Internet Explorer 7/8 has a nagging problem of freezing when its started. The tab opens up with the text “Connecting” and remains at the same state for an infinite amount of time.

The culprit seems to be the Windows Live Sign-in Helper add-on and disabling this add-on fixes this freeze issue.

To disable the add-on

1. Start Internet Explorer with all plugins disabled. In the Windows Run, type iexplore -extoff
2. Go to Tools –> Internet Options –> Programs –> Manage Add-Ons
3. Within Toolbars and Extensions, search for Windows Live Sign-in Helper add-on (should be under Microsoft Corporation) 
   
4. Disable the Add-on and restart the browser.

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.

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

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

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

http://tinyurl.com/yv5xp4

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

Scrolling using Spacebar

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

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

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

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

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

Reopen/Undo Closed Tab

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://tinyurl.com/5hucpj

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.

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 !

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 ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vista SP1 details:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 !

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

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

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

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

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

Other Related Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

General Guideline for System Rating:

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

I have been planning to buy a USB flash drive from quite some time now. My current 256MB flash drive is of no use in the sense that it runs out of space too quickly.

My 30GB iPod could have served as an alternative; however its little bulky to carry around and the “proprietary” cable that has to be tagged along with the device makes it much more difficult.

Transcend and Sandisk are the 2 major vendors of USB Flash drives. I had a look at the products offered by both vendors and was more impressed with the Sandisk range.

Sandisk flash drives looked much better; cute and compact. However compared to Transcend they are priced on the higher side.

The other reason for choosing Sandisk was because of the 2 Year International warranty. Transcend provides lifetime warranty only at the place/country where it is bought (The one I got was bought in Taiwan )

After going over the entire product portfolio, I finally settled on a 4GB Sandisk Cruzer Micro.

Let’s go over the specification first

Dimensions: 7.94mm x 20.6mm x 57.15mm (D x W x L) (Please note that my photography skills are limited)

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 ?

Source Control also known as Revision control or source code management (SCM) is the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information.

Source Control is most commonly used in software development to manage ongoing development of documents like application source code or design documents or any electronic information which is worked on by a team of people.

There are a lot of revision control software out there, the notable ones being CVS, ClearCase and Subversion. The following wikipedia page gives a complete list of the revision control software including detailed information on each of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software

Eclipse is fast becoming the default IDE among developers (Thanks to the extensible architecture of the platform).

Following is the list of Eclipse Plugins for some of the popular Source Control software.

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 ?

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.

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.

In recent times Videos, especially streaming videos are becoming extremely popular. There are hundreds of video sharing sites that want to become the Flickr of online video world.

Most of the videos on these sites are encoded in Flash and if someone is interested in downloading the videos, he has to start searching for a video downloading software.

Also if you want to copy this video to your iPod or to your mobile device you need to search for a video converter.

Movavi Video Converter is an easy-to-use, powerful software that lets you convert video files to different formats in no time!

User Interface

The following snapshot gives a pretty good overview of all the features in Movavi Video Converter.

You can add multiple source files into the conversion list and you could optionally de-select items from the list by un-checking the checkbox.

Other than videos, you can also add DVD’s into the source file list. (Movavi video converter can be used to rip DVD’s as well)

Once the candidate for conversion are identified, you can use the Favorites or the Devices tab to choose the output video format. The path for the converted video is set on the “Output Directory” pane.

Movavi provides support for the following output video formats:

Alternatively you can use the Devices tab to choose the target device e.g iPod, Zune, PSP, Mobile Phone.

Any user who is not aware of the technical knowledge of the video formats should use either the “Favorites” or the “Devices” option for choosing the video output format.

The “Advanced” option lets you to customize the output format. For E.g. If you want the output format as FLV (Flash), you can choose the Advanced option and select the output video quality.

Other features

• Rip the audio from the videos (MP3/WMA)
• Using the Gallery option you can capture images from the videos.
• Convert only a segment of the video.
• Join Video files.

Minimum System Requirements

• Microsoft Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP (installation of all recent updates is recommended)
• Intel or AMD or compatible processors at 1 GHz minimum
• Display graphics minimum resolution of 800x600x 32-bit color
• RAM 128 megabytes (MB)
• Minimum 40 MB of free hard disk space is needed for installation, minimum 300 Mb for proper operation
• Administrative permissions are required for installation
• CD/DVD ROM
• Sound card

However this feature rich video converter is not free and comes at a price. You can find more details on the pricing of the tool here.

Download Movavi Video Converter

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

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

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

Search on Google

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

Search on Yahoo

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

Search on MSN Live

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

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

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.

When you delete a file in Windows Explorer or My Computer, the file is put into the Recycle Bin. The file remains in the Recycle Bin until you empty the Recycle Bin or restore the file.

If the files are deleted from the Recycle bin or if you empty the recycle bin, the files are “permanently” lost.

I myself have developed a habit of deleting every other file using “Shift+Delete”. I rarely move the files to Recycle Bin. And many times I have accidentally deleted few important files/folders.

The only way to recover these “permanently” deleted files is to use an “undelete” software. There are lot of undelete software’s out there in the marketplace; however most of them are not free.

Undelete PLUS is a free tool which provides a quick and effective way to retrieve accidentally deleted files, files removed from the Recycle Bin, in a DOS window, from a network drive, from Windows Explorer with the SHIFT key held down.

Undelete Plus works on Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 operating systems. The program also supports all Windows file systems including FAT12/16/32,NTFS and image recovery from CompactFlash, Multimedia and Secure Digital cards.

Also the software claims to have no adware, spyware or malware.

Download Undelete PLUS