But this excellent article by Gwen Shapira – Hadoop FAQ – But What About the DBAs, changed my whole perspective and really piqued my interest.

Gwn lists a couple of advantages of why DBAs could make great Hadoop administrators

• Everyone knows DBA stands for “Default Blame Acceptor”. Since the database is always blamed, DBAs typically have great troubleshooting skills, processes and instincts. All those are critical for good cluster admins.
• DBAs are used to manage a system with millions of knobs to turn, all of which have critical impact on the performance and availability of the system. Hadoop is similar to databases in this sense – tons of configurations to fine-tune.
• DBAs, much more than sysadmins, are highly skilled in keeping developers in check and making sure no one accidentally causes critical performance issues on an entire system. Critical skill when managing Hadoop clusters.

After reading this, I went on to installing a 4-node Hadoop cluster and getting my feet wet in the Big Data world. If you have been asking yourself this question, I highly recommend reading Gwen’s article and may be it will change your perspective too.

It sure did change mine.

Task Management tools aim at aiding this aspect of your life. I have discussed a few other task management apps tagged ’GTD’ after the popular book by David Allen, Getting Things Done. I have read pieces of this concept here and there and tried it but I am picking this book up for a complete read this weekend from our local library.

Regular ShanKri-la readers might know that I use Remember the Milk (RTM) for my personal task management and d-cubed for work related (project oriented) tasks. However, after reading Getting Things Done I want to implement this into RTM and I’ll document here in the coming weeks. Check back here or subscribe to the ShanKri-la feed to keep track of the happenings at ShanKri-la.

For someone looking for a very simple, web 2.0ish web-based task management application, this might be what you are looking for. (but it is not Beta and does not have a fancy logo)

Todoist – Useful, fast and easy to use

If you like ajaxy interfaces and simple to-do lists, Todoist is going to fit the bill. It’s interface is simple, intuitive and quick. Better yet, it’s free. If you are an average user and if your needs for task management aren’t as complicated as Google’s page rank algorithm, then I have a feeling you’ll like Todoist.

Some quick facts about this quick web app:

• A simple and clean interface with lots of ajaxy goodness
• Folders/projects offer hierarchies (collapsible too)
• Built-in calendar
• Easy addition of tasks & setting priority
• Keyboard shortcuts for power users
• Mobile access
• Widgets available for Netvibes & iGoogle

Why do we need one more GTD tool? Every application isn;t built equal. What works for one person is not guaranteed to work for another. And I am always in the lookout for better applications and I like to see what’s out there every now and then. I gave Todoist a whirl when I read about it and I am sticking with Remember the Milk as it is the best fit for my needs right now.

There are several other players in this arena. Most of the web apps make it easy to sign for a free account and it will only take a few minutes to check out a new player.

As much as finding these tools and tweaking them to your needs are fun, don’t get side tracked by all these in your goal of getting things done. A good GTD tool should let you spend the least time configuring and tweaking it and rather let you concentrate at the task at hand. I think Todoist does that well as well.

Machinarium is an amazing point and click adventure game playable on Windows, Mac or Linux.

In an effort to prove a point, Machinarium developers – Amanita Design from Czech released the game without any DRM restrictions. You can install the game without any serial numbers or online authentication.

This makes the game so easy to copy and be pirated.

Sadly, the game developer is saying that Machinarium has only 5-15% of players who actually paid for the game.

Amanita Design in an attempt to give a second chance for those 85-95% of players who haven’t paid for the game has announced a ‘Pirate Amnesty’ sale.

Machinarium and its soundtrack is available for a mere $5 with 75% off from its original price of $20 until August 12. They are hoping the game pirates will make amends buy purchasing it at this low price.

However, this amnesty sale doesn’t apply to just who already have a copy but also to anyone interested in this game.

I played the online free demo and was totally amazed by the creativity behind this point and click adventure game. $5 for such an amazing experience is nothing, IMHO.

Try Machinarium

{ via Ars Technica }

We looked at the new Firefox 3.1 beta 3 features last week. Did you know Firefox 3.1 is being renamed to Firefox 3.5?

While we wait for that to come out of beta, let’s look at a few cool Firefox extensions, shall we?

Firefox Extensions of the Week

• About:Tab (experimental): Firefox 3.1 is going to have a new design for the new tab. Here are a few iterations that are being considered. You can test this out in the latest 3.1 development build with the About:tab extension.
• Drag & DropZones: Firefox Search Engines Supercharged. Your whole Firefox window is now divided into drag and drop zones where you can link a search engine into each zone. And you can drag and drop keywords you wanna search into this transparent grid to start searching. This is a fork from the full-featured WebSearch Pro add-on that I love and use.
• Tab Sidebar: As the name implies, you can replace your main tab menu with a tab sidebar with always visible tab previews and in tab navigation. You can switch between 2 views if you choose to via options. Great for those with wide screen monitors.
• RoamAbout: It is a brand new extension for the social media hounds. Adds a openbar and tray while you are surfing. OpenBar shows you live changing content as you surf. And Tray adds access to your favorite social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail so they are just a click away anytime you want to interact with them. TachCrunch was handing out 1000 beta invites here
• Gmail Signatures: I have written a detailed review on custom HTML Gmail Signatures here before. If you haven’t tried it recently, you should check it out as it has had some major improvements. I’d still love to see WYSIWIG editor for formatting your signature and also a way to synchronize your signatures across different computers.

As I usually advice, make sure you remove extensions you don’t use anymore to keep your Firefox install humming along swiftly. And if you are looking for more, my list of Top Firefox Extensions could have a few surprises in store for you.

Greasemonkey Script of the Week

This is a new section I started doing this month to highlight a cool Greasemonkey script!

Gmail 3.0 (Productivity Package): You will love this script if you live in Gmail all day like I do. It pushes Gmail and makes its cloud services like Google Docs, Zoho services etc right in your Gmail. For instance, your New Mail button is replaced with a cool menu where you can choose to create a mail or any other Google service documents.

Firefox Theme of the Week

CamiFox takes the cake for the Firefox Theme of the week. It has a very clean, crisp and sophisticated design that’s very pleasing to the eye. I have been using PitchDark featured last week for a while but I might keep CamiFox for a bit as its such a pleasant change.

You can see the Tab Sidebar add-on in action in teh screenshot as well. How do you like it?

Do you have an extension, Google greasemonkey script or theme recommendation? Leave a comment here or contact me and I’ll try to showcase it in my next review.

Typealyzer.com sets out to analyze a blog based on the content and determines the personality type of the blog.

Typealyzer Logo

Typealyzer analyzes writing style in the blog based on text patterns, etc and determines the type of blog. Of course, naturally I put ShanKri-la to the test and we came out as

ISTJ – The Duty Fulfillers

The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to
the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right.
Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks
whatsoever.

The Duty Fulfillers are happy to be let alone and to be able to
work in their own pace. They know what they have to do and how to do
it.

I am not sure if that is flattering or demeaning but I tend to take things positively. Even though the title seems a little discouraging, the details are more friendly and some of it even true.

I do like to work in my own pace – I feel no urge or desire to post for the sake of posting everyday or to some schedule. Of course, you know that as a regular reader.

One little secret I’d let you in is that actually I like reading others work more than I do writing. This results in me devouring a lot of stuff from the web but only writing about a select few that I really feel excited about here. I hope this shows in my writing than just being ‘dutiful fulfiller’.

Behind Typealyzer.com

There isn’t a lot of information about the site (no About page for starters) in the home page. But, the site does have an active Google Group for Typealyzer.

Reading through a few posts reveal that Typealyzer only analyzes the text directly on the url provided. So, I could have been really dynamic this whole year but Typealyzer determines the blog type by just the 10 posts in my home page.

So, try putting different pages of your site url to see what you get. For eg, search results page or archives page, etc.

Alternately, my wife’s Indian recipes blog SpicyTasty.com came out as ESFP – The Performers – the entertaining and friendly blog.

Our iPhone blog TopiPhoneResource.com came out as ESTP – The Doers – the active and play-ful type.

Let us know in the comments what type of blog is yours.

Flock has just released a new version of their social browser this time based on Chromium. Chromium is the open source browser project Google made Open Source when they released the Google Chrome browser.

Flock has ditched Mozilla’s Firefox and has moved over to Google Chrome as its base and totally re-engineered their social browser.

For those new to Flock, it is a social web browser where they let you add all your social networking accounts and provide easy access to them as well as nice integration so you can seamless share content with your friends as you browse.

Here is what I found on the Flock blog

These are exciting times around the Flock offices and in our wider community. As many of you know, we recently launched the New Flock Social Browser and the response from our users and people new to the Flock experience has been phenomenal. A core focus of the new Flock is to help users better manage the large volume of information and relationships they interact with online each day and we’ve been blown away to see that our first 20,000 new Flock beta users have viewed, managed and interacted with over 100,000,000 "activities" in the Flock sidebar in the first 3 weeks of using product! ("activities" include tweets, DMs, status updates, comments, feeds, requests, invites, photo upload notifications, etc, etc.)

Right now, the new Flock browser (beta) seems to support only Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. But, the integration is similar to the one before. You could see the Twitter, Facebook updates in the sidebar. Also, you could see them as a unified view if you use multiple accounts and just want to check them together.

You could also add your favorite RSS feeds in the mix.

Earlier, I believe they had integrated Delicious, StumbleUpon, Gmail, etc but the new motto ‘Built for Twitter and Facebook’ probably makes it clear on their intentions to keep things focused on these 2 powerhouses.

I have been using Google Chrome more and more lately for casual surfing and Firefox for Web development. I am giving Flock a try to see if it really aids my social networking seamlessly while working just like Google Chrome. if it does, we will have a winner here with most Google Chrome fans.

The new Flock beta is now only available on Windows and you can enter your email address to get notified for a Mac version.

Download New Flock browser

RSS is the best thing since sliced bread to me and many of you who follow our feed. But, it offers little flexibility in choosing what you want to read in a particular feed. Often you end up receiving any updates made in a blog/site and then manually discarding (marking Read) that item in your feed reader. Some blogs offer your category feeds, so you can choose the category you’d like to follow. But, often times it is not that clear cut.

For instance, what if you don’t want to receive any post of mine that talks about ‘Remember the Milk’ or if you wanted to only receive posts that are about ‘Firefox’? How would you like to fine tune a feed to match your interests and filter out other stuff that are probably interesting to others reaching your feed reader?

With FeedRinse, you can do just that. And more.. Let’s take a look at it’s features and I’ll show you how it can help you overcome your RSS Overload.

FeedRinse Quick Facts

• Add individual feeds or import an OPML file (most feed readers have an export option)
• You can get a rinsed individual feed or create a Channel RSS with multiple feeds in it. (limit of 5 channels)
  
• You can choose to allow or block a post in a feed by specifying one or more filters. Use a filter like iPhone to block any posts about iPhone or a filter like Facebook in a channel to get all the news about Facebook or even a combination of multiple keywords.
• You can set filters for individual feeds or set filters for Channels (group of feeds)
• Feed filtering includes keyword filtering, author filtering, isolating filter by title or body & profanity filtering.
• Filtering supports Regular Expressions for power users.
• You can easily add a page you are browsing to FeedRinse with a bookmarklet.
• Once, you have rinsed your feeds, you can get RSS feed url for individual feeds or Channels. You could also opt to export all your rinsed feeds as an OPML file that is readable by most Feed Readers.
• It’s FREE to sign-up & use.

I have previously discussed, as a blogger how you can use Google Alerts to stay on top of your niche. FeedRinse can help you in a similar manner where you can create customized channel feeds.

Here are a few ways you can use FeedRinse:

• You can also use author filtering to follow a single author in a multi-author blog.
• If you are following feeds from Craigslist/Slickdeals.net but you are looking for just one particular item, use FeedRinse to get just that item.
  
• If you are following a job feed and you want to filter the feed to your interest, you could do that.
• Follow a personal finance feed to follow just posts about Mutual Funds or create your own custom Finance channel.
• Follow just chicken recipes in a Culinary blog
• Follow windows recovery tools from a site like Softpedia

As you can see, the way you can use FeedRinse is limited only by your
imagination. Sure, you might miss out on a few interesting posts when
you are filtering but isn’t it much better than just letting it
accumulate and marking them all as read in frustration?

I have heard of FeedRinse before but haven’t had the need to try it so far. I set out to do something about my Google Reader feeds. I simply wasn’t able to read all my feeds everyday.

I had subscribed to a lot of feeds and some of the feeds were getting updated with tons of posts. For instance Mashable has anywhere between 30-50 posts a day and it was increasingly getting hard to read all the posts. I could have deleted their feed but some of their posts were of great interest to me. That’s where FeedRinse helped me out.

After setting this up this week, today was the first time I was able to actually really read and mark my feeds as ‘Read’. It did take me a week to achieve this and I will be fine tuning this by adding and deleting feeds to FeedRinse as I go.

This is my workflow to rinse my feeds

• Move a potential feed with clutter to FeedRinse to the proper channel
• Either choose to allow certain posts or block certain posts
• Come back and add more filters or remove filters until I get it just right

So, give your feed reader a fall cleaning and read your feeds with your own spam filter for the feeds. Are you ready to overcome your RSS Fed overload?

Geeks are Sexy $1300 Contest

Geeks are Sexy s having an awesome contest where they are giving away prizes worth $1300 celebrating their 2 year anniversary. And this is my entry for this contest and there is only a few more days left until the contest ends. So, write your how to article to enter the ccntest!

Mister-Wong.de has been hugely popular in Europe and I have been in their closed-beta for over a month. I was really excited because I have been looking for a better interface than del.icio.us and Mister Wong came very close to it.

On August 2, Mister-Wong.com was officially launched and opened the doors for everyone to join.

You can read how I used this trick to make del.icio.us actually taste good here.

If you use del.icio.us or myYahoo, some of the features mentioned below might not be new to you. But, I am listing here for the benefit of anyone wanting to try an online social bookmarking service.

Quick Facts

• Tags: Tag your bookmarks and bundle your tags into tag bundles for easy grouping.
• Secure: Make your bookmarks public or private.
• Buddies: Find your buddies and share bookmarks with them and receive messages.
• Groups: Join groups of your own interest to keep track of popular bookmarks.
• Profile: Attach a picture to your profile so your friends can make fun of you.
• Import: Easy import from del.icio.us or from your browser.
• RSS Feeds: RSS feed are available for your bookmarks for easy sharing. (activate it in Settings)
• Firefox: Use Wong Firefox Toolbar for easy bookmarking.
• Bookmarklets: Bookmarklets available for other browsers for easy bookmarking.
• iPhone: Works great on an iPhone!

Video

Here is a video by 2 geeks and a hot girl of Mister-Wong to take a look at some of the above-mentioned features.

[youtube hKqPp94rzLg]

Links

Mister Wong

Firefox Toolbar, WordPress Plugin, Wong Widgets, etc.

Do you use a social bookmarking tool? If you use del.icio.us are you happy with it? Would you give Mister-Wong a shot?

You can read manuals after manuals and still may not get the hang of it, but if you watched someone do it, you pick it up instantly. If you are this kind of person, which I am, you are going to love this site. It is a site full of how-to and instructional videos.

Sclipo – broadcast your skills

It is striving to be the YouTube of instructional videos and it already has a lot of videos. Here is a run down of some quick facts about the site:

• It is FREE
• You can upload your video and have it rated and commented on by other users.
• They have a revenue sharing model for their top videos – check out the ‘Masters’ section.
• Masters may also get tipped by the viewers to their PayPal account.
• Slipo:Live – Live web classes classes can be given or taken for free or for a charge. This feature is in private beta testing at present. This allows one to take notes and record sessions so you can review any classes later on.
• Accept avi, mov & mpg video formats but the recommended format is mpeg4 at a resolution of 320 x 240.

I am having fun with this site and the Masters section is a good starter page to get a hang of the videos that are already considered popular so you can gauge the quality of the site for yourself.

If you like Sclipo, there are couple of similar places you could turn to for instructional video: SuTree and ViewDo.

I would really like to upload an instructional video to Sclipo. Instead of pulling a how-to out of thin air, I would like to ask my readers for suggestions. Is there something you would like me to do an instructional video on?

Automattic has announced a WordPress.com branded solution called VaultPress for private beta. Matt Mullenweg from Automattic says

The vision of VaultPress is to ensure that blogs and sites under its care are always completely secure, regardless of what happens. Today, this means every bit of content will be safe, from plugins and themes to the smallest comment or post revision, with WordPress-aware, real-time, multi-cloud backups. This is some of the most advanced technology I’ve seen interact with WordPress.

In the future, if your site is tampered with in any way, we’ll know within minutes and can take appropriate steps. The VaultPress core engine will be able to protect you against zero-day security vulnerabilities by updating your blog with hot-fixes, even while you sleep.

VaultPress is a premium solution with a price tag of $15-20 a month but promises to be different than the current WordPress solutions in the following ways

• Protection and powered by Automattic – that reliably serves 10 million blogs and 250 million monthly visitors
• Premium Service
• Easy setup and fliexible scaling – via a WordPress Plugin
• Tailored to WordPress
• Realtime, continuous monitoring
• Backed by WordPress experts

With more and more self-hosted WordPress powering entire websites (my wife’s service plug ) and not just blogs, it is about time we had a reliable backup solution and I am glad Automattic is offering this.

If your business website is powered by self-hosted WordPress, would you mind paying for such a comfort?

Would VaultPress become the best paid WordPress backup solution?

[via VaultPress blog]

This Chinese concept bullet train never stops anywhere. That’s right! It never stops. Anywhere.

The way they figure it is there is a compartment at the station where the passengers are loaded before the train arrives. And as the train passes the station it picks up the compartment at the top as it enters and drops off a compartment as it leaves. The passengers who needed to alight are already in the top compartment that was dropped off.

Zero time wasted in loading and unloading passengers.

I can’t think of any practical hurdles that could ruin this project. For eg. It could be pretty cumbersome for everyone to get into that one compartment if this was a really long train but will work for short commuter-type bullet trains.

Anyhow, this is a really novel yet simple concept that I felt worth sharing.

Have a great weekend!

Now, Activision’s latest title Call of Duty: Black Ops has made $1 Billion in sales in just 6 weeks since launch.

This is an amazing feat only achieved by movie Avatar.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is available on all 3 major gaming platforms – Sony Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii.

Here is the complete press release:

Call of Duty®: Black Ops Surpasses $1 Billion in Sales Worldwide

Over 600 Million Hours Logged Playing Call of Duty: Black Ops Game Continues to Set Entertainment Records

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Dec. 21, 2010 /PRNewswire/ – Activision Publishing, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATVI) announced today that Call of Duty: Black Ops continues to set sell-through records crossing the $1 billion mark in sales worldwide since its launch in November, according to internal Activision estimates.

In its first five days alone, the game sold more than $650 million worldwide, outpacing theatrical box office, book and video game sales records for five-day worldwide sell through in dollars, according to internal Activision estimates and boxofficemojo.com.  The game exceeded Activision’s previous five-day worldwide record of $550 million set by last year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare® 2.

To date, more than 600 million hours have been logged playing Call of Duty: Black Ops since the game launched on November 9, 2010.  According to Microsoft, the average player logs on more than once a day and plays for more than one hour each time.  Over half of that time is spent playing online with and against friends, illustrating the unique social characteristics of the game.

“In all of entertainment, only Call of Duty and “Avatar” have ever achieved the billion dollar revenue milestone this quickly,” said Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard.  ”This is a tribute to the global appeal of the Call of Duty franchise, the exceptional talent at Treyarch and the hundreds of extraordinary people across our many Call of Duty studios including Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer that work tirelessly on the franchise.  Our ability to provide the most compelling, immersive  entertainment experience, and enhance it with regular, recurring content that delivers hundreds of hours of audience value, has allowed Call of Duty to continue to set sales and usage records.”

Kotick continued, “This extraordinary milestone was achieved  because of  the tens of millions of passionate Call of Duty players around the world.  Global audiences have logged billions of hours online with Call of Duty games on Xbox LIVE, the PlayStation Network and on personal computers.  This unique level of community engagement has enabled Call of Duty to become one of the world’s most engaged online communities.

“Call of Duty continues to rewrite not just the record books, but also the rules of interactive entertainment,” says Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing. “Even more remarkable than the number of units sold is the number of hours people are playing the game together online which are unprecedented. Call of Duty is more than a game, it’s a true community.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is rated “M” (Mature) by the ESRB for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence and Language.  For additional information about the game, visit www.callofduty.com/blackops.

Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, Activision Publishing, Inc. is a leading worldwide developer, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment and leisure products.

Activision maintains operations in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia, South Korea, China and the region of Taiwan. More information about Activision and its products can be found on the company’s website, www.activision.com.

*All references cited are sourced according to www.boxofficemojo.com or www.guinnessworldrecords.com

We had a bit of a good news with Xmarks staying alive but Delicious is going away. I have a ton of bookmarks saved for a few years in delicious and started looking around for ways to save them.

Here are a few ways to backup and also a few alternatives.

How to backup Delicious bookmarks?

1. Login to your delicious account
2. Go to Settings –> Bookmarks –> Export/Backup Bookmarks
3. Check ‘include my tags’ and ‘include my notes’ and click ‘Export’.

Save your delicious bookmarks as a HTM file. You can rename the extension to .HTML so it is compatible for import into browsers.

Export Delicious to your browser

You can export the Delicious bookmarks to your browser but unfortunately they arrive without tags. This could be a deal breaker as that is one of my key ways of organizing bookmarks in delicious.

In Firefox, you can just go to

Bookmarks –> Organize bookmarks –> Import and Backup –> Import HTML

If you have Xmarks or Firefox Sync, you can use one of those sync services to keep your bookmarks synced across your browsers.

In Google Chrome, go to

Bookmark manager –> Organize –> Import bookmarks

You can choose in Chrome settings to sync your bookmarks to Google.

Both these solutions aren’t pretty if you have thousands of bookmarks like me tagged nicely in delicious. So, I am in search of other alternatives to Delicious but haven’t decided on one. I will share them here to get some ideas from you as well.

Delicious Alternatives

Diigo – This is a service that offers bookmarks as one of its features in addition to note taking, web reasearch, etc. Plus, Diigo is not free. You can see the comparison here. How-to guide.

Evernote – The popular note taking web app can import your delicious bookmarks but with no love for tags.

Spabba.com – A quick service put together by Blippy co-founder. Quick as in built-in 30 minutes However, the service is supposed to work only with old-ish accounts that were created before yahoo merged. Also, they seem to be hitting an API limit with a ‘fail fish’ error. Might have to try again later.

Pinboard.in – A paid barebones bookmarking service whose price goes up as more members join. Here is a list of features roadmap for this budding service.

Mister Wong – I have reviewed this service a long time back. Maybe it’s time to take another look.

Historio.us – A simple service like Pinboard but it also lets you search for any word on the pages you have bookmarked!

Faviki – Another cool bookmarking service that applies the concepts of Wikipedia to tags.

Also, here is an interesting read – Delicious’s Data Policy is Like Setting a Museum on Fire.

It is pretty sad to see one of the first services that got ‘web 2.0’ is going away. But, I see this as a wonderful opportunities for other startups to fill in this void. Who knows, we might end up getting something way better than Delicious.

What do you think?

{credit to some sources here – TNW }

Google’s Define Query

The simplest and fastest way is to use Google’s search interface. Just type ‘define: voracious’ (without the quotes) in the Google search box to get the meaning of the word ‘voracious’.  It’s simple, fast and you can use the same familiar interface you use to search for other things.

Ninjawords

As geeky as the name sounds, this dictionary is fast like a ninja! Just try it to find out just how fast. Ever since I’ve found Ninjawords, that’s where I go first to get meanings for the words I am looking up.

Definr

Definr is my latest find and I just love it. It is fast plus it is such a life saver if you are not sure about the spelling. It lists words and its variations as you start typing so you can just click on the one you want to look up. Plus, if you are a Firefox user, Definr lets you look up words super fast by these easy ways:

• It has a Firefox extension to add Definr to list of search engines.
• Type definr/voracious in Firefox and hit Ctrl+Enter to get you the meaning for voracious.
• Drag and drop their bookmarklet to your toolbar

OneLook (Thanks Jeanne!)

OneLook has a quick dictionary feature just like the others for quick lookup. But, it is more like a search engine for words and phrases. It has more than 5 million words from over 900 dictionaries indexed! As Jeanne explains in the comments, it is a great resource for anyone trying to build their vocabulary or just plain looking up word’s meaning or origin, etc.

If you are a person who loves to learn new words, the Reverse dictionary feature can be fun to play with! I once had a Reader’s Digest Reverse Dictionary and had so much fun learning new words.

What do you use for your dictionary needs? Do you find one of these useful enough to bookmark and use later?

Remember the Milk is my favorite online to-do manager and even has a great RTM iPhone app too.

I use Gmail and Remember the Milk extensively everyday. So, naturally Remember the Milk for Gmail Firefox extension has been such a wonderful tool for me.

I can access RTM from within Gmail. This is pretty huge as I live in Gmail and it makes it so easy to add and manage my tasks.

Google Chrome has slowly been gaining my trust because it is so fast to load. Plus, each tab runs as a separate process so even if a web app crashes it doesn’t close the whole browser.

Remember the Milk has come out with an add-on for Google Chrome.

With the Google Chrome RTM for Gmail add-on, you can manage your tasks from within Gmail. You can complete, postpone and edit tasks. You can add tasks and connect them with your emails, contacts and even Google Calendar events.

This is huge as I use both RTM and Google Calendar. You can automatically add tasks for starred messages or specific labels in Gmail!

All you need is a free Remember the Milk account and make sure your Gmail language is set to US English.

Download RTM for Gmail Google Chrome Add-on

Google Chrome supports extensions only in their recent beta version. Just follow the notice you will get when you try to install the RTM add-on if you are using an older Google Chrome.

[via RTM blog]

BuddyPress reached version 1.0 last year but it was friendly only with the multi-use version of WordPress – WordPress MU. Those with single installations of WordPress, like myself, were unable to use BuddyPress with the same ease as WPMU users.

With the release of BuddyPress 1.2, single installations of WordPress can also use BuddyPress now for their forum needs.

We can install BuddyPress as just a plugin from within the WordPress installation. BuddyPress makes it very easy to integrate a forum in an existing WordPress blog.

And you can share your existing WordPress blog user base across your forum too, just like that. If you had tried to integrate user login with forum software like PHPbb or the like you might already know how painful that is.

BuddyPress makes that a breeze. But, there was one catch. BuddyPress comes with it’s own default theme and most WordPress single installation blogs already have their own themes.

The good news is that, Andy Peatling, founder and lead developer of BuddyPress has created a WordPress plugin – BuddyPress Template Pack.

The Template Pack walks you through the theme additions step by step that adds the necessary configuration to your existing WordPress theme in a non-destructive way so you can back out if you don’t like it.

I can’t wait to try out BuddyPress integration shortly in some of our sites. How about you?

Try BuddyPress

If you use Opera for your browser, you will be all too familiar with the Speed Dial feature. It is a feature where you can set a bunch of websites as thumbnails in your home page. Talk about power browsing with all your most used websites available in a single click as soon as you fire up your browser.

If you use Firefox, there is a Speed Dial extension that lets you do exactly the same. This is all fine and dandy as long as you are on your computer. What if you are on the road using someone else’s computer and you can’t remember the darn website address?

HomepageStartup – Fill your Home Page needs

HomepageStartup is here to fill that niche. You can create a free account and set up all your favorite sites in there. You can customize the startup page to have upto 5 columns & 10 rows (50 thumbnails). Anything over 10-15 might beat the whole purpose of easy access, IMHO.

In addition to quick visual access via website thumbnails, it features custom tabs. So you can group your sites by categories such as Home, Work, Bills, Blogs, etc. Tabs is something that is missing in the Speed Dial Firefox extension and I have started using this just for that.

Quick Facts:

• Set this up to be your homepage and access your favorite sites instantly
• Sports a search box to make searching for websites and adding to your startup page easy
• You can switch the default Google Search to MSN, Yahoo, Ask.com, Wikipedia, etc.
• You can move the boxes around to rearrange the thumbnails
• You don’t need an account to use it on one computer but to save it and access it on another computer, you need to register for a free account.
• Create and share your homepage with friends of family. Actually get a cool http://<account_name>.homepagestartup.com web address
• Option to make your page private or public (public by default)
• Customize number of columns, rows, background color, fixed/movable boxes, etc.

I have a liking for web services that fills a special need. This one fills such a need and does it very well. Plus, this site is ad free and the author says in his blog that he intends to keep it that way.

You don’t need an account to play with it.. so go ahead and try it and this might be the best thing since sliced bread! (I like this look better)

Google recently introduced Google Public DNS service. Last week, I wrote about what Google Public DNS actually means to you. If you are not aware of what it is I recommend reading that post before reading this further.

With a couple of different options with DNS Servers now between your ISP’s default DNS server, the time tested OpenDNS project and the new Google Public DNS server, you might be wondering which one of these should you be using.

Namebench is a free tool that’s here to answer just that question for you.

It runs a bunch of tests and finds the fastest DNS server available for you. It runs a pretty exhaustive bechmarking by using your web browser history, tcpdump output or even standardized datasets to give a personalized recommendation.

Namebench is a free download and works on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. It sports both a GUI (graphical user interface) and a command line interface.

It does not install anything in your computer but just runs standalone. Here is a sample Namebench result after a run.

You can choose to use this DNS settings and you may be able to realize faster browsing speed.

Download Namebench

Twitter introduced User Streams API earlier that allowed for instant delivery of tweets. The older API allowed for the clients tto check for new tweets every few minutes.

TweetDeck launched a new version with the User Streams API but I found it a bit buggy to use. Today, in a new version update, TweetDeck has brought the User Streams API into the main version.

Once you install the new version v0.36, you will have the new stream feature enabled. The tweets you see are in real time and are updated as they happen instead of the old way where TweetDeck would poll every few minutes for new updates.

This can be really useful and kind of give the same functionality of TwitterFall.com inside TweetDeck.

However, if you follow a large number of people on Twitter, this could get overwhelming. You can easily turn this off and go back to the old method by going to

Settings –> Twitter –> Enable realtime Twitter streaming

and disabling it.

TweetDeck has a few tips on using the new feature

You can’t just expect to jump into your F-14 and start buzzing the tower without a few pointers. So here are a few key articles from our support site that should help you understand some of the finer points of streaming updates in TweetDeck.

• Twitter may throttle your search results under certain circumstances
• Searches have slightly different rules – here are some tips
• You might want to reduce the amount of popup notifications – read about how TweetDeck batches notifications when streaming
• You can see when you get added to Lists in your New Followers column
• When someone favourites your tweet, you will be notified in your Mentions column
• Twitter does not yet include Lists in the Streaming API. Voice your support for them to be included here.

Other than that, just strap yourself in and enjoy Twitter the way it was meant to be – in TweetDeck and in true real-time!

If you are thinking you may not use this feature and don’t need to upgrade your TweetDeck, think again. Twitter seems to have made another major architectural change behind the scenes.

Twitter is switching to a new way of assigning unique identifiers to each tweet in it’s database. This new method, dubbed "Snowflake", has forced us to make some fundamental changes behind the scenes in TweetDeck. 

The result of all this techno-jiggery-pokery is that you *must* update to at least v0.36 urgently. If you have not upgraded before 24th November then your TweetDeck will start going very wrong.

So, make sure you update your TweetDeck before Nov 24.

{ via TweetDeck }

ScreenToaster is an online screen recording tool that doesn’t need anything installed in your computer. Yes, that’s the beauty of it. It just works in your browser.

ScreenToaster Features

• Record part of your screen of in full
• Add subtittles
• Host and share videos online
• Embed videos in your websites
• Start and stop recording with keyboard shortcuts

You just need to register for a free account with ScreenToaster and you are good to go. It is in private beta at the moment and you need an invite code to sign up.

Here’s a short video sample recorded with ScreenToaster but I don’t attest to the claim in the video to make your computer faster.

What’s to come

ScreenToaster will fit only very basic screencasting needs and it doesn’t compare with the full-featured screencasting software like Camtasia, etc.

ScreenToatser is missing audio recording so you can’t narrate as you record a screenshot. You could do a voice ver after you record the video but that’d need some practice. Also, the videos are now only hosted in ScreenToatsre and no download options are available. But, the developers say they are working on those missing features for future release.

ScreenToaster is a no-frills zero-download screen recording tool that works everytime. If you are on the road and need to record something without your favorite tools, ScreenToaster could come to your rescue.

It worked great in Windows but had some issues running in Linux and warns about those if you have graphic effects turned on.

There are plenty of other options out there. Which is your favorite?

Update: 01/17/09

ScreenToaster just opened for public and gets the much needed recording audio option. Check it out.