual refresh

Twinkle

Twinkle is very similar to MobileTwitter in terms of features and User interface. One interesting feature in Twinkle is the “Location” feature using which you can check on the tweets posted by people near to you. If you don’t find any tweets you can always change the distance

If you know of any other Twitter client for iPhone, please suggest the same via the comment form.

Exactly an year back I wrote about moving this blog from GoDaddy to Dreamhost. The story continues and this year I have moved to Media Temple (referral link).

I had considered Media Temple last year, however the site revenues weren’t enough to match the rates quoted by Media Temple. Even this time around I thought a lot before choosing  Media Temple. I did see a lot of negative reviews on Media Temple but I guess you would see that for every other hosting provider.

You need to use the service to come to a conclusion and MT does have a 30 day money back guarantee option.

Why shift from Dreamhost ?

One main reason was the downtime that this site experienced while running on Dreamhost. At one point of time, the pingdom service used to report a downtime almost every day.

The site speed also was no way near to normal and this definitely affected the pageviews (People who come via search engine referral would hesitate to explore the site, if the landing page is too slow)

One positive thing about Dreamhost is the quality of support. I got response for almost all my support queries and unlike the site response time, I have no complaints on the support response time !

Isn’t MT expensive ?

Some of the best hosting options would cost around 10-12$/month and MT quotes around 20$/month.

However if you do a 1 year pre-payment you do save 40$. I used a coupon code and saved another 15% to finally end up with 14$/month charge which in my opinion isn’t too much if your site is monetized.

And you do have the option of reselling the hosting and this can also help in bringing down the monthly expense.

Isn’t moving data a pain ?

Moving all the data from one server to another is a time consuming task and is one of the reasons users would hesitate to switch to a different hosting. Unlike my previous move from GoDaddy to Dreamhost, this time around I had a lot of data to move !

Transferring the data from Dreamhost to my local system and then transferring it back to Media Temple would have definitely taken time. However I used one simple yet powerful SCP command to transfer the files within 10 minutes !

For e.g. to move my entire domain related files (not the database), I just executed the following command from the SSH terminal on my Dreamhost server

scp -r venukb.com u...@mediatempleaccessdomain:/backup

Note: For the above approach to work, you need to signup with MT and should have received the Access Domain related data and the login credentials for the access domain

I also dumped the database using mysqldump and again used SCP to move the SQL files onto the MT server.

The transfer was done at a blazing speed of 2MB/second. Once the data was moved, all I had to do was to move the domain related files to the MT specific server paths and restoring the SQL data on to the newly created MySQL database on MT grid.

You can even test the new setup by modifying your hosts file on Windows (i.e. I pointed venukb.com to the new MT server) and once its tested you can go ahead and modify the name servers to point to the new domain (This modification in the DNS will take some time to propagate)

Is MT worth the price ?

It just been 2 days and I am not in the state to comment on the hosting performance and support. In a few days I should be able to make a good judgement on MT and will definitely keep you posted

If anybody is already on MT, let me know how your experience has been till now (I do read a lot of posts where people write about moving to MT, but have seen very few who have written about the actual experience ! )

Meanwhile for all those keeping a tab on this blog’s RSS feed, please do open up this post in a browser and let me know if the site is loading up fast . It’s also an opportunity for you to checkout the new theme running on this blog

A 16 GB iPhone just made its way to my home today all the way from an US store. Even though I had “experienced” iPhone by reading about it and by seeing tons of videos on YouTube, using it live was a totally different experience.

iPhone is an amazing, astounding, remarkable, wonderful, incredible, marvelous product from Apple!

The sad fact is that I can use this phone only for the next 20 days after which my brother would take ownership! (He is the actual owner of this phone)

Sadder is the fact that I have to return using my HTC Touch. Believe me, HTC Touch UI is nothing compared to iPhone; same goes for the user experience.

Using iPhone in India

We all know that iPhone is available only in a few select countries and its also bound/locked to a particular carrier in that country. And if you are not lucky to be in that country, the only way to use an iPhone is by “hacking” it.

I spent almost 3-4 hours by going through the various forums to find the safest way of hacking the iPhone.

As you read more and more into these forums, rather than being informed, you end up in a confused state. You really can’t decide as to what method to use to hack your 500$ iPhone.

I am in no way an iPhone hacking expert but this is what I understood by going through tons of articles and forum posts. (Disclaimer: The information might not be 100% accurate)

First thing is to understand some of the terminologies associated with hacking the iPhone.

If you are planning to use iPhone in India you need to do all of the above. For some legal users of iPhone hacking might only involve “Jailbreak” which allows them to install third party applications.

Tools to hack iPhone

After going through the various forums, I narrowed down onto two tools to hack the iPhone (on Windows)

1. ZiPhone 2.6b
2. iPlus 2.0b

There is one set of users who have had success with ZiPhone and there is one set which believes that iPlus is the safest way of hacking iPhone.

The way ZiPhone breaks iPhone is different from the way iPlus does; ZiPhone permanently downgrades the bootloader from version 4.6 to 3.9 whereas iPlus downgrades it to a fake blank 3.9 bootloader. With iPlus you have an option to go back to 4.6 bootloader which is probably required to shield against future firmware updates from Apple.

Many believe that iPlus2.0b is the safest way to hack iPhone; however note that there is one issue found with using Fake Blank Bootloader. More details on this post. The issue is more of a warning and might occur only if you try to downgrade to 1.0.0 or 1.1.1 firmware.

ZiPhone has a very nice user interface and it almost tempted me to use it rather than iPlus. (Note: ZiPhone is probably an ideal tool to break iPod Touch)

However the inability to restore back 4.6 bootloader prompted me to use iPlus2.0b with the international payload. Though iPlus2.0b is command line driven, it did its work of breaking, activating and unlocking the iPhone with zero trouble.

The iPhone is currently activated on Airtel network and it should also work with the following service providers:

• Spice
• Vodafone
• CellOne

For using iPlus2.0, I followed the instructions given on this post:

• How to activate, jailbreak and unlock 1.1.4 firmware with iPlus (3.9 / 4.6 bootloader)

Also note that I skipped the loading of 1.1.4 firmware; You can skip this after confirming that you have 1.1.4 version of the firmware on your iPhone. To confirm the firmware version, you need to type in this code: *3001#12345#*

Also if you are not comfortable with this command line interface, the same developers of iPlus have come up with iLiberty+.

This UI wrapper for iPlus was released a week back and I thought it might be risky to try out a new untested tool. However I do like the concept of iLiberty+ where they have tried to design it as an extensible tool; users can download and place the payloads of their choice and select the same from the “Advanced” tab.

Disclaimer: This post is just my experience of breaking iPhone using iPlus2.0, if you bricked your iPhone using iPlus2.0 or ZiPhone I am not liable

The BIOS on my Acer 1694 laptop was 3 years old and I did manage to find an updated version of the same on the Acer support web site. However ever after trying for about say 10 times, I couldn’t upgrade the BIOS from Windows Vista.

The upgrade from Vista always ended with a blue screen and a system restart. I even booted from the Vista DVD and got into the command console (using Alt + F10 on the License screen) and tried updating the BIOS using command line; again blue screen followed by a system restart !!

After digging through some forums I realized that the BIOS could only be updated via XP which meant that I had to install XP again !

Installing XP from Acer Vendor DVD means that I would have to loose the primary partition (C:\) since the DVD does a ghost copy of Windows XP to C:\. Vista was also unfortunately hosted on this primary partition

Acer does come with a hidden partition which can be used to do a Disk to Disk (D2D) recovery and you can invoke this by pressing Alt+F10 during the BIOS setup.

(If the Alt+F10 option is not invoking the D2D recovery on your Acer laptop, the Acer MBR might have been corrupted or overwritten by some Linux/Vista installation and you have to rewrite the Acer MBR again. )

I restored the Acer MBR and tried the Alt+F10 option expecting a D2D menu ! To my shock the D2D recovery started running immediately and started copying files onto to the primary partition without any user confirmation.

I successfully managed to loose the data on my primary partition yet again !!! The only consolation was the fact that D2D helped me in getting XP up and running with all drivers in just 10 minutes !! I also upgraded the BIOS with no trouble; not sure what the trouble with Vista was !

I also realized that it was in my best interest to have both Vista and XP running on the laptop, so that I could switch between them whenever necessary ! However setting up this dual boot was also not straightforward (especially if you have a OEM version of Windows XP); More details on this in the next post !!

Ah.. the day I have been waiting for ! Windows Vista SP1 has been finally released via windows update today !

I upgraded to Vista last year and there were a few issues bugging me including the file copy to external drives, WiFi connectivity, Printer Connectivity etc.

Few of the issues were addressed by patches and few of them were also fixed when I upgraded to the beta release of Vista SP1. With today’s final release of SP1 I am hoping that MS has addressed all the reported issues in Vista.

Vista SP1 details:

You can download the SP1 via Windows update; Note that if you are downloading via Windows Update, you might have to install all the pending updates before the SP1 shows up in the update list. Also as per the official release note, download via Windows update checks for specific driver issues and hence might not show up in the update list.

If SP1 is not showing up in Windows Update list, download it from http://tinyurl.com/32z6vj (440 MB)

eBay Desktop, the free alternative to eBay web portal is a very good application to showcase the power of Adobe AIR. I totally fell in love with the user interface; easy to use and very fast.

One reason I prefer FeedDemon over Google reader is the pace at which I can navigate between the feeds and perform operations on the feeds/news items. Google Reader is fast but its still a long way from matching the speed of a desktop app. Its the exact difference you find even in eBay Desktop compared to its web peer.

I don’t do much of shopping on eBay but definitely use it to track/watch the price of some of the gadgets which are on my wish list ! If you are a serious eBay buyer or seller, eBay Desktop is worth a try !

When Google Calendar was launched in 2006, I didn’t find anything unique except the “Quick Add” feature. I might not have spent too much time exploring the powerful features of Google calendar then, but I am sure that most of them would agree that there was no single compelling feature in Google Calendar.

At that time, my usage of Calendar was also pretty limited; However age is catching up with me and I really had to start using a calendar to keep track of my day to day events. (I am not going to write in detail about these events, but these were the ones which made me realize that I was getting old )

When I again checked on Google Calendar, 2 features caught my attention.

Getting Notifications via SMS

You can set your mobile number in the Calendar setting and get event notifications on the mobile as SMS.

This feature is definitely useful for users with regular phones (With Smartphones you generally have the ability to synch your calendar and tasks). You can configure the time before which you wish to receive the event notifications.

Synchronizing with Microsoft Outlook

Google has now launched a new Calendar Sync utility which allows you to sync events between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar. You’ll be able to determine the direction of “sync”, as well as the sync frequency.

Till now, there wasn’t a straightforward way to setup the sync between Google Calendar and MS Outlook Calendar. This new utility make it really simple to setup the sync and is a treat for people using Outlook and Google Calendar.

With the above 2 features, I have become a “regular” user of Google Calendar and is now firmly positioned as my second favorite Google app (The first one being Gmail !)

Talking of favorite Google applications, here is how it stacks up for me: (Note: I have not considered Search as an “app”, for me Google is the default search engine ! )

1. Gmail
2. Google Calendar
3. Google Docs and Spreadsheets
4. Google Notebook
5. Google Reader

What are your favorite Google applications ?

The demonstration of WorldWide Telescope made Scoble cry and in his follow up post he did explain as to what made him cry.  I didn’t cry (not to prove that I am stronger than Scoble ) , but was definitely impressed after seeing the following video.

(Note: It’s a lengthy video and the streaming isn’t that fast)

You might also like reading this paper from Jim Gray which triggered the worldwide telescope project.

Moneycontrol.com which boasts itself as an end-to-end business and financial portal is a perfect example of showing how you can screw up a web site by putting too many ads.

When you first type in the URL in the browser, you have a full page Ad with the link to “continue to Moneycontrol“. Once you continue, this is what you see: (Click on the image for a bigger picture )

I agree that the page is well designed and at first sight, the page layout might actually look cool, but if you inspect the page more deeply, its just filled with ads; There are Google Ads, sponsored ads, flash ads, budget ads etc etc.

If you do manage to find some useful content on the home page and click on it, you are again bombarded with more ads ! I do agree that ads are one of the primary source of revenue for any portal; however too many ads (especially the flash ads) are just a PITA !

Note that I have no complaint on the quality of the content;however the number of ads around this content just creates a kind of optical illusion !!

Now to the important question: Will Moneycontrol do anything about this ? I just checked on their trend using Google Trends and this is how it looks

If that trend continues, I am sure Moneycontrol would be searching for more real estate on the page to insert ads !!

Talking of Ads and Ad layout, even this site has Ads and sometimes I wonder if its a similar kind of pain for readers ! If your answer is yes, please do leave your feedback in the comments section. I will definitely try to reduce the pain

Meanwhile, if you love this weblog and want to totally get rid of Ads, you can always subscribe to the RSS feeds

In my last post, I had mentioned about the new 8Mbps plan being introduced by Airtel. I opted for the 1299 (4GB download limit) plan and the same got activated yesterday.

Activation would have been happened much earlier if I wasn’t on the commercial segment ! To activate the 1299 plan, I had to rollback to the home segment !

I just did a couple of test downloads and saw the blazing download speed of more than 1MB/second ! Exactly “8″ years ago, I had bought a 56kbps D-Link Modem and was downloading at 200bits/sec and gradually saw it increasing to 1-2kbps. We have come a long way since then

I was researching on the broadband speeds in different countries and as of now Japan seems to have the fastest connection @ 60Mbps !. And according to this report from speedmatters.org, USA is way far behind !

Meanwhile did you know that Sweden’s Sigbritt Lothberg has the world’s fastest Internet connection @ 40Gbps and she uses it for casual browsing !! Duh !!

Airtel has now introduced 8mpbs plans in India. Airtel happens to be the first operator offering this speed for resedential segment.

Even though the news of this plan has been doing rounds from the past few weeks, nothing was put up on the official web site till now.

Here is the list of plans available on 8mpbs

I might try out the 1299 plan for a month and see how it goes. Meanwhile I am hoping to see some good plans to be introduced under 2mpbs speeds !

How many of you are already on 8mpbs plan ?

Anybody buying this ?

More information on Kindle here !

Just got myself a new printer : HP Photosmart C6188

By the way its not just a printer, its also a copier,scanner and a fax machine !  The scanner and copier is definitely of some use; not sure how extensively I would use the fax feature, but I did manage to get it up and running ! (with my existing DSL setup)

I did spend considerable amount of time researching the printers available in India before finalizing on HP C6188 !

And currently I am spending more time to get “all” the features of “all in one” printer working on Vista (There are issues when I switch the printer from Wireless to Ethernet and vice versa)

More on it in the coming posts !

Meanwhile how many of you own a printer ? How useful is it ? Which model do you own ? Which model/manufacturer would you recommend ?(I might as well have put this question before I bought one !)

PayPal, the e-commerce site which allows payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet has got a  new look and also has added some new features which might be of interest for users in India.

For one, PayPal has introduced new hosted payment buttons. Specific buttons receiving the refresh include: Buy Now, Pay Now, Add to Cart, Donate, Buy Gift Certificate and Subscribe.

If you are using any of the above buttons, you might have already noticed the change. The button does look a lot better compared to the old dull looking button. Now I hope more people will notice the “Donate” button on my weblog

The official PayPal blog post has more details on this new feature.

PayPal had recently introduced a new feature via which you could withdraw the money in your PayPal account to your Visa Card (credit or debit). However at that time I was not able to add my Indian visa debit card and only my Visa Credit card was eligible to receive payment via the above option.

Now PayPal has added a feature (probably of more interest for users in India) via which you can withdraw funds directly to your bank account in India.

Transfers to the following banks in India can be done via PayPal.

For adding the account, you should first know the IFSC (Indian Financial System Code); the code is unique for the bank branch and is not specific for your account.

The Indian Financial System Code (IFSC) is an alpha-numeric code designed to uniquely identify bank branches in India. This is an 11 -digit code with the first four characters representing the bank code, the next character is a control character, and the last 6 characters identify the branch.
The Reserve Bank of India publishes the IFSC and MICR codes, but only IFSC codes should be used. Please contact your bank in India for this code.

Withdrawing to your bank account is much faster than ordering a cheque and I hope even Google Adsense can come up with a feature like this

GMail, the most popular (and my favorite) Email service from Google has added IMAP support in addition to the existing POP3 support. One of the advantages of IMAP is that you can sync your mail from multiple clients. With POP3, even if you read a mail from one client, it isn’t reflected on the other client and you have to re-read the E-Mails.

IMAP helps in synching the client operations to the server and this feature is one of the major reasons for the popularity of Microsoft Exchange Server.

You can enable IMAP Access in GMail via the Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP link.

Setup Instructions for most of the popular IMAP Clients can be found on https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=75726 (Even iPhone can sync with GMail)

I quickly setup accounts on Windows Live Mail and Outlook 2003 to see IMAP access in Action. On outlook once the account is setup, you have to explicitly subscribe to the IMAP folders.

Outlook took almost thrice the time to download the message headers when compared to Windows Live Mail. So on my home PC, I might be sticking with Windows Live Mail to read/sync GMail.

Other features:

• Starred messages in GMail show up as "Flags" in the Email Client and vice versa
• New folders created in the Client show up as Labels on the web client.
• When you move a message to a folder in the client, the labels are automatically applied.

Also you don’t need to worry about the bandwidth required to download all your GMail mails ! Only the headers are downloaded by default and the mail content is downloaded on demand.

IMAP access will definitely help me save some time at my work place (My employer might say otherwise ). If GPRS cost comes down in India, I can as well setup the account on my HTC Touch (By the way its already synching with GMail over Bluetooth )

Live photo gallery was one of the recent applications which got added to my favorite application list. In my previous post on Live Photo Gallery I had wished that the application provided integration with Flickr.

The Photo gallery team headed by Michael Palermiti has heard to this wish and the latest update of Live photo gallery now supports a powerful Flickr Integration.

Rather than going into the details of the feature, I will just embed the video created by Michael.

One of the best things about this tool is that now you could tag the photos/input captions/photo title and the same would be reflected on Flickr. So if you do have a Flickr Account, its time to switch from the default Flickr Uploader to Live Photo Gallery.

(Note: The Flickr feature is downloaded as part of the Windows update and is not part of the Live photo gallery download)

Other Related Links

• Blog Post on Official Live Blog
• Blog Post on Official Flickr Blog

I have been tracking and trying out Vista since the Beta days and have written a lot of posts on the same.

• Windows Vista Beta 2
• Windows Vista logs into India
• Planning to upgrade to Windows Vista ?
• Acer – Upgrade to Vista
• Planning to upgrade to Vista ?

From the past few months I have also been regularly checking the price of Vista on http://microsoft.indiatimes.com. I finally choose Vista Ultimate and shelled out 9K INR for the Ultimate upgrade edition

The upgrade wasn’t that straight forward; thanks to the confusing messages shown by the Vista Installer.

When I ran the Vista installation from within the existing installation of Windows XP, I couldn’t install on my primary partition since it was FAT32. I was asked to start the vista installation by booting from the DVD. I followed the instructions only to be again told that the Product key was a "upgrade" key and can hence could be run only on an existing installation of Windows.

I couldn’t even format the primary partition using the "convert" command. The command was queued and could only be run again during system startup. I finally managed to convert my primary partition to NTFS and was then able to install Vista on the same partition.

Vista did give a good score for my 2 year old laptop

General Guideline for System Rating:

A computer with a base score of 4.0 or 5.0 is able to run all new features of Windows Vista with full functionality, and it is able to support high-end, graphics-intensive experiences, such as multi player and 3 D gaming and recording and playback of HDTV content. Computers with a base score of 5.0 were the highest performing computers available when Windows Vista was released.

I still have to explore the new interesting features of Vista. The "Aero" is not that happening . IE 7 looks and works much better than its predecessor.

How many of you are planning to upgrade to vista ? Meanwhile can anyone recommend me a good Anti-Virus software for vista. I am currently trying out Kaspersky Anti-Virus !

Along with Windows Live Writer Beta 3 there were a bunch of other tools released as part of the Windows Live Suite. It included

• Windows Messenger
• Mail
• Photo Gallery
• Toolbar
• OneCare

I have been using the Photo Gallery application from the past one week and looks like I have fallen for one more product from Microsoft.

Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta is a photo organizer that you can use to view, manage, and edit digital photos and videos. By default, all the photos in the Pictures folder on your hard disk appear in Photo Gallery. Additionally you can also add other folders on your hard disk to Photo Gallery Beta. You can also add photos to Photo Gallery Beta by importing them from a digital camera or memory card.

Photo gallery can quickly show you the photos based on date and you can also start tagging and rating your photos. Viewing photos is a treat using Photo gallery. The photo load speed is amazing and it reminded me of AcdSee ! The slider based zooming is another unique feature worth nothing

Other than simplifying viewing of photos, the gallery app also provides handy tools to fix/edit the photos.

The “Fix red eye” feature worked like a charm and I was able to give back the human look for some of the “monstrous” looking photos.

Other feature include:

• Printing/Ordering Prints (No service provider available in India)
• Creating panoramic photo
• Burning photos to CD
• Publishing photo to Windows Live spaces and videos to MSN Soapbox (Wish Flickr was also included !)

A must have tool for Windows !

Orkut’s new look is active on my profile. The Google logo is highlighted in the footer and there is also the link to the official Orkut blog.

Even though there is no major change in terms of features, the new look definitely looks fresh and is a welcome change. What is your opinion on the new look of Orkut ? Meanwhile how many of you are still active on Orkut ? Do share your Orkut experience  

I haven’t written a post in the past 10 days and many of my friends including some readers started pinging me to check on my status

I am very much alive, only that I was caught up with a little work and also decided to take some time off

FeedDemon, the RSS reader that I use, was filled up with so many new posts !! I was forced to use the “Mark Folder Read” option for most of RSS folders. However I did a quick check on India Technology Bloggers feed and got myself updated with the latest happenings in the tech world. (Thanks to QOT for staring this network, its really useful)

Orkut seems to have got a face-lift; It looks only like a CSS update (with rounded corners/use of “blue” color/new icons). Not sure, if Orkut team read one of my earlier post, but they do seem to have finally started an official blog on June 25.

Other than this:

• Apurv seems to be having a fun filled time in Austin. His first tryst with Square dancing even won him a Philips DVD player
• Vasu takes some time off to explain the significance of his name. His blog archives are just amazing. Most of his posts are worth reading over and over again
• Chris does throw up an interesting proposal on Twitter Groups
• Kyle reminds to update the Text Link Ads Referral Links.
• Shankar, as usual is glued to his PC after school and has a lot of interesting posts.
• Nirmal suggests 7 Plugins to improve the comment section of your WordPress powered weblog. I really need to integrate some of those plug-ins to improve the “commenting” experience on this site.
• Mayank talks about the new Bloglines Beta RSS reader.
• Shivaranjan talks of the built-in Screen capturing utility of Vista. I am still on Windows XP and I am really keen to know as to how many of you have upgraded to vista and how many of you would recommend an upgrade.
• Vijay points to an interesting Web Page Technology profiler – Builtwith
• If you are a game freak, do checkout the Microsoft Sidewinder mouse suggested by Madhur. I am not into gaming much these days and I’m quite happy with my Logitech V500 mouse
• I was about to check on the 3 WordPress Plug-ins that won the WordPress Plug-in Competition when Aprit warned me of the security flaws in each of these plug-ins.

One important feature expected from a Touch screen based Windows mobile Smartphone is the ability to quickly input text.

Be it composing a SMS/MMS or taking a note or composing a word document, a powerful keyboard application is a must on a Smartphone/Pocket PC.

I quickly got adjusted to the Touch based navigation on my newly purchased HTC Touch Smartphone, however when it came to composing a SMS using my fingers, I failed miserably !

I had to either take support from the Stylus (which I didn’t want to) or I had to search for a better powerful keyboard alternative for my phone.HTC did market the Touch phone as the first touch based Smartphone, but they forgot to provide a better text input user interface !

By default the Windows Mobile OS came with the following methods of text input.

Keyboard

Unless you have very small fingers, the only way to work with the above keyboard is by relying on the stylus supplied with the device.

Letter Recognizer/Block Recognizer

On this interface, even your small fingers wouldn’t be of help. The only way to use this interface is again via the stylus attached with the device.

Transcriber

The Transcriber application is Microsoft’s award winning application that uses Transcriber technology to bring you unprecedented recognition accuracy and ease of use.

Transcriber employs advanced fuzzy logic and neural net techniques that allow it to recognize your handwriting with unparalleled accuracy and speed. Think your handwriting is too messy for Transcriber to make sense of it

Download Transcriber

Once you get used to the Transcriber, this method might be the most effective among the above 4 methods. However like in Letter/Block Recognizer, you are forced to use the stylus in Transcriber mode too

Alternative Touch Based Keyboards

Here are 2 alternative keyboards which saves you from using the Stylus.

HTC T9 Phonepad

HTC supposedly started licensing T9 text input capabilities and included a software input method for their devices that let you easily type out text using common T9 techniques.

This was a great feature for phones that only had touch screens since you could use your thumb to type out messages in much the same way you would do so on a standard numeric keypad using T9. However it was abandoned by HTC for some odd reasons. I was finally able to grab hold of the CAB file for the phone pad in XDA developers forum

After using it for a more than a week, I should say that this is probably the most efficient and fastest way of inputting text on a touch based device.

I couldn’t locate the forum thread which had the cab, so here is the link to the T9 Phonepad application.

Download T9 PhonePad (1.46 MB)

Full Screen Keyboard

Unlike T9 Phonepad, Spb’s Full Screen Keyboard is not a free application. However at 10$ its worthy every penny ! Unlike other input methods it covers the entire screen area and has keys large enough to be typed with finger-tips rather than with a stylus.

Additionally the dictionary-based correction algorithms allow users to reduce the number of misprints significantly.

Other notable applications

There are 2 more applications worth mentioning even though they are not touch based applications. They rely on the stylus but have some unique features which help you to input the text at a pretty fast rate.

TenGO

Resco KeyBoard

If you know about any additional keyboard applications useful for Touch based device, please do leave your suggestions in the comments section.

The success of YouTube has spawned a lot of clones in India. My earlier post here covers some of the popular video sharing sites in India.

Konkan.tv one of the popular sites among that list has now launched “Live Television“. This is what the owner of the site, Rohan Pinto had to say about the new service.

The Live TV service is 100% free and is aimed at bridging the east and the west. There are “desi” channels for folks far away from home to connect with, and international channels for folks back home to enjoy western broadcasts for free.

Streaming speeds are totally dependent on the end users bandwidth speed. Also some channels are not 24/7 and may not be available all the time as the live stream is based on the actual broadcast time.

There are about 35 live TV channels available on Konkan.tv. I hope the site improves on the categorization of the channels, this would make it easier to access content of interest.

I did try to access CNBC TV 18 from my workplace and it did work well with the limited bandwidth.

Watch Live TV on Konkan

Plaxo is an online address book service founded by Napster co-founder Sean Parker, Minh Nguyen, and two Stanford engineering students, Todd Masonis and Cameron Ringand. I have been a loyal user of this service from some time now.

I happened to meet a person named Ghanshyam Dass in Shanghai airport (during transit), who later turned out to be the Nasdaq Director for Asia Pacific !! We exchanged cards and the next day I received a Address Update request from him.

This was when I was introduced to Plaxo (By the way this was way back in 2004) !! I immediately signed up for the service and even downloaded the Plaxo toolbar for Outlook (which was the E-Mail client used by my employer)

For those who have not used Plaxo, this is how it works:

• Plaxo has an online service which helps you to store your contacts on web.
• Plaxo also synchronizes the contacts stored on the web onto a host of mail clients like Microsoft Outlook,Thunderbird and Mac OS X Address Book. Note that the synchronization is 2 way in the sense that the contacts added/updated in the Client applications are also updated onto the web.
• You can send update requests to all/selected contacts and the updated information is synchronized across the Web and Client applications.
• If the contact is also a Plaxo user, any update of his contact information is automatically synchronized.
• The synchronization is not just limited to contacts; you can even synchronize your calendar events and Outlook Notes.

For me, Plaxo eliminated the necessity to backup my contact data. It also helped me to keep the address details of my contacts up to date !

Plaxo recently did a major service upgrade and the new version makes the service more simpler to use. The online Plaxo service has been completely revamped (“Ajaxified”). I am not impressed with the way the Contacts and Notes are displayed. The classic (previous) version displayed the data in a more user friendly way.

The all new Plaxo 3.0 now supports synchronization with Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, Apple, AOL, Thunderbird and your mobile phone.

Plaxo also has a new toolbar for Outlook and it automatically sync’s with the online service (There is no need to manually click on the “Sync Now” button)

The service is still a Beta and I did have trouble synchronizing my calendar data with Google.

Plaxo 3.0 also introduces a new service called Pulse. I still haven’t completely explored this service; meanwhile check this link for more details on Pulse

How many of you are using Plaxo ? How many of you find the service useful ?

Walt Mossberg of WSJ is highly regarded as one of the most influential writers on information technology. After trying out iPhone for 2 week, he has his say on this post

Checkout this video too

Points to note from the video:

• He was able to get in terms with the virtual keyboard after 5 days of usage
• Access to Internet using EDGE is slow (However there is an alternative way to connecting using WiFi which is faster)
• The phone is locked on AT&T and if the AT&T coverage is not good, its not worth going for the lusty phone as of now.
• The web browser is in a league of its own and so is the E-Mail application.

I am wondering how much time it would take for the iPhone to arrive in India !

Meanwhile if you want to know more about Walt Mossberg, read this article. (Thanks to Apurv for pointing out this article)

One of the announcements made by Steve Jobs in WWDC was the availability of Safari Web Browser on Windows. As soon as I saw the news (it was around 1AM IST), I was tempted to try it out.

The windows installable is around 8MB. The Browser setup optionally installs the following components:

• Bonjour Networking Service
• Apple Update Software

According to Apple, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

Also Safari executes JavaScript up to 2.8 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

When I loaded web pages on Safari, I didn’t see any considerable change in web load speeds compared to Firefox. However there was some notable difference in JavaScript execution. Here are the 12 reasons that will make you love Safari !

 

One of the unique feature in Safari is Private Browsing; a mode in which no record of information about the user’s web activity is retained. The option can be enabled from the “Edit” Menu.

Note that the download is Alpha release and not even a Beta. Just with 5 tabs open in the browser, Safari almost gobbled around 140MB of memory on my system. Also when I opened few secure sites, Safari crashed and worse , there is no option to restore the crashed session.

I dumped Internet Explorer long back and have been a fan of Firefox since then. Flock did try to take me away from Firefox, but it failed due to various reasons.

Safari looks like a good alternative to Firefox and probably will switch once a stable release is available :).

Will you switch to Safari ?

The other day I was reading about the popular Desktop search tools on a popular technology site. The 3 tools featured were

• Google Desktop Search
• Microsoft Desktop Search
• Yahoo Desktop Search

I was immediately keen to know as to how Google, Microsoft and Yahoo display their respective desktop search products on their search engines.

Search on Google

Google puts its own desktop search product ahead of Windows and Yahoo. However it should be noted that it puts in the Microsoft product ahead of Yahoo Desktop Search.

Search on Yahoo

Yahoo, similar to Google puts its own product on the top. And it also returns favor to Google by listing Google desktop search as the second popular link. MS is pushed to third (probably acquisition fears )

Search on MSN Live

Surprise ! Surprise ! Microsoft unlike Google or Yahoo does not put its own product as the most popular desktop search tool. Its lists Google and Yahoo products and puts itself as the 3rd most popular desktop search product.

What does this mean ? Is Live search the most unbiased search engine ?

I was a die hard fan of Suse Linux and was hesitant to try other Linux distributions.

Suse 10.1 worked flawlessly on my laptop and I was able to even get the Xgl working on my ATI Radeon X700 graphics card.

Post on Suse
Suse 10.1
Xgl Working on Suse
XGL on Suse – Photoset

The other Linux distribution that is very popular among geeks is Ubuntu. My friend Harish recently shifted to Ubuntu and this further motivated me to try out Ubuntu.

Unlike Suse distribution which is around 4GB, Ubuntu 7.04 codenamed Fiesty Fawn is a lightweight distro at 700MB.

Installation

1. When I booted up via the Installation CD, I was directly taken to the “live mode” of Ubuntu. The installer even detected the sound card and welcomed me with a audio clip
2. On the live mode, I was able to connect to Internet (via my secure D-Link Wireless Modem/Router)
3. Ubuntu even detected the SD card and displayed a shortcut for the same on the desktop.
4. The live mode is not a persistent mode and hence I proceeded with the actual “disk” installation. Again this was made easy by an “Install” shortcut on the desktop.
5. Best thing was that I could browse the Internet while the installation was in progress
6. The installation interface is not that great.
   • The time display was wrong even after setting the correct time zone
   • The Partition manager was very slow. After every change in the partition configuration, the installer used to scan the hard drive and this was awfully slow.
7. The installation also read the user profiles on the windows partition and asked if I was interested in importing the user profiles !

Post Installation

1. The Ubuntu startup screen with the Orange progress bar does look cool.
2. On starting up Ubuntu, there was a continuous dump of error message. The error was something like “mmcblk – error 1 – sending read/write“. After some time I realized the error was related to the SD card. Ubuntu had trouble reading the SD card (Note: Ubuntu had no issue reading the SD card in “live mode”)
3. In terms of software, Ubuntu does come bundled with all the goodies. There was even a free Sudoku game ! Cool eh
4. Even though I didn’t install any video drivers for my ATI card, proper resolution was set for the wide screen display.
5. I turned on the Desktop effects and even this worked flawlessly. I had the “wobble” and “cube” effects working with no issues.

Screenshots (Click to view the enlarged image)

More screenshots can be found here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/venukb/sets/72157600269090101/

Try out Ubuntu if you haven’t. It does look like a good alternative to SuSE.

Google Personalized Search which was out of Beta this February was enabled by default for every Google account.

Once you login to your Google Account, your entire “Web History” is being recorded by Google. The recording is not just limited to Google Search; in fact searches across the various Google services such as Image Search, Map Search etc are recorded.

This web history could be used by Google to improve the search results. For users it does provide useful information regarding the search done over the period of time(Trends).

In fact you can search for items within your search history

However the problem I have observed from the past few weeks is that this new personalized service screws the Link URL’s of the search results (I am not completely sure Personalized Search is the culprit)

1. Log into your Google Account
2. Search for something using Google Search
3. Copy a search result link

For E.g. The URL of the first search result for keyword “Sudoku”:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.websudoku.com%2F&ei=ipZYTg&usg=AbYUJnig&sig2=wezA

The link I intended to copy was this: http://www.websudoku.com

For every other link that I intend to copy and use (share), 3 parameters are added to the URL

• ei
• usg
• sig2

Even if you pause the web history, all the 3 parameter are still present in the search result links. So this probably means that even if you pause web history, google internally does collect web search data.

Till few weeks back, I had no issues in copying links from Google Search results, but now its totally messed up. The only way to get out of this mess is to logout of Google, which in turn logs you out of all Google Services.

Are you facing a similar problem ? Is there any way to avoid this mess ?

P.S. Meanwhile I checked for the behavior in Yahoo and Live Search services. In Yahoo the link is screwed irrespective of whether you are logged in or not. In Live Search there is no issue in copying the link.

Flickr announced a new improved version of the photo slideshow. The old version of the photo slideshow definitely sucked; it was slow and sluggish. The new version definitely rules

• Fast loading of images.
• Much bigger photos
• Ability to view titles and description

Click on the photo below to see the new Flickr Slideshow in action.

Just a few days back I bought licensed copy of Mint; the cute powerful Web analytics application. When I wrote about Mint some days back I also mentioned about the poor navigation interface in Google Analytics

Looks like I was not the only one complaining; Jeff Veen and Brett Corsby unveiled the new version of Google Analytics at the EMetrics Summit.

What’s different?
We’ve redesigned the reporting interface for greater customization and collaboration. This should make it easier for businesses and website owners to find and share the data you need to make informed decisions. The new version presents data more clearly and in context, so you can look at a single report to gain insights rather than having to pull up several reports to understand what action to take.

(By the way I was also wondering what Jeff Veen was doing after moving to Google since I wasn’t seeing any progress on Measure Map or Analytics )

The analytics accounts will be activated over the period of time and as of today the new version is available in Australia.

Checkout the demo for more details on the new features.

Consilient has brought its free mobile E-Mail application called Push to  India.

Using this application you can retrieve E-Mail’s from your Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail AOL or any POP3/IMAP E-Mail account.You can also send and receive photos and read your work email using Consilient Push.

The Push service also has attachment support (ZIP, MS Word, PDF & Excel) and uses 128-bit encryption.

The help section of the Consilient web site has pointers to the User Guide and FAQ

Unfortunately I don’t have data connection on my Airtel mobile and hence wasn’t able to download the “push” application and use it.

If you have a mobile with access to data network, go ahead and try the free mobile E-Mail application.

Note: Do have a look at the supported phones as well before trying out the application.

Apple’s iPod has become a huge cultural phenomenon similar to what Sony’s walkman created few decades back.

The success of iPod also has bought in a lot of players in the iPod accessories market.

The Bose SoundDock digital music system is one of the accessory specifically designed to expand and enhance your enjoyment of the music stored on dockable iPod’s

Thanks to my brother; this accessory is now part of my big list of iPod accessories and at 300$ is probably one of the most expensive one too.

Key feature of Bose SoundDock

• Bose proprietary acoustic design: Rich, full sound from a relatively small enclosure.
• Docking cradle: Holds and automatically charges your iPod, iPod photo, iPod mini or iPod nano whether its playing or not.
• Infrared remote control: Controls the system and basic iPod functions from across the room.

Unit Specification

• 6.65″ H x 11.91″ W x 6.48″
• 4.56 lb (2.1 kg)

Pros

• Very easy to setup. Also connectors are provided(3 connectors) so that the different types of iPod’s can be docked.
• I have been continuously listening to music (not typical of me) from the past few days and I am totally impressed by the sound quality. The audio is clear and not a strain on your ears even at high volumes.
• At 2kg’s its totally portable and is an ideal choice for people on the move.
• The dock charges the iPod automatically and is probably this is probably one of the easiest ways of charging the iPod.

Cons

• Can be used only with iPod. There are no other auxiliary inputs into the system.
• Even though the connectors are provided to accommodate the different generation of iPod’s, my video iPod was not sitting properly in the dock. I have to literally struggle everytime to see that its docked properly.
• The SoundDock is not portable in the sense that you have to always carry it around along with the power adapter. A built-in battery would have made it more attractive.
• Its very expensive; There are couple of other alternatives listed at the end of the post.
• The remote is of limited functionality; you cannot switch between albums/playlists. You cannot change the Equalizer setting.
• Even though you can play videos, you can’t navigate between the different videos in the library.

Alternatives to Bose SoundDock

1. Altec Lansing has a lot of products targeted for iPod’s. You can find the list of all the models at this link
   
2. Apple iPod Hi-Fi
   
3. JBL – On Time and Radial Series
   
4. Logitech
   

When I initially started this blog I signed up with Statcounter service which showed me detailed data of visitors reading my posts. It was exciting and nice to see the increasing number of visitors every day.

However the free service of Statcounter has limited functionality and you infer less data with more visitors visiting your blog.

Later I started using Google’s free analytics service: Google Analytics.

I have been using it from the past 8 months and I still find it difficult to get in terms with the user interface. Of all Google products, I believe Analytics has one of the worst navigation interface.

There are 2 analytics service I have heard a lot of and I am waiting to try it.

1. MeasureMap
2. Mint

Mint definitely looks good except for the fact that you have to shell out 30$ for the service.

MeasureMap was acquired by Google a year back and even now the site is accepting email addresses for invitations.

There is no update on the future of this service and 1 year is really a long time ! What ever happened to the service ? What ever happened to Jeffrey Veen ?

I started my web log with Blogger and later on moved to WordPress.com. The restrictions/limited features on WordPress.com made me switch to WordPress.org which at that time required a user to buy his own web hosting and a domain name.

This gave birth to venukb.com/blog and on mid April I will be celebrating the first anniversary of this web log

I did write a nice little post on my web site setup experience:
How to setup your own web site !

The site is currently hosted by GoDaddy and for my economy paid/Linux based hosting I got

• 5 GB Space
• 250 GB Transfer
• 500 Email Accounts
• 10 MySQL Databases
• 50 Email Forwards
• Forums, Blogging, Photo Galleries
• No ads

Price: 3$/month i.e. 36$/Year.

However access to my web log is very slow and many uses/readers have repeatedly told me about this !

• One of the reasons is the CMS that is used to host the blog: WordPress. Thought the latest version (2.x) has made lot of improvements in terms of database access, MySQL driven WordPress is still slow
• The second reason is the hosting itself, I am not at all happy with the service provided by GoDaddy !
• The blog which initially had 20-30 unique visitors now has at least 900-1000 unique visitors !

I have decided to switch from GoDaddy but I am not able to decide on good/better hosting service provider. I am willing to spend a little bit more on my hosting, but there are like “tons” of hosting providers and the decision making is really getting difficult !

Can anybody suggest me a good hosting provider ? Request you to share your hosting experience as well !

Airtel broadband service, one of the 3 SBU (Strategic Bussiness Unit) of Bharti Enterprises has now started offering 2Mbps bandwidth plans.

The official site is still not updated with the latest tariff plans. The service is available only in select areas (as told by the customer service).

Sushubh has more info about the new packages.

Special Double Speed Offer

My 256kbps unlimited plan seems to have been automatically upgraded to 512kbps !!

2Mbps Packages