Tools

I find myself pronouncing a lot of English words differently from what my friends do. One of the reasons for this is the fact that English just happens to be one of the 5 languages that I speak.

A couple of these word pronunciations also lead to a healthy debate with neither party accepting defeat and the only way to conclude such a debate is to validate the pronunciation.

Not to boast, but most of these debates are won by me and there is no denying that I have lost a couple too ! Surprisingly there have been debates where both parties have lost :)

When you are also in a similar situation below are some of the tools

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

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

At my workplace I somehow managed to eat up almost all of the 40GB on the primary partition and I had no clue as to what directory/file was eating up the space.

As usual, Windows XP has no inbuilt tools to accomplish the simple task of finding the culprit directories/files.

In my earlier post, I had mentioned about some of the tools which could help in a similar situation. Some of the tools that I mentioned on that post are no longer supported and hence I had to "google" to find the right tool for the cleanup task.

WinDirStat was one of the useful tool that I found ! Its a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool

Xobni is an excellent add-on for Microsoft Outlook and has definitely simplified email management for me. Even Bill Gates fell in love with this application and referred it as the next generation of social networking.

(Microsoft did try to acquire Xobni and it failed due to various reasons)

Xobni was initially invite only and today they have made it publicly available to everybody. If you use Outlook and manage a lot of mail, Xobni is a must have.

The following video highlights the unique features in Xobni

I have been using it for quite some weeks now and it has negligible effect on

This site is powered by WordPress and when it came online 2 years back for some odd reason I opted to install WordPress on the "blog" sub-domain. I guess it was popular then to have the blog installed on its own domain.

And even though I knew the kind of content I would write, I still opted to use my name for the domain. Something which I can't change easily now :)

venukb.com remained as a dummy entry point and it just used to redirect to venukb.com/blog. I have always wanted to get rid of the sub-domain and move to the root domain.

I was of the opinion then that the move would affect the Pagerank

Jing, a concept project from TechSmith is a handy screen capture utility. It also adds up as a useful screencast utility.

One aim of the Jing project is to simplify the process of screen capture and screencasting and it does fulfill this aim. Jing has one of the simplest UI for taking screenshots.

In SnagIt you need to inform the app before hand whether you intend to capture a Window or a region. Jing automatically adjusts the capture boundary when you hover over the edge of the screen.

You can also highlight sections of the captured image, add text, frames and arrows. The Undo/Redo feature is also quite useful.

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

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

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