Meebo Adds Video and Voice Chatting Features To Their Web Messenger

Meebo, the most popular web based chat application launched Voice and Video based chatting on Meebo IM interface.

To avail Video and Voice chatting, open a chat window and click on rocket ship icon on the chat tool bar. The window expands and show different options to start Voice and Video chatting conversations.

Sandy, a Meebo blogger, says...

We're super excited to debut applications inside meebo! Just click on that shiny new rocket ship icon in any IM window and then select which app you want to launch with your buddy. The first type of application we're showcasing? Drumroll please... Voice and video chat :)

Via Meebo blog

Freedom to Your iPhone/iPod With a Single Click - Powered By JailBreakMe.Com

JailBreakMe.Com is a great web site for all iPhone and iPod lovers who want to install third party applications on their iPhones/iPods. With the help of this site, it is a matter of single click to release all the locks and security restrictions implemented by Apple on iPhone/iPods to disallow third party applications.

Point your safari browser to http://jailbreakme.com and click on Install AppSnapp. It automatically downloads and installs a tiny application called Installer by exploiting the security holes in Safari browser.

After installing the application restart your phone once and you will find a new icon Installer on your phone. Now your phone is ready to install all the beautiful applications available on net.

Another interesting news is, Jail breaking not only allows you to install applications on your iPhone but also fixes a bug in Safari browser and makes the phone more secured. [Tuaw]

The One and Only Black iPhone In The World [Pictures]

Mark Hoekstra, a Dutch hacker who is well know of Slurpr & iNoPhone fame redesigned an original iPhone from Apple to suit his taste. The end product is a beautiful Black iPhone. This Black iPhone looks much better than the original iPhone.

Mark got an iPhone from his friend and activated it to work on Vodophone with a simple hack. Later he reassembled the entire phone by painting it in black and changing the logo. The logo is changed to old multi color Apple logo which is very attractive.

Via Geek Technique Paint it black - The iPhone

New Yahoo Messenger For Windows Is Amazingly Good - Embraces YouTube, Flickr and Maps

Yahoo today released new version of Yahoo Messenger(v9) application for Windows users. This new version of messenger has nice features like inbuilt ability to play YouTube videos & Filckr albums, new skins, more emoticons and great look and feel.

In a chat conversation if someone sends YouTube video URL, Yahoo Messenger 9.0 allows you to play the video inside chat window without visiting YouTube website.

Yahoo Messenger 9.0 also allows you to preview images of Flickr photo streams, other web images and Maps inside the chat window.

The new version of Yahoo Messenger 9 is a wonderful upgrade for regular users to share images, videos and other multimedia content on the web.

Another interesting feature is, you can configure Yahoo Messenger to deliver the IM messages received while you are Offline to a Mobile as SMS messages.

See the video demo released by Yahoo on the new features of Yahoo Messenger 9

 

Download Yahoo Messenger 9 for Window Vista and Windows XP

Best Gmail Productivity Tips

For the user of Gmail and Firefox, here are the two best tips to get email under control.

Keep most mailing list emails out of your inbox, one of the best way to handle emails is to keep most of the mails out of your inbox.It is common that we usually subscribe to bunch of mailists and end up with a lot of emails,but by adding filters like “If the email is to some-mailinglist, skip the inbox.” we can reduce the inbox load.

After finishing the first tip, its not a surprise that, you still end up with a lot of emails,fortunately the Firefox addon Better Gmail provides the way to prioritize the emails.Here’s how:

1. Install Firefox and Better Gmail addon.
2. Go to Tools Menu of the browser and select the option Better Gmail.After that select the “Saved Searches” option in the tab “Sidebar”
3. Go into Gmail and you’ll see a new sidebar with several example searches.
4. To run a saved search, just click on the search you want to run in the sidebar. Click on “Edit Searches” and add a new search.

Also, it is very easy to add a new search.Imagine that you get forward mails from your ex-collegues from some abccompany.com with names siva, raju and shyam.This search would find emails from any of those people that are still in your inbox and that are directly sent to you:

How do you add a new search? It’s easy. Imagine that you work at abccompany.com and you work with a team of three people: Alice, Bob, and Carol. This search would find emails from any of those people that are still in your inbox and that are directly to you:

to:me label:inbox AND from:(siva|raju|shyam)@abccompany.com

So let’s click on “Edit Searches” in the sidebar and add this new search. Here’s what you’ll see:

Under the text “Create a new persistent search” fill in the “Label” field with something like “My Ex-Collegues” and in the “Query” field, add a query like the one I mentioned, then click “Save Changes.”

Now when you’re facing a bunch of email in your Gmail inbox, you can click on the “My Ex- Collegues” link and you’ll see the important emails that you don’t want to miss. You can add quite a lot of people, too.

There are all sorts of other tricks you can do with labels and persistent searches. You could make a persistent search for different groups of people at work, or a search for email from your family.

Skype Mobiles are Launched. Mobile Communication Made More Cheaper.

UK Mobile phone service provide 3 and Ebay subsidiary Skype has announced today that they are going to sell Skype enabled phones from November 2 onwards in all the major stores of Britain.

With Skype enabled mobiles users can make free calls and text messages to other Skype users. Also users can make cheap International Calls calls with the help of Skype account.

Skype CEO said "Skype is now truly mobile. This new handset lets you make free mobile Skype calls when you are on the move to other Skype users all over the world"

This year has seen many revolutionary changes in mobile industry. Apple iPhone has changed the perception of a mobile and now Skype integrated mobiles from 3 network are going to support this change. There are many rumors of Google gPhone and it is expected to be announced anytime.

Summary of Skype Phone Benefits

• Make free Skype voice calls and messages to other skype users
• Make cheap international calls using Skype service directly from your mobile
• No need of PC or laptop to connect to Skype messenger

Charlie Ayers - A Millionaire Cook and Ex-Google Executive Chef

Like many Google employees, Charlie Ayers is a also millionaire today. He holds Google shares of worth approximately more than $26 million.

Charlie joined Google in 1999 as a chef(employee #56) and served free breakfast, lunch and dinner to all the young and multinational work force.

Charlie had a very good following in Google and his fame spread all over the silicon valley for preparing high-quality, environmentally friendly and largely organic meals to keep Googlers happy.

Charlie left Google in May 2005 and started venturing into his own business.  He is currently providing consulting service to major silicon valley corporate's on innovative food services and designing Micro kitchen / Food Service programs.

Apple Says "No Cash Please And You Are Allowed To Buy Only 2 iPhones"

Apple cracked whip again on iPhone resellers and pirates by imposing new restrictions. Apple and AT & T stores no longer accepts cash for iPhone purchases and the number of iPhones sold to a person is restricted to 2.

Apple spokesperson said

Customer response to the iPhone has been off the charts, and limiting iPhone sales to two per customer helps us ensure that there are enough iPhones for people who are shopping for themselves or buying a gift. We're requiring a credit or debit card for payment to discourage unauthorized resellers.

Apple was selling 5 iPhones person before making this statement and there were no restrictions on mode of payment.

Since the release of iPhone in June 29th of this year, Apple reportedly sold 1.4 million phones. Out these 1.4 million iPhones Apple estimated that 250,000 are unlocked and illegally used.

This move of Apple hits many of the black markets in countries like India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Singapore of Asia. In India you can purchase an unlocked iPhone for Rs. 26,000.00. But with the new restrictions in place, it will become tough for iPhone resellers to get phones from Apple stores. So there are chances of price hike of iPhones in black market.

Advertising on Facebook Sucks!!

Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspirations recently ran two ad campains on Facebook and had a bad experience. Amit purchased  5,000 ad impressions for 10$ on Flyers Basic of Facebook advertising system. And for his surprise he was able to get only 5 visits to his site from that ad campaign.

Observing his bad experience on Facebook advertising I feel it is better to stick to Google AdWords. For Indian content blogs I prefer to run ad campaigns on indianpad, the Indian version of famous DIgg.

Seems to be Google sensed that there is not much threat from Facebook and their bidding for Facebook share was less compared to Microsoft(Microsoft is the highest bidder for Facebook share and the deal is through) .

Read full story of Amit in his blog post.

Are You A Microsoft Office Whiz? Google is Looking For You!!

Google Jobs has an interesting advertisement. Google is searching for Microsoft Office Experts! Google Jobs site is running an advertisement for "Executive Assistant to the Executive Director, Google.org - San Francisco" with the requirements

• 5-8 years administrative experience in a fast-paced, high-tech environment; non-profit experience is a plus.
• BA/BSc degree from a top-tier university.
• Proven mastery of Office applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.
• Interest and experience in using technology to improve work efficiency.
• Interest and experience in interacting with all levels and departments within a company - to include working with several field offices, domestic and international.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills
• Strong organizational skills, detail-oriented, and the ability to handle multiple priorities.

Darren Strange, the UK Product Manager for Microsoft Office noticed this ad and said

The implication seems clear - if they have "interest and experience in using technology to improve work efficiency" they'll need to be Microsoft Office experts.

Does it mean that Google is depending much on Microsoft Office products rather on it's own/supported office products Star Office and Google Docs to carry out day to day activities efficiently?

Thanks Darren Strange

Tech Thoughts PR Is 4. Thank You Google For Giving Us Page Rank Love

Today morning we got a surprise gift from Google. A page rank 4 :). Google surprised our blog Tech Thoughts by giving page rank 4. Till yesterday page rank of Tech Thoughts is 0.

We at Tech Thoughts are very happy to see a huge gain in page rank and our sincere thanks Google for loving us.

The interesting thing is page rank of Tech Thoughts is increased when the most of the big names in blog sphere are facing Google Axe on their page rank. The leading blogs which saw drop of page rank are Engadget from 7 to 5, Autoblog from 6 to 4 and DownloadSquad from 5 to 4.

Put Your Gmail on Steroids with Better Gmail Firefox Extension

Better Gmail  a collection of 25 top class addons, is a wonderful   plug-in for firefox. This plugin makes Gmail with Firefox an ultimate experience.

It enhances Gmail in lots of different ways like:

• Adding Saved Searches
• Attachment Icons
• Label Colors
• Keyboard Macros
• Filter Assistant   and
• Right-Click Conversation Previews

The Handy firefox extension which is a combination of best Greasemonkey scripts, removes the pain of spending time on searching the best Greasemonkey scripts to improve your GMail.

Are you not using Firefox browser?

Track Your Comments On Blogger Blogs

Yesterday Blogger released a small and much needed feature of tracking comments. Now we can subscribe to email notifications when a new comment is made on the post which we commented earlier.

To create a follow up to track comments just select "Email follow-up comments to xxxxx@gmail.com".

It is also possible to track blogger comments through rss/atom feeds but not many people like to read the comments as feed items.

Unlike WordPress plugin "Subscribe to Comments" where anyone can subscribe to email notifications, blogger allows only Google/Blogger account readers to subscribe.

So only readers who have Blogger/Google account can be benefited by this new feature.

Hope soon Google will allow everyone to subscribe to comments.

Rare Photos of Bill Gates : Walk through his life

Young CEO

Bill Gates, about 27, in his Microsoft office in 1982.

Bill Gates: The Early Years Geniuses at Work

Gates watches his friend and future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen typing on a teletype terminal at the Lakeside School in Seattle in 1968. Gates was 13 when he entered the exclusive prep school, which was around the time this photo was taken.

  

Slacker?

Much of the computer equipment at Lakeside was bought with proceeds from a rummage sale organized by the students' mothers. Gates was drawn to programming the machines and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest.

Graduate

Gates during Commencement at the Lakeside School in 1973.

 

Arrested

In 1977, Gates was arrested by New Mexico police for speeding.

Partners

Gates and Allen in Microsoft's offices in 1982. Started initially in New Mexico, the company moved to Bellevue, Wash., in January 1979.

 

The Staff

The early team at Microsoft paused for a group portrait in 1978. Gates is at the bottom left.

 

Lots of Memory

Gates demonstrates the memory power of a CD in 1987.

Bill Introducing Microsoft

 

Bill's Lexus

Bill and Melinda Gates

 

Gates' 40,000 sq. ft. "ecology house" in Seattle - 7 years to built at estimated cost of $97 million (1998)

 

Bill Gates gets knighthood from Queen Elizabeth (2005)

 

Bill Gates playing video games at CES (2005)

 

Bill Gates hands over beta 2 of Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Longhorn Server at WinHEC 2006 in Seattle (2006)

Bill Gates launches Windows Vista and Office 2007 at New York's Times Square (2007

Bill Gates and his wife Melinda cuddle Samuel Baltazar (right) and Ires Mahnica during a visit to the Manhica Health Research Centre

GTalk Chat Shows the word BP in Blue Color. Do You Know Why?

Did you ever notice GTalk chat application window showing the word BP in blue color? If you have not, try now. When you send a chat message with a word BP, GTalk shows it in blue color.

Few minutes I wondered, what made GTalk to display BP in blue color? Then a simple Google query found answer to my question. The answer is very simple, BP is a smiley in GTalk and GTalk displays all smileys in blue color.

Hmm...That is news to me. I never knew that BP is a smiley. Digging little further on the net, I got complete list of smileys supported by GTalk. Here is the list and the below image which shows how these smileys look in GTalk chat window

;-| ;-O ;-x ;-P ;-D ;-( ;-) ;'( ;| ;O ;x ;P ;D ;) ;( ;)
:-| :-O :-x :-P :-D :-( :-) :'( :| :O :x :P :D :) :( :)
B) B( Bx BO B| BD BP

How to Enable Auto Filling of Website Address in Firefox Browser Address Bar?

By default Firefox displays a list of website address which matches to the characters entered in Address bar. This gives us an easy way to scroll down and select the required address if it is already there in visited web pages list.

But if we set the value of property browser.urlbar.autoFill to true, Firefox automatically completes the address as we type. In some cases this feature of Firefox browser saves time by automatically filling the address which we are about to type.

Follow these simple steps to enable auto fill property in Firefox browser

1. Type about:config in the address bar
2. Locate the configuration key browser.urlbar.autoFill (you can use filter to easily locate keys)
3. Right click on the configuration key and select the option Toggle.By default the value is set to false, you should change it true to enable auto filling.
4. That's it done. From now onwards your Firefox browser will automatically fill the address as you type in the address bar

Other Popular Firefox Posts

• Firefox Tip - Stop Firefox from Pre-Fetching Web Pages And Reduce Your Bandwidth Usage
• How to Open Accidentally Closed Browser Tabs
• Single Firefox Plug in to Upload/Download Flickr, Picasa Albums, Youtube, Box.net and Facebook Content

Don't you use Firefox? Please think again if you are not using!

Firefox is one of the best web explorers available in the market. Just look at the few awards won by Firefox for the past 2 years.

• PC World 100 Best Products of 2007, 2006 & 2005
• PC Magazine Choice, October 2006, 2005
• Forbes Best of the Web, May 2005
• Webware 100 winner, June 2007
• CNET Editors' Choice, October 2006

Get the FREE Firefox browser right now for for faster and secure web browsing.

C#.NET : Display TreeView Nodes in Different Colors

It's always fun to customize and draw .NET graphical user control to suite specific needs of our application. In .NET framework 2.0 custom painting of Windows user controls is very easy and even beginners can  master the art of custom painting in couple of days.

Today we would like to explain you how to change the colors of TreeView nodes using a sample C# program. The sample program which we are going to create now displays selected nodes of a TreeView control in Red color. Start following these simple steps

1. Open Visual Studio.NET 2005 editor and create a new C# Windows project
2. Open Form1 in designer mode
3. Drag and drop a TreeView control on the Form1
4. Add few nodes to the TreeView control(use the property Nodes to add nodes)
5. Set the property DrawNode of the TreeView control to OwnerDrawText
6. Add the following code to DrawNode event of the TreeView control and execute the project. That's all you see selected nodes in red color.

---

private void treeView1_DrawNode(object sender, DrawTreeNodeEventArgs e)

{

   //Paint text of selected node in red color

   if ((e.State & TreeNodeStates.Selected) != 0)

   {

       e.Graphics.DrawString(e.Node.Text,

               e.Node.TreeView.Font,

               Brushes.Red,

               e.Bounds);

 

   }

   //Paint text of other nodes in default color

   else

   {

      e.DrawDefault = true;

   }

}

---

If you observer the above  DrawNode event code, selected nodes are identified with the criteria (e.State & TreeNodeStates.Selected) != 0 . And the selected node's text is painted in red color by specifying Brushes.Red as third parameter in the e.Graphincs.DrawString method. Now its your time to play with this event and customize painting of nodes. Enjoy programming.

Access Blocked Orkut at Office/School/University

There are different ways to access your favorite sites which are blocked at your office/school/university. In our previous post we explained you 4 easy and simple tricks to access blocked web sites. In this post we explain you the different tricks to access blocked Orkut web site.

Trick 1. Using PowerScrap.com

Using PowerScrap web site to access Orkut is the one of the easiest and most reliable way to unblock Orkut. PowerScrap is a safe, fast, reliable and very powerful site to interact with your friends in Orkut.

Trick 2. Using images.orkut.com

In most of the organizations access to images.orkut.com is not blocked. If your organization has not blocked this site then you are very luck. Accessing orkut through images.orkut.com is same as accessing orkut directly.

Trick 3. Using Facebook web site

If you have Facebook account  then you can use My Orkut application of Facebook to get access to Orkut.

Installing and configuring My Orkut Application on facebook web site is very easy by following these simple steps

1. Click here to install My Orkut Application
2. Then copy and paste full url of your orkut account in the preference page of My Orkut Application . URL of your orkut account looks similar to

   http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=1820189889131874780. You can get to the URL by clicking on your own Photo after signing in to Orkut.

3. That's all. Now you can access your Orkut through Facebook.

(it is very unlikely that facebook in banned in most of organizations in India/Asia)

I hope at least one among the above three tricks works at your organization/school/university. Happy Orkuting!!

Bonus Tip - Download free Norton Anti-Virus from Google

Do you know that the world class Anti-Virus program Norton Internet Security 2007 is free with Google Pack? Google is distributing free Norton Anti-virus software for all the users to ensure safer browsing. Download it right now and keep your computer safe.

Golden iPhone - Gadgets For Filthy Rich

Gold Sticker International, a UK based company is introducing 24 Kt golden iPhones. Golden Sticker is well known for adding gold to popular electronics gadgets like Mobiles, iPods and Notebook computers.

The golden iPhone price is not yet announced and expected to be available in market by the end of October 2007. If you are rich enough to afford the price then get ready to grab this mobile at Gold Sticker International

Microsoft.NET Family Welcomes F# To Be As First Class .NET Language

F#, the functional programming language incubated by Microsoft Research is now elevated as 1st class .NET programming language. This brings F# to be hand in hand with .NET framework which allows seamless integration with other .NET programing languages like C#,VB.NET. Also F# will be fully integrated with Visual Studio IDE to provide the development environment which every developer love to work with. 

How is F# Pronounced?

F# is pronounced as F-sharp which is very similar to the way C#(C-Sharp) is pronounced.

What type of language is F#?

F# is a functional programming language which is derived from ML family of languages. Here is the Wikipedia definition for functional programming and ML family of languages

Functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions, in contrast with the imperative programming style that emphasizes changes in state.

ML is a general-purpose functional programming language developed by Robin Milner and others in the late 1970s at the University of Edinburgh,[1] whose syntax is inspired by ISWIM. Historically, ML stands for metalanguage as it was conceived to develop proof tactics in the LCF theorem prover (the language of which ML was the metalanguage is pplambda, a combination of the first-order predicate calculus and the simply-typed polymorphic lambda-calculus). It is known for its use of the Hindley-Milner type inference algorithm, which can automatically infer the types of most values without requiring explicit type annotations.

What are the goals of F#?

F# is developed to implement the core features of ML programming on the .NET platform to bring the benefits of .NET and ML-style programming to the scientific, engineering and high performance computing communities.

As a developer what I can expect from F#?

F# is a programming language that provides the much sought-after combination of type safety, performance and scripting, with all the advantages of running on a high-quality, well-supported modern runtime system. F# gives you a combination of

• interactive scripting like Python

• the foundations for an interactive data visualization environment like MATLAB

• the strong type inference and safety of ML

• a cross-compiling compatible core shared with the popular OCaml language

• a performance profile like that of C#

• easy access to the entire range of powerful .NET libraries and database tools

• a foundational simplicity with similar roots to Scheme

• the option of a top-rate Visual Studio integration

• the experience of a first-class team of language researchers with a track record of delivering high-quality implementations

• the speed of native code execution on the concurrent portable, and distributed .NET Framework

Read more about F# at Microsoft Research

Google Logos: The Different Faces of Google

Dennis Hwang (Hwang Jung-moak), a 23-year-old Korean computer artist in the United States , who has been drawing the face of Google for almost two years, creating a buzz of sorts with his simple yet witty designs.

 

Mother's Day

 

Father's Day

Women's Day

National Library Day

St.Patrick's Day

Michelangelo's Birthday

Einestien;s Birthday

Ray Charle's Birthday

Dragon's day

 

Alfred Hitchcock's Birthday

                       

Earth Day

 

 

Halloween

National Teacher Day

 

Water Day

 

valentine's Day