Archive for April, 2008
Plagiarism - Protect Yourself
April 30, 2008 by Guru, under Featured, Tips and Tricks.
If ever you have gone though the media guru’s blog, you must have read that his articles are being copied by basictweak.com. To circumvent such practices, I will try to come up with some major tips to protect yourselves. I have yet to implement them. As a matter of fact this article is the product of inspiration to fight plagiarism. (more…)
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6 Comments
Vbulletin 3.7.0 Gold Released
April 29, 2008 by Guru, under Tech News.
Vbulletin has gone Gold again. This time, it is iteration 3.7.0!!! You must all have noticed the above icon often. If I guess right, it is most likely the most active and successful forums that are using Vbulletin. It is being actively developed.
In fact, what does gold mean? According to wikipedia, it is the final version of a particular product. You read it the right way, the most stable and most likely to have the least possible bugs. 
(that is what is most desirable).
I Have used Vbulletin in some occasions, and my advice, it is the best. As it claims to be. About three years back, I can still remember, it was the best and so is it today also. 
Fully packed with the right set of features and community contributed add-ons, it is no other that an unbeatable package.
This time it has come back with more powerful and useful features.
- Inline spam management & prevention
- Thread tagging
- Search cloud / tag cloud
- Thread prefixes
- Reciprocal friendships between users
- Public visitor messaging on profile pages with ‘conversation’ feature
- User picture galleries with user comment facility
- User-created social groups with invite only and moderated membership options
- Extended member profile pages
- Customizable member profile pages with admin-controlled styling abilities
- Inline editing of custom user profile fields
- Lightbox viewer for attached images
- Viewable and comparable history maintained for post edits
- Extended re-authentication for inline moderation actions
- Notices system for navigation bar
- Multiple human-verification systems including reCAPTCHA, image verification and Q/A
- User change history
- Social bookmarking integration
Comparing the set of presented features with previous versions, I can say “Yes major improvements have been made”. In fact, these are the new additions (features) and the most basic ones. Customisation takes you beyond the average ones.
You might also want to take a look at vBSeo, its specialised SEO package. And this one really works.
Tempted to download? So am I, but it is a commercial package. Costing $150. But, overall comparing it with all the open source forums software and IPB (Invision Power Board), it is worth investing.
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HyMini - Green Power Is In Your Hand
April 27, 2008 by Guru, under Gadget, General, Tech News.
How does it sounds? Technology and environment! For me, this is ’sound’ thinking. MiniWiz, the company behind HyMini , has come forward with facilitating your life and being an environment fighter. Own your own power generator.
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Funny Adsense Ad!
April 25, 2008 by InF, under Randomness.
I just published the AVG post, and check what I found in the ads just below the post!
Sometimes, Google can have humour too it seems! 
Anybody want to buy a baby online? Lolz go to contextual advertising! 
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AVG Free 8.0 Released
April 25, 2008 by InF, under Software.
I know many people are using AVG as an anti-virus solution. Well, you probably know that AVG upgraded to 8.0, but the free version was stuck at 7.5.
Good news! You can now get the 8.0 version of AVG Free. It’s really worth it, considering that the free version now comes bundled with an anti-spyware solution, which is better than 7.5 which didn’t offer anti-spyware.
Go get it here. I personally think AVG is one of the best anti-virus solutions around, specially among the free ones. So 8.0 is worth checking out.
(Wow! That thing is growing in size! 8.0 is a 46MB file now! It was 23MB previously! I just hope it’s not becoming a bloatware!)
Here are some screenshots:
The interface is much cleaner, pleasing to the eyes and functional. Everything can be known about the state of the antivirus at a glance.
The number of settings has been increased too. AVG8 is much more customizable than 7.5. In fact, much much more!
The computer scanning screen is nice and clean. Note the slider at the bottom, where it says automatic scan. That can be changed to slow scan (less resources needed) and fast scan (more resources needed). This is a nice improvement, and I didn’t find that in any other AV I used.
(If you want to bypass the image-overlay, just right-click on the image and click View Image or Open in Background Tab (if you have TabMix) in Firefox)
Overall, I’m impressed with AVG8. It’s lots better than 7.5 and deserves its 46MB file size. Now, I haven’t tested its virus detection and cleaning skills yet. So more on this part later. Give it a try if you need a small, fast (no fuss) and free AV.
EDIT: I found a problem with AVG 8. For some obscure reason, the Link Scanner crashes my Firefox or greatly slows it down. Disabling Link Scanner in AVG itself results in an ugly icon in my notification area, with a big exclamation mark.
If you want to disable AVG’s Link Scanner, go to Tools - Add-ons in Firefox, and disable AVG Safe Search 8.0 there. This doesn’t result in an ugly icon, and returns Firefox to stability.
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Orange’s Brochure
April 24, 2008 by InF, under IT, Mauritius.
I dunno how that Orange propaganda brochure (as if there wasn’t enough Orange advertising already) landed at my place, but I thought I’d look through it. And guess what? It lands on GeekScribes! I ain’t got a scanner, so bear with the cam-pic quality! Here’s the cover:
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Rapidshare.com Happy Hours - Captcha Stories
April 24, 2008 by Guru, under Randomness, Tech News.
On the 17th April 2008, this was as quoted on Rapidshare News.
As every free user should have noticed, we are experimenting once again with the CAPTCHA system. The reason is that RapidShare is popular enough for people to create tools to download from RapidShare as a free user as if they were a premium user. This has a negative impact for our paying premium users, since they expect a fast download. On the other hand we are also experimenting with happy hours again. When our servers have enough spare bandwidth, we will make it easier for free users to download from RapidShare, knowing that this also makes it possible again to automatically download files with those tools. Right now the RapidShare Happy Hours will disable the download tickets and the captchas completely.
I think this is a quite good alternative. This morning itself I headed to rapidshare to rip some files off its server. The COOL little cats didn’t let me pass the captcha test. :S At this time, I found the New Rapidshare Happy Hours and I Googled It.
It is good to know that at some point, we may download without having to wait and input captchas. We don’t know what the guys at Rapidshare have in reserve for us. My advice, keep posted in their News section.
5 Comments
Creating ADODB Connection in VB
April 23, 2008 by Guru, under Programming, Tips and Tricks.
Developing applications in Visual Basic (VB) is rather easy. But, thinking of connecting to a database using purely codes may look difficult. But it is not! After understanding the basics and coding a little, it becomes as easy as pie. First we need to get everything ready with the references, then understand what you will need to do (I leave this part to you. Google is here!) and finally creating the connection… Note that this article pertains to VB6, but might work for other flavors. (more…)
3 Comments
Monitor your traffic usage with NetMeter
April 23, 2008 by InF, under Featured, Software.
With Orange having implemented their Fair Use Policy (FUP), it is advisable for us, Internet users to monitor our bandwidth usage. No, we are not going to take out a notebook and track every download we ever made! For this task, we will a small application called NetMeter.
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Bittorrent and P2P usage grow worldwide
April 22, 2008 by InF, under Tech News, Torrents.
Following the major discussions taking place about Orange and its capping policies, I thought this article deserved some consideration.
Well, according to Ars Technica’s report, there has been a 25% increase in Bittorrent traffic from November 2007 to March 2008, with UTorrent being the application leader. Yep! Azureus and BitComet come after! This represents a big increase. Possibly millions of new users?
Regarding P2P, the Gnutella network is faring pretty well, being the #1 network in terms of traffic. Limewire must be thanked for this position in the list, being the leader in P2P applications.
Why did I post this article? I don’t really know. I found those facts pretty interesting, and thought I might share. In Mauritius, Orange is trying to limit the use of P2P and Bittorrent via its Fair Use Policy (FUP), whereas in the world, the use of these two services are growing rapidly, probably fueled by the megabit connections available abroad.
Although many use these services for piracy, P2P and Bittorrent have many “legit” uses such as sharing open-source distributions, and making lesser-known “garage band” artists and productions available to the public.
I personally think that many people opt for a high-speed connection because they download large files and want these faster. What’s the use of a high-speed connection if it cannot be used for downloading? I doubt you will use a megabit connection for plain browsing. Well, that’s the logic Orange is applying here. 1GB capping was just ridiculous. Now with FUP, even that limit is not known. It’s just weird. Just derive your own conclusions!
Anyways, comments awaited on this. Maybe they will help me rephrase my thoughts a bit better!
