Step 1 – Setting Up

The first step towards creating a corporate or business blog is to select a blogging platform like Typepad, WordPress, Blogger and so on. Every site has its own features and advantages and before when creating a blog, one must consider certain options like RSS feed, blog hosting in existing website, trackback functionality and so on.

Step 2 – The Content

There are a few things one needs to remember, while creating and managing an efficient website. The blog should be lucid and simple to read. It should be like an instruction manual but must be straightforward and interesting. The posts of a business blog must be edited and updated from time to time. It has to be active all the time and the queries and responses of the customers must be addressed each day; that is, it cannot be treated as a static website or a personal blog. A passive and unresponsive blog will be alienated by the customers and public and it will lose all its interest and values. Moreover, the blog has to be concise and to the point, so that it does not cause boredom among the readers.

Step 3 – Continued Maintenance

The blog can be maintained by any office personnel or content developers, blog managers and writers. Employees should be appointed for each of these posts by the company. If any office personnel are endowed with the duty to create and manage a business blog, he or she must consult different websites and blogs for examples and advices on how to create and manage business blogs.

Step 4 – Blog Promotion & Marketing

The person writing a blog can be personal and humorous but at the same time should not relegate his professional motives. Being objective, the writer has to maintain a friendly tone to attract more people. Another very important aspect of efficient business blogging is promoting and advertising the blog. The blog can be included in the existing webpage of the company. Other than that, the blog link can be promoted through sites like Facebook, twitter and Google plus. Attaching the blog to social networking sites will be beneficial for the company as well, as it shall get more online coverage.

Step 5 – Provide Value & Keep Going

Business blogs have many advantages other than product promotion and customer response. It is extremely useful for small companies and low budget industries as maintaining a blog is free of cost, unlike websites. Therefore a business or corporate blog has a number of things to offer to a small business. It is a low cost alternative for them and designing a blog is easier than creating and maintaining a web-site.

Business or corporate blogs have immense role to play in today’s world. They are integral to any business company and play a vital role in the company’s progress and prominence in the market. Maintaining a successful business blog adds to the success of the company largely.

Main Focus of the Project

As discussed earlier, the main focus of the project remains in developing an OS that is more readily available to the people. It will be free so it will have a distinct advantage over other OS which are single company owned and marketed. However, this is not the only focus of the company. The Smartphone and Android market is clearly fraught with people who want their OS to actually work for them in all ways. This clearly means that Mozilla cannot skimp on the specifications of the OS and its standards. To keep up with this, Mozilla developers will have to build up brand new APIs that will include necessary services like SMS, Camera, Bluetooth and of course telephony. Also, the idea of cloud storage is an essential part of the new area of mobile apps, which is why Apple, Google and most popular androids are looking towards this direction to improve upon their services. Mozilla will have to unite the strength of all their developers to include all these elements in their B2G.

Improvements & New Specifications over the Native Mobile Apps

Mozilla will have to rely upon Android to perfect their operating system and build their user interface. However, they intend to depend on Android to the minimum. B2G will work on its system and their main target will be Android Smartphones that are powered by NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core processors. Mozilla will however, come up with their own local APIs that will not be centered upon Android’s Java graphics. The B2G will be the first of its kind that wages a war against the sole dictatorship of proprietary mobile apps over the various devices available in the market. Mozilla has revealed their plans in this regard even before they have completely reached their goals. One of the primary reasons for this is that they need the responses and even contributions from their consumer group to understand the scope that B2G will have over the market. However, with all the right steps towards futuristic elements like cloud storage and multiple devices booting on the same system, there is a fair chance that B2G will turn out to be a major success.

Individuals and companies use a variety of methods to gain information about their competitors. Some methods are controversial, and may even be considered unethical, but it is important that you are aware of them. Even if you don’t want to use the questionable tactics yourself, it is important that you and your staff understand them, so you can be prepared and protected if your competitors decide to use them to learn your company strategies or secrets.

Social engineering, commonly thought of as manipulating people into taking certain actions, also includes the act of manipulating people into disclosing information that really should not be disclosed. The original computer hackers often used this type of social engineering to obtain passwords or information about a secure system. Quite often, the weakest points in a security system are the individuals behind the system. Be sure to implement a clear policy regarding what information can and cannot be disclosed, and to whom it can be disclosed. Having clear policies and security procedures in place are critical to protecting your company from competitors.

The flip-side of competitive intelligence is that you can also use competitive intelligence to improve your business and performance.

There are a number of things business owners can easily do to assess the competition, which require very little effort…

Evaluate a competitor’s website and the meta data contained in it. Simply “view” the HTML source of a website to reveal the meta data. This will give you some insight into the keywords they are hoping to rank well for in the search engines. In the process, you may discover a keyword or phrase that you hadn’t thought of before, but will work well for your company too.

There are also a variety of web tools that can assist in uncovering data about competing companies. For example, Webmaster Elements has a number of tools that help with competitive intelligence. You can find and review their selection of Competitive Analysis Tools at http://www.webmaster-elements.com/webmaster-tools/competitive-analysis-tools.htm .

Competitive intelligence can help influence difficult business decisions, and can often help a company gain a competitive advantage. Information is power, and your competitors can use information about your company to make decisions about their business…. and you should too.

And this WFH (Work From Home) culture is not restricted to the house wives or the part-timers, but to people looking for alternate careers, or extra money to just to keep themselves busy. Age is no bar. Skype itself has made the need for a physical 9-5 presence obsolete. When your virtual presence is as influential as your physical presence, then life becomes a permanent vacation. Video conferencing and desktop video have been made famous over the past two years. And with the advent of VOIP and smartphones, the world is in your pocket, literally.

The survey includes responses from 1,000 professionals from 500 businesses of all sizes. 62% of the companies already allow employees to work remotely. Of which 34% of their workforce occasionally works remotely. Employees who work from home say that they spend around 40% of their work hours at home. 75% of the employees said that working from home was becoming more acceptable and 56% believe that people who work from home are far more productive and satisfied.

Working from home also works well for the companies. It reduces the costs of maintaining an office for 6 days a week.  The company also gets to hire more people with the money saved or invest that money in more projects, which ultimately benefits both the company and its employees. The employees, on the other hand, live a less stressful life; have more time with their families, friends and hobbies. This, in turn, gives a creative boost to them and helps increase their productivity. The time saved on travelling to and from work is wisely invested in work.

But all this does not replace the advantage of a work place. Having an office will increase the credibility of a company, as opposed to an entirely virtual presence, because work ethics in India have modernized, but have not altered so much as to eliminate the need for a traditional working environment. As easy as it is for the employees, the company may find it difficult to manage and monitor the performance of people working from home. It will be difficult to maintain the feeling of a team spirit when most people start working from home, and that diminishes the possibility of a work community. When work life and personal life get so intermingled, it will be tough to draw boundaries and separate them. And neither will receive the attention it deserves.

These dilemmas need to be tackled before embarking on the project of turning our economy into a working-from-home one. Perhaps the ideal situation will be that employees divide time between work and home, so as to maximize their potential and ‘have a life’ !!

Who thought that when you wrote about your pet squirrel’s first steps, a sea of people would share the joy! Welcome to the world of Blogging, where the whole web world is your family. Benedict Anderson’s theory of “imagined community” is best realized in today’s Blog world, where everything you feel or have an opinion about is worth a second read.

Blogging is sharing a part or a lot of yourself with a foster family of fellow readers and bloggers. How you share yourself is entirely up to you. Some people are open about their identity and reality, while others wish to talk from a certain degree of separation, from behind another acquired persona or a mask of the unknown, anonymous.

The important question is, how effective is anonymous blogging. Is it worth sharing your most intimate feelings without telling people who you really are, or is it a good thing to have a certain distance between who you are and what you write?

Anonymous blogging proves helpful when you are writing about a sensitive or controversial topic, one which has repercussions beyond the virtual world, or if your job does not allow you to express pointed opinions on any public platform. Separating your real self from the self you project or the stories or poetry you write can give a different kind of creative freedom to an individual. The feedback you receive for an anonymous piece is for the piece itself, detached from your personality or its influences. And there is also the perk of writing on many blogs simultaneously in different styles and following different thought processes.

Celebrities opt for anonymous blogging in order to satisfy their creative urges as well as to keep away from internet trolls, intrusive media persons and stalkers. Companies or salespeople opt for anonymous blogging so as to separate the various products/ services they endorse and not confuse people who might look for their name and find various conflicting results.

There are various downsides to anonymous blogging too, which are mentioned below -

1. If fame is your ultimate goal, then you’ve picked the wrong lane. Writing anonymously will only take you as far as you keep churning out creative pieces, but there is something about being able to attach a face to a write-up that attracts immediate attention of the readership. There are very slim chances of making friendships over the blogging world if no one knows your name.
2. No business can be based on anonymous blogging. If you do not attach a verifiable personality to what you write on the web, your readers and customers will not trust what is written, and investments will take a downturn.
3. Blogging entails a relationship with the reader which is difficult to acquire if your personality is kept under the wraps. Anybody would think twice about sharing their lives someone who has a brain of his/her own but no one can see where they keep it.
4. Anonymous blogging might make you feel disconnected from your own writings too. And if you have many such blogs, it is quite a task to keep track of them all and write in the exact same vein as you have been. There is a lack of consistency on several blogs by one person.

To know more, about how Anonymous blogging is different from Conventional Blogging, do visit here.

Whatever the reason to blog anonymously, make sure it is an honourable one that does not defy the trust of your readers / clients. And remember, not every invisibility cloak is as impenetrable and invincible as Harry Potter’s.

The technical search giant, Google, alone is the inspiration and sole cause behind the creation of thousands of new businesses. There are now companies dedicated solely to Pay-Per-Click campaign management. Thousands of individuals and companies now make money through search engine optimization and outsourcing their services to improve website rankings, specifically to see that a website ranks well in Google’s organic search results. There are now software applications that can determine what keywords to use in optimizing a website for search engine rankings, and other software programs that assess and evaluate website traffic and popularity. These products and businesses were all brought to fruition as a result of Google’s Internet search domination and technical stature.

Likewise, technology has also killed a fair amount of companies. Fifteen years ago, the top search engines were AltaVista, Infoseek, and Goto.com (now known as Overture, or more recently Yahoo Search Marketing). In fact, Goto.com was the initial brains behind the pay-for-placement marketing model, of which a similar model was later adopted by Google, and very successfully grew Google’s coffers.

Adopting new technologies is not enough though. Innovative business leaders see the opportunities that result from the emergence of new technologies, and are able to creatively figure out how to capitalize on those emerging technologies.

Without a doubt, technology has been the inspiration behind a series of new business ventures. Podcasting has launched indie stars, YouTube has launched movie stars, and technology has spurred innovation. Every day, individuals have rocketed to stardom simply by producing and publishing videos on the Internet. YouTube and iTunes are now household terms, understood by nearly everyone in the western world. Again, twenty years ago, this would not have been possible, simply because the technology did not exist.

The nmap team put together this image by retrieving the favicon images from the top 288,945 sites (according to Alexa Ranking) and composing the image. The more popular the site is, the bigger the icon in the image. As you can see Google’s the biggest of the lot.
You can take a look at an interactive version of this image on their site, where you can zoom into the image, or search for a particular site’s icon within the big one – http://nmap.org/favicon/

According to their site, the original image’s dimensions are – 37,440 x 37,440 pixels, which is quite a large one.

Posted via email from Vinu’s Random Posts

Posted via email from Vinu’s Random Posts

Google is sometimes thought to be the bane of the Internet, and it certainly can be a thorn in the side of search engine marketers. Many fail to look beyond the search of today, toward what the implications of indexing and storing information will have on future generations. Forget the slogan “diamonds are forever” — “Google is forever” is more accurate in regard to the Internet. And if not Google, then some other search giant will be able to retrieve information from previous years within a few seconds. If something is online, it does not just “go away”. Like it or not, the entire world is being indexed and categorized, and will be searchable for years to come.

Individuals today have a personal brand. Employers and colleagues will search on your name, so it is imperative that you keep this in mind when posting online. You must control your online reputation.

The web is not always a friendly place, so what do you do if you are not using an alias and someone is posting derogatory information about you, your company, your products, or your brand?

Monitor Your Brand
The first step in monitoring your brand is to setup automated notifications within the various search engines, either via email or an RSS feed. This way, you will know when you are being discussed, either in favorable or unfavorable terms. For example, the “Google Alerts” feature is a free service that will send email notifications to you when specific words or phrases appear in new search results. Simply use your name, company name, product name, or brand as the phrase being monitored. Ego Feeds work in a similar fashion, except the alerts appear in a custom created RSS feed that updates whenever new mentions occur. For more information about Ego Feeds, see a related article at http://www.feedforall.com/ego-searches.htm

Control Your Brand
The second step in protecting your brand is to take a pro-active approach to appearing in the top search results when your name is entered into a search engine. You can do this by offering interviews, reviews, SEO, and writing articles or posting blog entries. At the very least, make an effort to control the top search results for your name. This will ensure that when your personal brand is searched, those items will be listed in the top 10 search results.

Damage Control
If you find something that is damaging or harmful, do damage control. Control your responses, and behave in a professional manner so it is clear that you took the high road when the exchange is viewed by others at a later time.

Social
The final bit of advice is to simply keep personal things personal. While the social sites are great for maintaining friendships, they are not helpful for people who have an occasional lapse in judgment. Refrain from posting pictures that show anything that you would not want your mother or future grandchildren to see, or saying anything when you are mad or upset since we often say things “in the heat of battle” that we regret later.

The Internet is preserving and archiving personal history in a way that has never previously happened. Control your online reputation for posterity.

This is a guest post by Sharon Housley, and you can find more information about her at the end of this post.

Innovative, memorable, and compelling domain names are becoming more and more difficult to come up with. The following tools can help webmasters find great domain names for their online businesses….

Domain Name Soup
Domain Name Soup is a free domain name generator that helps you find available domain names in your niche.
http://www.domainnamesoup.com/

Bust A Name
Bust A Name is a free tool that lets you quickly check domain name availability. The Bust A Name domain search engine combines the keywords that are entered and tells webmasters what combinations are available.
http://www.bustaname.com/

Domain Suggestion Tool
Domain Suggestion Tool uses name-spinning and semantic technology to come up with unique domain name options for webmasters.
http://domain-suggestions.domaintools.com/

Dot-o-mator
Dot-o-mator can be used to create domain name suggestions. Simply enter keywords in the box on the left, and then choose different endings, or enter your own ending. Click the button to see what combinations are available.
http://www.dotomator.com/

Domain Exposer
Domain Exposer is a tool that helps webmasters find available domain names. Combining keywords with common words to create a new domain name, the Domain Exposer tool checks the domain name availability for all of the created suggestions.
http://www.domainexposer.com/

Domain Typer
Domain Typer uses a domain name generator to create easy-to-remember domain names. Domain Typer randomly generates .com domains, and lists their availability.
http://www.domaintyper.com/

DomainsBot
DomainsBot includes domain suggestions, name-spinning, a complete searchable index of expired and expiring domain names, as well as a list of all domains available for sale.
http://www.domainsbot.com/

Name Boy
Name Boy generates domain names based on keywords you enter, and it also allows you to instantly register domains that you locate.
http://www.nameboy.com/

Make Words
Make Words creates random phonetic names. Make Words is a random domain name idea generator. The Make Words website includes keyword collections, and synonyms to assist webmasters in finding the perfect domain name.
http://www.makewords.com/

Name Tumbler
Name Tumbler allows webmasters to enter keywords, and then the Name Tumbler tool combines those keywords with their database. It allows you to select keyword placement, and optionally whether you want a hyphenated domain or not.
http://www.nametumbler.com/

Snap It Now
Snap It Now generates domain names that are based on keywords and categories. You can optionally include hyphens to find a great domain that meets your needs.
http://www.snapitnow.com/

Domain Pigeon
Domain Pigeon lists available domain names, as well as Twitter names, which you can register as you find one you like.
http://www.domainpigeon.com/

Coming up with a great domain name can be a struggle, even for the most creative entrepreneur. The above tools will assist in your domain search.

Harsha’s put up a tenative list of talks for this month’s event:

• Developing Facebook Application using PHP by Sriram Kumar
• Job Queues by Abhinav Lal
• Zend ACL Component - Bare_Acl by Sudheer Satyanarayana

Here’s the link to this month’s meetup event – www.meetup.com/Bangalore-PHP-Users/calendar/13135127. We’ll keep that page updated with the latest details about the event. If you are planning on coming for this, join our Meetup group and RSVP ‘YES’ to the event.

As always – Please forward that link to your friends who you think would be interested in our group as well.

Ever since I have shifted to Ubuntu, Open Office has remained static in it’s appearance; I am counting over 6 years of “free open source software use”. The ideological underpinnings not to use closed source software ever has not yet blinded me to the eye candy and the functionality of other systems. This is not a gripe session but Open Office is found wanting in it’s approach. It’s good thing to be standards compliant, it’s good to have cross platform availability but it sucks to have a jaded look because one doesn’t really have a choice. Indeed a paradoxical situation.

Downloading and installing to use K office is a pain because they have implemented the product in a manner which throws out user friendliness out of the window. I am not a KDE fanboy but clearly having few default “settings” that works also makes sense most of the times. It feels buggy and bloated and clearly not in the best of the “open source implementation”.

Contrast to this is perhaps the only product from Microsoft that works to some extent is their Office platform. It has been criticized ad nauseum because of the “additional options” it provides but it works and is a huge money spinner for the company. Another notable mention is Apple’s Keynote software that consistently gets scored high on usability, themes and transitions.

Why is that the developers from Open Office have not been able to innovate? In retrospect, it seems as if they are trying hard to emulate the previous versions of the closed source systems and bring out a functional product. Truth be told. Open Office is definitely a vast improvement over the previous versions. I use Impress heavily and I can testify clearly that ability to add tables and images has vastly improved over the previous versions. Animations and slide transitions are more or less static in their development but they deliver the goods specially when over the top eye candy is not required.

The difference in the approach is for other software. I had the opportunity to see Keynote in action recently and was totally wowed by the implementation. It is not even surprising that Google spews out thousands of results to turn the computer into a Mac lookalike. The usability is definitely a concern but Apple does provide a fresh perspective to it’s operating system and it’s various tightly integrated components. Ubuntu is inching closer but yet too far off for practical purposes.

This is not to say that anything free cannot compare to closed source alternatives. The debate usually centres on individual perspectives. It is all about choice. Yet, I do feel let down because my Ubuntu Box cannot match the best in the world for Office Applications.

It is no wonder that Ubuntu wanted to let go of Open Office for it’s netbook edition. It is bloated, eats up huge amounts of memory and would definitely be a pain for underpowered processors. They wanted to settle in for Google Docs with Gears implemented; it would have been a huge commercial spin off for them too. The idea is to implement Open Office as a lean mean application with eye candy and extensibility.

Interestingly, on their ideas implementation Wiki, Open Office does aim to “ape” Apple’s keynote. Unfortunately, there is no “out of the box” idea to justify this.

I am typing this out on Google Docs because it would let me email this presentation in couple of clicks. All the more practical approach. I can also collaborate with others to edit it and it works for me if I don’t demand anything extra from it. Very soon Google would be streaming advertisements too. It keeps a back up of all my past write ups although this is unhealthy reliance on cloud computing.

As I had mentioned, this is not a gripe session but an earnest need to improve upon open office beyond it’s jaded interface. This would bring in more “respectability” as well as more users, in my opinion. Ultimately it’s about increasing the user base and claiming 100 million users on the website is not going to help. Most of them, on any given day, would still want to use addictive eye candy.

We are so much used to the proprietary systems that it seems the “open source alternatives” may not be able to “stand up to them”. For example, the open source alternative to MS office is Open Office (including a suite of other programmes but then it is all about choice). For an average user, the predefined set task flows are good enough. Yet, there is an inherent resistance to change because the open source options don’t always feel “like” the way “standard” option does.

Hence it makes sense to stick on to products with options for cross platform approach. I have been using Opera as my standard desktop browser, which may sound antithesis to my said approach towards Open Source as a whole. The very fact that Opera has a commitment towards “Open Standards” and to “free up the web” from the evil eye of “Explorer” is a motivation enough to stick on to this browser.

Opera has had a solid reputation for innovation. They came up with tabbed browsing way before anyone even thought of that. Firefox as a “spin off” from the doomed Mozilla product is in many ways an “open source clone” of Opera. It has sought to “generate” a whole ecosystem of “extensions” with a very buggy approach towards it’s browser as a whole. The software is stunted in it’s approach and the Mozilla Foundation has neither a coherent acclaimed goal nor depth of thought process to implement it’s flagship product.

Opera has followed consistent path to dominate the browser market through mobiles and game consoles but has raised serious issues of privacy concerns. In any case, the vast majority of us nevertheless have been relying on so called “cloud computing” with no iota of debate about the same. Privacy can never be guaranteed on the Internet with variety of methodologies to hunt your browsing habits. Barring this, the product is sheer joy to use because of it’s intuitive interface and the fact that it works across the platforms. Which means that user choices are similar across the platforms and it is just a matter of synchronizing with Opera’s servers.

This isn’t about Firefox bashing but it’s competitors have a pathetic approach which makes Opera “stand out” in comparison. Coming back to where I started from. Opera has it’s native feel in Unix, BSD or even Solaris and across the “dominant platform”, Microsoft Windows.

Two notable events are worth mentioning. One is that Opera’s implementation of Widgets which can run on any platform independent of the browser; almost like an “extension library” as for other browsers like Firefox and Chrome. The other is implementation of user sharing experience of Unite. This is brilliant because it allows for a simple file transfer protocol to be implemented from the browser; while not in the strictest sense of the term but nevertheless, makes file sharing across the various connected systems a breeze.
Firefox has a lot of catching up to do; it uses up a lot of memory footprint, eats up bandwidth and is bug prone. Neither it has a mobile version but it remains a pathetic implementation of Open Source. Worse still, it cannot even package for Unix systems; instead relies on old “tar” archival format.

Should closed source systems be allowed to be ported on open source systems? This is indeed a matter of debate but then again it all boils down to personal perspective and user choice. The whys and hows are best left to be answered according to one’s approach to the solution.

I did have an issue with Opera’s 10.10 default installation in Ubuntu. It used to randomly freeze my “X” screen. This was a documented bug mentioned on the forums but there was no quick work around. Opera is implementing the new version of it’s Carakan based browser very soon and has significant amount of resources devoted to the same. They must beat the Mach deadline before MS starts shipping with it’s service packs and allows for a browser choice. For obvious reasons, Opera wants to have a stable release of it’s justified claims of the “fastest browser”.

Any alternative to Opera like Chrome is less than perfect solution. I have had to add extensions downloaded from Chrome website to make it functional as I was used on Opera. It’s ad blocking and handling of RSS feeds sucks majorly and I truly miss the in built mail client and RSS reader with occasional IRC chats as all in one solution.

The newer beta for Windows is truly a revelation. I still have to get used to something better than this. The page loads up in a jiffy and handling of resource intensive web sites is simply amazing. Opera’s engineers have worked truly hard to make an astounding product and justify the tag of the world’s fastest browser.

It would take some time before Opera 10.5 is available for other platforms; nevertheless, the wait is truly justified.

The debate between closed and open source can never have a clear winner. But everything is finally dependent on the freedom of choice and it is imperative that we become aware of such a choice too.

This article is written by a friend of mine, Dr. Abhishek Puri. He’s a doctor who’s a technology freak on the side. He dabbles around with Open Source software and is a strong advocate for the Open Source community. Here is his experience with setting up Ubuntu 9.10 on his latest laptop.

My search had been on for a system that would work on Linux flawlessly. For the past few years, I have come to love the reliability and the stability of Ubuntu and with it’s more frequent updates which give me the “best” in the desktop appearance. With an anemic RAM in the previous version, I could ill afford to run multiple applications, turn on anti aliasing of Open Office or even risk the opening up of multiple tabs while running Opera. At risk of a system freeze, it was still a workable and a usable laptop. The present day era is of 64 bit processors and it’s hard to justify their routine use for a casual user. Nevertheless, it has never been the user’s prerogative to choose.

A search in most of the electronic showrooms was quite disappointing. Most of the laptops on display were infested and infected by bloated crapware called as Windows. With jacked up prices for fancy video cards, it drove me away as I had a limited budget. I went running to my old trusty vendor who showed me a nearly perfect laptop for my needs with preloaded DoS. More than that, it had a great combination of a motherboard, an Intel chipset and integrated Wifi.

The Live USB version of Ubuntu worked great and after a quick lspci command in the terminal, I put down my hard earned money for a Compaq system.

The first thing was to format the hard drive, load up Ubuntu, apply the updates and viola a nearly perfect system was ready to use. After the mandatory load in of plug ins to ensure playback of restricted formats, it was all set up.

The only major issue surprisingly was with Opera 10.10. It used to crash the X randomly with the screen freezing up and an unresponsive keyboard. In any case, there was no solution from the forums except that I could try out Qt4 version. I decided to chuck it in favor of waiting for Opera 10.5 which promises to be a fab release due out for Unix in couple of months. I was indeed sore that the Windows version would be released first as they have huge amount of resources dedicated. This is because, Microsoft has been forced to give an option to consumers regarding the choice of browsers and Opera had been behind this landmark anti trust case. It only goes on to prove that Unix platform does offer a choice; but Opera has “cold shouldered” the Unix community as a whole since any reported bugs get scaled down on a lower priority till the new version comes out in the beta or the final release.

There is a plethora of browsers to choose from in Unix; yet I settled down on very remarkable and wonderful Google Chrome. It’s one of the most exciting software to have been released in recent times and although it doesn’t have the functionality as Opera in it’s default form, there are numerous extensions available for the same. Frankly, I have never been too happy about the extensions per se because I feel that the browser ought to have the key features built in. In any case, it all boils down to a personal choice though. For my mail and RSS feeds, I found that Evolution is a good alternative to Opera’s both inbuilt mail as well as RSS reader although the format has not really changed in the past few years. Yet, it works the works and I do miss Opera.

The icing on the cake is perhaps oodles of RAM being able to support Compiz Fusion and it’s brilliant and awesome effects. It’s sheer eye candy customisable to the nth detail and a great execution of details. Full kudos to the developers who have developed various plug ins; my favorite is the “burn” effect which burns down the window when you close it. You Tube is full of videos on this and it is indeed a school boy’s fantasy come true to own such a thing. Day in day out, I am fascinated by various effects and Mac Os looks pale in comparison in many respects.

It would not be feasible to run a full scale comparison with other platforms; this write up only details my purchase, the customization, the software and of course, the choices made. Your own experience may vary or some of the readers would want to defend the “latest” Windows 7. Yet, my arguments stay in place that “free” open source software can outperform the “closed” systems by a mile.
Ubuntu 9.10 is a great option; admittedly, there are tons of other distros that would have their adherents too. But then Open Source is all about the choice.

If you’ve got lots of books in other formats, I had a lot of books in Mobipocket format which I used to read on my mobile phone, you’ve got to check out Calibre. It’s a cool software which allows you to move files in other formats like epub, mobi, doc or PDf to the Kindle. It actually transforms the file into the Kindle format and transfers it to your device. Here’s a video of Calibre in action.

I use it as my library management system, where I keep all the ebooks I buy on the web. Remember that Calibre can support only non-DRMed content, which means if you have an ebook which is tied to a device, you can’t read or process it on Calibre.

The best part is that Calibre is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. Click here for downloads.

Links:
Calibre Project Page

Webinar – PHP Development Best Practices: The Untold Story of Geekville
January 19, 2010 – 9:00 am PST – your computer via webex

Have you ever wondered how you could advance your PHP development? Have you considered using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), an Issue Tracker or a Version Control tool, but were concerned about how complex it might be? Taking PHP development to the next level may be easier than you think.  Attend this webinar, hosted by Atlassian and Zend More Information/Registration

Webinar – Troubleshooting PHP Issues: Best (and Worst) Techniques
January 28, 2010 – 8:00 am PST – your computer via webex

Understanding what’s causing your PHP application to be slow or just break is often time-consuming, and almost always frustrating. Join this information-packed webinar, delivered by a senior Zend PHP consultant, to learn what techniques PHP professionals use for pinpointing PHP issues in development, testing and production. More Information/Registration