Chaos Laboratory

Free eBook: The Complete Windows 7 Shortcuts list

miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:35:15 +0000

The Windows Club has just released a free eBook titled, “The Complete Windows 7 Shortcuts”.

Apart from an exhaustive list of more than 200 common and new keyboard shortcuts for Windows 7, this eBook contains introductory discussions on basic keyboard usage, organization of keys, typing & editing, creating custom shortcuts, etc.

The actual list of shortcuts covers the following areas:

General Windows functions keyboard shortcuts
Dialog box keyboard shortcuts
Windows logo key keyboard shortcuts
Windows Explorer keyboard shortcuts
Ease of Access keyboard shortcuts
Magnifier keyboard shortcuts
Remote Desktop Connection keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts for MS Paint
Keyboard shortcuts for WordPad
Keyboard shortcuts for Calculator
Windows Journal keyboard shortcuts
Windows Help viewer keyboard shortcuts
Windows Media Player keyboard shortcuts
Internet Explorer keyboard shortcuts
Windows Media Center keyboard shortcuts

The eBook has been authored by Nitin Agarwal, a Windows 7 enthusiast and is available in both PDF and XPS formats with fully linked content index.

You can grab the eBook from here.

Suggested reading:

Original publication: Free eBook: The Complete Windows 7 Shortcuts list by Sourjya Sankar Sen at Chaos Laboratory on 2010-02-01.
Digital Fingerprint: CLxSSS__5zzEccS8Xi7vXxsuXh2ER8632Q7AE2Ds

Google IME: Typing Indian languages made super easy

miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:20:10 +0000

Here comes Google’s latest baby – Google Transliteration IME (Input Method Editor) – a freeware tool that allows you to attain mastery of typing 14 different languages including Indian scripts such as Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

What makes the job easier is the phoenetic transliteration feature that allows one to type in any of these languages using a roman keyboard.

Users can type a word the way it sounds using Latin characters and Google Transliteration IME will convert the word to its native script.

This is very different from translation – which is conversion of a word or sentence from one language to another while keeping the meaning intact. With transliteration one converts the sound of words from one alphabet to another.

Earlier on, I had reviewed two very useful transliteration tools – Avro Keyboard and QuillPad. While both these tools are superb at their respective tasks, they suffer certain limitations. Avro Keyboard – a desktop application, was designed to type only Bengali. QuillPad supports multiple languages – but one has to be online to be able to use their editor.

Google IME is an offline application that transcends these boundaries by providing support for a multitude of languages without being dependent on internet connectivity. The application sports extremely useful features like dictionary support for completion for common and rare words, personalized correction memory, typographic customizations, quick web search etc. A full list of features is available on the Google IME page.

Once installed the IME can be fired up via the Language bar or through shortcut keys. It manifests itself in the form of a small floating band (status window) at the bottom right corner of your screen. The leftmost icon denotes the application itself and doubles up as a dragging handle. The second icon represents the input language and can be used to switch back and forth between it and English. The third one is used to launch a virtual keyboard while the last one brings up the application menu.

Once you start typing in your favourite editor, a small suggestions window pops-up displaying completion lists based a customizable dictionary which allows addition of new words in case none of the suggestions match with what you want. The correction memory keeps a note of this and next time you start typing in the same sequence of letters, your preferred word will be shown at the top of the list.

The virtual keyboard is mighty useful too and comes to your aid when you just can’t dig up the correct sequence of keystrokes required – specially in the case of complex joint characters - for a successful transliteration.

As of now Google IME only supports 32-bit Windows 7/Vista/XP. For other platforms, there’s always the online Google Indic transliteration tool. One drawback is that the supported languages are not bundled in together and need to be downloaded individually – as per your requirement. This helps keep the baggage at a bare minimum, though!

So… how about you grab a copy of Google IME and run down your experience by me.

[via The Official Google India Blog]

Suggested reading:

Original publication: Google IME: Typing Indian languages made super easy by Sourjya Sankar Sen at Chaos Laboratory on 2010-01-29.
Digital Fingerprint: CLxSSS__5zzEccS8Xi7vXxsuXh2ER8632Q7AE2Ds

Free eBook on best performing Ad placements for Chitika and AdSense untis

miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:04:08 +0000

Chitika, the search targeted advertisement network is offering a free guide (eBook) for making the most out of Chitika Premium and AdSense.

The book analyzes various medium to large websites and provides valuable suggestions for optimal & harmonious placement of Chitika and AdSense advertisement blocks on your website leading to greater revenues.

Also provided are tips for customizing the Chitika ads (color palettes, fonts etc.) through code as well as heatmaps of high CTR (Click-Through-Rate) locations.

You can download this free eBook from here.

For those who haven’t tried out Chitika yet, Chitika Premium ads are displayed only to visitors coming to your site from search engine results pages. In contrast with the contextual AdSense ads that depend upon your site’s content, these ads are relevant only to the searched keywords. For example, if you searched for “technology” on any of the major search engines and landed on a post in this site, here’s what you’ll see…

On this site, Chitika Premium ads are displayed immediately following a post’s content. However, the target segment is visitors from the US. Hence to see these ads in action, you’ll have to visit this live demonstration link. Alternatively, they can also be viewed by appending a #chitikatest=keyword(s) at the end of any post’s URL.

If you’re interested in serving Chitika Premium ads on your website, you can do so by signing up as a publisher with them.

Suggested reading:

Original publication: Free eBook on best performing Ad placements for Chitika and AdSense untis by Sourjya Sankar Sen at Chaos Laboratory on 2010-01-29.
Digital Fingerprint: CLxSSS__5zzEccS8Xi7vXxsuXh2ER8632Q7AE2Ds

Google Reader now lets you monitor static websites that do not offer RSS feeds

miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 06:36:50 +0000

A new feature in Google Reader now allows you to monitor (and get updates) from static websites that do not offer feeds.

Using this feature is as easy as subscribing to a normal RSS feed – simply enter the URL of the site in the Add Subscription box and hit enter. For a feed-less site, Google Reader will automatically show you a dialog box with an option to Create a Feed.

GReader will setup a monitoring service for the page and intimate you of any changes when they occur.

Earlier on, the only options for monitoring a site for changes were third-party services like Page2RSS, Feed43 etc. – which acted as an intermediary layer between your feed reader and the site and provided you with RSS feeds from the target site’s content. To view the feeds, you were required to subscribe to the URL provided by these services using your feed reader.

With Google Reader, you’re essentially able to bypass this middle layer altogether – as both the conversion of a static site to RSS and the reading of RSS feeds will be handled by GReader itself.

If normal feeds are anything to go by, this service may very well double up as an archiving system for a particular web-page by keeping a detailed record of changes of time.

Suggested reading:

Original publication: Google Reader now lets you monitor static websites that do not offer RSS feeds by Sourjya Sankar Sen at Chaos Laboratory on 2010-01-27.
Digital Fingerprint: CLxSSS__5zzEccS8Xi7vXxsuXh2ER8632Q7AE2Ds

A smarter Google to provide factual answers to your questions

miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 17:58:52 +0000

A smarter Google is out to capture the Next Generation Web with a pledge to provide a better understanding of the web.

“Google Squared” – which, so far, was an experimental effort to automatically identify and extract structured data from the web has been rolled out into the public today. With these algorithmic modifications in their search engine, comes the ability to highlight answers in the search results.

Answer highlighting helps you get to information more quickly by seeking out and bolding the likely answer to your question right in search results. The feature is meant for searches with factual answers… If the pages returned for these queries contain a simple answer, the search snippet will more often include the relevant text and bold it for easy reference.

For example, if earlier on someone was searching for the height of the Empire State Building using the keywords “empire state height”, the most probable results would be…

Not so anymore. With Google Squared working behind the scenes, the same query will now fetch…

As you can see, instead of providing links to articles containing the query keywords, Google now highlights portions of those articles containing to the point answers to the query. The idea is very similar to the quantified results that Wolfram Alpha provides although the presentation still remains in the same old Google format.

This is definitely a huge step towards the next generation Web as envisioned by Tim Burners Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web) and will make it much easier and quicker for end-users to get to the answers they are seeking. However, ReadWriteWeb expressed concerns over this new feature, stating that this may, in reality, prove to be a deterrent factor in terms of website traffic – as users won’t be required to visit the website anymore to dig through the article for the correct answer. Speculations aside, for webmasters it’s going to be more of a breathless wait-and-watch now.

On a similar note, the algorithmic changes introduced by Google Caffeine have started lapping up results from Twitter and related social media & networking sites.

What are you think about G-Squared?

Suggested reading:

Original publication: A smarter Google to provide factual answers to your questions by Sourjya Sankar Sen at Chaos Laboratory on 2010-01-23.
Digital Fingerprint: CLxSSS__5zzEccS8Xi7vXxsuXh2ER8632Q7AE2Ds