Microsoft's Global Anti-Piracy Day

Microsoft celebrated October 21st as Global Anti-Piracy day.
Truly telling I love open source because it keeps me away from pirating software. But its the way of life and all of us need it.
To answer the call of Microsoft's Global Anti-Privacy Day, famous bit torrent site thepiratebay.com came up with a new idea. It put Bill Gates picture and wrote "Bill Gates made me do it". And to top it all, they put the torrents of all Microsoft products on their homepage.
thepiratebay.com has been involved in many piracy related cases, lets see how far they can go before they are pulled off.
Read the full story here.

Windows 7, how come??

Well a lot of talk going on about the Windows 7. Nothing new, unlike Google that simply puts up the beta puzzling everybody, Microsoft goes around shouting about what they will do. And then fail in doing that. We saw it with Vista.

Sad but true Vista was a big failure. Now the new Windows coming is Windows 7. But how come is it 7?? Microsoft thought us how to count. Lets see:

Windows 1, 2, 3.11 were not much, but was great, much innovative.
Windows struck the market with Windows 95. Windows 95 is named to be Windows 4
Then Windows 2000 is said to be the Windows 5
Windows Vista the sorrow of Microsoft is Windows 6
And then Windows 7

But I think Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) forgot a few things : - Windows 98 and Windows XP?
They are the most popular Windows Versions and Ballmer doesn't name them. (Did you see the video of a man throwing eggs at Ballmer? Check it out)

Here is a tutorial on how to fix your Vista.

Alice and Bob

Read the names too many times, didn't we. Just check the wikipedia.

It is just that it was confusing to keep telling person A said to person B that she was sending a letter but person E was listening to the messages from person A and was modifying it before it reached to person B. Understood?
Lets try again
Alice (person A) said to Bob that she was sending a letter but Eve was listening to the messages from Alice and was modifying it before it reached to Bob
That's much better.
Anyway check this strip out. http://www.xkcd.com/177/

Twincling Society

I mostly use open source software . The Open Source community rocks. But the trouble is where do I go when I get a trouble. Is there any local organization that can help me? Well, if you are in Hyderabad, Banglore, Pune or Vijayawada, we can help.

TWINCLING Society is a registered, "not-for-profit" organization. It focuses on open source.
What Twincling does?
. Promote open source by seminars and workshops
. Encourage students and professionals to work on open source
. Develop open source
. Conduct different events

Twincling representatives go to different college to promote open source.
Twincling is developing various open source software that involve students in the core team.
Twincling has contacted many colleges in and around Hyderabad to involve their students in development activities. The best thing is you can put these projects as your B.Tech final year project.

One of the great things is twincling mailing list. You can ask any question related to linux or other open source software and there are 1700+ members listening to you, so you are sure to get an answer.

Check it out: www.twincling.org

Useful sites - 5

For MAC users this time

Here are a few links that I got from different people. Good to learn that there are a few people who read my blog. (I thought I was wasting my time on it) But now I think at least 5 people read it(excluding me, of course :) )
Anyway here are the links:

http://nomercymac.blogspot.com/ - List of really cool applications
http://bestmactricks.blogspot.com/ - Some goods tips they say
http://www.osxfaq.com/tutorials/LearningCenter/ - Start using the console, starts from basics (good for linux users as well)
http://www.macinstruct.com/ - Some really simple tutorial / FAQ
http://refit.sourceforge.net/ - Bored of pressing Options button (I guess, don't remember) while booting to choose the OS you boot? Try refit bootloader, it should work
http://www.macprovideo.com/tutorials/ - A picture's worth a thousand words they say. What about a video?? All tutorials in videos
http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX/Installing - Install WINE (Wine Is Not Emulator) and run your windows applications on Mac. They say Wine is more XP compatible than Vista and that FIFA 08 runs better on WINE than on Vista.

Post your favourite Mac related site in the comments. I wan to learn more about it.

Messengers

One of my all time favourite timepass is to play with software.
After standing against chatting for years, I started chatting at the end of 3rd year (2nd semester). I chatted for nearly 7 days with only 2-3 hours of break. It was a very tiring and new experience. I didn't know the shortcuts, emoticons. But what messenger to use was the golden question.

Well lets list out a few good messengers:
1. Yahoo Messenger
2. MSN Messenger
3. Pidgin
4. Digsby
5. Trillian
6. Adium
7. Miranda
8. www.meebo.com
9. www.ebuddy.com
10. www.iloveim.com
11. Apple iChat
12. Google Talk

the list is very big, but lets stop here.

Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger are two really good messenger with a lot of good features. I hate both of them because of the nonsense features like BUZZ/nudge, audibles, etc.
These things are too disturbing. But the world uses it for the same reasons. :(
The audio and video chats are really great features and really easy to use.

My favourite messenger is Pidgin. It is a wonderful piece of software. It supports Bonjour (the protocol all the KLCE juniors use to chat among themselves), MSN, Yahoo, XMPP, Gtalk and many others. It's a multi-messenger. You can log in to all your accounts from one place.
You may say Yahoo messenger has the ability to allow multiple messenger. But there is a big difference, Yahoo Messenger gives different windows and tray icons for every account but in Pidgin its all in one place. Less windows, less trouble.
Pidgin is clean, simple. It has multiple plugins that make life easier. It doesn't blink or irritate you with popups (if you want you can activate these options).
Pidgin supports text replacement, doodle, file sharing, etc. It doesn't provide webcam or audio facilities and has no plans to implement them.

Kopete is another great messenger but only available for the folks on Linux/Unix. It has audio/video chat support. It is protected by KWallet. It has good interface and its default settings provide minimal disturbance while keep you informed about buddy's status/messages.

In order to make your life wonderful with smileys, you may want to install smiley themes for Yahoo/MSN as the smileys coming with Kopete or Pidgin is not upto the mark.

Trillian is a multi-messenger. I heard about it before I knew what messengers were. It has a free and a premium version. The reason I never tested it despite all the good rating is that it comes with ads and it asks me to install toolbar in Internet Explorer.

Adium is a messenger for Mac OS, it has very good rating. I have never used it.

Digsby is a flashy/glittering multi-messenger. Its different from others. How? It doesn't save your account details or chat log on your system but instead on its web server. So, if you move to a different computer, you can login using your digsby account(if that system has a digsby installed on it, very unlikely) and find all your accounts and logs there. It supports reading mails and replying to them without opening the mail account. It supports some social networking site like Facebook and MySpace. You can even chat with your facebook buddies without having to open the browser. Many other features.

Apple iChat is inbuilt messenger for Mac OS. It has a few features and because Bonjour is Apple's protocol, it is great with Bonjour.

Google Talk is something I have neither read nor used. It is among very few google services that I haven't used. But I expect it to be just as good as all other services that google provides.

Coming to web based messenger. My all time favourite is www.meebo.com
Its good. Really good, but gives a lot of network problems.

www.ebuddy.com is a great web based messenger. It loads a little slower but poses less network problem than meebo.com

www.iloveim.com is yet another great messenger.
Too bored to write about them :(
Leave comments on why this article is a crap.

P.S. : These are just a few messengers that I know. If your college has blocked them already, ask for more. I have a big database of web-based messengers ;)

Send e-mail via Yahoo! Mail or Gmail by default

Normally, clicking on an e-mail address on a Web page will open up a new e-mail using your default e-mail program. If you'd rather use Yahoo! Mail, open up Options under Firefox's Tools menu, select the Applications tab, and scroll down to the mailto: entry. Select Use Yahoo! Mail and click OK.

Gmail is not included as a built-in option in every installation of Firefox, but if yours doesn't have it, you can add Gmail easily enough. Skip the Options dialogs for now and instead type about:config in Firefox's address bar and hit Enter. In the Filter field, type gecko.handlerServiceAllowRegisterFromDifferentHost. Actually, you can simply type gecko and find the entry in the filtered list. Double-click the gecko.handlerServiceAllowRegisterFromDifferentHost entry to change it to True.

Next, cut-and-paste this line into the address bar and hit Enter: javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto", "https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Gmail")

A message will appear at the top of the browser window asking if you want to add Gmail as an application. Now, repeat the process above for choosing Yahoo! Mail, but select the new Use Gmail option instead.