Is Microsoft Acrylic really a Photoshop killer

Microsoft launched a preview version of an illustration and graphic design tool codenamed Acrylic, and is offering it as a free download. Microsoft intends to offer Acrylic as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop, likely at a lower cost. Or does Microsoft plan to offer Acrylic for free as they did with Microsoft Photostory.

According to Publish, Acrylic Has Its Strengths, But It Won’t Threaten Photoshop.

As it turns out, Acrylic isn’t likely to endanger Adobe Photoshop (or more to the point, Adobe Illustrator) any time soon - nor does that seem to be its aim. But the program does have some unique and appealing strengths that make it worth a look.

Acrylic is actually an updated version of Expression, the vector drawing program that Microsoft acquired when it bought the Hong Kong-based company Creature House in 2003. Expression’s core strength lies in its “skeletal strokes” technology, which applies the look and texture of real-world painted strokes to editable vector paths.

Screenshot of Microsoft Acrylic Interface

Read the full story Microsoft’s Acrylic Beta

Update August 2005: Microsoft is ramping up efforts to take on rival Adobe by relesing on Monday a second beta of Acrylic, a program intended to ease the process of creating graphics for Web pages. Microsoft initially released a preview of Acrylic in June, and since that time the application has been downloaded close to 200,000 times. The updated pre-release of Acrylic will also have the capability to export designs into Extensible Application Markup Language, or XAML, the new format that will enable developers to take advantage of Windows Vista’s new graphics engine known as Avalon.

Pricing for Acrylic has not yet been announced, but Microsoft representatives have said it would be competitive with other graphics design programs of its type. No date has been set for a final release.

Download Microsoft Acrylic Community Technology Preview (CTP).

Google Blogger adds one feature, breaks another

Google recently added Blogger Images that allows you to upload up to 300mb of images.

In order to provide the image layout options, Google added an HTML code to wrap all posts in a

tag.

This update changed the formatting of my blog and the Google Ads no longer blend with the text. This is when I din’t even upload any images.

Google engineers reacted quickly and have introduced a new setting to suppress that markup.
How To Use The Setting

1. Sign in to your Blogger Dashboard
2. Click the “Change Settings” icon next to your blog
3. Click “Formatting” under the Settings tab
4. Choose “No” on “Enable float alignment”

Please note that suppressing the markup will result in layout problems when using left or right alignment for images. You should only change this setting if you are currently having trouble with normal posts.

For those who want to refrain from changing the above setting, Matt has posted a quick fix:

.Post div { clear: none !important; }

Simon Waddington adds: Thankfully the fix by Matt works great, just don’t try putting a comment above it.

Nathan points to another fix

Just add the following code in your template, right after the style tag:

#main #menu {
position: absolute;
right: 21px;
}

The WSJ Effect: Picture uploads in Blogger

Blogger was the last choice for The Wall Street Journal when it came to comparing Blogger vs MSN Spaces vs Yahoo 360.

Seems like Google was quick to react to the WSJ report. Atleast to some part of the report.

Now you can post pictures? in Blogger too.The image icon in the post editor’s toolbar will allow any users (with blogs on BlogSpot or published via FTP) to upload images to their blogs. Or, you can enter the URL of an image that is already online and have it inserted into your post.And something similar to Hello interface, you can choose the layout of the picture in the post (Or use CSS)

Blogger however did not update the Third Part add-ons page - There is no mention of the new Blogger Images service - Windows users can also post photos directly to their blogs with the Hello BloggerBot.

Blogger Images Storage allows you to upload up to 300mb of images.

How to be a blogger - A 101 Guide

TIME.com has a story So You Want To Be A Blogger?


It’s easy to create your own blog — a good-looking one, with text, photos and links to other sites—in a flash, no technical know-how required. One good, basic service is Blogger.com, which is owned by Google. Blogger will host your site and give you a set of powerful, easy-to-use publishing tools for free. A caveat: Your blog’s URL will end in blogspot.com unless you do an advanced setup. Another good bet is MSN Spaces, also free. Yahoo’s 360° is still in limited beta-testing mode (you need to be invited by a current user to try it), but it should be open to the public later this summer, according to the company. There’s also LiveJournal, which is popular with teens, and TypePad, which offers more advanced features for $5 to $15 per month, depending on level of service. (Both are owned by Six Apart, creators of Movable Type, a publishing platform for more serious users.)


If you regularly read several different blogs, consider using a newsreader such as Bloglines or Kinja. These services let you view content from multiple websites, putting it all in one place so you don’t have to surf around. (There are also newsreader applications that you can download to your desktop. Check out Pluck.)

Blogger Template inserting div clear tag in all my posts

Something strange is happening with my Blogger template.

All my post have a div clear:both tag at the beginning so that forces the body text to start after the Google Adsense block. The ad units no longer blend with the body text.

Did anyone else notice this ?

My Google Adsense earnings are bound to drop due to this. Looking for a CSS hack or workaround.

Think like Google - How Google works

How Google works covers Google hardware architecture , servers, what Google indexes , features and limitations, Google ranking principles and tips, Googleplex

This amazing guide has three simple steps to get a high Google Pagerank:

1. Server Speed: Your website pages must be downloaded nearly at the speed of light. Yes it is, Google gives more visibility to websites that are resident on fast servers.

2. Site Updating: Googlebot has the ability to check out WHEN your pages have been uploaded to the server. Here’s a simple hack - Upload all your pages everyday even if nothing has changed.

3. Lots of light HTML pages: Google adores simple websites with hundreds of pages. If you are building a page that (because of its extensive contents) is going to be larger than 50K , split it in two or three pages.

If you want to know something more about Google file system and architecture, read these PDFs:
The Google File System
The Google (cluster) Architecture

Read Google Ranking - the Definitive Guide by Googlerank: How Google works - overview and features

The Economist reveals some more interesting facts about Google.

When you perform a Google search, you are not actually searching the web, but rather an index of the copy of the web stored on Google’s servers. The index is compiled from all the pages that have been returned by a multitude of spiders that crawl the web, gathering pages, extracting all the links from each page, putting them in a list, sorting the links in the list in order of priority (thus balancing breadth and depth) and then gathering the next page from the list.

When a user types in a query, the search terms are looked up in the index (using a variety of techniques to distribute the work across tens of thousands of computers) and the results are then returned from a separate set of document servers (which provide preview “snippets” of matching pages from Google’s copies of the web), along with advertisements, which are returned from yet another set of servers. All of these bits are assembled, with the help of PageRank, into the page of search results. Google manages to do this cheaply, in less than a second, using computers built from cheap, off-the-shelf components and linked together in a reliable and speedy way using Google’s own clever software. Together, its thousands of machines form an enormous supercomputer, optimised to do one thing—find, sort and extract web-based information—extremely well.

Expressive Typography using Macromedia Flash

Expressive Typography points at some excellent websites that illustrate the limitless possibilities of experimental type in Macromedia Flash and bring typography to life. As these examples show, Expressive and Kinetic typography can convey moods, ideas and aesthetics with an interpretive potential that static type cannot thereby infusing a message with life.

The inspiration for this work undoubtedly came from Arabic Calligraphs where the poem or verse is a shaped picture of the poems content. Ni9e.com follows this tradition of typo-pictures with some excellent work grouped under Typographical Illustrations. Typedrawing is a unique drawing application that lets you draw with type. This Flash application is both fun and intuitive to use. You can add your own drawing to the database that contains some of the author’s favourite creations. Another interesting on-topic experiment is Typoscope where simple-yet-effective interactive kaleidoscopic patterns are generated using type. In a similar vein to Typedrawing is the playful Robotype which allows you to create anthropomorphic (and other) designs from typography using Univers, Bodoni, Future and Helvetica. Apollinaire would have loved both of these.

Keats at the excellent Storynest arranges the words ‘Here Lies one whose name was writ in water’ in a circular form. Mouse proximity effects the size of each of the letter, more importantly a center point (full-stop?) can be teased to effect the circle as if where behaving like water. Typorganism is a series communication experiments exploring computational interaction design and interactive kinetic typography based on the metaphor ‘Type is Lifeform’. ‘Dna’ recombines spheres on a nucleic spiral into letters when a key is hit. The ingenious ‘Weight’ interactively simulates the weighing of type with a set of scales.

Letters are not just glyphs for communication they are also real physical shapes that can be played with and animated to create complex semiotic experiences with extra layers of metaphor.

Microsoft writes a tutorial on Adobe Photoshop

Microsoft launched a preview version of an illustration and graphic design tool codenamed Acrylic, and is offering it as a free download.

It is quite evident that Microsoft Acrylic is aimed at grabbing the market share from Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator (Adobe CS2) and even Freehand that Adobe picked up when it acquired Macromedia. The move follows last month’s announcement of Microsoft Metro, a tool that threatens to compete with Adobe’s Acrobat and PDF format.

Microsoft Acrylic is able to both open and export to Adobe’s Photoshop PSD and Acrobat PDF formats, so it is clear that Microsoft intends to offer Acrylic as an alternative to Photoshop, likely at a lower cost. But what surprised me the most was this tutorial on Microsoft website - Actions automate repetitive Photoshop tasks. Here Microsoft explains in detail how to automate repetitive tasks through batch processes on a large number of images.

Why would a company write a tutorial on their main website about a competing product? Is Microsoft internally using Photoshop for all their designs ? This is a very recent tutorial though there is no mention of Adobe anywhere ? Looks like a copyright violation too.

Or does Microsoft plan to offer Acrylic for free as they did with Microsoft Photostory. Adobe is definitely not worried at the moment. Adobe’s Creative Suite 2, a bundle of its top design and publishing applications, showed strong sales in its first quarter of release and will likely gain momentum in the coming months as international versions ship, Smith Barney analyst Tom Berquist said in a research note.

Free Software Tools And Fonts CD

The Government of India is sending out Free Hindi software CD to anyone by post. Here are the contents of the Hindi CD:

Hindi Language True Type Fonts With Keyboard Driver
The data can be created in any Window applications i.e. on Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. The Keyboard Layouts could be Inscript, Phonetic or Typewriter type.

Hindi OCR
Scan Hindi Newspapers or Hindi magazines and convert hindi into editable text with this free Hindi OCR software. Any printed font format can be trained with this training module thus enhancing the accuracy of the product.

Text To Speech System for Hindi
Talk to your computer in Hindi. The computer can read the Hindi text for you. The basic requirement is for this to work you must have a sound card with speakers.

Hindi Language Spell Checker
Spell check Hindi data entered in MS Word through GIST TT typing tool.

Dictionary English-Hindi
Find hindi words with this powerful English-Hindi dictionary.

Translation Support System For English-Hindi
This provides online translations for English sentences to Hindi.

Hindi Text Corpora
The copyright free books in Hindi have been made available as a download having text in UNICODE format. This can be used by developers and language learners.

Hindi Language Multifont Keyboard Engine For True Type Fonts
Enables the user to create Hindi data in various true type fonts provided by different vendors. Appropriate selection of engine and fonts from the same GUI of Multifont engine is the key to this tool.

Firefox - Browser In Hindi
Firefox empowers you to browse faster, more safely and more efficiently than with any other browser and plus now the menus are in Hindi.

Gaim - Instant Messenger In Hindi
This is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, GroupWise Messenger, and Zephyr networks.

Aasaan Hindi Typing Tutor For Hindi & English
Free software to quickly learn touch typing in Hindi. Depending upon your speed, you can move to advanced lessons and be a master of touch typing within a shot period of time. Choose between English and Hindi mode of typing.

Integrated Word Processor
Unicode based editing facility, Typing support in Inscript Keyboard Layout

Hindi Language Transliteration Tool
This is a transliteration tool for English to Indian languages for Openoffice.org Writer. Currently, it supports transliterations from English to six Indian languages namely Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Gujarati. Transliteration is a process, in which the user actually types in a language which he is used to (English in our case) but the words will be of target language (Hindi, Tamil etc).

Download Indian Fonts, Typing Tutor, Language Translation software

Get a free software tools and fonts CD

The Indian Government is distributing a free software tools and fonts in Hindi to boost the use of information technology in India among masses particularly the rural people.

The Government has invited applications on www.ildc.gov.in and intends mailing them CDs containing compilation of several Hindi fonts and tools free. The contents of the free CD will include Hindi language true type fonts with keyboard driver, Hindi Language Unicode Compliant Open Type Fonts, generic fonts code and storage code converter for Hindi, Hindi language version of Bharateeya OO, Firefox Browser in Hindi, Multi Protocol Messenger in Hindi, Email Client in Hindi among others.

Microsoft already sells a version of its Office suite in India, called Microsoft Office Hindi, that supports nine Indian languages. The Hindi version of Windows XP Starter Edition is a stripped down, low cost version of Windows XP that is being piloted in emerging markets such as Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. Microsoft Office 2003 supports Indian languages in localized version, and you can also get proofing tools for Hindi, English, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu.

The other contains include Aasaan Typing Tutor for Hindi and English, Integrated Word Processor, Dictionary English-Hindi, Hindi Language Spell Checker, Hindi Language Transliteration tool, Hindi Language Text to Speech System, Translation support system from English to Hindi through the website and Hindi language Corpora over the website.

Download Page for free software tools and hindi fonts.
Register to receive the Free CD by email.

Useful links for Hindi Software, Hindi Fonts and other Indian Scripts

1. BhashaIndia.com - Microsoft Indian Language Development Portal

2. Devanagari Wiki - From the Wikipedia

3. Convert English to Hindi - online service

4. Indiapress - Hindi website

Updated August, 2005: I received the Hindi Software Tools CD by post today and was impressed with the work done by CDAC and other contributors. Following are the contents of the free Hindi Fonts CD.

Hindi Language True Type Fonts With Keyboard Driver
The data can be created in any Window applications i.e. on Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. The Keyboard Layouts could be Inscript, Phonetic or Typewriter type.

Hindi Language Multifont Keyboard Engine For True Type Fonts
Enables the user to create Hindi data in various true type fonts provided by different vendors. Appropriate selection of engine and fonts from the same GUI of Multifont engine is the key to this tool.

Hindi Language Unicode Compliant Open Type Fonts
GIST-DVOT range of OT font is for Devanagari script. The glyph set of this font have been optimized to get the best performance. The fonts are aesthetically developed specially for the purpose of content creation and display. The readability of the font is greatly enhanced due to the uniformity of the shapes of the glyphs of the font. The font is embeddable which means that static web content can be developed using this font and displayed in a browser without any download.

Hindi Language Unicode Compliant Keyboard Driver
Enables the user to create content in Hindi. It supports INSCRIPT, Phonetic and Typewriter keyboard layouts. The data can be created in any UNICODE based Windows application which supports different font’s e.g. MS Office XP. Data can be created on Win2000/WinXP OS etc

Generic Fonts Code And Storage Code Converter For Hindi
To convert data from one font code to another. It converts text files as well as database files. It also converts old data prepared in GIST Card/GIST Shell to Windows format. The user need not have parent software (old data format) to convert to target software (new data format)

Hindi Language Version Of Bharateeya Oo.o (open Source)
BharateeyaOO - Open Office in Indian languages - BharateeyaOO is a Unicode based office suite in Indian Languages which can be used across all major platforms. It provides rich support to a number of natural Indian languages as well as any International languages. The BharateeyaOO.o project is an initiative to bring OpenOffice.org to India in Indian languages

Firefox - Browser In Hindi
Firefox empowers you to browse faster, more safely and more efficiently than with any other browser and plus now the menus are in Hindi.

Gaim - Instant Messenger In Hindi
This is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, GroupWise Messenger, and Zephyr networks.

Columba - Email Client In Hindi
A powerful Email Client to compose, send and receive messages in Hindi.

Hindi OCR
Scan Hindi Newspapers or Hindi magazines and convert hindi into editable text with this free Hindi OCR software. Any printed font format can be trained with this training module thus enhancing the accuracy of the product.

Aasaan Hindi Typing Tutor For Hindi & English
Free software to quickly learn touch typing in Hindi. Depending upon your speed, you can move to advanced lessons and be a master of touch typing within a shot period of time. Choose between English and Hindi mode of typing.

Integrated Word Processor
Unicode based editing facility, Typing support in Inscript Keyboard Layout

Hindi Language Spell Checker
Spell check Hindi data entered in MS Word through GIST TT typing tool.

Dictionary English-Hindi
Find hindi words with this powerful English-Hindi dictionary.

Hindi Language Transliteration Tool
This is a transliteration tool for English to Indian languages for Openoffice.org Writer. Currently, it supports transliterations from English to six Indian languages namely Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Gujarati. Transliteration is a process, in which the user actually types in a language which he is used to (English in our case) but the words will be of target language (Hindi, Tamil etc).

Text To Speech System for Hindi
Talk to your computer in Hindi. The computer can read the Hindi text for you. The basic requirement is for this to work you must have a sound card with speakers.

Translation Support System For English-Hindi
This provides online translations for English sentences to Hindi.

Hindi Text Corpora
The copyright free books in Hindi have been made available as a download having text in UNICODE format. This can be used by developers and language learners.

Google Dadsense

As it always happens, Google folks have a new logo to celebrate Father’s Day.

In 1910, Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington, organizes the first Father’s Day celebration on June 19, her own father’s birthday. The mayor of Spokane and the governor of Washington state officially support the event. Dodd’s father, a farmer and Civil War veteran, had been a single father to six young children after the death of his wife. And in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge publicly supports plans for a national Father’s Day.

Get more information on Google Logos and meet the brain behind these amazing designs. They never cease to amaze me.

Be sure to read the Google Permission’s page before using any of the Google stickers.

Favorite Google AdSense Tips

Answers.com writes about AdSense, an advertising program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text and image advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on a per-click basis. Google utilizes its search technology to serve ads based on website content, the user’s geographical location, and other factors.

It currently uses JavaScript code to incorporate the advertisements into a participating site. If it is included on a site which has not yet been crawled by the Googlebot, it will temporarily display advertisements for charitable causes.

That are the Adsense basics. Eric Giguere offers very effective Google AdSense Tips.

1. If you’re wondering about something, don’t be afraid to ask Google Adsense Support. Their responses are always very polite, and they appreciate getting problem reports and suggestions.

There are two email addresses to use, depending on the type of question:
adsense-tech@google.com: for additional technical questions or concerns.
adsense-support@google.com: for general program or account questions

2. Then there is an online free tool to check your keyword density. Although Google doesn’t release exact details as to how they determine the ads to serve on a given page, they do tell us that it’s the text content of the page that matters, not the meta tags. Before serving ads on a page, then, you might want to check its keyword density.

http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html - This lets you fine-tune the page before exposing it to the AdSense crawler.

MasterCard Credit Card holders at little risk

MasterCard International reported yesterday that more than 40 million credit card accounts of all brands might have been exposed to fraud through a computer security breach at a payment processing company, perhaps the largest case of stolen consumer data to date.


MasterCard said its analysts and law enforcement officials had identified a pattern of fraudulent charges that were traced to an intrusion at CardSystems Solutions of Tucson, Ariz., which processes more than $15 billion in payments for small to midsize merchants and financial institutions each year.


About 20 million Visa and 13.9 million MasterCard accounts were compromised; the other accounts belonged to American Express or Discover cardholders. The accounts affected included credit cards and certain kinds of debit cards. The F.B.I. said it was investigating.


A MasterCard spokeswoman, Sharon Gamsin, said an infiltrator had managed to place a computer code or script on the CardSystems network that made it possible to extract information. She would not elaborate on how long the breach might have lasted, on when the inquiry began or on whether any infiltrators had been identified. She did say that the breach occurred this year.


MasterCard said other personal data that might contribute to identity theft, like Social Security numbers and dates of birth, was not stored on its cards and therefore not at risk. And it said credit card holders would not be liable for any fraudulent charges to their accounts.


Read full story - MasterCard Says 40 Million Files Put at Risk

Microsoft Challenge - Hack me if you can

Microsoft recently invited hackers to descend upon Redmond for a chance to exploit Windows code openly. The event was billed as “Blue Hat” in reference to the popular Black Hat conferences that provide a public forum for security professionals and the hacking community to interface.


The two-day Microsoft affair was another step toward Bill Gates' claim that Microsoft will create more secure products. Currently, the software giant estimates a third of its research budget — US$2 billion dollars — is spent annually on security-related matters.


However, not all security professionals think the strategy of meeting with hackers will be effective for the company. “I see all these things as somewhat sad attempts to pander to the media’s love of hacking, and a bit of wishful thinking along the lines of ‘maybe if we’re nice to the hackers they’ll be nice to us in return,’” is how Marcus Ranum, chief security officer of Tenable Network Security and inventor of the proxy firewall, described the event. [Via]


The engineers realized that hackers are no longer geeky teenagers with nothing better to do, but educated and seasoned technology professionals just like themselves. Likewise, security researchers gained a better perspective of the processes Microsoft engineers must go through when faced with vulnerabilities divulged by the hacking community.

The new icons of Adobe Creative Suite 2

In Adobe CS2 Iconography, Stanley analysis the new look of icons in Adobe CS2.


The release of Adobe CS a little over a year ago introduced a set of unified & nature-inspired icons designed by MetaDesign. It was quite a shift from the traditional Photoshop “eye” and the Illustrator “Venus” motif.


One of the biggest changes is the new starfish icon of GoLive CS2. While the original star icon didn’t fit into the overall “small objects of nature” CS theme, the new GoLive CS2 icon is a nice subtle shift. It unifies with the rest of the suite without completely throwing away the previous look. Bravo.


Another change are the new color schemes. When the original Adobe CS was released, not only did the traditional icons change, but the color schemes for icons and their respective document file icons changed as well. Suddenly Photoshop CS PSD files where green and Illustrator CS AI files were pink. The new CS2 sees a return to the old colors. Photoshop CS2 to blue (well, a mix of green and blue) and Illustrator CS2 to orange/peach. Everything old is new again.

Camtasia Studio 3.0 - Screencasting Swiss Knife

Camtasia Studio 3 is one the most popular Screencasting tools developed by TechSmith. I personally use the wonderful Camtasia Studio with Snagit all the time for my website and presentations.

Camtasia Studio can help you record and edit videos of screen activity in all multimedia formats and enhance the captured material with special effects, narration and a variety of multimedia features. With Camtasia Studio, you can teach and demonstrate complex ideas and subtle points visually, rather than through words alone with exact video renderings of desktop activity. Stream videos live or distribute by CD-ROM and from the Web.

Camtasia is very popular tool for creating screencast. Even Jon Udell, the lead analyst for the InfoWorld Test Center prefers Camtasia over Qarbon Viewletbuilder and Macromedia Captivate.

Techsmith is now positioning the tool as a Flash Printer for converting CAD Drawings, Photographs to smaller Flash SWF files. The most amazing new features in the upcoming version :

Picture-in-Picture (aka PiP): You can now record the presentation and the presenter. Camtasia now captures video from your video camera and synchronizes it with your screen recording. Now it’s easier than ever to deliver training and presentations with a personal touch.

Titling: Give your videos a common look and feel with Titles. Title graphics and text can be inserted to introduce your videos or to add credits to their endings.

The best screencasting software is just getting better. Other new features include quizzing, smaller Flash files, and one month of free web hosting for your videos. If you buy Camtasia Studio 2.1 today, you will get a free upgrade to 3.0 when it’s released.

Techsmith has released a free update to Camtasia Studio 3.0.1 which is available for free.

What’s new in Camtasia Studio 3.0.1 - Changed the IDs of the PowerPoint buttons so that they don’t conflict with the IDs used by the Macromedia Breeze Add-in for PowerPoint.

Compare your version of Camtasia Studio with the latest Camtasia 3.0.1

Techsmith provides a casestudy for converting PowerPoint Live presentations to flash with Camtasia Studio used by Stanford University Professor Carrye.

Thom Robbins tells us that Microsoft Channel 9 team members also use Camtasia Studio for creating screencasts.

Download patches for Adobe Acrobat 7.0 and Adobe Reader 7.0

The Adobe Reader 7.0.2 and Adobe Acrobat 7.02 update addresses several known issues in Adobe PDF software. This update provides improved security. It also addresses known issues associated with forms and viewing PDF files using a Weblink plug-in. For more information, read the Adobe security advisories.

The hole in the Adobe products, referred to as an XML External Entity vulnerability, under certain circumstances allows XML scripts to be used to discover a user’s local files. If an XML script is embedded in JavaScript, it is possible to discover the existence of local files. An attacker could then maliciously use the gathered information. Still it won’t be that simple to crack unpatched Acrobat software - the local files can be found only if the attacker knows the complete file names and paths in advance of such an attack.

The vulnerability impacts Acrobat and Reader running on Windows and Mac platforms. Adobe Reader and Acrobat for Windows users can download the updates - Adobe Acrobat 7.0 [exe].

The company said it will release an update for the Mac OS versions shortly. Until the Mac patch is available, Adobe advises end-users to disable any Acrobat JavaScript. This should protect systems from the vulnerability. [Via | Via]

Related Stories:
  An Adobe Killer from Microsoft
  Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Review

Blogger vs MSN Spaces vs Yahoo 360

WSJ.com compares the most popular free blog-creation services in terms of publishing text entries, or “posting” as it is called in blog land; adding photos; publishing links to other Web pages on our blogs; providing privacy online and also the overall style and formatting options provided on each site.

The verdict: Microsoft’s MSN Spaces did the best job of performing these tasks in a way that was organized and self-explanatory. Yahoo 360 was almost as easy, but it tries to tie in the use of too many other Yahoo services. Blogger.com has a long way to go until it becomes as easy to use as the others.

The author comes down heavily on Blogger.com due to the following reasons:

1. Editing photos: ..to add a photo to go with her post .. download a separate program called Hello from Picasa, a photo service that, like Blogger, is owned by Google.
2. Requires HTML knowledge: ..instead of offering a place for entering lists of URLs on your blog, you must instead follow directions to enter HTML code in the blog’s Template section.
3. No Privacy: all of Blogger’s blogs are public, without any way to set restrictions on who can or can’t see your blog.

I do agree that posting photographs in Blogger posts is a bit tedious but with a service like Flickr, you can just send an email to Flickr with an image attachment and that email automatically translates into a blog post with captions and a body.

Blogger is the only service that support Universal XML-RPC Weblog Interface that allows third party clients like w.bloggar to add/edit/delete posts.

Blogger gives you complete control over the look n’ feel. You can use the available blogger templates or write them from scratch. The only limit is your imagination. Imagine your Adsense CTR if the GoogleAds are not blended with the text. And this flexibility only comes with Blogger.

Privacy.. Do you really want it ? Add robots meta tag and search engines will dare not visit your site. Don’t ping and nobody will ever discover you.

But Blogger is painfully slow and even Alexa statistics support my statement.
Site Stats for blogger.com: Speed: Slow (61% of sites are faster), Avg Load Time: 2.3 Seconds

Cheap International Phone Calls

Talk anywhere across the world at local call rates, All you need is a Internet line to get started - Steve writes about making a crystal-clear Internet call using Skype’s slick software in PCWorld.com:

With all the talk about Internet calling services like Vonage and AT&T’s CallVantage, you might have overlooked my favorite option, Skype, which has been around for a couple of years. Using Skype is much like using instant messaging. (In fact, IM features are built in.) Click a name in your contact list, and your PC rings your contact’s phone. Once that person picks up, start blabbing. It’s free to call anybody, anywhere, who has Skype installed. You and your friend will need a broadband connection for Skype to work well.

Skype has lots more going for it, too: The program is incredibly easy to set up and use, the sound quality is great, and unlike with Vonage there are no monthly fees. In fact, in the United States, you avoid all taxes and pesky regulatory fees. And for a small charge, you can obtain various landline-like features from Skype. For example, SkypeOut allows you to call any landline or cell phone. You pay only about 2.5 cents a minute for SkypeOut calls. I spent 12 cents using SkypeOut to arrange for a hotel reservation in Buenos Aires. SkypeOut’s rates are on a par with those of other VoIP and landline services.

There are some cool things to do with Skype. Another service called Skypeout lets you make calls to old-fashioned phone numbers all around the world. Landlines, mobile phones… it works with almost all of them. SkypeOut is not free but it is pretty cheap, actually. Or link up to five folks in a conference call. (Click Tools, Create a Conference.) To add more, have participants invite people. Did you know that you can use Skype with the same telephone you use for regular telephone calls? For more tips, see Michael Gough’s Skype Tips page. Download Skype and start calling for free all over the world.

Microsoft Windows XP Power Tips

Making Windows XP Start Faster - This latest story on PCMag has tips from Windows XP Speed Solutions offering step-by-step guidance for making Windows XP run like a Tiger.


I list the Windows XP registry tweaks that really worked wonders for me. Make backup of the registry if you are a novice.


Disabling Recent Documents History - Windows XP includes a feature that keeps track of all recent documents you have opened or used. The idea is that you can select Start/Recent Documents History and quickly reopen any document you have recently used. I use many documents each day and never use the feature myself. In my opinion, I can keep up with what I want to use without Windows XP doing it for me.


The bad thing about Recent Documents History is that Windows XP has to calculate what should be put there each time you boot Windows, which can slow things down. So, if you never use the Recent Documents History, it’s a good idea to disable it. Here’s how:


1. Open the Registry Editor (select Start/Run, type regedit, and click OK).

2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer.

3. Create a NoRecentDocsHistory D_WORD key. Double-click the value to open it once it is created.

4. Set the Data Value to 1 to enable the restriction.

5. Click OK and close the Registry Editor. You’ll need to restart the computer for the change to take effect.


Reducing the Wait Time - When you start to shut down Windows XP, it has to quit, or “kill,” any live applications or processes that are currently running. So close all applications first. However, some applications and processes are always running in the background. You can reduce the amount of time that Windows XP waits for those applications and processes to close before Windows XP kills them. Edit three different Registry settings to change this:


1. Open the Registry Editor.

2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop. Select WaitToKillAppTimeout and set the value to 1000.

3. Select the HungAppTimeout value and set it to 1000 as well.

4. Navigate to HKEY_USERS.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop. Set the WaitToKillAppTimeout and set the value to 1000. Select the HungAppTimeout \newline value and set it to 1000 as well.

5. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control. Select the WaitToKillServiceTimeout value and set it to 1000.

6. Close the Registry Editor.


Automatically Killing Tasks on Shutdown - You know the drill. You start to shut down the computer, you wait a few moments, and then you see a dialog box asking if you want to kill an application or service that is running. Instead of prompting you, you can make Windows XP take care of the kill task automatically. Here’s how:


1. Open the Registry Editor.

2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop.

3. Highlight the value AutoEndTasks and change the value to 1.

4. Close the Registry Editor.

How does Microsoft Metro compare with Adobe PDF

The new Metro Document Format (MDF) from Microsoft is expected to become available at around the same time Windows Longhorn is released. Metro appears to rival Adobe’s PostScript and PDF (portable document format) technologies.


Metro is a new document file format, similar in many ways to PDF. It’s also a spool format. When you print on a Windows or a Mac computer, the print system has a format that it uses to communicate the data through the print subsystem and spool it to the device. And it’s also a page description language, similar to PCL PostScript, that can be used to transmit that information all the way down to a printer, where it turns into the data that comes out on a piece of paper. And Metro is very tightly related to this thing called WinFX.


In an interview to PDFzone, Adrian Ford, explains how Metro differs from PDF and what are the similarities in the two formats.


How is Metro similar to PDF?

Like PDF, you can have a Metro document that sits on disk and that you share with other people and e-mail around, and that document contains all the graphical data and resources and images and fonts and everything else, and supports compression in an efficient container, and people can view that document in a viewer that isn’t related to content creation applications. In that sense the format does have similar characteristics with PDF.


Also, if you look at the specifications for PDF and for Metro they have similar functionalities defined within them.


How does Metro differ from PDF?

One of the key things about Metro is the use of it within the print subsystem on Windows. There are number of issues and limitations you have to face printing on Windows. The application developers or printer-driver developers have to work extremely hard to make those things work and to bypass these limitations in the print subsystem.


Today you could have an application that understands RGB wide-gamut photo printing, but the application can’t send that data through the print subsystem to a printer because that extra information gets lost. So today you often get software that bypasses the print subsystem, and you can’t go file to print nice pictures on your Epson printer. There are a number of real issues that Metro solves on the print side that PDF doesn’t solve.

Work from Home for Google through the Internet

Are you looking for a work at home job at Google where you can work without commuting through the Internet? Well, if you a computer with high speed internet connection, you can work for Google from your home.

Google, the company best know for the web search engine, is hiring temporary workers around the world to help the company refine search results as it competes with Yahoo! and Microsoft’s MSN for users.

Work from Home for Google

Google is looking for ”quality raters” who will work from home or any remote location and will help Google with evaluation of search quality results. The temporary workers, who will rate the quality of search results in different countries, will supplement Google’s computerized Web ”crawlers.”

The most basic requirement for applying to these part-time jobs: Participants must have a high speed internet connection. In addition, Candidates must be web-savvy and analytical, have excellent web research skills and a broad range of interests.

Update: Google is no longer hiring international workers but they have telecommuting jobs for people based in US and Canada. The position is still called “Quality Raters” but here you will be responsible for the quality of Google Ads that appear on search results and the not the quality of actual search results.

According to an exiting Quality Rater who works from home for Google, the pay for just jobs is roughly $15 per hour but the work is easy, hours flexible, and it’s pretty interesting. When you join this position at Google, you will not be a Google employee but part of WorkforceLogic assigned to a project at Google for a maximum period of 9 months. This means WorkforceLogic will manage your employment and they are the ones who will issue you a weekly paycheck.

Qarbon Viewletbuilder: Imagine the power of screenshots

In the next few days, I shall be reviewing Screencasting software. This is part I of the series where I present my first hand experience of Qarbon Viewletbuilder.

Qarbon Viewletbuilder is a software for creating software demos (Screencast), online courses (e-learning) and sophisticated SCORM compliant instructional material without requiring any knowledge of complex Macromedia Flash authoring environment. So even non-technical managers can create tutorials and demos quickly and easily.

ViewletBuilder’s authoring mechanism allows users to take snapshots of the screen while recording the demo. Each screen capture is accompanied with a camera shutter sound and is represented as a slide in a timeline (similar to Powerpoint program). Here you give finishing touches to the slides and then compile them to produce an engaging and interactive Flash simulation.

Since compiled viewlets are Macromedia Flash files, all the benifits of SWF files are inherently present in Viewlets like streaming, greater accessibility, easily distributable, small file size, better audio integration and compatible with even PDA’s and Pocket PC’s.

You can use ViewletCam in combination with Viewletbuilder to create dynamic content with full-motion video recording from your PC screen. While ViewletBuilder’s patented screen capture method works like a digital camera, ViewletCam’s recording process works like a digital camcorder.

Viewlets are not just limited to software simulations or software tutorials. You can find a million other uses:

1. A Macromedia Breeze alternative - You can use Viewletcam to record your powerpoint presentations with mouse movements and voice narration, save it to a flash .swf file and stream it on the web or local intranet.

2. Your very personal Flickr badge - Create a slideshow of your family pictures and embed the flash file on your weblog page.

3. Keep track of your child’s internet surfing habits - Keep running Viewletcam in the background in Record Mode and then create a movie of your children online activities.

4. Your manual System Restore utility - If you are planning to make some major changes to your Registry or your PC audio settings, record your actions - Incase some disaster happens, you can just replay the movie and undo the steps.

5. Real estate agents can use Viewlets to provide a virtual “walk-through” of a home (professional-looking virtual home tours) for prospective buyers.

See related story: Screencasting to help your mom.

Qarbon offers the full version of ViewletBuilder for 30 days, but the viewlets created in the Trial version will have a superimposed watermark until you pay for the licensed version, which will remove them. Qarbon has an impressive list of customers including ADP, JCPenny, Sun, Oracle, Sony, Alias and UPS.

And Qarbon knows how easy it to use Viewletbuilder, they don’t ship any local help file with the software - And believe me, you won’t ever need it - the Viewlet authoring tool is that simple to use and exciting to work with.

The Viewletbuilder application is written in Java so the program runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris and now it’s also available on the Mac OSX.

Download Viewlet Builder at: http://www.qarbon.com/download/index.html (Current Version: ViewletBuilder 4.4.4, ViewletCam 1.7)

Frontpages of all international newspapers on one page

What were the headlines in the international newspapers on September 12, 2001?


Newseum - The Interactive Museum of News can help you view the front pages of all the newspapers on that day. - The pages are presented as image screenshots (jpg) and can also be download as PDF files which can be viewed using free Acrobat reader.


Newseum allows you to read today’s headlinesfrom more than 300 U.S. and international newspaper front pages. The newspaper screenshots can be viewed as a interactive Flash map or sorted by regions of the world.


The front page thumbnails on the main screen are in alphabetical order by U.S. state, with newspapers displayed alphabetically by name within each U.S. state. Immediately after the papers from individual states are national U.S. papers, such as USA TODAY and The Wall Street Journal. Following that are international papers, in alphabetical order by country, with papers arranged alphabetically within each country. Make sure that pop-up are enabled in your web browser.


Reminds me of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine from Archive.org that allows people to visit archived versions of Web sites. Visitors to the Wayback Machine can type in a URL, select a date range, and then begin surfing on an archived version of the Web. Imagine surfing circa 1999 and looking at all the Y2K hype, or revisiting an older version of your favorite Web site. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine can make all of this possible.

Should I buy a laptop or a desktop

Microsoft will help you decide what type of computer would best suit your family’s needs.


Factor in the price:

Desktop computers are less expensive than laptop computers. For example, Dell has desktop PCs that begin at about $399, compared to its cheapest laptop at $599. The price difference is because a laptop’s components are much smaller, usually more expensive to manufacture, and more time-consuming to build into the final product.


Computer buyers on a budget should opt for an Intel Celeron processor, available for both desktop and laptop PCs. These CPUs take longer to process instructions, which results in slower performance than Pentium 4 chips, but are just fine for most tasks including e-mail, word processing, Web surfing, and using home finance and educational software.


Compare size vs. portability:

Desktop computers usually come with a vertical chassis, referred to as a tower, which typically sits on the floor under a desk. A monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers are all attached to the tower separately.


Laptop computers, on the other hand, are small, battery-powered, lightweight (usually between five and seven pounds) and ideal for those who require portability, such as businesspeople who travel or university students who could then easily move from a dorm room to a library to a lecture hall to a café. With a DVD player, laptops can also be used as portable entertainment systems.


Evaluate upgradeability and repair options:

Components in a desktop computer are easier to upgrade than those in a laptop. Repairing a desktop PC is also a lot simpler.

Windox XP error - Cannot delete file

You try to delete the file, Windows waits a few seconds before announcing that access is denied, the file is currently in use and cannot be deleted. File access denied ? File in use error Or Cannot delete file or folder even after system reboot ? Even if you boot into safe mode and try to delete the file or folder, XP throws the same problem..

If you are running Microsoft Windows XP, you would have faced a problem that at certain times, a file (like .exe, .doc) cannot be deleted because the file is in “use”. When you try to delete a file, Windows may complain: “Cannot delete file: It is being used by another person or program. Close any programs that might be using the file and try again.”

You have several alternatives to fix this “cannot delete” problem and all are free to download.

1. Unlocker - Unlocker is an explorer extension that allows you with a simple right-click of the mouse on a file or folder to get rid of error message such as error deleting file or folder, cannot delete folder: it is used by another person or program. Download Unlocker.

2: TotalCMD from ghisler.com or totalcmd.net if you have need of a Norton Utilities type of program.

3: Dwnload and install HijackThis spywareinfo.com which is an amazing little utility that is free and very useful. To use it to delete your file just execute and select the Config button at the lower right, then select the Misc tab at the top and then Delete a file on reboot, then you are asked for the location and name of the file, just browse your way to it or them and your done. Now when you reboot the file is gone

Helps delete locked files with error messages like:

- Cannot delete file: Access is denied
- There has been a sharing violation.
- The source or destination file may be in use.
- The file is in use by another program or user.
- Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.

Running Windows XP with NTFS file system, I one day noticed that a .exe file on the desktop (C: drive) could not be deleted. (With this exception, Windows seems to work just fine.)

Take Command over the web

YubNub is a command-line for the web. After setting it up on your browser, you simply type “gim porsche 911” to do a Google Image Search for pictures of Porsche 911 sports cars. Type “random 49” to return random numbers between 1 and 49, courtesy of random.org. And best of all, you can make a new command by giving YubNub an appropriate URL.


Jonathan Aquino writes on why he designed YubNub: On a practical note, I was tired of setting up the same Firefox keywords on each of the 5 computers that I use. By putting my keywords into YubNub, I can hit “am mark twain” for an Amazon search, or “gmap vancouver” for a Google Maps search, no matter which computer I’m on.


The beauty of YubNub is that anyone can help to extend it. If there is an existing web service with a submit form, they can add it pretty easily (like I did with the Amazon example above). But even more interesting is the adding of complex data-processing services (like validating an RSS feed, or converting webpages to audio using text-to-speech).


This will really come into play when I implement pipes (e.g. “google jon udell | to_rss | xargs text_to_speech”). Now that is going to rock! And I don’t have to be the one to make these commands — anyone in the world can create the code for to_rss, xargs, and text_to_speech, hosting it on their server. YubNub is just the glue that enables these pieces to interact.

Great Titles for your web articles

Robin Good’s article How To Write Great Titles And Headlines For The Web is definitely the best resource for writing eye-catching titles that also increase the search engine ranking of your blog posts.


1. Make an effort to keep your title short. - Three to six words is the ideal length, and at around ten the maximum limit. Major search engines give high relevance only to the first set of words you use in the title, and they display only up to 8-10 words in their search engine result pages (Google and MSN; Yahoo displays up to 16 words).


2. Do not try to make the title “smart”, by using irony, word play or other “journalistic” approach. - On the Internet, headlines are often displayed out of context. The reader is searching for your content and will only get to it, if a most appropriate, serious and well thought out label is attached to it. On the web, readers often don’t get the chance of applying background understanding to the interpretation of the titles they are presented with.


3. Proper names, products, brands and services names go last. In general, leave product names in the end of the title as people who are searching for products or services by name will often want to go to the original manufacturer web site. If on the other hand you are providing review, analysis or commentary on specific products, people, organizations, you may want to associate qualifying keywords in front of the product name (e.g.: Issues and problem with Skype; Alternative tools to Microsoft Word, etc.).


What is best way to test if your title is effective ? Take the Google test n°

Verify if AdSense ads (those text ads displayed on the right side column of Google page results) do appear. If they do appear and are of great relevance to the topic you are covering, then you have written a good one. If Google ads don’t appear it may mean that your title is OK, but it is either too specific, long, not clearly expressing a specific topic/theme. Or it simply means that you have done a bad job of it. It’s hard to say. What you want rather to avoid, is the view of Google ads coming up but with content clearly not relevant to your topic/theme. That is clearly a sign not to go with the selected title, as it maybe ambiguous, badly worded or interpreted in completely other ways from what the ones you had intended to.”


And most important: You can never get a great title down in one shot. Please realize this. You need to allow time and refinement in your title writing process as the title matures with your better understanding of it. Write it down right away, however bad it is and let it sit. Then keep writing your article and from time to time get back to it. Edit it and improve it. Try out new solutions. Experiment with it and test the new combinations in the search engines. At one point your title will automatically emerge from your investigation as only so very few can stand the matching with the criteria I have given you above.

Desktop Screen Recorder Software for Geeks

Dan Miser has just discovered a very brilliant use of Camtasia - he uses Camtasia for Debugging:


During conversion of our application suite to Delphi 2005, I ran into a very irritating bug where a form was flashing extremely quickly during application startup. It was so fast that I couldn’t get a feel for which screen it was that was flashing. Debugging the application also didn’t reveal what form it was. So, what to do? I thought of using Camtasia to record the screen during startup, and then play back the recorded session at a very slow rate so that I could find out what I needed to know. I had to be sure to crank up the frames per second capture rate as high as it would go, but after a smooth install and some tweaking of options in Camtasia, the plan worked beautifully. I found out what form it was that was flashing, and then fixed it.


Not just Camtasia, there are host of other software tools which can help your record your actions and desktop activity . BB FlashBack, Macromedia Captivate and Qarbon ViewletCam are some of the best available commerial tools for creating demonstration videos, training tutorials, e-learning modules and screencasts. Screencasting to help your mom carries a complete list of screencasting software and reviews.

Amazon to open support center in Hyderabad, India

Computerworld reports:


Amazon.com Inc. is planning to open a customer service center in Hyderabad, India, that will offer e-mail support to customers, it said Wednesday.


The new facility, which is set to be operational in the second half of this year, is expected to create up to 100 customer service jobs within six months, according to the Seattle-based Internet retailer.


As more of Amazon’s customers come from outside the U.S., the company needs to be able to respond to its customers regardless of the time zones they might be in, the company said in a statement.


In 2000, Amazon outsourced some of its customer support operations to Daksh eServices Pvt. Ltd., a business process outsourcing company in Gurgaon near Delhi. Daksh was acquired last year by IBM.


Amazon could not immediately comment on whether the new facility at Hyderabad will supplement or replace the current arrangement with Daksh.


The company also has a development center in Bangalore, which is focused on search and Web services technologies.

How to set up a custom DVR box

Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) have become a necessary luxury over the last several years. Millions of people rely on these devices to pause and rewind live television, and to keep track of broadcast schedules and record programs for them. Many consider them just as essential to their daily lives as their cell phones. Gone are the days of the VCR - DVRs let you schedule recordings of your favorite shows and replay them at your convenience.

Ken Sharp build his personal DVR dream machine using only off-the-shelf software and components. Here’s how to build a Better DVR out of an Old PC. You will need the following to set up your personal DVR.

Windows machine with at least 256MB of RAM (512MB is better), plenty of hard drive space, and a good video card.

TV and receiver presumably from your existing home theater system).

TV card I used a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 card, $149 at hauppauge.com.

PC DVR software I used BeyondTV, which was bundled with the Hauppauge card, but is available from SnapStream separately for $70 at snapstream.com.

WinDVD I already had an old copy of this from my video card, but it’s $50 from intervideo.com.

Winamp The standard Windows MP3 player, free at winamp.com.

VNC Remote PC access software, free at realvnc.com

SlimServer Lets your server stream music remotely through the internet, free at slimdevices.com.

Various game emulators Run console game ROMs, many free ones listed at zophar.net.

Playstation or Nintendo game controllers These work much better than PC gamepads for the price, and are available lots of places for $15 and up.

PSX/N64 to USB converter Lets you use console gamepads on the PC, $13 each at lik-sang.com.

Girder Automation software, $20 at promixis.com

Cygwin and server software Linux-like operating system, free at cygwin.com.

Dynamic DNS service Lets you connect to your home server using a fixed domain name if your broadband account allocates your IP address dynamically. I got this from dyndns.org.

And the basic sequence of steps are:

1. Build the PC
2. Install the TV and receiver
3. Install the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 card and BeyondTV
4. Install video, music, and game utilities
5. Install PSX/N64 to USB converters
6. Install and configure Girder
7. Install Cygwin and server software
8. Set up firewall and dynamic DNS service

Read the full article for detailed steps to build a combination Digital Video Recorder (DVR), music server, and game machine out of an old computer. It does far more than a commercial TiVo, and there’s no monthly fee.

TiVo for cable and satellite is more expensive and less portable. TiVo offers TiVo2Go, which converts TiVo programming into a viewable format on your laptop, but it takes a long time to do the conversion.

Several big-name cable companies, including Comcast, are renting DVRs to subscribers for a monthly fee competing with ReplayTV and TiVo.

Adobe Photoshop plug-ins for Photographers

Almost every digital camera, no matter how inexpensive, generally comes with rudimentary photo-editing software for changing exposures and retouching small flaws like red-eye in flash photos.

But to do more than that usually means turning to Adobe Photoshop CS2, a program that dominates photo-editing software so much its name has become a verb for digitally altering images. And, much like Apple’s successful iPod music player, Photoshop has spawned a small secondary industry of companies that make accessories for it. In Photoshop’s case, of course, accessories take the form of software, known as plug-ins, that add features.

NYTimes highlights certain areas like Sharpening, Color Adjustment, Exposure where Adobe Photoshop may not be able do the best job but plug-ins come to the rescue : Tools for the New Darkroom - Plug-in programs can make picture editing software easier to use.

Readers interested in Photography would love these articles in the Technology section of Nytimes.

Less Cursing, Better Pictures: A guide to things you should ignore and things you shouldn’t.

Photo Prints?: Everyone Wants Your Business

Which Camera Does This Pro Use: With four decades of war, sports and politics at hand, photojournalist David Burnett has had a lot of experience with a lot of different cameras.

Transfer your vinyl LPs, old tapes to an iPod

Don’t let your beloved records and cassettes degrade to silence. There are few areas of computing so immediately rewarding and downright sensible as converting old LPs and cassettes into digital format.

Doing so offers massive benefits. For instance, you can preserve your favourite music in its current condition forever and even improve it by removing scratches and tape hiss.

Songs will no longer degrade with every new play. You can make your own compilations and save them to CD or turn your computer into a fully-featured digital jukebox. No more fast-forwarding through tapes, flipping records or sitting through turgid album ‘fillers’ while waiting for the next decent track.

Never again need you replace your turntable’s stylus or clean those tape heads. And, of course, it saves you a fortune in replacing treasured recordings with CD reissues.

The Forbes has published a six step process to digitize your vinyl. The author using Roxio CD Spin Doctor that takes line-level audio input from pretty much any source into which you can plug a stereo cable and records the audio from those sources into a digital file that you can then edit and clean up as needed. Watch the video: The Digital Life: Records And Tapes, Meet iTunes

Computeractive also covered the essentials in Revive your records on CD using PC and audio software. They recently published an updated overview of the process to Convert your records to CD. It includes everything you need to know if you missed the original feature, and tips on using the latest technology and software to make the process even easier. Availale in two parts.

Best practices for partitioning a hard disk on a computer running Windows XP

Mitch Tulloch explains from his personal experience how to partition a hard disk and the benefits from dividing your hard disk into more than the single partition and hard drive that it originally came with. These benefits can help you be better organized, more productive, and ensure the integrity of your data.

1. Install Windows on drive C on your first hard disk.

2. Create a second partition on your first disk to store your active work files, and keep it fairly small so you can maintain it more easily. Unless your work is graphic design or video production, since your work files will be much larger.

3. Install a second hard disk on your computer and create at least two partitions on it, one for your paging file and the other for archiving old work files and other important files like your Outlook PST file.

4. Create additional partitions on your second disk only if they will contain files that are infrequently accessed to minimize contention with the paging file partition.

Read full story here - Best practices for partitioning a hard disk.

Of course, don’t forget to back up all your data before you start partitioning your disks!

GMail RSS Feed: Read Emails in a News Reader

Get an RSS Feed for Gmail Emails

If you are on Gmail, you can easily read you email messages in a news reader like FeedDemon as an RSS feed.

The RSS feed of your Gmail Inbox can be found at the following location:

https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom

When you subscribe to the Gmail RSS feed in a newsreader like FeedDemon, it will ask for your Gmail / Google account credentials before completing the subscription process.

Google Reader doesn’t support authenticated feeds at this time.

In case your feed reader doesn’t support regular authorization, you may add the Gmail username and password in the Feed URL itself just like the FTP syntax.

Your new Gmail feed URL with the user / password will look something like this:

http://gmailusername:password@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom/

The RSS feed will only display unread email items from your Gmail Inbox so if your Gmail RSS feed is showing up as blank in a newsreader, that’s not a problem because you probably don’t have any unread message in the account.

Also see: RSS Feed for Yahoo! Mail

What makes X1 an amazing desktop search tool

X1 is an entrant in the The Software Hall Of Fame picked by the TechWeb Pipeline Editors. The other software entries are Macromedia Dreamweaver, GMail, Eudora and FeedDemon. A little surprising that Mozilla Firefox is missing though PCWorld called it the Product of the Year.

Did X1 steal anything to become the top desktop search tool. Mike Elgan evaluates why you should get in the habit of using X1 which supports 370 file formats, as well as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Mozilla, Thunderbird, Netscape Mail, and Lotus Notes. You can even search attachments - while they’re still attached.

Microsoft bundles a pathetic search utility with Windows XP. However, the Department of Justice didn’t consider this “bundling” anti-competitive: It’s so bad it actually helps the competition. There are also a lot of shareware, freeware, or pay-way-more-than-it’s-worth-ware out there to help you find files.

The problem with most search utilities, however, is that they don’t use the basic formula perfected by an ancient DOS program called Magellan. That’s why X1 is so great. It stole the Magellan formula. The secret Magellan sauce is to find files as you type and show the results in a right-hand pane in real time with search words highlighted. This is how X1 works.

Let’s say you’re at work and you need to find that picture of Angelina Jolie you stashed away. Bring up X1 and choose Email, Files, Attachments, or Contacts. (Contacts? Yeah, you wish…) Click into the Search field and start typing. As soon as your index finger strikes the “A” key, every file on your system with an “A” in it appears in your search list. Press the “N” key, and every file with “AN” together appears. The list will keep narrowing down until you stop typing.

Each hit on the list appears in a left-hand window pane with the selected words highlighted. Click on the file name, and the contents pop into the right-hand pane, with each search phrase hit in a different color. Bang on the down-arrow key and you’ll rip through the hits.

TechWeb is running the The Great Tech Call-‘Em-Like-You-See-‘Em Contest, the contest where TechWeb reader can win iPods, X1 software, Logitech Quickcams plus other cool prizes. Just write about your favorite software. Impress us with your prose, make us laugh, dazzle us with your well-reasoned arguments, do something to make us sit up and take notice.

Comparing the Yahoo! and Google Interface Design

Google vs. Yahoo! Interface Design by Luke. Yahoo! and Google have almost similar offerings and now the interfaces are also getting closer.


At a high level, Yahoo! has better integrated business goals with their product designs. For example, their comparison shopping site features multiple entry points that better match consumer shopping behaviors (browse by brand, browse by category, featured products, etc.) than Froogle’s single search box. Yahoo! also has more robust answers to vertical information finding (Travel, Finance, Movies, etc.) than Google’s Web Search features. That doesn’t negate the value of Google’s simple solutions to these tasks. It’s just that a simple solution sometimes requires something in addition to (or other than) a search box.


In addition to providing easy access to more than 8 billion web pages, Google has many special features to help you to find exactly what you’re looking for. Yahoo! offers you new, faster ways to find the information you’re looking for, whether it’s on the Web or part of the Yahoo! network. You can access a range of features with one simple search.

Microsoft offers free Desktop Backgrounds for Windows

Microsoft New Zealand is making available some free desktop backgrounds for use on your computer. Includes the New Zealand version of Bliss; A special Queen’s Birthday 2005 edition; the world-famous directional sign in Bluff; and the theme pack for Royale.


Preview Desktop Backgrounds before downloading - ‘Royale’ is set to run on Windows XP. A .zip file extractor is required for the ‘Royale’ theme.


Download details: Desktop Backgrounds for Windows


This download is available to Microsoft Windows XP customers running genuine Microsoft Windows.

Macromedia Flash Platform like a printing press

Macromedia has announced a new Flash Platform that includes content creation and Web development tools that can interact with a company’s server and be sent to mobile devices. The Flash Platform includes a collection of individual Macromedia Inc. products, many of which have been in the public eye for a long time. Now, they’ve been brought together to form an interactive coalition.

Platform users will have access to the Flash Player; development tool Macromedia Flex; Flash MX 2004 for content creation; the Flash Communication Server for two-way audio and video streaming; FlashCast, which delivers mobile content; and Flash Lite, which is used to run Flash on mobile devices.

Companies have already been putting the Flash Platform to work to create rich media sites. For instance, Purdue University uses Macromedia Breeze to hold virtual office hours and online conferences. Discount clothing store TJ Maxx used it to create a simplified and intuitive shopping cart for its Web site.

The Sherwin-Williams Co. used the Platform to construct its Color Visualizer, an interactive tool that allows customers to try out different paint color combinations on virtual interior and exterior environments. Whitmann-Hart Information Architect Andy Dennee, who worked with Sherwin-Williams to create the color tool, said the new Platform has enabled his team to create a site with rich color, photorealistic images and real-time lighting, something he said wasn’t possible before, using just the HTML paradigm.

Dennee said he sees big things ahead for the platform. “It’s really like the printing press,” he said. “It represents such a significant shift of the experience you can provide to the user - keeping them interested and engaged in the online experience.”

Read the full story on Publish.com: Flash Matures into Full-Fledged Platform

Google 101 and Advanced Googology

Patrick Crispen of Netsquirrel.com shares some of his excellent techniques for enhancing search results from Google. The PowerPoint presentations and handouts are free to download provided you don’t make any money from these presentations, and give credit where due.

Google 101: Stop Searching and Start FINDING [1.57 MB]

Sick and tired of looking for information about the Civil War and ending up with 1,247,672,286 hits for stuff like sheet metal fasteners or naked pictures of Ernest Borgnine? This presentation is for you! In this one hour presentation you’ll learn the advanced searching tips and techniques that will help you actually FIND what you are looking for on Google.

Google 201: Advanced Googology [3.50 MB]

Ready to take your Googling to the next level? Beyond the world of plusses, minuses, and quotes lies a whole universe of secret Google tips, techniques, and tools. This quick, one-hour workshop introduces you to little known Google features like pipes, stop-word workarounds, full-word wildcards, and query modifiers—features that will instantly make you the envy of your friends and the center of attention at cocktail parties.

If you are a instructor, you will enjoy the presentation on Microsoft Producer 2003 for Microsoft Powerpoint - a free PowerPoint add-in that lets you easily capture, synchronize, and publish audio, video, slides, and images, turning your old PowerPoint slide shows into rich-media presentations that you can easily put on the Internet. Microsoft Producer 2003 is the most exciting thing to happen to PowerPoint in years, and it will forever change the way that you look at PowerPoint slide shows.

Adware is not really Spware

What is the difference detween adware & spyware


Adware - Adware is considered a legitmate alternative offered to consumers who do not wish to pay for software. Generally most or all features of the freeware are enabled but you will be viewing sponsored advertisements while the software is being used. The advertisements usually run in a small section of the software interface or as a pop-up ad box on your desktop. When you stop running the software, the ads should disappear.


In many cases, adware is a legitimate revenue source for companies who offer their software free to users. A perfect example of this would be the popular e-mail program, Eudora. You can choose to purchase Eudora or run the software in sponsored mode. In sponsored mode Eudora will display an ad window in the program and up to three sponsored toolbar links. Eudora adware is not malicious; it reportedly doesn’t track your habits or provide information about you to a third party. This type of adware is simply serving up random paid ads within the program. When you quit the program the ads will stop running on your system.


Spyware - Spyware is considered a malicious program and is similar to a Trojan Horse in that users unwittingly install the product when they install something else. A common way to become a victim of spyware is to download certain peer-to-peer file swapping products that are available today. Once installed, the spyware monitors user activity on the Internet and transmits that information in the background to someone else. Spyware can also gather information about e-mail addresses and even passwords and credit card numbers.


Because spyware exists as independent executable programs, they have the capability to monitor your keystrokes, scan files on the hard drive, snoop other applications, such as chat programs or word processors, install other spyware programs, read cookies, change the default home page on the Web browser, while consistently relaying this information back to the spyware author who will either use it for advertising and marketing purposes or sell the information to another party.


Always read the fine print before downloading software - Licensing agreements that accompany software downloads sometimes warn the user that a spyware program will be installed along with the requested software, but the licensing agreements are not always be read completely by users because the notice of a spyware installation is often couched in obtuse, hard-to-read legal disclaimers.

Secret Yahoo! Labs

Google Labs is no secret but Yahoo! labs are still a secret.


Yahoo! prefers to call it as Yahoo! Next - It’s a showcase of some of Yahoo!’s newest and coolest projects - the cutting edge of what Yahoo!’s doing today and working on for tomorrow!


Almost all the Yahoo! projects that are in Beta stage are listed here like Yahoo! Messenger, YDS, YIQ, Yahoo! Music and My Web.


Yahoo! Next is actually part of Yahoo Research Labs

If your computer freezes, please walk away from it

Come on, it’s not like you’ve never imagined whacking a sledgehammer through a computer that keeps freezing. Workers nowadays are overly reliant on this one piece of very fallible office equipment.

So in the likely event that your computer misbehaves - like taking hostage three weeks worth of work - who can blame you for getting superstressed?

Such workplace stress can proliferate in many ways. Most people in one such study commissioned by Compaq, for example, have seen other workers rage against their computers — swearing at the equipment, for example.

So what can workers do to avoid such stress?

Basic steps include backing up work on a hard disk and taking courses to bolster your computer know-how, Norman said.

In the likely case that you still have problems, Norman suggested walking away from your computer and taking a break. Maybe companies could have rage breaks, providing a punching bag to help workers vent their frustrations?

All companies need to have a backup plan, added Andrew J. DuBrin, a Rochester Institute of Technology management professor. In case DuBrin’s home office computer goes down — which is where he does his research and writing — he has a backup laptop with some of the same capabilities.

After all, he’s not immune to computer mishaps. Last year he battled for weeks with an unruly computer, before finally buying a new one and getting over his fear of learning new software. “It would do the strangest things,” he said. “All of a sudden everything would be highlighted, like I had hit Control Alt. I couldn’t get out of it.

Via Got computer rage? Expert suggests safe ways to vent

The best of Firefox Tricks, Extensions and Websites

Scott Kingery has collected some of the best Firefox Tips and Tricks - The website can be subscribed as an RSS Feed.

I came across a useful Firefox extension similar to AI Roboform called Scribe - It lets you save the field of your form. So if you are on-line and filling out a blog post or a coment to someone elses post you can hit crtl+s and save your comment locally. If something should happen you can do a “File - Open Entry..” and open you saved file right into your form. Handy for Gmail and other web based email programs.

Scott has also listed of some of the best Firefox related websites:

Firefox Switch: Excellent Guide. Answers the questions: ‘Why switch to Mozilla Firefox?’, ‘Questions about switching’ and ‘How do I make the switch?’

Switching from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox: Mozilla’s site for getting IE users up to speed.

From IE to Firefox: Has some great set up tips.

Secrets of Firefox 1.0: Windows Secrets newsletter posting include quite a bit of what you will find here and goes into a bit more detail.

Mozillazine’s Firefox FAQ

Wikipedia’s Firefox entry has tons of ever increasing information on all things Firefox.

HowStuffWorks has a comprehensive article that has tons of info including history, extensions, open source software, etc. Lots of detail there.

Check out what the tagged web on Technorati is saying about Firefox

Firefox Tutor is a brand new site that will have new and interesting tips for the browser. Check it out and subscribe to it’s RSS feed.

Firefox tips & tricks from Mozilla: You’ll find tips on making your button bars more XP like or Windows Classic like. And things like speeding page rendering and even running Firefox for removable media like a USB drive.

Introduction to Mozilla Firefox: Includes screenshots of how to set up Firefox and info on tabbed browsing and so forth.