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.