18 ways to stay focused at work

Over the years I have worked at many client sites and a variety of office layouts. On one project in particular, we had as many as 80 people in a project team, seated via an open plan arrangement. It was pretty difficult trying to stay focused in an environment like this. These days, the projects I’m on are typically smaller, but there are still a number of distractions which frequently interrupt my working groove. So what are some of the things we can do to minimise such interruptions and distractions?

Here’s my list of 18 ways to stay focused at work:

1. Write out a daily task list and plan your day. There’s nothing like a task list sitting next to you to keep you focused. When you have a list of the things you need to accomplish in a day, having that close to you constantly reminding you of what needs to be done is a great way of keeping on track.
2. Allocate time slots colleagues can interrupt you. In a busy work place, people are moving and talking all the time. If you play a role in a team where others need to interact with you, try allocating a time slot they can interrupt you. Instead of having people stop by your desk every 10 mins and asking you questions, let them know of a time in the day, say between 2-4pm you can be interrupted. At all other times, you can really get some work done.
3. Apply time boxing. In a previous article, I wrote about the benefits of time boxing. Instead of working at something till it is done, try working on it for a limited period, say 30 mins. By that time, the task is either completed or you allocate another time slot, perhaps in another day, to pick it up again. This way, you keep your work fresh and engaging throughout the entire working day.
4. Setup filters in your email. If you spend a lot of your time communicating and planning in front of your computer, chances are you deal with emails on a frequent basis. Setting up filters in your email client can be a great way of sorting out what’s important and urgent from personal stuff which can wait. Instead of dealing with a single Inbox with hundreds of unread email, you only need to deal with smaller folders categorised by project, priority and context.
5. Do not check personal email in the morning. Checking personal emails can be very distracting even with filters setup. This is especially true when your friends send you links to interesting articles, jokes or videos on YouTube. If you’re not careful, you can get side tracked for hours. Instead of checking your personal email as soon as you get in, try starting work straight away. This will build up some momentum as you ease into your work day. You should check your personal email only after you have a few tasks completed or underway. Also, if you don’t want to perpetuate a particular distracting email thread, just don’t reply to it until after work.
6. Set your IM status. If you use Instant Messenger, when you don’t want to be disturbed, make use of the status and set yourself as being away or busy. Your friends and colleagues will honour that. They can either send you an email or look you up later when you aren’t as busy.
7. Listen to the right types of music. Music is a great way of settling into the working routine. In addition, having music can drown out office noises like printers and background chattering. Be careful though, depending on personal preference, some types of music are not particularly conducive to productive work. For me, I can’t work when listening to songs with lots of lyrics because the words interrupt my thinking process.
8. Use the headphones but leave the music off. Some people prefer to have absolute silence when working. I think that also depends on what kind of work you are doing. If you’re doing some serious planning or something computational, having music blasting in your ears may not be the best thing for keeping focused. Try using headphones or ear plugs to block out the background noise but leave the music off.
9. Fill up a water bottle. Keeping yourself hydrated is pretty important for all sorts of health reasons. Instead of going to the water cooler with your glass every hour, try filling up a water bottle at the start of the day. This does a couple of things - firstly, it limits the starts/stops associated every time you get up for water and secondly, it avoids being sucked into lengthy discussions around the water cooler.
10. Find the best time to do repetitive and boring tasks. No matter how much you try to avoid it, you’re going to have to face doing things which are either repetitive or boring. For these tasks, I find it is best to choose a time in the day to work on them. For example, I’m more alert at the start of the day, so it’s better to work on things which require brain power early. Working on boring tasks that can be done via auto-pilot are better left towards the end of the day when I’m usually tired.
11. Bring your lunch and have it at your desk. I’m not suggesting you do this every day, but if you really have to focus and are trying to meet a deadline, having your lunch at your desk really helps. The normal one hour lunch break can really interrupt any momentum you might have built up during the morning. I find when I’m eating lunch at my desk, my lunch breaks are shorter and I can get through a few emails while I’m eating. After I’m done, I’m straight back working on the next task.
12. Don’t make long personal calls. Most of us have a good separation between our working and personal lives (or a least try to). I think we can all agree we should avoid having work intrude on our personal time as much as possible. The reverse of this also applies. Try limiting the time you spend doing personal things during work as they can be distracting and draining on your motivation. For example, you do not really want to be thinking about your weekend away with your spouse when you really need to get things done.
13. Clean up your desk. Some of you may have desks which can only be described as ordered chaos. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as long as you can find what you need without too much digging around. However, if you can’t, I suggest cleaning up your desk. That doesn’t mean having an empty desk, it just means having neat stacks of paper, all filed in the correct location. It also helps tremendously having all the things you need easily within arms reach. For example, if you need a place to write, having your pen and notepad close by and easily accessible is incredibly useful.
14. Get a good chair. If you sit for long hours at your desk and I’m sure some of you do, you might find it helpful to get a good chair. I find it’s pretty hard to stay focused when my neck and back are sore because I have a bad setup at my desk. A good chair can eliminate this, allowing you to work for long stretches without breaks and physical distractions.
15. Use shortcuts on your computer. If you find you do the same thing with your computer more than once throughout the day, you might find it helpful to look for ways in which you can do them without too much manual repetition. For example, if there’s a project folder you access all the time, try adding a shortcut to your Explorer or Finder so you can get access to it with a single click, instead of expanding folder after folder in the tree panel.
16. Close programs you’re not using. As a software engineer, I use a lot of programs important to my work. However, in most cases, I only need a few applications open at the same time. Instead of Alt-Tabbing constantly and fighting the computer to locate the program you need, try only having the applications you need open. Close everything else. For example, if you have already located a file and no longer need a particular Explorer or Finder instance open, close it. There’s no reason to leave it around at all.
17. Limit time on Digg, Delicious, news sites and blogs. I don’t think I need to say too much about this. There are so many sites on the Internet worth looking at, including this site . Digg, Delicious, news and blogs are great from an interest perspective, but they can really take you away from the work you should be working on. Try to limit going to these sites during the working day. If you really have to, try doing it during your lunch time. No, you don’t need to have your finger on the pulse every single minute of the day…
18. Change your mindset and make work fun. For me, I find it difficult to stay focused on doing things I’m not by nature interested in doing. In most cases, there’s probably nothing I can do about it. However, be mindful of the fact that your perception of work is something you can control. For my last tip here, I suggest you try changing your mindset or turning work into a game. An unfocused mind, is an unchallenged mind. So make things fun!

I hope these tips will take you closer to more focused and productive work days. If you are still in need for more tips about staying focused, you can take a look at a previous blockbuster smash hit article I wrote entitled 11 ways of staying focused. In that article, I approached the issue from a top down, rather than bottom up perspective.

Ok, good luck! If you like this article, tell your friends, Digg it or add it to your Delicious bookmarks.

Hey, what are you still doing here? Get back to work!

A download manager for Firefox.

DownThemAll (or just dTa) is a powerful yet easy-to-use Mozilla Firefox extension that adds new advanced download capabilities to your browser.
DownThemAll lets you download all the links or images contained in a webpage and much more: you can refine your downloads by fully customizable criteria to get only what you really want.
DownThemAll is all you can desire from a download manager: it features an advanced accelerator that increases speed up to 400%, it allows you to pause and resume downloads at any time and, last but not least, it's fully integrated into your favorite browser!

Download dTa from here.

what is Orkutting ? . What is Orkut ?

courtesy : www.wikipedia.org

orkut is an Internet social network service run by Google and named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. It claims to be designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Similar to Friendster and MySpace, orkut goes a step further by permitting "communities" of users. It is also invitation-only: users must be invited to join by a member.

Orkut was quietly launched on January 22, 2004 by Google, the search engine company. Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer, developed it as an independent project while working at Google (required by its policy). Some discomfort with this exists among users and potential users of orkut, especially since Google's other noteworthy product of 2004, the Web-based email client Gmail, had servers scan emails for keywords in order to deliver advertisements targeted at them, which sparked an idea that Google was "reading your email".

While previously working for Affinity Engines, he had developed a similar system, InCircle, intended for use by university alumni groups. In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Büyükkökten and Google based orkut on inCircle code. The allegation is based on the presence of 9 identical bugs in orkut that also exist in InCircle.

Originally, the orkut community was felt to be elite, because its membership is by invitation only. However, at the end of July 2004 orkut surpassed the 1,000,000 member mark, and at the end of September it surpassed the 2,000,000 mark.

While the intended invitation method was e-mail between two acquaintances, invitations to orkut are obtainable via the web with a bit of diligence or eBay, just like Gmail invites.

Orkut's use as a social tool is complex, because various people frequently try to add strangers to their own pool of friends, more often than not just to increase the number indicating their number of friends next to their name in their profile. Many "add-me" communities exist, solely for this purpose. A large number of bogus, cloned, fake, invisible and "orphaned" profiles also exist.

As of August 22, 2006; there are 26,352,271 users on orkut.

How to proctect Your Computer From Spyware,Viruses and Trojans

1. Keep your Windows operating system updated.

I assume most everyone is running Windows XP anymore but I don't care what version of Windows you're running (personally, I like Windows 2000) - you must keep it patched and updated.
Click on this link to get to Windows Update
NOTE: You must use Internet Explorer. If you are reading this blog at this very moment using Firefox (and if you are, you get a gold star), this link will not work properly. Alternately, you can go to Start, Windows Update and it will automatically open Explorer and get you to the Update page. You can also always access Windows Update in Explorer by going to Tools, Windows Update.
Once you're at Windows Update, if you get a popup asking you to download the Windows Update software, click YES. Then click Scan For Updates. It will check to see if you are missing any updates and patches. I can't really walk you through the rest of this because everyone's computer will bring up something different. But it should list a series of patches you're missing, each with a REMOVE button next to it. You need to read through each of these in case there is one that indicates that it must be installed first before the rest of the updates are installed. In that case, you would remove everything but that one, click Install, reboot your computer when it's done, then go back to the Windows Update page and get the rest of them. Otherwise, just install them all together.
NOTE: I think Microsoft has made some changes to the Updates page recently. If the instruction vary from the above, just go with the flow.
Service Pack 2 (SP2) - if you're running XP and you haven't yet upgraded to SP2, you absolutely must (you can learn about SP2 here if you want to read up on it). This is a major upgrade to the XP operating system, not just a security patch. Windows Update will most certainly prompt you for this. It will take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes (or more) to download (depending on your internet connection) and a couple of hours to install. You don't have to babysit it; just tell it to install (after the download) and go shopping or something. DO NOT UPDATE to SP2 if you have not completed the steps I gave you in Security 101. Your operating system must be clean of infections or you will most certainly run into trouble here.
To make life easier for the future, you can set Windows Update to automatically download and install new updates to your computer. Go to Start, Control Panel. Double click on System. Put a checkmark next to Keep My Computer Up To Date. Then decide on the options it offers.

2. Antivirus Software

You probably already have some kind of Antivirus software running on your computer. If you don't, there are very good free ones you can use. I use AVG on all of our computers at home and can highly recommend it. It's very simple to use, it does not take up alot of space, and it does a very good job of monitoring your computer. You can download AVG FREE from here. (Remember, first you download, then you install.)
If you're using Norton or McAfee, that's perfectly fine too. I, personally, don't like them or recommend them because they're huge programs that are major resource hogs. With XP itself being such a resource hog, I don't want to slow my computer down even more with either of these two programs. And quite honestly, they're not superior products that you should have to pay for. But if you don't mind the annual fees and if you have plenty of harddrive space and memory, you're good to go.
NOTE: If you decide to use AVG and you're currently running either Norton or McAfee, you need to first uninstall Norton or McAfee and THEN download and install AVG. Multiple antivirus programs do not play well together. They bully each other around and that leaves you to constantly referee their battles. To Uninstall either of these, FIRST open the program and turn it off ('disable', or whatever similar prompt you can find). THEN, go to Start, Control Panel (or you can double click on the My Computer icon on your desktop and get to Control Panel from there), then Add/Remove Programs. Find Norton or McAfee from the list of programs and click Uninstall.

3. SpywareBlaster

I just love this program. It doesn't cure your computer of anything, it simply keeps all sorts of bad stuff from ever getting onto your computer in the first place. You can download SpywareBlaster from here. I highly recommend you use this. Download it, install it, click Download Latest Protection Updates, then Check for Updates, then Enable All Protection. That's it. Then close the program. It doesn't need to be open and running for it to work. You just go about your internet business and it stays on guard protecting you.
NOTE: The updates page will ask you how it is you want to go about updating the program. There will be a little checkbox that says "always use this option and don't ask me this again" or something like that. Click on the checkbox and then click on the INTERNET button. Then whenever you check for updates in the future, it will know to go to the internet and get them.)

4. Spybot and Adaware

You should already have these on your computer by now but if you don't, scroll down to the Security 101 post and click on the links from there. Then scan your computer with each program and fix everything they find.
There are many other spyware fighting programs out there you can use besides Spybot and Adaware. Counterspy is one I really like but it's not free (on the other hand, it's only $20). Not only will it find and clean malware but it will run in the background and alert you when something is not kosher. It comes with a 15 day trial so you can download it and use it without purchasing anything if your computer is having problems and you want to do a more thorough check. You can download Counterspy from here.
NOTE: If you go looking for more Spyware fighting programs on your own, make sure you CHECK THIS LIST before downloading anything onto your computer. There are many programs out there that masquerade as spyware tools but are not actually trustworthy. If it's on this list, stay away.

5. Switch To Firefox

Firefox is today's browser of choice. It's safer by miles over Internet Explorer. There really is no excuse anymore for not using Firefox. It is extremely user friendly and there is a very minor learning curve because it looks and acts very much like Internet Explorer so you're not going to be lost and not know what you're doing when you start using it. Read up on and download Firefox from here. Firefox is very flexible and adaptable to your own style of internet surfing. You're going to love it. I promise.

6. Get In The Habit of Monthly Maintenance

Once a month, you should update and run Spybot and Adaware. You should Immunize in Spybot after every update. You should update SpywareBlaster then click on Enable All Protection. You should empty your cookies and your temporary internet files. You should run Windows Update. If your computer seems much slower than usual or is acting up in some other way, you should go to the Housecall Trendmicro page and the Trojan Scan page and run those online scans (links from the Security 101 post). These are not difficult things. Just do them. Your computer is going to thank you for it.

7. Keep on the Lookout for Email Worms and Viruses

People just love to click on all those attachments their friends have mass emailed to them. And yes, many of them are legit and won't harm your computer. But sometimes, it's not your friend who has sent the email at all but an email worm that has infected your friend's computer. Now you open a malicious file and infect your own computer with it. Try to use some discretion about what you actually open. At the very least, you should not open anything that has an attachment with an '.exe' on the end of its name. That's an executable file. You can be sure it is nothing but trouble.

8. Don't use Peer to Peer (P2P) software

I used to download music via P2P programs. And my computer paid the price for it. Just buy your music instead. Much, much safer. If you want to check out the music first, borrow it from the library and have a listen. Then go to one of the legitimate music sites and pay for your download. Or take the old-fashioned route and go to the store and buy the CD.

9. Don't Download Anything From Websites You Don't Trust

Get into the habit of only downloading programs from websites you are familiar with and trust. If you're not sure, do a quick Google search to check things out. Most of the bad stuff that ends up on people's computers are things they have downloaded themselves without knowing it.

10 - Firewalls

If you are not on a router to the internet, you might want to consider using a firewall. I'm not a big fan of firewalls myself, but they're recommended for protection. If you're using Windows XP and have updated to SP2, there is a firewall already included. If you're interested in a freestanding firewall for your computer, check out ZoneAlarmFree. You can download it from here.

Is your head spinning yet? Let's simplify this whole process now lest you don't end up doing any of the above:
1. Set Windows Update to automatically update your system
2. Make sure you have an Antivirus program running
3. Download and install Spyware Blaster
4. Download and use Firefox
If you do nothing but these four things, your computer will be very well protected. Now how hard is that?

The Birth Of Google.

Larry thought Sergey was arrogant. Sergey thought Larry was obnoxious. But their obsession with backlinks just might be the start of something big.

Courtesy Wired.com

From the original article written by John BattellePage

"And then there was light" - Bible.

It began with an argument. When he first met Larry Page in the summer of 1995, Sergey Brin was a second-year grad student in the computer science department at Stanford University. Gregarious by nature, Brin had volunteered as a guide of sorts for potential first-years - students who had been admitted, but were still deciding whether to attend. His duties included showing recruits the campus and leading a tour of nearby San Francisco. Page, an engineering major from the University of Michigan, ended up in Brin's group.

It was hardly love at first sight. Walking up and down the city's hills that day, the two clashed incessantly, debating, among other things, the value of various approaches to urban planning. "Sergey is pretty social; he likes meeting people," Page recalls, contrasting that quality with his own reticence. "I thought he was pretty obnoxious. He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did, too."

"We both found each other obnoxious," Brin counters when I tell him of Page's response. "But we say it a little bit jokingly. Obviously we spent a lot of time talking to each other, so there was something there. We had a kind of bantering thing going." Page and Brin may have clashed, but they were clearly drawn together - two swords sharpening one another.

When Page showed up at Stanford a few months later, he selected human-computer interaction pioneer Terry Winograd as his adviser. Soon thereafter he began searching for a topic for his doctoral thesis. It was an important decision. As Page had learned from his father, a computer science professor at Michigan State, a dissertation can frame one's entire academic career. He kicked around 10 or so intriguing ideas, but found himself attracted to the burgeoning World Wide Web.

Page didn't start out looking for a better way to search the Web. Despite the fact that Stanford alumni were getting rich founding Internet companies, Page found the Web interesting primarily for its mathematical characteristics. Each computer was a node, and each link on a Web page was a connection between nodes - a classic graph structure. "Computer scientists love graphs," Page tells me. The World Wide Web, Page theorized, may have been the largest graph ever created, and it was growing at a breakneck pace. Many useful insights lurked in its vertices, awaiting discovery by inquiring graduate students. Winograd agreed, and Page set about pondering the link structure of the Web.

Citations and Back Rubs
It proved a productive course of study. Page noticed that while it was trivial to follow links from one page to another, it was nontrivial to discover links back. In other words, when you looked at a Web page, you had no idea what pages were linking back to it. This bothered Page. He thought it would be very useful to know who was linking to whom.

Why? To fully understand the answer to that question, a minor detour into the world of academic publishing is in order. For professors - particularly those in the hard sciences like mathematics and chemistry - nothing is as important as getting published. Except, perhaps, being cited.

Academics build their papers on a carefully constructed foundation of citation: Each paper reaches a conclusion by citing previously published papers as proof points that advance the author's argument. Papers are judged not only on their original thinking, but also on the number of papers they cite, the number of papers that subsequently cite them back, and the perceived importance of each citation. Citations are so important that there's even a branch of science devoted to their study: bibliometrics.

Fair enough. So what's the point? Well, it was Tim Berners-Lee's desire to improve this system that led him to create the World Wide Web. And it was Larry Page and Sergey Brin's attempts to reverse engineer Berners-Lee's World Wide Web that led to Google. The needle that threads these efforts together is citation - the practice of pointing to other people's work in order to build up your own.

Which brings us back to the original research Page did on such backlinks, a project he came to call BackRub.

He reasoned that the entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation - after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could divine a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it "the Web would become a more valuable place."

At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler.

The idea's complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. "I talked to lots of research groups" around the school, Brin recalls, "and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry."

The Audacity of Rank
In March 1996, Page pointed his crawler at just one page - his homepage at Stanford - and let it loose. The crawler worked outward from there.

Crawling the entire Web to discover the sum of its links is a major undertaking, but simple crawling was not where BackRub's true innovation lay. Page was naturally aware of the concept of ranking in academic publishing, and he theorized that the structure of the Web's graph would reveal not just who was linking to whom, but more critically, the importance of who linked to whom, based on various attributes of the site that was doing the linking. Inspired by citation analysis, Page realized that a raw count of links to a page would be a useful guide to that page's rank. He also saw that each link needed its own ranking, based on the link count of its originating page. But such an approach creates a difficult and recursive mathematical challenge - you not only have to count a particular page's links, you also have to count the links attached to the links. The math gets complicated rather quickly.

Fortunately, Page was now working with Brin, whose prodigious gifts in mathematics could be applied to the problem. Brin, the Russian-born son of a NASA scientist and a University of Maryland math professor, emigrated to the US with his family at the age of 6. By the time he was a middle schooler, Brin was a recognized math prodigy. He left high school a year early to go to UM. When he graduated, he immediately enrolled at Stanford, where his talents allowed him to goof off. The weather was so good, he told me, that he loaded up on nonacademic classes - sailing, swimming, scuba diving. He focused his intellectual energies on interesting projects rather than actual course work.

Together, Page and Brin created a ranking system that rewarded links that came from sources that were important and penalized those that did not. For example, many sites link to IBM.com. Those links might range from a business partner in the technology industry to a teenage programmer in suburban Illinois who just got a ThinkPad for Christmas. To a human observer, the business partner is a more important link in terms of IBM's place in the world. But how might an algorithm understand that fact?

Page and Brin's breakthrough was to create an algorithm - dubbed PageRank after Page - that manages to take into account both the number of links into a particular site and the number of links into each of the linking sites. This mirrored the rough approach of academic citation-counting. It worked. In the example above, let's assume that only a few sites linked to the teenager's site. Let's further assume the sites that link to the teenager's are similarly bereft of links. By contrast, thousands of sites link to Intel, and those sites, on average, also have thousands of sites linking to them. PageRank would rank the teen's site as less important than Intel's - at least in relation to IBM.

This is a simplified view, to be sure, and Page and Brin had to correct for any number of mathematical culs-de-sac, but the long and the short of it was this: More popular sites rose to the top of their annotation list, and less popular sites fell toward the bottom.

As they fiddled with the results, Brin and Page realized their data might have implications for Internet search. In fact, the idea of applying BackRub's ranked page results to search was so natural that it didn't even occur to them that they had made the leap. As it was, BackRub already worked like a search engine - you gave it a URL, and it gave you a list of backlinks ranked by importance. "We realized that we had a querying tool," Page recalls. "It gave you a good overall ranking of pages and ordering of follow-up pages."

Page and Brin noticed that BackRub's results were superior to those from existing search engines like AltaVista and Excite, which often returned irrelevant listings. "They were looking only at text and not considering this other signal," Page recalls. That signal is now better known as PageRank. To test whether it worked well in a search application, Brin and Page hacked together a BackRub search tool. It searched only the words in page titles and applied PageRank to sort the results by relevance, but its results were so far superior to the usual search engines - which ranked mostly on keywords - that Page and Brin knew they were onto something big.

Not only was the engine good, but Page and Brin realized it would scale as the Web scaled. Because PageRank worked by analyzing links, the bigger the Web, the better the engine. That fact inspired the founders to name their new engine Google, after googol, the term for the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeroes. They released the first version of Google on the Stanford Web site in August 1996 - one year after they met.

Among a small set of Stanford insiders, Google was a hit. Energized, Brin and Page began improving the service, adding full-text search and more and more pages to the index. They quickly discovered that search engines require an extraordinary amount of computing resources. They didn't have the money to buy new computers, so they begged and borrowed Google into existence - a hard drive from the network lab, an idle CPU from the computer science loading docks. Using Page's dorm room as a machine lab, they fashioned a computational Frankenstein from spare parts, then jacked the whole thing into Stanford's broadband campus network. After filling Page's room with equipment, they converted Brin's dorm room into an office and programming center.

The project grew into something of a legend within the computer science department and campus network administration offices. At one point, the BackRub crawler consumed nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth, an extraordinary fact considering that Stanford was one of the best-networked institutions on the planet. And in the fall of 1996 the project would regularly bring down Stanford's Internet connection.

"We're lucky there were a lot of forward-looking people at Stanford," Page recalls. "They didn't hassle us too much about the resources we were using."

A Company Emerges
As Brin and Page continued experimenting, BackRub and its Google implementation were generating buzz, both on the Stanford campus and within the cloistered world of academic Web research.

One person who had heard of Page and Brin's work was Cornell professor Jon Kleinberg, then researching bibliometrics and search technologies at IBM's Almaden center in San Jose. Kleinberg's hubs-and-authorities approach to ranking the Web is perhaps the second-most-famous approach to search after PageRank. In the summer of 1997, Kleinberg visited Page at Stanford to compare notes. Kleinberg had completed an early draft of his seminal paper, "Authoritative Sources," and Page showed him an early working version of Google. Kleinberg encouraged Page to publish an academic paper on PageRank.

Page told Kleinberg that he was wary of publishing. The reason? "He was concerned that someone might steal his ideas, and with PageRank, Page felt like he had the secret formula," Kleinberg told me. (Page and Brin eventually did publish.)

On the other hand, Page and Brin weren't sure they wanted to go through the travails of starting and running a company. During Page's first year at Stanford, his father died, and friends recall that Page viewed finishing his PhD as something of a tribute to him. Given his own academic upbringing, Brin, too, was reluctant to leave the program.

Brin remembers speaking with his adviser, who told him, "Look, if this Google thing pans out, then great. If not, you can return to graduate school and finish your thesis." He chuckles, then adds: "I said, 'Yeah, OK, why not? I'll just give it a try.'"

From The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, copyright � by John Battelle, to be published in September by Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Battelle (battellemedia.com) was one of the founders of Wired.

How to Connect two or more computers at home.

How to connect two or more computers at home

If you have two or more computers at home, the smartest thing to do is to network the machines to allow sharing of information.

By networking computers at home, you can:

• Share a printer. Once networked, there is no need for you to copy files on to a floppy disk, take it to the computer with the printer configured to it for printing. You can print directly from your computer.

• Share all files. Including images, spreadsheets or documents so that they can be accessed from any other computer on the network.

• Play multiple user games.

• Share a single Internet connection. By dialing up from one computer, you can also connect to the Internet from another computer on the network.

The Internet is the most conspicuous example of computer networking, linking millions of computers around the world.

The basics
There are two kinds of home networking systems: wired and unwired. Unwired networks are easy to implement, but are very expensive.

For a wired network, you'll need a network interface card for each computer, network cables and a hub (a central point to which all network cables connect). A hub is only required if you are connecting more than two computers. All Pentium^TM machines have PCI (Peripheral component Interconect) slots to hold the network cards, while some older machines might have ISA (Industry standard architecture). If you are networking a 486 and a Pentium^TM, you need to ensure you have the right cards.

If you are not a computer technician, and would still like to do it yourself, home networking kits are easily available. These kits come with detailed instructions to install the hardware and the required change in settings. If you are not very confident, you can get help from your computer support technician.

For those running the Windows^TM operating system, networking software is built in and quite simple. You will have to determine the technology for the network - the most popular being the standard Ethernet. Most networking kits come with the necessary instructions and hardware. But if these kits are exorbitantly priced, you can buy the parts separately and then network your computers.

There are sites with detailed instructions about the whole process, along with screenshots and images. Homepcnetwork.com has a step-by-step guide to building a peer-to-peer (a network that connects two or more computers) Ethernet network, at home.

After fixing the hardware and the cables, you will have to configure the systems to share files, printers and even the Internet connection. This is the most important part of networking.

Howstuffworks.com has information on how to configure settings for Windows^TM. This article explains everything about network settings – from naming your PC to setting up security information. Screenshots are also included for easy understanding. This site has details on home networking with the Linux system.

More Resources

- Share a keyboard, monitor and mouse with several computers

-- Network a laptop into your home LAN

-- Networking PC and Mac

-- Sharing Internet connection

-- Other types of networking

-- Do-it-yourself home networking

How to Access Restricted Sites . Tips & Tricks. Anonymous Browsing , How to hide my IP address ? How to bypass Firewalls ?

A proxy server is, in most cases, a normal computer that hides the identity of computers on its network from the

Internet. Which means that only the address of the proxy server is visible to the world and not of those computers

that are using it to browse the Internet.

News aggregators,news readers,Web Feeds. RSS

News aggregators provide an easy and efficient way of surfing the Internet

From being a sluggish, monster resource hog in its early days, RSS feed readers are today changing the way many people browse.

The basics

Short for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary), an RSS reader allows users to aggregate content from different Web sites into a single window on their desktop. With an RSS reader, you can distill a larger volume of information, spread over several sites, much faster than if you visited each of them individually.

Says Kevin Burton, developer of NewsMonster, a feed reader that can be used with a Mozilla browser: "With an aggregator I can monitor a few hundred sites and stay updated when they publish new articles without spending hours going to all of them."

David Peckham, developer of NewsDesk (one of the better feed readers based on Microsoft's .Net framework), says that staying informed is now effortless. Each time you browse a Web page, you have to wait while it loads. This could be several seconds to a few minutes, since most pages use dynamic and graphic content liberally.

Setting it up

For a start, you will need to download a newsreader (most of them offer their plain vanilla versions free) that is compatible with your browser. Once you have set it up on your computer, start subscribing to RSS feeds that you want. Many sites like BBC, ESPN, Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, besides several Web logs, provide free RSS feeds.

Now, the aggregator kicks into action and pulls headlines and summaries of all the latest content from the sites you have subscribed to and displays them to you. Just click on any link that interests you, and the relevant article will open up in a browser window.

NewsMonster Newsdesk, NewzCrawler (PC), Radio Userland (PC or Mac) and NetNewsWire (Mac) are some of the popular RSS readers.

RSS feed readers run on software that reads an Extensible Markup Language (XML) file written in the RSS format (example: RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0) containing content that a site wants to syndicate. The reader presents the information in the feeds that you subscribe to in a quick and readable manner.

The current scenario

Of late, there has been an explosion in the number of RSS feed readers and each has a different approach towards achieving the primary task of aggregating and displaying feeds.

While the commercial Newsgator fits neatly into Microsoft Outlook as a plug-in, NewsMonster hops on to the Mozilla platform as a sidebar item. NewsDesk takes the stand-alone application approach based on the Microsoft .Net framework, enabling it to seamlessly integrate the Internet Explorer browser within itself.

Since it first appeared in 1997, the development of the specification and the software that reads it, has been turbulent, even at the best of times. As a result, the definition of an ideal RSS reader is constantly changing. As things stand now, a good RSS feed reader should have the following features as a minimum:

1) RSS auto-discovery: For your Newsreader to fetch any content, you will have to specify the location of the RSS feed itself. But, if your Newsreader is capable of RSS auto-discovery, it will find the feed even if you specify an HTML page. It does this by reading a tag on the HTML page that points to the RSS feed. It might not always work, since many sites that do provide RSS feeds don't incorporate the tag in their HTML pages.

2) Export/import OPML: If your newsreader allows you to save your subscription list in OPML format, exporting or importing this list when you switch applications or platforms becomes a breeze.

3) Background processing: A good feed reader must chug away in the background, polling a user's subscription list for fresh content at set intervals, without user intervention.

4) Offline caching: The reader should be able to save new content from a user's list of subscribed sites to a local computer for viewing offline. Since it can be a bandwidth hog, it should ideally be set as inactive by default.

The feed reader that you finally choose depends on the features that you require. Burton makes a very strong case for NewsMonster by citing its cross-platform nature: "Having the browser integrated into your Web and email is very compelling. For example I can read an RSS article and forward it to a friend with Mozilla Mail." He also argues that its ability to integrate new features quickly is a big advantage.

If one has the stomach (and the bandwidth) for the 20 MB download of the Microsoft .Net framework, NewsDesk implements most of the necessary tasks without much fuss.

Most entry-level users would find integration to Newsisfree, a service that makes convenient the task of finding and adding the feeds, considerably easy. "You can use the Add Channels Wizard to effortlessly search more than 5,700 channels in 25 languages," says Peckham.

The caveats

The RSS specification has had a troubled past and currently has two versions, 1.0 and 2.0. The public and often acrimonious disagreements among the groups that develop the versions threaten to slow down the development or even derail it, making life considerably difficult for developers of the feed reader software.

Taking an optimistic view of things Burton says, "There is still some discussion that needs to happen but this is natural and healthy and I want to see it carried forward." Peckham says it would all ultimately stabilise around features most wanted by a majority of users.

A problem Indian users might encounter is that most popular Indian sites, news-based or otherwise, do not have an RSS feed. They will have to depend on external aggregators like Newsisfree or Moreover.

This problem is compounded by the refusal of some popular blogging sites to provide an RSS feed as a standard feature. "No weblog at Blogspot has an RSS feed and services like RSSify are a strain on server resources," says Kiran Jonnalagadda, one of the rare breed of people in India who use NetNewsWire, a feed reader that runs on Apple's OS X.

But these niggles notwithstanding, RSS feed readers are a valuable tool to manage the information overload on the Internet.

Some popular news aggregators.

-Feedreader
- News is Free
- Syndic8
- Freshnews
- Headline viewer
- Netnewswire
- Newzcrawler
- RSS Readers
- WTicker
- Awasu

Adsense Tips & Tricks

 

Build an Empire?

When you’re deciding to become a website publisher you will fall into one of two broad categories:

• Publish 100 websites that each earn $1 a day profit
• Publish 1 website that earns $100 a day profit

The reality of it is, most people end up somewhere in between. Having 100 websites leaves you with maintenance, management and content issues. Having one website leaves you open to all sort of fluctuations (search engines algorithm’s, market trends, etc). You can adapt your plan on the way, but you’ll have an easier time if you start out going in the direction of where you want to end up.

General or Niche

You can build your website around general topics or niche ones. Generally speaking niche websites work better with adsense. First off the ad targeting is much better. Secondly as you have a narrow focus your writing naturally becomes more expert in nature. Hopefully this makes you more authority in your field.

If this is your first try at building an adsense website, make it about something you enjoy. It will make the process much easier and less painful to accomplish. You should however make sure that your topic has enough of an ad inventory and the payout is at a level you are comfortable with. You may love medieval folk dancing, but the pool of advertisers for that subject is very small (in fact it’s currently zero).

Once you’ve gotten the hang of how Adsense works on a website, you are going to want to dabble in some high paying keywords, you may even be tempted to buy a high paying keyword list. This does come with some dangers. First off the level of fraud is much higher on the big money terms. Secondly there is a distortion of the supply and demand relationship for these terms. Everyone wants ads on their website that make $35 or more a click, however the number of advertisers who are willing to pay that much is pretty limited. Additionally the competition for that traffic is going to be stiff. So, don’t try to run with the big dogs if you can’t keep up. If you have to ask if you’re a big dog, then chances are, you’re not. I have used a high dollar keywords report from cashkeywords.com and was pleased with my results (see cash keywords free offer recap).

New Sites, Files and Maintenance

When you’re building a new site don’t put adsense on it until it’s finished. In fact I’d go even farther and say don’t put adsense on it until you have built inbound links and started getting traffic. If you put up a website with “lorem ipsum” dummy or placeholder text, your adsense ads will almost certainly be off topic. This is often true for new files on existing websites, especially if the topic is new or different. It may take days or weeks for google’s media bot to come back to your page and get the ads properly targeted. TIP: If you start getting lots of traffic from a variety of IP’s you will speed this process up dramatically.

I like to build my sites using include files. I put the header, footer and navigation in common files. It makes it much easier to maintain and manage. I also like to put my adsense code in include files. If I want/need to change my adsense code, it’s only one file I have to work with. TIP: I also use programming to turn the adsense on or off. I can change one global variable to true or false and my adsense ads will appear or disappear.

Managing URL’s and channels

Adsense channels is one area where it’s really easy to go overboard with stats. You can set up URL channels to compare how one website is doing to another. You can also set up sub channels for each URL. If you wanted to you do something channels like this:

• domain1.com - 728 banner
• domain1.com - 336 block
• domain1.com - text link
• domain2.com - 728 banner
• domain2.com - image banner
• domain2.com - 336 block
• domain3.com - 300 block

While this is great for testing and knowing who clicks where and why, it makes your reporting a little wonky. Your total number will always be correct but when you look at your reports with a channel break down things will get displayed multiple times and not add up to correct total. Makes things pretty confusing, so decide if you really need/want that level of reporting detail. TIP: At the very least you want to know what URL is generating the income so be sure to enter distinct URL channels.

 

Site Design and Integration

Once you know you are going to put adsense on your website you’re going to have to consider where to put it. If this is new site it’s easier, if it’s an existing site it’s more difficult. While there are some people who will be able to do it, in most cases I’d say if you just slap the adsense code in, you’ll end up with a frankensite monster (props to Tedster of WMW for the buzzword). While every website is different, Google has published some heat maps showing the optimal locations. No surprise that the best spots are middle of the page and left hand side. Now I’ve done really well by placing it on the right, but you should know why you’re doing it that way before hand, and be prepared to change it if it doesn’t work out.

Google has also has published a list of the highest performing ad sizes:

• 336×280 large rectangle
• 300×250 inline rectangle
• 160×600 wide skyscraper

From the sites that I run, I do really well with the 336 rectangle and 160 skyscraper. My next best performing ad size is the 728 leaderboard, I don’t really use the 300 inline rectangle too often. So really it depends on how well you integrate these into your site. Placement can have a dramatic effect on performance. TIP: When working on a new site or new layout you may want to give each location it’s own channel for a little while until you understand the users behavior.

Another ‘trick’ that can increase your CTR is by blending your adsense into your body copy. For example if your body copy is black, remove the adsense border and make the title, text, and URL black.TIP: Try changing all of your page hyperlinks to a high contrast color (like dark red or a bold blue) then change the adsense title to the same color.

The one area where I’ve found blended ads don’t perform as well is forums, especially ones with a high volume of repeat members. Regular visitors develop banner blindness pretty quickly. One ‘trick’ to keep the ads from being ignored is to randomize the color and even the placement. As with any of the decisions about location, placement and color it’s a trade off. How much do you emphasize the ads without annoying your visitors. Remember it’s better to have a 1% CTR with 500 regular visitors as opposed to a 5% CTR with 50 visitors. TIP: For forums try placing the adsense ads directly above or below the the first forum thread.

Using Images

One of the latest ’secrets’ to make the rounds is using images placed directly above or below an adsense leaderboard. This has been used for a while but came out in a digital point forum thread where a member talked about quadrupling their CTR. Basically you set up the adsense code in a table with four images that line up directly with the ads. Whether or not this is deceptive is fuzzy and very subjective. Obviously four blinking arrows would be ‘enticing people to click’ and be against the adsense TOS. However placing pictures of 4 laptops over laptops ads isn’t, so use your best judgment here and look at it from the advertiser or Google’s perspective. If you have a question as to your implementation being ‘over the line’ write to adsense and ask them to take a look.

As far as using the images, I’ve done it and can tell you it definitely works. You get the best results when the images ‘complete the story the ads are telling’. For example if you have ads about apple pies, use pictures of freshly baked apple pies, instead of granny smith, Macintosh, pink lady, and braeburn apples. TIP: Don’t limit yourself to using images only on that size ad unit, it works just as well with the other sizes, like the 336 rectangle.

Added:
I got a little criticizm for this and rightly so, as I wasn’t specific as I could have been. Do not use very identifiable brand name or products for your images. Use generic non-specific stock images whenever possible and appropriate.

Multiple Ad Units

Another way to increase ad revenue is to use multiple ad units. According to Google’s TOS you are allowed to post up to three ad units per page. Similar to standard search results the highest paying ad units will be served first and the lowest being served last. If there is enough of an ad inventory, place all three ad units. However you should pay attention to the payouts. Current assumption is you get 60% of the revenue (on a $0.05 click you get $0.03). So if a click from the third ad unit is only paying between 3 to 5 cents you may want to omit it from your page. This is one are where giving your ad units channels does have value. If one ad unit is getting a higher percentage of click throughs you’ll want to make sure the highest paying ads are being served there. TIP:Use CSS positioning to get your highest paying ads serving in the location with the highest CTR.

Adsense in RSS

With the growth of blogs and RSS feeds you’re starting to see adsense included in the feeds now. IMHO this doesn’t work, and here’s why:

• You only get to place one ad unit.
• You have no control over finding the ’sweet spot’ for the ad unit.
• The ads are usually poorly targeted (this is getting better).
• People develop ‘banner blindness’.

I know people like being able to read full postings in their feed reader, and there are at least a dozen other reasons for full posts from pleasing your users to mobile offline computing, all of which are completely valid. However if your website depends on generating adsense revenue to survive, then bring them to the site and show them the ads there.

Affiliate Sites

Placing Adsense on affiliate sites is tricky. Are you giving up a $10, $20, or $30 sale for a $1 click? This is something you have to test on your own to figure out. If you aren’t converting now it’s definitely worth a try. I like to use adsense on my article pages. For example let’s say you had an affiliate website where you sold shoes. You’re going to need some related articles to ‘flesh out’ the site. Things like ‘getting a shoe shine’ or ‘finding a shoe repair shop’ these are excellent spots for adsense. While you won’t get rich, they will usually provide a small steady income and cover things like hosting costs.TIP: If you find you have pages getting more than 50 clicks per month add more pages about this topic, and link the pages together. Mine you logs for the search terms used.

PPC Arbitrage

This is a dicey subject so I’m going to steer clear of precise examples. Basically you bid on low volume uber niche terms at a very low cost. You set up landing page that contains high payout ads for the related general topic. You are looking for terms with a large gap between the price you are bidding on adwords and the price you are getting on Adsense. If you pay $0.10 a click and get $1.00 a click you make $0.90 each click. To get your adsense ad approved you will need to ‘add some value’ along the way. You can make a killing or get taken to the cleaners with this one, so make sure you know what you are doing before you try it.

Have any other adsense tips, tricks or secrets? Drop me an email and let me know, I’ll give you credit.

728 leaderboard works very well if it is just above the end of the
“above the fold” area on what would be considered your viewers average
resolution/browser window size if there are few other enticing links
above the fold. Makes for an interesting layout but if you’re building
a site for AdSense it may be worth it. We consistently receive very
high CTRs from doing this.

Try to build sites that allow you to quickly try any and all of
those locations outlined in the heatmap guide or at least allow you a
wide degree of freedom to easily change ad/content locations.

Rapidshare tips & tricks,Megaupload,Yousendit

Ever wanted to bypass the annoying limit on how much you can download on Rapidshare, and don’t want to wait until the next hour to download a second part of a file? Then try this trick. It doesnt work if u use a proxy though.

For Windows XP:

1. Launch Command Prompt: Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt

2. When Command Prompt is opened, Copy and Paste this in the Command Prompt:

——– Start Copy after this line ——-
@echo off
echo ipconfig /flushdns
ipconfig /flushdns
echo ipconfig /release
ipconfig /release
echo ipconfig /renew
ipconfig /renew
exit
——– Stop Copy before this line ——-

3. Close Command Prompt And Start Your Download as Before.

Rapidshare Link Grabber: A Rapidshare Download Tool

Rapidshare Link Grabber is a handy tool to facilitate downloads from terrible Rapidshare. It allows multiple simultaneous downloads by using proxies. It contains all tools you need to cheat Rapidshare free-service:

• Link Collector (My Link Store)
• Proxy Checker (ESSENTIAL)
• Link Checker (Check your links before downloading!)
• IP Renew option (for those with dynamic IPs)
• Rapidshare explorer (search files on Rapidshare via Google)

With advanced built-in downloader you can prioritize your downloads (using Speed Limiter).

More info: http://7irpages.com/index.html

Download: http://rapidshare.de/files/19214056/Imb_ey64.mp3.html

Megaupload Trick: Disable Country Download Slots Limit

If you want to download something from Megaupload and getting message like “All slots assigned to your country are in use, try again later”.

Then, this is a simple way to by pass the download slots limit.

1. Go to Google Translate tool.
2. Paste your Megaupload download link into the “Translate a web page” box.
3. In the “from” option, select English to German. Other option besides English to German might work.
   
4. So, just hit the Translate button and wait for the download page to load.

Now, you can see that you can download the file that previously you can’t! No download slots limit!

Note: If you don’t want to do that, then check out Megaupload/Share.am Link Grabber, it is a perfect tool for you

Downloading RapidShare Files With Resume Capability

With this technique you could download RapidShare files with resume capability and Support for Download Accelerators, I personally found this technique quiet useful thought it would be useful for you too (especially people on Dailup).

Well these are the things you would need for this tutorial:

• A hosting with php support (well try this free php host www.profreehosting.info)
• Rapid leech script http://rapidleech.com
• Rapidshare Link Grabber

Then follow these steps:

1. Logon to your hosting
2. Upload all the files of RapidLeech Script in the desired directory
3. Chmod the folder to 777 and also chmod index.php to 777
4. Get the link using Rapidshare Link Grabber
5. Go to www.yoursitenamehere.com/RapidLeechFolder
6. Paste the link in the textbox and press download

Well if you don’t see any thing at all it might be because it take a little time to copy the file depending on your hosting (50mb takes around 2.5 to 4 min)

Tip: You can find more info about chmod on these pages

• http://www.computerhope.com/unix/uchmod.htm
• http://catcode.com/teachmod/

Easy Way to Delete Rapidshare Cookie

If you logged into Rapidshare with an account that was detected by fraud detection you will need to delete the Rapidshare cookie. You could either:

• 1. Delete all the cookies, but this will make you have to login back into every website that you told the browser to auto login for you.
• 2 . Go through every cookie and find that one rapidshare cookie.
• 
  

So, here comes this little trick! You could bookmark this link and click it every time you need to delete ONLY Rapidshare cookie:

http://rapidshare.de/cgi-bin/premium.cgi?logout=1

• 
  
• 
  
• RapidSearch: A Rapidshare Search Tool
• 
  

RapidSearch Beta v0.2

Search the entire Google directory for any files on rapidshare.de

You can:

• Download the files
• View the files website origin
• View google cache of website

What’s new in v0.2:

• Search Term – Enter the keywords of the file you want to find
• File Type – Only files with the extentions that match your criteria will be displayed.
• Filename Filter – Filter out certain keywords in the filename e.g microsoft will only add files which have the string “eminem” in the file name.
• 
  
Download: RapidSearch Beta v0.2

Useful Firefox Plugins and Extensions.

 

Web Developer

Once you find it, you won't know how you ever lived without it. A godsend for anyone who publishes Web pages, this Extend Firefox winner makes validation, design, and CSS work much more efficient.

Google Browser Sync

This add-on from the search-engine leader allows users to sync all of their Firefox browser settings, such as bookmarks, passwords, and persistent cookies, across multiple computers.

CookieSafe

If you're the type who stays on top of your browser cookies, this simple and effective extension might be up your alley. It adds a small icon to your status bar that lets you allow and deny cookies globally or for specific sites.

ColorZilla

Another fabulous tool for Web designers and graphic artists, this helpful extension offers color readings for items within your browser. You can also measure distances between two points or get information about DOM elements quickly and easily.

MenuX

For those of us who use multiple Firefox extensions, it's easy to be deluged by the wealth of new icons, sidebars, and taskbars. Mark Bokil's nifty add-on helps save valuable browser space with a library of small icons that control numerous browser and extension functions.

Download Embedded

 This add-on lets you capture various forms of content embedded in Web pages. Movies, MP3 files, and Flash games are only a few of the possible files types that can be downloaded.

Performancing

Bloggers using a variety of platforms like the ease of use and speed of this publishing tool. Drag and drop notes from existing Web pages, take notes for later use, or post directly to your blog.

NoScript

We like NoScript, too. Like many of the best Firefox extensions, this add-on does one thing very well: specify which sites can use JavaScript, Java, and other executable code, and shut down the rest.

Tab Mix Plus

 This outstanding add-on also makes the grade with our users. Add close buttons to individual tabs or define keystrokes for navigating through and manipulating tabs.

FoxyTunes

 It's the most popular add-on after SiteAdvisor. Control your favorite media player with controls built right into the browser interface.

Protect from spyware with System Restore

 

No matter how vigilant you are, you may wake up one morning and find your PC overrun with pop-up ads or your browser hijacked by a piece of spyware. Windows System Restore, found in Windows XP, offers a quick and easy way to remove such a spyware infection--if you catch it early enough.
Whenever you install a new piece of software or make a major change to your system, you can create a restore point in Windows, which records your system configuration before the change. This works like a system-wide undo, letting you fix any problems that a new piece of software or hardware or something else has caused. System Restore shouldn't affect any of your data, only your system configuration, and in any case, the changes you make are completely reversible. You can turn on System Restore so that it automatically creates restore points daily and before you install software. Or if you know you're about to install a new program or make a change, you can manually create a restore point.

• To access System Restore, click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > System Restore. If you have System Restore turned on, you'll be presented with a calendar showing available restore points. If not, you can choose to create one before you install a new app.
• If you've been using System Restore and suspect you've accidentally downloaded spyware, just select the most recent available restore point that you believe predates the introduction of the spyware. Remember, this will undo all changes made to your system, including any software updates, though it won't delete documents you've created since the restore point. So be conservative; you can always try again with an earlier restore point.
• Once you've successfully banished the spyware and restored your system to good working order, you may want to delete your saved restore points so that you don't inadvertently use System Restore and reinstall the spyware on your system. To do this, right-click the My Computer icon on your desktop, click the System Restore tab, click the check box next to "Turn off System Restore on all drives." Click OK, then repeat the process, unchecking the box to turn System Restore back on.
• If you're about to download software that might be suspicious and you don't have System Restore turned on (it can be a bit of a system hog), just create a restore point before you install. Click System Restore, then Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > System Restore, and choose "Create a restore point." Follow the prompts and install without fear. If something goes wrong immediately or after a few days, just restore to the point you created.

Photography tips & tricks for you & camera

 

One of the reasons people leave their pictures imprisoned in their camera phones is that they're disappointed with the shots they've taken. The images are too blurry or too washed out, or the perspective is distorted. In detecting details, film cameras and digital cameras are more limited than the human eye, and camera phones, in turn, are more limited than both film and digital cameras. For that reason, you not only need to apply basic photographic principles to get the best-looking pictures possible, you need to be aware of and know how to compensate for your camera phone's deficiencies.
Framing your shot
The camera phone is a great way to capture a spontaneous or otherwise unexpected moment. With that in mind, many people attempt to snap a picture without thinking about the composition of the shot. That's the wrong approach if you actually want to display your pictures in some fashion.

Use the entire frame
Any photographer will tell you that one of the most basic techniques is to use the whole frame. Many people tend to focus their attention on only the center of the frame or the main subject of the picture, while ignoring the rest of the scene. When you take the whole frame into account, you pay close attention to objects in the background or on the periphery of the image.

Place subjects off-center
Another classic rule is to avoid placing the main subject in the center of the frame. Placing the subject slightly off-center gives a more interesting sense of space, as you can see in the difference between the two images below.

 

Slightly off-center subjects makes this shot more appealing.

Adjusting for lighting conditions
It would be nice if the lighting conditions for taking photographs were always optimal, but that's not the case. Many of those buttons and dials you find on traditional cameras deal specifically with this problem. Unlike 35mm-film cameras or digital cameras with manual settings, however, camera phones don't offer a wealth of user controls for manipulating the lens to adjust for lighting conditions. With that in mind, you'll have to do your own compensating for less than ideal lighting conditions.

Avoid low light
Because they automatically make adjustments to the shutter speed based on the amount of light available, camera phones have difficulty capturing details in low-light environments. Taking pictures in bright environments provides a faster shutter speed and more depth of field. Therefore, the more light in your environment, the sharper the image. Even a unit with a built-in flash will provide minimal support since the range is only about 2 or 3 feet, compared with the 10- to 15-foot range you get with a midlevel digital camera.

Adjust the brightness level
If the image on your display seems too dark or too light, try adjusting the brightness level before taking the picture. You'll be able to see the difference on the screen as you make the adjustment, especially when taking pictures of subjects that have light-colored elements.

Adjust the white balance
In some cases, it's not so much a matter of having enough light as it is what kind of light you're dealing with. In these instances, adjustments to the white balance can improve your pictures. Experienced photographers use blank white or gray cards to help judge the white balance. Not everyone will have the time or the inclination to go through this procedure to take a quick snapshot. If that's the case, you can simply keep the white balance set at Auto. But if this setting doesn't properly compensate for lighting conditions and if you have a couple of minutes to spare, you can use the same technique the professionals use:

1. Place a white card or sheet of paper in front of you.
2. Go to picture-taking mode.
3. Look at the white card through the screen.
4. If the card appears off-color (too yellow or red, for example), go to your camera phone's white-balance settings and toggle through the selections until the card appears as close to white as possible.

Avoid backlighting
Before snapping a picture, think about where your light source is coming from. When the light source is behind your subject, it will appear too dark, almost like a silhouette. Cameras with fill-flash options can compensate for this, but camera phones, even those with built-in flashes, have no such feature. Unless you want your subject to appear as a silhouette, it's best to stand with the light behind you, not your subject.

Keep your subject close
Camera phones use fixed-focal-length lenses, and the focal length--the distance between the optical center of the lens and the place where it focuses the image--is very short. The LG VX6000's focal length, for example, is 3.3mm; for a 35mm-camera lens, 50mm is considered a normal focal length. That means the lens can capture details in a wide area but not a deep one. If your subject is too far away, it will appear very small. It's best if you keep your subject within 3 or 4 feet of the camera.

Avoid zooming
Camera phone makers, like manufacturers of digital cameras, love to tout their products' digital zoom capabilities. Digital cameras at least have some optical zoom capabilities, which actually uses the optics of the lens to bring the subject closer, but camera phones are stuck with digital zoom options, if they have any at all. Given the limited focal range of camera phones, you may be tempted to use this feature to capture faraway objects. Not only will this degrade the image quality, but you may be able to use it only when the camera is set to take pictures in a lower-resolution setting, which will result in a smaller image.

Meebo - The all in one web based IM.

Have you ever been on a public computer , where there are no IM clients installed. Or you maybe using yahoo..but the PC has MSN. Meebo is answer to all. Meebo is a web based all in one IM. Meebo supports Jabber,Gtalk from google,MSN,AIM,and the most popular yahoo.The web based interface is all made in AJAX and loads very faster even for a 56K connection.This is a great tool for all travellers and tourists who get into cafe and find they dont have your favourite IM installed.A tourist from US comes to Singapore where Yahoo messenger is the popular one.But the US citizen wants AIM.Meebo does the work.Try Meebo. www.meebo.com

CAPTCHA - an end to automated spam bots.

A CAPTCHA^TM is a program that can generate and grade tests that most humans can pass, but current computer programs can't pass. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs can't:

Test drive a CAPTCHA^TM: ESP-PIX | Gimpy

Principal Investigators
Luis von Ahn
Manuel Blum
Nicholas Hopper
John Langford

Some Publications

Telling Humans and Computers Apart Automatically (CACM)
CAPTCHA: Using Hard AI Problems for Security (Eurocrypt)

Applications

CAPTCHA^TM tests have several applications for practical security, including (but not limited to):

Online Polls.

In November 1999, http://www.slashdot.com released an online poll asking which was the best graduate school in computer science (a dangerous question to ask over the web!). As is the case with most online polls, IP addresses of voters were recorded in order to prevent single users from voting more than once. However, students at Carnegie Mellon found a way to stuff the ballots using programs that voted for CMU thousands of times. CMU's score started growing rapidly. The next day, students at MIT wrote their own program and the poll became a contest between voting "bots". MIT finished with 21,156 votes, Carnegie Mellon with 21,032 and every other school with less than 1,000. Can the result of any online poll be trusted? Not unless the poll requires that only humans can vote.

Free Email Services.

Several companies (Yahoo!, Microsoft, etc.) offer free email services. Most of these suffer from a specific type of attack: "bots" that sign up for thousands of email accounts every minute. This situation can be improved by requiring users to prove they are human before they can get a free email account. Yahoo!, for instance, uses a CAPTCHA^TM test of our design to prevent bots from registering for accounts.

Search Engine Bots.

It is sometimes desirable to keep webpages unindexed to prevent others from finding them easily. There is an html tag to prevent search engine bots from reading web pages. The tag, however, doesn't guarantee that bots won't read a web page; it only serves to say "no bots, please". Search engine bots, since they usually belong to large companies, respect web pages that don't want to allow them in. However, in order to truly guarantee that bots won't enter a web site, CAPTCHA^TM tests are needed.

Worms and Spam.

CAPTCHA^TM tests also offer a plausible solution against email worms and spam: "I will only accept an email if I know there is a human behind the other computer." A few companies are already marketing this idea.

Preventing Dictionary Attacks.

Pinkas and Sander have also suggested using CAPTCHA^TM tests to prevent dictionary attacks in password systems. The idea is simple: prevent a computer from being able to iterate through the entire space of passwords.

Google Buys Neven Vision to strengthen Picasa

Neven Vision acquisition expected to bolster portal's Picasa photo management software and service.

Google plans to strengthen its Picasa photo management software and service with the acquisition of Neven Vision, a Santa Monica, California, company specializing in mobile photo search.

Adrian Graham, Picasa product manager, announced the deal in an official Google blog posting today, saying that Neven Vision brings expertise on automatically obtaining information from a photo.

"It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about,"

Image Recognition

A spokeswoman for Neven Vision confirmed the acquisition has been finalized, but declined to provide details about the deal. Google didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.

Neven Vision, which also has offices in Japan, Germany, and the U.K., has developed a suite of image-recognition and facial-analysis tools for mobile devices, according to the company's Web site, which has since been shut down. The tools can be used for marketing, e-commerce, search, security and biometric verification purposes.

Google recently retooled its Picasa photo management software, giving users the ability to publish albums to the Web and share them with other people, making Picasa more competitive with rival service Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo and is considered a pioneer in online photo sharing.

Trolltech launches cell phones in LINUX OS .

Trolltech, best known for development tools and Linux application stacks for phones and other mobile devices, will ship an "open" Linux-based phone in September. The "Greenphone" features a user-modifiable Linux OS, and is meant to jumpstart a third-party native application ecosystem for Linux-based mobile phones.

The Greenphone appears to be a working GSM/GPRS mobile phone endowed with a bootloader amenable to letting users re-flash the phone with modified Linux-based firmware, via a mini-USB port. The phone will not be available standalone, but rather as part of a development kit. The kit will be offered under separate licensing terms to open source developers, educational institutions, "major" software vendors, and to "phone designers and manufacturers," Trolltech says.
Trolltech says it hopes the Greenphone will help foster a third-party application ecosystem around its Qtopia Phone Edition (QPE) Linux mobile phone stack. Such an ecosystem is "critical in satisfying growing customer demands, and shortening development and delivery cycle times," it says.
Anticipated applications include games, business applications, and web services frontends, along with "unpredictable" applications. The company says it expects to be "surprised" by what users come up with, adding, "[The] spirit of innovation has been key to the success of the PC and Internet. We think that the same dynamic has to appear in the mobile market."

Features and specs

The Greenphone is manufactured for Trolltech by Yahua Teltech, one of its customers based in China. The phone has a fairly thin and small "candybar" form factor, and measures 4.2 x 1.9 x 0.6 inches (106.5 x 49.0 x 15.6mm). It is based on a dual-core Marvell (formerly Intel) XScale processor clocked at 312MHz. It has 64MB of RAM, and 128MB of flash, expandable through a mini-SD card slot.
The Greenphone has a QVGA (320 x 240) LCD touchscreen display, in addition to hardware buttons to support keypad-driven user interfaces. Trolltech's QPE has supported both touchscreens (popular in technology-driven Asia) and keypad interfaces (popular in convenience-driven markets such as Europe and the U.S.) since November of 2004.
The device also includes WiFi, and comes with SIP middleware supporting VoIP calls.
Other Greenphone features include a 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth radio, and the all-important mini-USB port, over which the firmware can be updated. The Greenphone's baseband processor/modem is a Broadcom BCM2121.

Department of State began issuing Electronic Passports

The (e-passports) to the public. Production has started at the Colorado Passport Agency and will be expanded to other production facilities over the next few months.

Consistent with globally interoperable specifications adopted by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), this next generation of the U.S. passport includes biometric technology. A contactless chip in the rear cover of the passport will contain the same data as that found on the biographic data page of the passport (name, date of birth, gender, place of birth, dates of passport issuance and expiration, passport number), and will also include a digital image of the bearer’s photograph.

The Department of State has employed a multi-layered approach to protect the privacy of the information and to mitigate the chances of the electronic data being skimmed (unauthorized reading) or eavesdropped (intercepting communication of the transmission of data between the chip and the reader by unintended recipients). Metallic anti-skimming material incorporated into the front cover and spine of the e-passport book prevents the chip from being skimmed, or read, when the book is fully closed; Basic Access Control (BAC) technology, which requires that the data page be read electronically to generate a key that unlocks the chip, will prevent skimming and eavesdropping; and a randomized unique identification (RUID) feature will mitigate the risk that an e-passport holder could be tracked. To prevent alteration or modification of the data on the chip, and to allow authorities to validate and authenticate the data, the information on the chip will include an electronic signature (PKI).

Know about RSS

RSS = Really Simple Syndication. What is it ?

An RSS feed is a little text file that contains information about what was updated recently on a certain site. An RSS feed generally contains three things, a headline, a short summary, and a link which you can click to read the full article.

An RSS feed is formatted in the XML language, so though it is a text file, a human would have a hard time figuring out which part means what. You need a RSS Reader in order to “render” an RSS news feed.

There are many free tools available out there that do this, but our favorites are the following:

RSS Reader 1.08
http://www.rssreader.com
FEED DEMON is another great and freeware tool.
http://www.newsgator.com

Review - Sony Introduces Mylo

Sony Introduces Mylo Pocket Communicator.

Sony is launching its first WiFi broadband communication and entertainment device to capitalize on the growth of wireless Internet access. The new mylo personal communicator is capable of operating in any open 802.11b wireless network.According to Sony, the product is designed for people who use instant messaging as a primary form of communication and networking for their social life. The name mylo stands for “my life online” and the communicator lets consumers use instant messaging, browse the Internet, listen to music, send emails and view photos concurrently.
Small enough for a pocket or purse, the slim, oblong-shaped device features a 2.4 inch color LCD (measured diagonally) with a slide out QWERTY keyboard for quick thumbtyping.
The device, available in black or white, comes embedded with popular instant messaging services: the Google Talk instant messaging service, Skype and Yahoo! Messenger. These services are free and the product does not require initial computer setup or a monthly service contract.
The product also includes JiWire’s hotspot directory listing more than 20,000 WiFi networks in the United States.
The “What’s Up” screen serves as the communication central, storing up to 90 friends’ avatars for a quick status of who is online. An embedded HTML browser lets users connect to full Web pages on the Internet.
The communicator also runs an e-mail client, being compatible with services such as Yahoo! Mail and the Gmail web mail service.
The communicator comes with Skype software built into it, allowing registered Skype users to make free Internet calls to other other Skype users worldwide.
The mule personal communicator comes with 1GB of flash memory, to store data. This includes music, and the device is complatible with MP3, ATRAC and WMA (secure and unsecure) files. The mylo communicator has a built-in speaker for listening to music as well as headsets. It can also play MPEG-4 videos by transferring files via USB cable or with Memory Stick Duo media.
It auto detects other mylo units cose by and creates an ad-hoc network. With the ad-hoc application, is possible to share play lists and stream music between mylo communicators one at a time.
The lithium-ion battery offers up to 45 hours of music playback, around seven hours of chatting and web surfing and more than three hours of continuous Skype talk time. It comes with a microphone, stereo headphones, a USB cable and a neoprene case.
The mylo personal communicator will be available in September for about US$350.

Get More info at : http://www.sony.com/mylo