GuidetoTech

In a rush to get started blogging on your first blog, you might have settled for a second-rate domain, one that doesn’t exactly relate tot he niche that you are in. Many problems can arise form not planning properly or evaluating all your options.

Most of you would have read about the new and fast browser from Google called Chrome. I have always been amazed at how Google gives its own twist to a well established application paradigm. When they announced Gmail, I wondered how I was using an email application without conversation mode so far and immediately fell in love with Gmail. This time, it is Chrome. Geeks who tested it with Javascript benchmarks are stunned by the results from benchmarks. Everyday internet users who tried Chrome are not so impressed because it’s not visibly faster than IE or Firefox for most websites. And that is because the Web is not yet ready for Chrome! Let me explain why.

It is an understatement to call Chrome as a browser. It is a mini operating system for running Web applications. So far, most of the Web applications have been running on the server side and used the browser only for display. Recently, there has been a push towards Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that use your browser’s advanced functionalities such as Flash, Javascript etc to deliver desktop application-like complex feature set. Zoho and Google docs are examples of popular Office applications that run in your browser. This trend has just started and is growing. Think of a photo/image editing application as complex as Adobe Photoshop but runs in a browser and allows you and your friend (living in a different state/country) to edit a photo simultaneously across the Web. Think of a Movie editing application like Windows Movie maker that runs online completely. Chrome has been designed with such complex future applications in mind and that’s why we don’t see its impact right now.

Let me just touch upon the features of Chrome that make it suitable for such complex applications.

Application Isolation

Any complex application will have atleast a few bugs. Imagine that you are running a Photoshop-like application in one tab of IE/Firefox and a Powerpoint-like application in another tab. If the photo application crashes because of a bug, IE/Firefox itself will die and you will lose your (potentially unsaved) work in the presentation application. This is unlike a real OS environment where PhotoShop crashing won’t affect PowerPoint application. Chrome provides such isolation by restricting the failure to just one tab and all other tabs will stay alive. There are very few websites that use Javascript heavily now. So, the impact of this will only be seen in future.

Memory Management

Any good Operating System will try to avoid memory fragmentation and reclaim unused memory effectively. Chrome does this by creating a different process for each tab and using a thorough garbage collection mechanism. Chrome comic book explains this clearly if you are interested. Yes, it will take up more operating memory than Firefox due to multiple processes but then Chrome is not just a browser. It’s a platform for complex applications that will require lot of memory themselves.

V8 Javascript Compiler

As you know, Javascript is the language for creating client-side Internet applications. Normal websites will only have a few lines of Javascript. But truely complex applications could have thousands of lines of js code. So far, Javascript engines have always been interpreting the javascript code whereas V8 will compile it directly to the target machine code. Anybody who has taken a basic computer course will know that interpretation is much slower than compilation. Java, when it was originally introduced, was an interpreted language and it was dead slow. Later, they implemented Just-in-time (JIT) compiler and there was dramatic improvement (I have experienced the difference myself when I was working on a JVM). Now, Chrome has given Javascript the status of an advanced programming language! This will encourage developers to build Internet applications that will run much faster. Their Javascript application will run as fast as a C++ or C# application and it will also be able to collaborate effectively across the Web.

So, the next time you see somebody ignoring Chrome as just another browser, tell them it’s not. Chrome is getting ready for the future of Internet. It’s just that the Web is not ready for Chrome yet.

The transfer of human intelligence to the machine is something the internet makes easy to do. With reCAPTCHA, we keep spammers at bay while helping digitize old books, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk lets us crowdsource small tasks to a dynamic human workforce available on demand, and Google Image Labeler makes the tedious task of tagging fun. Now Yahoo is trying to tap into that human machine through their new VideoTagGame, a game that encourages participants to tag sections within a video for better retrieval.

The first VideoTagGame ran back in summer of 2007 during a Yahoo! party in Amsterdam. Now they’re ready to take their experiment to the public through the Yahoo! Sandbox so they can collect more statistics on its usage.

The objective of the VideoTagGame is to collect time-based annotations of the video which could then enable the retrieval of relevant parts in a video when a search is performed, rather than returning the entire video itself. These annotations are collected in the context of a multi-player game.

How To Play

To play the VideoTagGame, participants must sign in with their Yahoo! ID and join a new game. There will always be at least three players in each game. After a 3-second countdown, the video will begin to play. As it plays, participants enter tags that correspond to the various parts of the video. When two players agree on a tag (that is, they enter the same tag), they each get points. The closer together the tags were entered, the more points are rewarded. After the video ends, participants can then watch as it plays again, this time with the tags overlaid on top of the video.

The game, like Google Image Labeler, can be both fun and challenging for those involved. Think it sounds easy? Don’t be fooled – the other participants are often fast typers capable of of entering nearly a hundred tags during a couple minutes of footage.

The VideoTagGame is a fun time-waster for those who like to play online games. It’s similar to the games at the site Gwap (”games with a purpose”), launched by Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, as it uses “the human processor,” too. Like the GWAP games, the end result of the VideoTagGame is the possibility of enabling new technology for searching within videos…or your name at the top of the scoreboard…whichever one sounds more exciting to you.

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Apple has always been very protective over their proprietary software. The company doesn’t want anything but iTunes to control an iPod – and for good reason, too. The iTunes Store is a money-making machine with over 65 million active customers helping the company sell billions of songs, videos, and apps. Despite iTunes’ popularity, however, there are still those out there who would rather run their own software.

Reverse-Engineering iTunes

In order to make an iPod work with an alternative software program – like gtkpod, Winamp, and Songbird, for example – developers need to understand a file called iTunesDB. To prevent people from writing to this file, Apple protects it with a checksum hash which has to be reverse-engineered. Usually that process only takes a couple of days.

With the latest iTunes update, Apple has once again changed the hash, meaning it needs to be reverse-engineered again. The developers doing so collaborate together and share their thoughts on iPodhash, an open-source project hosted on Bluwiki, a free web site that lets users create wiki pages.

Now Apple has asked for that site to come down, a request that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says is out of line. Earlier this month, a lawyer from Apple’s legal firm O’Melveny & Myers sent out a takedown notice to the site stating the content was illegal under the terms of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). According to the cease-and-desist email, the site is “disseminating information designed to circumvent Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management system.” It continued, “FairPlay is considered anti-circumvention technology under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA explicitly prohibits the dissemination of information that can be used to circumvent such technology.”

The EFF has jumped on this case, saying that Apple “doesn’t have a DMCA leg to stand on.” According to EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann, this move is effectively bending the law in order to stifle free speech. “Apple is essentially saying here that people can’t even talk about the mechanisms that Apple uses to lock in its music to the iTunes software,” he said.

The EFF web site goes into more details as to why the EFF believes Apple to be in the wrong, listing the numerous reasons why there’s no DMCA violation on the site.

Where Does This Leave The Linux Community?

Since the Bluwiki site has complied with the takedown notice, the question is where does this leave the Linux community now? The main reason for the iPodhash project’s existence is due to the fact that Apple does not provide a version of iTunes that runs on Linux. The project is an important community effort that helps Linux users create software programs that work with their iPods and iPhones.

Bluwiki’s founder, Sam Odio, had said he was unsure if putting the site back online would be possible. Says Odio of his compliance with the takedown notice, “I regret having to do this. I may be able to put the site back online, but quite honestly it’s unlikely because I can’t afford a legal battle with Apple.” Luckily for him, the EFF is now involved, so he will not have to worry with the legal fees.

Apple may only be protecting their very profitable iTunes business, but in this case, they’re suggesting that the DMCA covers people merely talking about technical protection measures. If that’s so, then as EFF says, “they’ve got a serious First Amendment problem.”

You can follow this case’s progress on the EFF’s web site, Odio’s blog, and on the iPodhash project’s homepage.

Gladinet is a free Windows application that makes it easy to view and manipulate files stored in online services like Google Docs, Picasa Web Albums, Windows Live Skydrive and Amazon S3. Instead of using the web interface in a browser, Gladinet mounts a network drive and lets you access the files from remote servers in Windows Explorer.
That means you can click on a document stored in Google Docs and it will open in the word processor installed on your computer, for example in Microsoft Word. After you edit the document and save it, Gladinet will upload the new version to Google Docs. Unfortunately, the software doesn’t use the latest features of the Google Docs API, so it simply deletes the old version before uploading the document.

The integration with Picasa Web is better: you can view thumbnails for your pictures, the files can be edited in Photoshop or any other photo editor and the new versions are instantly uploaded. A local file manager provides a better interface for uploading or deleting a large number of files.

Gladinet offers another feature that lets you share folders with other computers. The main goal is to access all your files from a single interface, no matter where the files are stored.

Note: make sure you trust the service before entering the credentials of your Google account or your Windows Live ID.

The video embedded below is inspiring to say the least, presenting a different view of what blogs can do. More than one half of all people in Iran are under the age of twenty-five, with more than 700,000 blogs in 2005 (100,000 actively maintained), making it the third largest country of bloggers.

Despite the fact that many face imprisonment if they use their real name, they continue to voice their opposition against the government and try to speak out about the rights that many other countries.

In many parts of the world, including the United States, much of Europe, and elsewhere, it is “legal” to blog and no government official can condone you for your activities unless you are a threat to the security of the country or express severe hatred against certain groups of people.

The video was created by a group at the Vancouver Film School, found here.

It happens some times when you try to remove a specific program installed on your windows computer by running uninstall through Add Remove Programs in Control Panel but you cannot remove the program instead it remains there in the add remove programs list and you cannot remove it.

So you delete the associated files and directories of that program but still it remains there in the Add Remove Programs Entries as an invalid entry

Today we will tell you two methods to remove those invalid entries from add remove programs list, first one is a geeky way out and second one is quite simple with a free utility.

Lets see how can you apply these methods to remove invalid entries from add remove program list

Geeky Way ( Method 1 )

1. Open Start Menu >> Run, type regedit and press Enter Key

2. Navigate to the following path

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

Under this key you can see the sub key for each program installed. Right Click the programs entries you want to remove from Add Remove Programs list.

Simple Method ( Method 2 )

Add Remove Program Cleaner is cool free utility provided by famous IntelliAdmin, it allows you to remove any invalid entries from your add remove program list.

Invalid Entries occurs when a program installed on your computer is not uninstalled properly, you may have deleted the files of the program form C:\Program Files rather than uninstalling it form Add/ Remove Programs

Add Remove Program Cleaner will let you remove those invalid entries from add remove program list in control panel

It should be used to remove only those entries which are broken and cannot be removed by running normal uninstall procedure through Add Remove Programs in control panel

Note: Add Remove Program Cleaner works with both windows XP and Vista

Download Add Remove Programs Cleaner.

Google Product Search (formerly known as Froogle) added an option to restrict the results to sellers that offer free shipping. If you enter your location, the service also shows tax and shipping information for some of the products.

A recent post from the Google Base blog informed sellers that they can submit tax and shipping information. “We’ll soon be displaying this information on Google Product Search to provide buyers with more accurate price information, so we strongly encourage all merchants to start submitting it.”

In case you are wondering, Google Base is a low-profile service that lets you upload structured data. Google uses the data about products in Google Product Search and the real estate listings as a refinement option in Google Maps and the main search results, but I find it surprising that Google doesn’t use the data in expanded snippets.

While I haven’t been a huge proponent of Twitter, I believe that its emergence from a bloggers-only to mass media will help it become more useful in the long-term as a method of quickly communicating to people, versus other methods such as email and chat, which have some drawbacks.

Some people use Twitter in conjunction with their main blog, or use it separately in order to gain more followers, i.e. people who associate your name with your account. However, there is a large percentage of people who don’t effectively use the service for what it was intended, so here are a few tips on how to effectively manage using Twitter.

Will You Be Using it To Promote Your Blog?

If so, you will want to follow the tasks listed below.

First of all, to better associate your blog with your Twitter account/name, you’ll want to create an account with the address: http://twitter.com/blogname in order to associate your entire brand together. Much like a regular domain, a Twitter account’s address is also important – you don’t want one that’s too long for others to remember.

Already have a Twitter account for your private/personal life? Then, it may be necessary to create a separate account just for your blog or business. Otherwise, it’ll be difficult to separate the messages from one another.

Make the link prominent on your blog. Once you have developed a small following of RSS readers and daily visitors to your site, you can promote it by placing the link in the sidebar beneath the subscription area or in place of an RSS feed (Twitter can be used to promote your posts, also).

When people “follow” you, they will be given the opportunity to read what you have posted, linked to, or otherwise shared on your page/profile.

Issue updates and link to new posts through Twitter. This will allow your blog to have “return” visitors who would normally not visit your blog, even if they have subscribed – Twitter can do amazing things in terms of blog promotion.

Branding – Use a logo or image that represents your domain, closely associated in order for readers to have the greatest brand recognition, even after leaving your site.

Will You Be Using it To Promote Your Name/Larger Brand?

Depending on the approach that you want to take, you’ll have to make a different decision at this point.

If you use it in conjunction with your name or larger brand, you’ll want to use one name to associate all your accounts. This is, of course, similar to how you would create an account using a main domain, but slightly different, as you won’t directly be marketing your blog through Twitter.

Again, associate your one account on all your projects/domains/sites in order to have the most reach. You want to build a following in order to communicate with the greatest number of people at any one time.

Branding – Use a personal photograph or logo that you associate with your entire brand/company, rather than a single blog.

Additional “General” Tips

• Don’t ‘follow’ too many people. Selectively choose those in your niche that you want to follow. It is similar to choosing blogs that you want to subscribe to, as you won’t be able to “subscribe” to everyone, and not everyone will post as frequently or too frequently that you won’t be able to keep up-to-date.
• Use other methods of subscribing. You can use the RSS subscription link in the address bar to subscribe to any RSS feed without actually “following” the person, although this deters from the main purpose of Twitter.
• Don’t spend too much time on Twitter. Although Twitter can help you promote your content and brand, it is still necessary to spend a good amount of time creating new content for your blogs. The main point of Twitter is to spread quick thoughts and notes, in-between chat and email, although not quite so private.
• Use it for other purposes. There have been numerous cases of people using Twitter for non-conventional purposes, such as starting a new promotion, running campaigns, and pitching ideas to others. What other purpose will you use for the service?
• Discover better writing through less content. A good writer will be able to vary the length and style of posting. Practice this through Twitter, which has a 140 character limit.

Conclusion

I realize that there are dozens of other tools available for using the micro-blogging service, but I wanted to introduce you to the service and several of the ways to use the tool more effectively and efficiently when associating it with your brand/domain.

How do you use Twitter/what are your thoughts on the service?

They say that happiness is an elusive thing. Not exactly who is or continue it. Happy is one of the greatest feelings a person can face. This is an exciting feeling to be alive, fresh lift the mood. Laughter is of the joy of celebration. Sometimes, in our quest for true happiness, an important factor is that overlooked. Happiness more important and useful when we help others to find, too. It is inherent in this joy to know that others helped them find their own vision of happiness, because the very act of selfless assistance in the establishment of joy.

It is like sharing your life with them. There are 3 main keys to find happiness helping others.

1). Motivate and inspire, you know the feeling when someone who thrilled that I am to you and to motivate all you want in your life. This is one of the best things people can do for someone to help them achieve happiness, or the return of joy that once lost or forgotten, only little smile. In search of ways to motivate and encourage people. There are times when even the simple act of friendship hugs, warm smile, the model on the back, firm handshake, or simply to say that their trust and faith in them enough to make them happy.

2) Give yourself free. Most of the saints, like Mother Teresa are the best examples of selfless acts of kindness to free themselves. Even if it is sometimes difficult, but freely gives of itself is a useful experience. An easy way to do this through involvement or connection to a company or group to support all types of these wonderful, because you do not have to worry about and try to figure out how to free itself. All you need is your presence and you just have to do what you need to do b. It shows the various parties to any of you when you unconditionally and never asked anything in return. You may not know that happiness can be provided by someone just doing that, sharing stories, laughter, or just on a voluntary basis, even for a few hours or a few months after his time.

3) Because this is a classic example of how this is done live. The biggest and effectively assist people in finding their own fortunate enough to live very happy for you. In doing so, you certainly show that people Yes, it is indeed possible and able to live a very happy and fulfilled life. They follow you and you are the epitome of a happy life. They are a classic inspiration for many. They think that if this could happen to some people, it could happen to them. Ultimately, as we well know how to do it and live it, teaching others how to succeed in life happy and meaningful life much easier.
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