Tip of the day: eBooks

I found this couple of days ago. Has good collection of books for techies. Explore yourself.

http://knowfree.net/

Tool of the day: Thinkfree

ThinkFree is an online office product. Though not the best one but a better one than Microsoft's Live. It is one of the PCWorld's Top 100 best products of 2005.I've used ONLY the word document so far. The features that I like and used are..

1. Converting to pdf
Works fine and looks nice. Unfortunately cannot post it to blogs.
2. Post to blog
You can directly post the document you created to blog.s Works fine with blogspot and wordpress blogs.
3. Free and 1GB storage
4. Cross platform

The features that I don't like so far are

1. The PowerEdit is slow as it uses java
2. QuickEdit is very buggy and for some reason removes the '+' character always from the doc

Tip of the day: DOS & Windows Explorer

You can enter "explorer /e,." (explorer, space, slash, e, comma, period) at the prompt to open Windows Explorer in the folder you're working with in DOS. Handy when you sometimes want to work Windows Explorer GUI while working in DOS command mode..

Topic of the Day: Virtual India

Apologize. It is out of the topic for this blog but I found that I should share this.

Microsoft is never shy to copy & yet bold to call it their research. In this case they copied Google Earth technology,extended it to be multi-lingual and call it Microsoft Virtual Earth technology. Virtual India is built out of this (copied??) technology with Govt of India. The map is now online & currently supports street level searches for Bangalore city alone. Still in proto-typing phase. Yeah copying without patent violation takes time.

Tip of the Day: New feature of netstat command in XP

If you have never heard or used netstat command before see here. There is a cool new option to show name of the process associated with the connection or listening port. Here is how to use..

C:>netstat -b



This option will display the executable. If the executable is an host then the components associated with connection or port is displayed. A cool feature of trouble-shooting network related in distributed systems. I previously had to use a seperate application for this purpose.

Tool of the Day: AVG AntiVirus

A free anti-virus software.VB(Virus Bulletin) has given it 100%, ICSA certified & so thought it should be good. My pc-cilin has expired on my stand-alone home PC and was looking for a good GNU anti-virus software & found this one. My guess was right. It is a good, simple & effective tool. The installation was smooth. The updates & scanning could be done only once during a day in the free edition but could be scheduled. I used it for a week and all of the updates & checks were successful. I tested with couple of viruses & worms (old though) and AVG was quick to catch them :-) Would definetly recommend.

Read & follow the license agreement. AVG free edition is allowed ONLY for stand-alone home PC & is not for commericial or office use.

Tool of the Day: TestDisk (Partition Recovery)

This is an excellent utility to recover lost paritions. It is an OpenSource software and is licensed under the GNU Public License. I strongly recommend the newbies to run this utility in log/debug mode and send the output to experts or forum for recovery instructions.

Tip of the Day: Improve your screen readability on XP

Have you ever wondered why you prefer to print and read from papers rather than screen directly?The answer is that the fonts appearing on the screen are not sharp & clear as the printed material. Microsoft has attempted to resolve this pain of customers through ClearType. I think they did really well. See it yourself to believe it. The improvement is very impressive in LCD. I personally don't see much in the CRT. You can enable ClearType on XP using the following web interface.

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/Step1.aspx

Note:
1. Use IE instead of firefox as this enabling is based on ActiveX control.
2. After this, increase your screen resolution and see that now you'll be comfortable with larger resolutions. I use (1400 x 1050) than (1280 x 1024) when ClearType is enabled. Saves lot of scrolling & tabbing.