Future Cup: India Vs South Africa 1st Test

Chennai Test 26Mar08-30Mar08

Defragmentation: Windows Vs Linux

I stumbled across a great explanation of why hard drives on Linux computers rarely need defragmenting. It’s a common question from students and, as laid out in this post, makes for a great quick lesson on file systems and hard drive management for high school and college students just beginning their study of computing and computer science.

While the article itself basically hands you a lesson plan (one could even imagine in-class activities with students filling in squares on graph paper, rearranging their seats, or any number of other hands-on demonstrations of bits moving around a simulated hard drive), the essence is that FAT/NTFS require frequent defragmentation because they order files sequentially. Linux file systems, on the other hand, leave room between them on the drive, allowing them to expand, shrink, and move on the fly without being broken into chunks (or fragments) as frequently happens in Windows file systems.

It’s a cool read and very understandable for students from a variety of backgrounds. Enjoy!

RSS: Whats it and how useful it is for you?

There are many places where you would have seen webpages with RSS Feed enabled. Some sites specifically indicate it, other sites have the symbol to show that there is RSS Feed enabled in the site. So what is it all about? This article will try to explain the same.

What is RSS?

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.

Why RSS? Benefits and Reasons for using RSS

RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News.

What do I need to do to read an RSS Feed? RSS Feed Readers and News Aggregators

Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.

A variety of RSS Readers are available for different platforms. Some popular feed readers include Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac), FeedReader (Windows), and NewsGator (Windows - integrates with Outlook). There are also a number of web-based feed readers available. My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader are popular web-based feed readers.

Once you have your Feed Reader, it is a matter of finding sites that syndicate content and adding their RSS feed to the list of feeds your Feed Reader checks. Many sites display a small icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a feed is available.

There are also readers offered by two of the most famous Internet Browsers: Mozilla Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7.

In Mozilla Firefix 2 Browser the rss feeds coem through the in-built Mozilla feed as shown in the screenshot below:


In IE 7 the Feed will be enabled whenever you visit a RSS Enabled website like Yahoo News or Google News as shown:

RSS Feeds are very useful and fetch you the latest stories from around the web in no time. I personally used Google Reader which is the only known site for having fully utilized the RSS Feeds benefits and have borne fruits! Please check out Google Reader site for yourself.

P.S: I will try to put up an article on Google Reader and its features when I get time. Till then happy surfing!

Holi in your Gmail :-)

Hope you would have read my earlier article on Labels. This article will explain you on how to add colors to your labels to make it appear more attractive ;)

You can set the colors to the labels using the small drop down box next to the label name as shown in the screenshot.

You pick a color that you wish to use for your label. This color will be your background text color and not the text color :). There are options to Edit the name as well as removing an applied color too. So what are you waiting for, Holi is around the corner, lets play with the colors :-).

Happy Holi!!

Gmail Part V: Colors for Labels

Hope you would have read about the Labels in Gmail Part III of my Blog. This is an extension to that part :) with some colors on it in a decorative approach.

Google Search Tricks

Many of us try to get the contents from the internet straight from Google and may not succeed many a times. There are a few tricks to getch the files that we are exactly looking for straight from the FTP Server.

This article will show you some shortcuts/keywords used to fetch those things exactly:

Secret Google Instructions

-ext - With this u can find some types of files by extension (,,ext:exe"):

-related - With this u will find similar web sites(,,related:appzstock.com"):

-site - With this u can limit list of results on 1 single site (,,site:appzstock.com"):

-allinurl - Search a file in URL.For example, if u search ,,allinurl:appzstock.com" it will show u only the sites which use ,,appzstock" word in adress:

-allintitle - Search only in title (,,alintitle:appzstock.com"):

-define - Search only definitions;

-.. -Text with interval.With a little bit luck, u will find firs music tops ;

-link - Test the popularity of a site (,,link:appzstock.com");

-filetype - Find a specified file after name and extension (,,Windows filetype:rar");

-movie - Informations about movies (,,movie:Star Wars").

Spy with Google

-Passwords - You can find passwords (,,admin account info":filetype:log);

-MP3 Music - Find copyright music (,,Index of /" +mp3);

-Secret Documents - Find confidential documents (,,confidential filetype:doc'').

Thats all till now!

iGoogle-Whats that?

The Latest addition into the Google's menu is iGoogle. It's a personal homepage that comes along with a lot of gadgets that help you keep in touch with the latest and trustworthy information.


Gadgets are an excellent and easy way to add stuffs to your Page with drag-and-drop facility. You can add new tabs to your page. You can also set a theme for your page. You can use iGoogle as your home page and enjoy various benefits it offers in the form of Gadgets. With more and more surfers on the net, iGoogle is surely a hit with times to come!


A sneak peak into the various categories of gadgets that are available:

• News
• Tools
• Communication
• Fun & Games
• Finance
• Sports
• Lifestyle
• Technology

So what are you waiting for, go for your page and keep smiling :)

Gmail Part IV: Filter

Gmail comes up with a powerful filter option. Filter is an option given by Gmail by which you can do the following actions on a conversation as it arrives based on the sender, receiver, Subject, content and attachment presence:

1. Archive the conversation
2. Mark the conversation as Read
3. Star the conversation
4. Apply Label to the conversation
5. Forward the conversation to a new email address
6. Delete the conversation

While creating the filter you will get a "Test search" option which will scan your "All Mail" folder and display the results immediately without refreshing the current page :)

Now you can select the action that you would like and apply these actions to the search results too using the "Also apply filter to 27 conversations below" check box.

Gmail Part III: Labels

In Gmail Labels are like folders in your hotmail or yahoo. In case of folders you can move a message to a single folder only, but in case of Labels you can apply more than label to a conversation.



Once you've created a label, you can view all the messages with that label by searching, or by clicking the label name along the left side of any Gmail page.

You can easily create, edit, and delete existing labels. Here's how:

To create a label:

1. Select the message(s) you'd like to label by checking the box(es) next to the sender's name.
2. Select New label from the More Actions... drop-down menu.
3. Enter the name of the new label in the text box, and click OK.

The selected messages will automatically be categorized under the new label.

To edit a label:

1. Sign in to Gmail.
2. Click Edit labels at the bottom of the Labels box.
3. Click rename next to the label you want to edit.
4. Enter the new label name, and click OK.

All the messages categorized under your old label name will now be categorized under your new label.

To delete a label:

1. Sign in to Gmail.
2. Click Edit labels at the bottom of the Labels box.
3. Click remove label next to the label you want to delete.
4. Confirm that you'd like to remove the label by clicking OK.

* Removing a label doesn't delete the messages previously categorized with that label.

After labeling a message or conversation, you can remove it from your inbox by archiving it. Then, you can view archived messages by clicking All Mail, or by clicking the label name along the left side of any Gmail page.

As shown in the following picture, once you delete the 'Inbox' Label to the already assigned 'test' label conversation, the conversation will be archived and wont be available in Inbox. You can however find the conversation in 'test' label or 'All Mails'.

You can find out whether a conversation in the Inbox is labelled or not using the Label indicator as shown below.

Gmail Part II: Web Clips

Gmail comes with a great add-on called Web Clips. These clips as the name projects are tiny news clips which keep rolling on the top of your Inbox window. Clips include Google Sponsored Links, Gmail tips, and custom content.

You can roll between the news clips using the arrows and click on the news of your interest. These are basically RSS Feeds from various sources that are set up in default in your Gmail settings.

To view or modify these settings, navigate to Settings -> Web Clips. You can enable or disable this feature using the check box "Show my web clips above the Inbox".

You can add or remove various Clip sources using the Search feature and remove link respectively.

Gmail Part I: Gmail Views

Your Gmail comes with 3 Flavors: Standard, Without Chat and Basic HTML view. You can switch between these options in your Gmail Inbox, down at the foot of the window.

The "Standard View" shows your chat window to the left of the screen. The "Without Chat" window as the name indicates hides the Chat window. The "Basic HTML" view is a normal HTML View and render a view which is equivalent to Yahoo's Inbox view rather than the new-better-improved Gmail view. Note that this view does not have a Chat option.