I use Google Calendar Sync to synchronize my Outlook calendar items with Google Calendar and this worked fine until I upgraded to Office 2010.

Google Calendar Sync did not like Outlook 2010 and I was no longer able to synchronize calendar items. I was almost tempted to go back to Outlook 2007 and then I found a thread to resolve this issue

Follow these steps to get Google Sync work with Outlook 2010

1. Backup Outlook.exe. If you have done a default install of Office 2010, the file can be found at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14
2. Close Outlook if its already running and ensure that Outlook.exe is not listed in Task Manager
3. Edit Outlook.exe in a Hex Editor
4. Replace text 14.0.0 with 12.0.0
5. Save the file.
6. Start Outlook and ensure that its still functioning
7. Start Google Calendar Sync and you should see sync back in action.

A service is a long running executable which does require any user intervention and is configured to start when the operating system is booted.

On Windows, the services are managed via services.msc and you can also communicate with a NT service using the SC tool.

On Linux the services can be controlled via the chkconfig command line tool.

Usage details of chkconfig  is shown below:

chkconfig –list [name]
chkconfig –add <name>
chkconfig –del <name>
chkconfig [--level <levels>] <name> <on|off|reset>

Add and Del options are used to create or delete services for management. A service can be activated or deactivated using the on or off flags. Note that you have to mention the runlevel using the --level option.

The absensce of this runlevel will lead to the settings being applied to the current runlevel.

The <name> argument refers to the name of the service and this can be found by referring to the /etc/init.d director on Linux, which is a central repository for all startup scripts.

Also note that chkconfig modifies the data on /etc/rc[0-6].d directories and not the actual startup scripts.

A much faster way of enabling or disabling Linux services is by using the ntsysv command.

The command lists the services available on the repository (/etc/init.d) and enables the user to disable/enable services in one shot.

Also if the service name looks too cryptic, you can always press F1 to get more information about the selected service.

As with chkconfig, if you need to control the services at multiple runlevel’s you need to invoke ntsysv with the --level argument

ntsysv --level 345 will configure the services on runlevel 3, 4 and 5.

If you are a Linux newbie, Linux.com has an excellent introduction to Services, runlevel’s and rc.d scripts.

Note: In Debian, services are managed using the update-rc.d command

I have been reading in many posts which mention special tools to help in ejecting/removing a USB disk.

The Windows “Safely Remove Hardware” feature has been notorious for hiding itself after installing the new hardware.

You do have the option of Ejecting the hardware; however this becomes a pain if you are working with multiple USB devices.

Also in Windows XP, one USB device might list multiple entries in the Remove Hardware dialog. In Windows Vista there is a option to filter the device components.

Do you really need to eject the USB Hardware ?

Most of the USB Disks are optimized for safe removal and in my opinion you rarely need to use the “Eject” or “Safely Remove Hardware” feature.

To confirm this setting do the following

1. Right Click on the removable disk and select Properties
2. Click on the Hardware Tab, select the removable disk and click on the Properties button
3. Click on the Policies Tab and you should see the following window
   
4. As you can see from the available options, the disk is either optimized for quick removal or for performance and most of the disks by default are optimized for quick removal.

With write caching disabled by default for most of the USB disks, you really don’t need to worry about ejecting or safely removing the USB hardware.

Note: Unlike USB drives, the hard drives have write caching enabled by default for better performance and hence are susceptible to data loss or corruption on power outage.

If you are still not comfortable unplugging the USB disk without Ejecting, you can always add a shortcut on your desktop to quickly access the Safely Remove Hardware dialog

The target of the shortcut should point to:

RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

Alternatively you can install utilities such as USB Disk Ejector which simplify the above task.

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?

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.

I happened to reinstall the OS on my system (yet again) and there is a set of software that I install after every OS re-install. In fact I have a “Must Have” directory which has all the software’s that I use on a day to day basis.

Here is my list of “must have” applications for Windows. I am also mentioning it in the order of install of these applications.

Kaspersky Antivirus

The first thing to do after reinstalling an OS (or before you connect to the Internet) is to install a good Antivirus  and a AntiSpyware application. I currently have a 2 year subscription of Kaspersky and its one of the best AV applications that I have used so far.

There are a lot of quality free Antivirus software out there, but this has been one area where I am not willing to take risk by opting for a free alternative. I’ve had bad experience using some of the free alternatives and even some of the paid ones such as Norton gave me a lot of trouble.

Kaspersky takes the least amount of memory and CPU and also does the best job when finding/detecting viruses. No wonder its rated in the top in almost all the Antivirus reviews !

For spyware, as of now I am relying on Windows Defender which comes pre-installed with Vista ! Not sure if I am taking a risk here

Mozilla Firefox

Unfortunately the OS (Windows XP/Vista) does not come pre-installed with this powerful browser and I do have to install it separately ! Also thanks to the continuous updates, I always download the latest version rather than choosing the installable in my “Must Have” directory !

Few years back if you happened to visit a browsing center, you would only find IE installed on all the systems. When I used to ask about Firefox, I always used to get “What is that” expression ! Now I see that Firefox is also installed by default. Yes more users are now aware of this browser and rightly so !

I am not going to explain the choice of this browser; If you are a Firefox user you know the reason, if you are not, you better switch and start using Firefox !

And if you also happen to reinstall your system OS every now and then, do remember to backup the bookmarks via the Bookmark Manager !

WinRar

This is again a shareware application, but I do have a registered copy of WinRar and its way better than WinZip. Especially while handling the CAB or the JAR files I find WinRar very useful. 7Zip is a free alternative if you don’t want to shell out money for WinRar.

Free Download Manager

When it comes to download managers, you again have a lot of options. I have tried most of them and have finally settled on Free Download Manager. It has the best user interface and does not run any Ads !

I do find the community options annoying is one feature that I turn off during the installation.

Do remember to run the “Optimization master” (found under options menu) to get the best download experience possible via FDM !

Launchy

If you are keyboard junkie then you would definitely like Launchy. It’s one powerful application launcher and have written more about this app in my earlier post.

Read my earlier post on Launchy !

FeedDemon

I hate web based RSS readers, they are slow and UI is sluggish compared to the desktop based readers. Of the desktop based readers, I love FeedDemon for its simple yet powerful user interface and the synchronization feature ! What more, its free and a must have if you don’t like Google Reader

Read my earlier post on FeedDemon !

VLC Media Player/iTunes

Ah ! I hate the inbuilt Windows Media Player ! I end up seeing the “codec” error almost every time I play a video (which is not AVI ! ).

This is when VLC Media Player comes to my rescue ! It’s a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, etc) as well as DVDs, VCD’s, and various streaming (RTSP) protocols.

I also install iTunes to manage my iPod and the loaned iPhone !

Notable Alternative: Zoom Player

Google Talk

Google Talk is the only IM client that I use ! Yes I’m done with Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger ! Google Talk is light on memory and has almost all the features I need from a IM client; Presence, Chat History, Sharing files etc. And I love the way it delivers IM even though I have logged in from more than one location !

CCleaner

This app might not be required as soon as you re-install the OS, but does come in handy over the period of time. The default “Disk cleanup” feature in Windows does almost nothing compared to CCleaner ! And yes it does the cleanup work pretty fast too !

TextPad

TextPad saves you the pain of installing an editor for every other file format ! Want to open a CSS file, PHP file, HTML file,  a properties file or even a file with no extension, TextPad comes in handy.

Notable Alternatives: Notepad++ and PSPad

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Live photo gallery is one of the applications from the Live family that is worth loading. No Google love here;I prefer this app over Picasa for a number of reasons !

Read my earlier post on Photo Gallery to know why ! 

µTorrent

If you download a lot of stuff from torrent a lightweight BitTorrent client is a must ! Even though I don’t download much data from Torrent sites, I have used µTorrent a couple of times !

The install size is pretty small and even the memory usage is pretty low compared to the other BitTorrent clients !

Foxit PDF Reader

Adobe Acrobat Reader is a pain to use; its slow and more often than not it freezes the browser (including Firefox). Though there are extensions in Firefox to avoid this, nothing has been done to improve the Reader loading speed. It’s one of the reasons I have settled on Foxit for opening PDF documents. Its amazingly fast and its a must have if you open a lot of PDF documents !

Read my earlier post on Foxit !

Note: The below mentioned applications might make more sense if you author a blog

FileZilla

There are a lot of quality FTP clients for windows and I have settled on FileZilla for its simplicity. You have a site manager feature, if you do connect to a lot of different FTP servers and transferring of files between the server and client is damn easy (Even drag and drop onto the server is supported)

WinSCP

WinSCP is a free SFTP and SCP client for Windows. Unlike FTP clients, there aren’t many quality clients out there supporting SCP on Windows. When I edit any of the files on my server I always do it via WinSCP. Editing a file on the server opens the same on a SCP editor and a save on the file automatically puts back the file on the server.

WinSCP also has come in handy for me to transfer files between my iPhone and the PC !

The good thing about WinSCP is that it does come with a standalone version which can be copied and run from your USB drive !

Windows Live Writer

Almost every blog writer has fell in love with this Microsoft product ! Live Writer simplifies the task of writing and publishing posts !

Read this to know why Live writer rocks !

The following is the other list of software that I install and have mentioned separately since they are not the “must have”

1. SharePod – Used to copy songs between iPod and PC
2. Eusing Registry Cleaner
3. Flickr Uploadr
4. eBay Desktop
5. Twhirl Twitter Client
6. PowerISO

What does your list look like ?

I am sure many would be surprised with the title of this post. Gmail for one provides with almost 6.6GB of space and its keeps growing every day. It would be amazingly difficult to fill up this space.

Even on the Gmail’s home page, you would see this marketing statement:

Over 6628.815124 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so
you'll never need to delete another message.

So why would anyone want to clean up/delete the mails on his/her Gmail account ?

I for one find it annoying to store unwanted mails; Note that I am not talking of spam mails and referring to marketing mails etc which are genuine but unwanted !

These mails just fill up your pages and most importantly show up while I am searching for important mails.

So how to clean up your Gmail ?

Most of the time I ensure that I delete the mails as soon as I see them; however some of them still manage to live in my inbox. This is how I clean up my inbox.

1. Click on a message which I find “unwanted”
2. Click on “Filter Messages like these” option (Snapshot shown below)
   
3. The above option was introduced to ease the creation of Filter/labels and for some reason the filtered messages pages doesn’t have a “delete” option !
4. This is where the Gmail keyboard shortcuts come in handy . Select all the message and press #. The selected messaged are deleted !

So even though there are no menu options to operate on the filtered mails, the keyboard shortcuts still does work !

Do you delete your Gmail acccount emails ?

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

WordPress 2.5 was released some days back and I upgraded to the same with some minor hiccups. There were high expectations from me and everybody with respect to the Admin user interface.

I for one was totally disappointed when I found out that the menu items in the interface were taking almost 50% on my 15″ widescreen.

Also I found that it was not just me complaining; Many found that the new admin interface was not that user friendly including Dean Robinson who came up with Fluency Admin Theme for WordPress 2.5. The theme moves the main options to a sidebar and the sub-options to the top (screenshot below)

It just looks so neat and it even simplifies the user navigation. The only limitation of this theme is that it works only with CSS2 compliant browsers i.e. Firefox, Safari and IE8. If support is added for the other browsers, it should definitely qualify to become the official theme for WordPress Admin UI !

Thanks to Raj Gaurav for pointing me to this plugin!

Download Fluency Admin Plugin

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 !!

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 ?

In one of my earlier post I covered some of the tools that can be used to copy songs from iPod to PC. Most of the tools available are shareware and there are very few free quality applications.

Sharepod is one such quality application for iPod. It’s a lightweight music management tool for iPod which you can run from within the iPod disk. This circumvents the necessity of having iTunes on every other system for managing your iPod.

Below is the list of Sharepod features which might motivate you to install and use it

• Track tag editing
• Video import support
• iPod Shuffle supportDrag and drop tracks to Explorer
• Completely rewritten codebase to safely import files to your iPod
• Play Count, Last Played Date support
• Volume Adjustment support
• Faster loading/sorting time!
• Built-in Media Player
• Tag Editor to edit track tags : Title, Artist, Genre, Volume Adjustment, Media Type etc.

SharePod has almost all the features available on iTunes and has the additional ability to backup/copy songs from iPod to PC.

If you know any other such quality free tools for iPod, please feel free to suggest the same in the comments section.

Many a times I have been in a situation where I need to delete a windows service and every time I end up “googling” to find the easiest/fastest way of doing this. Most of the posts in the search result talk about modifying the windows registry to delete the service, which isn’t always foolproof.

The easisest way of deleting a service is by using the sc.exe command line tool. This tools comes bundled with Windows and is probably the easiest way of maintaining and administering Windows Services.

Lets take an example of a totally useless service on Windows: Windows Search Service.

The first thing to do is to get the name of the Windows Service; What is shown in the service list (Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services) is the Display name and this cannot be used as an input to sc.exe. The example service we have chosen has the name “WSearch” as shown below:

To delet the above service all I need to do is to execute the following command

sc delete WSearch

The SC tool comes in handy for many operations other than delete. A detailed description of this tool can be found in the following knowledge base article.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/251192

P.S.

You can always disable a service, but if you are in a situation where you need to delete a service, the above tool definitely comes in handy.

Synergy is an open source software lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware.

It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk. I have a similar setup at work and till now I was struggling while switching between the desktop PC and the notebook. You could remote desktop to one of the computers, however you would loose out on using both the display units.

The official documentation for configuring Synergy isn’t that straightforward. Here is how I configured Synergy between 2 computers running Windows.

1. Install the software on all the computers that will share the keyboard and mouse. In my case I installed the windows version of Synergy on both the desktop and notebook.
2. Configure the synergy server on the PC to which the keyboard and the mouse is connected.
   • Start Synergy and select “Share this computers keyboard and mouse(server)” option
   • Open the configuration dialog by clicking on “Configure”

   

3. Configure the “Screens” and the “Links“. For my above setup, I configured 2 screen and 2 links as shown below.

   

   Note that synergy recommends to input the computer name as the screen name. If you don’t have DNS configured, you can also input the IP addresses in the “Alias” box while configuring the screens.

   The links section tell synergy about the position of the configured screens. As you can see from the above image, its not enough to indicate that the laptop is on the left of the desktop. I also need to configure a link saying that the desktop is on the right of the laptop.

4. Click on “Start” to start the synergy server.

5. On the client side (i.e. on my laptop), I just need to instruct synergy to use another computer’s keyboard and mouse.

   

Once the client successfully connects to the Synergy server, you can easily switch between the 2 computers. When the mouse is moved to the leftmost part of the desktop screen, it automatically switches onto the laptop screen. All further keyboard strokes are also directed towards the laptop.

If you are a keyboard junkie like me, you might also want to configure the “Hotkeys” on the server as shown below

I have one key configured to bring the laptop to focus and another to bring the desktop into focus. You can also configure synergy as a service so that its started automatically when you log in.

(Matt Cutts has written a post titled How to configure synergy in 6 steps to help you setup synergy between 2 computers running Windows and Ubuntu.)

Pointui (pronounced point-you-i) is a software which brings in a total new user experience on Windows Mobile 5/6 powered devices. Techcrunch notes that this software is probably more for the users who are envious of iPhone; The UI navigation does look very much on the lines of iPhone, but again iPhone is not just about the easy navigation.

As we all know the basic user interface of Windows Mobile sucks big time and it hasn’t improved much in Windows Mobile 6. This post by Gizmodo discusses some of the flaws in the current version mobile OS and also confirms that Microsoft will probably work on these in the future version of Windows Mobile.

I have been using Pointui on my HTC Touch for the past 2 days and I should say I am not un-impressed by the free program. Yes, Pointui is free.

Pointui helps you to go around the OS using finger swipes and it takes some time for one to come in terms with this interface.

Home Screen

The home screen does have all the widgets that will help you quickly launch the most commonly used programs on the devices. It also has options to quickly access the phone settings, change volume levels and lock/unlock the phone.

You can also slide at the center of the home screen to access the time/calendar and your outlook task list.

However it lacks the following:

1. There is no way to “theme” the home screen. The blue background really looked awkward on my HTC Touch I couldn’t find any way of changing this.

2. Windows Mobile 6 has a new feature via which lists the active running programs and you can selectively kill each process or stop all the applications (In windows mobile 5, the same was accomplished more painfully by going into the settings menu). The Pointui home screen removes access to this feature.

3. The battery icon doesn’t tell you if its being charged.

Some screenshots which might inspire you to try out Pointui

Settings Screen and Applications Screen

Unlocking using Pointui

More Help

When Pointui is launched for the first time, it also launches the automated help. The video of the same is embedded below.

You can always access this help via “Settings -> Help”.

Download Pointui for Windows Mobile

One of my favorite tools, Launchy just got upgraded to 2.0. As the website says, Launchy is an utility desinged to help us forget about the start menu in Windows. I have recommeneded this tool to many of my friends and  not one of them have complained about it. Its like a “must have” tool for Windows.

The new version has been completely written in QT and hence the old plug-ins and skins will no longer work. The old configuration will also be wiped with the upgrade to 2.0

The options are now merged into a single preference dialog.

Anyone who wants to realize the true power of Launchy, should also read the “Readme.pdf” file once.

I have written more about Launchy is some of my earlier posts:

• Launchy – QuickSilver for Windows
• Launchy – Out of Beta

And if you still didn’t like launchy (which according to me is impossible), try out the other alternatives

• Keybreeze
• Colibri

After upgrading to Windows Vista, setting up the communication between Vista and my HTC Touch was a PITA ! And I would like give the entire credit of this pain to Vista !

On Windows XP, Activesync did a very good job in syncing with the smartphone and I also managed to synchronize over Bluetooth. When I plugged in the handset (via USB) to the vista upgraded laptop, the windows mobile device center opened up and showed the connection status as "Connected".

The dialog box looked something like this:

Open "Windows Mobile Device Center" and you are treated with a dialog box with 2 check boxes (as shown above)

The "Waiting" status actually turned into "Connected" and the Storage card of the mobile phone (with the HTC Touch Photo) was also listed in Windows Explorer. Vista just gave me a feeling that everything was setup with no issues. However I couldn’t sync contacts/notes etc and I couldn’t even explore the device.

Initially I thought that the unlocking of the "SIM Locked" phone might have caused this problem and I even did a hard reset on my device. I started WMDC with lot of hope only to see the dreaded box again

It took a lot of time for me to realize that the connection was never setup properly. (I found this out from the Activesync status report on the handset)

I went through a lot of forum threads and none of them had a concrete solution for the above problem. In one of the threads I read about running Windows Update after connecting your handset.

On doing this, Vista update suggested that there was an "optional" update for Windows Mobile Device Center. After I ran this update, I was presented with a totally new looking Windows Mobile Device Center.

• Programs and Services allowed me to get updates of WMDC.
• Pictures,Music and Video option allowed me to import pictures and music from the handset
• File Management allowed me to explore the device
• Mobile Device Setting allowed me to setup a "Sync" partnership with the device.

So all that was required to fix the problem was to run Windows update ! But wait ! I ran windows update and the WMDC update never showed up !!! This is why I blamed vista in the first place for the pain it caused. The update showed up only when I connected the device which in a way was weird.

So if any of you guys are having trouble setting up WMDC, run the Windows update after connecting the device ! I even managed to "Sync" over bluetooth with no issues.

Let me know if any of you have still trouble setting up a sync partnership between your handset and WMDC running on Vista !

When I bought the HTC Touch Smartphone I was never told by the reseller that it was locked onto Airtel Network in India. Only after seeing some of the comments left on my earlier post, I realized that it was a SIM locked phone.

Recently when I traveled to Beijing, I felt the pain of having a SIM Locked phone. I had all my contacts and other details on this phone and yet it wasn’t useful when I needed it the most.

When I inserted the China Mobile SIM onto the phone, I was prompted to enter the "Unlock Code". A search for the unlocking procedure on Google pointed me to a lot of paid sites which were ready to send the unlock code on a payment of 20$.

However I did stumble upon a thread in XDA Developers forum which helped me to easily unlock my HTC Touch ! (free of cost)

Instructions for Unlocking HTC Touch

1. Use ActiveSync to copy the following files onto your phone

• Cert_SPCS.cab
• EnableRapi.cab

2. Install the above 2 applications on your phone by clicking on the CAB

3. Unzip Touch_Unlock.zip on your PC  and run Unlock_Touch.exe (See that the ActiveSync connection between the PC and the mobile is still up)

4. A file unlock_code.txt will be generated which will have the 8 digit unlock code (Ignore any other digits if generated.)

Download: Cert_SPCS.cab/EnableRapi.Cab/Touch_Unlock.zip

More information can be found on the following official thread on XDA Forum.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=328221

The procedure was quite simple and thanks a ton to Rishi, the guy who submitted the procedure on the XDA forum

Unlocking HTC Touch Dual

Many visitors have landed on this post searching for a unlock solution for HTC Touch Dual.

Going by the comments on this thread, it seems like the Unlock solution for Touch mentioned above does not work for HTC Touch Dual.

I spent some time on XDA forums and finally found this thread which lists the procedure to CID unlock the HTC Touch Dual

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=355730

CID Unlock is also referred to as the vendor lock and is done by the  manufacturer to prevent installation of ROM not released by them.

After unlocking using the procedure, you can flash any ROM of your choice.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=355397

Note: Use the above procedure at your own risk. I will not be responsible for any damage caused by the files attached in the procedure.

If you know about any other procedure/tools to unlock HTC Touch/Dual, please feel free to suggest the same in the comments section.

Windows Live Writer Beta 3 was released a few days back and this is one tool from Microsoft that deserves a lot of praise. It definitely simplifies the task of writing posts for your blog.

Beta 3 has the following new features:

• Insert videos using new ‘Insert Video’ dialog
  

• Upload images to Picasaweb when publishing to your Blogger blog

• Publish XHTML-style markup

• Use Writer in 28 additional languages

• Print your posts

• Justify-align post text

• Better image handling (fewer blurry images)

• Resolved installation issues from last release

• Many other bug fixes and enhancements

More on Windows Live Writer

• WLW – Powerful Desktop Based Weblog Client
• Live Writer Beta 2 Reviewed

If you are still using your favorite blogging platform’s web based console to write posts, its high time you switched to Windows Live writer !

The other day one of the application server wouldn’t start up because of a required port being used by another application. This, I am sure is of the common problem faced by many developers

The task manager in Windows shows only the active processes and gives no detail on the ports opened by these processes. One of the ways to find the process using a port of your interest is to use the netstat command.

The netstat command on windows can be used to list the TCP connections, ports on which the computer is listening, Ethernet statistics, the IP routing table etc.

The netsat -b option can be used to list the process name that is using a port. (Not sure why this option is not mentioned in the Microsoft Documentation)

However the command is so slow that you could probably restart windows couple of times !

(On Linux/Unix use nestat -p to list the processes names along with the list of active TCP/UDP ports)

Currports is a stand-alone application that doesn’t require any installation process or any additional DLLs. The cports.exe executable can be run from any location including your USB drive.

The following snapshot pretty much summarizes the features available on Currports !

If there are better alternative applications, please feel free to suggest the same.

The camera on my old Sony Ericsson T630 was totally hopeless. Also the amount of memory was so low that after every few photos, I had to move it out to make some space for new ones.

However the same is not true with my new HTC Touch. The 2MP camera doesn’t take the best of the pictures but its a very handy feature to have in a mobile device. The 1GB memory does take care of storing the photos for a long time.

(God! I am talking about HTC so much these days; For those who are bored with these HTC posts, please bear with me )

Here is a look at the HTC Camera Interface:

You can set the resolution for the photos and set white balance depending on the lighting conditions. The max 2M resolution setting has a image output with resolution of 1600*1200 which isn’t too bad and the photos were definitely worth uploading to my Flickr Account

One of the mobile tools recommended by Flickr is Shozu. Also I had seen Scoble using this service extensively to upload the photos taken on his Nokia N95 !

Installation

1. Sign-up/Register on Shozu
2. Select your mobile device (List of Compatible phones)
3. Once you complete the registration, a SMS will be sent with a link pointing to the Shozu application which is compatible with your mobile device.

Shozu on Windows Mobile 6

Shozu isn’t the easiest of applications to use; However it does accomplish the task of uploading and tagging your photos. Here are few screenshots of Shozu User Interface.

As you can note from the above screenshots, Flickr isn’t the only destination for your camera photos. You can upload to a host of locations including Blogger, WordPress, Facebook, Webshots, FTP site etc.

And its not just photos, you can even upload videos and backup your contacts with Shozu!! With Shozu application installed on your mobile device, you don’t have to copy the photos to a intermediate location like your PC.

Checkout some of the photos taken on HTC and uploaded via Shozu here !

Do you use your camera phone to take pictures ? How do you copy/archive/upload these pictures ?

Try Shozu

ActiveSync, a synchronization program developed by Microsoft allows a mobile device to be synchronized with a Desktop PC. Other than syncing your contacts, calendar, tasks and notes you can also sync the Emails on the Exchange server.

ActiveSync also allows you to

1. Copy files between PC and the Mobile Device
2. Install/Uninstall Mobile Applications

ActiveSync can also be used to connect to a network or Internet. The connected device can use the computer’s network connection as if it were its own. You can use this feature to perform tasks such as downloading non-Outlook e-mail messages or to browse the Internet.

The above feature was the primary reason I wanted to setup a ActiveSync partnership via Bluetooth on my HTC Touch Smartphone. The device did have Wi-Fi capabilities;however the minute I turned it on, it used to suck the handset battery big time !

Fortunately Bluetooth wasn’t that damaging on the battery and hence is an ideal way to sync with your PC and also happens to be the best way to connect to Internet as well !!

Here is a step by step guide to setup ActiveSync via Bluetooth

(Note that the snapshots and features correspond to ActiveSync 4.5 and a Windows Mobile 6 powered Device)

1. Setup a Bluetooth partnership between the device and PC
   I am not going to write in detail about this step. The above process essentially involves turning on the Bluetooth on both your PC and Handset, making them discoverable and adding the Bluetooth device to the “Devices” list. Optionally you can also setup a secure partnership by associating a passkey.
2. Add Incoming Bluetooth COM port on your PC
   The Bluetooth Settings on your PC has a tab to configure the Bluetooth COM ports. Add one Incoming port (device initiates the connection) as shown below
   
3. Set the Bluetooth COM port in the ActiveSync connection settings dialog.
   
4. On your Handset go to Start -> Settings -> Connections -> Bluetooth
5. Your PC should be listed in the Devices Tab (If step 1 was successfully done)
6. Click on the PC device in the list to open the “Partnership Settings” screen. After clicking on the “Refresh” button, you should see a “ActiveSync” service listed as shown below
   
7. Open ActiveSync on your Mobile Device : Start -> Programs -> ActiveSync
8. Click on Menu -> Connect via Bluetooth ! If the ActiveSync partnership has been configure properly as described above, you should see activity on ActiveSync running both on PC and the mobile device. If your PC is connected to the Internet, the same will also be used by your Bluetooth connected mobile device.

If you had any trouble getting the ActiveSync to work via Bluetooth, feel free to raise the issue in the comments section

If you are used to a tabbed browser or a tabbed text editor you would also love a tabbed Windows console. As we all know the windows console isn’t the prettiest of the applications nor its usable when it comes to selecting text or pasting text. (I am not sure if the console application has been improved on Windows Vista)

The Console project on SourceForge.net is one handy application if you use the windows console a lot. Features include

• Multiple Tabs
• Text Editor like Text Selection
• Customizable console – You can configure the background color, image and transparency levels
• Keyboard shortcuts – If you are keyboard junkie, you would appreciate this feature too

One of the nice things about this console application is that you could configure multiple console types defining a custom look and feel for each of them. The keyboard shortcut can then be used to create a new console of your choice.

If you are looking for a similar tabbed Telnet/SSH console checkout Poderosa which is a nice but not stable alternative to Putty.

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.

After launching the Internet browser on my HTC Touch, the first site I opened was of my own blog. The browser almost came to halt while loading the home page.

When I loaded other sites such as GMail, Flickr, Google Search one thing I noticed was that all these sites had a page compatible with the mobile browser. The content fitted exactly to the bounds of the handset display. Images were kept to minimal, so was the content !

A search for WordPress+mobile on Google took me to Alex Kings WordPress Mobile Edition plug-in for WordPress. The package consists of a WordPress plug-in which detects requests from Mobile Browsers. It also has a WordPress theme which takes care of rendering your site on the mobile browser.

You can easily read all the posts with no need for horizontal scrolling. The page fits your device display perfectly.

Here are some snapshots of my blog opened in IE mobile browser.

Even the images fit nicely into the display width. You almost have the same experience as reading on your normal web browser.

And if somebody is still interested in seeing the original page (loaded with ads and sidebar), you can always exit the mobile edition and view the standard browser edition.

Is your site mobile browser friendly ? If not install and activate Alex Kings WordPress Mobile Edition Plug-in. Probably I should start tagging my buddies to install and activate this plug-in

Download WordPress Mobile Edition

After switching over to HTC Touch, I did have a tough time configuring MMS on the handset. Matters were made worse by Airtel’s “amazing” customer care service.

Initially I was told that the settings would be sent to my phone and that this would avoid the pain of doing the manual configuration. The settings never came; after few more calls to the customer service, I realized that my old Sony Ericsson phone was still registered in Airtel’s database and they were trying to send the wrong setting.

I finally was able to manually configure the settings not with the help of Google but with little assistance from NowSMS.

So if you are stuck with configuring MMS for Airtel on a Windows Mobile device this is what you need to do:

Activate MMS (if you haven’t)

To Activate MMS, send a SMS with text “MMS ACTIVE” to 121.

Configure the GPRS Connection

1. Go to Start -> Settings -> Connections
2. Click on the Connections item
   
3. Add a new modem connection under MyISP
4. Input a name for the connection
5. Select the modem as “Cellular Line (GPRS)”
   
6. Click next and Input Access Point Name(APN) : airtelmms.com
   

Configure MMS Options

The MMS option screen was kind of hidden and I am not sure if its the same on Windows Mobile 5 as well. Here is how you access the “hidden” MMS options

1. Start -> Messaging -> SMS/MMS
2. Menu -> New MMS
3. Select a Blank Template
4. Menu -> Options -> MMS Options
   

Its kind of weird that I had to create a New MMS message to view the MMS options screen.

Select Servers tab and enter the information as shown on the below screen (This information is what I got from NowSMS)

Note that the Server name can be anything. Also the MMS connection should be pointing to the new modem connection that was created with APN airtelmms.com. This is accomplished by setting it in the “Connect via” box.

Once the configuration is done, set this new server configuration as the default.

That’s it You are now all set to send and receive MMS messages. Also the above steps can be used to configure MMS for any mobile operator, only the settings (Gateway,Server Address etc) would change and this data has to be got from the service provider.

The recent problem of spam comments bypassing the Akismet filter made me realize that its too bad to rely completely on one service.

For one I spent considerable amount of valuable time deleting comments. The other problem was created when these spam comments made their way as “subscription comments” and I got many mails from users asking me the steps to un-subscribe for the comments.

Here are some of the alternatives to prevent comment spam:

Bad Behavior

Akismet focuses only on handling Comment/Pingback/Trackback spam. Your blog might be subject to other attacks such as email harvesting, automated cracking attempts etc.

Bad Behavior, conceived in 2005 as a fingerprinting method for HTTP requests, has proven shockingly effective at identifying and blocking the kind of attacks described above. So with Bad Behavior activated, you would see far less comments filtered by Akismet. In a way Bad Behavior reduced the work load of Akismet.

Spam Karma

Shiv is of the opinion that Spam Karma is much better than Akismet. But other than Shiv, I haven’t heard of too many people voicing the same opinion. Is Spam Karma a worthy alternative to Akismet ? Opinions please

Extended Comment Options

This WordPress plug-in allows you to switch comments and/or pings on or off for batches of existing posts. Once the plug-in is activated, there is a new options page added via which you could control comments on your older posts.

As far as I am concerned, I would hate to switch off commenting on older posts. Most of my posts at least have no connection to the date it was written and hence it doesn’t make sense disabling comments !

WordPress Comment Management

Now this is one options which I completely overlooked. WordPress itself has a pretty good Comment moderation and comment blacklist feature. This can be accessed via “Discussion” on WordPress options page.

In comment moderation, you can add list of words commonly used by the spammers. If a comment contains any of these words in its content, name, URL, e-mail, or IP, it will be held in the moderation queue. You can input one word or IP per line. It will match inside words, so “press” will match “WordPress”.

Comment blacklist does the same thing except for the fact that it marks the comment as spam rather than adding it to the “Comment Moderation” list.

Using the above 2 options, I could have easily marked/moderated hundreds of comments with text: “Nice” & “interesting”

Any other options to prevent comment spam ?

P.S. Benedict has confirmed that Akismet is back in action. Irrespective of this, I would definitely adopt the above options except using the Extended Comment options plug-in.

Amit of Labnol suggested couple of useful sites on this post which help you to get more information about a domain. I particularly liked Whoishostingthis.com which helps you to quickly have a look at the hosting provider of a particular domain.

I would like to recommend the following 2 sites.

Whois.sc

Whois.sc was recently renamed to Domain Tools. Domain Tools has been tracking whois history for quite some time now (since 2000). The information provided by the Domain tools whois service is exhaustive.

The information is categorized into

• Front Page Information – Website Title, Title Relevancy, SEO Score etc
• Indexed Data – Alexa Trend and Ranking
• Server Data – Details about the server where the site is hosted.
• Registry Data – Domain registration data including the Name servers
• DomainTools Exclusive – This information was the one I found very useful. You actually come to know of how many sites are on your shared hosting space. My site seems to be sharing load with 23 other sites. When this site was hosted on Godaddy, it was a whooping 3350 sites !!!

If you are on shared hosting, do check as to how many other sites are sharing your server

Instant Domain Search

Although there are lot of sites which help you in searching for domains, Instant Domain Search stands out. Its a free service that instantly (literally) checks for .com .net and .org sites.

If you are planning to buy a domain, bookmark this site

Are there any other better whois and domain search tools ?

In yesterdays post on Sandisk Cruzer Micro, I was mentioning how U3 Smart technology allows you to carry your favorite PC programs on the flash drive.

Turns out that U3 is not the only technology available to accomplish this task. There is an open source project called PortableApps using which you could turn any flash drive/iPod into a “U3 smart” device.

A portable app is a computer program that you can carry around with you on a portable device and use on any Windows computer. When your USB flash drive, portable hard drive, iPod or other portable device is plugged in, you have access to your software and personal data just as you would on your own PC. And when you unplug the device, none of your personal data is left behind.

Even though you can run the PortableApps along with U3, I decided to first test it on my iPod. There are 3 different flavors of installation available.

Installation

Download any of the above 3 flavors and extract the contents to the root of your flash drive.

PortableApps Menu

Unlike U3 Launchpad, PortableApps Menu does not have the ability to auto-launch when the flash drive is connected to the PC.

The PortableApp application are of “paf” format and can be installed via the PortableApps Menu. The number of Portable applications is limited and is listed on this page.

Download PortableApps

My mom still believes that that her roll film camera is much better than the digital camera that I have. The explanation that she gave was that even though digital cameras can store tons of photos on the memory card, she rarely sees any of them being printed !!

I did try to explain that photographs taken with the film fade with age and the digital ones retain the clarity and the color even after many years.

That said, if the hard drive which stores these photos crashes, you loose the photos forever, unless you have made a backup.

I use Flickr Pro account to backup my photos. The Pro account allows permanent archiving of high resolution images. Again not relying completely on an “online” service, I have backed up the photos on my 30GB iPod too !! (I need to buy an external hard drive soon )

You can easily share photos using Flickr and other similar services. But how to share photos to people who don’t have access to Internet ? Getting the photos printed does make sense in this case.

One way to get the digital photos printed (at least in India) is to copy the photos onto a USB stick (or write to a CD) and take them to a photo studio. Alternatively some of these studios have an online service which allows you to upload the photos and order for a print.

Having already uploaded all my photos to Flickr, I went in search of a online photo printing service which integrates with Flickr.

Flickr does have an option of “ordering prints“, however there seems to be only one non-regional partner named QOOP. The company is based in California and they have to ship printed photos to India; this might turn out to be a time consuming and expensive proposition.

After little bit of “googling” I found 2 online photo printing services based in India

• iTasveer – http://www.itasveer.com/
• Picsquare – http://www.picsquare.com/

Both the services, once authorized, allow you to pull photos from Flickr.

iTasveer seems to be a better service compared to PicSquare. The user interface of iTasveer is much more easier to use/navigate compared to Picsquare.

Also iTasveer is much more faster and has additional tools to modify the photos (crop etc).

On the pricing front, iTasveer is more expensive compared to PicSquare (PicSquare is running a promotion program till June 30). If you are also planning to print your online digital photos, I would definitely recommend iTasveer. I only hope they reduce the pricing a little bit.

How do you manage your digital photos ? How do you back it up ? How do you get the photos printed ?

The sidebar now displays the list of Top commentators for this blog. This has been overdue from some time now.

Nate Sanden’s Top commentator plugin eased the task of showing the top commentators. It is currently shown only on the home page.

In order to accommodate this list on my 2 column theme, I have also decided to move the Blogroll to a separate page.

(Thanks to Shankar for pointing out the Blogroll Plugin)

Note: If you are using the Top Commentators plugin, you should also have a look at the 9 options that could be tweaked by editing the plugin. (Unfortunately, the plugin doesn’t come with a preference page.

I especially found the following options useful:

reset (’hourly’, ‘daily’, ‘weekly’, ‘monthly’, ‘yearly’, ‘#’)
This tells the plugin how often it should reset the comment count for users. For example: If you choose monthly, only comments from the current month will be counted towards a visitors comment count. If you use an integer such as 30, it will show all commentators for the last 30 days.

limit (any positive integer (1 – infinity))
This will limit the maximum number of users you want shown.

filter_users (comma seperated list of usernames)
This will filter out any usernames you don’t want shown. For example: ‘Administrator,Admin’.

filter_user_ids (comma seperated list of user id’s)
This will filter out any user_ids you don’t want shown. For example: ‘1,2′. 1 is almost always the ‘Admin’ user.

number_of_comments (y=yes, n=no)
If you want to only display the commentators name and not the number of comments he/she has made, set this to ‘n’.

List of Top commentators:

• ranjitsinh

Pingdom is a service which provides tools to monitor web sites, E-Mail Servers, FTP servers and a multitude of other services.

Though I didn’t find the service that useful, they do seem to have introduced a nice little tool (free) to check the page loading speed.

http://www.pingdom.com/tools/fpt/?url=www.venukb.com/blog

(Replace the “url” parameter with the URL of your site)

The Full Page Test loads the complete HTML page including all objects : images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.

The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars. It will help in finding the culprit script/image which is probably affecting the page load of your website.

Meanwhile Pingdom.com is linking to a red site according to Mcafee SiteAdvisor !!

More details here:
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/pingdom.com

Contrary to what most people think, deletion of file on windows does not mean permanent loss of the data. 

When the file is deleted, its not “shredded”; Instead, the table of contents that points out the location of the file is erased.  To put in more simpler words, the attribute of the space used by the deleted file is changed from “occupied” to “available”.

Eventually, the hard drive will write new data over the area where the old file is located.

File Recovery utilities take advantage of the fact that the deletion of file in windows is reversible.

Active@ File Recovery is a powerful software utility, designed to restore accidentally deleted files and directories.  It allows you to recover files that have been deleted from the Recycle Bin, as well as the ones deleted bypassing the Recycle Bin (e.g. Shift-Delete).

Active@ File Recovery helps you to restore data residing on hard drives or floppy drives formatted in any of the following file systems:

• FAT12 
• FAT16
• FAT32 
• NTFS 
• NTFS5

User Interface

Active@ File Recovery provides users with 2 options for scanning deleted files

• QuickScan
• SuperScan

QuickScan

QuickScan is a fast and basic scan. Most deleted files and folders can be found using this method. After you have scanned a drive, you can tell what state your deleted files and folders are in by the color of the icons

SuperScan

SuperScan is a much slower and thorough scan. It processes the whole hard drive surface detecting all possible deleted data.

If, after running QuickScan you did not find your deleted files you should go ahead and try SuperScan.

You can also use SuperScan to recover a partition or logical drive that you know has been deleted or damaged. In other words, if you do not see a logical drive listed under a device node in the Local System Devices list, it is time to use SuperScan. 

If a disk has been severely damaged and partitions and files are not found, you should turn on the File types to be recognized based on signatures option.

Provided that the files are not fragmented, Active@ Scan technology would detect the file signatures and would try to reconstruct files of certain types.

Other Features

• Previewing recovered image files – This option is enabled for most of the popular image formats.
• Re-assemble deleted or damaged RAID
• Saving QuickScan/SuperScan results
• Recovery of compressed, fragmented and encrypted files on NTFS
• Creating Disk Image – A mirror copy of your logical or physical drive.

Try Active@ File Recovery

P.S. Check the “Concepts” section in the built-in help of Active@ File Recovery. It has got some amazing information on File Systems and how recovery software works!

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored review.

PixelBeat has nice compilation of some of the commonly used Linux terminal commands. The commands are also categorized and should help in finding the right command/command usage for the task at had.

Link: http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html

Also note the comment in the above page:

Examples marked with • are valid/safe to paste without modification into a terminal, soyou may want to keep a terminal window open while reading this so you can cut & paste.

Don’t forget to Bookmark it for future reference !

Backup in the world of Information Technology refers to the process of making copies of data. This copy of the data would be useful in the event of a data loss. 

Virus attacks, hard disk failure or accidents are the primary reasons for data loss. Most of the PC users have one PC at max and the data is generally stored in a single hard drive.

The most common way of backing up data is to either write it to a CD/DVD or to copy on to a secondary hard drive/USB drive. If you have a hosting space you can backup data even on to this server. One of the problem that I face while backing up data is doing the  incremental backup.

Backup Platinum is a powerful tool that provides professional quality backup of your data to a local drive, LAN, CD/DVD writing device or a remote FTP server.

Other than easing the basic backup functionality, Backup Platinum also can be used to synchronize files between two computers on a network or with a remote FTP server. The backup operation can also be automated using the powerful and flexible scheduler. 

User Interface

Backup platinum uses a wizard approach to define the backup items. While defining the backup item, you can also specify the location for the backup(DVD/FTP etc) and also the time for the backup operation.

Quick Run on the New Item Wizard

In the first step of the wizard, you input the name for the Backup Item. Also you should choose the type of the item. Type can be either of

• Backup – Select this option if you want to backup your data
• Synchronization – Select this type if you want to synchronize data between two different locations.

(Note: The other pages described below are related to the “Backup” option)

The second page of the wizard allows you to add the files/folders/registry keys.

One of the nice things about this page is that there are set of pre-defined items such as Registry Key/Address book/Window setting etc which probably are some of the critical data from any user’s perspective.

Page three of the wizard allows you to choose the backup destination path.

The wizard page presents a user friendly to input the data for the selected configuration. For E.g. If you select FTP, you can input all the server details and you can even create new directories from within the wizard page.

Page 4 of the wizard allows you to specify the storage options. The feature to highlight here is the ability to create self extracting ZIP files which again could be secured by setting a password.

Page 5 of the wizard allows you to schedule the backup operation.

Page 6 of the wizard provides a summary of the options selected in the previous 5 pages.

(The highlight of the wizard pages is the User Interface design of the wizard pages. Its neat, simple and powerful)

The synchronization feature is also very powerful. You can synchronize your work PC and home PC or your laptop and desktop PC on the fly. In case of data loss, you can restore by the click of a button.

Try Backup Platinum

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored review.

Eclipse.org always amaze me with the kind of tooling that they go on adding to the Eclipse Platform. Few months back when I was browsing the different projects in Eclipse, I stumbled on Remote System Explorer (RSE)

Remote System Explorer is part of Target Management which in turn in a subproject of Device Software Development Platform (DSDP).

The purpose of the Target Management project is to creates data models and frameworks to configure and manage remote systems, their connections, and their services.

Remote System Explorer helps in

• Creating connections to remote Linux/Unix Servers
• Exploring the remote file system
• Editing and saving remote files
• Open shells and execute commands
• Search for files on the remote system

Installation

• Download the RSE plugin from the following link (Please check against the version of Eclipse that you are using)http://download.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm/downloads/
• Install the RSE plugin. I would recommend to install the plugin using the “links” concept
• If the plugin is properly installed you should be able to see a new “Remote System Explorer” perspective added to the workspace

Configuration

(Note: I have a slightly old version of RSE at my workplace. The wizard data might differ in the new version)

The default Remote System Explorer view shows your system’s local file system by default.

You can additionally configure/add new connections via the “New Connection” dialog

Input the host name and connection name (optionally you can input connections description)

Once a new connection is added, you can connect to the sever using the required security credentials. After a successful connection you should be able to explore the remote system from the Navigator view.

The remote files can be opened/edited and saved from within Eclipse. Default Eclipse editors come into action based on the type of the remote file.

You can launch a shell and execute commands (Even the environment variables for the shell can be set)

With RSE plugin, my usage of Putty (Poderosa) has reduced a little bit.

Even for copying files between the local machine and the remote server, I don’t need to do FTP/SCP. I just drag and drop the files between the remote file system and the local file system.

More Tutorials/Documentation

The RSE tutorial and the TM Overview slides give more details on the features in RSE.

IBM also has detailed documentation on Remote System Explorer

• IBM Remote System Explorer -> http://www.developer.ibm.com/rational/remote_system_explorer.html
• IBM RSE Guide -> http://www.developer.ibm.com/isv/rational/rse_pres.pdf

(Note: All the features in IBM RSE might not still be part of Eclipse RSE)

Microsoft‘s Windows Live Writer is a powerful desktop based weblog client and is currently the only product I like from Microsoft’s stable. The initial beta had lot of interesting features which made it a must have for any blogger.

Review of Windows Live Writer Beta 1

There are lot of free and licensed desktop weblog clients including Qumana but not a single client is as powerful and feature rich as Live writer. Beta 2 version of Live writer is now available and there are lots of new features added into the new version.

Feature Highlights:

• Inline Spell Checking – From now on you no longer need to manually run the spell checker.
• Inserting/Editing Tables – You can insert and edit tables. Nice add-on
• Support for excerpts – “Split Post” option now allows you to insert the “more” tag in the posts. Previously this could be done only via the HTML Code view
• Better integration of local and online edited posts.
• New look and feel

Checkout the official post for more interesting features added in Beta2

Screenshots

Download Windows Live Writer Beta 2

The “Start Menu” on my PC generally extends upto 3-4 columns; thanks to all the software/tools that I install/try out.

[Note: Screen width is set to 1280 pixels ]

On the top of this, Windows XP has a totally useless Start Menu; If I have to quickly launch an application, I spend more time searching for it rather than using it !

Colibri did come to my rescue; Using Colibri I could quickly launch applications and control panel widgets.

Read my earlier post to know more about Colibri

Launchy is another small little app which helps in quickly launching applications. Unlike Colibri, Launchy also allows you to index folders via which you can even quickly launch documents/folders.

Even in terms of system resource utilization, Launchy did a better job than Colibri.

KeyBreeze is the new kid on the block. Using KeyBreeze you can:

• Type keywords to open files, folders, and websites.
• Type commands to check the weather, get memory usage, shut down your computer…
• Search Google, Dictionary.com, Wikipedia, eBay, and other websites by typing letter commands.
  • Examples: s:mp3s, d:plaudit, w:omega-3, etc.
• Type functions to change the display settings of a window.
  • You can hide any window, set a window on top, make a window translucent…
• Make your own functions that paste custom text into any text field.
• Record macros to automate repetitive computer tasks.
• Create notes on your desktop; set reminders

Do checkout the complete list of Keybreeze features here. The screenshots page also gives a good overview of the features.

I have been using it for the past 2 days and it does look like a eligible replacement to Launchy.

Download KeyBreeze

If you want to take your keywords/commands/macros on a USB flash drive, check this page for more details on the USB version of Keybreeze.