The Pirado

How easily one can track and monitor the smartphone details using software?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 10:01:00 +0530

The need for monitoring smartphones varies from person to person. However, the most
common reasons are: to monitor your spouse to check their faithfulness, to check on your kid’s smartphone activities constantly, and to monitor your employees to ensure they are being efficient in their work. Well, if you monitor someone’s activities and whereabouts, you may fear of being caught. However, with the help of modern innovation, mobile monitoring apps have been developed to ensure that you can track the smartphone details with ease without letting the target person know about your monitoring program.

The mobile monitoring software helps users to monitor the smartphone easily as it works in a complete covert mode. Once the software is installed onto the target phone, you can instantly track every single detail of the phone. The actual user cannot see any signs or indications of the software being installed on the phone. So, there is no way that you can be caught.

In order to monitor the details of the smartphone, here is what you need to do

1. Register with the particular software you wish to purchase

2. Pay the specified fees

3. Login to the web account with the help of username and password provided to you via
email

4. Install the software onto the smartphone

5. Start monitoring

Features of the Monitoring Software

SMS Logs: Most often, individuals make use of SMS mode to convey secret messages as they find it risky to disclose it over other means of communication. With the help of the software, you can view the text messages word to word even if they have been erased from the smartphone.

Call Logs: The mobile monitoring software captures details of all the outgoing and incoming
calls that include:

Phone number

Data and time stamps

Call Duration

Contact name, as saved in the phone book

Phone Book Logs: The software allows you to view the entire phone numbers registered on the target phone memory.

Location Logs: The software lets you track the precise position of the smartphone, and also
shows the location details through Google maps. Through this feature, you can know the hidden truths like:

• Is your spouse truly busy at work?

• Is your kid at school?

• Is your employee stuck in traffic?

Email Logs: Retrieves every single email received and sent from the smartphone. You can
easily detect if something is being hidden from you via email.

URL Logs: The URL’s browsed by the suspect can be tracked

Photo Logs: The photos and videos uploaded on the target smartphone can be viewed through the web account.

To conclude, once the software starts functioning on the phone, you can view everything via
the web account. As the technology is becoming much more advanced than before, you can see numerous products or apps being designed. Mobile monitoring software like Cell Phone Spy is one of the best inventions that aid to monitor the suspect or loved ones. You can browse on the net to figure out some of the best and powerful monitoring software available in the market and monitor tiniest of details of your smartphone.

Lucille J Cronk is a blogger passionate about mobile spy technology and other monitoring apps. She has her own blog on cell phone spy software. To know more, visit her website.

Easy Installation of Mobile Spy on Any Smartphone

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 1 Jul 2012 14:17:00 +0530

Regarded as the next generation spy software, Mobile Spy is developed to monitor the activities of your spouse, employees, and kids on a smartphone you have or possess permission to monitor in compliance with the current laws. If you suspect your employee or child for abusing SMS privileges, this is the most advanced spy technology for you to secretly monitor their illegal or harmful activities.

Once installed, this app starts to work in the invisible mode to record all phone activities along with the GPS locations without notifying the phone user about the same. These phone activities include SMSs, MMSs, calls, web sites visited, social media conversations, contacts, photos, videos, memos, tasks, calendar and events.

With the help of the phone’s Internet capabilities, it then uploads them as logs to your Mobile Spy account online and arranges them in relevant categories for easy browsing. Working independently, the Mobile Phone Spy software never relies on the phone's database of calls and messages for tracking the activities. Well, this means that even if your kid or employee deletes the various logs and histories, you will be still able to see those logs via your online account. So, if you have decided to use this app, here are the details on how to install this small app on the compatible smartphone that you desire to monitor.

Prerequisites

Any Smartphone running Windows Mobile 6.x, Android 1.x / 2.x /3.x, Symbian OS 9.x, Apple iPhone 3.x / 4.x / 5.0 / 5.0.1, or BlackBerry 4.x / 5.x / 6.x / 7.0 / 7.1
Internet carrier for GPRS upload

3-Step System

Once you ensure the presence of the above prerequisites, you just need to follow these three steps:

Register on the official site to open your account.
Install the app directly to the target smartphone and launch it.
Log on to the online account after an hour to view the tracked phone activities in the form of logs.

Once you order the app, you will immediately get an e-mail that will disclose your registration code. With this code, you will have to register your account on the app’s site by visiting its Register page. This is where you will enter the desired username and password, email address, and code.

After your registration process is over, the second step is to install the Mobile Spy app directly on the intended smartphone. For this, you will have to first download the app from the site. But before you install the app, note that the installation instructions differ for each mobile operating system. Therefore, it is vital to first read the corresponding installation instructions page and then install.

Once the app is installed, you can log on to your account from any Internet-enabled device to view the logs at any point of time after an hour since installation. This will show you a control panel wherein you can view, delete, search, and export the logs. Further, you can even send SMS to the device for performing a particular action such as locking the phone or get GPS attributes. And yes, the brand new LIVE Control Panel allows viewing the smartphone's screen in real time.

Installing Mobile Spy is really easy and hardly takes any time if you follow the instructions correctly.

Lucille is a blogger passionate about writing on Mobile technology. She has a blog on mobile spy software, where you can find enormous information on Mobile Spy.

Smarthphone of the Future

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 18:41:00 +0530

The following post is about the perfect Smartphone of the Future.

The wake-up call

Time to get up. Your phone wakes you gently with a dawn chorus and light of increasing intensity. cast on to the wall by a built-in pico projector. You grab it from its wireless charging dock, present it to your yawning mug, and its facial recognition software activates the snooze function. Just 5 more minutes.

The future, today! LG WCD-800 charger, Samsung Galaxy Beam

Health check

Check out your sleep stats (how much proper REM sleep you got how much was lost to your 2am coffee habit) and your calorie-burning target for the day, which is measured by the bracelet on your wrist That tub of goose fat you ate yesterday will take some burning off, but you're going to a festival; it might just be possible.

The future, today! Zeo Sleep Manager. Jawbone UP

Morning applutions

As you wander down the hallway, you set the shower running at the perfect temperature with a tap of the screen, then stream your morning playlist from your double-based music library, A quick NFC-powered lap of the phone on to the stereo fills the bathroom with Waking on Sunshine. Also steam.

The future, today! Google Music, Android@Home

Finding the way

You hop in the car. Now where's that darn train station? Dock your phone and its projector turns part of the windscreen into a head-up display. A few spoken instructions tell it where you want to go, and it traces out a line on the road ahead. Your tunes are now streaming to the car's speakers for a mosh-tastic ride.

The future, today! Route 66 sat-nav, MVS Virtual Cable, Ford Sync

Console yourself

Uncharted: Drake's Colostomy Bag is calling following your PS4 session last night, so on the train you resume your save game in undiluted quality, powered by your mobile's octo-core Nvidia Tegra processor Touch controls still ain't much cop. so you tap it against your analogue- sticked Bluetooth pad to sync via NFC.

The future, today! Nvidia's Tegra roadmap. PS Vita, Android Beam

Expensive gestures

You've finally made it to the festival, and the burly security guard taps your phone to detect your NFC ticket before fondling your pockets You're through and at the bar purchasing a round for your males who've just tweeted you to say they're almost in All it takes is a wave at the card machine - dangerously easy.

The future, today! Google Wallet. Visa Pay Wave

Pinned down

You've found some friends, but there are still stragglers to locate. You fire up your social AR app and survey the heaving throng in front of the main stage on your screen. There's Tony near the front, marked with a pin-drop-he's just tweeted "Dubstep? So 2012. Wish they were playing something bleepier."

The future, today! Wikitude and Highlight apps, Facbook places

Zoom and share

You can't get any further forward but that wont stop you from capturing every bead of sweat the singer's brow: thanks to yo phone's 60MP image sensor you can be way back from the action and still zoom in to take a crisp snap- Your photo syncs to the cloud and posts to Facebook and the envious comments roll in.

The future, today! Nokia PureView 808

Moshly unharmed

Finally in the thick of it, you get little carried away in the mosh pit. Your phone's gone, stamped into the mud by energetic punks. After some frantic scrabbling you miraculously locate it and wipe it down - not a scratch, and the filth's done no damage either. Thanks liquid-repellent nano-coating technology!

The future, today! P2i Aridion, Gorila Glass 2

Shine a light

As the last of the daylight fades and the headliners hit the stage it's time to capture the moment. Your phones high-power 40W LED flash illuminates the situation (and helps you find the keys Tony dropped), while face recognition tech auto-tags each fizzog as it's uploaded to Facebook and add to the festivals event page.

The future, today! STCF04 LED flash from STMicroelectronics

Steam dreams

Time to leave - camping's not your bag. On the train home you catch up with Harry Potter and the Endless Dole Queue, streamed in unfettered 1080p on your phone's 5in screen, with 7.1 Dolby Digital Plus sound through your headphones. Your zippy 4G connection ensures it won't drop a frame of the middle-aged magic.

The future, today! Everything Everywhere 4G. Voddler video

Early warming

There's an unseasonal frost forming on the windows of the train, so you fire up the app that controls your home's thermostat and whack it all the way up ready for your return. You can even set different temperatures for each room. Now when you walk through the front door the it'll be toasty and warm. Lovely.

The future, today! Nest Learning Thermostat

RAID your freezer

You're almost home exhausted but having moshed through your caloric target for the day. A quick remote browse of your freezer shows a spare bag of chips, so before you tap your phone to your front door and enter your PIN code, you stick the oven on to preheat. Mmm. McCain Home Fries. The true food of the future.

The future, today! AT&T Digital Life, LG Smart Appliances

Show them everything

Before turning in, chip-stuffed you decide to show absent mates what they missed out on. You initiate a 3D video call using the pair of 12MP cameras on the front of your phone and live-share some of the 4K footage you've shot today. Now if that sleep management app would just stop telling you to go to bed...

The future, today! Yahoo! Messenger. LG Optimus 3D

Please share with us, what you expect from the future smartphones in the comment box below.

Computing Power

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 17:35:00 +0530

As computing technology has advanced, our idea of what constitutes a "supercomputer" has grown with it. This table tracks the maximum recorded performance of various supercomputers over the years in mega-flops, and compares it to some familiar domestic computing devices. Computational throughput is a factor of the software as well as the hardware, so these figures should be considered a rough guide only.

Click to enlarge

Running Diaspora on Your Server

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 14:16:00 +0530

A key part of Diaspora's design is the fact that anyone can run their own server. At present, though, installing the software is - in the developers' own words - "a bit complex".

This is because Diaspora isn't distributed in binary format: it comes as source code, which must be compiled for whatever system you're using. This means you'll need to install a number of development tools and libraries to get it working, including Ruby, MySQL, the OpenSSL encryption library and the ImageMagick image-processing library - plus a web server such as Apache if you plan to host a publicly accessible pod.

At the Diaspora website, you'll find a guide to installing and configuring these components under Windows. OS X and various distros of Linux, You'll also find instructions for downloading and compiling the Diaspora source and configuring your web server, SSL, the database and other services, such as the components that connect Diaspora to Twitter and Facebook.

If this sounds like a fun project, head over to https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Notes-on-Installing-and-Running-Diaspora and start compiling; the Diaspora team will doubtless be delighted to see a new pod open. But we suspect the majority of Diaspora users will prefer to use established servers, rather than administering a complex back-end system.

QR code vs Microsoft Tag vs Data Matrix

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 13:56:00 +0530

The term "QR code" is popularly used to refer to oil types of 2D barcode - that is, barcodes that encode their information in a matrix of pixels, rather than a series of vertical stripes. Technically, though, it refers to a specific format originally developed by Toyota subsidiary Dense Wave - and there are several other types of 2D barcode that you might run across.

Microsoft Tag

By far the most popular alternative to QR codes is Microsoft's High Capacity Color Barcode system, branded as "Microsoft Tag" (pictured). This system uses colored patterns, and can support customizable backgrounds, allowing more interesting designs than are possible with QR codes. A lack of visual consistency, however, makes Microsoft Tags less iconic and recognizable than QR.

The Digimarc Discover system is targeted at professional advertising, and works by embedding augmented reality content into images, using watermarks invisible to the naked eye. When these are scanned by specific apps, interactive video or similar content is revealed. The technical demands of the system, and the need for supporting software, however, has seen Discover get off to a slow start.

Data Matrix codes look a little like QR codes, using black-and-white pixels to represent binary data, with an L-shaped border to help scanners locate the code. Similar error-correction systems are employed to improve readability if the barcode is damaged - a common hazard in the military, aerospace and electronics industries where Data Matrix coding is to be most commonly found.

How Hyper-Threading Helps ?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 13:47:00 +0530

Most Intel CPUs use a feature called Hyper-Threading to double the effective number of cores. For supercomputing purposes, Hyper-Threading is of limited use, but it isn't worthless.

To understand why, consider how Hyper-Threading works. Inside the chip, each core contains one central execution unit and two sets of registers and other resources, between which it can switch very rapidly. By dividing its time between two threads, the execution unit can service both in what appears to be realtime. We sometimes describe this arrangement as representing one physical core and one virtual one. although in reality both cores are half-real and half-virtual.

This approach works well for everyday computing but unfortunately, the same can't be said for supercomputing tasks. Here, the object is ordinarily to complete a large number of calculations as quickly as possible: the execution unit is kept constantly busy, and there's nothing to be gained by splitting the workload across two threads rather than one.

That's the theory, anyway, but it's very difficult to create code that makes full use of your computing resources. So even when a thread is intended to fully tax the CPU it's likely that some cycles will be left spare, which o Hyper-Threaded core can use.

We tested this using the multithreaded 3ds Max rendering application, and found that Hyper-Threading on a dual-core processor improved rendering times by 11%. A quod-core processor had a more drastic effect, though, knocking 36% off the time. Hyper-Threading has value, but it's no substitute for real silicon.

Supercomputer Coding

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 13:33:00 +0530

The sorts of job that demand supercomputer levels of performance are typically very specialist. The most mainstream applications are 3D modeling and rendering, but even these are niche interests. In most cases, supercomputers are used to solve unique research problems - which means that you'll have to write the code yourself.

This needn't be a daunting prospect. Creating a supercomputer application isn't something we'd recommend for novices, but if you're in need of supercomputing resources, odds are you're already au fait with software development. And whether you're using CPU or GPU silicon to perform your calculations, you can usually build on mainstream development practices.

There are, however, caveats. For a start, all the dangers associated with trying to create any multithreaded application apply. For example, you should avoid having two routines running at the same time try to make use of the some area of memory, If one overwrites the data stored by the other, it can lead to unpredictable behavior.

A more subtle problem is making efficient use of the resources on hand. You may hove 100 computing cores available, but it's very unlikely that your program will divide cleanly into 100 independent workloads. More likely, it will follow a "critical path" - a series of calculations where each step depends on the outcome of the previous one.

Formulating such problems to make full use of the available processing power is one of the greatest challenges in supercomputing. Do this badly and you can cripple the effective performance of your supercomputer. As such, citing supercomputer performance in terms of gigaflops can be misleading, as the amount of work done depends greatly on the efficiency of the application: such figures should be considered only as guides.

Happily, tools exist to make effective parallelisation easier - and one major one comes from the manufacturer of Knights Corner. Intel Parallel Studio 2011 is a plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio (also available in Linux-compatible standalone C++ and Fortran editions), which lets you debug your code in a parallelised testing environment. It can also analyse your routines to catch instances where a process could be accelerated by being broken up into concurrent tasks. The new Cluster Studio provides similar tools for developers targeting clusters.

Top 5 Features of Windows 8

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 12:36:00 +0530

Windows 8

In this post we discuss about the top 5 features found in Windows 8.

1. Fewer Surprise Restarts

Desks across the world have fist-sized holes in them, caused solely by Windows' habit of restarting to implement a security update, often losing unsaved work in the process. Windows 8 doesn't abandon forced restarts, but it's much more considerate about them.

First, Microsoft promises only to restart for the security patches that arrive on Patch Tuesday once a month - unless a "critical security update to fix a worm-like vulnerability" crops up, in which case Microsoft will push out an update that will restart machines. Second, it will ease off on the nagging: there will be no more pop-ups interrupting presentations or DVD playback. Microsoft will instead place a prominent warning about necessary restarts on the revamped lock screen. Furthermore, it will give three days' notice of any restart, as opposed to the 20-minute default countdown from Windows 7.

As well as the three-day deadline, Windows 8 won't restart i: there are applications running in the background or if there's unsaved work open. How Microsoft defines "unsaved work" is, however, unclear: would data in a web form or CMS that hasn't been submitted count as unsaved work?

2. Built-in Antivirus

Microsoft seems reluctant to shout about it - perhaps through fear of attracting unwanted anti-trust attention - but Windows 8 is the first version of Windows to include built-in antivirus protection. And not before time.

Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), the optional free antivirus package for older versions of Windows, now appears under the Windows Defender umbrella in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. As with the Windows 7 version of MSE it's light on features, but as an unobtrusive minder to keep an eye out for anything untoward, it should suffice. Microsoft is also vetting Metro Style apps before they appear in the Store, adding another layer of protection.

Those measures, together with Windows 8's built-in firewall, could convince many people not to bother with extra, paid-for security suites. Whether it will eventually prove a bonus for malware writers - who may only have to worry about worming past Microsoft's security software instead of an entire field of third-party security suites - remains to be seen.

3. Cross-Device Synchronisation

The Windows 8 installation screen practically forces users to set up a Windows Live account. This not only becomes the PC's primary login, but it also gives access to the Windows Store and allows settings to be synchronised across different Windows 8 devices.

The lock screen, Windows desktop wallpaper and Metro theme are all synchronised by default, providing visual consistency across all of your PCs, laptops and tablets. Internet Explorer history and bookmarks are also shared, as well as other Windows settings. The Sync menu also allows the synchronisation of "certain settings in your apps", although frustratingly, it doesn't reveal any further details. On our test PCs, we saw our social network setting synchronised in the People app, but not much else.

Indeed, it could be argued that Windows 8's synchronisation doesn't go far enough. It would be nice if Microsoft at least offered to synchronise the Metro desktop and any installed apps, provided that both devices had sufficient storage space. Fingers crossed it will be sorted by final release time.

The Windows Store does at least contain a list of apps you've previously purchased, making it easier to re-download them onto a new device.

4. Improved 3G Support

Windows 8 offers native support for 3G and 4G (the latter of which won't be of use until we get the next-gen networks found in the US). Given that most high-end tablets have 3G slots in the back, Microsoft could do little else. However, this isn't the only concession that it's making to mobile broadband users.

There's built-in metering to make sure consumers and business users don't stray beyond their data cap. Hefty device drivers won't download by default while running on mobile broadband, and the new Task Manager also reveals which apps are hogging your data connection, allowing the most greedy to be summarily despatched.

Windows 8 will also automatically switch to Wi-Fi when in range of a known access point to prevent users incurring unnecessary bills.

5. Picture Passwords

Tapping in passwords on a tablet, even using Microsoft's excellent soft keyboard, is hardly ideal. Picture passwords are an inventive alter native. Select a pho from your library, make three gestures with your finger on ti i chosen photo - tapping each of your children in alphabetical order, for example, or swiping across three letters in a picture ( fridge magnets - and that becomes your Windows login. Picture passwords can be used with both touchscreens and mouse controls.

Should you forget your Picture password, you can switch back to the more conventional methods of logging in with your Windows Live ID or with a simple text password.

Signing in with a Picture Password

Please share your favorite feature in the comments below.

Also read, 24 hours with Windows 8

Are Facebook Friends for Real ?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 19:43:00 +0530

Fake Facebook accounts attracts more friends than Real ones

One of the most common criticisms of social media - among those who don't actually use Facebook or Twitter - is to doubt whether virtual friendships are real, I've been actively involved in online communities for 10 years, as both participant and builder, and I know that online relationships can be just as tangible as those involving physical contact.

But here's where things start to get fuzzy, because Facebook informs me that I have 287 friends, while on Twitter that balloons to 2241, if you count followers as friends. I don't, because people may follow my posts on Twitter without any prompting from me, and without my having to confirm that I know them in any way at all. But what about Facebook? I have confirmed online friendships with almost 300 people, all of whom I've either met in person or else know through online activities of one kind or another.

So why have I bothered to bring this up now? Well, because the bad guys are increasingly exploiting the implied trust that a Facebook friendship confers to perpetrate scams, phishing attempts, social-engineering traps, and to distribute malicious links and software. The importance of Facebook security is increasingly moving beyond the domestic and into the commercial arena, as more and more businesses are adopting workplace social media strategies, PeoplePerHour.com's 2012 small-business survey researched 1300 small businesses and found that 91% were using social networks for business, up from only 60% the previous year.

Quite often fake friendship works in exactly the opposite way to what you'd expect. The Facebook account of someone who's already your friend might get compromised, with bad guys using that account to recommend malicious links or worm information out of you, but that isn't how all of them operate. A recent survey conducted by Barracuda Networks uncovered a more insidious way to exploit Facebook: the fake friendship scam. The survey examined 2844 Facebook accounts, and discovered that fake ones, established solely for the purpose of ripping you off, have on average six times as many "friends" connected to them as real accounts do! This random sampling of active accounts provided an insight into the way many people choose their virtual friends, and it's rather alarming.

For example, only 40% of real account profiles identified themselves as being female, but that rises to 97% for fake accounts. To appeal to the widest range of potential victims, 58% of the fake profiles declared their sexual interest to be in both men and women, compared to only 6% of real accounts that declared themselves bisexual. Presenting yourself as more highly educated is another scammer's strategy, with 68% of the fakes claiming to have attended college or university, whereas only 40% of real people did the same.

Certainly they work on the principle that an assumption of mutual friendships will lead to sufficient trust or curiosity, to accept friendship requests from a complete stranger. That would explain why the fake account holders are more likely to use photo tags than real people do, to the extent that an average real account uses one such tag for every four photos, but fake users will tag 136 times for the same four photos. Just because someone is tagged as "user A" in a group photo featuring a colleague, friend or family member, doesn't mean they are who they say they are. nor that they're actually known to your acquaintance. But these tactics work because the numbers can't lie - real profiles had an average of 130 friends per account, while the fake ones averaged out at 726 each.

But why worry about it? Well, it's that trust thing again. These short-lived fake Facebook accounts will be the ones that immediately start distributing malicious links to anyone who connects with them, but the really clever money is on a more stealthy and long-term scam that creates "fake friendship syndrome" victims. Although the evidence suggests that 43% of these scammers never update their status, compared to only 6% of real users, that doesn't mean the accounts and their friendships aren't being put to use. Most likely the scammers are quietly collecting valuable personal information divulged by their linked friends, information that could be exploited later on as part of a phishing attempt, ID theft or account hijack. Those Facebook users who are most aware of privacy issues, and who restrict visibility of their postings to friends only, are precisely the users most likely to give away valuable persona] information under such circumstances, because they'll wrongly believe their data is only being shared among a limited circle of real friends.

By the very nature of social networks, it's almost impossible to guarantee people won't receive rogue friendship requests that purport to come from friends of friends. However, there are tools that can help you determine whether such requests are genuine - the Barracuda authors have one such tool I've recommended before. Profile Protector (http:// profileprotector.com), which employs a feature-based heuristic engine to try to distinguish fakes from friends. It applies a bunch of machine-learning techniques to analyze shared URLs and profile contents, as well as connections within social networks, to reveal weak and strong associations between accounts. No such tool could ever be 100% idiot-proof but it beats leaving things to chance.

Dealing With Spam Surrogates

Two readers were in touch recently with the same query about the annoying problem of surrogate spam. George J told me that his email address was being "used by person or persons unknown as the return address for spam", while Mike M asked for advice after he "suddenly started receiving hundreds of failure notices a day from Mailer-Daemon@yahoo.com, which seem to refer to emails with porn or other attachments purportedly sent from one of my email addresses".

That, in a nutshell, is what I mean by surrogate spam - a spammer spoofs your email address by completing the "From:" field of a sent email by inserting a random address. I say random, but your address could just as easily have been lifted from a forum or blog post, generated by automated spamming software, or plucked out of a hat and made up on the spot. However it happens, being on the receiving end is no fun, as I can tell you from personal experience. The end result is always the same, as George and Mike have discovered - hundreds of failure or bounce messages in your inbox every single day, with the odd rant or offensive message too.

Spammers continue either to buy lists of genuine email addresses, or else employ automated software that creates likely email addresses from core name lists and sends them to popular mail service domains. In either case, a percentage of the addresses being mailed will not exist: spam mail lists get old very quickly, while automatically generated ones are hit and miss as to whether they ever existed. When a message arrives at a mail server addressed to an account that doesn't exist, then depending on how that server is configured, a failure message will be sent back, and ifs these bounce messages George and Mike had been experiencing, threatening to flood their inboxes and make their email very difficult to use.

George contacted his ISP, which confirmed that his account hadn't been hacked. The ISP also suggested he scan his system for malware. I'd say that George did the right thing by contacting his ISP, as even if it was unable to stop the flood, it's good to keep the ISP in the loop if you suspect foul play. Once informed, it's aware that the increase in mail traffic isn't your fault and can field any complaints that arrive as a result.

This is an important point, because, although sadly the only practical advice is to wait for the flood to stop, in the meantime you and your business could be suffering time lost dealing with the situation and damage to your reputation. Contacting your ISP will help mitigate the abuse allegations, and setting up filtering to redirect bounce messages away from your inbox should reduce the time penalty, too. Your ISP or mail provider will almost certainly be able to advise you, either by setting up such a filter for you or giving you instructions on how to do it for yourself in whatever mail client you use.

That only leaves reputation to deal with, which can be much harder to repair. For an individual it isn't really a big thing, but for a business it could be very damaging. So how can you reduce the damage? This is a bit of a piece-of-string-length question to which I can't give you a one-size-fits-all answer, but there are several steps you can take.

In fact, you should have already taken one. which is to filter out machine-generated bounce messages. This is important, as the filter thereby exposes the residue of human-generated complaints, and you should reply to these using a templated response. Refer to your mail client or provider on how to set one up. It should apologize for any inconvenience, and explain that you're also a victim and are being inconvenienced by the actions of an unknown third party. This may feel over the top, but if you're a business, think in terms of how you'd respond to a normal customer service complaint and it starts to make more sense (I'm not suggesting that you respond to your customers using an automated template).

Another option you have as a business owner is, depending upon the importance to your business of the address being spoofed, to change the targeted address for a new one. Over the years, this has never become necessary for any of my clients who have suffered from spam surrogacy, and the combination of bounce filtering and polite apologies has always been enough to stem the tide until the flood turns to a trickle and then dries up completely. George tells me that his problem peaked with 365 bounce messages during one 12-hour period, most likely when the spam list was initially distributed using a botnet-for-rent service. After a week or two it stopped, which is typical for such collateral spam damage.

Khan Academy : Free Global Classroom on your iPad

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 9 Jun 2012 11:52:00 +0530

Home schooling just got a whole lot easier with the comprehensive - and free - Khan Academy app for the iPad. Khan Academy fancies itself as a non-profit "global classroom", with over 3000 educational videos for students of all ages. You can learn about topics as diverse as Romanticism in France (art history), binomial distribution (statistics} and deflationary spiral (macroeconomics), and each video can be streamed to your iPad or downloaded for off-line viewing. You also get the option of downloading all of the videos for a particular topic.

The maths, science and economics sections are by far the most comprehensive, and adults wanting to brush up on their high school maths in particular will find most of the major topics covered. The humanities section only covers o handful of topics in history. American civics and art history, while the test prep section is heavily skewed towards US exams. Calling them "videos" is also o bit of a stretch - most of them are really more like audio podcasts with a picture slideshow. although o few of them do make use of diagrams drawn in real-time to illustrate particular concepts.

The app saves the position of each video you watch so you can come bock to them later, and there ore subtitles below the videos so you can jump to different parts of the lecture quickly. You get the option of creating your own profile, and this logs the videos that you've completed and any 'achievements' that you've unlocked. You con also post about videos you've watched on Facebook and Twitter, but that's about the limit of the interactivity that's available. Sadly, there's no option to comment on videos or ask questions, and there are no follow up exercises you can complete to test your learning.

[ Khan Academy for iPad on the iTunes App Store ]

Free Instagram App for Android

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 7 Jun 2012 11:39:00 +0530

iPhone users hove one less reason lo lord it over the Android-toting masses now that Instagram has been ported over. The Android version of the popular photo editing and sharing app is more or less identical to the iPhone one, with 17 different filters you can apply to snapped photos, the option to upload to Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Tumblr (the iPhone app offers a couple of more sharing options), and integrated access to Instagram's own social network for sharing photos with your followers.

If you haven't stumbled across the Instagram phenomenon yet, its beauty lies in its ability to make the most mundane photos look interesting. Boring shots of your cat, the chicken schnitzel you ate for lunch, and even your grotty old gym shoes are transformed into arty masterpieces, courtesy of the retro-style filters that you apply on top of your original image.

The fact that it's free and easy to use has made it a huge hit with smartphone users. Filters are applied with a single tap, and you can apply them to photos you've already taken or to o photo that you've shot from within the app. There are also basic editing options for fixing exposure and rotating the image.

If you're more of a power user, however, the limited selection of filters ond options - not to mention the inability to layer filters for different effects - may have you seeking out richer apps like Vignette, which comes with no less than 76 filters and effects (including the ability to double-expose shots and add a tilt shift effect) and works as a full camera replacement app as well.

Also worth mentioning is that Facebook recently bought Instagram for a whopping $1 billion. Great news for the developers, but whether it continues as a separate service or is folded into Facebook remains to be seen.

[ Instagram on Google Play ]

10 Features we'd Like to See in Windows 8

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 5 Jun 2012 11:21:00 +0530

Below are the 10 features we'd like to see in Windows 8.

1. START BUTTON ON THE DESKTOP

Even if it only pings you bock to Metro, the old desktop needs a proper Start button, not on invisible one.

2. BLU-RAY SUPPORT

To hell with the expense, we need support for Blu-ray. And support for MKV video.

3. ONE-CLICK SHARING OF OPTICAL DRIVES

Necessary for Ultrabooks and tablets; something OS X has had for a while.

4. DRAG TO OPEN

Drag documents onto a taskbar icon to open them with that program.

5. VIRTUAL DESKTOPS

Come on Microsoft, it's 2012. Linux has had these for ages.

6. SIMPLE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT LANGUAGE

Like Visual Basic used to be before it went all .NET.

7. A FONT MANAGER

That lets you conveniently preview and install fonts from a given location.

8. A DUAL-PANE EXPLORER

For easily moving files around from one folder to another.

9. A TUTORIAL

To show people how to find all the new features, gestures, shortcuts and so on.

10. A PROMINENT SHUTDOWN BUTTON

Hiding Shutdown away in settings is insane.

We hope Microsoft will add the above features soon. Please share the other features you want in the comments below.

Top 5 New Essential Applications of Android

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 3 Jun 2012 10:56:00 +0530

In the below post, we will be discussing about some of most interesting Android applications which were released recently or have seen a major upgrade recently.

TouchDown HD

For anyone dealing with business email on an Android tablet, the bundled email app for use with IMAP and Exchange accounts isn't very good. There's no synchronizing of tasks or notes, and no search facility, which can be a real pain if you're out and about and need to dig out an old memo* TouchDown HD fixes all these problems, adding a few useful extras, including encryption and a brilliantly effective remote-wipe facility. This lets you send an email with a kill code to your email address, which will wipe data from a lost or stolen tablet.

Due Today

Everyone needs to make to-do lists at one time or another, but Android offers no such facility as standard. That's a pretty big omission, but Due Today fills the gap with admirable aplomb. Naturally, you can create simple lists of tasks, give them priorities and due dates as normal, but that's not all Tasks can be assigned to "contexts" -to help you keep work and home items separate, for instance - projects and people. It's easy to use, with a simple yet effective front-end, and it also synchronizes with the online to-do list service, Toodledo.

LogMeIn Ignition

For those times when you simply must have access to your desktop PC. you'll need a remote desktop application and there's a wide choice. LogMeln Ignition, though, remains our top pick. Connection is a doddle - no fiddling around with port forwarding is needed - and response times are quick. It's a little pricey on Android, but is free on iOS, with cloud storage and other features available as an annual in-app purchase.

ES File Explorer

ES File Explorer is almost insanely powerful for a free app, functioning as a file explorer for both local device storage and networked devices, an application manager, a file viewer, Bluetooth transfer tool and it will even sync with your cloud storage client. It's not the simplest of apps to use, but it makes up for it with the breadth of its functionality - a must download for any Android user.

SwiftKey Tablet X Keyboard

SwiftKey is a popular keyboard option for Android phones and has recently made the shift to tablet devices. SwiftKey helps you increase your typing speed using a virtual keyboard by use of clever Al predictive text (which learns from your vocabulary). It also allows for a split screen keyboard, letting you thumb type while still holding the device.

Top 5 New Essential Applications of iPad

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 1 Jun 2012 10:44:00 +0530

In the below post, we will be discussing about some of most interesting iPad applications which were released recently or have seen a major upgrade recently.

iA Writer

A word processor that's been pared right down, iA Writer isn't the app you'll be bashing out the company report with. There's no formatting control at all. Instead, iA Writer forces you to concentrate on the writing, with Focus Mode even limiting the view to the current sentence. A host of clever keyboard shortcuts makes it ideal for writing considered pieces of text.

Omnifocus for iPad

OmniFocus won't be for everyone: it's an app for people with complex workloads, for whom a simple to-do list just isn't enough. You may also need to start thinking the way OmniFocus thinks. For example, it uses the term "contexts'* to describe different scenarios such as being in the office, at home, or being with your boss. Tasks are assigned to that context, and you can then see what needs to be done next when you're in that situation. There are many more strings to its bow: the forecast feature, showing what you need to do today, this week and in the future, is just one. If its structured way of working suits you, you'll find OmniFocus well worth the high price.

iANNOTATE PDF

This fabulously powerful app allows you to highlight, mark up, comment and scribble all over PDFs. saving the need to print out and scribble down notes in pen. It's particularly suited for working on the train or in the back of a car, with bumps no longer threatening to ruin a document with shakily inked annotations, especially when used with a decent stylus. The developers are constantly adding features, and the most recent upgrade has simplified the toolbars and made performance even smoother. Options to seamlessly synchronize documents with Dropbox, or email annotated files to colleagues, add the final touches to a splendid app.

AirDisplay

A simple app that provides a very impressive bit of functionality -AirDisplay turns your iPad into a second monitor for your Mac or PC. You'll need to install a small piece of software on your desktop or laptop {the app itself directs you on where to go to do this) after which you'll be able to pair the two over Wi-Fi. You can rotate the iPad from portrait to landscape as you choose. All in all, a great way to incorporate a tablet into your working life.

Bento

Bento comes from FileMaker - people who know quite a bit about databases, as we're sure you'll agree. Bento provides a simple way of organizing personal or work related data into a personalized database using a number of templates* Contacts, projects, events plans - it doesn't matter what you're organizing, Bento makes it easy to keep and track a detailed database.

Integrated vs Low-End Graphic Cards

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 30 May 2012 00:04:00 +0530

The GPUs now being integrated into processors effortlessly decode media and can increasingly run 3D games - albeit at limited settings. In fact, they've improved so much that they're threatening the low end of the discrete card market.

The APU Question

To get a current-generation AMD integrated GPU, you'll need a Llano processor. The A8-3870K is the dearest at $150, and contains a top-end Radeon HD 6550D. Its overage of 33fps in our 1600 x 900 Medium quality Crysis test is around twice as fast as the Radeon HD 6450 and GeForce GT 520 discrete cards.

You don't have to buy the best Llano processor to beat those discrete cards, though. The next step down is the Radeon HD 6530D, which is found in four processors, starting with the S80 A6-3500. It averaged 27fps in the Medium quality Crysis test, and 29fps in the Medium quality DiRT 3 test. The HD 6410D has half as many stream processors, but hit 52fps in our Low quality Crysis test - 11fps faster than either discrete card.

Intel Inside

Intel's HD Graphics 2000 and 3000 chips are integrated into second generation Core i3, i5 and i7 CPUs, while the HD Graphics 4000 is found in the new third generation Ivy Bridge CPUs. None of these are as good for gaming as AMD's APUs: The 3000 and 4000 deliver playable low to medium detail frame-rates though, which was once unheard of with Intel graphics.

The latter is your best choice. Its average of 50fps in our 1366 x 768 Low quality Crysis test is 11fps ahead of the discrete Radeon HD 6450. That's some way behind the slowest of AMD's integrated chips however.

Click to enlarge

What to Buy ?

Whether integrated graphics make sense depends on your situation. The prices we've mentioned are for the CPU/GPU combo, so they're not comparable to the price of a graphics card. If you already have a CPU, for example, you may not want to replace it just to get a better GPU for media tasks, in which case a $45 Radeon HD 6450 card makes more sense.

If you're buying o new CPU or building a new PC, however, it's worth knowing that the graphics core inside it is at least as good as cards costing around $50. Of course, if you want proper gaming then opt for a card, but if you need a GPU for media there's little point wasting money. Even Intel's integrated graphics cores ore now good enough.

HTC One X : Reviews, Features and More

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 28 May 2012 23:52:00 +0530

HTC One X

Some of the criticism that has been leveled against HTC over the past few months has been about the sheer number of handsets being pushed out by the company - a large number of devices, with a lot of confusion over target users. The One range is HTC's attempt to rectify this - a smaller range with a tighter focus - and the HTC One X is the flagship of this new range. As flagships go, this is one of the most successful devices we've seen.

The design of the One X is instantly distinctive - o sleek polycarbonate unibody design with Corning Gorilla Gloss 2 over the display, curving down into the frame. It's a really remarkable piece of engineering. The phone is surprisingly thin - a mere 8.9mm - and at 130g it's lighter than the iPhone 4S, despite packing in so much real-estate in terms of screen size. Speaking of the resolution and a very wide viewing angle, apparently a product of the process used in attaching the Gorilla Glass to the phone. We tested the One X running MapMyRun during a 4km jog; despite the size of the handset, it stays easily in a shorts pocket without feeling uncomfortable or in danger of falling out, something we would not feel safe doing with the Sensation XL.

Power and Precision

Of course, the One X is famed for its Tegra 3 quad core processor - a chipset that's only just finding its way into tablets, let alone phones. It may seem like overkill, but the effect of all this processing power on the device is nothing short of remarkable. In Quadrant benchmarking, the One X easily outstrips the competition, scoring 4868 against the Galaxy Note's 3317. In fact, it even out-scores Motorola's Xoom 2 (2450). With the Sun-spider JavaScript benchmark, we saw results around the 2.2 second mark - very zippy.

This translates into some seriously smooth action when using the One X. It's extremely noticeable when browsing or gaming - we tested it with Temple Run to see how the rendering would look and were blown away by the game. It's especially good for HTC's Sense UI, now in its own 4.0 iteration. Sense has often been accused of slowing down HTC handsets, but the One X runs with nary a stutter. We were also really impressed with the start up of the X: 12 seconds from fully shut down to being up and usable.

Connected Snapper

Call quality was very solid in our tests, even when outside or in loud interior environments. Music playback is especially fine - thanks to HTC's continued relationship with 8eats, the proprietary Beats Audio software is built into the unit, same as the Sensation XE and XL before it. With the screen size and high resolution, we also experienced great video playback, happily watching short TV episodes we'd loaded onto the phone. With 3 2GB of memory built in, it's more than possible to store an excellent selection of music and movies.

The camera is a big element of the handset - 8MP with a dedicated imaging chip. A range of effects is built in, as is 1080P video recording and the slightly unnecessary ability to take still shots while shooting video. For Skype users or anyone fond of the mirror function, the 1.3MP forward-facing camera can take 720P video.

Power User

There are a few niggles about the HTC One X, but they aren't many. The unibody means that the battery is built in and non-removable. There's also no expansion port for MicroSD or anything similar, although HTC has worked a deal with DropBox giving any One X users 25GB free for two years - well worth it. With the One X, HTC has made the jump to the microSIM, which might be annoying for users transitioning from an older phone. Surprisingly, the battery was quite good - while it was all but tapped out after our 24 hour tests, the 1800mAh model performed far better than we would have expected, given the screen and processing power. While some of this is the Tegra 3's power-saving "fifth core", kudos must still be awarded to HTC for providing o powerhouse that still manages all day battery life. While the heavy gamers and social media gurus might find themselves running on fumes at the end of a hard day, the average user will have no issues.

In all, HTC has produced a truly remarkable phone that restores a great deal of our confidence in the company. A masterpiece of engineering and design, we're happy to see the HTC One X become our new A-Lister for smart phones.

Wearable Computing Gets a Boost

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 26 May 2012 23:39:00 +0530

In early April, the Internet was a buzz with news of Project Glass, Google's camera-toting, heads-up-display vision of the future of wearable computing. A concept video showing how the device might work (which can be viewed via http://tinyurl.com/bl83lvr) fired the imagination of many, as well as inspiring more than a few parody videos. The footage revealed that Project Glass was essentially a pair of spectacles that provide an AR overlay controlled by small head movements. If the clip is to be believed, the specs will be able to do everything from take covert photos to teaching you to play the ukulele.

"We believe technology should work for you - to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don't," explained Google in a statement. "A team within our Google[x] group started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment."

Only a few short weeks later, it transpired that video game titan Valve was working a similar wearable computing project, this one with a focus on gaming, While still very much in the early stages - Valve developer Michael Abrash was adamant that a product from this project might be years away -Valve was happy to admit that cult geek novel Snow Crash was a major inspiration.
"I wouldn't be at Valve doing this - in fact. Valve itself might not be here - if it weren't for Snow Crash diverting my career told [software] in the first place," said Abrash.

Abrash also had a clear vision of what he wanted to produce: "by 'wearable computing' I mean mobile computing where both computer-generated graphics and the real world are seamlessly overlaid in your view; there is no separate display that you hold in your hands".

iPhoto for iOS

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 24 May 2012 23:16:00 +0530

With photo-editing apps among the most popular categories in the App Store, it's no surprise to see Apple stake its claim with an iOS version of iPhoto. Available both for iPhones and iPad 2 upwards, iPhoto is competitively priced - but how does it compare to rival apps?

iPhoto brings a few clever innovations to tablet-based editing. You can, for example, tilt the tablet to straighten a photo, and simply brush over areas with your finger to apply effects such as desaturation, darkening or sharpening -offering finer control than Snapseed's selective adjustments.

Sliders to control saturation, sky tone and greens to the photo as a whole are neatly implemented. Unusually, Apple has felt the need to include help tooltips to explain features and icons - anathema to its normal "it just works" attitude.

This first version of iPhoto is far from flawless, however. Performance - especially when using high-resolution JPEGs or the repair brush - is surprisingly sluggish, even with the new iPad's quad-core GPU. Edits can be lost without warning if you don't follow Apple's prescribed workflow. And the selection of artistic filters is not a patch on the creative filters within Snapseed, which can odd real impact to photos snapped on listless smartphone and tablet cameras.

Comparisons with Photoshop Touch are a little unfair: iPhoto is primarily a tool for touching up photos, while Photoshop adds enthusiast-grade features such os adjustment layers, marquee/lasso selections and curve controls. Yet, rarely does Adobe's more sophisticated palette of tools stutter in the same way as iPhoto's, suggesting Apple's developers have more work to do on multicore.

In short, for performing basic photo edits and creative effects we still prefer Snapseed, while iPhoto doesn't come close to the sophistication of Photoshop Touch for those who prefer fine control over their edits.

This app is designed for both iPhone and iPad $4.99

Turbo-Charge Your Tablet

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 22 May 2012 22:43:00 +0530

Most people will have bought a tablet for surfing on the sofa, watching video on the train, or playing games on a decent-sized screen. But can they be put to more serious use? As we discovered, when we recently attempted to run The Pirado on tablets for a day, they're perfectly capable of serious work. But being productive on a (non-Windows) tablet is a very different experience to toiling away on a conventional laptop or desktop PC.

In this feature, we'll share our personal experience of using tablets to be genuinely productive, not just for consuming media. These experiences have been gained not only from our day-long experiment, but from using tablets over the past couple of years. We'll reveal what works, what doesn't, and how to get around the various roadblocks created by tablet hardware. We've also included our pick of tablet apps, to help you turn your device from toy to tool, be it Android or iOS.

Running Web Applications

The continued shift towards working in web applications is what made it possible for us to carry on producing our magazine for the day without our PCs {well, almost without our PCs). Our website is, of course, managed via an online CMS. and we can share and edit documents online in services such as Google Docs. And publishing is far from the only industry shifting to a browser-based workflow.

Yet, many web apps are still designed primarily for PC web browsers, We found it impossible to upload photos to articles in our web CMS because the tablet browsers we were using didn't permit access to the device's file system. We expected such restrictions on the iPad, but even on Android tablets, which expose the file system far more readily, our web CMS wouldn't let us upload files. Likewise, when the Android tablet users attempted to access blogging platform WordPress via the browser, they found they couldn't perform tasks they take for granted on the PC, such as resizing text-entry boxes. A warning for tablet users then: just because you have a browser window, don't assume your web applications will just work.

Nonetheless, we still just about managed to get the job done. We edited features in Google Docs, albeit at a slower pace than we would have using Word on a PC. We had to work around a few idiosyncrasies: the down cursor on our iPad keyboard allowed us to move between lines in a paragraph, but not from one paragraph to the next, for example. Several familiar keyboard shortcuts don't translate to tablets and web apps. And there was a noticeable and irritating delay between keystrokes and the words appearing onscreen. It's nothing close to a showstopper, though.

Keyboards

We equipped our team with a variety of Bluetooth keyboards and docks at the start of the day - although there was some internal argument over whether this was "cheating". At the end of the day, external keyboard/ docks aren't terribly expensive and often come as part of a quality tablet case, such as Kensington's Keyfolio range, and we reasoned that anyone serious about working on a tablet would likely invest in a keyboard.

Despite this, some people found onscreen keyboards preferable, and one team member succeeded in bashing out a 660-word review without, as he put it, "uttering a single swear word".

For those who couldn't countenance working with a software keyboard, it does pay to choose an external Bluetooth keyboard carefully. Some have dedicated shortcut buttons that make it possible to perform common tasks - such as cut, copy and paste -without having to lift a finger to dab the screen. Some of the combined dock/keyboard cases position the tablet screen almost perpendicular to the keyboard, forcing you to slouch back in your chair to see the screen. Also bear in mind that Bluetooth keyboards require a source of power (either via built-in rechargeable or alkaline batteries), and usually can't be powered by the tablet itself.

Multitasking

Without doubt, the biggest bugbear for the team on tablet day was the difficulty of multitasking. We're used to working with two or three monitors on our desks, often with dozens of windows open simultaneously. Although the iPad and Android tablets both boast of "multitasking", you're effectively forced to work in a single, full-screen application window at any one time. Even with an HDM1 output to a desktop monitor, you can only mirror the tablet screen - not extend the desktop to display more than one app at once. By the end of the day, we were definitely seeing the appeal of Windows 8 split-screen Metro interface, will allow users to devote two-thirds of the screen to one application and a third to another.

Even using the tablets' limited multitasking capabilities was fraught with risk. On numerous occasions, users switched away from whatever they'd been writing or editing, only to find that the app has completely disappeared from the recent apps list, resulting in a loss of work on three or four occasions.

Forcing users to focus purely on a single task can have its advantages.however. It can. for example, help minimize distractions. Instead of having one's attention diverted by an incoming email, a meeting request or the latest Twitter meme, you can focus purely on the task at hand. This almost certainly results in the job being completed more quickly than it would if you were sat in front of a regular laptop and external monitor setup, with several windows open simultaneously. True, it's possible to simply shut out all possible distractions on a PC, but the single app focus of the tablet eliminates the temptation to keep that Outlook window open or TweetDeck session running on a secondary screen.

Networking

After multitasking, the second biggest hurdle the team faced on tablet day was accessing the company network. Most companies shares files between its teams via shared folders on a local server, but shared drives for networked homes with multiple users are becoming more and more common. Accessing servers, however, can be far from simple on a tablet. In our scenario, those running iPads couldn't find any way to connect to the server, although the Android users eventually found a way to tunnel through via the ES File Explorer and Astro File Manager apps. The experience wasn't seamless, though: many tablet apps refuse to work properly with anything other than files stored locally.

"Working on files from the server is fiddly," said one of the Labs team. "I've resorted to copying files to local storage first, then copying them back after the final edit, after yet another document vanished into thin air 1 had opened a file successfully direct from the server, and seemingly saved it. Yet when 1 returned to check the original location, no changes had been made."

Our savior, as it turned out, was Dropbox. The file-synchronization service is a long-standing office favorite, not least because it allows both Mac and PC users to share files without fuss. Now, we can add tablets to that list. Many iOS and Android applications are Dropbox compatible, allowing you to drag down a file from the cloud, make edits on the tablet, and then upload the changes, which are then synchronized across all computers that have access to that shared Dropbox folder.

Printing

With no direct access to the networked office laser and no Apple AirPrint-compatible printer to hand, we didn't hold out much hope of being able to make hard copies of work, but we were wrong. Google came to the rescue here.

Google's Cloud Print service allows users to print remotely from their tablets and smartphones, via Google Docs or compatible third-party apps. There are a couple of catches: first, this has to be set up using the Google Chrome browser on the PC, which means that the PC has to be switched on and logged in for prints to be successful. Second, there's precious little app support for Google Cloud Print on iOS, meaning text has to be pasted into Google Docs before printing. The Android users were more successful in this regard, using the third-party Cloud Print to send prints directly to the services from within apps.

Email

Access to office email was largely a non-issue. Both Android and iOS's built-in mail clients offer decent support for the Microsoft Exchange accounts we use and once the correct settings had been established, it was plain sailing, Features such as the auto-completion of in-house email addresses were still available via the tablet clients, although some advanced Exchange features, such as automatic meeting scheduling and checking the availability of meeting rooms, weren't available.

The biggest barrier was search: on iOS we frequently found ourselves having to search email archives via the server, but this proved prohibitively slow - it certainly couldn't match the speed or advanced search features available within the Outlook desktop client. Android users, with no search facility at all in the built-in Exchange client, had to resort to using a trial version of the excellent third-party app. Touchdown HD

Conclusion

In many ways, our day-long test put an unfair burden on tablets. They're primarily mobile devices running adapted versions of smartphone OSes, and aren't intended to replace a PC in an office environment. That said, as the comments on our live blog testify, many companies are thinking about rolling out tablets to do just that.

While none of the team would willingly swap a regular PC for a tablet at this stage, we were quietly impressed with how much we managed to achieve. There were teething problems and we were forced back to Windows to complete a few tasks, but by and large we got through a working day without anyone being sent for stress counseling.

Our limited test might even change the way we work. Our Labs team, for example, found entering details into formulae-laden spreadsheets on a tablet was easier than expected. Writing copy using an external keyboard - or even with the onscreen one - was faster than we imagined, and much less distracting. And sharing files using services such as Dropbox was remarkably painless.

Choose the right apps and the right accessories, and it's most certainly possible to be remarkable efficient and productive on a tablet. It's a device that's totally silent, works anywhere, and most likely boasts much longer battery life than your regular laptop. The tablet can't compete with a full-blown PC for power, multitasking or regular desktop duties, but it is a flexible companion and one that's perfect for organizing your life.

Use your Mouse and Keyboard on Two Computers

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 20 May 2012 20:50:00 +0530

Click to Enlarge

This odd little aluminum bar - while not looking like much - is one of the most interesting products to cross our desk in a while. Designed to act as a KVM of sorts, it enables you to seamlessly use your mouse and keyboard on two computers. Simply plug in the USB connections, turn it on and install the software that comes on the wormhole station. You can then not only move your mouse off one side of your screen and straight onto the other computer, but seamlessly drag and drop files as well.
It even works between PCs and Macs, handy if you have a Macbook and a PC desktop, and also comes with a built-in card reader (that does memory stick, SO and Micro SO) and two port USB 3 hub. Designed to sit unobtrusively under one's laptop, its sheer simplicity and ease of use easily won us over, despite the fact that our initial research on the product website left us scratching our heads.

Price : $139

Website : www.j5create.com

Is Defragmentation Still Worthwhile to Keep your PC Running Smoothly ? Does it Work for SSDS ?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 18 May 2012 20:31:00 +0530

When did you last defragment your hard disk? If it's been a while, that's understandable. Once, "defragging" was a popular way to maximize performance; but as hardware has grown faster and more powerful, the effect of fragmentation has become less noticeable, leading to a perception that defragmentation is no longer necessary.

In truth, defragmenting your disks is still worthwhile. The more powerful our PCs become, the more natural it is to multitask - to leave processes running in the background, to have media players open in the foreground, and even to share files across a home network at the same time. This type of heavily parallel usage can still cause a fragmented disk to hiccup, leading to annoyingly uneven performance. And when it comes to servers, fragmentation is more of an issue. Personal storage servers typically use domestic drives, which aren't designed to handle many simultaneous requests. In business, a host of virtual servers may run on a single set of physical hardware, resulting in intense demands on the hard disk.

Even if a fragmented disk provides acceptable performance, constantly seeking is likely to shorten its lifespan. And every second spent doing so is an extra second the drive spends powered on and generating heat. The effect won't halve a laptop's battery life, but it isn't insignificant: a typical 500GB 2.5in hard disk draws 2.5W while active, but less than one watt idle. For a business running dozens or hundreds of disks, the cumulative wastage could be considerable - and that's before you weigh in cooling requirements.

Free Defragmentation Tools

Since Windows 95, all versions of the OS have come with a built-in graphical defragmentation tool, which can reorganize your hard disk to keep files together. There are plenty of free tools, too, such as Piriform Defraggler (www.piriform.com/defraggler), which adds a more friendly interface and extra features, such as the ability to selectively defragment individual files.

A full defragmentation with these programs can take hours, however; and your hard disk will be constantly seeking all over the place, interfering with your use of it. For these reasons, it's common to schedule a periodic defragmentation for times when you won't be using your system (by default, the Windows 7 defragmenter launches at lam every Wednesday).

But this works only if your PC is switched on, wasting power. And your disk won't be completely defragmented since the software can't move system files that are in use.

Preventing Fragmentation

The ideal solution would be to prevent fragmentation before it happens, by ensuring files are written contiguously to disk in the first place. When you create a file on an NTFS file system, Windows attempts to place it in the area of free space on your hard disk that most closely matches the size of the file, so as to make the most efficient use of the space.

Unfortunately, this involves guesswork, because the OS often has to start before it knows what the eventual size of the file will be. If it's a log file that grows over time, or a video file that will take several minutes to write, the size could be many times larger than expected. Windows tries to find a suitable place to write by looking for a space that is - depending on a simple predictive algorithm - between two and 16 times the size of the data that's already been cached for writing.

Sadly, although well intentioned. this approach is apt to cause more fragmentation than it saves. When a file turns out to be larger than the space allocated, it's fragmented across multiple areas of free space. And when a file turns out to be smaller, an unhelpful island of space is left immediately after it on the disk.

Defragmentation with Diskeeper

Enter Condusiv. Formerly known as the Diskeeper Corporation (and before that as Executive Software), it's been producing defragmentation software since 1981. Indeed, the defragmentation clients in Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 are built on routines licensed from the company. Via the Condusiv site (http://tinyurl.com/7d8s5ol) you can get a 30-day trial of Diskeeper 2011 Home package, an advanced utility that takes a smarter approach to defragmentation.

Diskeeper's secret weapon is a system called IntelliWrite. This changes Windows' default file write behavior by allocating larger spaces for newly created files, greatly reducing the initial occurrence of fragmentation. It's a strategy that relies on there being a certain amount of disk space to spare - IntelliWrite is automatically disabled when a disk has less than 2GB of available capacity. But modern disks typically offer hundreds of gigabytes of space to play with, giving IntelliWrite plenty of scope to improve performance.

Diskeeper claims that IntelliWrite reduces the occurrence of files being created in a fragmented state by up to 85%. In some cases, though, fragmentation remains unavoidable. The software therefore also continuously monitors your hard disk for fragmented data, and consolidates it whenever it's found. This obviates the need to run large, periodic scheduled defragmentation jobs - although if you want to be sure it won't interfere with your usage, you can create a schedule specifying when defragmentation can and can't happen.

A final string to Diskeeper's bow is the ability to defragment the page file that's used by Windows as virtual memory, by scheduling a targeted defragmentation job to run before Windows starts up. This may be slow if you're using a large page file, but again it can be scheduled - and there's no other way to ensure Windows is running at its smoothest.

Fragmentations & SSDS

So far we've focused on mechanical drives, but with solid-state drives (SSDs) growing in popularity, you might be wondering whether they also need defragmenting. The short answer is that defragmentation, as it's commonly understood, is unnecessary.

To understand why, let's focus first on read performance. Since flash memory has no "seek time", an SSD can read discontiguous cells just as quickly as adjacent ones. Strictly speaking, there's a performance penalty involved in switching between different banks of memory cells -but this is of the order of fractions of a microsecond. For all practical purposes, defragmenting the files on an SSD yields no improvement in read performance.

Indeed, conventional defragmentation tools don't work on SSDs. To the operating system - and hence to defragmentation software - solid-state volumes appear to be divided into cylinders, heads and sectors, just like mechanical hard disks. But this is an abstraction, used to provide compatibility with established disk interfaces. Inside the SSD, these virtual addresses map onto flash memory banks that will almost certainly be differently arranged.

Things are complicated further by a process called wear leveling. Each flash cell inside an SSD can sustain only a limited number of write operations; to prolong the lifetime of the disk as a whole, the SSD's internal controller attempts to distribute write operations evenly across the whole capacity. This means that the mapping of virtual sectors to physical cells changes dynamically every time a block of data is written. Try to write to the same disk location twice in a row and you'll in fact be addressing two different physical memory locations.

This utterly defeats traditional approaches to defragmentation. When a tool such as the Windows defragmenter thinks it's consolidating data, in reality it's shortening the life of your disk with thousands of pointless writes. For this reason, automatic defragmentation is turned off in Windows 7 for SSDs.

Avoiding Write Amplification

Although fragmentation has a minimal effect on SSD read performance, it makes a big difference to writing. This is because of a limitation of SSDs called write amplification. It occurs because flash memory cells can't be overwritten like physical hard disk sectors, To write to a cell that contains data (even junk data left over from a deleted file), it must be erased and then reprogrammed. The catch is that cells can't be erased singly: for technical reasons, they can only be erased in blocks, typically of 512KB.

This creates problems. When you write a file into a given block, it's clearly unacceptable for the drive controller to simply erase all nearby data. So when the write request is received, the controller must read the entire contents of the block into a cache, then erase the block, then rewrite all those contents back to the disk, along with the new data. A single write request is thus "amplified" into dozens or thousands of operations - greatly slowing down performance.

To an extent, the effect is mitigated by an SSD feature called TRIM. When a file is deleted, TRIM enables the operating system to tell the drive controller that the data doesn't need to be kept. Should the block need to be rewritten in future, the unwanted data can be skipped. This speeds up the operation at hand; and because the unused space is subsequently left blank, it can in future be written to directly without requiring further erase operations.

Diskeeper Home 2011 takes this one step further, with an SSD-specific feature called HyperFast As we've described, it isn't possible for defragmentation software to reorganize the data on an SSD. But by using methods similar to those employed by IntelliWrite, HyperFast discourages the OS from writing files in piecemeal fashion in the first place, greatly reducing the break-up of free space. This means that whenever data is written, it's much more likely to be to a block that's mostly blank - minimising the effect of write amplification. The default installation will activate HyperFast automatically for SSDs.

What is Lucid Virtu ?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:07:00 +0530


Lucid Virtu Interface - Simple.

Lucid first came about roughly three years ago, announcing some pretty exciting technology to the world that would allow not only SLI or Cross Fire support for chipsets that did not officially support it, but would also allow users to pair AMD and Nvidia graphics cards together in a sort of ad-hock solution with impressive scaling.

So what happened, and why weren't we using this technology in computers years ago? The first set back for Lucid was the fact that it took almost two years to perfect and bring Virtu to market. The second set back is that Intel's chipsets over the past few years have widely supported both Cross Fire and SLI. This removed the primary niche for the software - to bring SLI to the Intel platform after Nvidia was legally blocked from producing chipsets for Intel after the Nehalem launch.

So what gave Lucid the big break they needed to enter the motherboard market? It wasn't actually until Sandy Bridge that we saw a real use for the technology, as Intel needed to call in the clean-up crew on some arguably poor decisions made when designing the numerous chipsets for the processors.

The problem with Sandy Bridge was that Intel did too good a job when creating Quick Sync video trans-coding. It was faster than using the CPU alone, and it was faster than a dedicated GPU. This was a problem, because Intel made the critical mistake of disabling the on-chip GPU in its SB processors when using the mainstream P67 chipset, and if you opted for the GPU-enabled H67 chipset you lost the ability to run a high-end gaming system with overclocking and multi-GPU capabilities. It was a case of picking what you considered more important, video games and overclocking, or video transcoding with an efficient new technology.

This is where Lucid made its break. Essentially, this cool new technology could send workloads to the designated hardware of your choice. Games could be sent to dedicated graphics cards, video transcoding could be sent to the processor's GPU or CPU - essentially giving complete control over the way your PC handled any computing work.

Setting it up

Setting up Lucid Virtu is fairly straight forward, but it depends on what motherboard you have in your PC, and what deals manufacturers may or may not have done with Lucid. If you are lucky, you will have received this wonderful software package as a bundle with your motherboard.

For example, recently Asus have included Lucid Virtu in the vast majority of their Intel-based motherboard packages, while Gigabyte and MSI have also included Lucid on more than a few of their Intel models. If you want to find out if your board comes with a free copy you can check your model by, logging on to the Lucid website (lucidlogix.com) and checking the "where to buy" tab for motherboards that include the bundle. At the moment, a good rule of thumb is that if you don't have a Z68 or Z77 chipset, you won't have Virtu bundled in with your system.

If your motherboard was not bundled with the software, you can download the drivers for free from the Lucid website. If your CPU is compatible (Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge) the software will install; if you get an error message like "hardware incompatible" while installing, chances are you are trying to install the package on an older Intel platform, or on an AMD platform.

In order to get the most efficient set up, plug your monitor cable into your dedicated video card and run the Lucid Virtu software. Under the "games" tab, there should now be a whole list of 3D rendering and video conversion software that is installed on your system. These are the tasks that your CPU will perform using the Lucid Virtu technology, while all other 3D tasks not seen on the list will be assigned automatically to your dedicated GPU for processing.

If you try to install Lucid Virtu or the new MVP variant and you get an error stating "GPU configuration incorrect", be sure to enter your BIOS and make sure that your IGP is set to "enabled" and not "disabled" or "auto". The reason for this is many motherboards will likely disable the Intel IGP automatically as soon as a dedicated graphics card is detected.

Virtu MVP

MVP is the newest Lucid version, exclusive to Ivy Bridge. In this new edition you can take your system control to a whole new level, not just switching between dedicated and integrated GPU's, but also pairing them up to work together, bringing even greater performance to games and benchmark applications.

Virtu's Limitations

While this sounds like the perfect solution, there are still a few teething problems. Because of the way the Lucid software / drivers compile a list of programs for you to configure, it is not surprising to see some software or games missing from the list. This is because Lucid needs to manually add new software and games to its support list, and that is a near impossible task as new games and software are released or patched on a monthly basis. For this reason, some of the smaller games or software may not have support immediately, or may never get support at all. In a situation like this, unfortunately there is nothing you can do. Lucid Virtu will not work with this software (though this doesn't affect games too heavily, unless you wanted to use the on-board GPU).

Aside from the slight weakness in the Lucid Virtu software scanner, this technology really is a must-have for anyone owning a Sandy Bridge PC and a dedicated video card for gaming.

How to : Try the Windows 8 Consumer Preview

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:00:00 +0530

Windows 8 Consumer Preview

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview is free to download from Microsoft's website. It comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions and in a variety of languages, and the 64-bit version weighs in at a hefty 32GB.

if you're planning to do a clean install of Windows 8. or run it from within a VM, it's probably best to head straight for the ISOs at http://tinyurl.com/6u4m7hc. The page provides instructions on how to burn the ISO to either DVD or USB stick, using free tools provided by Microsoft.

If you're feeling brave, you can also install the Windows 8 Consumer Preview over your current installation of Windows XP. Vista or 7 using the special installer at http://tinyurl.com/7rnql5L . Note, however, that only Windows 7 users will keep applications, settings and user accounts in place. Those upgrading from Vista and XP have more limited options.

We've upgraded in place on several Windows 7 machines and it has worked flawlessly every time. Drivers, settings and Library structures have all been retained.

That said, the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is a glorified beta, so proceed with extreme caution, especially with PCs you depend on for work. Just because it worked for us doesn't mean it will do so for you, and there's no rolling back once you've made the upgrade. Take a full disk image backup of your existing PC before starting the upgrade, so you can revert to your current setup if something happens to go drastically wrong.

The upgrade installer checks your current PC has the right specification, and the compatibility of any applications you've pre-installed. If you Ye already running Microsoft's Security Essentials antivirus suite, you'll be forced to uninstall this first, os this is built into Windows 8 under the new guise of Windows Defender. Once you've passed all the necessary checks, the installer then proceeds to download and install the OS. After the download was complete, the installation took around 45 minutes on our aging Core 2 Duo laptop with 2GB of RAM.

Do beware that the Consumer Preview will eventually time out, and when the final version of Windows 8 is launched you won't be able to upgrade in place from the Consumer Preview. Microsoft has said it will provide migration tools to make the process of transferring data and settings easier than ever.

Doing it the Drupal Way

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 12 May 2012 18:51:00 +0530

Official homepage of the open source content management system

There are many different ways to build a website these days. When I first started in this business, you wrote HTML files directly onto a local web server and, if it all looked good, then uploaded these files to the live web server. Later, the introduction of scripting languages made the need for such a staging server all the greater. If your clients wanted their site altered, they'd tell you what to change - in electronic form if you were lucky, but more often via a phone call - and you'd have to implement these as soon as you could.

As websites became more strategically vital to businesses, it became desirable for them to be able to update their sites for themselves. But giving inexperienced users a copy of an authoring tool such as Dreamweaver was a recipe for disaster. Far better to offer a controlled means for users to enter their own content - menus automatically updated, images re-sized according to prior settings. Enter the content management system (CMS).

A CMS is a combination of a database that holds all the content, and an engine that generates visible web pages from it according to pre-established settings. The most popular CMSes were invented by the open source community, using PHP and MySQL. Some people criticize this way of building websites as a "sausage machine", where you turn the handle and out comes yet another unremarkable website. In some cases this may be true, but it doesn't have to be. For sites with a lot of fast-changing content it's the best solution, as it would be impossible for a small group to maintain such sites without the help of a CMS back-end.

Almost all of the larger ISPs nowadays offer build-your-own-website packages based around customized CMSes, and offer hosting of various CMSes that can be installed with a single click. The route to getting started is easy, but as with most things technological, this is just where the fun starts. Most of my work involves building custom web applications using Microsoft technologies, but a while ago my company was asked to quote for a CMS for a new client, and we decided that this should become the new standard within our company for building all such sites. Accordingly, we put a lot of thought and testing into the task of deciding which CMS to adopt - our main criteria were performance, flexibility and ease of use for the end users when updating their own sites.

We spent some time looking at the .NET solutions available, and while Umbraco (http://umbraco.com) has its charms, there were problems between versions and the modules, and support via the forums seemed limited. On talking to our existing clients, they too were wary of using a CMS they hadn't heard of, and so we decided to take a longer, harder look at old favorites Joomla. Drupal and WordPress.

We had built sites with Joomla in the past, but discovered that clients found it confusing to use. WordPress is great for building blog-style sites, and while you can get it to do amazing things, we wanted a more basic framework to which we could add functionality depending on clients' needs. Performance was also an issue, and scouring the forums and blogs suggested that Drupal (http://drupal.org) was highly thought of in that respect. I'm sure many readers will have other equally justified views about this matter, and you could argue over it forever, much the way you argue over the best car to buy down the pub. Often, in the end, it comes down to "gut feeling": if you like a product yourself, then it's going to be far easier to sell it to your clients. I felt that Drupal's administrative front-end was clear and concise, and it didn't log me out every few minutes like some CMSes, which was a definite plus!

The major criticism of Drupal is its steep learning curve - it's a basic empty framework to which you have to add modules before it can do anything at all. By default, it doesn't even come with a Wysiwyg editor to enter content. Things like this can put off the casual user - it does mean, however, that you can choose your favorite editor and install that.

The time came for us to set up and test an installation of Drupal. Before you even start thinking about going live with a CMS, it's critical to have a local copy of it on which you can test modules and settings before exposing them to the public. Rather than going through the whole process of configuring web servers, databases and server scripting languages, it made sense to use one of the pre-rolled configurations. As we were running a Windows desktop, the easiest way to do this was by employing the usually excellent Microsoft Web Platform Installer, or the free Microsoft WebMatrix. However, I said "usually excellent" because this time I couldn't get the Drupal package to work correctly on either of two machines, one of which had a fairly clean Windows installation.

Another reason for giving up on this way of configuring is that I've found, while you can run packages such as Drupal. WordPress and Joomla under Windows with IIS and Microsoft SQL. the level of support for the Microsoft route is considerably weaker than for Linux with Apache and MySQL. If. like us. you decide it's better to go down the Linux route, your hosting will also be cheaper.

When it comes to hosting your Drupal site, most web houses will use the hosting provided by their ISP rather than configure their own server, so the choice of OS isn't really an issue, but it does make sense to use the same OS on your development box as a live server to avoid any strange compatibility problems. The easiest way to get a local Linux box up and running on your Windows desktop is to use a virtual machine pre configured for that purpose.

I found the free BitNami range (http://bitnami.org/stacks) particularly useful in this respect, as it will run in the free VMware player (www.vmware.com/products/ player), providing a Linux machine preconfigured with MySQL and Drupal for you to get cracking with.

You'll need to do some basic editing of a few text files to get FTP access running, after which you can access and edit any other files via an FTP client such as FileZilla (http://filezilla-project.org)or Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus-plus.org). You'll need Notepad++ or similar rather than the Windows-supplied version of Notepad, because the latter won't handle the end-of-line breaks in Unix text files. The current version is Drupal 7, for which the module installation process has been made extremely easy. Via a web page, you point to a previously downloaded module archive file (http://drupal.org/project/modules), and once a module has installed, you can enable and configure it via the same web interface, with no cryptic command-line stuff, nor wrestling with Unix's Vi Text Editor. Version 7 also uses a different database schema from previous versions, so it's important you download the correct version of any modules.

I found the online help to be excellent, most of my questions being answered via the official Drupal site with little need to traipse through lesser forums. It would be dishonest, however, to say that this process was completely without its frustrations. My first site took about two weeks to get to a level that we were happy with, but then our next site - which had an e-commerce element - took only two days to get to a stage good enough to show the client.

As with many CMSes, Drupal's content is structured into content types, which are categories such as "articles", "stories", "blogs" and 'books", plus any of your own devising you wish to add. These types determine what can be entered by the client, and the basic format of how it will be displayed. Where a piece of content will get displayed on the site is controlled by "blocks": normally your content will be displayed in the "content" area, but you can have versions that display the same content in different formats on different areas. A "page" is known as a "node", and its look is decided by the blocks and content types.

The final appearance of the site is decided by a template. Menus are generated automatically, but can of course be customized. Before your clients can edit the content, they'll need to log in to the site, but one pet peeve of mine is having login forms on publicly visible web pages: if you're not allowing the public to log in, then why display a visible page to tempt them? Far better to reserve a URL that you can give only to your clients, and this is easy to achieve in Drupal.

When developing a non-CMS-based website, it's usual to work on the design first and then add content afterwards, but when using a CMS it's often better to add content and get familiar with the structure of the data that you'll need to work with, and only then add design features to it. Of course, it's a good idea to achieve a reasonable-looking design before showing it to the client, as otherwise all the feedback you'll get from them will be about cosmetic matters, such as the colors being wrong and so on. Getting clients to understand this often isn't easy, but coming up with a new design and all the tweaking that follows can be time-consuming.

One useful ploy is to use the rather excellent Artisteer program (www.artisteer.com), which features not merely a vast number of pre-made designs, but shows the effect of any changes you may make to them immediately in its preview. You can literally sit with your client and show them what their site will look like, complete with curved boxes, graduated fills or any other of hundreds of "tweaks" you can apply.

It would be foolish to suggest that Drupal provides the answer to all the problems of building websites - far from it - but once you get your head around its basic concepts, it really is quite easy to use. The latest version has laid many of the previous Unix-related frighteners to rest.