Tuesday, October 31, 2006

IE7 Addons Site


Microsoft has an official Add-ons site for IE7 - is an equivalent of the Firefox Add-ons Site. The Add-ons are distributed through exe (executable) files and are added to your Add-Programs list

Motorola SLVR L7e


Motorola has announced SLVR L7e - comes with a metallic finish and enhanced multimedia functionality. Is expected to be available in Q4 of 2006 Here are some of the features

  • Ultra-thin shell with an innovative nickel-plated copper-alloy chemically-etched keypad with illumination panel
  • High-quality imaging via a built-in 1.3-megapixel digital camera with 8x digital zoom, image editing, and video capture and playback with audio / video streaming (3GPP) and video progressive download
  • MP3, AAC, AAC+ enhanced music player for listening to favorite music on-the-go
  • Bluetooth wireless technology for handsfree convenience and streaming stereo sound
  • microSD memory expansion slot for additional storage with optional card
  • EDGE technology for high-speed data transmission with WAP 2.0 compliant browser
  • MotoSync to synchronize contacts and calendar at the touch of a button

Qunu - expert people service


Qunu is a search engine for people. We use instant messaging to connect -- in real time -- people who have (for now) software or tech-related questions with experts who are passionate and willing to help

Check more on Qunu

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Google Custom Search engine


Google has launched a customizable search engine. Both corporates and individuals can sign up and tailor the search engine to index sites & prioritize results. Google Adsense has been integrated with the customizable search engine as well.

Jump to custom search engine!

Revver - the video network that pays


Revver is a video-sharing platform built upon how the internet really works. Revver tracks and monetizes videos on our network as they spread virally across the web.

And claims to be the first viral video network that pays. They connect makers, sharers and sponsors of internet video in a free and open marketplace that rewards them for doing what they do best.

Scrybe - the awesome looking organizer




Scrybe looks good - really good. Just play out the above video and you will know what I mean.

The features that I liked the most

  • Offline support - works when you are offline! and syncs when you go online!
  • Timezone support - no late night meeting issues and rescheduling
  • Context sensitive
  • Superb UI

I have applied for a beta account and hopefully am lucky!

Top Indian Online Flight Booking Sites


The Airplane industry is booming in India - so are the online booking sites for Flights.

The following lists the most popular sites - most of them offer hotel packages as well in addition to online flight booking. This is no review of each site and I've personally used only Yatra.com which got the job done for me.

Here in no particular order..

cleartrip.com

Promoted notably by Ram Shriram of the Google, Junglee fame, Cleartrip stands out for simplicity and yet very usable in most of its features. Cleartrip seems to have the most popular airlines - Air Sahara, Indian, Jet Airways and Kingfisher. Certainly missing is Air Deccan. Also offers online hotel booking

makemytrip.com

Makemytrip claims to be the cheapest airfare site or they pay you the difference (gimmick!). Site is fairly usable and has tieup with 7 airlines and Air Deccan missing again.

arzoo.com

arzoo.com - a failed venture (I don't remember what it was before) by Sabeer Bhatia has been relaunched as a travel site - Has tieup with almost the same airlines as cleartrip. Also offers hotel, service apartment and holiday booking as well


yatra.com

Promoted by the TV18, Reliance ADAG and few more. Perhaps has the most tieups - most of the airlines in here including Spicejet, Indigo and Air Deccan. Very comphrensive and good service - the only one I have used.


mobissimo.in

Not exactly an Indian site - but does offer comphrensive flight information and connecting flights as well. Haven't seen it too much to comment but doesn't look bad at all.

travelguru.com

Has tieups with Air Deccan, Spicejet but no Kingfisher!

ghumo.com


No Indian - airlines that is, seems have to tieup with all the private players. Precaution than repenting ? :)

If you have some other site that you know - comment and let me know - Will include !

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Telnet to your modem

I use BSNL's connection with what they call a Type II modem - basically a wireless enabled modem - I have a Huawei WA1003A modem which runs Linux.

To login to your modem is pretty simple you do a

telnet 192.168.1.1


Trying 192.168.1.1...
Connected to 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1).
Escape character is '^]'.

BusyBox on (none) login: root
Password:


Type in the password that you use to login to the web interface (you use admin as the username there).

And there! you have a terminal to your modem.

You can many commands on the terminal - To know a list of commands - type in the following on the terminal

busybox

Explore things - For example - you can see the pppd connection which is what connects you to the internet as well as the thttpd server which is a tiny webserver.

Maybe you can discover a few tricks as well :)

Missing Icons in Ubuntu?


Missing those icons on your Ubuntu Desktop ?

Enabling them is easy - Execute the gconf-editor from your terminal

gconf-editor

On the gconf-editor window, Tree through as follows

apps > nautilus > desktop

You will see the icon options unchecked. Check whatever is needed for you and the icons should appear instantly on your desktop

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Social Bookmarking Buttons ?


Like the social bookmarking buttons you see below the post ? I had this implemented through the tutorial at Beautiful Beta by Hans. Pretty simple to get it up and running. Try it out!

hdparm - speed up your IDE disk

Still using those IDE hard disks ;-) ?

hdparm is a utility that lets you speed up your disk speed by optimizing certain IDE parameters.

hdparm should come installed with your distribution

First, execute

hdparm -tT /dev/hda

to check the disk speeds

Now, execute


hdparm -d1 -c1 -m16 /dev/hda

which basically enables DMA, IO Support & maximum number of disk sectors per single request

Execute the speed check and you will most probably notice significant increase in the speed.

hdparm -tT /dev/hda

Apache Tip - Case Insensitive URLs

Making Apache recognize case-insensitive urls is rather easy.

Load up the mod_speling module (yep, speling)

And, use the directive

CheckSpelling On

For more on the mod_speling module - check the Apache manual

Friday, October 20, 2006

Spike the vote - cheat digg

As sites get popular and potentially change the way people start looking at Internet - you get these "cheat" sites which claim to help you utilize the cheat. Be it Adsense ,Ebay or now Digg. Spike the Vote creates a community and diggs each other's stories so that they get it on the front page

Spike the Vote works on a point system. Each day I give you a mission with several stories to Digg. 20% of your mission involves digging stories submitted by users in this community, while 80% of of your mission is completely random. This is to eliminate footprints and keep things anonymous.

You earn 1 point for each story Dugg. Once you earn enough points, you can trade them in for Diggs on your own stories.


I wonder if all these really work and Digg would come up with a way to prevent/blacklist such methods.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Pic resize - resize your pics online


Picresize lets you upload your photos and lets you crop, resize and add special effects to your photos for free.

Modalbox - the Web 2.0 modal dialogues

ModalBox is a JavaScript technique for creating modern (Web 2.0-style) modal dialogues or even wizards (sequences of dialogues) without using conventional popups and page reloads. And yes, it may also be useful for showing bigger versions of images. :)

Try

Flash 9 for Linux


Flash 9 for Linux - Enjoy!

Digg, Slashdot, and del.icio.us - Diggdot.us


Diggdot.us fetches the most popular stories from Digg, Slashdot & del.icio.us and presents it in a nice viewable format

Chocolate - move over .. Come in - Shine


LG's new 'Shine Phone' LG-SV420 - featuring metal body,Schneider's 2M camera, 1GB memory More pictures & details at Aving

IE 7 available for download

Microsoft has released IE7 - features a 'new look', tabs, RSS feed, a search box and 'improved' security. Haven't tested it out but looks like a Firefox clone - except the security part ;-)

Download it anyway

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

18 mistakes that kill startups

Paul Graham writes ..

In a sense there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. If you make something users want, you'll probably be fine, whatever else you do or don't do. And if you don't make something users want, then you're dead, whatever else you do or don't do. So really this is a list of 18 things that cause startups not to make something users want. Nearly all failure funnels through that.

Read more

Liferea - the news aggregator


Have started using liferea - a news aggregator for Linux. Liferea seems to be
the most usable reader that I have found for Linux. If you find anything
better - please let me know!

Ubuntu users:

sudo apt-get install liferea

Nokia 5500 Sport


Nokia 5500 Sport comes with a durable, sporty design to withstand your work-out!

  • Instant Swap key for easy one-key switching between phone, music, and sports modes
  • Text to speech capabilities so the phone can read out SMS messages, increasing ease of use while on the move
  • Stainless steel body for enhanced durability with resistance to shock, water, and dust elements
  • Built-in MP3 player with FM radio
  • Integrated 2.0-megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom and video recording and playback capabilities
  • 3D Accelerometer monitors sports performance allowing users to get instant audio feedback by tapping the screen

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Flickr Mashup - Retrievr

Retrievr is a Flickr mashup. But, what it does is quite interesting - lets you search for images by drawing a rough "Sketch" or uploading images.

Try it out - its nice

Give me back my Google

Givemebackmygoogle strips all the sponsored links that you get from google searches.

Firefox 2 - RC3

Firefox 2 - RC3 is available for download. Look at the features here

Techcrunch has an article on it too

Google using Solar Energy

On Googleblog

Epic games of beach volleyball, urban indoor workspaces infused with natural light, enthusiasm for the outdoors – at Google, we've always taken advantage of the sun. And now we're ready to use the sun yet another way: to create clean electricity.

More here

Greasemonkey & userscripts

It's been quite sometime since I used Greasemonkey. I have started using it again and am so impressed with the number and the quality of scripts at userscripts.

For who haven't heard of Greasemonkey - Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML ("user scripts") to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page's style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page's design or interaction.

LG Chocolate - VX8500


LG Chocolate features an ultra-thin minimalistic slider, 1.3 megpixel camera, bluetooth, microSD slot among others.

Check at LG Mobile

Monday, October 16, 2006

Ajax based domain name registration


Domjax.com is a domain name registration site with a difference. Well, its based on AJAX. You can find domain names, validation & research tools in one single page powered by AJAX

Bubble 2.0 ? Keep track

Did you keep track of those dot-com busts in 2001 ? Techcrunch seems as if they are already expecting another bubble by keeping track of the Deadpool

Unplug your charged phone!


Who knew that leaving a fully-charged phone plugged in to the wall was such a problem? Nokia's formed a new group -- including rival Motorola, among others -- with the aim of educating folks on ways to use their phones in environmentally conscious ways, a move that seems appropriate for the company recently named greenest among cellphone manufacturers.. Among other initiatives, the group will be pushing to add reminders to phones' displays to unplug them once they've been topped off, a change that Nokia says would power about 60,000 homes a year if just 10 percent of the populace complied. The obvious question is, don't the phones begin discharging once they've been unplugged, thereby requiring deeper and longer charging the next time they're jacked in?

Via
Engadget & Infoworld

pdftk - the swiss-knife pdf utility

If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a command-line tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents. Keep one in the top drawer of your desktop and use it to:

  • Merge PDF Documents
  • Split PDF Pages into a New Document
  • Decrypt Input as Necessary (Password Required)
  • Encrypt Output as Desired
  • Fill PDF Forms with FDF Data and/or Flatten Forms
  • Apply a Background Watermark
  • Report on PDF Metrics such as Metadata, Bookmarks, and Page Labels
  • Update PDF Metadata
  • Attach Files to PDF Pages or the PDF Document
  • Unpack PDF Attachments
  • Burst a PDF Document into Single Pages
  • Uncompress and Re-Compress Page Streams
  • Repair Corrupted PDF (Where Possible)
Ubuntu users

sudo apt-get install pdftk

5 Reasons Why RSS Feeds are Not Popular

Only geeks use RSS feeds. Is this true? Unfortunatly yes. Why? well because like most things in web technology and computers only geeks can understand that nothing is one hundred percent all the time. There are probably 5 reasons that the average internet user does not know about or trust RSS feeds.

RSS is still unknown

RSS feeds fail frequently

RSS Feeds are sensitive

Feeds that have been removed

A notification service is needed

RSS feeds are becoming more and more important because of the importance that website owners place on them not because visitors think they are needed. Dreamhost.com has recently replaced their newsletter notification with an RSS feed. While I appreciate the convenience of a having a feed. I don't think that it is a good replacement for a newsletter.

To the average website visitor RSS feeds seem to be a geek toy requiring knowledge that they don't have time to gain or just are are not interested in. If web browsers included feed readers by default it would probably increase RSS usage 10 fold. But since none of the web browser makers seem to be interested in trying to do this RSS may remain unkown and unpopular for years to come.

Read more

Sony Ericsson MBW-100 Bluetooth Watch

MBW-100 is Sony Ericsson's latest creation for people who like to control their cellphone with their watch.
It has been designed with watch industry leader Fossil,and allows a new way of looking at a mobile phone. A stylish OLED display beneath the watch face displays who is calling when a call is incoming. A simple key press on the watch can reject the call, meaning users can remain in control of their calls in the utmost discretion.

Check more

Movie Downloads - Comparison




Techcrunch has a review of the various movie download services.


When trying out the services, I found the $0.99 rental from GUBA to be the best choice. It was cheap enough that I didn’t mind spending the time downloading a movie and deleting it after I was finished. Renting from the other services just didn’t seem a fair deal at $2.99 or $3.99 with Blockbuster down the street and Netflix in my mailbox. I can’t believe that most of these services expect me to pay the DVD price for a movie that hogs my hard drive, comes with a highly restrictive license, and sucks up my bandwidth for 1-2 hours of downloading. However, in the long run I choose iTunes as the service to watch. Their catalog is a lot smaller than the other services, but they offer the most value with their digital movies by easily integrating with my iPod and granting me more licenses. For now, I think I’ll continue using DVDs to archive my favorite movies, but rent digital versions of the ones I just want to see once. What I’d really like to see in this category is a digital Netflix service that automatically rents, downloads, and deletes movies from my computer for a flat monthly fee.


Read more here

Web 2.0 vs Web 1.0

Why Ajax is Conceptually Better

Ajax has been around for quite some time now (it is a bit more than a year ago that Jesse James Garret coined the term) and it has quite some lovers, and just as many haters. First of all let’s distinguish between two different things that are often confused when we talk about Ajax.What many think to be Ajax are really two independent things:

  • Asynchronous Communication: allows fetching and sending data asynchronously, in the background.
  • DOM-Manipulation: which allows all those fancy Flash-like effects on web pages, such as zooming images, floating windows, but also really basic stuff, like swapping text in boxes.
Read more here

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Understanding Vista Licensing

DownloadSquad has an article on Microsoft Windows Vista licensing issues and how ugly and geek unfriendly the restrictions in the EULA

Microsoft forbids you from transferring the OS to another machine more than once

If you've built your own machine and plan on upgrading your motherboard regularly, prepare to shell out for a new copy of Vista the second time you do.

Microsoft has forbidden installing Vista Home or Vista Home Premium on a virtual machine like VMware or Parallels. If you want to do that you'll have to pay for Windows Vista Business or Ultimate, which will retail for $299 and $399, respectively

Vista's license spells out its right to "phone home" to Microsoft and require validation whenever it feels like it, and the ramifications if validation fails for any reason: "The software will from time to time validate the software, update or require download of the validation feature of the software. If after a validation check, the software is found not to be properly licensed, the functionality of the software may be affected."

Via DownloadSquad

List of FM Radio Stations in India

Here is the list of FM radio stations in India - looks like they are updated regularly

Looking for Movie Subtitles?


Podnapisi has quite a decent collection of subtitles for all those foreign language movies & TV serials that get. Look out for the Covers as well.

Blue Screen of Death Top 10


The now infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) has been around since Windows 3.1. However, by chance, this screen made an appearance back in Windows 1.0! Have we finally discovered the original origins of this beast! There are many causes for this error: Bad DLL's, incorrect device drivers, bad memory, damaged registry, etc. This error has become less predominant in later years. Receiving such an error now, is much more serious than it used to be in the Windows 3.1/95/98 days. Below are some of the Top 10 Blue Screen of Death images! Some of these might be fake images, unless I was to take them myself how could I be sure obviously. Enjoy!

Via Real World

Forecastfox - your free weatherman


Forecastfox is a Firefox extension that can sit almost anywhere on your browser and show up the current and the forecasted weather conditions for your city - pretty accurate weather from accuweather.com. Try it out

Ajax loading gif generator


Ajaxload lets you generate Ajax loading gifs like the one above!

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Install Mac & Win Fonts on Ubuntu

Installing TrueType fonts is very easy on Ubuntu. On your desktop or in a file-browser window, just type Ctrl-L to access the Open Location window; then type fonts:/// and click Open. You will then see a list of all the fonts you currently have access to on your system. Drag your new TrueType font from your desktop or file manager into the font-list window, and it will be automatically installed and made available to applications through Defoma the next time they start up.

It's actually not quite that simple if the fonts come from a Macintosh system, because Mac OS embeds extra font information using a special format that Linux can't read directly. Before you drag Mac OS fonts into your fonts:/// folder, you need to convert them with a utility called fondu, which you can install with the following command:

sudo apt-get install fondu

Then copy your Mac OS font directory to your Linux machine and run:

fondu *

Source: Ubuntu Hacks

Ugly formatted perl code ? Try perltidy

Perl: perltidy is an excellent perl code formatter. It's freely available from SourceForge and provides an extensive range of user-configurable options for indenting, block delimiter positioning, column-like alignment, and comment positioning.

Get perltidy

Google Adsense for Blogger Beta



Having trouble adding Adsense to your beta blog ?

This is how you do it

Blogs replacing TechSites?


Okay - I thought to myself ,When was the last time you visited a Tech site? About 2 years ago, I used to visit the tech sites almost few times a day - be it CNET, ZDNet or PCWorld.

These days, I hardly go to any of them - the other day I went to CNET and was petrified at the clutter on their site - is that the reason or these sites just don't have the information that people want? Or was it that certain "known" blogs are a better source of information than those sites. I see a story on Techcrunch saying that CNET is bleeding Traffic and I for one am not surprised!

Friday, October 13, 2006

Coghead - the web-based application builder


Coghead provides a web-based authoring tool for non-programmers to build & deliver applications easily. Coghead has released a beta which you can signup for.

Go to Coghead

Code Style - Common file properties

With the exception of special-purpose files, each source file must ontain the GNU copying statement, CVS Id tag, and author's name and e-mail address.

C, Perl, and Bourne shell files must contain Gnu Emacs variables at the end of the file:

# Local Variables:
# mode: perl
# indent-tabs-mode: nil
# perl-indent-level: 4
# End:

Each file must always end with the linebreak. Otherwise it might conflict with CVS. All files must have Unix linebreak format.

Source - Torrus.org

Cisco VPN client on Ubuntu

Have problems with compiling & configuring the Cisco VPN client on Ubuntu Linux ?

Alan Pope has an excellent tutorial on how to compile the VPN client for Ubuntu.


Read here

How Much Money Do You Make?



Techcrunch has reviewed a site called Payscale which claims to have the largest database of salary information. The way it works is, you give out what your designation is, years of experience, your current salary and other related information. Payscale then compares your data with the other data in their database and gives you a detailed analysis of how much your pay should be. I did that and Payscale says I am underpaid ;-) and I have to do something about it. They seem to have data from all over the world.

Check it out.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Trackmenot - messing the search engine data


Trackmenot is a Firefox extension which lets you 'protect' yourself from surveillance and data profiling by the search engines. Basically, it sits in the background on Firefox and keeps sending random ghost search queries to various search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN & AOL

Download the Firefox extension

The Web According to Ballmer

A very interesting interview with Steve Ballmer on Businessweek where he discusses Web 2.0, Google, XBox, Zune and more...

Even the people running the richest tech companies are awestruck by Web 2.0 valuations. Microsoft boss Steven Ballmer, who sat down with BusinessWeek editors and writers hours before Google finalized its $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube, questioned how the online video service could fetch so much. He also talked about Microsoft's video-game and digital music business, as well as the new breed of competition the company faces.

Read more at Businessweek

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Local International Calling?


Futurephone offers Free International Calls - All you need to do is call up a Gateway Number (US) and dial-in your destination number. Looks like they are offering calls to over 50 countries. I don't know what the catch here is, neither do I know whether this works - check it out anyway.

How to be a Programmer

To be a good programmer is difficult and noble. The hardest part of making real a collective vision of a software project is dealing with one's coworkers and customers. Writing computer programs is important and takes great intelligence and skill. But it is really child's play compared to everything else that a good programmer must do to make a software system that succeeds for both the customer and myriad colleagues for whom she is partially responsible. In this essay I attempt to summarize as concisely as possible those things that I wish someone had explained to me when I was twenty-one.

This is very subjective and, therefore, this essay is doomed to be personal and somewhat opinionated. I confine myself to problems that a programmer is very likely to have to face in her work. Many of these problems and their solutions are so general to the human condition that I will probably seem preachy. I hope in spite of this that this essay will be useful.

Read more

Alltray - docking for Linux


AllTray for Linux can let you dock any application onto the system tray. Very nice if you have too many applications open and there isn't enough taskbar.

You can start the application using alltray

Find AllTray here

For Ubuntu users

sudo apt-get install alltray

Google Docs & Spreadsheets



Google has launched Google Docs & Spreadsheet - the integration of Writely into Google. Haven't used Writely, but Google Docs looks good especially with features like Revisions which lets you compare the changes you made to your document over a period of time.

Looks good to start off.

O'Reilly Codesearch the books!


You have heard of Google Codesearch, Now, O'Reilly has a codesearch too - it lets you search for code from over 700 of their books, containing over 123,000 individual examples.

Very nice I should say, no noise code that you see on Google.

Go to O'Reilly Codesearch

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Retrevo - the amazing Electronics search engine



Retrevo, a Alloy Ventures backed company is a exclusive consumer electronics search engine. See the images and test it out - Its neat.

Great Programmers Answer

Stifflog got an Idea

With the help of public accessible e-mail addresses I asked 10 questions to a bunch of programmers that I consider very interesting people and I respect them for various things they created. Coming out with question was a 5 minute job for me - these are things I would ask about if I could speak with them personally for, let’s say, 10 minutes, and I didn’t have time for thinking too much. The last two question don’t have anything to do with programming, this is simply something I like to know about everyone I talk to, lets say that’s my hobby. Not everyone wanted to answer them, and that’s fine. It was the first „interview” I ever made, so I also made some mistakes, which went out as people started answering… But despite of this, I learnt a lot of interesting stuff, so it was definietly valuable experience.


And he did just that - Check how the Great Programmers responded

WikiPatents - Community driven patent reviews


WikiPatents is a public community that reviews US patents and pending patent applications. The public can add prior art references for a given patent, vote on the relevancy of both original and user-added references, and make comments about how the prior art is related to a patent. Users may also vote on various market and technical merits of patents and patent applications.

See here

Iceweasel - the really free Firefox

IceWeasel is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the source code from the Mozilla project is free software, the binaries that they release include additional non-free software. Also, they distribute non-free software as plug-ins. (IceWeasel does keep the triple licensing used by Firefox to facilitate the reuse of code.)

Check IceWeasel

Best of Vim Tips


David Rayner and his collection of Vim tips

Check it out here

Google Earth aid for farmers

Roughly 140 kilometre from Mumbai, farmers are turning to technology to fight for their rights.

Read more

Comments on GooTube - Slashdot

GooTube

This shit is funny. GooTube in Hindi literary means asshole.

Goo --> Shit
Tube --> Tube
GooTube --> Tube from where you shit

Sorry, I am drunk on monday afternoon :)

Slashdot is outsourcing its +5 Funny to India now?

The Bubble is back! Bubble 2.0, but a bubble nonetheless.

Does this mean that YouTube will now go into Beta status?

Hey google, Thats 24 million dollars each isn't it? I'm a one man company, but you can buy my company (www.positech.co.uk) for just $15 million.
Give me a call, or just drop me an email guys. That figure is negotiable too.

Windows Vista RC2 Review


Information Week has come out with review of Vista RC2. Apparently, if you don't activate, Vista will stop working.

If you don't want to read the full review - here is the conclusion!

Performance-wise, RC2 looks and feels good and marks a continued progression from RC1. (I had only one unexplained reboot!)

The bottom line is that, with RC2, Vista is increasingly looking like a smart combination of heavy duty functionality sure to be welcomed by corporate users and an increasingly good-looking presentation that'll appeal to consumers.

Using ssh-agent for passphraseless logins

If you are on a office network and use Linux and those machines are networked through ssh public/private keys, you may want to consider using ssh-agent

You will have to ...

1. Run ssh-agent
2. Add your private key. "ssh-add .ssh/id_rsa" (in your home dir) -
Enter your passphrase
3. Verify whether your key was added successfully - "ssh-add -l"
4. You are ready to go!

Try it out - ssh to any machine on your network and enjoy the passphraseless logins!

Better Fonts


Better Fonts is a web based font viewer which claims to have over 10000 free fonts that you can preview and download. You can navigate alphabetically or even search for fonts. It comes with a sleek Web 2.0 interface.

Reload Every ...


ReloadEvery is a Firefox Extension which lets you .. reload a page! But then, it lets you reload a page - every few secs that you might need.

This is useful if you are tracking Stocks and you want the page to be refreshed say every 10 seconds or even trying to get an account on one of those private bittorrent tracker sites ;-) and you keep getting those User Limit reached errors - just put on Reload Every and you should get a confirmed account if they are pruning that is..

Google Acquires Youtube


Moments ago the deal was confirmed. In their largest acquisition to date, Google has acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in an all stock transaction. Both companies have approved the deal, which should officially close in the fourth quarter. YouTube’s 65 employees will remain with the company at YouTube’s San Bruno headquarters

Read Michael Arrington's notes on Techcrunch

Monday, October 09, 2006

Google Codesearch


In case you haven't discovered yet - Google has come up with a search engine for Code. It lets you search for publicly available code. You can limit search to particular languages as well.

Try Google Codesearch

Anonymous Surfing through Qoosa



Qoosa is a free online proxy server that lets you browse anonymously. Has features such as removing images, cookies, referring information.

IEs4Linux - easy way to get IE!


Well, Don't know why you would really want to do it unless you want to test your website for IE compatibility and you don't have Windows. IEs4Linux lets you install Internet Explorer on your Linux box rather simply. Try it out For Ubuntu, Do the following steps, Install cabextract (for extracting Windows Cabinet files) & wine. apt-get install cabextract apt-get install wine Get IEs4Linux from the above page and follow the instructions there.