Few services even banned this site for having no activity in the last 3 months.

I just took a long break from blogging and hope to be back as soon as possible !

It was time at my workplace which initially (and is still) held me from being “online”. Later I just felt better being “away”.

I also got hooked onto reading fiction novels! Currently I have these many books waiting to be finished

On the top of these 9 books, I have an additional 7 books in the queue including a few non-fiction books by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock

When I am not reading books, I am busy exploring the new 13″ macbook. Like with the Apple iPhone, even Macbook ownership is temporary and is finally ending up with my brother.

The new Macbook is way too cool, compared to my existing Acer Laptop (or compared to any of the notebooks out there in the market)

Currently I am stuck with a Windows based notebook and a Windows based mobile while my sibling is “all Mac”. Something I wish to change to in the coming few years !

I am liking everything about the Mac except for the fact that you have to pay for almost all the good software.

Meanwhile if you didn’t care as to where the hell was I, you probably should definitely care to see where the hell Matt was this year round

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.

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

June 17 was fixed as the release date and when I tried to download yesterday, the servers were down.

They seem to be back online now and you can download the latest Firefox from the below link:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox?p=downloadday

At the time I downloaded, 14K people had downloaded FF3 from India compared to 1063K downloads from US

Also don’t forget to check the "Tips and Tricks" page; it will help you to get the most out of Firefox 3

Lifehacker also has an interesting post on the history of Firefox (with Screenshots)

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

Don’t forget to spread the word around

I tried to check on the official website to know more about the launch day only to find the website down ! I tried accessing the site contents via Google cache; even that seemed to lead to pages with errors.

Update - Bialairport.com is now redirecting to http://www.bengaluruairport.com. The site is half baked and is hosted on Bharti in Karnataka, India.

The site was well designed and optimized for search engine queries. However looks like the IT team overlooked the bandwidth requirements and visitors seeking information have to end up seeing the above screen !

The web server seems to be in Texas and hosted by Theplanet.com Internet Services Inc.

The site should hopefully be online soon and till then, check my earlier post on BIA.

Instead of putting more data in that post, I linked to the official BIA site and I kind of regret that decision now

As with the case of HTC Touch, HTC Diamond will also be available via Bharti Airtel, which means that the device will be locked onto Airtel Network.

I am confident that the intelligent folks at XDA will come up with an unlock mechanism for HTC Diamond as they did for HTC Touch.

The specifications of HTC Diamond looks way better than HTC Touch. It has a much faster processor, more memory and a better camera. Its 3G enabled and also has GPS. The new 3D TouchFlo also looks good.

There is also a custom YouTube Application, however I am not sure if the video experience is same as in iPhone.

Official HTC Touch Diamond Video

The phone is being priced at 27500 INR (670$) which in my opinion is way too high. Hopefully the price will come down over the period of time in which case it will be a worthy alternative to HTC Touch.

The switch to the new airport will take place at midnight on May 23. As per the statement from BIAL (BIA Limited) all flights landing and departing after midnight will operate from the new airport.

Update: BIA opened on May 24 (Saturday) and handled 341 flights on Day One

Also flights arriving before midnight (on May 22) can also choose to land on the new airport.

Air India’s flight from Bangalore to Singapore will supposedly be the first flight to take off from the new international airport in the city, when it becomes operational on May 23.

Even though I am not traveling out of Bangalore in the near time, I decided to checkout on the connectivity and the various transport options available to and from the new international airport.

Official Website

The BIA official web site does have a lot of information on the new airport. The site is indexed pretty well in Google and also has managed to get the Sitelinks.

http://www.bialairport.com

http://www.bengaluruairport.com

Contact Details

Bangalore International Airport Limited
   118, Gayathri Lakefront
   Outer Ring Road
   Hebbal
   Bangalore - 560 024
   Tel: +91 80 2354 0000
   Fax: +91 80 2333 3400
   Email: contact@bialairport.com

Flight Schedule Details

BIAL has also come up with a Flight Schedule List which is effective from 24 May 2008 to October 25 2008.

• Domestic Departure Details - Download here
• International Departure Details - Download here

Note that these schedule are subject to change and for more accurate information you should/could always call up 1800 425 4425

BIAL website also has added a new feature via which you can view the live flight arrival and departure information.

Transportation Facilities

Following is the list of current transport options available. You can either travel by bus, use the Airport Taxi Service or drive by yourselves.

Airport Shuttle Service

There are around 40 Volvo AC buses which will shuttle between the city and the airport. The following table has more information on the pick-up/drop-off points. The following areas are covered as of now

• Hebbal
• MCTC
• Jeevan Bhima Nagar
• HAL (Old Airport)
• JP Nagar 6th Phase
• Koramangala
• Kempegowda Bus Stand
• Whitefield(ITPL)
• Electronic City

Note: Once you know the route taken by these buses, you can catch the bus at any place on the route.

The following transport map seems to show 2 more locations not mentioned in the above table.

For more information on the areas covered, you can always call up these numbers.

BMTC Control Room: Telephone No: 22952522/22952422
BMTC, Kempegowda Bus Stand: Telephone No: 22952311/22952314
BMTC, Shivajinagar Bus Stand: Telephone No: 22952321/22952324

For those who are familiar with Bangalore, the following image might help in choosing the shortest road to the airport

Airport Taxi Service

Meru and Easy Cabs are the official taxi operators at the airport. The cars supposedly have a GPS and are also air conditioned. They are also are equipped with a credit card machine and at a charge of 15 INR/km this is definitely required

You can also book these taxis over phone; the facility however is available only if you are going towards the airport.

Easy Cabs - 43434343
Meru Cabs - 44224422

Limo and Car Rental

You can also rent premium cars from Hertz or Akbar Travels. Apart from the regular chauffeured cars, passengers can also avail self-driven cars at the airport.

There will be three ranges of self drive cars- the compact category (Suzuki Swift), the intermediate range – (Ford Fiesta), the standard category- (Toyota corolla), Multi Utility Vehicles (Toyota Innova) and Sports Utility Vehicles (Ford Endeavour)

AirLift

AirLift is another car rental service which is currently charging 300 INR for a pickup/drop from any place in Bangalore. I checked on the official Website of Airlift and it looks like they are covering only south and east Bangalore as of now.

However at 300 INR, a drive in Toyota Innvoa with personal entertainment is a steal. I haven’t had the opportunity to use AirLift and hence can’t give a feedback on their service, if anyone has used Airlift, please feel free to give your feedback on the same.

If you intend to use Airlift, note that they are available at P-3 parking at BIA’s arriving terminal.

You can contact Airlift using the following details:

AIRLIFT
#106, Sherwood Suites,17/2 Varthur Main Road,
Marathahalli,Bangalore 560 037
Call : 97313 96331
Email : support@airliftonline.com 

RedBus

RedBus, the online bus ticket booking service has introduced BMTC Bus booking for Bangalore International Airport.

You can book using RedBus irrespective of whether you are traveling to or from the International Airport.

RedBus allows you to book the Volvo buses on all the routes mentioned above and they even let you pick your seats.

(Note: The available seats have a checkbox which when checked appears in the “Chose Seats” text field)

Parking Facilities

The Airport’s car park can accommodate 2000 cars. The system used for the parking management is fully automated, efficient and transparent and is provided by SKIDATA™

Car parking fees have been priced at Rs.40/- for two hours and Rs.20/- for every additional hour in the general parking area. For overnight parking, Rs. 300 will be charged for the first 24 hours and Rs. 200 for every additional day.

BIA Photos

For up-to-date information, bookmark the official BIA Website !

Update - BIA has now come up with an Easy Guide which has lot of useful information.

Download BIA Easy Guide.pdf

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

Till now there were a lot of YouTube clones which catered to the local video content and some of them even got considerable funding from VC’s

I am not sure if this edition of YouTube is going to pickup in a big way, but the below snapshot of the videos section might say otherwise !

The above is just a partial snapshot; in fact the entire page is filled up similar kind of steamy videos !

If this is the kind of videos we would see on Indian Version of YouTube, there is no doubt that it will be “hugely popular” !

(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 !

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.

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 ?

This site had a PR of 4 from quite some time and even during the last update where few sites were penalized for selling Text Link Ads the PR of this site remained at 4

At that time, I thought that I wasn’t penalized since I was not selling Text Link Ads from my home page (which had PR4) and was only having post level ads (Around 5 post level ads were active).

However this round of pagerank update has taken the PR from 4 to 2, reminding me of QOT’s PR downgrade from 6 to 3 !

I am not sure if dividing existing PR by 2 is the way of Google penalizing sites selling text link ads. I immediately stopped Text Link Ads and in a way it was even easy since a new month just began !

I have also raised a reconsideration request with Google !

But again I am not completely sure if TLA is the core reason behind this downgrade ! I moved my hosting from Dreamhost to MT some time back and one of the biggest mistakes I made was not to check on the XML sitemap.

After the hosting change, the XML sitemaps generator plugin for some odd reason started putting the XML file on venukb.com/blog while Google was searching for it on venukb.com. I had manually set to venukb.com and during the move, the option changed to “Automatic” and happened to select the subdomain.

And I realized this only after 3 weeks ! Duh !

The crawl stats also confirmed that the sitemaps were not accessible from quite some time !

I fixed the issue and even then I see that 0 pages from sitemaps are included in the search index.

Has the PR downgrade affected traffic ?

This site for one gets almost 80% of the traffic from search engines (mainly Google) and I have noticed that some of the high traffic pages are no longer in the Top 10 !

I do see a dip in the number of unique visitors, but after including the landing page, the pageview count hasn’t changed much.

I am hoping the reconsideration request to fix the PR And if any of you are running Text Link Ads and also get a huge amount of traffic from Google, you should consider switching the text ads off !

And yes be careful about XML sitemaps when you are moving to a new hosting ! (Though not sure if this is also the reason for downgrade !)

Talking of PR, do share your experience as well ! Has it improved ? Do you see change in traffic with the improved PR ?

With the intent of checking on some new plans, I tried to access the Airtel website http://www.airtel.in

I ended up with this:

The URL was being re-directed to http://www.airtel.in/srilanka/srilanka….. Looks like the site was hacked by somebody !

Talking of Airtel web portal, Airtel seems to be changing its domain every other month; Few months back, it was airtelworld.com (It was something else before this) and now its Airtel.in !

And with every domain change, they seem to be changing the URL for some of their important offering e.g. Airtel Data card.

Check an example URL for Airtel Data card:

http://airtel.in/level2_t7.aspx?path=1/106

And its not just this URL; every URL in the site seems to have a awkward “level2″ and path parameter. Also the path parameter seems to get a new value with every domain change and makes linking to their site a pain !

Update: Airtel portal is back in action; not sure who hacked it or whether it was some upgrade issue. The countless number of “srilanka” in the URL in a way conveys that it was probably not a server upgrade issue !

I did a search for HTC India on Google only to find crappy pages listed on the first page of search results.

There is not even a link to the global HTC site and this pretty much explained the reason for the number of people contacting me to know more on HTC customer service in India.

HTC does have a dedicated portal for customers in India. Unfortunately it doesn’t show up in Google search and the only way to find this to navigate via the HTC International home page

HTC India - http://www.htc.com/in/default.aspx

HTC provides support over Phone, Email and if it still doesn’t help you can walk into any of the customer care centers listed below:

If any of the above phone number is not working, please check this link for updated information.

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.

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 !

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