Random Bits

As i was writing the previous post i started weighing Firefox with MSIE. Then i thought its worth a full post and here it is.

One thing i really hate about Internet Explorer is the stubborness of MS for not providing the tabbed browsing feature. This is a very basic feature and puzzles me as to whats stopping MS from getting it into their browser. Mozilla Firefox is a very good alternative to MSIE. Yes, it supports tabbed browsing. Unlike the Mozilla browser, Firefox is light weight and has good look and feel, with all the cool themes available, its awesome. As i mentioned in the previous post it has some great extensions. Installing these themes and extensions is very easy and just takes a few clicks from its site. Some of the extensions i use are:-

You can find all these and many more here
Of all the cool themes available for Firefox i like AbstractPC the most, for its cute vitreous icons. Firefox has a builtin popup blocker, download manager and google seachbar which is very handy.

Another important feature of Firefox is its seamless integration with Mozilla Thunderbird, a very good mail client. Just like firefox, Thunderbird is light weight and comes with great themes and extensions. I have not used outlook express to compare with it, but thunderbird does the job for me. It can be easily configured to check various mail accounts. It has a good Address book and signature manager. It’s feature-rich mail composer allows one to send html/text messages. It is easy to insert pictures and smileys into messages. Some of the extensions i use with Thunderbird are:-

The duo of Firefox & Thunderbird is redefining the browsing experience. These stable, bug-free, open-source software are shaking the grounds of their mighty proprietary counterparts. I hope this success of community backed software development is reflected in other software domains resulting in some good open-source software. Though it takes sometime to happen in a large scale, its inevitable.

Related links:-
Get Firefox
Get Thunderbird

Bloglines - use this site to keep a watch on all the blogs you follow. Just add the names of the blogs you are interested in, and it will keep track of any new postings on these. Bloglines also has many notifiers - to inform about any new message posted. I use the notifier which comes as a plugin for Mozilla Firefox. It sits in the bottom corner of the browser reflecting the status of blogs under watch, without unnecessarily toubling you. And to read any blog just click the button and you get to view all of them in one place.

There are lot of other plugins for Firefox related to blogging. “Blog This” is another good extension for Firefox. It adds right-click access to Blogger’s Blog This popup. While surfing, if you come across an interesting site worth mentioning in your blog, then it is just a click away with this plugin.

Related Clicks
Firefox Themes & Extensions
Download Firefox

LaTeX is a very powerful formating language built over TeX ( created by Donald Knuth ) by Leslie Lamport. For the beginners it is a bit difficult to remember the various tags present. It is really worth the effort for the kind of output LaTeX generates when compared to other WYSIWYG formatters like MS Word. The difference is especially prominent when the document involves lot of mathematical stuff like equations, formulae etc. But it is always good to simplify the process if there is a good option. So the first thing i did when i started using LaTeX was to search for a good editor for creating LaTeX files, without requiring me to remember the various LaTeX tags. Kile is easily the best of the lot.

Kile is a LaTeX source editor for KDE. It provides a user friendly environment for creating and editing LaTeX documents. For those who are new to LaTeX, Kile is the best way to start using this powerful formating language and for the power users it is the fast and easy way to manage LaTeX projects. Kile comes with many commonly used templates. It provides an integrated interface for editing, compiling and previewing LaTeX files. Some of the useful features of Kile are:-

It also has a very good handbook( typical of a KDE app ) and LaTeX help.
I have included some of these features in Leela, a multilingual editor for GNU/Linux, making it an IDE for creating multilingual LaTeX documents.

With the ease of Kile and power of LaTeX and its related packages we can create beautiful books, reports, presentations, papers etc. So get rid of those WYSIWYG programs and switch to LaTeX.

Related Links:-http://kile.sourceforge.net/
http://www.tug.org/

Podcasting is a new way of managing media content on web. Any new media files uploaded in a site can be reflected using the Media RSS(MRSS) feeds. Search engines which are looking for media over web can look for these RSS feeds and get the updated version of the media. Podcasting is mainly used with audio files, especially for radio shows. In Podcasting as and when new shows are uploaded, the RSS files are suitably updated. This way anyone who has subscribed for these feeds will be aware of the available shows. Hence Podcasting acts like a new form of free radio over internet.

Three steps for listening to podcasts.

1. Download and install a podcast software like ipodder, itunes 4.9 etc. These softwares act as aggregators of the RSS feeds.
2. Search for the podcasts of interest and subscribe for their feeds. The podcast software software ( aggregators ) frequently look for the updated shows and download them on to our computer.
3. Listen the downloaded shows on the computer or sync it with other devices like ipod for convinient listening.

Through podcasting we can listen to all our favourite shows anytime, anywhere defying the schedule of the stations. There are many sites on the internet where one can start podcasting. It is as simple as writing a blog. Podcasting is quickly gaining popularity with many sites providing related services.

For more gyaan on Podcasting visit the following links:-

Froogle is yet another service from Google. The name Froogle is a hack of the words “frugal + google”, Google itself being a hack of googol( 10 to the power of 100 ). Froogle has two sides to it - from the point of view of a person who is looking for some cool products sold over web and a merchant who is selling goods online. Both the search and the listing services are provided freely by froogle ( thats why i like it! ). Froogle is not a store where we can buy things it only directs us to the stores which sells the products we are looking for. This way Froogle doesnot promote any store over another. However like anyother Google search, it comes with sponsored links, which can be safely neglected.

Froogle has two great features - “My Shopping List” and “My Wish List”. For creating these lists one should have a google login. In the “My Shopping List” we can add the products we like to buy, if not now in the near future, and thus keep a check on their prices, features etc. The best part of Froogle is “My Wish List”. This is the publicly viewable part of our Wish List. We can selectively add the products which can appear on our Wish List. This way we make our preferences known to the people who are willing to buy us gifts.

I hereby declare that i am ready to accept gifts from anyone who is willing to send some ( dont wait for an occasion ). Heres my wishlist to aid you My Frugal Wish List

For more information about Froogle shoping list visit this link

One good feature of Google Earth is the facility to fly between places. Google Earth is a free software. There are two more versions of this software called “Google Earth Plus” & “Google Earth Pro” which come with advanced features like GPS device support. But unfortunately they are not free. Unless they imbibe certain level of detail into the maps of India, it doesnot serve our purpose. However one can always try it for getting a feel of our world, through its out of the world interface.

For more details follow the link below
http://earth.google.com/

Few days back i read an article ( dont remember the link ) in which the author spoke of ways to earn money by writing free open source code. The author said that we can concentrate on taking small problems which are very important and for which there are no good solutions. Then we should write good code to solve such problems. We can host our solutions online in sites like sourceforge etc. From these pages we can a link back to our own sites. By doing so we are creating external reference to our sites and thus increasing its “Google Page Rank” and thus its advertisement potential. This way we can make money by allowing people to advertise in our site. In this article he had made a mention of Google AdSense.

When i checked out Google AdSense, i found it very interesting. The basic principle of Google AdSense is that Google will place advertisements of its sponsors in our site and out of the revenue generated, a part will be credited to us. Though it may not seem something great, the best part of Google Ad sense is that it will analyse the contents of our sites and then suggest most suitable ads. If we dont believe this, We also have an option of selecting the ads that can be placed in our site. The way google calculates the revenue is also very clear. We can get ad revenue based on either the number of impressions of the ads or based on the number of clicks on the featured ads. Google AdSense also provides a google search box in our site. The search results got from this will also have featured ads and thus gives us ad revenue. However revenue from these ads are based on number of clicks and not on impressions.

I am trying out Google AdSense through this blog. Let me see.. Anyways nothing to lose. Can come out of it anytime i like. My account, after initial problems in my credit name, is now under creation. I am eagerly waiting to make my first e-commerce transaction…

For more details about Google AdSense visit the following link

Eversince i got broadband connection i wanted to listen to internet radio. So as usual the first thing i did was to google for online radio channels. Then i found link to http://www.xmradio.com. Unfortunately accessing this site required me to shell out some money. However there was a 3 day trial offer which i tried. Thus i got my first feel of internet radio. XM Radio Online has a very good catalogue of channels and programs,currently being broadcast. It comes with a online player - XM Radio Online Player, so we neednot have real player or anyother media player installed. XM Radio Online has around 100 radio channels broadcasting various things like news, comedy shows, kids shows, musics of various genres like rock, blues, jazz, country, world, hip hop, dance, christian etc. Its worth a shot.

Easiest way to get access to free internet radio is through real one player. It has categorised various radio channels into Rock/Pop, Alternate/Punk, Rap/Hip Hop, Country, Jazz,…, News, Sports,Talk etc. Every category has a suggested list of stations. We can also see all the stations in each category. We can create a personal account in the real player and make a preferred list of stations etc. http://radio.msn.com is also a very good place for internet radio. Numerous channels are catalogued here. One channel that particularly interested me was http://beethoven.com. It calls itself “the world’s classical radio station”. It surely is. It features live classical music 24×7. There are many more such stations, i haven’t yet tried listening to.With internet radio around, i have stopped brooding for having in my house a radio which refuses to play and a TV which has seen more new years than me.

Advantages of Internet radio over Traditional radio:-Apart from PCs it can be accessed through mobile devices like car radios, cell phones, PDAs etc. Along with the audio content related media like photos, track info can also be broadcast. It is easier to start a Internet radio broadcasting station…

The following links gives detailed description of working of Internet radio

KNewsTicker is an applet for KDE panel. It displays the latest news reported worldwide in the form of scrolling text. It also provides a link to view the full article. We can add any news site to the list of news sites which KNewsTicker scans for news. By default it has included a good number of sites its list covering variety of fields like Arts, Business, Computers, Magazines, Recreation, Society etc. The list includes some popular sites like /.slashdot, dot.kde.org, cnn etc. We can configure KNewsTicker to add any site of our interest.

KNewsTicker works by reading and interpreting the RSS files present in the listed sites periodically. A RSS file is an XML file used to provide a means to syndicate web content in an easy and standard way. RSS can be used to present static and dynamic information in ones site along with the news stories. RSS provides simple tags for sharing news. All we have to do is mention the “name of the article”, “link where it can be found” and “a brief description of the article”. After writing the RSS file in the required format we have to register with the RSS aggregators who periodically check these RSS feeds for updates. This way information can flow very easily and may increase the traffic to our sites.

Thus RSS is a simple technology with potential impact.

The following link has a collection of article related to RSS

http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/
http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/ - a good RSS tutorial

This is a cool extension for the Mozilla firefox. By installing it a toolbar is added to the browser. It mainly contains a “STUMBLE!” button. On clicking it a new page will be opened in the browser. This page is suggested by one of the “Stumble Upon” users. We can configure Stumble, creating our profile and giving our preferences to match our interests. When we are browsing the web if we come accross some webpage which really interests us, we can click on the “I like it” toolbar button. There is also a “Not for me” button to rate the pages which we feel insipid. This way we can express our likes and dislikes. With numerous people using “Stumble Upon” we can find a lot of like minded individuals to help us while browsing the web.

If one is bored of browsing through the catalogued web( through yahoo etc. ) then “Stumble Upon” will be a welcome change. In the conventional way of browsing one moves between pages by clicking on the links displayed. This can be called linear-nonrandom browsing. “Stumble Upon” brings in randomness and makes it even more interesting.

All this said “Stumble Upon” is not useful when we require some specific info. For this we have to rely on Google etc. Thus “Stumble Upon” is a nice way to do time-pass on net, because we neednot even think of anything, just click on the button and Stumble upon some interesting page.

Happy Stumbling…