Two weeks back I upgraded FeedDemon to the latest beta that was available then only to realize that my subscriptions were no longer in sync – I use FeedDemon from home and work

Reading more into the release notes and a little bit of Googling made me  realize that FeedDemon had discontinued its NewsGator online synchronization and had replaced it with Google Reader backend.

I have never been a fan of Google Reader (I know many are) and I have written about it in the past as well. For me FeedDemon has always been the ideal client to quickly go over thousands of feed items that I get everyday.

With FeedDemon now working with Google Reader, I now have the ability to access the same subscriptions when I am not at home or work; and for those die hard Google Reader fans, they now have the ability to use FeedDemon without complaints

Note: With FeedDemon 3.0 you can even subscribe to your Twitter public timeline and response feeds !

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 that can help you to validate the English Word pronunciations:

AT&T Natural Voices Research Version

AT&T Natural Voices is a commercial TTS engine which has support for multiple languages and is marketed by Wizzard Software.

However they do have a Research Version which is also available for general public here:

http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

You can select from a list of voices (accent) and even have the option to download the voice.

The service is however slow and its probably due to the fact that the engine generates audio files on the fly !

However note that you can give input more than one word (preferably separated by comma) and the engine will generated the audio file with the pronunciation for all these words.

Dictionary.com/Thefreedictionary.com

Unlike Natural Voices, Dictionary.com and FreeDictionary.com allow you to hear pronunciations for words which are there in the dictionary.

Also you don’t have the option to input multiple words. However the pronunciations are pre-compiled and hence play much faster compared to Natural Voices.

If by any chance, you don’t have a sound card, or if the drivers of your card are corrupted, these 2 services provide a pronunciation key table which could be used to decode the word pronunciation.

HowJSay.com

HowJSay is another portal similar to the Dictionary portal mentioned above where you can type in the word and listen to the pronunciation.

However HowJSay additionally lists a set of words based on the input word and I found this feature quite useful.

Windows Text To Speech Engine

Windows comes with a built-in Text To Speech engine and mainly used for the Narrator Application.

On Windows Vista, you can access the Speech Properties dialog via

Control Panel -> Ease of Access -> Speech Recognition Options

On the “Text To Speech” dialog, you can input the word and select “Preview Voice” to listen to the word pronunciation.

The same option is also available on Windows XP. (Control Panel ->Speech)

I find this the quickest way of checking on a word and does not require an active Internet connection.

For Linux users, there is an option in the form of Festival ! I haven’t tried it though.

If you know of any other service, please feel free to suggest the same using the comment form.

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?

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 for Windows.

The tool can either scan all your disk drives or the individual drives or even specific folders. The entire directory tree is read and the information is displayed in 3 views:

• As a Directory list which is sorted by file/subtree size as shown below
  
• As a treemap view which represents each file as a colored rectangle, the area of which is proportional to the file’s size.

  The rectangles are arranged in such a way, that directories again make up rectangles, which contain all their files and subdirectories. So their area is proportional to the size of the subtrees.
  

• As an extension list which shows all types (filename extensions) occurring in the directory tree
  

The treemap is an amazing feature which helps you to quickly identify the file occupying the maximum space. The selection of the colored block automatically highlights the file in the tree view and you can delete the file from within the UI of WinDirStat.

A must have software for Windows

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 Outlook’s performance. Try Xobni !

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 and hence had held making such a move.  After the recent tanking of Pagerank I decided that it was the right moment to make this switch.

I had 2 ways of making this switch:

Method 1 – Changing the Blog Address in WordPress Options

WordPress can power your site’s root and yet can be copied to a separate subdirectory. In my case blog was the subdirectory and I could quickly switch to root by just changing the Blog Address in the WordPress Options.

You should also update the permalinks and rebuild the sitemap after making the above change.

However Google’s Index and sites linking to your pages would still have "blog" in the URL and this requires you to redirect all those requests to the root domain. I accomplished this easily by adding the following directive in .htaccess file

Redirect 301 /blog http://www.venukb.com

Everything worked fine until I tried to access the WordPress Admin console which was at venukb.com/blog/wp-admin. Since the /blog was redirected to root, I was never able to gain access to the admin console and with the mod_alias directive, there is no way to exclude access to a particular URL.

The only option was to fall back on mod_rewrite and use RewriteRule in conjunction with RewriteCond. I searched in a lot of forums for putting in the right rewrite directive only to end up in a confused state.

mod_rewrite is a one complex library and regular expression is something which I can probably never understand

If someone has already done this with mod_rewrite, please let me know as to what directive worked for you

Method 2 – Moving the WordPress contents to the root domain

I gave up on mod_rewrite and moved my entire blog directory including the WordPress core files to the root. With SSH access to the server, this was done in seconds with a mv command. I also backed up and restored the .htaccess file on the root domain (If you copy the .htaccess residing on the blog sub-domain, you would end up with 500 Internal Server Error)

In addition to Blog Address, I even changed the WordPress Address and as in the previous method, updated permalinks and the sitemap. The mod_alias Redirect directive worked like a charm and I had no issues in accessing the WordPress Admin console.

What else do I need to do ?

The main thing to do after moving to a different domain is to set the permanent redirection (301) and building your sitemap. The pages in your blog might have linked to several other internal pages and all this might point to the "blog" URL’s.

Even though the Redirection will take care of these links, its better off to modify these links.I am considering using the Search Regex WordPress plugin from Urban Giraffe.

If you are using a desktop based client like Windows Live Writer to publish posts, you have to update the account settings.

You might also want to monitor the 404 errors on your server and for this I am again using Urban Giraffe’s Redirection Plugin

Redirection plugin is also a powerful way of setting up Redirects in WordPress and this method totally avoids .htaccess. The author is also testing a beta version of this plugin which modified the .htaccess file itself.

If you also happened to move WordPress across domains, do share your experience.

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.

The captured image can be:

1. Saved locally
2. Copied to a server via FTP
3. Sent to Flickr
4. Sent to Screencast.com

Even capturing video is as simple as capturing an image. Checkout one sample screencast I recorded with Jing

As usual I am again showing off my HTC Touch! I miss iPhone tough

Only complaint from my side is with respect to the stability of the application. Jing keeps crashing now and then and its also a memory hogger.

Do give Jing a try and if you are still not happy you might want to check this list !

Which screen capture tool do you use ?

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 ?

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 user@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

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 !

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.

Xobni Insight is an add-on for Microsoft Outlook that offers email management and provides instant access to the most important information in your email. Xobni also supposedly exposes the hidden social network in your email.

The add-on has several features, including fast email search, email analytics, automatic phone number discovery, threaded conversations, and more. When you click on an email in Outlook, the Xobni sidebar shows the following information

• Relationship Statistics – Number of emails sent and received
• Contact Information (Phone number is automatically extracted from the email)
• Related People
• Threaded Conversation
• Shared Attachments

The “Organize” Tab displays the following information

• Upcoming Appointments
• To-Do Items
• A list of people whom you  might not have contacted in a long time

Xobni is currently in an invite-only beta; to try Xobni you can sign up here. I got an invite of Xobni via the Priority Access route.

I will not write about the features in detail, the following video pretty much summarizes the unique features in Xobni

Currently I have 5 invites of Xobni; If you want an invite, please do leave a comment on this post!

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.)

I have been a great fan of Newsgator products, particularly the desktop based feed reader FeedDemon ! I have been recommending the same to many of my friends.

After trying out lot of RSS readers including RSS Bandit and Google Reader, I finally found that none of them could match FeedDemon’s simple yet powerful user interface and I totally loved the synchronization feature built into the application.

Along with Flickr, FeedDemon became one of the apps that I paid for !

Now Newsgator has turned most of its RSS products including FeedDemon into FREE applications.

So go ahead and grab your free copy of Feeddemon ! There are host of other products including Newsgator Mobile being offered for free. Nick Bradbury, the creator of FeedDemon and many other products has more details on this free offering.

Do read my earlier post on FeedDemon and if I am not able to convince you to use FeedDemon, probably Amit would !

Thanks Nick

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

In one of my earlier post, I mentioned a couple of popular keyboard applications for smartphone/pocket PC running Windows Mobile operating system. One of the reader of that post, Idan pointed me to another cool virtual keyboard application from PocketCM.

The keyboard does look a lot like the iPhone keyboard and works a lot better compared to the default keyboard application. Check the official video below to see PocketCM keyboard at work.

I guess it will take some time for me to pick up that speed using the application. I did switch my HTC Touch phone to landscape mode and it was more comfortable typing with 2 hands.

Features worth noting:

• Visible feedback when the key is pressed
• You can move the fingers to change the key pressed, the key is triggered when you release the key (not when the key is pressed)
• Smart suggestion based on key position
• Adding of new words (very useful feature)
• Supports Themes – You can change the keyboard theme via the Input Settings page.

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

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.

SPB Mobile shell is an extension for the boring default user interface of a Windows Mobile powered Pocket PC phone. Key feature include:

• Phone style menu
• Weather forecasts 
• Photo speed dial
• World time
• Launcher
• Big dynamic tabs on Today
• Color based themes
• Smart contact search

The SPM Menu based navigation loads faster and you can quickly launch application of your choice.

Even the Now Screen is pretty detailed and gives a quick overview of

• Messages – Email/SMS
• Missed calls
• Volume level
• Weather
• Date and time
• Appointments/Meetings.

More screenshots of the shell can be found here !

Most of these features are already available on the Today screen of HTC Touch and hence SPB Mobile Shell might not be a good replacement option.

However this shell might a worthy replacement for the default UI provided by other pocket PC vendors.

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.

ZAR (Zero Assumption Recovery) is a Windows software to recover data from FAT and NTFS volumes after accidental format or other software corruption. Data recovery software like ZAR might not fall into the category of software that you use on a day to day basis.

There might be situations when your hard drive might crash (bad sectors etc) or might be accidentally formatted; Your entire digital information might be lost and this when data recovery software like ZAR come to your rescue.

Zero Assumption Recovery helps you with:

• Recovering formatted disks
• Recovering “RAW filesystem”
• Recovering from MBR damage
• Reconstructing broken RAID array
• Recovering lost digital photos

The tool has a very simple user interface to accomplish the above tasks. The “Tutorial” section has more details on using ZAR for recovering data. ZAR is also currently running a discount and the tool is available at 20$ (compared to the actual price of 50$).

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 !

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 default calculator that comes bundled with Windows Mobile 6 isn’t made for touch phones. Also the application hasn’t received an upgrade from a long time. Even my 5 year old Casio Pocket PC is running the same calculator application !

gCalc

gCalc is a simple calculator application which works great on a touch based phone and  is also good for one-hand use. The operator dial pad saves you the trouble of searching operators while doing the calculations.

The user interface looks so much better compared to the dull interface of the default application. And if you are still not impressed by the UI, gCalc developer has made the application skinnable

gCalc with ClownFish Skin

The theme change has to be done using the About option ! You can find more details on gCalc here.

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.

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.

When I signed up for Pownce, I had 5 invites and few days back 6 more were added. So I have a total of 11 invites to give away

I am sure most of you might have already signed up, if not leave a comment and get an invite for Pownce

Using Pownce via the Desktop software is more useful in the sense that its easy to send messages and share files/links.

Download the desktop software here and note that the application is built on Adobe AIR which can be installed from this link.

Happy “Powncing” !

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 ?

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 ?

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 ?

As mentioned in the About Me page, till now I have paid for 2 software which I thought were really worth the price.

One was for the Flickr Pro account using which I could archive and share “GB’s” of photos. Its probably the best photo sharing/management application that I have come across.

The other application that is worth paying is Mint. Its one of the best web analytics software out there and also one of the best looking application as well.

It provides real time visitor data and being a self-hosted application, it gives you complete control over your analytics data.

As of now I track/read around 70-80 RSS feeds everyday (unlike Scoble who manages to go through 622 RSS feeds ). One thing which will ease this task is a powerful RSS reader.

Somehow I am not comfortable with web based RSS readers including Google Reader. I was on a lookout for an ideal Desktop based RSS reader from quite some time.

After evaluating FeedDemon for around 30 days, I had shifted to RSS Bandit, which I thought was a good alternative to FeedDemon. One of the feature missing in RSS Bandit is the synchronization of RSS feeds. (Web based readers have an edge here).

Income from some of my sponsored posts pushed me into buying FeedDemon . With FeedDemon I am now able to synchronize my feeds across 3 machines

• Personal Notebook
• Office Notebook
• Office Desktop

So If I happen to find some free time at my workplace and read some of the feeds, they are synchronized when I access FeedDemon at home.

FeedDemon uses NewsGator to synchronize the feeds. So you have an added advantage of both an Desktop and Web Based RSS reader with FeedDemon.

FeedDemon has an amazing user interface;its a pleasure reading feeds on FeedDemon. There are lot of options to customize the reading view and it also has powerful filtering and searching capabilities.

Additionally it shows me the Feeds that I pay the “Most Attention” and “Least Attention”, which in turn helps me to re-organize my feeds

Which RSS feed reader do you use ? Do you prefer Web Based or Desktop Based Reader ?

Do you think its worth paying for an RSS feed reader ? If yes, which reader would you recommend ?

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 ?

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.