All about computing....

How to fix License is Expired error in Photoshop CS3

2009-12-25T03:42:00.000-08:00

The photoshop "License is Expired" error message is an error message that you will get when you legally or illegally try to activate Photoshop CS3. Even if you have successfully installed Photoshop CS3 with the correct Key and activated it successfully you will get this error message. I have a simple solution to this problem. Follow the steps below to resolve this error message. This tip is just for the users you have activated Photoshop CS3 with a key. Otherwise you will have to activate Photoshop with a key to follow these instructions.
1. Run Photoshop CS3 just to make sure that the error is not resolved!
2. Now go to Start > ContolPanel > Date and Time.
3. Set the system clock time to something like January 5 2006.
4. Restart your system.
5. Start Photoshop CS3 again.
Now I think your problem will have been resolved. This is a genuine crack for License is Expired error in Photoshop. I hope this tweak will work for you.

Sony Ericsson Xperia Rachael Android Cell Phone

2009-07-17T07:13:00.000-07:00

The new smart phone from Sony Ericsson, which is rumored to be a Android powered mobile phone was recently exposed. This new phone will be equipped with a 4-inch WVGA screen and an 8 megapixel auto-focus camera.

Sony Ericsson Rachael is expected to be equipped with Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon platform, a 1GHz processor and 3D graphics engine. It is also expected to have a miniUSB and 3.5mm headphone jack.
Read Full Story from www.phones-online.org

China has the largest number of IT users in the world.

2009-07-17T06:05:00.000-07:00

China is always a world dominator in adapting and creating new technologies. The Chinese people have loved and utilized the potential of the web like no other. They now have surpassed US population and become the country with the largest number of internet users according to CNNIC. A registry of the total number of internet users and registered top-level domains in China is maintained by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).
China has created history with landing their Taikonut in the moon and now they have surpassed another landmark. There is no relationship between space crafts and surfing the internet, but it showed the technological advantage they have gained over the years. China now has become an indisputable power among the technologically advanced nations in the world. So this is not a very surprising thing that they are also the largest users of internet.
China now has about 338 million internet users. There are about 13 million websites that are registered under the top level domain .cn. The tremendous increase in internet usage in china attributes to many new and modern technologies like popularity of 3G enabled mobiles and other internet enabled gadgets. Among the 338 million users about 155 million access the internet using mobile devices. Almost half of the internet users in China are accessing web on the go.
China is the biggest populated nations in the world. So even though it has surpassed the US population the gross population accessing the internet is close to 40% when compared to 74% in US. The number of security issues is also increasing with the steady growth in internet usage, which is a matter of concern. Technology has both pros and cons. So with increasing number of users China will also become a huge market for security software companies.
China is also the largest broadband internet using nation in the world and .cn, the country code top-level domain of China, is second largest top-level domain in the world.

How to increase your blog traffic with Twitter?

2009-07-17T04:10:00.000-07:00

Twitter has proved its dominance in the internet with in a short period. It has become popular among millions of people around the world. They use Twitter like their mobile phones to send messages and that for free. It provides internet users a great oppurtunity to share their deeds with their friends, family, and the world.

Twitter is a efficient and free messaging tool, which sometimes in the future may replace even e-mails. Time may come that some may ask your Twitter ID so that he can follow you or sent you tweets. This is a great thing in the information exchange point of view, but there are lot of buisness and branding possbilities with Twitter too. Many popular companies have started their own Twitter accounts and share tweets with the world. They see this as an oppurtunity to increase their brand popularity and reach millions of common people around the world at the same time.

We know how much RSS feed have helped bloggers to improve their blog popularity and your feed count is the proof of your blog success and search engines give lot more importance to your feed count while ranking your blog in their list. The time has gone, when you have to post your blog address at forums and request websites to place links in their websites. There is no need for such things now. There are many other ways before us now. You can list your blogs in blog search engines or blog directories, bookmarklets and now you have one other way to increase the popularity of your blog and make it a brand, and that is by using Twitter.

Twitter has opened another oppurtunity for bloggers to start attracting more users to their blog. What you have to do is tweet about the contents of your blog, about your blog, about yourself, and latest happenings in topics that relates to the content of your blog. It will help the world notice your blog so easily and fast. You might have seen the "Follow me at Twitter" button in many websites. So some day it is possible that RSS feeds may be replaced by this button.

There are many advantages using Twitter than many other services, it offers direct communication among followers and tweeters. It offers dynamic traffic to your site. If some of your followers like your blog or its content they will re-tweet it. In this way you get more traffic without doing anything. Twitter will help you create a brand image for your blog. All you have to do is to start a twitter account with the name of your blog. Another thing is that you can create any number of twitter accounts and manage them easily from your desktop. The most important thing is that it allows you to communicate with your followers, know what they are accepting, take ideas from them, and build a strong relationship with your readers. Many top websites have opened their twitter accounts and already have thousands of followers. So why are your waiting. Start your own Twitter account for your blog and boost your blog traffic.

Hulbee-A tag search engine.

2009-07-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

Hulbee is a new search engine which helps you search the web by adding related tags to your search queries. It uses Yahoo search index to provide you with related queries there by helping you to build queries by the click of a mouse button. It is another experiment in simplifying web search. Searching the web with Hulbee is very easy. Hulbee has a very intusive interface. While you search by entering a particular query,then Hulbee presents you with related keywords on the left side. These related queries are displayed as a tag cloud, like in a blog or a website. When you click on any of these tags, it will be added to your search query. In this way you can add more and more tags to your search query there by refining your search results.

I searched with Hulbee and it is a very interesting experience. You can also search Hulbee by entering your search queries and Hulbee will suggest you with related queries in a tag cloud. When a related tag is already in the search result, it will be highlighted. You can refine your search by adding the suggested queries. This will help you narrow your search and get quality results.

Hulbee is not a great search engine or even comparable to search engines like Google. But it will defenitely help you to make your search more simple and according to the developers of Hulbbe:"Changing of query on Hulbee is quite simple. Adding or excluding of query word takes one click. Intellectual technologies allow Hulbee to suggest possible query variants. For successful search it is enough to pick suitable one from suggested variants. Hulbee relieves from the necessity of keyboard using, it is normal to build query with mouse only."I assume that the motivation behind Hulbee is to make you use the mouse more than the keyboard while searching, but I think it is quite useful and will satisfy any kind of user. Moreover, if a search engine can provide you with what you need in one search that is better than building queries. Hulbee is efficient in that aspect too. It provides you with quality results and while adding more and more tags you will get more refined results.

The idea behind Hulbee is simple and it uses a new technology to present keywords with related themes as a cloud. Query suggestion is not a new thing and this option is availabe in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and others. The only difference is that they suggest you queries while you type your queries. Google provides you with apt query suggestions and it makes your search much faster to some extend. Hulbee implements this idea in a more different way, however, it is the search results that count.

Google also has come up with a new search feature similar to cloud search, which is called Wonder Wheel, which can be accessed by clicking on "Show options" link located on the top left of your search results. It will help you search and refine your results by clicking and navigating among queries suggested by Google.

I hope you enjoyed the post.

Free wallpapers for Android

2009-06-30T04:12:00.000-07:00

There are lot of websites that offer wallpapers for android G1 Phone. Here is a great collection of free android wallpapers. Download these stunning and amazing Android wallpapers for free by clicking on this link.

Alternatively, you can also download a zip version of these wallpapers by clicking on the following links. The resolution of these wallpapers is 640X480.

Wallpapers for Android phones - Volume 1

Wallpapers for Android phones - Volume 2

Wallpapers for Android phones - Volume 3

Wallpapers for Android phones - Volume 4

Wallpapers for Android phones - Volume 5

Wallpapers for Android phones - Volume 6

Wallpapers Babes for Android phones - Volume 1

I hope you enjoyed the post.

How to keep your system updated automatically?

2009-06-25T10:45:00.000-07:00

We have lot of applications installed in our computer. Most of the applications like browsers, anitviruses, firewalls, and others need to be updated to render maximum performance. Otherwise, these applications become outdated and our system will become vulnerable to malicious attacks. Manually updating applications in our system is a monotonous task.
A update tool is a software that will automate the process of updating applications running in your system. It will scan all the applications running in your system and will display available updates and patches for them. Not only that with the click of a button all these updates will be downloaded and applied to respective applications. I will tell you about some update tools that will help you keep your system and its applications updated and secure.

SUMo
SUMo tops in my list of the best update tool with a huge database of about 90,000 applications. So you will definitely find no problem in getting updates for all the applications installed in your system. It even has updates for other update tools that I will mention in the rest of this post. After starting SUMo click on the "Scan" button to start the scanning process. SUMo will list the applications installed in your system and specifies all the ones where an update is available. SUMo will not install the updates for you. Instead, it only notify you when updates are available. This is a major drawback of SUMo. SUMo is the application with the highest application detection rate than any other update tool. So if you need a tool that can detect updates then this tool is for you.

UpdateStar
UpdateStar is second to none when it comes to keep your system updated. It has a nice and cool interface. It is an amazing tool that will detect updates and download those updates for you and help to keep your system secure. It also has a huge database of about 80,000 applications to its credit. But the detection rate is bit low when compared to SUMo just because it only can list applications registered in the system control registry. Otherwise, does a good job and worth a try.

Update Checker
Update Checker is a update tool from Filehippo.com. Update Checker can scan for applications installed in your system and display updates in a Web page interface. You just have to click on the download icon to download a update. Update Checker can detect only 200 programs and only detects programs installed in the system control registry. But Update Checker includes updates for almost all popular applications including lot of freeware applications. Update Checker is a simple yet powerful update checker you ever need.

Personal Software Inspector
Personal Software Inspector is an all in one update tool that will keep your system secure. This is not just a update tool, but also a security tool that will help you close all the loop holes in your system by which malicious programs enter your system.
PSI is the software update tool from Secuna, which has a intuitive interface. It will help you patch applications there by keeping your system secure. The program has a database of just 4500 applications, but includes all major applications and does a good job in keeping your system up-to-date. PSI first scans for applications and its versions installed in your system. It then sends a report along with a signature of each application to the Secuna server, where it is compared against a database. PSI then presents you with detailed report of which applications are unsafe and needs an update. A wizard will help you install updates for the insecure version of application installed in your system. This is the best update tool I ever know and I highly recommend this tool for you.

Software-UpToDate
Software-UpToDate is the last, but not the least update tool in my list. SoftWare-UpToDate has a huge collection of applications in its database. It can detect applications listed in the system control registry and also will scan your registry to find applications. It then checks if updates are available for applications detected in its online database and notify you. The only drawback is that it can only detect applications and updates. It will not provide you with download link for updates. You manually have to download updates. Software-UpToDate is a nice update tool which can detect many applications and definitely worth a try.

I hope you enjoyed the post.

Wyzo- the browser for download Junkies.

2009-06-22T07:54:00.000-07:00

Wyzo is a new browsing sensation in the world of browsers. Wyzo is a Gecko browser engine based browser. So it looks like Firefox, but there are some differences in the way it looks. Otherwise, we can say that it is 90% Firefox + Extensions. The functioning of the browser, the menus, the shortcuts, and even the Firefox commands like "about:conifig" are there. So if you are a Firefox user then you will not find anything striking or new. The only difference you may feel is the look and few additional extensions, most of them are available for Firefox. Wyzo has a new theme instead of the Firefox default theme. Then it has some extensions that are quite useful and that make it Wyzo.

The most important feature of Wyzo is the main objective for which it is made, to download. Wyzo allows downloading torrents and other files much faster than Firefox. Since it supports torrents you did not need a torrent client to download torrents. The download speed you get will be much higher with the FireDownload extension. Then there is the FireTorrent extension that helps you download torrents. Another cool feature of Wyzo is Cooliris, it is previously known as PicLens. Cooliris allows you to browse thousands of websites in a 3D environment. These are the notable features of Wyzo. There is the Ctrl-Tab extension that allows you to visually navigate between open tabs and there is also widely popular addon for Firefox, FireGestures. Otherwise, it is just Firefox in disguise.

I downloaded Wyzo from their website. The browser is still in its beta and there are little little niggles when you use it. It allows me to download files much faster than with Firefox. So it really is better than Firefox in that aspect. It looks bit beautiful than Firefox. The security features are similar to Firefox. So there is nothing new or notable in that aspect and even the memory usage is also the same. The other difference I noticed is that instead of Google the default homepage of Wyzo, which is customizable, is powered by Ask. Another difference is that the "Getting Started" and "Latest Headlines" are not there in the Bookmarks Toolbar. Instead, it has bookmarks to popular websites like YouTube, YouTorrent, Flickr, Amazon, Myspace, Facebook, and digg.
In my opinion, Wyzo is for those who need the security features of Firefox along with some download speed. It comes preloaded with great extensions like Cooliris, Firedownload, FireTorrent etc. So you did not have to download them separately! Overall, it is a nice experiment and a good hack of Firefox made for download junkies.

How to get Everest Ultimate Edition for free?

2009-06-09T19:36:00.000-07:00

Everest Ultimate Edition is a system benchmarking and diagnostic tool. Now you can download a free copy of Everest Ultimate Edition for free. It is a limited timed offer. To secure your copy of Everest Ultimate Edition for free visit this page.

You will be prompted to enter your Name and e-mail address. Make sure that you have entered the correct e-mail address since the download link is sent to the email address you have submitted. A account verification e-mail will be sent to your inbox and when you click of this link you will be taken to a page with a message that says you have successfully registered with pro.de.

You will receive the download link within 1 hour. So check your inbox after some time. You should get a message along with the registration key for your Everest Ultimate Edition.

Go to Everest Ultimate Edition website and download a demo copy. Run the installer and enter the product registration key you have received via e-mail to activate your free copy of Everest Ultimate Edition.

Enhance the quality of your blog posts with Yahoo! Shortcuts.

2009-06-09T19:12:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! Shortcuts is a new plug-in that will help you improve the quality of your blog posts by suggesting you photos, maps, quotes, headlines, and much more related to your blog posts. is plug-in is available only for Wordpress now and will be available for other platforms in the near future.

Relevant Shortcuts
When you write you blog post Yahoo Shortcuts will suggest you relevant content related to that post by searching in websites like Flickr for photos and other websites on the internet for news, products, people, places, and lot more. You can enhance and add more depth to your posts using the content suggested by Yahoo Shortcuts. The shortcuts found by Yahoo Shortcuts will be underlined. You can add these shortcuts to your blog posts and customize the way a shortcut looks in your blog post. If you think a particular shortcut is not relevant you can delete it.

Adding Images
Adding images to your blog posts can be made easy with Yahoo Shortcuts. As you write your post Yahoo Shortcuts will search and find relevant images for your post from Flickr. You did not have to manually search and find images. You can then select the appropriate image and add the image link to your post. You can also determine the size, width, and alignment of the image.
Yahoo Shortcuts is an amazing plug-in which is a boon to bloggers and help them to improve the quality of blog posts. It is also beneficial for the readers because they got more relevant information while reading a single post.

Hexagon

2009-06-09T05:50:00.001-07:00

Hexxagon made by Neave Games

Amazon Kindle 2

2009-06-07T00:51:00.000-07:00

The new Amazon kindle, a super slim and elegantly designed Book reader is all set to release this year. Kindle 2 seems to give more importance to beauty than any thing else in its new avatar. The smooth and brushed white metal finish with white curvy edges and slim design may make us think it is an "Apple reader" at first sight.

Kindle 2 has some cool features while it has dumped some of its features in the older versions. The new Kindle comes with a 6-inch screen with a 16-tone gray scale e-link display. This seems good, but still there is flicker between pages. It still needs some time to flick between pages. Reading the text with Kindle is still a great experience because it was such an amazing gadget. When talking of Kindle, it is from Amazon a place to buy products online securely and easily. Kindle is also best at this, buying books. Purchasing books and magazines from Kindle 2 can be done easily by clicking on the 3-G link.
You can use Kindle 2 to share your books between multiple devices through Whispersync. This allows you to buy book using Kindle and read it on any device you prefer. Kindle 2 now has text-to-speech support, which is exceptional. This gives more value to you as a user. The text-to-speech engine will read books for you and you need not have to strain your eyes much. The scroll wheels have vanished and instead you have super sensitive buttons to navigate from one page to other. The removable battery has gone and as has the SD slot.
Browsing the web with Kindle still remains a dream. Kindle 2 also bears the same burden. It is slow and really crawls at times. Loading PDFs from the web is still a problem. The e-link display needs to improve and the text appears softer. The image display quality has improved to 16-shade gray scale, which is a great improvement. Then the pricing of titles is very high. You have to pay up to Euro10 a pop.
The Kindle has changed its face in Kindle 2. I think you will love the super-slim, sleek, and light-weight design. With Wi-Fi, great storage space, and elegant design Kindle is everyone’s’ dream reader.
Features
*Battery life-2 weeks with Wi-Fi off
*Storage- 2GB
*Dimension-203x135x9 1mm
*Weight-290g
*Whispersync
*Text-to-speech functionality
*Easy navigation with super-sensitive buttons.

The expected price is between $300-$350.

Google Docs can be used to edit Microsoft Word and Excel Files.

2009-06-07T00:39:00.000-07:00

Google Doc is the most popular online document processing tool. Google Docs now supports Microsoft Word and Excel Files. You can upload these files and Google Docs will automatically convert these files so that you can edit them online.
The only problem is that the document will appear without some formatting settings you have applied to your Word or Excel document. After Google Docs have successfully converted your document you can edit it in Docs.

I have uploaded a Word 2007 document that I received via email and Google Docs converted it for me. The only few things missing in the document were the formatting settings. The Word and Excel formats that Google Docs supports are .docx and .xlsx. Docs already supports .ppt file format. This is a good news for everyone because we no longer need a Word viewer or Excel viewer and view and edit our files online anytime or anywhere. Since formatting options are not supported you can only use Docs to convert unformatted .docx or .xls files.

Tetris Flash Game

2009-06-06T13:13:00.000-07:00

Slideshows of Office 2010 Beta

2009-06-02T22:33:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Office 2010 beta leaked video

2009-06-02T22:16:00.000-07:00

How to become a beta tester for Microsoft Office 2010?

2009-06-02T20:27:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Office is the most famous Office suite ever. Every new version of it creates waves in the software world. The new version of Microsoft Office is currently under development and Microsoft want this version to be the best than the previous versions like Microsoft Office 2007. For this they want beta testers from around the world to give them feedbacks about the new Office suite. Do you want to become a beta tester for Microsoft Office 2010? Do you want to give your feedback and let them improve the program based on your suggestions? This is the golden opportunity for you to enter into the world of software testing by testing one of the most prestigious software packages in the world.

To become a tester for Microsoft Office 2010 you have to take a survey in order to qualify as a beta tester. The survey is titled as Microsoft Office Technical Beta Nomination. When you enter this page you will see a message like "Space is very limited and all nominations will be evaluated on a first come, fist server basis". This means the "vacancies" are limited.
After you have successfully completed the survey you will see a message which tells that you will be contacted in July 2009 with an information status about your nomination. So as you have just submitted your application the status will be pending. Once you are approved your status will be Active.

Your application will not be approved immediately and you have to wait for sometime for your application to be approved. This measure is to ensure that only quality people are selected for beta testing, but if you have the passion and ready to dedicate yourself you can give it a try.
The public preview of Microsoft Office 2010 will be released with in a few months. So even if you did not get a chance to test the beta version you can wait until that happens. Any how the most eagerly awaited beta download of the year will be Microsoft Office 2010 and the greatest buzzes about this suite is already all around the internet. The fake and real screen shots, leaked images, and videos. So watch out for most awaited beta and only then the picture will be clear.

New Google Adwords Interface

2009-06-01T22:24:00.000-07:00

Google Adwords campaign management has got new look which will help advertisers to get their work done faster.

Notable Features
• Easier account navigation
through a new account tree.
• In-line editing of keywords, bids,
ads and placements.
• Integrated reports on campaign
management pages.
• Roll-up views of all keywords, ads
and placements in a campaign.
• Quick filtering to focus on the data
you care about most
• Performance summary graphs for
quick trend-spotting

You can read the full story here.

How to download the new Beta Version of Chrome?

2009-06-01T22:10:00.000-07:00

After a long a time the new version of Chrome is released and is available for download.The Chrome is a beta since December when it was released and so many people downloaded and used it which claimed as the fastest browser in the world. It really is a lightweight browser which offers better speed and usability to its users and conquered the hearts of lacs of users all around the world. The happy news to Chrome users is that it has launched a new beta for chrome.

Features of new Chrome
The new release has lot of features added to it to improve its usability and speed.
The Google Chrome after its release since September 2008 comes with almost 300 bugs fixed and an updated JavaScript engine which Google claims to have increased the speed of Chrome by about 25%-35%. This will increase the stability, security, and speed of Chrome. Then there is a Full Screen Mode, a most awaited feature of Chrome. There is also an option added to fill similar form fields automatically. Most of the changes are made to increase the speed and stability of Chrome than the look and feel. But a notable change to the browsing with new Chrome is the new Tab Page which allows users to remove thumbnails from the New Tab page. Then there is an auto scroll feature and lot more. You can download the new version of Google Chrome here.

How to play any video or audio file in your computer?

2009-05-31T18:07:00.000-07:00

If you want to play a particular video or audio you have to implement the suitable codec. If you did not have the right codec then you will not be able to play it. Most players like Windows Media Player, Winamp etc can play different multimedia formats for you. But many times these players cannot be able to play some audio or video files and will ask you to install the codec needed to play that file. I will tell you about some free and very useful players that you can use to play any multimedia format in your computer. You can use these players not because the above mentioned players did not have the capability to play them. Instead there are free and light weight alternatives for these players which you can use to play any audio or video format.

QuickTime Alternative
QuickTime is the most popular streaming video and audio format on the internet. You have to install the QuickTime player in order to view QuickTime (.MOV) videos. The QuickTime player is free to use, but there are some restrictions and you can only view the file and cannot be able to download it. You can use QuickTime alternative to play and download .MOV files and it is free to use and light weight.

Real Alternative
Real video format (.RA and .RAM) is also one of the most popular media formats. You have to install Real Player to watch these videos online. There is an alternative that you can use to play this format without installing Real Player and it is called Real Alternative.

SMPlayer
For a long time I am looking for a player that can play any format. Unfortunately, I need a different player for playing some other formats like .flv files. I am looking for a player that can play these kind of video and audio files too and I found one. That is called SMPlayer. SMPlayer, in my experience can play virtually any format I want. It can play .mov, .ra, .ram, .flv, and lot of other formats. This is the best player I ever know that can play these many different formats. This is functionally the best player that I have used. So if you are looking for a free and light weight player for playing any files then you can use this without installing any codec.

Note: Still you cannot play some formats then try installing codec packs like KLite Mega Codec Pack.

Ambiently-The discovery Search Engine

2009-05-31T05:41:00.001-07:00

Search engines are experimenting with new technologies to provide users with precise results. Searching the web is like finding new ways to easily access what you are searching for. We as users explore and experiment using keywords. So for a user using the right keywords is the way to find what he is searching for. A user generally searches for accessing or concentrating on a particular topic. He generally wants to find answers to his questions. So he wants more choices. A search engine provides users with relevant results, but it is possible that there may be at least a few irrelevant search results. As we navigate through results for a particular keyword from one page to other we become more and more distant from the topic we are searching for. That is the number of irrelevant search results increases.
A new kind of search engines are emerging that will try to provide users with more relevant and related search results as possible as they can and they are known as discovery search engines. A discovery search engine is not like an ordinary search engine. It did not try to provide users with pages that are related to a particular keyword; instead they will provide users with results based on the web pages they are currently visiting. So it can be called as a "real time" search result generation engine. In order to get a web page as a result you either have to enter the URL of the web page or type a keyword related to that page in a search engine. Then only you can use a discovery search engine to discover new pages similar to that web page. So a discovery search engine cannot be used as a "primary search engine". It is a "secondary search engine" because you have to start your search with a keyword typed in a search engine like Google or Yahoo etc. When you get a relevant result from these search engines, and you click on that link to land on that page, from there on you can use a discovery search engine to discover and explore more pages like the web page you are currently visiting.
Ambiently
Ambiently is a discovery search engine in its beta. It is considered as the first discovery search engine in the world, but anyway it is the most popular discovery search engine now. Getting started with Ambiently is very easy. First point your browser to Ambiently website. There you will see a small button on the left side at the top.

You have to drag and drop this link button into the navigation bar of your browser or bookmark it. Now like what I have said before start your search with Google or other search engine and when you land on a web page just click on the Ambient Page button to get an Ambient page similar to that web page. There is a small Jump button that you will see on the right side of links generated by Ambient. When you click on this button you can get results similar to a web page link without directly landing on that page. This will help you find what you are searching for more easily.
Benefits of Ambiently
What is the use of a discovery search engine like Ambiently? The web has a complex structure. The information we want did not reside on a single page. It is scattered among different pages on different websites. A search engine cannot index all these pages. The probability of these pages appearing in a search result depends on the keyword used to describe that page, page rank, and lot of other features. So if the page is not optimized to be crawled by search engines the possibility of that link appearing in a search engine is nil. Most importantly it depends on the keywords you use. If the keywords you used to search a term is similar to the page containing the information you want, then only you got that page as search result.

There remains lot of Web Pages that are not properly indexed or unknown by search engines because of these. This is where discovery search engines come into play. A discovery search engine tries to break the "right keyword" barrier between a search engine and a user there by providing them with more relevant search results.
What Ambiently do?
According to the creators of Ambienlty:"Most obviously, Ambiently is simpler than a search engine. On a search engine, you need to think of a good query and type it into a search box. Using Ambiently, all these steps are unnecessary. With Ambiently, all you need to do is to click a button. That action leads to a list of web links related to the current web page. In other words, every web page now is an automated "search engine" for a special topic, i.e., the topic of the page.

One of the biggest problems with today’s search experience is that we often know roughly what we want but cannot easily think of the right query. Sometimes our need is broader than a simple query can describe. With Ambiently, this action is not necessary. You get relevant web information by one click.

Using a search engine, you get web links related to your query. However, you also get web links related to the Web Pages you are reading, viewing, or enjoying. As the noted author Peter Morville said, the future of search will be "a future where search and browsing work together." Ambiently is doing just that."

I hope you enjoyed the post.

How to create a Music Studio in your house?

2009-05-30T00:36:00.000-07:00

A home music studio helps you edit and create music at your own home like a pro. Here is how to setup convert your computer into music engine.
You need the following components to get started.
1. A computer with decent configuration.
2. Sound card
3. Speaker
4. MIDI Keyboard
5. Adobe Audition
6. Head Phone

The computer system not only has a good configuration but also has addition features like CD/DVD writer and a 240GB hard disk is recommended. The sound cards and speakers should be of good quality. The quality of these two components are very important because they play an important role in deciding the Input and Output sound quality. A sound card inbuilt in your PC is not suitable for music editing. You can opt for some other sound cards like . Most of them are really cheap and if you the money you can opt for high end sound cards.

Speakers output sound and you need a good speaker to determine the output sound quality. A MIDI keyboard is a must for music creation. Most modern keyboards support MIDI and if your keyboard did not support MIDI then you can get one easily. With a MIDI keyboard you can play keyboard, guitar, drums, flute, and lot of other music devices just using your keyboard.

To record sound you need a good headphone. Try to select the best quality headphones always. They are not just listening devices, but also recording devices. If the headphones are of poor quality hence will the quality of music.

Another very important thing you need is a music recording and editing software. There are lot of software tools available out there. If you are a beginner or professional, I recommend Adobe Audition, which is the best music recording tool I ever know. It is fun and easy to use. No prior training is needed to record and create music with Adobe Audition. If you are a podcaster then this tool will be the most indispensable part of your life.

Finally, you need a clean and lonely room to get started. The room should be without any background noises or disturbing sounds. This is very important if you want to setup a home music studio. If you have all the above components then you can easily start your own home music studio.

How to get Panda Internet Security free for 3 months?

2009-05-29T08:39:00.000-07:00

Panda is one of the most popular and widely used security suite in the world. Now you have got a chance to get Panda Internet Security free for 3 months. Microsoft currently is running a "Protect your PC" campaign to make PC users aware of the security issues their operating system faces and take them seriously. It is a known fact that because Microsoft operating systems are used all around the world, they are always susceptible to malicious attacks. Microsoft as a result is partnering with Panda to provide free antivirus protection to its users there by encouraging them to protect their system. Anyway this is a great oppurtunity for you to act! Download a free copy of your Panda Internet Security Suite today.

Features of Panda Internet Security Suite 2009
*Anti-Phishing Filter
*Anti-Malware Protection
*Anti-Banking Trojan Engine
*Anti-Spam protection
*Advanced Proactive Protection
*Anti-Rootkit
*Automatic Backup and Restore
*Web Filter
*Firewall
*Parental Control

I hope you enjoyed the post.

How to convert your files online?

2009-05-29T07:44:00.000-07:00

Online applications can be used to convert your files to different formats . The benefit of using such services is that you did not have to pay for using many of these services. There are some incredibly useful sites that will help you convert your file online. Here I will mention some of the most popular file conversion tools online.

Zamzar: Zamzar is the most popular file conversion tool online. Zamzar is not a completely free file conversion site, but the basic service is free. You can convert 5 files of 100MB size at a time. It allows you to convert your files to lot of popular formats. It also supports video conversion. You can also become a paid user by paying a monthly fee. This will help you do unlimited file conversion and access to online storage space for storing your files.

Mediaconvertor: Mediaconverter is a one stop solution for your audio and video file conversion needs. It allows you to convert your videos and audios to almost every popular format. You just have to upload your file and select the format to which you want to convert your file. The service is bit slow, but still does a good job considering the fact it is completely free. You can also convert videos from YouTube, Metacafe, and other popular video sharing sites by providing their URL and pressing the convert button. It also allows sharing of converted files.

Freefileconvert: Freefileconvert is another great tool you can use to convert your files online. It supports about 30 different file formats and the file upload limit is 100MB. It also supports video file conversion. So you can upload a video file up to 100 MB and convert it to your preferred format. Freefilecovert is the best video converter I ever know. The features it offer is simply stunning. You can not only upload large video files but also decide the quality of your file by specifying whether the file is to be compressed or not. If you allow compression the file size can be reduced. You can also use it as an online downloader for YouTube. You simply have to enter the URL of a YouTube video in order to convert it.

Primopdf: PrimoPdf is an online tool to convert your documents to PDF. PDF is the most popular document format on the web. So it is the best format for sharing your files online. You can use Primopdf to convert any type of document to PDF using this online service. In order to convert a file you have to either upload the file or provide a URL of the file. After successful completion of conversion of the file it will be sent to you as e-mail. Since Primopdf allows document conversion only, the file upload limit is 5 MB which I think is pretty good.

Vixy: Vixy is an online file converter with a difference. Vixy allows you to convert .flv videos to be played in portable devices like iPhone, and other portable devices. In order to convert a file online you just have to enter the direct URL of the flv file and select the format to which you want to convert your file. The conversion tool is free to use and there are no restrictions.

Youconvertit: Youconvertit is your ultimate destination for converting files into different formats. This is an online tool which allows you to convert files to virtually any format. So if you did not find the format to which you want to convert your file anywhere, then just visit Youconvertit. It also allows you to send the converted files as e-mail.

I hope you enjoyed the post.

Google Wave

2009-05-29T03:49:00.000-07:00

"Google Wave is a new communication service which is previewed at Google I/O. A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more."

Best Free DOS Games

2009-05-29T00:27:00.000-07:00

Command and Conquer(Gold Edition)

MORTAL KOMBAT 2

CRAZY CARS 3

PRINCE OF PERSIA

Tom & Jerry: Yankee Doodle's Cat-Astrophe

GTA

WARCRAFT 2

SUMMER CHALLENGE

PANZA KICK BOXING

GRAND MASTER CHESS

DOOM 2

INDIANA JONES

LION KINGS

Rapidshare download manager JDownloader

2009-05-28T23:46:00.000-07:00

There are lot of download managers that offer you the facility to download files from Rapidshare. If you are a premium member you can use any download manager to download your files. If you are a free user you cannot use a download manager to download files. Even if you download the file there is no guarantee that the file works because the file hosters are making constant modifications to prevent these kind of downloads. So if one download manager works for a day then it is unsure that it may work for any longer.

My quest for the best, free, and most importantly a working download manager for free is almost in vain. It is recently that I heard about JDownloader, which is a free download manager with lot of features and that supports not just Rapidshare, but over 100 different other file sharing services. So I decided to try JDownloader to download some files from Rapidshare.
Downloading files with JDownloader is easy and it also offers you a lot of benefits. First you can copy the DDL link to a Rapidshare and paste it in JDownloader to download it. You can also drag and drop the link into JDownloader. You can paste as many links as you can and each file will be downloaded one after the other. Another great benefit is that you did not have to fill captchas or remain in queue to download a file. JDownloader will automatically do this task for you.

Amazing features of JDownloader.
JDownloader has so many features that you cannot expect from a free Rapidshare download manager. The first and the foremost thing is that it is free and open source. It can auto complete captchas in about 26 different file hosting services and it supports more than 100 one-click filehosters. It allows you to create a list of files by copying and pasting the file into JDowloader or you can make it automatically do this by allowing it to monitor your clipboard. It also allows you to download multiple files from multiple filehosters simultaneously. It has a reconnect feature which will be configured so that DSL users can automatically obtain an IP. It has lot of other features like a file upacker, a password list manager, plugin support, and even allows you to select a preferred server from a particular filehoster.

After you have downloaded JDownloader you have to run the file named "JDownloader.jar” to start the installation process. Then you have to select the download location for all your files. Before installing JDownlaoder make sure that you have installed the latest JRE in your computer.

Now you can start downloading files with Rapidshare. It is pretty cool and easy. Before you start downloading files you have to accept the Terms of Services for all file hosting services. It may take some time before a download starts because if you are a free user then waiting time cannot be bypassed. But you did not have to intervene in the download process. The files will be downloaded automatically once the waiting time is over. A very important thing you have to do is, whenever JDownloader prompts you to update it, then do it because otherwise it may not work. These updates are patches for different new features and modifications to bypass JDownloader included to a file hosting service. You have to update JDownloader frequently to continue downloading files for free.

JDownloader is the best Rapidshare downloader you can get and it is completely free and open source. You can download this handy application here. Linux users can visit this link to download JDownlaoder.

A Basic Crash Course in Graphic Designing

2009-05-26T20:11:00.000-07:00

Graphic designing is a very lucrative carrier. It provides a lot of opportunities. The benefit of learning graphic designing is that you can work as a freelancer or in reputed companies. The amount of money you can make is also immense. Moreover, the satisfaction of doing what you like and earning from it is amazing and this is also one of the reasons why lot of people want to learn Graphic designing.

A online crash course that will give you basics ideas about graphic designing, its challenges, and opportunities, and provide you with detailed descriptions, insights, and online resources which is easy to follow is published in PSD TUTS. I find these tutorials simply amazing and going through these basic lessons will help you estimate your talent and plan a successful carrier in Graphic designing. I truly recommend this basic course in graphic designing for those want to know about graphic designing and those who want to jump into the world of Graphic designing. Follow this link to get a great insight about Professional Graphic Designing.

How to get old version of SnagIt for free?

2009-05-26T19:49:00.000-07:00

SnagIt is the most popular screen capture software you can get. It is a professional screen capture tool that provides you with all you need to create stunning screen shots within just a few clicks. Professionals and non professionals, bloggers, and students will find this tool very useful. But even it is a very useful tool it is not free. SnagIt is a shareware, so you have to pay for it.
Now you can download a legitimate version of SnagIt for free online. An old version of SnagIt, SnagIt 7.2.5 is available for free now. If you do not want to miss this wonderful opportunity then visit this link.
You can register yourself with your email address and name here. You will be sent the key for unlocking SnagIt 7.2.5 version.

Note:You will be sent the registration key only. You have to manually download the trial version of SnagIt 7.2.5. To download the trial version of SnagIt 7.2.5 click here.

How to get Full version of Armor Firewall 3.0 for free?

2009-05-26T19:02:00.001-07:00

Online Armor is one of the best firewalls in the market now. Online Armor is available as a free download just for today and it is not another give away of the day offer. You will get Online Armor with a 1-year license. So you will be entitled to get full support and updates until the license period expires.
Developers description of Online Armor.
"Online Armor - is a Personal Firewall to protect your money, identity and your Data. Whether you’re browsing, Transacting or receiving Email; Online Armor can protect you. This award winning software is easy to use right of the box.

The powerful “HIPS” functions, which is designed to stop all unrecognized programs from running on your computer, makes it possible to protect yourself against new threats and attacks.

In standard mode, most decisions are made completely automatically based on Online Armor’s whitelist - users never need answer a complex firewall prompt again.

Online Armor protects your passwords and private information from being stolen by blocking keyloggers as they try to activate. Online Armors behavior detection ensures that even specially created or new keyloggers are detected and prevented."
In order to learn more about this offer and download your free copy of Online Armor click here.

Factual Search VS Keyword Search

2009-05-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

Searching is a online activity we do the most than anything! Because we have to search hard in order to find what we exactly need. The way we now search are using keywords. Using keywords may affect the quality of our search because most people search online because they have a doubt in mind. We always think in terms of What, How, When, and Why rather than this and that. In that sense even if the search engines are doing a good job providing us with results they are not actually providing us with "factual" data. These results are based on keywords. We have to use the right keywords in order to get the right results. So search engines today are not providing the data with meaning, but with keywords.

The need for a factual search engine arises from this thought. Wolfram Alpha is the brain child of Dr. Wolfram at Harvard University. Wolfram Alpha allows us to type our queries as questions and it will provide us with meaningful answers with relevant and useful data. The first thing I typed in to Wolfram Alpha is "Who is Mahatma Gandhi?” The answer I got is quite surprising and satisfying. It identifies that Mahatma Gandhi is an Activist and provide me with basic information about him like his full name, date of birth, place of birth, date of death, and place of death. It also provides me with a timeline of Gandhi's life. I type few other questions like "Who is Abraham Lincoln"? etc. But when I type "What is a firewall?" it provide me with the result of a movie named Firewall and its box office collection etc. So if you want to know the box office collection of a movie then this is the best way. Type in the name of the movie and you will get it.
The search engine or COMPUTATIONAL KNOWLEDGE ENGINE, which is the name with which the creator of Wolfram Alpha like to call it; provides lot of other features too. That is why it is called as a computational knowledge engine rather than a search engine. It basically, I think is not intended to provide you with search results, but to interpret your natural queries into a machine understandable form and provide you with the right answers. So it is more of an "answer to question computational engine" than a search engine. In other words, it is the marriage between knowledge and intelligence blended with search technology. So if something like Wolfram Alpha will become popular then knowledge will become more accessible and the internet will become more valuable.

Wolfram Alpha provides additional features like Comparison of stocks. One example given in the Wolfram Alpha website is that of the comparison between Apple's and IBM's stocks. The results you got are stunning and detailed. It will immediately provide you with the correlation coefficients, annual return, average daily return, and annual volatility like an expert with great precision. So you can use Wolfram Alpha to compare and analyze stocks too.
Another cool feature I noted in Wolfram Alpha is that when you enter the name of a town you get the details like the population, current time, weather forecast etc all in a single page and that is very useful. Then it can answer your mathematical queries. If you select the Mathematics section you can use Wolfram Alpha to provide you with solutions to the even the most difficult problems in mathematics. The date and time section provides you with detailed reports of a particular date, its features, most important happenings in history at that day etc. It also can provide you with information and answers related to lot of other categories like Statistics and Data, Physics, Chemistry, Materials, Engineering, Astronomy, Earth science, Life Science, Technological world, and lot more.

Wolfram Alpha is available as a add-on for Firefox3 and you can also download Wolfram Alpha plug-in for IE. IE8 users can download the Accelerator for Wolfram Alpha. It is also available as a widget for Widows Vista, and a gadget for iGoogle. Windows (XP/Vista) users can download a deskband version of Wolfram Alpha. You can even download Wolfram Alpha to your iPhone. To learn more about downloads you can click here.
The computational engine is I do not think related to the so called search engine war in any way because when search engines try to take you from websites to websites Wolfram Alpha tries to find solutions for your problems by analyzing, processing, and retrieving data from the internet and other database sources. So it will be more helpful to academics and researchers than ordinary surfers. But it is just a beginning and Wolfram Alpha is still in its early stages, so we did not know what is going to be the future of this great computational engine, but it will defenitely the way people search.

Dr. Wolfram, the founder of Wolfram Alpha has lot of plans for his new and amazing web tool. In the near future we may see Wolfram Alpha partnering with some big names on the internet. The future is, I think going to be bright for Wolfram Alpha which is considered one of the greatest inventions in computing by many experts. The only drawback that we may consider about Wolfram Alpha is that most people did not use natural language or questions regularly, they still like to use keywords because of the fact that they are quite accosted to it. But who knows, it may the invention that will change the way we search and use search engines forever.

YouTube Embed Magic Tool

2009-05-25T19:03:00.000-07:00

YouTube Embed Magic Tool is an amazing widget from blogger-templates.blogspot.com that will generate embed codes for YouTube videos without annotations or search bar. You simply have to enter the URL of the video you want to embed in a webpage and press the OK button. You will get the embed code for the video in the textarea just to the bottom of the input box. You can access YouTube Embed Magic Tool here

Yahoo Sideline

2009-05-24T23:02:00.000-07:00

Yahoo Sideline is a great twitter tool, but it is not just another Twitter tool. It will not show your followers or tweets. You can use Sideline to search twitter by using keywords. When you open Sideline it will display a list of most popular topics in twitter. You can expand each tab by clicking on the small plus icon. This will display three latest tweet related to that topic. You can also create your own favorite tabs by using your own search terms. You can include multiple search queries to topics you create. This will help you find all the latest tweets about the topics that are of your interest.

For example, you can create a topic named cricket and then track tweets related to it using multiple keywords like IPL, Preity Sinta, Knight Riders, and Rajasthan Royals. You can also narrow down your search results to a particular keyword or phrase, tweets by particualr person etc.Sideline allows you to favorite tweets and you can reply them by clicking on the Reply option.
Yahoo Sideline is a great twitter tool, especially if you are interested in a particular topic. Moreover you can use it to track down your favorite tweeters, reply to them, and all within a nice cool interface. To know more about Yahoo Sideline click here.

How to remove ballon tips in XP?

2009-05-24T20:15:00.000-07:00

You might have noticed the balloon tips that appears in the desktop notification area. These tips are useful at times, while they are annoying at some other times. We can remove this option from Windows XP using a simple registry editing.

1. Type "regedit" in the Run dialog box.
2. Navigate to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced".
3. Find the option that says "EnableBallonTips".
4. Double click on it and change its value to 0.
Note:If you cannot find this option simply create a new DWORD Value named EnableBallonTips and then change its value to 0. To re-enable the option change the value to 1.

WINRAR tips.

2009-02-03T06:30:00.000-08:00

WinRAR is a fantastic compression utility. There are a lot of cool features that make WinRAR a great compression tool. I would like to mention some cool features of WinRAR that will help you a lot.

Create an SFX archive.
SFX stands for Self Extracting Archives. WinRAR can be used to create SFX files. Sure, WinRAR is great for compressing files. But if you want to send a fie to somebody who did not have WinRAR then it is better to compress the file as an self-extracting archive so that he can open it without the help of an utility like WinRAR.
To create an SFX do the following.
1. First select a RAR archive.
2. Navigate to Tools>Convert archive to SFX.
You will be provided with three modules. Select an SFX module among them. Now click on OK. You have successfully created an SFX archive.

Splitting a file using WinRAR.
Want to split files. You do not need any specialized file splitters to do this task. You can use WinRAR to easily split files. To split files using WinRAR do the following:
1. Select the file or folder you want to split.
2. Now right-click on it and select "Add to archive" option to compress the file.
3. From the window that appears click on the "General Tab" and under the section that says "Split to Volumes, bytes" select a size from the drop-down menu and press OK.

Creating an installer with WinRAR.
WinRAR can also be used to create installers. It allows an user to install an archive than extracting it. It is also more customizable than an SFX archive. First, right click on the file or folder which you want to compress and select the option that says "Add to archive". From the window that appears check the option that says "Create SFX archive".

2. Now click on "Advanced" tab and then on the "SFX Options" button.
3. Here you can enter a path to which the file is to be extracted, enter the name of a program to be executed before or after the installation, add an icon to your archive, display a license text after the installation etc.

Protecting an archive with Passwords.
You can also protect your archives created with WinRAR using passwords. To do this just right click on a file or folder and select the option that says "Add to archive". From the window that appears click on "Advanced" and then on "Set Password.." to set a password to your archive. Only when the password is entered correctly that a person can open the archive.
Estimate the time taken to compress a file.
You have a large file and you want to know how much time it will take to compress the file. Then do the following:
1. Navigate to Start>Programs>WinRAR.
2. Browse for a file or folder you want to compress.
3. Select the file or folder and click on the "Info" icon.
4. Click on "Estimate" button.

You can also use this option to know the information about an archive in your computer.

Repair an archive.
To repair an archive select the archive and click on "Repair" icon. Before repairing an archive select a location to which the repaired file is to be stored, and archive type. Now press OK to continue. You can repair both zip and rar archives using WinRAR.

Hope you enjoyed the post!

How to add games to your Blogs?

2009-01-17T06:42:00.000-08:00

Want to make your blog more attractive and interactive. The best thing you can do is to embed some games to it. That will definitely make people stay in your site for some long time. Heyzap is a flash game publishing site that allows game developers to create, and share games through a blog or a website. What you have to do is to upload your flash game by creating a widget and then specify its height, width etc. Then the game will be evaluated by Heyzap and if it is approved you get the URL and the code to embed the game in your website or blog.
The games are well categorized. Publishers of games will find it so easy to submit their games here. They can also generate extra cash because Heyzap offers revenue sharing for the pre-roll video ads. It also offers a nice dashboard through which developers can track the game usage and its popularity.
For bloggers they can be able to attract and hook more readers to their sites by posting game links from Heyzap.

heyzap.com - embed games

How to improve the performance of Firefox?

2009-01-17T03:10:00.000-08:00

Firefox offers us a lot of things to surf online better. It is safe, fast, and perfect. But sometimes you find that it is a bit slow. The reason may be you have installed a lot of add-ons, memory problems, cache size, incorrect configurations you have made etc. So I will tell you how to improve the performance of Firefox.

Add-ons: Firefox is extremely extensible. There are lot of add-ons and themes available in the Firefox website. So you wildly downloaded and installed them. That may be reason Firefox is slowing down. Because having lot of add-ons enabled and using colorful themes means a lot of memory. The best thing you can do is to remove unwanted add-ons. Only try to install add-ons like Adblock which will help you to block pop up ads and something like that which will improve your security and browsing. Do not install add-ons that are unnecessary. Install developer add-ons like Greasemonkey which will help you to customize websites. But use it only when needed. Then try browsing in safe mode than Normal mode. In safe mode you can disable add-ons which will lower the memory usage by Firefox. Using themes add more color to Firefox. You can fashion Firefox using different themes. But many of these themes hog lot of memory. So learn by practice. Use themes that do not require a lot of memory. Avoid themes that slow down Firefox. It is better use the default theme. In this way you can save a lot of memory and improve the performance of Firefox.

Tweaking the configurations: Do you think your Firefox uses a lot of memory and that is affecting your browsing, then you can do this Firefox tweak. It is not recommended anyway. First, type about: config in the address bar and press enter. This will give you access to the configuration settings of Firefox. Now search for "browser.cache.memory.capacity". What this setting is that it determines the amount of RAM that Firefox will use as cache. If you cannot find this setting make sure that "browser.cache.memory.enable” is set to true and create a new preference of the name browser.cache.memory.capacity.

The default setting is -1. This means that Firefox will automatically determine the amount of memory to be used as cache. The setting of 0 means that RAM will not be used as cache. You can enter a value in Kilobytes to manually set this value. For a 256 MB system the setting may be 5000 KB or 5 MB, for a 512 MB system it may be 14000 KB, for 1 GB system it may be 18000 KB etc. This may increase your browsing speed a bit.

Restart Firefox: If you use Firefox for a long period of time then it may become slower and slower. This is because Firefox increases the memory usage from time to time. So if you find that it is lagging a bit then try restarting Firefox.

Update: Another reason Firefox is a bit slow is that you did not properly update it. You may have installed a lot of add-ons or plug-ins. Make sure that you update those plug-ins and add-ons properly.

Increasing browsing speed: Browsing speeds you get is always not constant. Sometimes it is fast, but sometimes it crawls. There are lot of things you can do correct these problems. If you are using Firefox then you can try this tweak to increase your browsing speed. Again type about: config in the address bar and press enter. Now search for "network.http.max-connections". This determines how many simultaneous HTTP connections can be made by Firefox. The larger the value the greater the speed you are going to get. The default setting is 24 or so. You can set this value to something around 35-40 if you are using slower connections. But if you have fast broadband internet connection you can use a setting between 48 and 96. Then you can tweak another setting which is the "network.http.max-connections-per-server" configuration setting. This determines the number of simultaneous connections that can be made to a single server. You can try increasing this value also. The default value is around 8-15. You can try increasing it to somewhat around 25-35. This may also increase browsing speed.

Few other tips: Now I will explain some other things that you commonly do and must do which is very important in keeping Firefox in good condition. First, you must clean your browsing history, including cookies. If you use add-ons like DownThemAll make sure that you also clean its download history. If you have some saved passwords you can chose whether to delete it or not. But making your browser remember your password is dangerous. Instead you can search for "Signons.txt" file in your Firefox directory where all your saved passwords are stored. You can copy it to a notepad file and save it in your hard drive. You can also encrypt it using an encryption tool like NeoCrypt if you have accounts with sites like PayPal, Amazon.com, e-bay etc. Then delete those saved passwords list from Firefox.

I hope you enjoyed this post!

The new Windows 7

2009-01-11T13:26:00.000-08:00

The new Windows 7 Beta is out there. It is available as a free download now. The version is just for testing purposes and will expire in August.
The new Windows 7 Beta 1 promises a lot of amazing features. First, it installs faster than Vista and even XP. Vista is a fantastic OS. But it is definitely a resource hogging OS. Windows 7 is noticeably fast and sleek without the frills in XP and Vista and still offers a bunch of features.

Installing Windows 7 is a breeze. First download it here. It is a beta, so make sure you have backed up all your useful data before installing Windows 7. It is better run it in a virtual machine. So read this article how to run Windows 7 on XP and Vista using Vmware. You can directly download the iso image from here. You can also download the torrent of the ISO image here. After you have downloaded the beta image burn it to a DVD and then boot from it. Then you need activation key to continue your installation process. You can read an article about activating Windows 7 here.

Windows 7 comes with a bunch of features. One of the greatest hyped feature in Windows 7 is the Superbar. It is being unlocked in Windows 7 Beta release. It will show you thumbnail views of applications that is being opened. You can hover your mouse over these thumbnails to expand them into view. The 3D style pop up windows is amazing.
The OS just looks like Vista. At first sight you cannot discriminate it from Vista. But there are lot of changes within. That is evident in the way it handles processes, runs applications, manage memory, processor support etc.
One great feature that I noticed is not quite useful you may say. But is a great improvement. We can install patches without rebooting the system.
Lot of changes are made to the Aero interface. To run Aero in Windows 7 you did not need a powerful processor or a lot of memory. The Aero runs faster and transition effects works much better than in Vista. The windows can be snapped to sides and the icons looks almost life like. The button bar is translucent which can be easily arranged by just clicking and dragging on it.

Windows 7 has a new feature called Action Center, which will co-ordinate all the security issues, updates, and alerts. Windows 7 also has Windows Defender by default. Another feature added to Windows 7 is the ability to burn ISO images.
Some of the features are locked in the Beta because they are incomplete. If you want to know how to unlock these features read it here. Overall it is a nice OS. The happy news for customers is that Microsoft is offering Windows 7 as free upgrade for customers who purchased Vista after July 1. I do not know it is a limited time offer. So it means XP is already nearing its end and the new Vista honeymoon will also end somewhere in the near future. But we have to wait because Windows 7 is going to release as a full OS only in 2010 or so. Again it is just a rumor. But one thing is certain Windows 7 is one of the perfect Beta release of an OS ever. It is a bit buggy at times. But almost perfect at every aspect.

The best offline Blogging clients.

2009-01-11T12:59:00.000-08:00

Blogging is very popular now a days. Blogs are the free and best platform to share your ideas with the world. So it is time to think seriously about some offline blog editors that will help you to write blogs, edit, and post them. Here is a list of the best blog editing tools that can make your blogging more fun and easy.

1. Flock: Flock is the best offline editor available now. It can be used as a browser/blog editor. It can be considered as a social browser that is designed to fulfill your social networking, blogging, and browsing needs. You can use Flock as your Blog client. It is an excellent offline blogging client that works with all major blogs sites like LiveJournal, Blogger, Wordpress, and a wide range of other platforms including Metaweblogs. Due to this universality it can be considered as the best offline blogging client. Creating and posting blogs with Flock is so easy. Install Flock, and when you run it for the first time, you will be prompted to enter the URL of your blog, User name, and password to log in to your blog. Enter those details correctly and you are all set to go.
A cool feature of Flock is the "Blog This" feature. If you see some interesting content or a photo, or anything else so interesting just right click on it and Select "Blog This" to instantly post it to your blog. There are a lot of cool features that Flock has and you can explore it to learn more about Flock.

BlogDesk: Another great offline blogging tool you can use and it is free. You can use this to easily post your blogs. But I think it is not as flexible as Flock. The striking features of this tool is that it has a good tag editor. You can add your tags to a list and whenever you want to add a tag to your posts, you can add it from the list. It has a spell checker! The spell checking is a useful feature. I think configuring it is a bit tough. To configure BlogDesk you have to select File> Manage Blog. There are two ways to upload images via BlogDesk. First you can directly upload images which is the easiest way and the second method is to use FTP protocol. You can edit your images within BlogDesk because it offers basic image editing features like cropping, rotating, and changing file formats etc. Some other features of note are that BlogDesk allows you to edit already posted blogs. Then it has a auto save feature which will automatically save your post in a folder locally so that you did not have to take a backup of your blogs.The only down side is that it did not support a lot of blog platforms. Actually I cannot find the name of Blogger in the supported blog list. But it definitely worth a try.

Live Writer: Live Writer is a cool blogging client from Microsoft. But installing it is a bit tricky for me. When I clicked on the install button I see a message that I have to upgrade my installer. So make sure you have updated your system with the latest Windows installer. A nice article to solve installation problems for Live Writer is available here. Liver Writer is free to use and offers a bunch of features to make your blogging more efficient. It is so easy to use Live Writer because it has a lot of nice features that makes your blogging easy. You can create posts exactly the way it looks in a web browser. This is because Live Writer will download a copy of the CSS style you are using in your blog and keep a local copy of it. The next feature that I noted is that it allows you to add maps to your post via Windows Live Local. Live Writer has an auto correct option and it also can automatically save your post as drafts. It allows tabbed blogging. That is you can create more than one blog at a time. Each post appears as a tab. The image editing features of Live Writer worth mentioning because it provide you with some basic image effects that is very helpful to add image effects to your images. You can also add videos, podcast etc to your blog. The only downside is that the preview is rendered exactly the way it looks in IE! The software is in its beta now. So it is not a completely stable version. Sometimes after this beta we will have to wait and see if it remains free or become commercial or become a part of Microsoft Office suite. So grab it now!

Qumana: A nice blogging tool you would use especially if you are a beginner and still learning how to post blogs using offline clients. It has a nice interface and so it is very easy to learn. Then it has all the features you expect from a blogging client. When you run it for the first time, it will prompt you for your blog address. Just type in your address, User name and password. Qumana will automatically configure everything for you. This is a feature that is of great help. Creating posts with Qumana is also easy. Another feature it possess is that it gives you the opportunity to monitonize your blog using QAds. You can sign up for QAds and insert ads in your posts. Then it has a blog manager which helps you to manage your posts quickly. In the Blog Manager window you can see the number of blog posts and you can preview, edit, publish, and republish posts. But it is a bit slow. It is a cross platform tool, that may be the reason. It is noticeably slow when you spell check your post. Above all it is one of the best blog editors I ever know.
w.blggar: It is a fantastic blogging tool that works well with Windows operating system. It is a good replacement for Live Writer! Because Live Writer is in beta there may be some stability issues, because Quamana is Cross Platform it has some problems running in Windows. So the tool that you have to watch out for is w.blggar. When you launch w.bloggar for the first time, the configuration window will appear where you have to select a platform and enter an alias for your blog. Then you have to enter User name and Password of your blog and press Finish button to complete the installation process.But creating posts is not easy for novices because w.bloggar did not have a WYSIWG feature. It instead has a text editor. It supports HTML syntax highlighting. Unfortunately it did not support tags. It also did not have an image editor. Truly not for novices. But it is quiet stable and almost never crashes. It also has good blog backup feature. It also has powerful FTP uploading features that definitely worth a mention. It supports a wide number of platforms. It is a tool apt for a pro-blogger.

Zoundry: Zoundry is another blog editor that you can give a try. It is one of the best blog editors both in case of usability and functionality. After you have properly configured Zoundry you can start creating your blog. I will mention quickly some of the features I like the most about Zoundry. It has an intelligent tag completion feature as you see in website design tools like Dreamweaver. So you will love using HTML scripts while creating posts with Zoundry. The auto complete list includes both XHTML and CSS keywords. It has Design, XHTML, and Preview modes. You can create multiple blog profiles in Zoundry. It also supports a large number of blogging platforms. It also offers good blog back up features. It is highly extensible with plug-in support. All you have to do is to visit Raven Zoundry site and download plug-ins you need. Then extract and copy them to your Zoudry installation folder. Then there is a blog profile manager and good tag support. Lot of cool features you can explore and find. Amazing tool that worth a try!

Do not want any of these tools just log in to your blog account and create post there. Alternatively, you can also use MS Word which support blog creation and posting. You can also use ScribFire which is a Firefox plug-in for blogging. It gives you the comfort of blogging inside Firefox. There are commercial alternatives also like BlogJet and ecto.

I hope you enjoyed the post!

How to create a Myspace theme online?

2009-01-08T08:28:00.001-08:00

Here is a full fledged online Myspace theme creator. It will help you to easily create themes for your Myspace profile. To get started click here.

It is a cool Myspace theme creator you will love. What you should have to do is to just click on tabs named Background, Sections, Headings, and each of which relates to different elements of your Myspace profile. For example, the Background section allows you to edit the background components of your profile. In the Background section you can customize the Background color, Background Position, add a background image, align the image etc.
The second is Sections tab which allows you to edit look of each section of your profile. Just play with the sliders until you are satisfied.You are provide with a live preview of what is happening to the look of your profile on the right side. In Sections part you can edit the border size of each page element, Border color, Background color of each section, Border styles, and finally the Opacity.
The next section is Headings where you can edit headings of each section of your profile. The first section here is Name Font section which allows you to edit the way in which your name is displayed in your profile. You can determine the size, font, color etc of your Name. You can also edit Contacting Member Name section properties of your profile here.
The final tab is the Main Text section which allows you to edit the way the details you have in your profile is displayed, its color, font,font size, color of links, and link hover color.
After you have successfully created a cool profile click on the Generate Layout button to apply the changes to your Myspace profile. When you click on this button you will be provide with the instructions to apply theme you have created to your blog. A nice and cool way to create breathtaking themes to your Myspace profile. Also attract more friends and get their appreciations for your artistic themes.

How to add a CSS menu to your blog?

2009-01-06T17:27:00.000-08:00

You want to tell a lot of things through a blog. You probably give labels to your blogs so that people can click on those labels to go to the posts related to that label. They can also navigate using the blog archive in your blog. But as your blog becomes bigger and bigger it may contain lot of labels and archives and you find it more difficult to manage them.
The user who visits your site also found it too difficult to find what he want. So you can give your visitors an idea about the topics you are blogging about by adding a menu to your blog. If you are blogging about Linux then you can add menu items like News, Tips and Tricks, Softwares, Resources etc. By clicking on these links they can easily navigate to each section in your blog. This adds more professionalism to your blog and it also make your blog more easy to navigate.
I will tell you how to add a CSS based menu in your blog. First what you need is an image that can be used as the menu. You can use this image.

Upload your image to a free image hosting service like Picasa web albums. Then copy the URL of this image and paste it in a notepad file because you need it to continue this tutorial.
You now have successfully hosted your image and have the URL of it with you. Now we are going to add the CSS script to your blog. I think you all know what CSS is. It is used to add styles to web documents. It is used to format images and text contained in a webpage. So we have the image and its URL. We have to format this image using CSS and add it to our blog. Here is the CSS script that we are going to use.

#tabsH {
float:left;
width:100%;
background:#000;
font-size:93%;
line-height:normal;
}
#tabsH ul {
margin:0;
padding:10px 10px 0 50px;
list-style:none;
}
#tabsH li {
display:inline;
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
#tabsH a {
float:left;
background:url("tableftH.gif") no-repeat left top;
margin:0;
padding:0 0 0 4px;
text-decoration:none;
}
#tabsH a span {
float:left;
display:block;
background:url("tabrightH.gif") no-repeat right top;
padding:5px 15px 4px 6px;
color:#FFF;
}
/* Commented Backslash Hack hides rule from IE5-Mac \*/
#tabsH a span {float:none;}
/* End IE5-Mac hack */
#tabsH a:hover span {
color:#FFF;
}
#tabsH a:hover {
background-position:0% -42px;
}
#tabsH a:hover span {
background-position:100% -42px;
}

It is time to add this script to your blog. So first login to your blogger account. Now click on the Layout tab and select Edit HTML. This will show you the HTML code of the template of your blog. You are going to edit this template. So make sure that you take a backup of the current template.
Press CTRL+F and enter the following lines in the Find search box.

Now enter the CSS script just above this line. Replace "tabrightH.gif" in the CSS script with the exact URL of the image. Click on the Save Template button to save changes to your blog template.
The next step is to add HTML script for this menu. To do that once again you have to click on the Layout tab. You have to select the "Add a Gadget" option. From the list that appears select HTML/JavaScript. Now place this Gadget just below your blog header image. Click on the Edit link to add HTML script to this Gadget. Here is the HTML script you are going to add.

Now you have to add some links to the "#" section in this script. I think you have labeled all the post in your blog. So replace this section with "http://youblog.blogspot.com/search/label/lablename". Replace label name with a label you have used in your blog. Say, if you have a blog about Linux and you labeled some posts with "TipsnTricks" then replace labelname with TipsnTricks. Replace Link1, Link 2, Link 3, Longer Link Text, Link 5, Link 6, and Link 7 between the opening and closing span section with the names you want to give to these links. Click on Save button to save your changes. Also save changes to your template.
You have successfully added a CSS menu to your blog. Visit exploding boy website for more CSS menus and scripts.
I hope you enjoyed this post!

How to view the list of all opened files in your system?

2009-01-05T15:57:00.000-08:00

There are times we want to delete some files and we got error messages like "The file is being used by another person or program". This is because the the file in currently in use by an application or process. OpenedFilesView is a tool that allows advanced users to view all opened files in their system along with other details like handle value file position, process, file size, attributes, Full Path etc.

After you have identified the process or application you can use OpenedFilesView to kill the process associated, close the file handles, bring the process to front etc. It can also generate an HTML report of all opened files or a selected file. The HTML file contains the name of the files and their exact path.

You may know that some of the process or files in your system are not genuine or are related to viruses and spywares. Every time you try to delete them you got an access denied message. You can use OpenedFilesView to resolve these " problems. If you are a newbie you find it a bit tough. But it is a very useful tool which helps you identify whether a application running in your system is malicious or not.To download OpenedFilesView click here.

A social bookmarking site for Bloggers!

2009-01-04T16:21:00.000-08:00

Social bookmarking is a great way of finding new websites on the web for web surfers. It also is a way to proclaim the world that I have a site or blog and attract more traffic to it.
Digg, Stumble Upon, Del.ico.us are examples of some sites that allow you to bookmark websites. Now a new site has arrived which allow bloggers to bookmarks their blogs, comment on blogs etc. YouBlogged.com is a social bookmarking site, but it is for bloggers. It is more or less similar to those Diggs and Dels but aimed at the blogosphere.

The site has just started and is quite new that there is only a meager content that you can find here. Since it is a social bookmarking site and more than that, a blog bookmarking site it is up to you, bloggers to bookmark their favorite blogs. The site is well organized and each to navigate with lot of categories like Arts, Science, Crafts and so on. There is a cool bookmarklet feature too.
To start with you have to create an account with YouBlogged.com. While creating an account you have to enter your blog address along with other details like email address and all. Since it is a new site at first I do not think it worth a try. But as time goes on I think you will benefit a lot. It is not just a bookmarking site; it is where a blogger can promote his blog, share his thoughts, ideas, evaluate the popularity of a blog. A user can rate a blog, browse blogs based on categories, and subscribe to categories to topics of his interest.
Overall it is a nice site that has a great purpose and a boon for bloggers who are always looking for ways to promote their blog. This one is for you and you will definitely benefit from it in the long run. To sign up with YouBlogged.com click here.

How to create a favorite websites page in Firefox?

2009-01-03T16:14:00.000-08:00

Firefox has a nice bookmarking feature integrated with it. Using this you can easily bookmark your favorite websites. But as the list becomes bigger and bigger you find it very difficult to maintain. So the best thing you can do is to just create a WebPage that links to all your favorite pages you have bookmarked with Firefox. You can automate the task with Firefox. Here is how to create a webpage to access your favorite sites using Firefox.
1. Open Firefox and navigate to Bookmarks menu.
2. Select "Organize Bookmarks" option. This will open up the Bookmarks Library window.

3. Click on "Import and Backup" icon.
4. A pull down menu will appear and from that menu select "Export to HTML" option.

5. Save the HTML file with a name you like.
You have successfully created an HTML version of your Bookmarks. So the next time you want to visit your favorite bookmarks, you can open this webpage and click on the links to access them.The advantage of exporting your favorite bookmarks is that you can make sure that your hard earned bookmarks will not be lost when you reinstall Firefox or due to software crashes. After reinstalling you can import those bookmarks by clicking on "Import and Backup" menu and selecting "Import HTML". Also you can import these bookmarks to Opera or IE.
I hope you enjoyed the post!

How to create a dictionary in MS Word?

2009-01-02T07:19:00.000-08:00

Microsoft Word has full-fledged dictionaries in many languages. To select your language you have to go to Review and select Thesaurus.

From the window that appears select your language.

If you are using word a lot you know how useful the spell check feature in Word is. After you have just typed the word, Word will highlight it by underlining the word or sentence in red or green. Red means that the spelling of the word is incorrect. Green means that there is a grammar mistake. You can right click on it so that Word will display the possible options. Replace the incorrect word with the correct one in that list or enter the right word yourself.
Word uses the dictionary in it to spell check words. It compares the words you enter with those in the dictionary.

There are some words which are highlighted with a red underline, but when you right click on them you will get no suggestions. If you click on the Autocorrect option also this word will not be replaced with the correct word. Also some correctly entered words are highlighted with a red underline This is because that particular word is not in the dictionary used by MS Word. So you can add that word to the dictionary by right clicking on that word and selecting the "Add to Dictionary" option.
If you are using a lot of medical terms, biological terms, chemical names etc in your documents then you might encounter lot of such red underlines in them. It is better add all the terms you use in a daily basis that are not in the Word dictionary all at once than right clicking on each of them and adding them to the Word dictionary one by one. Here is how to create your own dictionary in Word.
1. Go to Review and select Spelling & Grammar tab.
2. From the Word Options window that appears click on Custom Dictionary button.

3. To add a new word click on Edit Word List..
4. To create a new dictionary click on New button. Give a new name to your dictionary and start adding words to it.
But if you add words to your dictionary in this way you can enter only one word at a time.
To add a complete dictionary to word do the following
1. Open a new Notepad file.
2. Now type the words, one word per line. There should be no spaces between two lines or words.

3. Save the file and then copy it to C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Microsoft\UProof.
4. Open Word and go to Review>Spelling & Grammar> Proofing>Custom Dictionary
5. The new dictionary will appear in the list.
6. Make sure it is selected by clicking on the check box to the left of your custom dictionary and press OK.

7. Go back to the Word Options Window and Select Proofing.
8. Now in the "When correcting spelling and grammar in word" section make sure that all the options as shown in the figure are selected.

9. Click on the Recheck option and press enter to apply your changes.

You have successfully added a custom dictionary to Word!

How to create an Online Quiz.

2008-12-30T16:38:00.000-08:00

Everybody loves quizzes especially if they are for fun. Quizzes are an easy way to increase your knowledge and fun. So what about creating your own quizzes and embedding it in your WebPages or sending your friends. Here is how to easily create a quiz online.
MyStudiyo is a website that allows you to create your own quizzes. What you have to do is to register yourself with Mystudiyo. To register click here.

You are just a few clicks away from creating your own quiz. First you have to choose a template for your quiz. There are a large number of templates from which you can choose the apt one. You can also customize these templates by adding splash screens at the beginning and so on. Now it is time to add your questions. The questions should be in text format or you can use your images and videos questions. Then you have to add choices for your question. It is form these choices that a user has to select the right answer. In this way you can add number of questions and their choices. At the end the final score a user got is calculated based on the number of right answers and you can choose up to five custom ways in which the score is to be displayed.
You can also create interactive quizzes in which the user is allowed to submit questions. But he must be a member of MyStudiyo to do so. It is up to you to decide whether to accept the submitted questions or not. You can also include a contact form in your quiz so that users can send you their feedbacks about your quiz.

The quiz you created can be embedded in a webpage. So if you have a blog or is a member of a forum etc you can embed it there. All you have to do is to copy the quiz code provided by MyStudiyo and paste it in your webpage. If you do not have a webpage then you can email the URL of your quiz to your friends so that they can click on that link to participate in your quiz.
A quiz adds variety to your WebPages and allows more interactivity than a poll. So I think it is a nice idea to add a quiz in your webpage which will add more interactivity to your site.
computer_knowledge_test
I hope you enjoyed the post!

The online office suite from Adobe

2008-12-29T15:52:00.000-08:00

A new contender entered the online document sharing arena. Adobe after its online Photoshop edition has released an online office suite which is called Acrobat Office. It allows online sharing of document and can be used for both business and home purposes. It allows online publishing of documents and sharing of documents along with online conferencing facilities. The service is completely free and to use the service you just have to log on to www.acrobat.com.
Getting an account with Acrobat office.
First go to the acrobat office website. To sign up click on the sign up button.

You have to provide correct email address because a conformation email will be sent to your inbox for verification. You have to click on the link provided in the email to complete the sign up process.

Features of Acrobat Office.
Acrobat Office posses a flash based word processor called Buzzword. Buzzword has all the basic features you expect from an office application. It allows you to create documents, format documents, add images to your documents, hyperlinks, and tables. The interface is nice and easy to understand. You can easily share your documents or collaboratively create documents using Buzzword.

There are different sharing modes in Buzzword. Using these modes you can give different rights to users. You can set user rights for users while submitting a document. The first one is the Co-author mode which allows users to edit your document. The second one is the reviewer mode which allows users to just comment on these documents. The third one is reader mode which only allows users to read documents. Hence you can secure your online documents from unauthorized editing. The comments are given different colors depending on their privileges.
Buzzword supports a large number of file formats. You can import and export buzzword documents to .doc, .xml, .rtf, and .txt file formats. A buzzword file can be exported to .pdf, HTML format.
Acrobat office allows sharing of documents. When you create an account you get 5GB of storage space and each file you uploaded to the website will be given an URL. To share a document you have to provide the email address of those with which you desire to share the document. An email is sent to the email you specified which contains the URL of the document to be shared. You can easily sort documents based on user rights and also see the changes made to your document, time a document is edited, user comments etc.

Acrobat office allows conversion of documents to PDF documents. But it is restricted to 5 PDF conversions a month. So you cannot use the service just to convert your documents to PDF format. It supports a large number of file formats like .rtf, .txt, .doc, openoffice, word perfect, Photoshop, jpeg, tiff, png, gif, and bmp. The maximum size of a file that can be converted to PDF format is 200 MB.

Acrobat office online web conferencing feature called Connect Now. The maximum number of people who can participate in conferencing is three. It provides all you need for a full fledged online conferencing which include screen sharing, VOIP, chatting, white boards etc. Connect Now provides a unique meeting URL. So to participate in a conferencing just point your browser to that URL.
Prerequisites.
Acrobat office requires the latest flash player. You have to install Flash Player 10 . It supports Firefox 2, IE 6/7, and Safari 3 browsers and Widows Xp with SP2, Vista, or Mac OS v10.5.
It is going to be a close encounter with Acrobat Office and Google Docs. More and more features will be added to Acrobat office in the future including free and paid services.

How to enable Registry Editor and many other options disabled by Virus?

2008-12-29T15:40:00.000-08:00

One of the common problems created by Viruses that affect our PCs is that they will disable some important options like registry editor, task manager etc. This virtually disables our administrative privileges on our system.
It is very important to re-enable these options like removing the virus. Sometimes you cannot access your registry, taskmanger etc even when the virus is removed. To solve this problem do the following
RRT(Remove Restriction Tool) is a small software you can download to re-enable the important option disabled by viruses. To download RRT click here.
It is a small download of about 139 Kb. But it is extremely useful. After you have downloaded the zip file unzip it to a location of your choice. Now you have to boot your PC in the safe mode.

Run RRT and check the options you want to enable. Click on the "Remove" button to re-enable the disabled features.
There is a pro version for RRT which helps you to remove malwares that infect through removable storage devices like Pen drives. If you want to use this additional feature you have to purchase RRT.
I hope you enjoyed the post!

How to edit images using IrfanView?

2008-12-25T15:45:00.000-08:00

IrfanView is a free image editing tool that can be used as an image editor and viewer. Here are some cool things that you can do with IrfanView.
1. Applying filters
IrfanView comes with a bunch of filters that can be used to give a nice look to your photos. To easily apply filters to an image using IrfanView do the following:
Navigate to Image>Effects>Effects Browser or simply press "Ctrl+E".

You will get a list of filters along with the preview of the image before and after applying the filters. Click on these filters to see how your image will look like before it is being applied to it. You can also adjust the filter settings by dragging the sliders associated with each filter.
To apply the selected filter click on the "Apply to original image button".
2. Color Correction

Color correction involves making changes to the overall brightness and contrast of a image. It is also used to color balance the image to compensate for any tonal deficiencies and color casts in the original image. Let us see how to do color correction in IrfanView.
To color correct a image in IrfanView chose Image>Enhance colors or press "Shift+G".

You can adjust the Brightness and Contrast of your image to make it look better. You can adjust the RGB values by dragging the Color balance sliders. To darken or lighten the midtones drag the Gamma correction slider to the left or right. You can also enter a Gamma value at the entry box to the right of the Gamma slider. To adjust the saturation of the image drag the Saturation slider.

You can see a live preview of the changes that occur to your image before it is being applied to it. To apply multiple color corrections to your image use the "Apply to image" button. To reset the changes applied to the image you click on "Set default values" button. After you are satisfied with the changes press the "OK" button to apply the changes.

3. To create Grayscale of an image

To create Grayscale of an image chose Image>Convert to Grayscale. This will help you to create black and white images from color photos.

4. To pixelize an image
Another useful option in IrfanView is that it helps you to pixelize images. It can be used if you do not want to dispay certain parts of an image.
To pixelize an image first select the region of the image you want to pixelize. Then chose Image>Effects>Pixelize.
5. To crop a image

To crop a image, position your cursor on the image, then click and drag to define the crop.
Chose Edit>Crop Selection or press "Ctl+Y" to apply the crop.
6. To rotate an image

To rotate an image in IrfanView chose Image>Custom/Fine rotation. Enter value of the angle to which the image is to be rotated in the entry box. You can also set the background color of the rotated image here. Click on "Choose" to select a background color. Press "OK" to apply your changes.

7. To create a slide show
You can use IrfanView to create a slideshow and then can save it as an EXE/SCR file. To create a screensaver do the following:
Chose File>Slideshow or press "W". A dialog box will appear which allows you to add images to your slideshow.

Select a directory to add images to your slideshow. You can add all the images in a directory pressing the "Add all" button. If you want to add only a few images then you can use the "Add" button.
To add an MP3 as background music for your slideshow select an MP3 file and add it to your slideshow. Check the option "Loop MP3 files(background music)" to loop the MP3 song until the end of the slideshow.
Click on "Advanced options" to set whether the slideshow should be displayed in fullscreen, otherwise you can specify a custom size.
Now you are almost done and after specifying the time interval between each slides and a little bit tweaking you can save your slideshow. To save the slideshow click on "Save as EXE/SCR file". If you have Nero Plugin for IrfanView you can burn it to CD or create a VCD by clicking on the "Burn to CD" button.
8. Create a Panorama image.
Multiple images can be stiched together to create a large image. Such images are called panorama images. You can create Panorama images using IrfanView. To create a Panorama do the following:
Go to Image>Create panorama image.

A dialog box will appear which prompt you to enter the images to be used to create a panorama.

Make sure that you selected the images that closely match each other. Specify a horizondal or vertical alignment. To create a Panorama image press on "Create image" button. You have successfully created a nice looking Panorama image!
Good Luck!

How search engines work?

2008-12-24T12:47:00.000-08:00

Search engines are the life of the internet. Search engines played an important role in making the web as simple as it is now. Otherwise the web will just be a geeks’ only land. Now it is a playground for all. It is definite that the web will not be what it is now without search engines.
A search engine can be simply defined as a piece of software that can access a database of internet resources. When a user enters a query in the search box it searches in this database to provide relevant search results.

The first search engine in the world is ALIEWEB, which was created in 1990 by Alan Entrage. It was not a full fledged search engine like what we see today. FTP was primary mode of sharing files online at that time. A user who wants to share files will run an FTP server. The person who wants to download a file runs an FTP client to connect to the FTP server and download the file from the server. The client need not be a server and only need a FTP client software to connect to a server and download files.. Later anonymous FTP sites came into existence which allowed users to post and retrieve content from FTP servers. But it is not as simple as you think. There are so many problems in using FTP protocol for file sharing. First the user has to know that an FTP server exists and he has to visit that server to download files from it. The problem is that FTP servers are not well organized and it is a monotonous task finding FTP servers at that time. You can get a list of anonymous FTP servers here.

Entrage created a searchable directory of FTP files called ALIEWEB or simply Archie. It used a script which scours the FTP sites and indexes the contents of FTP sites on its run. It also allowed users to submit the location of FTP files and servers. It requires Telnet and FTP. The regular expression matcher of ALIEWEB allowed users to access its database. It was considered as the first web search engine by many because it is the first tool developed to search files on the Internet.

Another search engine that was developed to search the internet is Veronica. It is a search engine that was developed in 1992. It was used to search and index Gopher files. Gopher is a protocol used to share plain text documents. So the indexed files in Veronica consist of plain text documents. Yet another Gopher search engine popular at that time was JUGHEAD. It was similar to Veronica but is not very effective.
Wanderer developed by Matthew Gray was the first web search engine to use the robot concept. It was also the first search engine that indexed the contents of the worldwide web A robot is a software program that is used to access WebPages using the links contained in WebPages. It is actually designed to count the number of web servers in the world to determine the size of the web. Wanderer captured one URL after the other and ultimately created the first web database. So we can say that it is wanderer that laid the foundation for future search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask, AltaVista etc which also employ almost the same concept.
What is a search Spider?

A search spider is the component of a search engine that crawls WebPages and index the links contained in them and then store them in a database. The spider crawls the internet from time to time updating the contents of the database. A spider works on the principle that all WebPages are linked through hyperlinks. They work very much like a web browser. They first start off by requesting an URL and then proliferate by accessing the hyperlinks contained in successive WebPages. A spider did not index all the contents of a website. It is programmed to filter the contents based on certain criteria and this makes crawling fast and efficient. The frequency with which a spider visits a WebPage depends on how often a website is updated. A large number of policies are used by a spider for this. These policies include the following:
1. Selection policy: A spider uses a selection policy which is used to decide which websites to be indexed and which not. The web is a huge country and it is not possible to index all the contents of it. So the web spiders use a selection policy so that the links include in its database will provide useful content. So the spider uses different techniques to decide which pages to include and which to neglect. First it checks for the quality of the webpage, then the number of inbound links, the amount of traffic to the website etc. Google spider uses the best selection policy and that is the reason why Google is considered the best engine.
2. Revisit policy: A spider uses a revisit policy to decide when to visit a website again to check for updates. This depends on the frequency in which a website is updated. If a website is updated on a daily basis then it may be possible that a spider revisits it often. But revisit policy used by spiders is a complex thing to deal with. Considering the amount of information contained in the web and the tremendous speed at which it is expanding revisiting websites for updates is a time consuming process. Here also different techniques are used by spiders. A spider always looks for most recent content. It tries to visit pages frequently, that serve fresh content and even if a site provide useful content but it is not relevant and fresh then the possibility of a spider revisiting the site is megre.

3. Politeness policy: The functionality of a search engine also depends on the politeness policy it uses. A politeness policy is something that prevents spiders from overloading websites. Spiders hog a small amount of bandwidth while crawling websites. This may affect the performance of the servers. Also spiders work in parallel because of the very nature of their functionality. This may create overload on the servers. To avoid this search engine uses politeness policies. A spider usually searches the site thinking that it is made for crawling! But sometimes the spider cannot be able to access the links in a website and may even crash a server if it cannot properly crawl a site. First a search engine uses a robot exclusion policy to avoid this. This allows a web administrator to specify which pages to crawl and which not to. On top of a URL a file named robot.txt is specified which invokes the robot exclusion protocol. Another method is to specify this information in the Meta tags of a webpage. Using anyone of these methods we can inform the spider that links contained in the page are not for indexing. A spider is programmed to obey this policy.
4. Parallelization policy: A spider is a multitasking application. It run multiple instances of it at the same time to increase the download speed and the number of pages crawled at a time. This also helps to increase the overhead on the server because the monotonous task of crawling websites is divided into different lighter processes. Hence this helps to improve the overall performance of the spider and also helps to reduce the work load on servers. There are mainly two types of parallelization policies used by search spiders. They are the following:
1. Dynamic Assignment: In dynamic assignment, a central server takes the responsibility of assigning URLs to each instance of the spider dynamically. This helps to maintain the load the server in equilibrium.
2. Static Assignment: In static assignment different algorithms are used to assign URLs to spider instances. These algorithms specify certain conditions which are to be satisfied for a spider process to start crawling a webpage. Different search engines use different algorithms for this purpose. But the concept implemented by these algorithms are almost the same.
Indexing the contents
After crawling the contents of a webpage the spider indexes the links. Indexing is the key process that decides the quality of a search engine. A search engine should index the contents crawled by the spider in such a way that the user gets relevant links while searching. If not it will not benefit the user or the search engine even how innovative and powerful the search spider is. The indexing occurs in a number of steps. The indexing of the links fetched by a spider is done by an Indexer. It is the indexers that do the following things.
1. It decompresses the contents fetched by the spider.
2. It parses the contents and links in a webpage fetched by the spider and store them in an anchor file
3. It converts the document into certain word occurrences called as hits which is used to determine the location of a particular keyword in a webpage.
Displaying the contents.

The next and the final phase is to display the indexed contents based on the keywords inputted by the user. This is the visible part of a search engine. It is based on this a user tends to rate a search engine. He does not want to understand how the contents are displayed. But the displayed contents are of importance to him. So the popularity of a search engine more or less depends of this. Most search engines use page ranking technique to display results. The efficiency of a search engine also depends on this page ranking technique. Currently many people consider Google uses the best page ranking technique. Different algorithms are used to rank WebPages. The ranking of a webpage is based on certain criteria as defined in the algorithm. So understanding how these algorithms work will help people figure out how to make their WebPages displayed among the first ten results of a search engine. Because most people only visit the sites listed in the first few pages of a search engine. The baddies use illegal techniques to be listed in the top ten and these websites are called as scraper sites because they make use of web spiders to index their content in the form of search results. The efficiency of page ranking algorithms also depends on how efficiently it can counter these illegal techniques. The search engine companies are constantly working on improving their page ranking techniques and there by increasing their popularity.
Types of Search Engines.
The websites we use now can be classified into different categories based on their functionality and working. The most popular type of search engines are the following

1. Meta search engine: A Meta search engine searches in more than one search engine at a time and then display the results in WebPages. The advantage of using Meta search engines is that you get the results in all major search engines without searching in them individually. Many Meta search engines allow users to specify the search engines in which they want to search. Meta search engines are available both as client side and server side applications. The disadvantage of Meta search engines is that they cannot provide the entire search results of search engines in which they search.
2. Subject directories: A subject directory is a completely human created database of internet resources. It is called directory based search engine because a directory is maintained by the webmaster which contain links to different websites. Also users can submit websites to these directories. The links in a directory is divided into subcategories based on the topic they are related to. A subject directory contains number of such directories. The disadvantage of a subject directory is that it is very difficult to fetch information from them.
3. Searchable databases: A searchable database is another type of search engine. The pages contained in a searchable database are not often indexed by search engines. So a searchable database is also called as invisible web because the contents of it are often not indexed by a search engine. These databases generally include research papers, library catalogs etc. They are called as specialized databases and to get results contained in them you have to visit that website and enter your query in the search box. Then results relevant to that keyword are displayed in a web interface. Searchable databases are generally created and maintained by universities, government organizations etc.
Which search engine is the best?

There are lots of search engines in the world. You even do not know the names of these search engines except the name of a few top ones like Google, Yahoo, Ask, AltaVista, Alltheweb, Alexa etc.But are lot of crawler and meta search engines out there unnoticed by you. A good search in Google or other popular search engines will unleash them before you. Are you confused with which search engine is the best? Then I will tell you some things that will help you decide which search engine is the best. The ultimate answer to this question should be found by you.
You have understood how a search engine works already. All search engines have the above mentioned components. What makes some search engines stand out and others neglected is determined by the way those components are implemented. Still I will mention some of the features that will help you determine the best search engine.
Database functionality

The database is the core of a search engine. How big the database of a search engine is plays a very important role in determining where a search engine stands. A good search engine database has answers to almost everything queried by a user. Google has the largest database of websites indexed. So Google surpasses all others in these in the size of database. It is evident from the results we got from Google and that is the reason why it is more dependable than any other search engine.

The size of a database alone is not a factor that determines the quality of a database. But it also depends on the freshness of the database. If you search for something and got the same results all the time then you can understand that the database is not updated efficiently. A good search engine has its database updated regularly and constantly. Another feature of a good search database is to include the results which contain different file formats. If you search for something like "C++" and you got only links to few HTML tutorials on C++ then the search engine cannot be considered as good. For example if you search Google for "C++", you got results which contain links to C++ books from Google Books, some links from Google Scholar, some pdf tutorial links, pages etc. The diversity of the links provided by a search engine counts. Google currently has the ability to provide you with most relevant content because it offers a lot of services which are intelligently weaved to its basic service the Google Search engine. Many other search engines are still miles behind Google in that case also.

Another cool feature you have to look out for is the consistency in search results. Search for something and if you got the same results consistently then the search engine can be considered consistent. If the results change rapidly then the search engine cannot be considered reliable.
The size and the diversity of the links definitely count. But the greatest database functionality of a search engine depends on its ability to support Boolean search. A good search engine supports searching using all the Boolean operators. There are three main Boolean operators you use while searching online. They are AND, OR, NOT. These are the basic Boolean operators. Most time we did not use Boolean operators but while searching for some specific kind of information you can use these operators. If you search for something using AND to say Cricket AND Football you got results related to both. If you use OR you got results related to anyone of them. But if you use NOT you got results related to just Cricket and not Football. This is how these operators work.

Google supports AND and OR by default. Yahoo supports AND, OR, NOT and also nesting of these operators. So you can use a combination of these operators while searching in Yahoo.
But instead of NOT you can use "-" in Google. So if you use "-" the results contain links related to the main keyword minus the keyword to be excluded. For example if you search for Cricket - Football you got results related to cricket and the results related to Football are excluded. You can similarly use "+" if you want to search for some additional results to be included while searching for something. For example you can search for Pamela + Jolly so that results related to Jolly will also be included while searching for Pamela. Google supports both operators. Search with these operators in search engine you want to test and see the results.
The other option you have to watch out for is how accurate the search engine is. All the above functionalities are used to improve the accuracy of your search. But there are some additional components you can use to get more accurate results. Ultimately these options also play an important role in determining the quality of a search engine. For example you can use quotation marks to search for results that contain a particular phrase. For example you can search for something like C++ "book" so that all the links containing books along with the term C++ will be included in your results. Another option is to use wild cards. If you want to include a large number of categories related to something or if you do not know the keyword to search for something you can use the "*" operator. For example you can search for Christmas * to get everything related to Christmas. It is a very useful option and it is also a key feature to look out for. Google supports all the above features. But it did not support truncation. Yahoo supports quotation marks but did not support search using wild cards. But it supports truncation.

The list of features you have to look out for to decide which search engine is the best is still not enough. There are many other search options that are very useful. They are the inurl:, intitle:, site:, link: etc. If you search for something using inurl: then you got results with that term in URL. For example search for inurl: download you will get links which contain download in the URL. Similarly also try other search options. All these options are supported by Google and Yahoo. But Yahoo supports an additional option which allows users to search for hosts and the option is host name. It is a useful option too. Ask as also supports these features in addition to some very useful features like geoloc:, last:, lang: after date: before date:, between date: etc.
These are some of the basic things that helps you determine which search engine is the best. Still there is some additional functionality that help you how useful a search engine is. Because the usability of a search engine also very important in deciding whether a search engine is best or worst. These options include spell checker, language translator, calculators, definitions, maps, phone books, stocks etc. Google supports all the above functionalities. Google Maps is the best map tool you can get. You can convert WebPages to about 50 different languages. Yahoo too is not behind Google in that case. It also offers additional search features like searching for ISBN patents, synonym, traffic encyclopedia etc. Ask also offers all the above features.

The quest for the best search engine still continues because there are lots of things that remain to be mentioned. Try to understand about more search options search engines support. Watch out for new features added to these search engines. Evaluate how useful they are. Search using all the options you know. Search and find other unknown options you can find. Search with them. Ultimately you will find the answer which search engine is the best. So until then the question remains unanswered.

How to search online collaboratively ?

2008-12-23T06:43:00.000-08:00

Searching online is not a simple task. To get what you need require lot of skill and understanding about searching online. There are a lot of new technologies and tools that help to make your search efficient, like intelligent keyword prediction that many search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask etc have. I will tell you a new way to make your search efficient. You can search collaboratively with your friends online and this will definitely make your search efficient and entertaining. SearchTogether is a new search collaboration tool from Microsoft and it helps you to search online with your friends in real-time.
SearchTogether is available as a plugin for IE7. You also have a Live email ID to use this plugin. You can download the SearchTogether plugin for IE7 here. To get a Live email ID click here.
After you have installed the plugin, launch SearchTogether and enter your Live email ID. Now press the connect button. You are ready to start a new search.

To start a new search navigate to Actions> Start a new search. Now you will be provided with your MSN messenger buddies list. Select a person who is online from the list. You can start a search by typing a keyword. The keyword appears below the name or photo of the person who initiated the search. To start searching for a keyword entered by your buddy just double click on it. The number of keywords queried by each participant will appear under his name or photo. So if somebody joins the fun late he will be able to figure out what is going on. You can chat with other members and also comment on websites while searching online.
Another great feature of this tool is that it allows members of a group to monitor each others browsing activity. You can use the Follow option to view or follow the browsing activities of a buddy. You can even watch his or her browser screen in real time using this option. It is a great tool worth a try.
Reference: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/searchtogether/tutorial.html

The amazing world of Visual Effects.

2008-12-21T15:57:00.000-08:00

The world of visual effects is fascinating that it became the most important ingredient of visual media. It is now the part and parcel of every movies, cartoons, or television serials we see. So now they are like the part of our life. We see a lot of visual effects day by day. We watch science programs in Discovery, then probably we see at least a few hundreds of visual effects in a single program. These effects make the narration more interesting and the meaning of it so clear that we really indulge in it for some time. It is the magic of visual effects. It can take us to the world of imagination and reality at the same time. Let us travel to the magical world of Visual effects...

What is a visual effect?
A visual effect is simply a computer generated effect that is blended with a movie, or animation to create an illusion of reality. For example, if we have a video of cloudy sky then we can create some lightning using VFX and blend it with our video of sky so that when people see it they got the feeling that it is actually lightning.
Where is it used?
You probably know where these visual effects are most needed and used. Yes, movies, television , and other entertainment media use VFX to create amazing visuals. But VFX is not just restricted to simple effects. You have seen lot of visual effects in Video editing and 3D creating sotwares. These effects are just a version of VFX. There are a lot of versions for VFX. The most dominant one is CGI or Computer Generated Imaginary. These are images created using computers. CGI is widely used in movies and games to create stunning backgrounds and life like characters. So you might have seen lot of CGI in your life while watching movies or playing games. These images are so inevitable to the entertainment industry that CGI is a multibillion dollar industry now. The availability of powerful computers and programs played an important role in popularizing CGI.
CGI and Hollywood.
CGI is widely used in Hollywood movies. So the history of CGI in one way or the other is also the story of Hollywood. The Hollywood movies especially scifi movies are a peice of wonder. Every movie will have at least one new visual effect you have never seen in your life. You go to the theaters not just to watch spiderman climbing the walls of buildings or the titanic sinking into the sea but also to enjoy the beauty of those buildings and effects that are purely CGI.
The first Hollywood movie that used CGI is "West World" released in 1973. It used 2D based CGI images to create visual illusion. Interestingly the second part of West World called as "Future World" is the first movie to use 3D based CGI images. This was just a beginning. The real VFX revolution is just about to start. The first movie that through which VFX became a buzz in Hollywood is the movie "Star Wars". It is released in 1977 and it introduced new trends in Hollywood. Then came a lot of movies that used CGI. But the movie that "rejuvenated" VFX was "Terminator 2-Judgment Day". It was a tremendous success, not because it is a fantastic movie but also it has lot of stunning visual effects. You probably might not forgot some of those effects. One of the unforgettable effect is the liquid metal and morphing effect that we meet through the villain T-1000.

The second movie that worth mentioning is Jurassic Park. After viewing the movie many think that the Dinosaurs used in that movie where real and they want those animals to be immediatly added to the National Zoo. Those dinosaurs where computer generated even though they look life like. They are animated and perfectly blend to the movie so that even a person with a doctorate in the study of dinosaurs think that they even exist now. Another movie that utilized the amazing potential of VFX is Titanic. There is no doubt that without those special effects the movie won't be so attractive and touching. More and more movies are added to the list that owe a huge part of their success to the VFX used in those movies. In short VFX has become an integral part of Hollywood.
Composting
The process of combining two or more images to a shot is called Composting. Composting is most commonly used to combine 3D images.It is not as simple as you think. When you do this the output must look real. Otherwise there is no meaning in composting. There are different techniques used in compositing. The most common are Bluescreen, Rotoscopy etc. Let us understand the most common compositing techinques in detail.

Rotoscopy:
Rotoscopy is a technique used in composting. It is an effective way of composting images. The first step in Rotoscopy is to project recorded live action film images to a frosted glass panel and then an outline is drawn around the objects. The device used to project images is called Rotoscope and hence the name Rotoscopy. The perfection in Rotoscopy based compositing depends on how sharp is the outlines drawn around objects to be included in the scene. Then computer generated images are carefully added to the background of these objects. The process of Rotoscopy is time consuming and need a lot of patience and talent to draw perfect outlines around objects because this ultimately affect the output scene. Rotoscopy is used perfectly in Star wars. The glowing wand in the hand of the hero is rotoscoped. The "actual" wand in his hand is covered with blue screen mat and a glowing wand is added to its place, which is CGI generated, using Rotoscopy.

Optical Printer:
Another technique used in compositing is Optical Printer. An optical printer has two projector heads. The important parts of an optical printer include film rate, lenses, camera finder, and adjustable shuttle controller. It is used to give visual effects like fade in fade out, slow motion etc to a movie scene. A combination of these effects can be added to a scene using Optical printers. They are widely used in the early stages of VFX, but now they are completely out of picture.

Match Moving:
The process of merging virtual objects to the footage of a already shot action movie is called Match Moving. Match Moving is a complex process that needs lot of precision and care. Match moving is entirely different from motion capturing where motion sensors to capture motion and blend it to the object to be animated. Here no motion sensors are used. Instead it is done just using movie camera. Match Moving is done by tracking the movement of the camera. This information is used to change the position of virtual camera inside the computer. It can be used to naturally blend the virtual with real scene in a movie. Match Moving is done using two popular software packages, Shake and Adobe After Effects.

Bluescreen:
Bluescreen are considered the basic element needed to create a visual effect. It acts as the backbone of VFX. Bluescreen is used to blend images to the background of a charecter. We can say that there is no VFX if there is no Bluescreen.
A blue or a green screen is placed behind the character. A character acts standing in front of this screen.The scene is shooted and the background is removed while editing. Now the scene is left with only the acting charecter. The background is rephotographed through a bluefilter to display just the background. A special kind of film is used to rephotograph the background to get a black&white negative film. The output will be a black&white image with the character at the middle of the background. This is called female mate.The background image is again rephotographed. The difference is that it is rephotographed using green and red filters instead of bluefilter. By doing this we get only the foreground image. This is called a male mate.
The background image is again rephotographed using male mate and the bluescreen shot is rephotographed using female mate. An optical printer is used to merge these two images into a single frame. But instead of optical printer we now use computer softwares to merge images into a single frame. Using softwares we will be able to give more charm and precision to each frame. We can also add different effects to these frames.

Motion Capturing:
The technology used to give life like movements to animated characters is called motion capturing. It is used in Hollywood movies, games,and cartoons to give realistic movements to CGI images.You might have been stunned and wowed when you see the war scenes in Lord of the Rings. Motion capturing is used to give life like movements to these charecters. In motion capturing sensors are used to record the movements of human beings and after that these movements are then given to 3D charecters. This is called Motion Capturing. With motion capturing you can create stunning animations. In motion capturing a man wears a suit fitted with complex sensors. These sensors are connected to a computer. The computer can read his motion with the help of these sensors and are digitally recorded. Then these motion files are imported to 3D softwares like 3D Max and these effects are applied to previously marked portions of a 3D image.
Motion capturing is the most effective way of giving life like movements to animated 3D characters. There are so many reasons for it. You can easily animate a 3D charecter. You can make him walk, dance, talk, or sit anything. But there are different "expressions" that you cannot easily create while animating. Facial expressions are one aspect. To create a natural facial effect for a 3D character is time consuming. Motion capturing can make this task easy. Facial motion capturing is used to do this. You might have seen the movie King Kong. The charecter touched our hearts. It is almost real and it fascinated us for a few days even after watching the movie. The character is not real, it is a 3D animated character and what makes it so real is its facial animation. These facial effects are done using facial motion capturing. Small sensors are placed at the face especially around the eyes and the lips to capture the facial effects of a humanbeing and then the captured motion is applied to the 3D character. It is the most complex form of motion capturing. Hundreds of sensors are fixed to the face of a man. Different filters are used in this kind of motion capturing. Marker tracker and markerless tracker are used to capture facial movements. High resolution cameras are used to track the facial movement of each marker fixed to the man's face. There are different marker technologies used in motion capturing. LED marker technology is widely used for real time motion capturing. Motionless trackers are used to track even the slightest movement of eyes and lips.
How it works?
Each and every movement of the actor can be recorded using high resolution motion camera. In motion capturing only his body movements are recorded and not his body.
Also the position of the camera is recorded while capturing the movements. This is to identify the camera angles to be given to the characters generated using computers. These data comprise a motion capture file and it is saved. Then this file is imported to a software like 3D Max and the motion is applied to the appropriate areas in the 3D objects. Thus a perfect animated effect is created.

The Matrix Revolution
While talking about VFX it is a must that we should mention atleast a words about Matrix. Matrix revolutionized the way people think about VFX. There are a lot of criticism about the way visual effects are used in the movie. But definitely a large percentage of those comments were of appreciation. The effects in Matrix really stunned the viewers. The viewers are taken to a world of magical realism from where they cannot come out for some time. Matrix showed the power of VFX and the extend to which we can use it in a movie.
Matrix is considered as a classical example of using VFX in movies. Every scene in Matrix introduced new effects which are a pleasure to watch. These effects are the stepping stones to new vistas in the world of VFX. So when we talk about the effects in Matrix then we have to talk about each and everyone of them. But the most perfect and innovative one is Bullet time. It is a new effect in which the camera rotates in a 360 degree angle around the charecters in Matrix. This effect required the skillful and creative use of computer to control the movement of a camera. Bullet time can be used to create scenes with slower rates of motion than the Slow motion technology.

The process of creating this effect is a very complex one. At first an array of still cameras are placed around the object to which we want to give Bullet motion. Then a sequence of pictures of the object is taken using these still cameras. These pictures are taken from different angles. Then these images are arranged in the correct order one after the other. These still images are used to create the illusion that the camera is rotating around the characters.
While the camera is moving around the object, we also got the feeling that the object is also moving. In matrix the camera path is set as visualized by computer. A laser targeting system is used for this purpose. The cameras in the array are aligned using this system. The system controls the movement of cameras, which automatically skipped the control to each camera in the array periodically. Using this technique the shots are taken sequentially according to the movement of the viewpoint. Then the frames are scanned by the computer for processing. This kind of innovative technologies and a lot of creativity and hard work is behind the creation of each effect in Matrix. That is why it is said to be a classic in the world of VFX.
A green screen is used as the background of object to which Bullet motion is to be applied. This is used to give screen effect to the shot. The motion rate of Bullet motion can thus be effectively controlled to give more clarity to the shot. One difficult problem here is slow rates of motion which is much slower than what is needed. To rectify this softwares are used to increase and maintain a constant motion rate.Then background images are blended to the background of the image.

Morphing
Morphing is the technique of transforming one object to another. The first movie that used morphing effects was "Willo". It used a effect in which the face of a man is transformed into an animal. The potential of morphing was understood by the entertainment industry and a lot of morphing effects are created and used in lot of movies and animations from there on.`
The movie that took morphing effects to a new height was Terminator 2 -Judgment Day. The movie is full of visual effects and the morphing effects used in it were outstanding and will be remembered for ever. If you see that movie then you will be a little bit surprised about how the villain in that movie easily transforms his shape. And probably you also think for a moment that if you have that skill.Morphing effects are skillfully and efficiently used in Terminator to animate the villain character. He can easily transform his hand into a sword and all. These effects are created using different morphing techniques.
In earlier days cross fading is used instead of morphing. It can be considered as an early form of morphing. With the invention of morphing cross fading is discarded. Morphing makes the creation of morph effects easy. There are a lot of morphing softwares you can use to create morphing effects. Using these softwares you can create stunting morphing effects. To do morphing we need two objects, one is the object to be morphed and other is the object to be obtained after morphing. Points are marked on the key areas of the two objects. It is these areas that transform into the morphed shape giving us an impression that the object have changed into another object. There are lot of softwares using which you can easily do animations. One such popular software used in movie production is Avid Elastic Reality System. There are a number of free morphing tools that you can use at your home computer too. One such free morphing tool is WinMorph.

The world of Dinosaurs.
You might have been astonished after seeing the dinosaurs of the Jurassic period in silver screen and thought how these dinosaurs are created. The way the dinosaurs move, eat, act, etc are so realistic that we actually fell in love with them. Jurassic park is a movie that explored the potential of using computers and VFX. The dinosaurs in that movie are not just created using CGI. It also used another technique called animatronics, which can be considered as a combination of animation and electronics. The models of these huge dinosaurs are created using appropriate materials and then are moved using a animatronics device. The technicians that handle these animatronics devices are called as puppetries. The first thing that the puppetries do is to understand the model to be animated very well. Then only these models can be efficiently animated because different models need different areas of the body to be animated in a particular manner. A dinosaur never walks like a man. So understanding the model gives an idea about how to move the object perfectly and naturally. Then puppetries give motion to these models. For example to move the hand of a dinosaur the puppetry have to move his hand to which a telemetric device is attached. So when the puppetry moves his hands this device informs the circuit controlling the dinosaur. Radio Frequency circuits are used to control the models. The process of creating the models is tedious and also time consuming. The main difference between animatronics and motion capturing is that the models to be animated are not CGI generated.

The world of 3D Graphics.
3D Graphics is a word that does not need any special introduction. Even if you did not know anything about 3D Graphics you might have seen a lot of 3D movies and animations. 3D graphics is mainly used in computer games. You might have played at least a single 3D game in your life. 3D characters and scenes are a hot commodity in the world of games. A game is rated not just based on the ease of play or the game intelligence but also of its stunning graphics.
First to create a 3D movie or a game we have to create a 3D environment.Creating a 3D character might be easy when compared to the effort needed to create a 3D world. Then we have to decide the way it is to be displayed in the screen. Which portion of it will we see at a point of time, which portion to hide, the position and arrangement of pixels in the screen etc.

Then only we can create a nice 3D environment. Lot of things need to be taken care of while creating 3D graphics. The first thing we should understand is we are creating a artificial world, they are created using softwares and the process of creating the 3D environment needs a lot of care, patience, and creativity. You see only a portion of the 3D world created for a game at a particular time. It depends on the way in which the 3D scene is defined and viewed. The potential of 3D is so wide that there is virtually no limit for the kind of environments, or characters or effects you can create with it. All you need are some powerful 3D creating and animating tools and some creativity. You can create stunning and great looking charecters and animations.
A 3D object is composed of different image components. It is based on these components that the quality of the 3D object is decided. The most important components of a 3D image include textures, lightning, perspective, depth etc. A 3D object also is formed by combining different 3D shapes like rectangles, squares, circles, lines, curves etc. To create a shape the first step is to create a wireframe which is a combination of thousands of such shapes. The next step is to give a surface for this wireframe.
Surface Texture:
A 3D surface has different properties. The information about a 3D surface depends on these properties.The surface of a image has the following properties:
Color: The image surface has a color.What is the color of the image, its distribution on the surface of the image, etc are determined by this property.
Texture: The smoothness of the image can be determined by this property.
Reflectance: It determines the amount of light being reflected, its intensity etc.
These are the three important properties that can be used to create a life like character. It is these properties are to be most importantly taken care of while creating a 3D image.
Lightning:
The realistic display of a 3D image requires the removal of lines and surfaces which are not visible from a particular viewpoint. To obtain this we must use the correct lightning effects on the surface of the object. The amount of light reflected, its depth etc plays an important role in defining the "originality" of a 3D object. A very useful but computationally intensive technique called Ray Tracing is used for this purpose. It plays an important role in determining the quality of the rendered image. Light falls on an object from different angles. It then reflects from the surface which create some sort of "shadow effects" and these effects play an important role in determining the quality of the 3D object rendered. It gives us an ideas about the strength, depth etc of the object. Different objects reflect light in a different manner. So special care and skill is needed while creating lightning effects.
Perspective
Perspective can be defined as the angle of view. It is a kind of transformation. It
gives us the feeling that an object in a scene is concentrated on a single point away
from the object. Most common type is one point perspective where the object seems
to be moving concentrated on a single point. There are also other kind of perspectives like two-point, three-point perspectives.

Depth
The depth plays an important role in creating the illusion that the object viewed is
real. To create this different kind of optical effects are used. One such effect is depth
of field. There are different depth of field like shallow depth of field, deep depth of
field etc.
Frame Rate
Frame Rate plays an important role in determining the quality of your animation.
Animators often try to give appropriate frame rates to their animations to make then
look natural. The number of frames per second is high for some animation while it
requires only 21-30 frames for some other animations. It depends on the kind of
scene you want to animate. To animate a man walking 21 or a bit higher frame rate
can be used. If you want to create a man running then you have to use a higher frame rate. In most 3D games to give originality to their animation animators and
programmers try to include 50-60 frames per second. This is to overcome the blurring between frames.
Camera Effects
The 3D objects are often given camera effects. This is also done to give more
originality to the animation. We can view a object from any angle in a 3D environment. This is done using virtual cameras. A virtual camera is not a real camera. You might
have used a "miniature" version of these "virtual cameras' in games with which you
can view a 3D object from different angles. A virtual camera can be used to view
objects from an angle you like. It is implemented in most 3D graphics creating
programs. The rendered image depends on the angle on which you have placed the
camera in the 3 dimensional area while creating the objects. You can use this camera to give different effects like field of visual ratio, zooming, rotating, dolly etc.
The virtual camera in a 3D software allows you to give different effect to your 3D
object. You can view the object from different angle. What you have to do is to just
click on the camera icon and drag the mouse to get a particular angle of vision. You
can give different camera effects to different frames in a 3D movie. What you have to
do is to create key frames and then apply different camera effects to these key frames.In this way you can create and shoot your own "virtual movie" in a computer.
Rendering
Rendering is the final process of creating an animation. After you have done all the
hard work you can see the output of it. Rendering is a vast topic and even if you have created a great animation the quality of it largely depends on the rendering engine
used to render the animation. It is therefore also a very important stage in the
production of movies. We have given a lot of effects to our movie like lightning,
shadow, etc and all these will be perfectly rendered. Rendering is also a
computationally very intense process. In that sense it is expensive too. There are a
lot of rendering engines that are used in different 3D programs. The real quality of a
3D package depends more or less on the rendering engine it uses. Maya and 3D Max
in my opinion posses the best rendering engines.
Rendering is a very slow process. There are two types of rendering real time and
pre-rendering. Pre-rendering is most commonly used in the production of movies and
is extremely long one. Real time rendering is used in games. To render a 3D image
we need a good 3D rendering graphics engine. The whole rendering process is a long one and can be classified into different sections as following:

Scan line Rendering and Rasterization: Each image consists of primitives. A primitive
is a combination of pixels. Lines and curves are the primitives in 2D images while
rectangles and triangles are the primitives in 3D images. To render a 3D image pixel
by pixels is almost impossible because it may consist of lacs and lacs of pixels. So
3D images are rendered primitive-by primitive. Sometimes we have to render images
avoiding the portions of images without primitives. For such kind of rendering
rasterization is used. Rasterization is supported by most modern graphics processors.
Raycasting

Raycasting is used for the real time rendering of 3D images. It is widely used in
rendering 3D games and cartoon animations. There are different techniques to
identify the color value at different areas of a 3D image in Raycasting. Changing the
color values of areas where 3D points join to the actual color value of the pixel is one
such technique. Raycasting is the best way to render shadows and lightning effects in a 3D image.

I hope you have learned something new. Wish you all the best.

The evolution of Web 2.0.

2008-12-21T15:41:00.000-08:00

The word Web2.0 is little bit controversial. The controversy is mainly around what it actually mean? The web is a service provided by the internet. So if the web can be called Web2.0 then the internet can also be called Internet 2.0. The web actually emerged as a way to share information. But the way we share information through the web has actually changed. The term Web 2.0 is coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004 and it represent that change.
The Web is now moving from 2.0 to even Web 3.0 and we can expect Web 4.0, Web 5.0 and so on in the near future. Lot of changes is coming to the web and the internet in such a great pace.

What is a Web 2.0 website?
The websites in the olden days provide static content. The user can just only view the information and comment on it. He actually cannot digg it, stumble it, or write a blog about etc. Web 2.0 offers all these features. It allows us to create dynamic WebPages, and allow the users to interact with these websites in a different way. It allows online collaboration, and sharing of information among users. It gives users the ability to control data. A Webpage is not just a static html document, instead it is a dynamic application in which contents are added dynamically and the users not only can read the content on the website but also interact with it like an application either by adding and editing the content, or bookmark it in a social bookmarking site etc.
The interface of a Web 2.0 application is also dynamic. It is highly customizable. So we do not have to worry about the content while changing the look and feel of the website. The data is highly independent from design. This gives more flexibility in designing web applications.
The Web 2.0 not only allows the creation of dynamic websites. It also helps users to create content. The users can upload and share their photos, videos, documents, create their own websites etc. So Web 2.0 adds a social networking aspect to the web. It allows the users to become the consumer and the creator. So the users can efficiently participate in the creation of the largest medium in the world- the Web.
The content in a Web 2.0 environment is created in a collaborative environment. So Web 2.0 is more versatile and content rich. The content is shared between users. The applications used to create the content are web based and this allows more participation. Web 2.0 actually accelerated the growth of internet and the web as the ultimate entertainment and information medium.
What are the services provided by Web 2.0?
Web 2.0 allows the creation of dynamic content. So what are the kinds of services provided by Web 2.0 that we can use to create and share information? The most common types of Web 2.0 applications are the following:

1. Blogs: Blogs are one of the most dominant services provided by Web 2.0. The popularity of blogs comes from the fact that they allow the users not only to read content but also allows them to share what they know by posting their contents. A person who blogs is called as a blogger. A blogger can publish his thoughts online through blogs. A blog allows users to select templates and customize them. They can then add contents to it by just pasting it on these templates. It also allows a high level of interactivity because the users can comment about a blog, they can bookmark it online, subscribe to it etc. There are a lot of blogging website like blogger, wordpress, typepad etc which allow users to publish their thoughts online easily.

2. Social Networking: Social networking sites are another type of dynamic web applications which allows users with similar opinions to share their thoughts, and make friends with each other. These sites allow users to invite friends, join online communities, discuss current issue etc. So using the web as a medium for social activities is a new trend and is a part of the Web 2.0 revolution.

3. Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking allows collaborative bookmarking of websites. If you find a website informative and useful you can bookmark online. There are some websites that allow online bookmarking. Almost all Web 2.0 websites allow online bookmarking. This allows users to share information about good websites they come across while surfing the internet. They can also use it for future reference. It intends to make your surfing more collaborative and productive. Digg, stumbleupon etc are examples of some popular social bookmarking sites.

4. Video sharing: Video sharing sites are a new boom in the world of web. There are lot of popular video sharing sites like YouTube through which you can share your videos with others. You just have to upload your videos to a video sharing site and then others accessing the site can view the video you have uploaded. They can also comment and rate the videos you have uploaded.

5. Photo sharing: Photo sharing websites allows you to share your photos online. You can upload your photo collection to these websites. Then others can view and comment on it. Many photo sharing sites allow you to edit and tag your photos. You can also sent photos as e-mail to your friends and many more. There are lot of popular photo sharing sites which offer these services for free like photobucket, flicker etc.

6. Wikis: Yet another popular and one of the most useful and dominant service provided by Web 2.0 is Wiki. If you have visited a site like Wikipedia you know what a wiki is. It is a very popular way of sharing your ideas and knowledge. In a wiki you can not only read content but also edit it, write your own content etc. Wikis are a very popular medium of sharing information now. The wiki Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites in the web. This underlines the popularity of a wiki. The information contained in a wiki is free and can be edited by anyone. So wikis can be considered as user contributed knowledge houses.

7. File sharing: Online file sharing is another service provided by Web 2.0. Users can upload videos, pictures, music, and other digitized content online and share it with other users. There are a number of online file sharing websites. They allow users to upload and download files. The most popular file sharing site is Rapidshare. There are also other filesharing sites like Megaupload, Mediafire etc.
Conclusion
To conclude Web 2.0 allows users to determine the content of the web. Websites act as the interface through which users share their content. So a Web 2.0 site is just like an application than just serving information. There are certain concerns about this open structure of the web too. Because it may lead to illegal sharing of files, content etc. But ahead of these the benefits offered by Web 2.0 is so immense that it is definitely the future of the web and can rightly be called as Web 2.0.