Say No to Software Piracy - Downloading Serials or Cracks from Internet Could be Dangerous

Do not download pirated software or patches from the internet - When you download a crack, you can be almost certain that some bad things will be included.

If you really can’t afford the software you are looking for, contact the author and explain your situation. There is a big chance that you get a reduction or that you get the software for free.

Most crackers will include trojans that they have written themselves and are therefore not detected by virus scanners. Many cracks will include spyware.

The trojans allow the cracker to access your computer. If you use your computer to make payments by credit card or to do online banking, the cracker will have access to your passwords and pin codes and will use your credit card or bank account to buy things.

The spyware can break many things in your computer. It can make your browser unusable. There is also a good chance that viruses are included.

Now you may think that serials are safer. You don’t need to install anything on your computer to use them. But if you think this, you are wrong. The web pages where you find the serials are a dangerous place. Many of these web pages exploit security holes in your browser, and can install trojans, spyware and viruses on your computer just by visiting the web page.

Just searching on the web for web pages that contain serials can damage your computer, can give the crackers access to your credit card, and can install spyware that tracks everything you do.

Better Safe than Sorry. Alway buy original software.

MSN - You could not win my heart

Nor a place on my desktop.

The MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search was officially launched today. The toolbar also includes a pop-up blocker and form fill functions to enhance the browsing experience. Users of MSN’s line of services, such as Hotmail, Messenger and Spaces, will find one-click access within the product. To address some privacy concerns, you can control which files the software indexes and how often.

But are there enough reasons for me to switch from Copernic to MSN ? No, not yet.

1. MSN Desktop Search is only available on machines running Microsoft Windows XP/Server 2003/2000 & Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 or later. If you are a Firefox fan like me, stay away from it.

2. MSN added a preview pane similar to the one in Microsoft Outlook. This is a useful enhancement but according to SEW, Microsoft’s preview is painfully sluggish compared to Yahoo’s, to the point of being virtually unusable.

3. There is a toolbar everywhere. (See the image on the right) The suite includes three toolbars, one for Microsoft Outlook, a toolbar for Windows and Internet Explorer, and a toolbar for the Windows taskbar. Why not a standalone program ? I can’t live without the Google Toolbar and installing another toolbar decreases my browser preview area further. Why would I want to look at a toolbar all the time even though I would use only 2% of my time.

4. MSN doesn’t automatically index PDF files - Most of my official documentation is in PDF format but MSN requires you to download a separate plugin for indexing PDF files. I see some rivalry here. Microsoft is expected to release its own Metro document format which is being touted as Adobe’s PDF killer. Maybe that could be the reason for Microsoft not adding native support for PDF in their search suite. When MSN DS can index 200 file types, why not 201 ?

5. Microsoft plays some hide n’ seek - One of the non-public betas reviewed by PCMag actually added tabbed browsing to IE, a useful feature that has, unfortunately, been held back for further security testing. Hopes dashed.

6. Can I search for files in any language? - Not yet. MSN Toolbar Suite and Deskbar Search supportU.S. English only.

7. Do I really need MS Desktop Search ? No, It’s already there.

Some amazing software will cease to exist

In the battle for “Survival of the Fittest” - Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Flash are expected to survive the Adobe-Macromedia merger, while Fireworks, Freehand, and GoLive will be eliminated.

This is predicted in an NPD report cited by MacNN. Photoshop and Dreamweaver customers will be least affected by the merger, as these products will remain largely intact. However, the FTC regulations may require Adobe to sell GoLive, Fireworks, FreeHand to another vendor.

NPD believes that customers will “most definitely” benefit from the merger. For example, integration between Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Flash would enable animators, Web designers and advertising professionals to “streamline their workflows.” In the short run, the customer using both Photoshop and Dreamweaver “won’t need to do anything differently.” Later, this customer will “probably be able to buy a single suite of tools from Adobe, resulting in significant cost savings.”

Recently, Macromedia sold off its font editor creator software Fontographer to Fontlab. Fontographer is a software for creating fonts while Adobe, the leader in digital typography, sells fonts. A software for creating fonts may not interest Adobe much. Fontographer along with Freehand were both products originally born at Altsys.

Screencasting Software Guide - Review of Desktop Screen Recording Tools

Screencasting to help your mom is a software buying guide to help you choose the right software for screen capture and for screencasting or recording movies of your desktop screen activity.

How often friends visit you to learn how to use email, how to search Google or how to install a software. Or how do you teach Microsoft Office to mom who is sitting miles away. Well, the answer is simple - just record a screencast video of your screen with voice narration (aka screencast) and upload it a website like YouTube.

What is Screencasting (Desktop Screen + Broadcast)

Screencasting (see glossary) is a process of creating interactive demonstrations and software simulations by capturing a series of screenshots of any running software application. The screencasting software (like a video camera) records all your actions and instantly creates a simulation or screencast. These screencast movies can be exported in a variety of formats like Standalone EXE, SWF, Flash Video, Windows Media, AVI, QuickTime or MPEG-4 incase you want to distribute your screencast on a portable device like an iPod or a cell phone. These formats are widely supported so you may easily import screencasts into any video editing software for more advanced editing.

Screencasts can be used for describing software features, reporting bugs, or for interactive e-learning. Just as a screenshot is a picture of a user’s desktop screen, a screencast is essentially a movie of what a user sees on his or her monitor. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, a movie is worth a thousand pictures. Software Tutorial companies like TotalTraining.com, lynda.com and vtc.com also use one of these screencasting tools to create their instructional video DVDs.

Screencasting Software - Tools for Recording Screencasts

Here’s a list of some of my favorite screencasting tools along with a quick review.

Commercial Screencasting Tools

1. Qarbon Viewlet Builder - Qarbon patented the Screen Capture technology and prefer to call their flash movies as Viewlets which are basically .swf files. Qarbon seems to have the best Flash file compression algorithm around. However, another software called ViewletCam is required to enable moving screen captures. This is Windows only as Qarbon recently discontinued ViewletBuilder for Mac.

2. Camtasia Studio - From the developers of SnagIt, Camtasia is probably the best screencasting software for Windows. Camtasia Studio can produce 720p HD screencasts with minimal effort and Camtasia for Mac is expected soon. Camtasia can also record and export your PowerPoint presentations as a movie.

3. Turbo Demo - With Turbo Demo, you can create screencasts in either Flash or Java. The screencasts projects can be exported to plain text files, that are editable and can be imported back into Turbodemo. In the screencast editing mode (after screen capture), you can change the cursor style or reposition the mouse anywhere on the slide.

4. Adobe Captivate - Captivate (earlier RoboDemo) is a screencasting cum e-learning program and at $800 a license, Captivate is the most expensive screencasting software tool that I know of. Other than basic screen capture, you may use Captivate for creating interactive simulations, soft-skills training in organizations, quizzes and e-learning courses. The software can export your screencasts as SWF, FLA, FLV (with closed captioning), and MP3 (for audio podcasts).

5. Camtasia Relay - University professors can use Camtasia Relay to record and publish their classroom lectures on the web in almost real time.

6. Demo Builder - It sports a very pleasing interface and can record full motion videos (like in Camtasia) or through manual screenshots (as in Qarbon Viewletbuilder). Demo Builder can automatically add visual hints (in the form of text balloons) at relevant points in the screencast (like closing a button with the mouse). You can also edit cursor motions after the screen capture.

Free Screencasting Software

7. Capture Fox - This is a free add-on that turns your Firefox browser in a screencasting application. It can record Firefox as well as the entire desktop screen and will save it as a video file.

8. Screen Toaster - This is an excellent online screencasting tool that requires no installation and works on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. You record the screencast on the desktop and it instantly becomes available on the web as a flash video. ScreenToaster can directly upload screencasts to YouTube and they also a community site like YouTube.

9. Community Clips - Another free screencasting tool from the Microsoft Office team that is not as polished a Screen Toaster or Jing but can used for creating quick screencasts from within Microsoft Office.

10. BB Flashback - This was a earlier a paid software but now the basic screen recorder software is available as a free download. BB Flashback installs a separate capture driver for Windows Vista to record the Aero effects of Vista at a high frame rate even on a slow PC.

11. Tip Cam - It’s a free screencasting software that can also record a remote computer screen provided your computer is running the VNC server.

12. Go View - From the developers of GotoMeeting.com, Go View offers desktop screen recording (with audio) as well as free hosting for your recorded screencast videos with no bandwidth limitations.

13. Debut - This can transmit your desktop screen or webcam video to a remote computer and can therefore be used as spy camera for monitoring the desktop screen from any internet connect camera.

14. Live Screencasting - Procaster from Mogulus is a free software that helps you broadcast your desktop screen (live streaming) on the Internet to any number of users.

15. Techsmith Jing - Jing can capture a still snapshot of your desktop screen as well as record screen movies. Jing Pro can record HD screencasts and both versions are available on Mac and Windows. Related: Compare Jing with Skitch

16. Demo Studio - GPL-licensed screen capture application for Microsoft Windows (open source). DemoStudio records by default to AVI format, but you may use Demo Studio Producer for converting screencasts into Flash (SWF) files.

17.  Windows Media Encoder - encodes other formats to WMV which can be progressively download and can even broadcast a live event from your webcam.

Open Source Screencasting Software Programs

18. CamStudio- GPL-licensed screen capture application for Microsoft Windows (open source). CamStudio is a simple, straightforward program to record screen activity to AVI or SWF format. You can also record audio from your speakers or microphone.

19. Wink (freeware) - Wink, available for Windows & Linux, can capture screenshots, mouse movements and you may also add annotations to your screencasts. You can also add voice narrations at the time of recording and screencasts can be exported as Flash, PDF or EXE for distribution on a CD.

20. vnc2swf - This can capture live motion of a screen through VNC protocol and converts it a Flash movie. Implementation available in Python and C - the former supports Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windows while the C version of vnc2swf only runs on platforms which support X11 (i.e. Unix, Linux or Mac OS X).

21. Istanbul: GTK-based Open Source Istanbul for Linux can record the desktop screen into an Ogg Theora video codec. The software works on GNOME, KDE and XFCE.

Screencasing Resources

• How to Embed MP3 Audio Podcasts
• How to Embed FLV Flash Screencasts
• Screencasting on a Mac - Use Snapz Pro X or create screencasts on an Apple Mac using free software tools like osxvnc, X11 and vnc2swf.
• Disable the Print Screen Key in Windows
• How to prevent blank screen captures from DVD movies

U.S. Government RSS Library

The U.S. government’s official web portal now offers an RSS Library.


My favourites are the NASA RSS feeds available in the Science Section.


General Science Information from NASA

Image of the Day


At the time of writing this post, the link to U.S. Army News was broken. You can even suggest a Feed here.

Guide for Google AdSense Publishers

If you are a regular visitor to my site, you might have noticed some changes in the style. Well, I drew most of the inspiration from the picture above also known as the “heat map”.

This “heat map” illustrates ideal ad placements on a sample page layout. Google folk have published an elaborate Optimization Tips page for Google Adsense publishers.

Looking at my recent adsense statistics, I must admit that the above illustration is fairly nice. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). All other things being equal, ad placements above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold. Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page.

Google has done an impressive presentation to woo new Adsense Publishers.

Adsense for Content remains my primary source of revenue from this blog. I do not use “Adsense for Search" as Googlebot doesn’t index my site too well. Yahoo! spiders do a better job, atleast in my case.

Microsoft Office 2006

Microsoft has established an internal Office 12 ship calendar that pegs Office Beta 1 availability for August 29, 2005. Beta 2 is slated for December 5, 2005. The internal release-to-manufacturing target is May 22, 2006. And the target for “street” availability for the Office 12 System is July 17, 2006, the sources said.


Looks like Microsoft is sticking to the deadline. The next version of Microsoft Office would be coming in 2006.


With Office 12, Microsoft is expected to release more server products designed for workgroup collaboration. Industry observers and analysts have speculated a new Excel server might be in the works, for example, but Microsoft has declined to comment. Existing server products in the Office System family include Project Server, Portal Server and Live Communications Server.


Microsoft originally planned to ship Office 12 alongside the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. The Office release is now likely to come before the new Windows version, which Microsoft has said will be broadly available in late 2006. [Via]

X1 or Yahoo! desktop search ?

If you are wondering why X1 is charging for features that Yahoo! is offering for free, think again.

X1, the big brother of all desktop search tools offers some unique features including special versions for Government and Enterprise users who have valid security concerns.

To help consumers choose which desktop search tool is right for them, X1 provides of comparison summary here.

Yahoo! Desktop Search - Gives consumers the power of X1 Desktop Search, including the ability to:
• Find all of your emails, attachments, files and contacts on your computer - spanning over 200 different file types.
• Instantly preview results - as fast as you type.
• Search directly from within Outlook.
• Customize and control your desktop search experience.

X1 Desktop Search - Provides professionals and businesses with additional unique features, including the ability to:
• Index and search network drives.
• Index and act on email messages stored in external PST archives - even if they’re not loaded in Outlook!
• Integrate Eudora or Mozilla email software products, which are fully supported by X1 Desktop Search.

X1 Desktop Search, Enterprise Edition includes all the capabilities of X1’s award-winning desktop search product, enhanced to provide “as-fast-as-you-type” search solutions across shared networks, is extensible, offers better data security options and a centralized server deployment options with a browser-based client.

Read more about Yahoo! X1 partnership in a letter from the X1 President.

To Read or Not to Read: That is the Query

To Search or Not to Search: That is the Query - Robert J. Boeri writes his views on Desktop Search Tools in this article on EContent.

I have been following the desktop search tool market for quite sometime now and would like to comment on this article.

Robert is right in pointing out that the desktop search market is hot. PC hard drive space has increased a thousand-fold. Google has become a common-place verb for searching, and with PCs always connected via broadband or DSL we simply have more to search for.

The rest of the article is however embedded with not-so-correct information. It seems the author has little or no knowledge about the desktop search companies and their tools. To Read or Not to Read this article ? That is the Query.

As of this writing, Google’s desktop search tool is a “beta” edition, and is still being fine-tuned.
The article was posted on May 09, 2005 and GDS was completely out of Beta on ….. - Yes there are security concerns with GDS but it is definitely not in Beta.

If you use a free desktop search appliance on your work PC, you may receive a deaf ear from the software (or your IT department’s) help desk if things go wrong
Forums - That’s the place to go when you have a problem. There are people (or geeks) all around the world to answer your queries as soon as you post it on a forum. And they don’t charge you for the help. And vendors offering free tools do offer support - I know of atleast two companies Copernic or Filehand that respond to your email.

Besides Google, ISYS is the only vendor I know that provides both desktop and enterprise search tools.
Robert, you need to update yourself - X1, dtSearch, Copernic - all of them offer enterprise search tools.

free desktop search tools have most enterprise search vendors on the defensive.
It may be true or may be not. There are two kind of markets - one for the standalone PC user and the other for Corporate or Enterprise users where the actual money is. True because there has been lot of talk on how desktop search companies plan to make money if they continue to offer software for free. Infact some Windows users argue that Desktop Search Programs shouldn’t exist as file indexing is already built-in and with Longhorn, most of the desktop search companies will have to close shops. Untrue because big corporates remain worried of security and privacy issues and rely only on enterprise versions. And yes, there are even home consumers willing to pay for desktop search tools. X1 charges around $75 for it’s desktop search tool even though a similar version, released by Yahoo!, is available for free.

Your comments are welcome.

Tools for generating email signatures

Google is getting generous and tons of GMail invites are now available. You don’t need to be a Photoshop expert to generate that cool looking GMail signature graphic. Just check out these two Gmail Signature Generator sites:

gizmo967.mgs3.org/Gmail/
playtime.uni.cc/gmail.php

Playtime allows you to download the source code of the gmail signature generator script but I personally like the styles of gizmo967.


Both these services are very simple to use: Enter you GMail username, click the ‘Create’ button and save the generated graphic as a .png file. Convert it other formats like .jpg or .gif using free tool like IrfanView. Done ! And putting a graphic instead of the email prevents you from spam as well.

Some more services for GMail and other popular email services.

1. http://www.nhacks.com/email/index.php - Get email graphic signatures for GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, ATT, Bigfoot, RocketMail, QQ, Comcast, Netscape, Blueyonder, SBCGlobal, Earthlink and Lycos

2. http://www.hkwebs.net/catalog/tools/gmail/ - Only for GMail

3. http://createsigs.com/ - Generate a cool looking signature for free to use on GMail, Hotmail, MSN, Yahoo!, AOL, ATT, Bigfoot, QQ

The last page on the Internet

So many websites claim to be The End of Internet.

You can even shutdown the internet by clicking the red button.

The message is clear: Leave the computer, do something productive or just go out and play.

You have reached the very last page of the Internet.

We hope you have enjoyed your browsing.

Enjoy the rest of your life.

Google relaunches an old service with a new name

You would have read about the "new" Google service called Blogger Mobile where you need to do to use it is send an email or MMS from your phone to go@blogger.com - your blog is automatically created, and whatever text or photos (or both) you send in the message becomes your post.

Before you say “This is cool” - think again. Such a service existed even when Google purchased Blogger from Pyralabs. It just had a different name Mail-To-Blogger - I really see no difference in Blogger Mobile and Mail-To-Blogger except that the former automatically create a blog for you the first time you use it and it send you confirmation notices of your posts.

Such kind of marketing is rarely seen from Google which itself admits the similarities in the two features. Once you have a blog set up, posting through go@blogger.com will be equivalent to posting with your Mail-to-Blogger address (since Mail-to-Blogger now supports image attachments).

This service is not for everyone having a mobile phone. It will work with your phone if you are a US customer of Verizon, AT&T, Cingular, Sprint, or T-Mobile. Photos are currently limited to 250K in size each. If you exceed that, your message will bounce and let you know so that you can try again with a smaller picture.

I still don’t find any convincing reason to switch from Flickr which has tons of mobile blogging features. You can even surf Flickr from any web-enabled cell phone or PDA: just go to http://flickr.com/mob/ on the web browser. Take a peek at all the Flickr Tools.

X1 desktop search countinues to impress

X1 Technologies, Inc., a recognized leader in desktop search solutions, today announced the immediate availability of X1 Desktop Search with support for the IBM Lotus Notes® email messaging system. The more than 118 million users of Lotus Notes now gain access to critical knowledge stored in their email, attachments, contacts and files via one of the most robust, award-winning desktop search tools currently on the market.

X1 is the brainchild of entrepreneur Bill Gross, who conceived and developed a similar product, called Lotus Magellan in 1989. Bill Gross is the founder of Idealab, a company that incubates Internet startups such as X1. Idealab founded Overture, which of course was acquired by Yahoo in 2003.

When Yahoo! released their desktop search product, I was a little concerned over the fate of X1. But X1 developers continue to impress and and X1 remains one of my my favorite desktop search tool. No desktop search tool comes close when it comes to file preview (Contextual previews). X1 has practically support for every filetypes that I have encountered so far. It can even show Adobe Illustrator drawings with the Illustrator program. X1 displays search results in their native format without requiring users to open the application it was created in - or even have it installed. With each new keystroke, results are displayed and refined immediately with search terms highlighted in contrasting colors

X1 5.0 was a major upgrade with a new, more standard, interface; an integrated index, allowing a single search across all of your data; huge performance improvements, no limits on the amount of data that can be indexed, tighter integration with Outlook; support for Thunderbird (and coming support for Lotus Notes). X1 fulfilled the promise in their latest release 5.2.

Enterprise Users with privacy concerns can consider the X1 enterprise edition. For beginners, X1.com has tutorial, a printable Quick Start Guide and excellent customer support alongwith very active user forums (They even have a RSS Feed for X1 Forums)

Google Blog has a new home

Googler insights into product and technology news and our culture.


Eric Case of the Blogger team writes about Google Blog’s to new home at Blogspot. However, you don’t need to resubscribe - the old Atom feed is being redirected to its new URL.




The old blog at http://www.google.com/googleblog/ is no longer updated. Google folks have even added a blogroll in this new blog which to my surprise includes blogs of their main competitors - AJ, MSN and Yahoo!. Scoble was also present.

A picture is worth a thousand pictures

Photomosaics are also referred to as photo montages, photo-tiled pictures, mixed mosaics, random mosaics and photo tapestries.

Photomosaics is an image creation process where a final image is formed from a collection of smaller images called tiles. The tiles are blend together to form a larger image completely unrelated to the individual images that form it.

The small tile images can be seen up close, but at a distance, an entirely different image can be seen. See this popular photomosiac of George Bush.

Photomosiac creation software was initially developed by Robert Silvers at the MIT labs and he does not license the technology which is protected by US patent 6,137,498, which also protects photomosaic’s “look and feel”. Since then over 100 of the Fortune 500 companies have been clients of Runaway Technology. Silvers has created covers for magazines such as Life, Newsweek, and Playboy and has created commissioned portraits for Vice President Al Gore, H. M. King Hussein of Jordan, and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.

USA Today comments: “If Leonardo da Vinci had lived in the computer age, he might have created Photomosaics. Instead, it was left to Robert Silvers to discover a digital way to combine art and science.”

You can view the gallery of photomosaic done by Robert Silvers himself.

Read more about the history of Photo Mosaics.

Arno provides a list of software programs for creating photomosaics. These software create professional level picture mosaics from any photo collection.

For Mac: MacOSaiX
For PC: Centarsia, RS, AdreaMosaic

The dark side of Desktop Search Tools

There is a lot of mention on UW’s study that found Copernic software to be the most well-balanced of desktop search tool among those evaluated, ranking it above 11 competitors including MSN Toolbar Suite, Google Desktop, Yahoo! Desktop Search, Wizetech Archivarius 3000, Ask Jeeves, Enfish Professional, ISYS Desktop, dtSearch Desktop, diskMETA Pro, Blinkx, and HotBot Desktop. The “Benchmark Study of Desktop Search Tools” is available to the public at no cost here. (PDF 2.4 MB) Earlier, WP described Copernic as obscure, a comment that drew widespread criticisim.

But the most important aspect of this study is when all the results were reviewed, it was determined that most of the desktop search tools were still too immature for significant business use due primarily to a lack of mature security and overall manageability.

This is definitely bad news for Desktop search companies. Even Federal agencies remain worried of free desktop search tools due to security problems. If security is breached, either by an intruder using an unattended machine or by theft of a desktop or laptop computer, prowlers can find sensitive information faster. Employees of law enforcement agencies, the FDA and other regulatory bodies can easily expose confidential investigations. The second concern is that when employees use free software, agency officials cannot control the applications as much as they control enterprisewide deployments. Until a better desktop search appliance arrives, enterprise search software might be a solution for federal agencies.

Google officials admit their desktop search tool is not ready for enterprise use. According to Aliya Sternstein, the product automatically records e-mail messages, saves copies of Web pages viewed through Internet Explorer and copies content accessed during Secure Sockets Layer sessions, making it available to anyone using the same computer. As Gartner had earlier warned, GDS could pose some risks for users in shared computing environments.

Filehand 3.0 Desktop Search

It is unfortunate that Filehand Search, winner of a 2004 Shareware Industry Association award for best utility using .NET, was not included in the latest report comparing desktop search tools.

Bob Gelinas just informed me that Filehand Search 3.0 is officially released and new features include better support for Outlook and use of tabs to multi-task among different searches. To me, the most unique and innovative feature of Filehand is Full scrollable extracts - You can see the extracts of the files you found, even for PDF files and even scroll through the extracts so you can quickly find the information you’re looking for. (look at the illustration below)



The new Filehand API provides tight integration of the Filehand search functions into any .NET application, including ASP.NET. The API is priced at $995 for a single use license. Multi-use and re-distribution licenses are also available. The product brief summarizes the Filehand API capabilities and also describes a .NET demonstration project and an ASP.NET search application that ship with the API.

Filehand 2.0 had some minor issues which I hope are sorted out. Download Filehand here. More information on Filehand here.

E-learning could be the next success story

BS writes that e-learning is slowly gaining ground as companies try to save time and costs. And if you thought that only IT firms were cashing in on their inherent technology strengths, think again – manufacturing firms too are using e-learning tools for, yes, the shop floor.


Two years ago, a couple of software engineers at Patni Computers had to be urgently trained for a critical application assignment. With no skilled personnel in India, the only trainer Patni had available was in Singapore.


But with the severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic raging there, there was no way he could wing his way down.


So what happened? Thanks to the e-learning systems installed by Patni, he could train the engineers in time so that they could complete the work for their client.


Patni isn’t the only company that is taking recourse to e-learning. Today, e-learning encompasses all aspects of life, and is used for induction programmes, sales training or softskills, computer applications, medical courses for nurses and paramedics or to work towards a degree in law or history.

Who answers your 911 call?

It’s the phone number that can help save a life.

But calling 911 and expecting help to come running is becoming more of a gamble than ever before — especially in a tech-savvy place like Silicon Valley, where people rely heavily on cell phones and are more likely to try out a new technology such as Internet phone service.

Now more than ever, the emergency phone system is being put to the test. As mobile and Internet phone services spread, it’s becoming harder for 911 dispatchers to pinpoint a caller’s geographic location, a crucial element of 911 and speedy response times.

In most Santa Clara County cities, 911 calls from a cell phone will end up at the local, city-run police dispatch centers. But dial 911 from Fremont or Menlo Park and it’s more likely to end up at the California Highway Patrol catchall dispatch center in Vallejo, where it will be rerouted to a closer 911 center — an extra step that could slow emergency response times.

For those using one of the new Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, phone services, calls to 911 might not even make it to a dispatcher because many of the providers aren’t yet able to provide direct access into the 911 network. [Via]

Using Mahatma Gandhi to sell mobile phones

What if a great man of the last century - Gandhi, say had had access to the communications networks of our age when he made one of his most important speeches? The result is ‘Telecom Italia Gandhi’, an astonishing 60-second spot that has just started airing in Italy. In fall 2004 Telecom Italia released a commercial using Gandhi’s feature and exerpts of his speech at the Inter-Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, 1947.

Imagine the world today if he could have communicated like this

The ad features Mahatma Gandhi giving a speech from a village hut in India. This ad file is a 60 seconds video done entirely in streaming Flash Video and can be viewed here(Flash) or here(Quicktime)

See ad details here.You can even buy this ad on a CD. Or Watch the commercial here.

Using a brilliant blend of real archive footage and sound in combination with specially shot material, ‘Telecom Italia Gandhi’ shows Gandhi repairing to a simple hut, where he seats himself and begins to deliver his ‘One World’ speech - a message of universal brotherhood and love. The biggest single challenge facing the team was the creation of the Times Square crowd and environment. Two hundred extras became thousands, and Gandhi’s face was placed above them all.

This is not the first incidence where Mahatma Gandhi, revered as the Father of the Nation, is used in advertising. See Marketing the Mahatma. Earlier, a court in India has criticised the organisers of a fashion show for displaying a picture of Mahatma Gandhi on the back of a model’s outfit. I hope Tushar Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi’s great grandson) is not listening. Tushar wants to prevent the “inappropriate” use of Gandhi’s name or image in advertising.

Creative Team behind Telecom Italia: ‘Gandhi’
Agency Young & Rubicam, Milan
Client Telecom Italia

Tweaking Tools from Google Fans

The WSJ has compiled a list of tools created by Google fans and critics that add features or remove ads. Google Logos and Google Mirror are missing from the writeup but they are another great innovations from Googe Fans.

The services were developed not by the search giant’s engineers but by enterprising Web users with a bit of programming moxie. Many are hobbyists who design the tools for fun, then realize others might find them handy and give them away. Some are companies looking to make a buck by riding on Google’s coattails. Still others are critics trying to draw traffic from the search giant’s site. Officially, Google frowns on the services, but it rarely goes after the people behind them.

Marcos Weskamp created a graphical interface for Google News as a way to see how much attention is given to individual stories. A headline that has appeared in several publications is represented by a large box, while a story that is less widely covered shows up as a smaller square. The boxes are grouped by color into categories like business and entertainment.

Meanwhile, Paul Rademacher designed a site that combines listings on classified site Craigslist.org with Google generated maps. When the tool was completed, he posted it on a Web site, and wrote a note on Craigslist inviting people to test it. A week later, Google’s official blog praised the site. It “had our engineers saying ‘wow,’ ” the entry read.

A site called Scroogle strips advertisements from Google search results, while Butler gets rid of ads and adds links to other search sites. Another site called GoogSpy lets marketers track which search terms their competitors are bidding on. All are free.

A site called Google Fight invites users to enter two search terms. The winner is the one with the most results. Gizoogle, which appeared this year, delivers search results in the slang of rap artist Snoop Dogg.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 - XP SP3

Microsoft has officially confirmed that Windows XP SP3 will be released after Windows Vista sometime in 2006. Windows XP Service Pack 3 (XP SP3) will be a regular customer fix and not a major upgrade. SP3 will contain significant security enhancements, in addition to stability and performance improvements.

Mr. Ballmer made some interesting remarks: Microsoft might indeed ship SP3 for Windows XP before Longhorn comes out. Also, upcoming version 7 of Internet Explorer should have anti-phishing technology built-in. [longhorn=Windows Vista]

IE7 will only be available to users running XP SP2. I hope that build Windows Media Player WMP 10 and Windows Movie Maker into XP SP3 itself.

The most important part of SP2 is an new firewall program to stop break-ins by network worms such as Blaster. Unlike XP’s earlier firewall, this one is turned on automatically and protects every connection on a computer — even if you already have another firewall active. It also watches what your programs do; if one wants to open its own channel of communication with the Internet, you’ll need to approve this action.

Microsoft has come under increased pressure from Google and other competitors, which have won customers by putting out products more quickly. This re-org at Seattle may be one of the several reasosn to to delay shipment of XP SP3 in favor of Windows Vista.

Download Windows XP SP1
Download Windows XP SP2
Download Windows XP SP3

The above is a torrent version of XPSP3 hotfix pack, that has the complete collection of pre-SP3 hotfixes is however available. Microsoft is advising users not to download the windows xp sp3 package.

The next Windows XP update could be a collection of already released patches, known as an Update Rollup, similar to what the company did with Windows 2000. Many patches posted on Microsoft.com do note that they’re slated to be part of Service Pack 3.

Microsoft have recently committed to release Windows XP SP3 - Microsoft Security Bulletin MS04-044 explicity says “The update for this issue will be included in Windows XP Service Pack 3.” If you have your wishlist for what you would like to be included in XP SP3, write to the Channel 9 forum.

Internet Giants come together

M Networks announced today the participation of the world’s leading technology companies at Small eBusiness World, a two-day technology event that educates small business owners and entrepreneurs on using Internet technologies to start or grow an online business. Small eBusiness World helps business owners evaluate online business technologies and learn how to adopt these technologies into their daily business lives. Companies offering free training include eBay, Google, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Monster, Marketworks, Constant Contact, PayPal and Intuit.


The inaugural Small eBusiness World is scheduled to take place May 6-7, 2005 at the Donald E. Stephens conference center in Rosemont, IL (next to O’Hare). Small eBusiness World contains an exhibit area, guest speakers and more than 30 hours of free workshops including:


— Google Ad Words 101 


— How to Sell on eBay


— Growing an Online Business with Amazon.com


— Online Hiring Solutions by Monster.com


— Organize Your Business with Quickbooks by Intuit


— Accepting Online Payments by PayPal


— Yahoo! Solutions for Business


Other event highlights include keynote addresses from Rich Riley Vice-President of Yahoo! Small Business and Frederic DeWulf Web Director of Microsoft Business Central; as well as one-on-one training with Google and a special program from eBay and the United States Postal Service where individuals can bring in any one item and eBay specialists will help them list that item on eBay in under an hour.

Want to publish your own book

Someday you may be able to walk into your grocery store and convert your Christmas photos into an instant coffee-table book written in your own deathless prose. And this may happen very soon. Sarah Glazer writes about a new phenomenon in the printing industry - “Print-On-Demand”. When Amy Fisher finished writing her memoir about shooting her lover’s wife, she told her agent not to send the manuscript to New York publishers. Instead, Fisher, who made headlines in 1992 as the 17-year-old ”Long Island Lolita,” turned to iUniverse in Lincoln, Neb. The company charges authors several hundred dollars to convert a manuscript into a book and make it available for sale online.

iUniverse is one of more than 100 ”author services” companies in a fast-growing industry aimed primarily at writers who can’t get the attention of traditional publishers. Self-publishing companies like iUniverse have been growing rapidly in recent years, displacing old-style vanity presses and competing with the number of titles produced by traditional houses. The difference between traditional vanity presses and modern print-on-demand publishing is essentially technology. Instead of expensive offset printing, which mainstream publishers use, print-on-demand relies on a glorified digital printer.

Meanwhile, for as little as $459, iUniverse will turn a manuscript into a paperback with a custom cover design, provide an International Standard Book Number — publishing’s equivalent of an ID number to place the book in a central bibliographic database — and make it available at Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and other online retailers. Borders has been offering a take-home self-publishing kit for $19.99 as an experiment. For between $299 and $598, customers can have a manuscript converted into a book by Xlibris, be listed on Amazon.com and get shelf space in Borders.

The Washington Post reminds that you’ll also need to shell out at least $245 for an ISBN number (apply at www.isbn.org), the unique identifier that keeps distributors from confusing, say, “Birds of America,” the illustrated guide by John James Audubon, with “Birds of America,” the short-story collection by Lorrie Moore. If you want a tiny printing, you might try a print-on-demand operation, such as Xlibris (www2.xlibris.com), CafePress.com or AuthorHouse (www.authorhouse.com). These companies can simplify the publishing process by providing layout and design services, the ISBN number, and a distribution network — but they tend to have higher costs and lower returns.

Bloggers may turn to BlogBinders service to publish their blogs as printed books. Or they may use Adobe Acrobat to convert their entire blog into a single PDF file and print the PDF on a laserjet. Ask your graphic designer for a referral.

xlibris.com | iuniverse.com | booklocker.com | enovel.com | ebookstand.com

Slipstream Microsoft products

Have you ever wanted a Windows CD that would install Windows by automatically putting in your name, product key, timezone and regional settings? And have it merged with the latest Service Pack to save time? Followed by silently installing all your favourite applications along with DirectX 9.0c, .Net Framework 1.1 and then all the required hotfixes, updated drivers, registry tweaks, and a readily patched UXTheme.dll without any user interaction whatsoever? Then this guide will show you how you can do just that!

According to Langa, slipstreaming means you create a new setup CD that includes all the patches and updates right in the setup files, so you can create a new Windows installation that won’t need hours of downloading and installing patches and updates to be made current. Instead, it will be fully current from the start.

L@rray, a Langalist read has come across a goldmine of a site.

While there, I learned to slipstream XP and various versions of Office, create a bootable CD/DVD, and pack it with a series of scripts that installs the OS, adds specific drivers during the process, installs Office complete with advanced customizations, installs applications such as MSN Messenger and Windows Media Player and even installs Nero Burning ROM (using command-line switches!). There is a whole host of apps that have been documented on the site, with full instructions on getting things right. There are even sample scripts that you can copy and paste to get you started.

There are tools that you can download from the site that even allow you to run a batch command and pack the whole shebang into an ISO file that can be burned directly to a CD (or DVD if you exceed a CD’s capacity), or use Virtual PC to mount the ISO as if it’s a CD. Then you can “virtually” test your creation without sacrificing a load of disks during the process. Best of all, the site is completely free. Note to readers: Make sure you understand the overall process before diving in. Read the entire site and double-check your scripts before you ever burn your first CD.

If you got a DVD Recorder, you can even bundle Office XP with Windows XP.

What you will need:
A Windows CD. Applicable with Windows 2000 through Windows 2003.
The Service Pack you wish to use for your operating system. Windows 2000 SP4 - Windows XP SP1a - Windows XP SP2
The Deployment tools for your operating system. This guide will cover the build for Windows XP SP2. Those can be found here

Other related interesting reads:
Windows XP SP2 Unattended | Office XP Unattended | InformationWeek on Slipstreaming Windows & Office Programs (Windows XP, Office XP/2003).

Macromedia FlashPaper Vs Adobe PDF

FlashPaper files are smaller than PDF files due to compression. If you compress both the pdf & the flash paper with zip, they end up about the same size. This is because swf’s have built in compression while pdf’s don’t seem to.

Flash Player is slower than Adobe Reader especially when you make the window large, and are trying to scroll, you get a very sluggish interface (as compared to any normal application).

Dave Wraight compares Macromedia FlashPaper with Adobe PDF and feels that FlashPaper has a lot of potential to provide source content in a form that is useful inside other Macromedia technologies (Director, ShockWave, AuthorWare) and also in common web standards such as HTML.

However its future usefulness as a means to sharing content may be limited by either the underlying document format or the viewing technology.

Adobe recently acquired Macromedia and their PDF standard is already facing the heat from Microsoft’s Metro which is being called by some as a potential “Adobe Killer”.

See this PDF presentation on Web Standards: Redesigning Sydney Morning Herald

The Forbes 400 Richest Bloggers

Kotte points to a list of 400 richest people in America who blog:

- Pierre Omidyar, $10.4 billion

- George Soros, $7.2 billion

- Mark Cuban, $1.3 billion

A little bit surprising that Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, David Filo, Jerry Yang, and Oprah aren’t on the list.

Checkout Homes of the Richest.

Frustrated with a website? Just destroy it

Drop nuclear weapons over the target-site, thowing at random different kinds of bombs with devastating effects. Or the best way to show one’s anger towards a specific site is to shoot at it like a mad man. You can even spill digital coffee or inflict cigarette burns on victims. Heck, pull in the big guns and have Mars attack!

Have you ever experienced, just like God himself, how it feels to generate disasters anywhere in the World (Wide Web)? You can do it now!

Click here to see what happens if I spill Coffee on my blog. Or here to see my blog burning right before my eyes. I see a flood coming.

Enter the URL of a website @ Netdisaster and just choose a catastrophe, from things like meteors, flood, spilled coffee and mould. Nice.

Still have some free time ? Try these Optical Illusions.

Let visitors search your blog

Need a powerful internal search engine script to allow visitors to search the contents of your site? Check out these free services. You will learn how to add search to your site without any complexing programming and without paying any money.

Weblogs (or Blogs) have changed the way people surf the internet. It is perhaps the best platform to publish your thoughts to the world. Blogs could be focused on one topic or may contain totally unrelated writings. One day he may write about the lated HD-DVD technology and the next moment he may tell you how her two year old son at the milk meant for the cat.

Agreed, you are an amazing writer. But what if your visitors can’t find what you wrote about Firefox hacks few days back. Millions of bloggers exists all over the world who attract millions and millions of viewers everyday looking for breaking news, tricks ….

Blogs show around 5-10 recents posts on the main page and the rest older ones are hidden in the archives. Some blogging software support “Categories” and “Related Posts” but Google Blogger users are not that lucky.

If you’re operating a five page family site for your ancestors and present family members, then you don’t need site search. But if any site deals with several topics, adding search capability is a must requirement. Visitors can quickly find what interests them else they will just wander aimlessly through your site and leave it after just a few click never to return.

There are hundred different ways to add search to your site but I will try to mention only those that are free and hosted on the search provider. And you don’t require any rocket science to incorporate these search scripts into your site. Blogger service users may even use them as a hack to add categories just like MoveableType does. Once you add the search to your weblog, your readers will be able to search your site for specific keywords.

Enough of introduction now, let’s look at my favorite companies that provide site search:

1. Google - Search and Google are synonmous. If you want visitors to find things easily within your web pages, add Google Free site search as well as web search. Google offers tons of customization like changing logos, text colors, background URL. The only problem with Google is frequency at which Google spiders your site. If Google doesn’t index your site completely, visitors will return empty-handed even though your blog may have the content they are looking for. My personal experience says that Google doesn’t spider blogs very well.

2. Picosearch - Pico is great for small sites as the free version allows upto 100 pages to be indexed. You can start indexing manually and they send you an email with the indexing stats. But if you are into heavy blogging, read on.

3. Freefind - A very customizable product with maximum features. The free version of Freefind indexes three thousand pages or 32 MB of storage, so it suits most of the blogs. Freefind supports PDF file indexing, generates a sitemap for you and it shows complete search reports, including top keyword counts and recently performed searches. Each time your web site changes the FreeFind spider will visit your site and build an index of your pages.

4. Blogdigger - It will solve all the blog searching requirements. For best results, make sure your blog pings Blogdigger each time it is updated. I am very impressed with the Blogdigger results. They provide XML feeds for the results. Undoubtedly, Blogdigger is the best tool for searching blogs. The results contain even the recent entries and the results page is clean and simple.

5. MSN - This works very much like Google site specific search and you still remain at the mercy of the MSN spider.

6. Yahoo! - Now you can also add the Yahoo! Search box to your web site! Yahoo! reserves the right to place advertisements on all Yahoo! Search result pages. But again, make sure that Yahoo! spider crawls your website.

7. Technorati - The most popular service now allows you to add search to your site with the Technorati Searchlet! Just copy the code below and paste it into your blog template, perhaps in a nice sidebar. The searchlet is in beta. Your blog must be listed in the Technorati database and only members get to add the searchlet. This is the coolest service of all and I use it as a hack to add categories to my blogger blog. Look in the right sidebar and view the source code to see the code hack.

Now let’s get down to some coding. Almost all of them work the same way, they provide you with an HTML code snippet that usually consists of a search box and an input button. That’s all the programming knowledge you need. You add this code to your blog’s homepage to provide your readers with a quick way of searching your past posts. Believe me, it’s that simple. When a visitor searches your site, the query is sent to the search company.

Make sure that you read the terms and conditions of these search companies before incorporating them into your site. Google doesn’t want you to mess around with their logo. “Only we get to do that”. If you are using the Google logo on a web page, there must exist a minimum spacing of 25 pixels between each side of the logo and other graphic or textual elements on your web page.

Read Google Guidelines, Google Terms of Service, MSN Terms of Use, Microsoft Do’s and Don’t page, Yahoo! Terms of Service, Technorati Terms. Always good to be safe than sorry if someone decides to remove your site from their index for violation of terms.

Enough of legal talk, let’s do some coding here. Based on what service you plan to use, add the corresponding snippet to your main page or template.

Remember to replace the words “YOUR DOMAIN NAME” with your own website’s actual domain name. The above code may violate the agreement in some cases as I just try to put miniumum amount of code. Feel free to customize the HTML to your heart’s desire. You can add a style tag to the FORM element and modify the margins in CSS to get a layout you want (e.g. style=”margin-top:4px; margin-bottom:20px;”) and also play with the widths of the textbox and button. Research shows that maximum web surfers look for a search box at the top right corner of a page.

Making music on your PC

Gone are the days when making an audio recording meant buying expensive equipment or making a trip to a studio and paying professional prices. Now you can use your computer to record vocals and instruments, edit the whole lot together to create a music track and compile and burn a CD of your work, all with the minimum of fuss and expenditure.

Vnunet has an extensive guide to help you to get started from the hardware requirements and the free software you need. Making and recording music is no longer something that only those with access to a music studio or dedicated equipment can do, and the audio-recording software we have looked at in this feature means making music is even more accessible. You can then use your computer to improve the quality of the music you record or add effects that would otherwise require expensive equipment.

Ars Technica carries another guide to ripping and encoding music. The instructions contained therein will satisfy the majority of casual music listeners, without boring them to tears with details. The author attempts to cut through the BS for the newbies who don’t care about alternative audio formats and bitrate charts and other such complexities. The article is huge but that’s understandable as there’s simply so much information on ripping and encoding audio CDs.

How to get your site indexed on MSN

While MSNBot crawls billions of web pages, not every page that we crawl is indexed. For a site to be indexed, it must meet specific standards for content, design, and technical implementation. For example, if your site’s link structure does not provide links to each page on your site, MSNBot may not be able to find all of your site’s pages.

Add MSN Search Box to your site - just like Google.
Here’s how you can add MSN Search to your site to enable your visitors to search the Web or your site using MSN Search, just add the code shown here to your home page.

Submit your URL
If your site does not appear in the MSN Search results, you submit your site here.

About your site description
As the MSN Search web crawler MSNBot crawls your site, it analyzes the content on indexed pages and generates keywords to associate with each page. Then MSNBot extracts page content that is highly relevant to the keywords (often sentence segments that contain keywords or information in the description) meta tag to construct the site description displayed in search results. The page title and URL are also extracted and displayed in search results. Excellent content design and effective use of terms that target your message are the best ways to affect the site description that MSNBot extracts from your site. Effective strategies include:
1. Placing descriptive content near the top of each page.
2. Making sure each page has a clear topic and purpose.
3. Add a site description into the description meta tag

Guidelines for successful indexing
Use only well-formed HTML code in your pages. Ensure that all tags are closed, and that all links function properly. If your site contains broken links, MSNBot may not be able to index your site effectively, and people may not be able to reach all of your pages.

Full guidelines are available here. You may also be interested in Site Owner Help here.

How to make money from household clutter

Want to turn your clutter into cash? If so, join the more than 100 million people around the globe who sell their stuff on eBay, the online auction community where almost anything in the world is available. Microsoft teaches you how to Sell your stuff on eBay. Unload unwanted goods and make a little dough, but be warned-whether you’re selling or buying, eBay may be addictive.

Irene Nolan started auctioning items on eBay in 1998 and got hooked on the rush that comes from discovering that your trash may well be another person’s treasure. “I once bought four plates at a yard sale for $10 and sold them on eBay for $500. The extra income is great, and I love the thrill of the hunt.”

Getting set up to sell on eBay is quick and registration is free. But before you start auctioning off your unwanted goods, be sure you’re aware of the fees for selling and of the potential risks involved in any e-commerce transaction.

Want more evidence that eBay might just be your next best venture? Consider this: eBay vendor Colleen Corley heard Donald Trump mention on TV that the pet business in the United States is a $30 billion industry. She bought some dog doors at a liquidation sale for $12 each and sold each one on eBay for $110-a profit of more than 800 percent. Happy trading!

Ebay is also known for some Weird Ads. In another case, their Indian CEO was arrested for selling DPS MMS clips.

Google yourself often

Instead of taking Google for granted, we need to remember that criminals get the same easy access to information we get from a capable and quick search engine.

To see what the Internet knows about you, start by going to the Google site or by using the Google toolbar. Next, either type your name in quotations or, for a more refined search, type intext: (intext with a colon) immediately followed by your name in quotes. Now type your address or phone number, and Google may turn up a church or a social group directory listing. If this doesn’t surprise or outrage you, type into Google your social security number or credit card numbers.

So never put anything personal, such as your social security number on a resume, on the Internet, not even temporarily. And if you find such information on a cached Web page (a page that has been taken off a live site but still exists within Google), consult this page for more details. [Via]

Microsoft suggests Adsense

An article on Microsoft’s small-business center has some suggestions for bloggers to make money from blogs.

To my surprise, the author suggest putting Adsense or BlogAds on your blogs to generate revenue. This may be a huge embarrasment to MSN which is planning to roll out it’s own adverting program soon. But is Adsense only good for lesser-known blogs ? I thought people were quitting jobs for Adsense earnings. Also, Lockergnome, NYTimes and host of other popular sites carry GoogleAds. Jeff Wuorio may need to understand blogging better.

For lesser-known blogs, services such as Google’s AdSense or BlogAds enable bloggers to establish ad programs. AdSense’s — which lets you select several ads that are consistent with the content of your blog — pays you based on how many readers click on the ads for further information. Even better, it’s free. BlogAds, on the other hand, hooks bloggers up with would-be advertisers and levies a commission in return for any ad placements that result.

An Adobe Killer from Microsoft

Adobe may have killed the competition in online publishing by acquiring Macromedia. But Microsoft is not keeping quite. The next version of Windows will include a new document format, code-named “Metro,” to print and share documents, Microsoft said Monday. Metro appears to rival Adobe’s PostScript and PDF (portable document format) technologies.

The format, based on XML (extensible markup language), will be licensed royalty free and users will be able to open Metro files without a special client. In the demonstration, a Metro file was opened and printed from Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s Web browser.

The Metro technology is likely to go head-to-head with Adobe’s PostScript technology. “It is a potential Adobe killer,” said Richard Doherty, research director with The Envisioneering Group in Seaford, New York. “But this is just the first warning shot. Adobe could put something that is even more compelling Longhorn. [Via]

This is not the first time Adobe and PDF have been in Microsoft’s crosshairs. When Microsoft originally announced its Xdocs electronic form plans in 2002, Xdocs was seen as a threat to Adobe and PDF. Indeed, the InfoPath feature that was eventually added to Office is a competitor to Adobe’s server-based document management tools, known as LiveCycle.

Whereas Microsoft is choosing to take PDF head-on, Apple Computer took a different approach when it created Mac OS X’s print format. Apple uses PDF as its native printing format and also as an option for saving any Mac OS X file. Though it uses PDF, Apple did its own implementation of the format, using the PDF details Adobe has published.

In fact, one of the things that may help Adobe is that the company is not alone in supporting PDF. Because it published the basic details of the format, it finds itself competing against other PDF creation and management products. On Monday, for example, Arts PDF announced its latest PDF product, challenging Acrobat directly with Nitro PDF a $99 product for authoring PDF files. [Via]

Compare the privacy options of desktop search programs

Gartner had earlier warned that companies shouldn’t use the new Google Desktop Search tool because of security concerns and a lack of features. "Google Desktop Search has great potential for business use. Its security problems and lack of corporate-ready functions, however, make it unsuitable for widespread use right now."

Google was quick to react to Gartner’s report and released an updated version with better privacy settings. Anick Jesdanun compares the privacy issues of the three main desktop search programs:

Google stands out in recording Web sites you’ve visited. Say you saw an interesting article but could no longer find it on the Web. Google’s program can retrieve it from your computer, even if you had never saved it. That feature cuts both way, however: Perhaps you DON’T want your computer to remember everything you’ve ever browsed - especially if you’ve been goofing off at work.

Yahoo is a bit better than MSN - Yahoo won’t record any IM chats by default, and like Google, it lets you exclude certain file types from indexing.

All three programs handle the basics well, so your choice may ultimately come down to what e-mail and IM programs you use and whether you care about Google’s retention of deleted files.

Firefox users would love this program

Mozilla Cleaner is a cache and history cleaner for Mozilla Suite, Firefox and Thunderbird. It deletes your cache, history and temporary internet files as well as cleaning e-mail trash, recycle bin, temporary folders, clipboard, windows most recently used items and user added files and folders.

A cookie manager is also included enabling you to save selected cookies. The app works only on Windows XP and requires Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1 or above. Available for download at The Register

Version 1.42 is available as freeware on the Register site while the latest 1.61 requires payment of £2.50 through PayPal.

I don't agree with the Inquirer

In a recent article, the Inquirer mentions some “key” problems in Firefox. I am surprised to read most of them. Infact, I would prefer to call them as features:

1. Perhaps a name change to Firefox Mailer would help?
Why would the Mozilla foundation want to change the name Thunderbird which is now associated with one of the best and free email clients. Mozilla calls their browser as Firefox and not “Firefox Browser” - Firefox is a product not a company.

2. No splash screen
Let’s do a quick poll here. How may would want a splash screen which covers the screen while the program loads. And Firefox is so quick to load that displaying a splash screen for a nanosecond make little or no sense.

3. NO FTP UPLOADS.
I thought we are talking of a browser which is meant for surfing the web. You have so many free FTP clients available like Flashget which can so easily be integrated with Firefox using extensions.

4. Why deliver security fixes as “new versions”, instead of patches?.
I am no super geek to explain this but as we have always seen with Microsoft patches, they fix one problem and create many others. When bandwidth is not a problem, Firefox does the right thing by not taking any chances.

5. No “Client Customization Kit”
Hey, Firefox is free and open-source. If ISP’s or business want to customize Firefox with their own themes, bookmarks, they are free to fiddle around with the source code.

6. An INSTANT MESSENGER (coded in xul) should be integrated.
Why ? Firefox is a browser. Use it for surfing or reading RSS. Trillian/Yahoo!/MSN already have good stand-alone messengers - Use them.

Adobe Acquires Macromedia: Future of Existing Software Brands ?

Adobe Inc. will acquire Macromedia Inc. for approximately $3.4 billion. The new company will be called Adobe Systems, Inc. This has not occurred yet, and will not occur until approved by stockholders and government regulators. Until the close of transaction, the companies will continue to operate business and usual. The combined company will not be able to create a joint product roadmap until after the transaction is closed.

Macromedia Flash Paper which allows you to print any document to PDF or SWF format truly sums up the merger of two publishing giants. According to Joe, the Macromedia acquisition could extend Adobe’s reach beyond browsers and operating systems to new platforms, such as cellular phones. Macromedia has had pretty good success wooing carriers to Flash. The presence is important, because there are many business functions for which a cell phone or PDA—and not a computer—would be the primary client. Macromedia’s success with cell phone manufacturers and carriers could strengthen Adobe’s position bringing document and collaboration technologies to new clients.

What would the meger mean to the rest of us ?

• All applications will get a standard interface and help system (probably generated from Robohelp)


• Less product choices will be available after a merger than the product choices currently available


• Might see SVG [adobe.com] support in Macromedia’s Flash Player


• Adobe might introduce more choices for consumers like pro / lite versions just like they did with Adobe Creative Suite


• Adobe’s Livemotion team might now focus on Macromedia Flash. Might support for exporting Illustrator files to Flash.


• The good features of Dreamweaver may be incorporated in Golive so we get best of both the worlds.


• Similar stuff may happen with Freehand / Illustrator and Photoshop/Fireworks/ImageReady


• Adobe will become the undisputed leader in traditional printing and online publishing tools - Might expect some anti-monopoly trials against them


• Photoshop and Flash will remain the same, since neither had competition from the other company (Livemotion is alread dead)


• Macromedia Captivate to get better support for capturing audio and video with support from Adobe Premiere and Audition teams


• Adobe Acrobat would support Macromedia Flash Paper technology


• Adobe might bring the flash-video mechanism to Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0


• The fate of Director is unknown - Still it is viewed as unncessary by many Flash gurus.


• Microsoft will surely loose sleep over this merger


• Corel and Quark may see their market share slipping away

Most of Adobe’s software are general design tools, like Photoshop for 2d raster imaging, Illustrator for 2d Vector imaging, Premiere / After Effect for Video Editing and Indesign for Press + Layout. Macromedia’s portfolio is mainly for online applications, like Director, Flash, Dreamweaver, ColdFusion etc. So in most of the cases, the companies products compliment each other, not fight for the same market.

Sean Gallagher is excited about the deal. Undoubtedly, the merged Adobe-Macromedia monolith will be able to bring an impressive array of technology to bear on the problems that face people trying to create content for nearly any medium. By assimilating Macromedia, Adobe gets the Web-oriented technologies it never could get any traction with itself—like the Dreamweaver Web site design and content management environment and Flash Web media platform—and eliminates the few semi-viable competitive products left in digital imaging and illustration.

Macromedia ate Allaire, Homesite, eHelp. Now Adobe ate Macromedia. Looks like the deal was done in a very short period of time. Why would Adobe release an updated Golive CS2 if it knew that Dreamweaver MX2004 was just an inch away?

Use Hotmail to Store Files

Much like GMailFS and the Gmail Shell Extension that were discussed previously, RoamDrive allows users to store files using the free space available on their Hotmail accounts. Unlike the other two, however, RoamDrive can store files without any size restrictions and has features like automatic compression. The developers also plan on releasing a “Pro” version that supports Gmail and Yahoo Mail, and can link your Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo accounts for a massive amount of storage. [ Via ]

ed. Is it only a matter of time before email companies start cracking down on this?

Microsoft Security Update has RSS feeds

Microsoft security update e-mail would will be discontinued in July. However, you can subscribe to their RSS feed.

This feed delivers the headlines on major security update releases, which are usually released on the second Tuesday of each month. To subscribe, add this URL to your RSS reader: http://www.microsoft.com/security/bulletins/updates.xml

The Security Newsletter for Home Users provides general notice about major new security update releases. You can preview it on the Microsoft Security at Home Web site http://www.microsof…