Blackberry Bold 9700 which was released in US around mid November is now finally available in India.

There was no launch party for the Bold release like the one that happened for Singapore launch !

The BlackBerry Bold 9700 will be available nationally from multi brand outlets serviced by Redington India as well as from operators including Airtel, Aircel, BSNL, Idea Cellular, Loop Mobile, MTNL, Reliance, Tata and Vodafone beginning today

Now for the disappointing part; Its priced at 31990 which is almost 700 USD

In US, the no-commitment price for the same device is 350USD.

Here is an video, which might tempt you to go for the phone irrespective of the price

In my earlier review of HTC Touch, I had hoped that the phone would last for couple of years; it did last for more than couple of years – 2.5 years to be exact and got replaced by a much superior, nicer, faster Blackberry Bold 9700

HTC Touch was a nice phone but not a useful device. The messaging capabilities were very limited partly because of the touch interface and partly because of the almost useless OS – Windows Mobile. The processor was too slow to run applications and it was a pain to watch the device load the applications.

I have been using the Blackberry for almost a week now and it has been an amazing experience till now !

• The messaging capabilities in Blackberry is something that can’t be even experienced on an iPhone. I could quickly configure all my E-Mail accounts via the Blackberry Internet service and now new E-Mails are pushed to the device as and when they land on the server
• The physical keyboard is a pleasure to use when compared to the touchscreen keyboard.
• Blackberry Messenger is an excellent tool to chat with your other Blackberry friends.
• Facebook App is developed by RIM and does integrate nicely into Blackberry. You can even link Facebook contacts into Blackberry contacts which in turn pulls information like phone number, photo etc from Facebook onto the device address book.
• There are quite a few useful applications which can be downloaded from Blackberry App World (like iPhone App Store) . There are few others which can be downloaded OTA.
• I love keyboard shortcuts and Blackberry has taken care to incorporate the same in most of the applications – Messaging, Browser, Home Screen etc.

The only problem I had was with respect to the boot time. Every time I uninstall an application, you have to reboot the device and this is something which does take a lot of time.

I don’t intend to write an exhaustive review of the device hardware and capabilities. In case you are interested to know more about this phone, do read the reviews done by Phone Arena and Crackberry.

I use Google Calendar Sync to synchronize my Outlook calendar items with Google Calendar and this worked fine until I upgraded to Office 2010.

Google Calendar Sync did not like Outlook 2010 and I was no longer able to synchronize calendar items. I was almost tempted to go back to Outlook 2007 and then I found a thread to resolve this issue

Follow these steps to get Google Sync work with Outlook 2010

1. Backup Outlook.exe. If you have done a default install of Office 2010, the file can be found at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14
2. Close Outlook if its already running and ensure that Outlook.exe is not listed in Task Manager
3. Edit Outlook.exe in a Hex Editor
4. Replace text 14.0.0 with 12.0.0
5. Save the file.
6. Start Outlook and ensure that its still functioning
7. Start Google Calendar Sync and you should see sync back in action.

Two weeks back I upgraded FeedDemon to the latest beta that was available then only to realize that my subscriptions were no longer in sync – I use FeedDemon from home and work

Reading more into the release notes and a little bit of Googling made me  realize that FeedDemon had discontinued its NewsGator online synchronization and had replaced it with Google Reader backend.

I have never been a fan of Google Reader (I know many are) and I have written about it in the past as well. For me FeedDemon has always been the ideal client to quickly go over thousands of feed items that I get everyday.

With FeedDemon now working with Google Reader, I now have the ability to access the same subscriptions when I am not at home or work; and for those die hard Google Reader fans, they now have the ability to use FeedDemon without complaints

Note: With FeedDemon 3.0 you can even subscribe to your Twitter public timeline and response feeds !

Moving from one web hosting to another has become one of the annual activities. However this time around, I had totally forgot about the hosting renewal; this post after 4 months would explain why I forgot about the hosting renewal

An automatic renewal (which I had not subscribed for) was tried by Media Temple which failed and I got an email notice of the same. 

Media Temples renewal charges of 170$/year was a bit too high this time around; the first year charges were also around the same, but only that the intention of moving to MT last year was different.

Google search for “MT Alternative” resulted in WebFaction.

Unlike MT, I could not find any bad reviews on WebFaction. Also at 8.5$/year (1 year prepayment) WebFaction looked reasonable compared to MT

Note: 5 year prepayment brings down the monthly charges to 5.5$

Also unlike MT, WebFaction comes with one click installers for almost 50 applications including Django, Rails, Drupal and WordPress

WebFaction control panel UI looks user unfriendly at the first glance; however once you start using it you wouldn’t stick to the initial opinion.

Moving hosting from one provider to another is a challenge which I seem to have mastered over the past 3 years. This site has traveled from:

GoDaddy -> Dreamhost -> Media Temple -> WebFaction

In the initial years, the biggest problem was of moving the data. The best solution that I have to found to resolve this problem is:

1. Sign up with the new hosting
2. tar.gz the files which needs to be moved.
3. Once the account on the new hosting is created, you would receive the server details (IP/User Account/SSH Account etc)
4. SCP the file from the existing hosting to the new hosting. Even if the data to be moved is in GB’s, it won’t take much time
5. Unzip the archived files on the new server; setup and test the application (in my case it was all WordPress) on the new hosting. You can access the application on the new server using IP since the domain name would still be pointing to the old server
6. Once the testing is done, you can go about changing the name servers to point to the new server.

It took about an hour or so for me to execute the above 6 steps; However the DNS changes does take a day or more to propagate

WebFaction looks like a decent host and hopefully this annual activity of moving from one hosting to another will stop at WebFaction.

If you want to suggest a better hosting provider, the comments section is always open.

The HTC Touch phone that I have been using from 18 months had turned into a nightmare from the past 2 months.

I do use the phone extensively to synch my Outlook contacts and calendar appointments. However from the past few weeks, I was seeing that the Time Zone on the phone used to default back to GMT+1 at random times.

I am on GMT+5.30 and for some unknown reason it used to default back to GMT+1. As expected, the appointments in the calendar were popping up at the wrong time; same goes for the morning alarms.

I did observe this reset happening after disconnecting the device from an active ActiveSync session. However I used to see this behavior at random times even without the assistance of ActiveSync.

When I connect the device to the PC, the time on the device is always synchronized with the time on PC, but the Time Zone was always untouched.

I did search thorough a lot of forums to find a fix for this problem. Some of the forum posts were pointing to the data set in the Regional Settings. I checked on it and every other possible option in Windows Mobile and nothing helped.

Just a few days back, I found a setting on the device which was causing this issue (Not sure how I overlooked it)

There is a Time Zones tab on the Phone settings (which is almost hidden)

I for some reason had enabled the option and hence the time zone was being set/overridden by the carrier; in my case the screw up was being done by Airtel.

The Airtel tower was setting the Time Zone on my phone to GMT+1 Prague, Budapest while it was standing tall and operating from Bangalore. I am sure opening a complaint with Airtel won’t help and I have disabled this option for now.

If any of you Windows Mobile owners are facing a similar Time Zone issue, do check this option.

This site saw the last post almost 3 months back and since then many have been checking with me on my well-being.

Few services even banned this site for having no activity in the last 3 months.

I just took a long break from blogging and hope to be back as soon as possible !

It was time at my workplace which initially (and is still) held me from being “online”. Later I just felt better being “away”.

I also got hooked onto reading fiction novels! Currently I have these many books waiting to be finished

On the top of these 9 books, I have an additional 7 books in the queue including a few non-fiction books by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock

When I am not reading books, I am busy exploring the new 13″ macbook. Like with the Apple iPhone, even Macbook ownership is temporary and is finally ending up with my brother.

The new Macbook is way too cool, compared to my existing Acer Laptop (or compared to any of the notebooks out there in the market)

Currently I am stuck with a Windows based notebook and a Windows based mobile while my sibling is “all Mac”. Something I wish to change to in the coming few years !

I am liking everything about the Mac except for the fact that you have to pay for almost all the good software.

Meanwhile if you didn’t care as to where the hell was I, you probably should definitely care to see where the hell Matt was this year round

I find myself pronouncing a lot of English words differently from what my friends do. One of the reasons for this is the fact that English just happens to be one of the 5 languages that I speak.

A couple of these word pronunciations also lead to a healthy debate with neither party accepting defeat and the only way to conclude such a debate is to validate the pronunciation.

Not to boast, but most of these debates are won by me and there is no denying that I have lost a couple too ! Surprisingly there have been debates where both parties have lost

When you are also in a similar situation below are some of the tools that can help you to validate the English Word pronunciations:

AT&T Natural Voices Research Version

AT&T Natural Voices is a commercial TTS engine which has support for multiple languages and is marketed by Wizzard Software.

However they do have a Research Version which is also available for general public here:

http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

You can select from a list of voices (accent) and even have the option to download the voice.

The service is however slow and its probably due to the fact that the engine generates audio files on the fly !

However note that you can give input more than one word (preferably separated by comma) and the engine will generated the audio file with the pronunciation for all these words.

Dictionary.com/Thefreedictionary.com

Unlike Natural Voices, Dictionary.com and FreeDictionary.com allow you to hear pronunciations for words which are there in the dictionary.

Also you don’t have the option to input multiple words. However the pronunciations are pre-compiled and hence play much faster compared to Natural Voices.

If by any chance, you don’t have a sound card, or if the drivers of your card are corrupted, these 2 services provide a pronunciation key table which could be used to decode the word pronunciation.

HowJSay.com

HowJSay is another portal similar to the Dictionary portal mentioned above where you can type in the word and listen to the pronunciation.

However HowJSay additionally lists a set of words based on the input word and I found this feature quite useful.

Windows Text To Speech Engine

Windows comes with a built-in Text To Speech engine and mainly used for the Narrator Application.

On Windows Vista, you can access the Speech Properties dialog via

Control Panel -> Ease of Access -> Speech Recognition Options

On the “Text To Speech” dialog, you can input the word and select “Preview Voice” to listen to the word pronunciation.

The same option is also available on Windows XP. (Control Panel ->Speech)

I find this the quickest way of checking on a word and does not require an active Internet connection.

For Linux users, there is an option in the form of Festival ! I haven’t tried it though.

If you know of any other service, please feel free to suggest the same using the comment form.

Firefox 3 was downloaded by more than 8 million users in 24 hours and it might well go down as the most downloaded software in 24 hours !

India’s contribution in the above 8 million was 226K  and US was the highest with 4632K.

Talking of new features in FF3, Alex Faaborg, the user experience designer who worked on Firefox 3 has a very detailed post on the new UI features here

http://tinyurl.com/yv5xp4

Below are 2 unique features in FF3, which I haven’t seen in hundreds of posts that cover the new FF3 features.

Scrolling using Spacebar

If you are keyboard junkie, I am sure you too will love this feature.

Till now, If you intended to scroll a web page, you either had to enable the Caret Mode (F7) and then scroll the web page or use the keyboard Page up and Page down key.

The first option isn’t that straightforward and the second one for some reason wasn’t always working reliably on FF2. Even in FF3, scrolling via Page keys doesn’t work properly.

However in FF3, you can easily scroll using the "Spacebar"

Spacebar - Scrolls the page down
Shift + Spacebar - Scrolls the page up

Reopen/Undo Closed Tab

Tabbed browsing keeps your taskbar clutter free and also makes you more productive.

However you might also end up closing tabs (browser pages) which you did not intend to !

FF3 has a new feature using which  you can quickly reload a closed tab. All you need to do is press Ctrl + Shift + T

Ctrl + Shift + T - Reopen closed tab / Undo Close tab operation

The shortcut is also kind of easy to remember since Ctrl + T is used to open a new empty tab.

Also FF3 does not just reload the last closed tab; in fact it maintains the history of closed tabs.

If you continuously press the Ctrl + Shift + T, you can reopen all the closed tabs in the session (the most recently closed is reopened first)

For the complete list of Firefox 3 shortcuts, check out this page

http://tinyurl.com/5hucpj

Firefox 3 intended to create a world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours .

June 17 was fixed as the release date and when I tried to download yesterday, the servers were down.

They seem to be back online now and you can download the latest Firefox from the below link:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox?p=downloadday

At the time I downloaded, 14K people had downloaded FF3 from India compared to 1063K downloads from US

Also don’t forget to check the "Tips and Tricks" page; it will help you to get the most out of Firefox 3

Lifehacker also has an interesting post on the history of Firefox (with Screenshots)

A service is a long running executable which does require any user intervention and is configured to start when the operating system is booted.

On Windows, the services are managed via services.msc and you can also communicate with a NT service using the SC tool.

On Linux the services can be controlled via the chkconfig command line tool.

Usage details of chkconfig  is shown below:

chkconfig –list [name]
chkconfig –add <name>
chkconfig –del <name>
chkconfig [--level <levels>] <name> <on|off|reset>

Add and Del options are used to create or delete services for management. A service can be activated or deactivated using the on or off flags. Note that you have to mention the runlevel using the --level option.

The absensce of this runlevel will lead to the settings being applied to the current runlevel.

The <name> argument refers to the name of the service and this can be found by referring to the /etc/init.d director on Linux, which is a central repository for all startup scripts.

Also note that chkconfig modifies the data on /etc/rc[0-6].d directories and not the actual startup scripts.

A much faster way of enabling or disabling Linux services is by using the ntsysv command.

The command lists the services available on the repository (/etc/init.d) and enables the user to disable/enable services in one shot.

Also if the service name looks too cryptic, you can always press F1 to get more information about the selected service.

As with chkconfig, if you need to control the services at multiple runlevel’s you need to invoke ntsysv with the --level argument

ntsysv --level 345 will configure the services on runlevel 3, 4 and 5.

If you are a Linux newbie, Linux.com has an excellent introduction to Services, runlevel’s and rc.d scripts.

Note: In Debian, services are managed using the update-rc.d command

I have been reading in many posts which mention special tools to help in ejecting/removing a USB disk.

The Windows “Safely Remove Hardware” feature has been notorious for hiding itself after installing the new hardware.

You do have the option of Ejecting the hardware; however this becomes a pain if you are working with multiple USB devices.

Also in Windows XP, one USB device might list multiple entries in the Remove Hardware dialog. In Windows Vista there is a option to filter the device components.

Do you really need to eject the USB Hardware ?

Most of the USB Disks are optimized for safe removal and in my opinion you rarely need to use the “Eject” or “Safely Remove Hardware” feature.

To confirm this setting do the following

1. Right Click on the removable disk and select Properties
2. Click on the Hardware Tab, select the removable disk and click on the Properties button
3. Click on the Policies Tab and you should see the following window
   
4. As you can see from the available options, the disk is either optimized for quick removal or for performance and most of the disks by default are optimized for quick removal.

With write caching disabled by default for most of the USB disks, you really don’t need to worry about ejecting or safely removing the USB hardware.

Note: Unlike USB drives, the hard drives have write caching enabled by default for better performance and hence are susceptible to data loss or corruption on power outage.

If you are still not comfortable unplugging the USB disk without Ejecting, you can always add a shortcut on your desktop to quickly access the Safely Remove Hardware dialog

The target of the shortcut should point to:

RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

Alternatively you can install utilities such as USB Disk Ejector which simplify the above task.

Web Analytic tools are must have for anybody running a website since they give interesting insight into your site’s traffic patterns.

Woopra Web Analytics was mentioned/reviewed by so many sites that I had to give it a try.

After signing up for Woopra, I immediately proceeded towards the downloads page. I installed the Desktop Client (for which I had to upgrade the JRE on my system to 1.6) and also installed the WordPress Plug-in.

Only after installing the WP Plugin did I realize that I had to have an “Invitation Code” to use Woopra !

Without an code you need to wait till Woopra inspects and approves your site !

I don’t understand as to why Woopra lets users download the software even before the user has added a site and has a valid Website ID! 

I let out my frustration on Twitter and looks like someone at Woopra has been tracking tweets on their application. My site was immediately approved ! (It might have been just coincidence as well )

Woopra Client

Woopra Client application has been written in Java and does make extensive use of the Image4J library to render the pretty looking UI.

The combination of Blue, Green, Yellow and White colors on the UI does manage to create an optical illusion !

Not sure as to what prompted the Woopra team to use this as the default color scheme. The other color schemes included in the UI are also of not much help.

What I liked ?

• Live traffic view including the Geographical view. It lets users see the active users and the number of pages they visited on your site.
• Starting a conversation with the “online” visitor (Some visitors might find this annoying )
• Visitor Tagging
• Geo Overlay on the Analytics Tab
  

What I did not like ?

• The need to install the client software on every other system
• The UI Color Scheme
• The Dashboard view
• A scrolling bar status bar which is so annoying and yes there is no option to disable it or pause it !

Also the visitor count data displayed by Woopra was only 75% of what I saw on Google Analytics or Mint. Not sure on the kind of visitors being dropped by Woopra !

Till Woopra fixes the above issues and improves the UI of the client I would recommend anyone to try out Mint Web Analytics.

I am a big fan of this app for a number of reasons including

• Ability to view the Analytics data on a Single page
• Live Traffic Data
• Best looking user interface
• Filtering/Analysis of data by third party Pepper’s
• Ability to host on your own server

Have you tried Woopra ? What is your view on Woopra ?

What analytics software do you use to track your site visitors?

Firefox has been the default browser on my PC’s from quite some time now. Firefox for some reason has always been able make its way back every time I try to adopt a different browser !

Flock and Safari were the two browser which gave serious competition to Firefox !

From the past few weeks I have been using the RC1 release of Firefox 3. I haven’t explored all the new features in FF3, but it does look faster compared to FF2 and does have a lot of UI enhancements.

The final release of FF3 is going to be some time in June and Firefox is aiming to set a new Guinness Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours.

I already pledged my support and if you are also a Firefox fan,  you should definitely head over to this link to pledge your support !

Don’t forget to spread the word around

The new Bangalore International airport started operating from today and seems to have already handled around 341 flights.

I tried to check on the official website to know more about the launch day only to find the website down ! I tried accessing the site contents via Google cache; even that seemed to lead to pages with errors.

Update – Bialairport.com is now redirecting to http://www.bengaluruairport.com. The site is half baked and is hosted on Bharti in Karnataka, India.

The site was well designed and optimized for search engine queries. However looks like the IT team overlooked the bandwidth requirements and visitors seeking information have to end up seeing the above screen !

The web server seems to be in Texas and hosted by Theplanet.com Internet Services Inc.

The site should hopefully be online soon and till then, check my earlier post on BIA.

Instead of putting more data in that post, I linked to the official BIA site and I kind of regret that decision now

HTC Touch Diamond was unveiled in London 2 weeks back and even India is part of the global launch of the handset.

As with the case of HTC Touch, HTC Diamond will also be available via Bharti Airtel, which means that the device will be locked onto Airtel Network.

I am confident that the intelligent folks at XDA will come up with an unlock mechanism for HTC Diamond as they did for HTC Touch.

The specifications of HTC Diamond looks way better than HTC Touch. It has a much faster processor, more memory and a better camera. Its 3G enabled and also has GPS. The new 3D TouchFlo also looks good.

There is also a custom YouTube Application, however I am not sure if the video experience is same as in iPhone.

Official HTC Touch Diamond Video

The phone is being priced at 27500 INR (670$) which in my opinion is way too high. Hopefully the price will come down over the period of time in which case it will be a worthy alternative to HTC Touch.

The Bangalore/Bengaluru International Airport (BIA) is finally commencing operations from 23 May 2008.

The switch to the new airport will take place at midnight on May 23. As per the statement from BIAL (BIA Limited) all flights landing and departing after midnight will operate from the new airport.

Update: BIA opened on May 24 (Saturday) and handled 341 flights on Day One

Also flights arriving before midnight (on May 22) can also choose to land on the new airport.

Air India’s flight from Bangalore to Singapore will supposedly be the first flight to take off from the new international airport in the city, when it becomes operational on May 23.

Even though I am not traveling out of Bangalore in the near time, I decided to checkout on the connectivity and the various transport options available to and from the new international airport.

Official Website

The BIA official web site does have a lot of information on the new airport. The site is indexed pretty well in Google and also has managed to get the Sitelinks.

http://www.bialairport.com

http://www.bengaluruairport.com

Contact Details

Bangalore International Airport Limited
   118, Gayathri Lakefront
   Outer Ring Road
   Hebbal
   Bangalore - 560 024
   Tel: +91 80 2354 0000
   Fax: +91 80 2333 3400
   Email: contact@bialairport.com

Flight Schedule Details

BIAL has also come up with a Flight Schedule List which is effective from 24 May 2008 to October 25 2008.

• Domestic Departure Details – Download here
• International Departure Details – Download here

Note that these schedule are subject to change and for more accurate information you should/could always call up 1800 425 4425

BIAL website also has added a new feature via which you can view the live flight arrival and departure information.

Transportation Facilities

Following is the list of current transport options available. You can either travel by bus, use the Airport Taxi Service or drive by yourselves.

Airport Shuttle Service

There are around 40 Volvo AC buses which will shuttle between the city and the airport. The following table has more information on the pick-up/drop-off points. The following areas are covered as of now

• Hebbal
• MCTC
• Jeevan Bhima Nagar
• HAL (Old Airport)
• JP Nagar 6th Phase
• Koramangala
• Kempegowda Bus Stand
• Whitefield(ITPL)
• Electronic City

Note: Once you know the route taken by these buses, you can catch the bus at any place on the route.

The following transport map seems to show 2 more locations not mentioned in the above table.

For more information on the areas covered, you can always call up these numbers.

BMTC Control Room: Telephone No: 22952522/22952422
BMTC, Kempegowda Bus Stand: Telephone No: 22952311/22952314
BMTC, Shivajinagar Bus Stand: Telephone No: 22952321/22952324

For those who are familiar with Bangalore, the following image might help in choosing the shortest road to the airport

Airport Taxi Service

Meru and Easy Cabs are the official taxi operators at the airport. The cars supposedly have a GPS and are also air conditioned. They are also are equipped with a credit card machine and at a charge of 15 INR/km this is definitely required

You can also book these taxis over phone; the facility however is available only if you are going towards the airport.

Easy Cabs - 43434343
Meru Cabs - 44224422

Limo and Car Rental

You can also rent premium cars from Hertz or Akbar Travels. Apart from the regular chauffeured cars, passengers can also avail self-driven cars at the airport.

There will be three ranges of self drive cars- the compact category (Suzuki Swift), the intermediate range – (Ford Fiesta), the standard category- (Toyota corolla), Multi Utility Vehicles (Toyota Innova) and Sports Utility Vehicles (Ford Endeavour)

AirLift

AirLift is another car rental service which is currently charging 300 INR for a pickup/drop from any place in Bangalore. I checked on the official Website of Airlift and it looks like they are covering only south and east Bangalore as of now.

However at 300 INR, a drive in Toyota Innvoa with personal entertainment is a steal. I haven’t had the opportunity to use AirLift and hence can’t give a feedback on their service, if anyone has used Airlift, please feel free to give your feedback on the same.

If you intend to use Airlift, note that they are available at P-3 parking at BIA’s arriving terminal.

You can contact Airlift using the following details:

AIRLIFT
#106, Sherwood Suites,17/2 Varthur Main Road,
Marathahalli,Bangalore 560 037
Call : 97313 96331
Email : support@airliftonline.com 

RedBus

RedBus, the online bus ticket booking service has introduced BMTC Bus booking for Bangalore International Airport.

You can book using RedBus irrespective of whether you are traveling to or from the International Airport.

RedBus allows you to book the Volvo buses on all the routes mentioned above and they even let you pick your seats.

(Note: The available seats have a checkbox which when checked appears in the “Chose Seats” text field)

Parking Facilities

The Airport’s car park can accommodate 2000 cars. The system used for the parking management is fully automated, efficient and transparent and is provided by SKIDATA™

Car parking fees have been priced at Rs.40/- for two hours and Rs.20/- for every additional hour in the general parking area. For overnight parking, Rs. 300 will be charged for the first 24 hours and Rs. 200 for every additional day.

BIA Photos

For up-to-date information, bookmark the official BIA Website !

Update – BIA has now come up with an Easy Guide which has lot of useful information.

Download BIA Easy Guide.pdf

At my workplace I somehow managed to eat up almost all of the 40GB on the primary partition and I had no clue as to what directory/file was eating up the space.

As usual, Windows XP has no inbuilt tools to accomplish the simple task of finding the culprit directories/files.

In my earlier post, I had mentioned about some of the tools which could help in a similar situation. Some of the tools that I mentioned on that post are no longer supported and hence I had to “google” to find the right tool for the cleanup task.

WinDirStat was one of the useful tool that I found ! Its a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Windows.

The tool can either scan all your disk drives or the individual drives or even specific folders. The entire directory tree is read and the information is displayed in 3 views:

• As a Directory list which is sorted by file/subtree size as shown below
  
• As a treemap view which represents each file as a colored rectangle, the area of which is proportional to the file’s size.

  The rectangles are arranged in such a way, that directories again make up rectangles, which contain all their files and subdirectories. So their area is proportional to the size of the subtrees.
  

• As an extension list which shows all types (filename extensions) occurring in the directory tree
  

The treemap is an amazing feature which helps you to quickly identify the file occupying the maximum space. The selection of the colored block automatically highlights the file in the tree view and you can delete the file from within the UI of WinDirStat.

A must have software for Windows

As many of you know, the Indian Edition of YouTube is now live @ http://in.youtube.com.

Till now there were a lot of YouTube clones which catered to the local video content and some of them even got considerable funding from VC’s

I am not sure if this edition of YouTube is going to pickup in a big way, but the below snapshot of the videos section might say otherwise !

The above is just a partial snapshot; in fact the entire page is filled up similar kind of steamy videos !

If this is the kind of videos we would see on Indian Version of YouTube, there is no doubt that it will be “hugely popular” !

Xobni is an excellent add-on for Microsoft Outlook and has definitely simplified email management for me. Even Bill Gates fell in love with this application and referred it as the next generation of social networking.

(Microsoft did try to acquire Xobni and it failed due to various reasons)

Xobni was initially invite only and today they have made it publicly available to everybody. If you use Outlook and manage a lot of mail, Xobni is a must have.

The following video highlights the unique features in Xobni

I have been using it for quite some weeks now and it has negligible effect on Outlook’s performance. Try Xobni !

This site is powered by WordPress and when it came online 2 years back for some odd reason I opted to install WordPress on the "blog" sub-domain. I guess it was popular then to have the blog installed on its own domain.

And even though I knew the kind of content I would write, I still opted to use my name for the domain. Something which I can’t change easily now

venukb.com remained as a dummy entry point and it just used to redirect to venukb.com/blog. I have always wanted to get rid of the sub-domain and move to the root domain.

I was of the opinion then that the move would affect the Pagerank and hence had held making such a move.  After the recent tanking of Pagerank I decided that it was the right moment to make this switch.

I had 2 ways of making this switch:

Method 1 – Changing the Blog Address in WordPress Options

WordPress can power your site’s root and yet can be copied to a separate subdirectory. In my case blog was the subdirectory and I could quickly switch to root by just changing the Blog Address in the WordPress Options.

You should also update the permalinks and rebuild the sitemap after making the above change.

However Google’s Index and sites linking to your pages would still have "blog" in the URL and this requires you to redirect all those requests to the root domain. I accomplished this easily by adding the following directive in .htaccess file

Redirect 301 /blog http://www.venukb.com

Everything worked fine until I tried to access the WordPress Admin console which was at venukb.com/blog/wp-admin. Since the /blog was redirected to root, I was never able to gain access to the admin console and with the mod_alias directive, there is no way to exclude access to a particular URL.

The only option was to fall back on mod_rewrite and use RewriteRule in conjunction with RewriteCond. I searched in a lot of forums for putting in the right rewrite directive only to end up in a confused state.

mod_rewrite is a one complex library and regular expression is something which I can probably never understand

If someone has already done this with mod_rewrite, please let me know as to what directive worked for you

Method 2 – Moving the WordPress contents to the root domain

I gave up on mod_rewrite and moved my entire blog directory including the WordPress core files to the root. With SSH access to the server, this was done in seconds with a mv command. I also backed up and restored the .htaccess file on the root domain (If you copy the .htaccess residing on the blog sub-domain, you would end up with 500 Internal Server Error)

In addition to Blog Address, I even changed the WordPress Address and as in the previous method, updated permalinks and the sitemap. The mod_alias Redirect directive worked like a charm and I had no issues in accessing the WordPress Admin console.

What else do I need to do ?

The main thing to do after moving to a different domain is to set the permanent redirection (301) and building your sitemap. The pages in your blog might have linked to several other internal pages and all this might point to the "blog" URL’s.

Even though the Redirection will take care of these links, its better off to modify these links.I am considering using the Search Regex WordPress plugin from Urban Giraffe.

If you are using a desktop based client like Windows Live Writer to publish posts, you have to update the account settings.

You might also want to monitor the 404 errors on your server and for this I am again using Urban Giraffe’s Redirection Plugin

Redirection plugin is also a powerful way of setting up Redirects in WordPress and this method totally avoids .htaccess. The author is also testing a beta version of this plugin which modified the .htaccess file itself.

If you also happened to move WordPress across domains, do share your experience.

Jing, a concept project from TechSmith is a handy screen capture utility. It also adds up as a useful screencast utility.

One aim of the Jing project is to simplify the process of screen capture and screencasting and it does fulfill this aim. Jing has one of the simplest UI for taking screenshots.

In SnagIt you need to inform the app before hand whether you intend to capture a Window or a region. Jing automatically adjusts the capture boundary when you hover over the edge of the screen.

You can also highlight sections of the captured image, add text, frames and arrows. The Undo/Redo feature is also quite useful.

The captured image can be:

1. Saved locally
2. Copied to a server via FTP
3. Sent to Flickr
4. Sent to Screencast.com

Even capturing video is as simple as capturing an image. Checkout one sample screencast I recorded with Jing

As usual I am again showing off my HTC Touch! I miss iPhone tough

Only complaint from my side is with respect to the stability of the application. Jing keeps crashing now and then and its also a memory hogger.

Do give Jing a try and if you are still not happy you might want to check this list !

Which screen capture tool do you use ?

There has been another round of pagerank  update and I see that many sites have got a higher pagerank and few of them have even managed to get a PR of 4 within few months !

This site had a PR of 4 from quite some time and even during the last update where few sites were penalized for selling Text Link Ads the PR of this site remained at 4

At that time, I thought that I wasn’t penalized since I was not selling Text Link Ads from my home page (which had PR4) and was only having post level ads (Around 5 post level ads were active).

However this round of pagerank update has taken the PR from 4 to 2, reminding me of QOT’s PR downgrade from 6 to 3 !

I am not sure if dividing existing PR by 2 is the way of Google penalizing sites selling text link ads. I immediately stopped Text Link Ads and in a way it was even easy since a new month just began !

I have also raised a reconsideration request with Google !

But again I am not completely sure if TLA is the core reason behind this downgrade ! I moved my hosting from Dreamhost to MT some time back and one of the biggest mistakes I made was not to check on the XML sitemap.

After the hosting change, the XML sitemaps generator plugin for some odd reason started putting the XML file on venukb.com/blog while Google was searching for it on venukb.com. I had manually set to venukb.com and during the move, the option changed to “Automatic” and happened to select the subdomain.

And I realized this only after 3 weeks ! Duh !

The crawl stats also confirmed that the sitemaps were not accessible from quite some time !

I fixed the issue and even then I see that 0 pages from sitemaps are included in the search index.

Has the PR downgrade affected traffic ?

This site for one gets almost 80% of the traffic from search engines (mainly Google) and I have noticed that some of the high traffic pages are no longer in the Top 10 !

I do see a dip in the number of unique visitors, but after including the landing page, the pageview count hasn’t changed much.

I am hoping the reconsideration request to fix the PR And if any of you are running Text Link Ads and also get a huge amount of traffic from Google, you should consider switching the text ads off !

And yes be careful about XML sitemaps when you are moving to a new hosting ! (Though not sure if this is also the reason for downgrade !)

Talking of PR, do share your experience as well ! Has it improved ? Do you see change in traffic with the improved PR ?

My 8Mbps broadband plan is sucking out money from the past 2 months; somehow I am managing to exceed the 4GB download limit.

With the intent of checking on some new plans, I tried to access the Airtel website http://www.airtel.in

I ended up with this:

The URL was being re-directed to http://www.airtel.in/srilanka/srilanka….. Looks like the site was hacked by somebody !

Talking of Airtel web portal, Airtel seems to be changing its domain every other month; Few months back, it was airtelworld.com (It was something else before this) and now its Airtel.in !

And with every domain change, they seem to be changing the URL for some of their important offering e.g. Airtel Data card.

Check an example URL for Airtel Data card:

http://airtel.in/level2_t7.aspx?path=1/106

And its not just this URL; every URL in the site seems to have a awkward “level2″ and path parameter. Also the path parameter seems to get a new value with every domain change and makes linking to their site a pain !

Update: Airtel portal is back in action; not sure who hacked it or whether it was some upgrade issue. The countless number of “srilanka” in the URL in a way conveys that it was probably not a server upgrade issue !

Many of the visitors who land on my HTC related posts have contacted me to know more details on HTC Customer Service. I was initially surprised as to why these users couldn’t get this data via Google.

I did a search for HTC India on Google only to find crappy pages listed on the first page of search results.

There is not even a link to the global HTC site and this pretty much explained the reason for the number of people contacting me to know more on HTC customer service in India.

HTC does have a dedicated portal for customers in India. Unfortunately it doesn’t show up in Google search and the only way to find this to navigate via the HTC International home page

HTC India - http://www.htc.com/in/default.aspx

HTC provides support over Phone, Email and if it still doesn’t help you can walk into any of the customer care centers listed below:

Check in this link for up-to-date information

http://www.htc.com/in/support/customer_care.html

If any of the above phone number is not working, please check this link for updated information.

Cell Broadcast also know as Short Message Service – Cell Broadcast (SMS-CB) is a service designed for delivery of messages to multiple users in a specified area. Unlike SMS Point to Point which is manly a one to one service Cell Broadcast is a one to many service.

Some mobile operators use Cell Broadcast for communicating the area code of the antenna cell to the mobile user (via channel 050), for nationwide or citywide alerting, weather reports, mass messaging, location based news, etc. The service might not be supported by all the operators; even some of the handsets don’t have the capability to receive Cell Broadcast messages.

One of the readers on my earlier post on HTC Touch wanted to know whether the Cell Broadcast service could be enabled on HTC. The service can be enabled easily on a Nokia or a Sony Ericsson phone and isn’t so easy to configure on HTC.

Steps to enable Cell Broadcast on HTC Touch

1. Navigate to the following screen on the device

   Start -> Settings -> Phone -> More

2. Check the “Enable” box under the Broadcast Channels

   

3. Click on the “Settings” to bring up the following screen

   

   -> Check “Receive channel list”
   -> Set Language to “All Languages”
   -> Create a new item with any name and channel number set to 050 or 50

4. You should immediately see the Cell Broadcast messages being displayed as message alerts.
5. Cell Broadcast messages as message alerts are annoying and if you want the same to appear on the home screen, install the BatteryStatus application. Once installed, the application has an option to display the Cell broadcast messages on the “Today” screen
   You can even optionally set the alignment for the broadcast messages.
   
6. Once the above setting is done, you should see the Broadcast messages on the home screen as shown below (The message is next to the battery status)

   

Note: The display of Broadcast messages is a battery sucker ! As you can see from the above image, the battery was fully charged before I enabled the broadcast feature. Within a day, the battery drained to 18% ! Every time a message is received, the display light is turned on and this is one major battery drainer.

I happened to reinstall the OS on my system (yet again) and there is a set of software that I install after every OS re-install. In fact I have a “Must Have” directory which has all the software’s that I use on a day to day basis.

Here is my list of “must have” applications for Windows. I am also mentioning it in the order of install of these applications.

Kaspersky Antivirus

The first thing to do after reinstalling an OS (or before you connect to the Internet) is to install a good Antivirus  and a AntiSpyware application. I currently have a 2 year subscription of Kaspersky and its one of the best AV applications that I have used so far.

There are a lot of quality free Antivirus software out there, but this has been one area where I am not willing to take risk by opting for a free alternative. I’ve had bad experience using some of the free alternatives and even some of the paid ones such as Norton gave me a lot of trouble.

Kaspersky takes the least amount of memory and CPU and also does the best job when finding/detecting viruses. No wonder its rated in the top in almost all the Antivirus reviews !

For spyware, as of now I am relying on Windows Defender which comes pre-installed with Vista ! Not sure if I am taking a risk here

Mozilla Firefox

Unfortunately the OS (Windows XP/Vista) does not come pre-installed with this powerful browser and I do have to install it separately ! Also thanks to the continuous updates, I always download the latest version rather than choosing the installable in my “Must Have” directory !

Few years back if you happened to visit a browsing center, you would only find IE installed on all the systems. When I used to ask about Firefox, I always used to get “What is that” expression ! Now I see that Firefox is also installed by default. Yes more users are now aware of this browser and rightly so !

I am not going to explain the choice of this browser; If you are a Firefox user you know the reason, if you are not, you better switch and start using Firefox !

And if you also happen to reinstall your system OS every now and then, do remember to backup the bookmarks via the Bookmark Manager !

WinRar

This is again a shareware application, but I do have a registered copy of WinRar and its way better than WinZip. Especially while handling the CAB or the JAR files I find WinRar very useful. 7Zip is a free alternative if you don’t want to shell out money for WinRar.

Free Download Manager

When it comes to download managers, you again have a lot of options. I have tried most of them and have finally settled on Free Download Manager. It has the best user interface and does not run any Ads !

I do find the community options annoying is one feature that I turn off during the installation.

Do remember to run the “Optimization master” (found under options menu) to get the best download experience possible via FDM !

Launchy

If you are keyboard junkie then you would definitely like Launchy. It’s one powerful application launcher and have written more about this app in my earlier post.

Read my earlier post on Launchy !

FeedDemon

I hate web based RSS readers, they are slow and UI is sluggish compared to the desktop based readers. Of the desktop based readers, I love FeedDemon for its simple yet powerful user interface and the synchronization feature ! What more, its free and a must have if you don’t like Google Reader

Read my earlier post on FeedDemon !

VLC Media Player/iTunes

Ah ! I hate the inbuilt Windows Media Player ! I end up seeing the “codec” error almost every time I play a video (which is not AVI ! ).

This is when VLC Media Player comes to my rescue ! It’s a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, etc) as well as DVDs, VCD’s, and various streaming (RTSP) protocols.

I also install iTunes to manage my iPod and the loaned iPhone !

Notable Alternative: Zoom Player

Google Talk

Google Talk is the only IM client that I use ! Yes I’m done with Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger ! Google Talk is light on memory and has almost all the features I need from a IM client; Presence, Chat History, Sharing files etc. And I love the way it delivers IM even though I have logged in from more than one location !

CCleaner

This app might not be required as soon as you re-install the OS, but does come in handy over the period of time. The default “Disk cleanup” feature in Windows does almost nothing compared to CCleaner ! And yes it does the cleanup work pretty fast too !

TextPad

TextPad saves you the pain of installing an editor for every other file format ! Want to open a CSS file, PHP file, HTML file,  a properties file or even a file with no extension, TextPad comes in handy.

Notable Alternatives: Notepad++ and PSPad

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Live photo gallery is one of the applications from the Live family that is worth loading. No Google love here;I prefer this app over Picasa for a number of reasons !

Read my earlier post on Photo Gallery to know why ! 

µTorrent

If you download a lot of stuff from torrent a lightweight BitTorrent client is a must ! Even though I don’t download much data from Torrent sites, I have used µTorrent a couple of times !

The install size is pretty small and even the memory usage is pretty low compared to the other BitTorrent clients !

Foxit PDF Reader

Adobe Acrobat Reader is a pain to use; its slow and more often than not it freezes the browser (including Firefox). Though there are extensions in Firefox to avoid this, nothing has been done to improve the Reader loading speed. It’s one of the reasons I have settled on Foxit for opening PDF documents. Its amazingly fast and its a must have if you open a lot of PDF documents !

Read my earlier post on Foxit !

Note: The below mentioned applications might make more sense if you author a blog

FileZilla

There are a lot of quality FTP clients for windows and I have settled on FileZilla for its simplicity. You have a site manager feature, if you do connect to a lot of different FTP servers and transferring of files between the server and client is damn easy (Even drag and drop onto the server is supported)

WinSCP

WinSCP is a free SFTP and SCP client for Windows. Unlike FTP clients, there aren’t many quality clients out there supporting SCP on Windows. When I edit any of the files on my server I always do it via WinSCP. Editing a file on the server opens the same on a SCP editor and a save on the file automatically puts back the file on the server.

WinSCP also has come in handy for me to transfer files between my iPhone and the PC !

The good thing about WinSCP is that it does come with a standalone version which can be copied and run from your USB drive !

Windows Live Writer

Almost every blog writer has fell in love with this Microsoft product ! Live Writer simplifies the task of writing and publishing posts !

Read this to know why Live writer rocks !

The following is the other list of software that I install and have mentioned separately since they are not the “must have”

1. SharePod – Used to copy songs between iPod and PC
2. Eusing Registry Cleaner
3. Flickr Uploadr
4. eBay Desktop
5. Twhirl Twitter Client
6. PowerISO

What does your list look like ?

I am sure many would be surprised with the title of this post. Gmail for one provides with almost 6.6GB of space and its keeps growing every day. It would be amazingly difficult to fill up this space.

Even on the Gmail’s home page, you would see this marketing statement:

Over 6628.815124 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so
you'll never need to delete another message.

So why would anyone want to clean up/delete the mails on his/her Gmail account ?

I for one find it annoying to store unwanted mails; Note that I am not talking of spam mails and referring to marketing mails etc which are genuine but unwanted !

These mails just fill up your pages and most importantly show up while I am searching for important mails.

So how to clean up your Gmail ?

Most of the time I ensure that I delete the mails as soon as I see them; however some of them still manage to live in my inbox. This is how I clean up my inbox.

1. Click on a message which I find “unwanted”
2. Click on “Filter Messages like these” option (Snapshot shown below)
   
3. The above option was introduced to ease the creation of Filter/labels and for some reason the filtered messages pages doesn’t have a “delete” option !
4. This is where the Gmail keyboard shortcuts come in handy . Select all the message and press #. The selected messaged are deleted !

So even though there are no menu options to operate on the filtered mails, the keyboard shortcuts still does work !

Do you delete your Gmail acccount emails ?

Twitter is a web service which helps you to communicate and stay connected through quick exchange of messages. Its supposedly one of the fastest growing phenomena on the Internet.

Until few days back, accessing Twitter service from iPhone was possible only via the safari web browser. Following are the 4 web based Twitter Clients for iPhone:

Twitter Mobile

Twitter Mobile is the official version of the mobile client. The User interface is basic (hence loads faster) and it lacks a lot of features available on normal web based client.

The following snapshot shows the only 4 options available on the mobile client.

Pocket Tweets

The user interface of PocketTweets is pretty good with buddy icons and the available timelines. However the good looking interface took a toll on the loading speed. It was amazingly slow even when I used the client over Wi-Fi

Hahlo

Hahlo has a much better user interface compared to PocketTweets and it also loaded up pretty fast. The home page is kind of not that user friendly and would have liked if it could directly showed the friends timeline.

iTweet

iTweet has all the features but not the right user interface. I found it too difficult to use; only a few tweets are displayed and the application menu itself took a lot of space on the screen.

Following are the 2 native twitter clients available for iPhone:

Mobile Twitter

MobileTwitter is a native twitter applications developed by Nicholas Pike and is available on the STE source. The native client loaded the tweets pretty fast and unlike the web clients you don’t have to enter the login credentials again and again.

The only issue with this client is the positioning of the options menu with respect to the iPhone keyboard which pops up while posting a tweet. Many a times I ended up clicking on an option rather than typing a character !

Features:

• Your timeline (you + those you follow)
• Direct messages
• Replies
• Everyone
• Updating your Twitter status
• Reply directly to tweets from MobileTwitter
• Open Tweets in MobileSafari (handy for clicking on links..)
• Direct message authors of tweets
• TwitPic.com integration
• Manual refresh

Twinkle

Twinkle is very similar to MobileTwitter in terms of features and User interface. One interesting feature in Twinkle is the “Location” feature using which you can check on the tweets posted by people near to you. If you don’t find any tweets you can always change the distance

If you know of any other Twitter client for iPhone, please suggest the same via the comment form.

Exactly an year back I wrote about moving this blog from GoDaddy to Dreamhost. The story continues and this year I have moved to Media Temple (referral link).

I had considered Media Temple last year, however the site revenues weren’t enough to match the rates quoted by Media Temple. Even this time around I thought a lot before choosing  Media Temple. I did see a lot of negative reviews on Media Temple but I guess you would see that for every other hosting provider.

You need to use the service to come to a conclusion and MT does have a 30 day money back guarantee option.

Why shift from Dreamhost ?

One main reason was the downtime that this site experienced while running on Dreamhost. At one point of time, the pingdom service used to report a downtime almost every day.

The site speed also was no way near to normal and this definitely affected the pageviews (People who come via search engine referral would hesitate to explore the site, if the landing page is too slow)

One positive thing about Dreamhost is the quality of support. I got response for almost all my support queries and unlike the site response time, I have no complaints on the support response time !

Isn’t MT expensive ?

Some of the best hosting options would cost around 10-12$/month and MT quotes around 20$/month.

However if you do a 1 year pre-payment you do save 40$. I used a coupon code and saved another 15% to finally end up with 14$/month charge which in my opinion isn’t too much if your site is monetized.

And you do have the option of reselling the hosting and this can also help in bringing down the monthly expense.

Isn’t moving data a pain ?

Moving all the data from one server to another is a time consuming task and is one of the reasons users would hesitate to switch to a different hosting. Unlike my previous move from GoDaddy to Dreamhost, this time around I had a lot of data to move !

Transferring the data from Dreamhost to my local system and then transferring it back to Media Temple would have definitely taken time. However I used one simple yet powerful SCP command to transfer the files within 10 minutes !

For e.g. to move my entire domain related files (not the database), I just executed the following command from the SSH terminal on my Dreamhost server

scp -r venukb.com user@mediatempleaccessdomain:/backup

Note: For the above approach to work, you need to signup with MT and should have received the Access Domain related data and the login credentials for the access domain

I also dumped the database using mysqldump and again used SCP to move the SQL files onto the MT server.

The transfer was done at a blazing speed of 2MB/second. Once the data was moved, all I had to do was to move the domain related files to the MT specific server paths and restoring the SQL data on to the newly created MySQL database on MT grid.

You can even test the new setup by modifying your hosts file on Windows (i.e. I pointed venukb.com to the new MT server) and once its tested you can go ahead and modify the name servers to point to the new domain (This modification in the DNS will take some time to propagate)

Is MT worth the price ?

It just been 2 days and I am not in the state to comment on the hosting performance and support. In a few days I should be able to make a good judgement on MT and will definitely keep you posted

If anybody is already on MT, let me know how your experience has been till now (I do read a lot of posts where people write about moving to MT, but have seen very few who have written about the actual experience ! )

Meanwhile for all those keeping a tab on this blog’s RSS feed, please do open up this post in a browser and let me know if the site is loading up fast . It’s also an opportunity for you to checkout the new theme running on this blog

WordPress 2.5 was released some days back and I upgraded to the same with some minor hiccups. There were high expectations from me and everybody with respect to the Admin user interface.

I for one was totally disappointed when I found out that the menu items in the interface were taking almost 50% on my 15″ widescreen.

Also I found that it was not just me complaining; Many found that the new admin interface was not that user friendly including Dean Robinson who came up with Fluency Admin Theme for WordPress 2.5. The theme moves the main options to a sidebar and the sub-options to the top (screenshot below)

It just looks so neat and it even simplifies the user navigation. The only limitation of this theme is that it works only with CSS2 compliant browsers i.e. Firefox, Safari and IE8. If support is added for the other browsers, it should definitely qualify to become the official theme for Wordpress Admin UI !

Thanks to Raj Gaurav for pointing me to this plugin!

Download Fluency Admin Plugin

WordPress, the publishing platform used for this site just got upgraded to version 2.5. As usual I used the Dreamhost “one click upgrade” and the upgrade to 2.5 was done within minutes. (I love this feature in Dreamhost )

However it took more than a few minutes to actually get the site going after the upgrade.

The first major issue was that I could not login to the WordPress Admin Console ! The error message indicated a fatal exception while registering the widgets and hence the dashboard could not be opened.

I knew that the error was related to a WordPress plugin and hence checked on the 2.5 compatibility list. The culprit plugin was the “Disable WordPress Widgets” which I had configured on my previous WordPress installation.

To fix this problem, I just SSH’ ed to my web server and deleted the plugin file.

When I used to upgrade manually, I always used to disable all the WordPress plugin’s. (This is also mentioned in the WordPress upgrade instructions).However if your hosting provides a one click upgrade, you should be more careful to ensure that you don’t run into problems like above.

The other problem I had is with Alex Kings Popularity Contest plugin. The plugin just wasn’t activating and if you are also facing the same problem all you need to do is to edit the popularity-contest.php (Line 59, if you are using the latest version)

if (!isset($wpdb)) {
        require('../../wp-blog-header.php');
        akpc_init();
}

The line require(‘../../wp-blog-header.php’) has to be changed to require(‘../wp-blog-header.php’);

WordPress 2.5 has a refreshing welcome change to the UI of the admin console. However one thing I noticed was that too less of content was displayed on my 15″ widescreen monitor. For e.g. check this image below

The site name along with the various menus itself ate almost 50% of the screen. I guess while WordPress developers test on their PC,  they always do it on big high resolution 21″-29″ monitors. I am not sure if there is anything else which can explain the reason for this being overlooked.

However I loved the Automatic plugin upgrade feature, its very useful. Also I thought that the “upgrade automatically” link should have opened in a window of its own by default

Have you upgraded to WordPress 2.5 ? What is your opinion on WordPress 2.5 ?

A 16 GB iPhone just made its way to my home today all the way from an US store. Even though I had “experienced” iPhone by reading about it and by seeing tons of videos on YouTube, using it live was a totally different experience.

iPhone is an amazing, astounding, remarkable, wonderful, incredible, marvelous product from Apple!

The sad fact is that I can use this phone only for the next 20 days after which my brother would take ownership! (He is the actual owner of this phone)

Sadder is the fact that I have to return using my HTC Touch. Believe me, HTC Touch UI is nothing compared to iPhone; same goes for the user experience.

Using iPhone in India

We all know that iPhone is available only in a few select countries and its also bound/locked to a particular carrier in that country. And if you are not lucky to be in that country, the only way to use an iPhone is by “hacking” it.

I spent almost 3-4 hours by going through the various forums to find the safest way of hacking the iPhone.

As you read more and more into these forums, rather than being informed, you end up in a confused state. You really can’t decide as to what method to use to hack your 500$ iPhone.

I am in no way an iPhone hacking expert but this is what I understood by going through tons of articles and forum posts. (Disclaimer: The information might not be 100% accurate)

First thing is to understand some of the terminologies associated with hacking the iPhone.

If you are planning to use iPhone in India you need to do all of the above. For some legal users of iPhone hacking might only involve “Jailbreak” which allows them to install third party applications.

Tools to hack iPhone

After going through the various forums, I narrowed down onto two tools to hack the iPhone (on Windows)

1. ZiPhone 2.6b
2. iPlus 2.0b

There is one set of users who have had success with ZiPhone and there is one set which believes that iPlus is the safest way of hacking iPhone.

The way ZiPhone breaks iPhone is different from the way iPlus does; ZiPhone permanently downgrades the bootloader from version 4.6 to 3.9 whereas iPlus downgrades it to a fake blank 3.9 bootloader. With iPlus you have an option to go back to 4.6 bootloader which is probably required to shield against future firmware updates from Apple.

Many believe that iPlus2.0b is the safest way to hack iPhone; however note that there is one issue found with using Fake Blank Bootloader. More details on this post. The issue is more of a warning and might occur only if you try to downgrade to 1.0.0 or 1.1.1 firmware.

ZiPhone has a very nice user interface and it almost tempted me to use it rather than iPlus. (Note: ZiPhone is probably an ideal tool to break iPod Touch)

However the inability to restore back 4.6 bootloader prompted me to use iPlus2.0b with the international payload. Though iPlus2.0b is command line driven, it did its work of breaking, activating and unlocking the iPhone with zero trouble.

The iPhone is currently activated on Airtel network and it should also work with the following service providers:

• Spice
• Vodafone
• CellOne

For using iPlus2.0, I followed the instructions given on this post:

• How to activate, jailbreak and unlock 1.1.4 firmware with iPlus (3.9 / 4.6 bootloader)

Also note that I skipped the loading of 1.1.4 firmware; You can skip this after confirming that you have 1.1.4 version of the firmware on your iPhone. To confirm the firmware version, you need to type in this code: *3001#12345#*

Also if you are not comfortable with this command line interface, the same developers of iPlus have come up with iLiberty+.

This UI wrapper for iPlus was released a week back and I thought it might be risky to try out a new untested tool. However I do like the concept of iLiberty+ where they have tried to design it as an extensible tool; users can download and place the payloads of their choice and select the same from the “Advanced” tab.

Disclaimer: This post is just my experience of breaking iPhone using iPlus2.0, if you bricked your iPhone using iPlus2.0 or ZiPhone I am not liable

Online Banking has really caught up in India and you rarely see a bank not providing online access to your bank account. However the quality of user experience varies across banks and the same can be said about the security.

ING Vysya Bank, the Indian arm of ING is one example of a crappy online banking portal. Checkout this exception while trying to access the portal:

StringIndexOutOfBoundsException ! hmm .. My complaint is not much on the stack trace print, but on not encapsulating this message in a meaningful string.

I for one like the way Citibank handles exceptions, you just get a message saying “We are unable to service your request”etc etc.

Which bank in India in your opinion provides the best online user experience and features ? Here is how it stacks up for me

1.  Citibank
2. ICICI Bank
3. HDFC Bank

The BIOS on my Acer 1694 laptop was 3 years old and I did manage to find an updated version of the same on the Acer support web site. However ever after trying for about say 10 times, I couldn’t upgrade the BIOS from Windows Vista.

The upgrade from Vista always ended with a blue screen and a system restart. I even booted from the Vista DVD and got into the command console (using Alt + F10 on the License screen) and tried updating the BIOS using command line; again blue screen followed by a system restart !!

After digging through some forums I realized that the BIOS could only be updated via XP which meant that I had to install XP again !

Installing XP from Acer Vendor DVD means that I would have to loose the primary partition (C:\) since the DVD does a ghost copy of Windows XP to C:\. Vista was also unfortunately hosted on this primary partition

Acer does come with a hidden partition which can be used to do a Disk to Disk (D2D) recovery and you can invoke this by pressing Alt+F10 during the BIOS setup.

(If the Alt+F10 option is not invoking the D2D recovery on your Acer laptop, the Acer MBR might have been corrupted or overwritten by some Linux/Vista installation and you have to rewrite the Acer MBR again. )

I restored the Acer MBR and tried the Alt+F10 option expecting a D2D menu ! To my shock the D2D recovery started running immediately and started copying files onto to the primary partition without any user confirmation.

I successfully managed to loose the data on my primary partition yet again !!! The only consolation was the fact that D2D helped me in getting XP up and running with all drivers in just 10 minutes !! I also upgraded the BIOS with no trouble; not sure what the trouble with Vista was !

I also realized that it was in my best interest to have both Vista and XP running on the laptop, so that I could switch between them whenever necessary ! However setting up this dual boot was also not straightforward (especially if you have a OEM version of Windows XP); More details on this in the next post !!

Ah.. the day I have been waiting for ! Windows Vista SP1 has been finally released via windows update today !

I upgraded to Vista last year and there were a few issues bugging me including the file copy to external drives, WiFi connectivity, Printer Connectivity etc.

Few of the issues were addressed by patches and few of them were also fixed when I upgraded to the beta release of Vista SP1. With today’s final release of SP1 I am hoping that MS has addressed all the reported issues in Vista.

Vista SP1 details:

You can download the SP1 via Windows update; Note that if you are downloading via Windows Update, you might have to install all the pending updates before the SP1 shows up in the update list. Also as per the official release note, download via Windows update checks for specific driver issues and hence might not show up in the update list.

If SP1 is not showing up in Windows Update list, download it from http://tinyurl.com/32z6vj (440 MB)

eBay Desktop, the free alternative to eBay web portal is a very good application to showcase the power of Adobe AIR. I totally fell in love with the user interface; easy to use and very fast.

One reason I prefer FeedDemon over Google reader is the pace at which I can navigate between the feeds and perform operations on the feeds/news items. Google Reader is fast but its still a long way from matching the speed of a desktop app. Its the exact difference you find even in eBay Desktop compared to its web peer.

I don’t do much of shopping on eBay but definitely use it to track/watch the price of some of the gadgets which are on my wish list ! If you are a serious eBay buyer or seller, eBay Desktop is worth a try !

When Google Calendar was launched in 2006, I didn’t find anything unique except the “Quick Add” feature. I might not have spent too much time exploring the powerful features of Google calendar then, but I am sure that most of them would agree that there was no single compelling feature in Google Calendar.

At that time, my usage of Calendar was also pretty limited; However age is catching up with me and I really had to start using a calendar to keep track of my day to day events. (I am not going to write in detail about these events, but these were the ones which made me realize that I was getting old )

When I again checked on Google Calendar, 2 features caught my attention.

Getting Notifications via SMS

You can set your mobile number in the Calendar setting and get event notifications on the mobile as SMS.

This feature is definitely useful for users with regular phones (With Smartphones you generally have the ability to synch your calendar and tasks). You can configure the time before which you wish to receive the event notifications.

Synchronizing with Microsoft Outlook

Google has now launched a new Calendar Sync utility which allows you to sync events between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar. You’ll be able to determine the direction of “sync”, as well as the sync frequency.

Till now, there wasn’t a straightforward way to setup the sync between Google Calendar and MS Outlook Calendar. This new utility make it really simple to setup the sync and is a treat for people using Outlook and Google Calendar.

With the above 2 features, I have become a “regular” user of Google Calendar and is now firmly positioned as my second favorite Google app (The first one being Gmail !)

Talking of favorite Google applications, here is how it stacks up for me: (Note: I have not considered Search as an “app”, for me Google is the default search engine ! )

1. Gmail
2. Google Calendar
3. Google Docs and Spreadsheets
4. Google Notebook
5. Google Reader

What are your favorite Google applications ?

The demonstration of WorldWide Telescope made Scoble cry and in his follow up post he did explain as to what made him cry.  I didn’t cry (not to prove that I am stronger than Scoble ) , but was definitely impressed after seeing the following video.

(Note: It’s a lengthy video and the streaming isn’t that fast)

You might also like reading this paper from Jim Gray which triggered the worldwide telescope project.

In one of my earlier post I covered some of the tools that can be used to copy songs from iPod to PC. Most of the tools available are shareware and there are very few free quality applications.

Sharepod is one such quality application for iPod. It’s a lightweight music management tool for iPod which you can run from within the iPod disk. This circumvents the necessity of having iTunes on every other system for managing your iPod.

Below is the list of Sharepod features which might motivate you to install and use it

• Track tag editing
• Video import support
• iPod Shuffle supportDrag and drop tracks to Explorer
• Completely rewritten codebase to safely import files to your iPod
• Play Count, Last Played Date support
• Volume Adjustment support
• Faster loading/sorting time!
• Built-in Media Player
• Tag Editor to edit track tags : Title, Artist, Genre, Volume Adjustment, Media Type etc.

SharePod has almost all the features available on iTunes and has the additional ability to backup/copy songs from iPod to PC.

If you know any other such quality free tools for iPod, please feel free to suggest the same in the comments section.