ADVT.
editalk Few years back, when we came out with the maiden issue of Globe, it was the dawn of IT in Kashmir. With a short life span of 4 months and 4 beautiful issues, Globe covered varied topics from egovernence in J&K to IT@Colleges to ban on internet (remember those dark days). In spite of all the applause it received, and the history it created by being the first infotech magazine of J&K, Globe could not survive to see the light of 5th month at that time. The issue of Globe in your hands marks the golden comeback of this journey to promote and report IT in the state of J&K. Recent times have seen rise in the use of mobile devices as smart replacements for computers to access internet and do other useful stuff. Open source has gained place in this market with Android already in the race. We have already chosen it as the top product of 2010. Facebook has dominated the social web with an estimated 500 million users. Google is trying to maintain its web supermacy and making a stealth social service. With the advent of social & behaviourial advertising, users’ privacy is at risk. Twitter has already established its supermacy in the field of micro-blogging. Here at Globe, we have done our part with the cover story “Best in Tech of 2010”, celebrating the ground-breaking products, services, startups, news stories & logos that made 2010 a banner year in tech. As we zeroed in on our top choices, several themes emerged. Obviously mobility is last year’s breakout trend, meaning that smaller, portable devices—and the software and services that make them work—dominate our list. Today’s smartphones have more processing power than the fullscale PCs of just a few years ago. What a delight it is to carry around a full- edged computer in your pocket. We’ve also seen an explosion of apps and services, often based in the cloud. Expect more of same in the coming years. This is just a beginning and our efforts will be incomplete, if we don't hear back from you. We are open to your suggestions / criticism to improve Globe and bring it at par with other IT magazines of the country.
“The issue of GLOBE in your hands marks the golden comeback of this journey to promote and report IT in the state of J&K” EHSAN QUDDUSI editor@globekashmir.com
VOLUME 1 \ NUMBER 2
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ADVISORY BOARD
Contents 16
COVER STORY
Vijay Dhar Dr. Mehraj Ud Din Er. A H Moon Sajjad Bazaz
CHIEF EDITOR Dr. Jauhar Quddusi
EDITOR Ehsan Quddusi Sub Editor: Shahid Qazi Writers: Obaidullah Malik, Mir Nazim, Vivek Khurana, Atul Jha Campus Correspondent: Zaid A Hakak
DESIGN Creative Director: Irshad Ul Islam Sr Designer: Javeed Meian Designer: Parvez Jan
SALES & MARKETING Brand Manager: Muzaffar Jan Asst Brand Manager: Asif
PRODUCTION & LOGISTICS Production Manager: A G Quddusi DISTRIBUTOR JANTA AGENCIES Char Chinar Complex, M A Road, Opp Govt Women College, Srinagar - 190001 Phone: +91 194 2474755 OFFICE ADDRESS GLOBE Magazine Khan Complex, Madeena Chowk, Gaw Kadal, Srinagar - 190001, J&K Phone: +91 194 2473818 Mobile: +91 9419422263 Email: globe@globekashmir.com TO ADVERTISE Call on +91 9419422263, 9419030006 Or email at advertise@globekashmir.com Published, Printed and Owned by N. Quddusi. Published from New Colony, Pulwama - 192301. Printed at Al-Hayat Printographers, Gaw Kadal, Srinagar - 190001 Editor: Ehsan Quddusi
BEST of IN TECH
2010 IN FOCUS
Internet is watching you SECURITY
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Facebook Privacy Toolkit
INTERVIEW
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HANDS ON
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PRINT REFILL PRINT “IT industry in Kashmir will be visible in next 05 years” Dr Mehraj Ud Din Director IT&SS, KU
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“We are providing Kashmir Valley inter-town network and intra-city connectivity”
ear Readers!
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FEATURES
Stay Connected 5 things about Twitter
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TIPS & TRICKS
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Q&A GENDER GAME TECH NEWS MARKET WATCH ECO WATCH
From the Chief Editor’s desk
D
PROFILE
Sanguine
Complete guide to refilling your cartridge at Home
You are welcome to the 're-launched' issue of Globe. Some of you may have a faint idea that almost a decade ago, we launched J&K's first infotech magazine -Globe, which inspite of active support from our well-wishers could not continue its publication beyond four successful issues due to some inevitable reasons. At that time we had the well- conceived intention and plan to fill up the vacuum in the publishing segment in the fields of information technology (IT), science & technology, scientific research and technology-oriented economic activities in Jammu & Kashmir. We believed and still believe that our vision of helping Jammu & Kashmir transform into a knowledge society, powered and guided by its formidable human resources could be shaped into a reality with the active support and participation of all those people who are directly or indirectly connected with IT and other technological fields. I take this opportunity to make a fervent appeal to all those professionals, researchers, entrepreneurs, teachers and students, who are associated with IT, to come forward and help us in making this infotech publishing venture a splendid success. Dr J Quddusi
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FOCUS J&K J&K Treasuries to go Hi-Tech The government is endeavouring to provide adequate and improved infrastructure for the state treasuries.The computerization of 11 district level treasuries has been taken in hand and a detailed project report framed for computerization of all other state treasuries under National-e-Governance plan at Rs. 27 crore.The state unit of NIC is developing the treasury software namely Integrated Finance Management system (IFMS) presently under final stage of development & testing.
J&K mulls to roll out SWAN Jammu & Kashmir is mulling to inter-connect all the government offices of the state through State Wide Area Network which envisages a common and high speed data network, aimed at promoting transparency and efficiency.
Gmail’s Conversation View IF YOU HATE how Gmail groups an email with all the replies to it, Google has answered your prayers and made “Conversation View” an option that you can turn off. So, instead of having one item in your inbox that includes, say, all 16 messages from coworkers about the monthly budget, you can now have 16 separate messages somewhere in your inbox. Judging from the complaints on the Gmail forum, people dislike Conversation View because the threaded approach doesn’t allow them to kill off individual messages. I like having a clean inbox, but I think conversation View haters are off-base. Threads make it much easier to keep track of the twists and turns of a topic. By default, you see only the messages you haven’t read yet; the previous messages are collapsed. Thee anti–conversation View crowd also says that undeletable messages are making the inbox too bulky. But a basic Gmail account now offers 7.5GB of storage. Unless your conversations include lots of attached high-def video files, those individual messages that you can’t delete aren’t making a dent in your storage.
200+ Million Web Domains
Goldman’s $50 Billion Facebook Valuation Can a company with $2 billion in sales be worth $50 billion? If the company is Facebook, Goldman Sachs thinks so, and so does a turn-away crowd of investors eager to risk a minimum of $2 million for a rare piece of the action. At $50 billion, Facebook would be worth more than Boeing, the 100th largest publiclytraded company in the world. But the world’s largest social network didn’t make Forbes Magazine’s 2010 list of the largest private companies in America. Goldman’s $50 billion price tag for Facebook is based on a calculation that the social network is worth 25 times its 2010 revenue. But let’s say Facebook’s valuation was based on a smaller ratio, say seven, the level at which publicly traded search giant Google is currently priced.
This will enable mobile subscribers in the country to use the UID card as the basic document for getting a mobile
“The intra-state network subsequently will be connected with the national network, aiming at modernization of communication infrastructure and improving administrative efficiency and quality of service to the common man,” Ruhullah said.
Government hopes that once the system is in place, it will greatly help in fighting corruption at various levels in the state. Ruhullah said that many more steps have also been taken to promote eGovernance in the state.
The most popular Top Level Domains (TLDs), in terms of registrations, were .com, .de, .net, .uk, .org, .info, .cn, .nl, .eu and .ru in the same order.
AADHAAR to be used for Mobile User Verification
Minister for Information Technology and Science and Technology, Aga Syed Ruhullah Mehdi said that SWAN will be of immense benefit to people of the state.
“With the help of this programme, the citizens will get effective government services with easy access through single window system.”
are separate websites but since they are all part of one domain, they won't have any effect on the overall VeriSign numbers.
connection. Unique Identification Number (UID) project, which will be using the 700 million of mobile subscriber database, will in turn become the basic document for issuing a mobile connection in the country.
The total number of domain names registered worldwide has recently crossed the 200 million mark (201.8 million to be precise) according to a VeriSign report. These numbers reflect “domain name registrations” and therefore the total number of websites on the Internet would be much higher. To give you an example, 16 million blogs are currently hosted on WordPress.com – these
“The project would benefit a few hundred million poor people of India who don’t have an identity, who don’t get benefits. Giving them this is more important than the risk. And we must ensure that the risks are completely mitigated,” said Nandan Nilekani, Chairman, UID Project. After, completely deploying the UID project in India, it will become easier for security agencies to track SIM card subscribers’ details.
market watch 9419422263
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market watch
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ADVT.
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interview
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“IN NEXT 05 YEARS, IT INDUSTRY IS GOING TO BE A VISIBLE INDUSTRY IN KASHMIR�
Dr Mehraj Ud Din Dar, Director IT & SS, University of Kashmir, in conversation with Ehsan Quddusi shares the achievements of his department in implementing e-governance at the University of Kashmir & road ahead. An alumni of BITS Pilani, Dr Mehraj Ud Din Dar has done his Ph.D from University of Kashmir. He joined Universiy of Kashmir way back in 1992 as System Analyst, held the positions of Reader & Additional Controller Exams before taking over as Director IT & SS in December 2007. First of all, will you brief us on the background, objectives & overall responsibilities of your department? The department of IT & SS came into existence in December 2007 and we started operations by mid of 2008 and thereafter we are striving very hard for the objectives that we have associated with this ICT mission of University of Kashmir. Our broader objective is to develop e-governance solution for the university & to improve the manual workflow by way of including the benefits of IT in those activities.
Will you throw some light on the achievements that have been made in these 2+ years? We have achieved lot of progress during these two years. Since the Admission & Examination system is very critical for the university, so we took these two
systems for e-governance on priority basis. We submitted a proposal of Rs 4.43 crores to Ministry of Communication and Information Technology for the automation of our examination system, which was accepted and we have successfully developed the system for the benefit of students. This enables the university to facilitate the timely declaration of results. For the registration & admission system, we started this activity last year on trial basis for PG admissions and it was a mega success. 37 thousand applications were submitted through our system last year. Initially the student had to download the prefilled form and submit it in the university, but from this year, students will be able to submit their forms online without making physical visit to the university. We facilitated the
submission of fee at all the branches of J&K bank for the benefit of student community & we are working to provide the facility of online payments for the deposition of fee. Our system has helped a lot to reduce the issues of discrepancy in student information, as the information is entered only once in the university records and reused wherever required. Same thing we have done for the examination system. This year if you will see, students get prefilled forms and they only sign the form and submit it with required fee. This has resulted in error free submission of examination data.
There are around 38 government degree colleges in Kashmir valley. How do you facilitate the flow of data between them? In order to reduce the digital divide between the colleges and the university,
interview 9419422263 we have set up information centres in 33 colleges as of date. We have connected them through WAN with the university data centre and provided them with dedicated internet and intranet bandwidth, apart from providing necessary hardware, software and office infrastructure. This has facilitated the digitization of registration data at college level, apart from solving other student related problems for which they used to travel to university.
There is always resistance to change. How you manage that? As far as the e-governance is concerned, it is 'e' & 'governance'; e is the ICT part, rest is the governance. And for governance, you must have will and determination of the top management. From day one, the Vice Chancellor provided all kind of support. Resistance has been there, but that resistance has been effectively neutralized by the top management. The operational level resistance was tackled with effective and organized training & awareness for the operational staff
Why did you chose to go with in house software development rather than availing the services of any software company? Basically for the e-governance thing, we have to take very important decisions, otherwise why should we reinvent the wheel. We have seen e-governance initiatives taken by the secretariat and revenue department, but they have failed. We thought, why can't we have our own core team to develop the software. We took the initiative of building our own team, despite the fact that we were advised by the concerned departments to go with NIC.
You might have faced lot of difficulties in building your own team. How did you manage that? As far as Kashmir is concerned, we have the people with best programming skills. We only need to groom them. For this, we tied with Wipro and they deputed few consultants onsite to our office and they helped us in different phases of software development for several months. Then we arranged training for our development team from a reputed agency on .Net technology, as we are using it as our development platform, and that has paid in the long run. We have been successful in development quality software systems internally.
How do you manage quality, scalability and other aspects of software internally? We get our software tested by third party, as we don't have a dedicated testing team as of now. For scalability,
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we have a good software architecture in place, which will take care of it.
What is the benefit of this project to IT entrepreneurs in Kashmir? We have now developed number of online services for the students like downloading of forms, results etc. Lot of people associated with IT have benefited with this and they are doing good business out of this. Secondly our success story has developed lot of interest in other government departments and many departments have already approached us for the same. This has provided a good opportunity for local IT professionals to replicate this model in other departments.
Are you planning to extend your ICT mission outside this campus?
“Our Examination Software System is catering to: n 2.5 Lac Students n 128 Colleges n 300 Examinations n 55 Departments n 60 - 70 Courses�
Considering the geographic existence of this region, we c a n ' t h a v e b i g manufacturing industries here, but IT industry has a good potential here. This is the area where we can generate business and employment. Keeping this in mind, we have started a project to ensure that IT industry grows here. We are planning to establish an advanced centre for communications and information technology. We have already identified few areas where we will be imparting specialized trainings to develop expertise. The areas are Software development, Network systems, Database systems, Multimedia systems; and VLSI & embedded systems. For imparting training, we will have collaboration with leading institutes and MNCs. The other thing that we have planned is technology incubation. We will provide infrastructure, back end as well as front end for startups to develop their products or services around IT and we will facilitate business as well for them upto the period of 3 years. There are some schemes of financial support upto 35 lacs from Ministry of Information Technology that these startups can benefit from, through us.
As you said earlier, that the project is being funded by Ministry of Communication & Information Technology, how are you going
QUICK FACTS to make this project self sustainable in future? Sustainability of the project is fundamental thing and we have this in mind. Now that we are providing good number of services to the students, and as a matter of fact, services can't be free. We are charging Rs 50 per examination to students for the services they are availing and this is generating us enough of revenue to sustain our activities. For around 2.5 lac students, we are generating approximately Rs 1,25,00,000 for one examination.
What kind of services are you planning to make available to the students through this project? Now that we have established a network & established information centers in most of the colleges, we are planning to effectively utilize this infrastructure to impart education & training. These information centers can be turned into training centers for running specialized courses through virtual mode.
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The Internet is Watching You Everything you do online is being used to track you and guess what you’ll want to do next. Should you be scared yet? Imagine that man in the store is following you around, reminding you to buy a gift for the party you said you’d be attending on Facebook last week. Or imagine that he’s seen your status updates about starting a diet, and starts telling you about the store’s lowfat foods section. This is pretty much what’s happening online these days.
HE OWNER OF THE CORNER shop has known you for a long time. He knows what you eat, that you like to drink Italian wine, and that you usually watch action movies on Sundays. That’s how he can offer you things that you need, like a new crime thriller, the perfect bottle for your next party, and reserved bags of your favorite snacks when you forget to order them.
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by one rule: get to know everything about our customers. The more information it has, the more specific its user profiles will be, and the more effective its advertisements. Thus, products that one has viewed on Amazon influence the display of others. For instance, if someone buys a Wii game console, he will be offered accessories for it in the future.
What sounds like a pleasant community store in the past occurs every day on the Internet. Our “corner shop owner” is not behind the counter, but instead runs a successful online business that offers exactly what his customers need. He might have had to know you personally 30 years ago, but today the business’s computers simply have to analyze your online visiting habits.
Analyzing surfing habits Behavioral Targeting techniques are an evolution of this idea, which many marketing professionals consider a wonder weapon. Behavior-based advertisement displays take into account where the user comes from, which websites he has visited previously, and what he has clicked on.
Now imagine that man in the store is following you around, reminding you to buy a gift for the party you said you’d be attending on Facebook last week. Or imagine that he’s seen your status updates about starting a diet, and starts telling you about the store’s low-fat foods section. This is pretty much what’s happening online these days. GLOBE shows how online shops today use advanced Deep Packet Inspection to screen customers such that they can offer exactly what the customer wants. We also give you the lowdown on how behavior-based advertisements work with behavioral targeting.
For a long time, Google’s AdWords service has been displaying advertisements after detecting keywords on a web page. However since March 2009, the search giant has also been offering behavioral targeting and can display specific advertisements to groups of people. For instance, if a user has been browsing through a sportswear website for a football shirt in August, he might be shown ads for another website with Christmas offers on similar products in December. Google itself describes its technique as using cookies which save tracking information on users' computers.
Online shops collect data en masse Online shops such as Amazon swear
Online shops also apply marketing tips from the real world. For instance, if a retailer wants to attract only well-to-do
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customers, leaflets with attractive offers are only put in mailboxes in upmarket areas with well-situated residents. Similarly, one can use geolocation information to analyze the place of origin of a surfer and recommend specific offers to him or her. The coordinates obtained through IP address identification on the Internet are very fine-grained, but modern cellphones and certain desktop browsers now supply precise GPS locations, which can even be used to guess the financial behavioral pattern of any surfer.
In-depth analysis divulges too much information Deep Packet Inspection, or DPI in short, is a technological continuation of this personalized advertisement strategy. While theoretically a surfer can avoid behavioral targeting by not allowing any cookies, DPI traces a user’s activities on the Internet as if he or she is under surveillance. In theory, every website that is called up can be recorded; every mail can be scanned in real time—and with the help of keywords found in these, an individual profile can be created through which advertisers can send users specific offers. For instance, if an advertiser detects a number of messages to a car dealer from a customer inquiring about certain accessories, advertisements for those very products can be inserted in advertisement spaces as he or she browses the Web. However, online shops cannot use DPI by themselves; they need Internet service providers to offer it, but they seem to be cautious of violating user privacy agreements. Governments will soon be forced to formulate policies to regulate this practice. DPI can be misused, but there are no cases that could be cause for any alarm at present. It possible for providers to analyze data traffic, and manipulate it as well—just like cybercriminals do when they attempt to send malicious code to a victim. When a user calls up a website, he receives more than just its source code. The Internet service provider can use DPI to slip in JavaScript that displays an advertisement, even if the website owner designs his/her website advertisement-free. Spyware installed on your computer can also do this. In the worst case scenario, a website owner is not even aware that an advertisement has been embedded into his site. ISPs could also determine which users are generating the most peer-to-peer file sharing traffic, and which are using their service mostly for email, leading to
bandwidth throttling. DPI has a negative connotation since it is used for monitoring and manipulating specific Web content—countries such as China and Iran use it to filter and censor the Web, which is alarming for free-speech advocates and political campaigners.
Web 2.0 follows specific identities Social networks are also ideal data sources for marketing professionals. Data collectors have been known to make the most of Facebook with its open API. One can program applications that convince users to grant them access to personal information, including details about their other friends. Other less ethical means include persuading people to add a fake profile as a “friend”, thereby granting it access to more of your user profile, which most people leave totally visible to their friends. Through the Facebook API, programmers can access information about members, including details such as their employers, religious affiliations, and sexual orientation. According to the Facebook developer Wiki, applications can access over 50 sets of user information—which is interesting for marketers and hackers alike. While Facebook is a superb example, all of this also applies to other services that identify individuals, such as OpenID and Google Accounts. These let users log into dozens of websites with a single username and password. For example, with a valid Facebook account, members can use the Facebook Connect system to log in to the video sharing portal Vimeo which also lets you publish your “likes” on your wall. This is easy for users and opens up new ways for companies to court customers if they are
Data collectors have been known to make the most of Facebook with its open API. One can program applications that convince users to grant them access to personal information, including details about their other friends. According to the Facebook developer Wiki, applications can access over 50 sets of user information—which is interesting for marketers and hackers alike.
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DEEP PACKET INSPECTION China uses it for Internet monitoring, the same way as Tunisia and Iran. Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) has become an explosive topic since it first started being used not only used for Internet security, but also for on-the-fly-manipulation of websites, be it to silence political dissidents or display personalized advertisements. Serving advertisements by harnessing this knowledge is a questionable practice in terms of data protection regulation, and most countries’ legal systems see this as a gray area. However, certain cases have come up in courts of law. Most countries’ laws have only limited control over what people do with the data floating out there, since they can hardly keep pace with the development of new technology. However at least some countries, for example Germany, are becoming aware of the problem and have begun to enact laws precluding general-purpose monitoring of citizens through DPI.
What it means for users Data that doesn’t include specific private information can still be enough to personally identify you. One does not need to read crude conspiracy theories to imagine how interesting such data could be for the world’s governments, which are already overzealous about protecting their national security. What if new laws compel Amazon and Google to disclose their log files to prosecutors and intelligence agencies? Each innocent-looking mouse click would gain even greater importance; way beyond individual privacy concerns.
ethical. Online shops are experimenting with ways to display products that friends have bought or looked at often (although this famously spoiled many people’s Christmas shopping surprises when Facebook demonstrated the capability with its highly criticized and short-lived Beacon advertising program in late 2007).
Users become advertising figures People are more receptive to recommendations from friends than from strangers, so companies try reaching customers personally by creating so-called fansites. Any user can, for instance, become fans of products, people, companies, and even designs. With Facebook’s Open Graph tool, companies even have the opportunity to put advertisements on external websites to receive testimonials from members of the fansite, and gain advertising exposure through the profile picture.
Data and the Google juggernaut Of course no discussion of privacy online is complete without analyzing Google’s datamining habits. The search giant is in a position to use its multiple online properties to gather amazing amounts of information, and possibly even link these profiles to individuals in the real world. The company’s motto has long been “Don’t be evil”, but it’s difficult to ascertain what exactly the company considers to be within this limit and what is too much. Incidents of antiGoogle dissent are growing more common, from strangers being able to follow you on Google Wave, to protests in the publishing industry against the mass digitization of books, to rumblings of antitrust cases because of the company’s dominance in online advertising. Jeff Jarvis, blogger and author of the book “What would Google do?” sharply criticizes the company for a product called Sidewiki which collects user comments about websites and saves them on Google servers. The site operators themselves, and the furious Jeff Jarvis, have no control over it. Google copies entire libraries, and has detailed photographs of the entire planet, covering all countries and cities, many streets and houses, the oceans, the Moon and Mars. Google offers an operating system for mobile phones, and soon there will also be one for netbooks. Google says "It is our mission to organize the information of the world and to make it accessible and usable worldwide”. Even the Chrome browser doesn’t have a clean record when it comes to privacy—it identifies each user with a unique ID. The ID is purged when a user first downloads an update, but it should not be there at all. Brilliant ideas underlie most Google services. They are easy to use, technically solid, and best of all, they’re nearly all free. Google does a lot of good as a company by
investing in alternative energy production and giving employees an allowance if they buy a hybrid car. But Google is also greedy for data. It commands the largest Web index available, and has insight into every website, photo and video.
Google tracks 80 percent of all websites One can hardly elude Google today. It does not help if you stop using Google Search, YouTube, Picasa or even the services requiring registration like GMail, Docs and Calendar. With its astoundingly wide network, Google is present on 80 percent of all websites—for lay persons often invisibly. After its acquisition of advertising network DoubleClick, around half of all ad banners on the Web originate from Google servers. The more inconspicuous, but still more widely spread text ads come from Google AdWords as well. The Google Analytics service works completely secretly, allowing website operators to analyze the click-paths of their visitors. Whenever a surfer lands on a site that uses this service, Google sets a cookie with a unique ID and records his or her IP address. Thanks to its super dense network, Google can then see exactly who moves how on the Internet. Every click or search query generates a log entry with an IP address and unique cookie ID as well as a time stamp. The log file of YouTube until mid 2008 alone was over 12 Terabytes in size. For database security as well as privacy concerns, the different databases for each Google service are not necessarily tied to each other, but it is technically possible and Google certainly has to have the know-how. Even when there are no actual names, the records have enough parts to piece together a picture of the person who is sitting at a PC, where he lives, what interests he has, and how much money he spends.
How much is too much? One can pick up interesting tidbits from the official company blogs, such as the fact that some employees are excited about the idea of building a 3D model of every building ever built on the planet. Google Building Maker already makes the required tools available. On an academic level, most of those working at high levels in the company are IT pros, mathematicians and statisticians—most of them toppers from prestigious universities. For them the masses of data collected are like toys with which they can run riot. They work on them as if possessed, to write algorithms which recognize patterns and structures in what seems like random chaos. There are no limits. Suggestions for projects which might seem outlandish are particularly welcome at Google.
Obaidullah Malik
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The Cost of Spam & Tweets CO2 Emissions According to data from a recent study by Commtouch (Internet Threats Trend Report) published in April 2010 and referring to the first quarter of the year, every day we send about 221 billion email messages, of which 183 billion are classified as spam (85% of the total traffic globally). United States lead the ranking of the “spamming” countries with 38 billion emails per day followed by India (13.7 billion), Russia (9.8), Vietnam (9.7) and Korea (7.6). How much does all this junk mail cost the environment in terms of CO2 emissions? Studies have estimated that each email message generates about 0.3 grams of CO2. Multiplying this value by the number of spam messages sent daily worldwide what we get is that every day around 54.900 tons of C02 are released into the environment: a number that translates into around 21 million tons of CO2 every year. Just a curiosity, for the sake of comparison: the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption in April 2010 released into the air around 150,000 tons of CO2 every day.
What’s the cost of tweets sent daily on Twitter in terms of CO2 emission? According to data from Twitter, published in February 2010, every day around 50 million tweets are sent over the popular micro blogging platform. Considering an average time of 10 seconds to write one single tweet and the average consumption of 250 watt/hour for one single computer, the total daily consumption amount to 35 kW h (kilowatt hour). Multiplying this value for the average estimate of CO2 emission per kW, we obtain the daily value of CO2 emission which rises up to 492,000 Kg. Obviously this value is only an rough estimate (rounded down) but, just to give you an idea, it’s like driving a car producing 150 grams of CO2/Km for 3,3 million kilometers.
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Facebook Sure, you like to share. But maybe something on the Internet, and that stay private; other people can pass maximize your privacy on the leading 1. Create Block Lists Go into your Privacy Settings from the Account menu (this is easiest on a desktop or laptop system, not on a phone) and look for Block Lists at the bottom. Here you can block individual users by name or e-mail, block invites to applications from certain users, invites to events from certain users, and best of all, block applications you never want to hear from again. This also prevents that app from using your information.
Edit Settings button for “Info accessible through your friends” and uncheck most of those, so your data doesn’t become available to apps you’re not even playing—it happens when your friends use them!
3. Limit Who Finds You At the top of the Privacy Settings page, click View Settings under Connecting on Facebook. This page lets you control who can find you on Facebook through search, who can send you messages or friend requests, and even whether they can see what town you live in. The
2. Limit Application Data Use On that same Privacy Settings page, click the edit link for Applications and Websites. You can’t limit who can see your picture, name, gender or networks you belong to, but everything else can be limited so apps can’t get the data (nor can your friends, or friends of friends). For example, the Instant Personalization feature is great if you want sites like Bing, Rotten Tomatoes, or Pandora to instantly know you based on your Facebook settings. Click the
choices are to let everyone see these things, friends only, friends of friends, or friends and other members of your network. If you go with friends only, that’s the smallest group that can interact with you and limits people finding or asking to be your friend...but maybe you don’t want any more friends.
you’ve been tagged in by others. And of course, it limits who can comment on all of the above. Again, you can set it so Everyone can see them, all the way down the scale to Friends Only.
5. Don’t Let Them Say Where You Are Places is for Facebook users to specify where they are when updating (a la Four Square). However, they can also tag you as being with them—even if you’re not. It’s all fun and games until someone says you were at a brothel when you were actually visiting your grandmother. Go to the Customize Settings page, under Things Others Share, and take the time to edit the “Friends can check me into Places.” This
4. Make Your Sharing Private It flies in the face of the social aspect of social networking, but it’s possible you don’t want everyone to read or see everything you post. Click the Custom button under Sharing on Facebook (still on the Privacy Settings page), and you can limit who sees your status updates and photos, your biographical and contact information, even pictures
is also where you specify whether others can post on your Facebook wall, or can tag you in videos and photos. The less they can, the less exposed you are to non-friends.
6. Limit Your Contact Info Chances are slim that anyone outside
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Privacy Toolkit not with everyone. And let’s face it, if you post includes Facebook, there’s no guarantee it will on what you said. But you can still try to social network by following these tips. 8. Don’t Advertise for Facebook
your circle needs your phone numbers, street address, IM name, or e-mail—if they’re really your friends, they already have it. Make sure all of the above are set to Friends Only, or at most, Friends of Friends, unless you want to be wideopen to contact by anyone and everyone.
In the past, there were some controversies when people found their pictures from Facebook showing up as part of advertisements on the service. You can make sure this doesn’t happen, with either third-party applications or ads on Facebook. Go to Account Settings and click the Facebook Ads tab. For both choices, choose “no one” from
7. Pick Viewing Permissions Per Post When you update your status in Facebook, below the box you fill in there’s a little icon of a padlock with a down-arrow next to it. This is a dropdown menu that lets you choose who can see this status, from everyone down to Friends Only. If you click
customize, you can specify that it also gets shared with certain networks you belong to, or block individual people from seeing it (so that your ex who said you had commitment issues doesn’t read that you’re engaged, for example). You can also make that a default setting.
the drop-down menu. Then click Save Changes for each selection.
to the Account Button, to Account Settings, and click “change” next to Account Security. You can set it so you get an e-mail or SMS message when a new device signs on with your Facebook credentials. This page also provides a rundown of recent account activity.
10. Temporarily Deactivate This is the ultimate security step short of totally doing away with your Facebook account; after all, the only true safety is never taking a chance. First, you can download your whole Facebook history with the new downloader tool, which is right above the Deactivation link—it’s not necessary, but it’s a good idea. Click the “deactivate” link on the Account Settings page and your Facebook account is put in stasis. When your
9. Look for Trespassers
Of course you know how to create a strong password and use one on your Facebook account. If not, someone might have figured out you “cleverly” used the name of your dog or your birthday as your password and is accessing your account. Unlikely as it may seem, it can happen. Fortunately, you can track if and when other devices and computers access your account. Go
account is deactivated, no one can find you, no one can friend you, no one can see anything you’ve posted (albeit some pictures and videos with others tagged in them will likely stick around). Deactivation doesn’t delete anything. When you’re ready to come back, you simply reactivate the account, and it’s like you never left. Deactivation can be handy when you’ll be away from the online world for an extended period of time.
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BEST of
BEST TECH
1
IN TECH
2010 GLOBE’s exclusive ranking of the most innovative, useful, and influential tech of the year.
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Netflix (streaming video service, video-by-mail plan; starts at $9, Watch Instantly free with monthly plan) Netflix came on strong this year with Watch Instantly. Aside from the popularity of the service on desktop PCs, the Watch Instantly app made a splashy debut on other devices such as the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. With more than 16 million members in the United States and Canada, Netflix, Inc. [Nasdaq: NFLX] is the world’s leading Internet subscription service for enjoying movies and TV shows.
BEST TECH STORIES Wikleaks
W
ikileaks was not a story, but an ongoing continuum of stories. It started with release by the wiki-based whistleblowing site in April of a video that seemed to show a U.S. helicopter gunship killing a number of Reuters journalists which was followed by Wikileaks
releasing 91,000 documents pertaining to the Afghanistan War and the release of 400,000 Iraq War documents and recently release of classified U.S. diplomatic cables. The stories that the overall Wikileaks
story gave birth to included criticism of the group and its founder. Questions arose. Was transparency desirable for its own sake? Is the principal of transparency worth men's lives and countries' safety? Did it make our world more safe by requiring governments to face up or less safe by uncovering things that are not necessarily illegal or immoral but secret to maintain lives? It's a story that is destined to keep on giving.
Online Tyranny The level of oppression against users of social media and other online tools
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PRODUCTS Google Android 2.2 (smartphone operating system; included with phone) Mobility led the tech industry in innovation in 2010, and amid a flourishing array of great mobile products, we found one consistent standout this year: Google Android. Expected to eclipse Apple’s iOS in market share by year’s end, Android brings powerful apps, a slick interface, and extreme customizability to a host of phones and tablets available across a multitude of carriers. The is range of options with Android is the one thing that the iPhone can’t promise. Add to that mix a flexible browser with Flash 10.1 support, OS-wide voice control and dictation features, and a rapidly expanding app ecosystem, and Android 2.2 is the OS to beat in the burgeoning mobile age.
6
Microsoft Security Essentials (antivirus sofware; free) When a product is this solid, it redefines the category. This tool offers malware
reached a stupendous level in 2010. The fear and anger those who hate dissent show to anyone who didn't roll over doubled and redoubled as social media gained more and more users around the globe. Low-lights include the sentencing of Canadian-Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan to almost 20 years in prison in Iran; the release, after additional torture, of the longest-serving imprisoned blogger, Kareem Amer; and the passage by the United Nations of a resolution that provides justification for blasphemy-based imprisonment and torture. Repressive governments around the world have proven much quicker to understand and accept the power of the social web than the world's media or business leaders have. Want to know
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2
Apple iPad (tablet; starts at $499) We’re in the midst of a revolution that’s putting slates at the forefront, and the iPad deserves full credit for launching it. After years of false starts for tablets, Apple’s 9.7-incher bucked the trend with a svelte look, a robust yet simple touch interface, and a phenomenal app collection.
3
Amazon Kindle, third generation (e-reader; $139) Amazon rewrote the rules for e-readers with its third-gen Kindle. T e Wi-Fionly version delivers convenient e-book shopping along with a stellar E-Ink Pearl screen and a streamlined, lightweight design.
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detection in an easy to use package with a well designed interface—and it doesn’t nag unnecessarily.
Samsung Galaxy Tab (tablet; price to be determined) This sleek little slate is the best Android tablet we’ve seen. It brings polished software and design finesse to a fun, multipurpose touchscreen device. It’s the iPad for the rest of us.
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Apple iPhone 4 (smartphone; starts at $149 with AT&T contract). Despite initial concerns, the latest iPhone is a stylish, attractive groundbreaker. This phone screams design elegance and has the sofware and gorgeous display to match, as well as the richness of the Apple App Store at its command.
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HP TouchSmart 600 Quad (desktop; $1699) HP’s latest TouchSmart all-in-one PC packs a punch, offering great performance and a vibrant 23-inch multitouch display. It won’t replace your TV, but its connectivity options make it just as useful when you where the online world is headed? Watch the internal police services of China, Iran and Egypt. They know.
Computer Warfare on Industrial Targets Outside of the security field, the idea of a computer virus tailored to a specific
hook it up to your cable box or your game console.
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Google Chrome (Web browser; free) The top pick in our tests is fast and well designed, has a clean and functional interface, supports plenty of add-ons, and provides strong security features. Chrome also offers extensive customization options for power users.
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Microsoft Office 2010 (office suite; starts at $280) Afer years of ceding the online productivity world to Google Docs, Microsoft finally builds Web apps into the latest Office suite. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all have new features for collaborating online. In addition, Power-Point gains built-in video editing and playback, smooth new transitions, and a tool for broadcasting slideshows across the Web. country and a specific undertaking was the stuff of paranoid thrillers. This year, the reality of country-to-country viral warfare was brought home with the unleashing of the Stuxnet virus. As the story played out, a number of eyewidening facts came to light. The virus was made by a highest-level digital team over a prolonged period. It was aimed solely at supervisory control and data acquisition systems, used only on large industrial machinery. Further, it was aimed directly at particular frequency converter drives from specific vendors. Those vendors exist only in Finland and Iran. It was designed, in fact, to change motor speed on, among other things, uranium processing facilities in Iran. The ubiquity of digital communication pathways mean that this is only the most dramatic event in governments targeting
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each other in this manner, not the last one.
Google Investigated, Sued for Privacy Offenses
When Old Communist Apparatchiks Think You've Gone Too Far, You've Gone Too Far China is the gold standard for censorship. Pioneering what one specialist called "networked authoritarianism," the leadership of the country knows it cannot flick a switch and shut down criticism. The Internet, especially China's, is too big to scientifically restrict, so in a sense terror must be used. It employs a combination of technical filtering, legal restrictions on free speech and social restrictions. A sort of social terror keeps the population in line enough for its Internet police to stomp down on real trouble-makers.
A Privacy Intrusion of Mammoth Proportions When India, the second largest country, and the largest democracy, on Earth starts up an allegedly elective, and practically mandatory, public ID program, the fiction of the Internet as liberator sinks right in. India's record on privacy was not great prior to this announcement. It has demanded, for instance, that Blackberry-maker RIM decrypt its user records for the government or it will be thrown out. They extended this demand to every device-maker that uses encryption. But the project to force every one of its one billion citizens to carry a card or other device linked to a central record, or risk denial of everything from housing loans to water, is one step beyond.
When it was revealed that software in Google's Street View photo cars gathered not just general information on Wi-Fi locations for Google Maps, but also private information such as photos and emails, all hell broke loose for the company. In quick succession, the company was investigated by Germany, France, Spain, Australia, Canada, Italy, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States and South Korea. Attorneys General from over twothirds of the states in the U.S. even met to arrange concerted action against Google. Oh, and there were private suits too of course. Google eventually agreed to start sharing information on their collection process and software. Although the U.K. found the company innocent of criminal wrong-doing, investigations led to the ability of Germans to opt out of inclusion in the mapping service.
Better. Stronger. Faster. As much as technology is said to change and as operant as Moore's law may be, the basic nuts and bolts of computing haven't seemed radically different to the vast majority of users for who knows how long. Now, however, work is being done that is leading to, and in some cases has already led to, a whole different kettle of computational fish. First, there's
graphene and water. Now it's the strongest, thinnest, most conducive material on earth. Its potential for exponentially speeding up computing centers on using (how am I not making this shit up?) water. OK. Now, IBM has thrown the giant Frankenstein-switch on its Watson Research Center for a five-year quantum computing project. Finally, they are now making computers out of brains. A Columbia University group is using "cortically coupled computer vision" and an EEG cap to united those things the brain does better than a computer and those thing a computer does better than a human brain. It works.
YouTube Grows Up It may seem like a rough thing to say, but it may be that a technology like photo-sharing can only be said to really grow when it comes face to face with the ugly realities of life. And no reality of life is uglier than death. And no death uglier than murder. Last month, a drug gang from the Mexican state of Guerrero placed a video on YouTube showing members of a rival gang bound, confessing to the murders of a more than a dozen tourists from the neighboring state of Michoacan, whom they had mistaken for members of yet another gang. If a bunch of inbred criminal thugs know about you, yours is no longer a developing technology. It is a grown-up technology in a grown-up world that is too often every bit as ugly as it is beautiful. And it's awfully beautiful.
BEST TECH TRENDS
1
Mobile
Key trends to watch in 2011 include: New versions of Android will challenge Apple's software with a focus on music and other cloud-based features. Apple will likely release a new iPhone and OS in the middle of 2011 as well and go in the same direction. Can Windows 7 carve out a niche for itself? Will other tablets besides the iPad become popular?
2
Internet of Things
While more and more people world- wide are becoming Internet
users, their number is dwarfed by networked objects. An estimated 35 billion devices are now connected to the Internet. Major developments this year include: July: News breaks that IPv4 running out of addresses, in part because of increasing networking of objects. August: Intel cites securing the Internet of Things as part of its rationale for buying McAfee.
3
Location-Based Social Networks
The focus in 2010 was strongly on
location-based social networks. While this trend will continue in 2011, we will also see even more location-enhanced services that use the user's location to provide more relevant search results and local information.
4
Real-Time Web
Real-time entertainment dominates web traffic globally, constituting 43% of all Internet traffic. Major developments this year include: January: Massive earthquake in Haiti; reactions and responses - from seismologists, from the media, and
cover story 9419422263 from international relief agencies - rely on real-time technologies. June: The World Cup becomes the most popular Web event ever.
5
Structured Data Structured Data is an important
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component of the Semantic Web, the way in which we understand meanings and connections between meanings on the Web. Trends to watch in 2011 include: Semantic mark-up will be more widely implemented by businesses, publishers, governments.
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Even though RDFa is known for being difficult to implement, more datasets will be made available in general, whether or not they comply with standardization efforts.
BEST TECH STARTUPS Instagram Photo Sharing Goes Viral The free app allows users to snap photos, apply one of 11 filters, and then quickly and easily publish them to a variety of social networks, as well as follow, comment, and like within the app itself. The new camera that came with the iPhone 4 this summer spawned a lot of great mobile phone apps, and Instagram is hardly alone in the photosharing space. But it has had incredibly viral adoption - growing by about a 100,000 users a week after its release in October according to a thread on Quora, with rumors of 1 million users to date.
Quora High Quality Q&A Q u o r a i s founded by former Facebook CTO Adam D'Angelo, and became an important new communication and knowledgesharing tool for the tech industry. Quora launched in private beta in January and opened to the public in June. As with Instagram, Quora is a startup in a crowded space; there are no shortage of Q&A sites. Quora allows you to subscribe to topics, users, and questions, and the ability to vote up good answers, along with the ability to offer edits on questions and answers, have helped to build a smart network on the site.
Flipboard Curated Reading, Built for the iPad The free app lets you curate various feeds - RSS, Twitter, Facebook - and presents them to you via a beautiful, touchscreen UI. Rather than scrolling through the Web as we have been trained perhaps to do, Flipboard allows
us to more easily browse and read. Having acquired the semantic technology startup Ellerdale, Flipboard's technology delivers a more personalized reading experience.
Rapportive The Gmail Social Plugin Rapportive replaces the ads in your Gmail side bar - which is cool enough right there - but then, it fills that space with a wealth of info - a picture of the person who sent you an email, their job title from LinkedIn, recent Twitter messages they've sent and more. Rapportive demonstrates some of the useful tools that can be built with our social data.
Diaspora The Anti-Facebook, Crowdfunded D i a s p o r a sought to build an open-source, decentralized social network, o n e t h a t respected users' p r i v a c y . Continued dust-ups this year over Facebook and privacy, along with the fact that Diaspora's challenge to Facebook simply made for a compelling story, gave the group a lot of press. The funds raised via Kickstarter skyrocketed from $8000, just shy of its $10,000 to almost $200,000 from over 6000 backers. Diaspora released the first version of the developer code in September, and launched in private alpha in late November. Diaspora certainly represents the power of crowd
funding, as well as an interest in making sure the social Web is not centralized in one company.
LearnBoost Bringing the Teacher Gradebook to the Web with Open Source LearnBoost is tackling a space for Web-based classroom administration tools. But tracking grades and attendance is an important, i f n o t cumbersome, responsibility of teachers, many of whom still use the paper-andpencil gradebook for record-keeping. In fact, LearnBoost is free, it supports data portability, and it integrates with Google Apps
Square The Future of Money is Mobile Square, the brainchild of Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, allows you to accept and pay via physical credit cards using a card swiper that plugs into the headphone jack of your mobile device. The hardware and app are free, but Square takes a small cut of each transaction. Square spent most of 2010 in private beta and had its share of hardware and security problems, but the addition to the team in August of Paypal veteran Keith Rabois marked a big win for the company. Square now says it's processing millions of dollars of mobile transactions per week, and boasts some avid users - small businesses and independent merchants who are looking for an easy and mobile way to manage credit card transactions.
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BIGGEST TECH FAILURES Apple iPhone 4 and "Antennagate� While the iPhone 4 is a great product in almost every way, and has been selling remarkably well, it is also the focal point of some pretty big blunders on Apple's behalf. First, an Apple employee named Gray Powell managed to leave a prototype of the iPhone in a bar, which was subsequently sold to Gizmodo. This constituted probably the biggest consumer tech leak of the year. Next, once the phone was in the hands of users, reports were coming in about problems with the antenna design where if the two parts of the outer rim of the case were touched with a finger, reception would drop significantly. CEO Steve Jobs responded personally to a customer by nonchalantly saying "Don't hold it that way", and Apple attempted to claim that it was actually a software issue. When Consumer Reports' testing confirmed that the problem was indeed real, Apple held a press conference to address the problem by offering free cases for the following three months. Most cases prevent the reception problem by covering the antennas and preventing them from being shorted together. A low budget alternative is to use a small piece of duct tape. Not specific to just the iPhone 4 as this affected all iPhones, there were numerous problems with the iOS alarm clock during the switch from Daylight Savings Time and on New Years Day 2011 that prevented the clock from ringing normally.
Google Buzz G o o g l e ' s f oray into the social networking/micr oblogging sphere backfired when people found
themselves reconnected with ex-lovers and old coworkers due to an "automatic follow" algorithm. Gmail users weren't too keen on having their most-contacted lists aired to the public, and the Buzz fiasco ultimately ended in a class-action settlement. The service was a tough sell to begin with, providing no Facebook integration and no way to push status updates to other social networks.
The Google Nexus One
The Nexus One was considered by many at the time to be the best Android smartphone available, in no small part due to its pure, unadulterated Google Android experience. Unfortunately, the model with which Google attempted to distribute the phone turned out not to be viable. Google thought that they could try something completely different by circumventing the carriers and allowing people to purchase the product directly. Unfortunately, this idea may have been ahead of its time and it was discontinued after a relatively short life.
Google Wave Over a year ago when G o o g l e demonstrated Google Wave at their Google I/O event, it was inspiring and looked like it could revolutionize the way that people communicate over the Internet, perhaps supplanting a large part of what we now use email for. Unfortunately, it may be another example of Google being a bit ahead of their time. It turned out that Wave
seemed a bit too "walled in" so that it became pretty difficult for outsiders to communicate with it. It was also a bit difficult to use. Google Wave waved goodbye in August 2010 due to a lack of adoption.
Net Neutrality Chalk up the decline of net neutrality to a few key events. First, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the FCC did not have the authority to stop Internet service providers from throttling peer-to-peer file sharing. Then, Google and Verizon proposed their own net neutrality framework that abandoned wireless regulation and caused a major backlash among tech watchers. The FCC talked of reclassifying broadband to gain more regulatory power, but is now considering softer rules to appease both
sides.
MySpace MySpace's new design takes the focus off social networking and emphasizes media discovery. We think it's a mess, but it's also a concession: Facebook won the social war. And if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Content farms In 2010, the phenomenon of "Content Farms" took off. These are sites where scads of low-paid writers generate quick link-bait content to bring in visitors, and often they lead to circular links to garbage that goes nowhere. The accuracy and quality of the content is often abysmal. The practice of these content farms is likely to continue to drive down the quality of journalism and media that exists on the Web. Just so you know, you definitely want to take what you find on such sites with a grain of salt.
ADVT.
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BEST TECH STARTUP LOGOS
BEST IT EMPLOYERS IN INDIA
FAST GROWING IT COS IN INDIA
RANK COMPANY
EMPEX
RANK COMPANY
GROWTH
1
HCL Infosystems
88.2
1
Fatpipe Networks Ind Ltd
1765%
2
iGate Global Solutions
85.5
2
Ad2pro Media Pvt Ltd
1649%
3
Rolta India
84.5
3
iYogi Technical Services
1438%
4
RMSI
84.2
4
Pilani Soft Labs
1025%
5
SAS Institute India
77.3
5
Vriti Infocom Pvt Ltd
687%
6
R Systems
72.0
6
Nexsus Techno Solutions
433%
7
Perot Systems
71.9
7
Nitor Infotech Pvt Ltd
420%
8
Tavant Technologies
71.7
8
Mobien Technologies Pvt Ltd 416%
9
Datacraft India
70.8
9
I-Create Software India
400%
10
Synechron
70.3
10
Kuliza Technologies
361%
Shariq Bakshi v/s Zainab Malik GENDER GAME
Changing the name of Computer
1 min 50 sec
Zainab, 15, 9th grade student is excited for the challenge and out of hurry renames the ‘My Computer’ shortcut on desktop to the desired name to show her competence. Then takes some time to reach the actual window for renaming it.
2 min 20 sec
Shariq, 14, 9th grade student starts with confidence & mistakes computer description for name. In search of right dialog, he goes through Users, Themes etc. At last, he heads to Windows Help & searches for ‘Computer Name’ to rename the computer.
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Read feed newspaper style It's an impressive web app that will re-format your Facebook like a newspaper If you don't quite like the plain river-like look of your Facebook news stream, check out PostPost (http://www.postpost.com). It's an impressive web app that will re-format your Facebook like a newspaper such that you can catch all the photos, videos and links shared by your Facebook friends on a single page. What's nice about this “Facebook Newspaper” is that it is interactive – you can watch videos inline, like posts or comment on any of them without leaving the page. And the boxes will realign themselves based on the size of your screen /browser. Like your main Facebook stream, you can also hide content from noisy pages or friends from appearing in the newspaper and keep it clean.
Print your passport photos at home All you need is a photo or inkjet printer, and you’d never have to go a photo studio again for prints
I
f you have a computer and an inkjet printer, we have good news – you no longer need run to the nearest photo studio each time you want a passport-size photo! the news is sweeter still if you own a digital camera – you can then shoot yourself, digitally touch the image up, and print it out on appropriate media.
01
Preparing your Photograph
Find or shoot an appropriate photograph of yourself. the first thing to note is that a photo meant for printing needs a resolution of 300 dpi and a preset size. To ensure this, start Adobe Photoshop, open your picture. Click on Image > Image Size, in the dialog box that follows, you will
STEP
there.
03
Framing your Picture
You will now need to create a ‘frame’ around the pasted STEP image. To do this, press [Ctrl] + [T] then press [Shift] and resize the image, making sure that some white space is kept around it as the need to supply the ‘Document Size’: width of 3cm and height of 4 cm; in the ‘Resolution’ field type 300 pixels/inch. Now click on OK.
02
Preparing your Photograph, II
We will now create a blank image within which we will paste our resized photograph. the blank image should have a white background since this colour will form the frame of the photograph. Go to File > New and specify a 3cm x 4cm image with a 300 pixels/inch resolution and a white background. Head to the photograph, which we earlier resized, press [Ctrl] + [A] to select the photo, [Ctrl] + [C] to copy it, then select the new image file with the white background and paste it
STEP
frame. Once satisfied with the size of the frame, double-click on the image to render it to the new size.
04
Printing your picture
This step will use a Photoshop tool to create an A4 size page full of your passport-sized pictures.
STEP
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Head to File > Automate and click on ‘Picture Package’. In the ‘Picture Package’ window that appears, here is what you need to do: ‘Select a ‘Page Size’ of 8.0 x 10.0 square inch. Next in the ‘Layout’ drop-down menu select (9) 2.5 x 3.25 – this will basically tell Photoshop to create nine images, each of 2.5 x 3.25 inches square – which is the standard size of a passport photo. Now we need to select a Resolution of 300 pixels/inch. That’s it! Click on [OK] and you are done! Well, almost done...clicking on [OK] will create an 8x10 square-inch image which you can print to your inkjet printer. Cut out along the white frame and use the passportsized photos as you desire.
Windows Process: Legitimate or a Virus? location column to your task manager. If you spot any suspicious-looking directory here, it may be a good idea to investigate that process further. NoVirusThanks (www.novirusthanks.org), an online virus scanning service, offers a portable desktop uploader that will make it easy for you to check if any of the Windows processes are legitimate or a virus /worm in disguise. When you run this tool, it will automatically generate a list of all your running
W
INDOWS TASK MANAGER lists all the running processes in your system. Some of these process names are obvious like explorer.exe which stands for Windows Explorer or chrome.exe for Google Chrome, but other processes like csrss.exe or dwm.exe will often make no sense to most of us. Is that Windows Process a Virus?
that a bad file with go undetected. Here's a sample report generated by the tool. Other than Windows Processes, you may also send your loaded DLLs, driver files and start-up programs for analysis online with a simple right-click. Another tool that can sometimes help you detect bad processes is Microsoft's Process Explorer. Launch the program (it requires no installation) and check “Verify Image Signatures” under Options. Now go to View –> Select Columns add
T
he first thing that will help you determine if any particular process is a legitimate Windows process or a virus, is the location of the executable itself. For instance, a process like explorer.exe should be running from your Windows folder and not anywhere else.
To confirm, open task manager, go to View –> Select Columns and select “Image Path Name” to add a
processes just like Windows Task Manager. You can right-click on any process name and upload the corresponding file online for virus analysis. Once the file is uploaded , NoVirusThanks will instantly scan it against a dozen or so popular anti-virus programs including AVG, Comodo and Kaspersky so chance are low
add “Verified Signer” as one one the columns. If the “Verified Signer” status of a process is listed as “Unable to Verify,” you may well give that process a second look. Not all the good Window processes will carry a Verified signature tag but none of the bad ones either.
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PRINT REFILL PRINT Complete guide to refilling your cartridge at Home
What you need n An appropriate catridge refill
A
n entry-level printer, today, costs no more than Rs 3,000 and that’s a great price for a home printer. But that’s not the ownership cost, as the hidden costs that surface once you start using printer will tell you. cartridges are exorbitant, and sometimes cost nearly as much as the printer itself. Under such conditions, refills are economical. In this hands-on gude we will teach you how to refill a cartridge. Various kits are available in the market, and we settled on the most popular and easily available – the one from Desmat. The cartridges we used for the test were from the HP DeskJet 1410. We printed various kinds of document, such as pure text documets, photographs and then compared the results to original cartridge prints, and the differences were not too big.
Removing Cartridges from
Tips!
the Printer These steps pertain to the HP 27A and 28A cartridges that are used in the HP DeskJet 1410. For other printers, please refer to their respective manuals.
01 STEP
Switch on the printer and lift the top lid. The carriage assembly centres itself in the middle, allowing for easy access to the cartridges.
To remove the cartridges, apply some gentle pressure in the downward direction, and STEP then pull the cartridge towards you.
02 03 STEP
Place the cartridges u p s i d e down, or on their sides,
on a table.
Do not apply force – just a gentle push in the downward direction is enough to release the cartridges from their locked position. Do not place the cartridges with their ink nozzles facing the table, Nozzles are delicate and are likely to be damanged.
kit – available at your local hardware vendor n A sharp balde or cutter n A cleaning cloth or tissue paper
Preparation Before refilling, get all the materials in one place. Remove the refill bottles from the kit, unwrap them and keep a cleaning cloth or tissues handy, for accidential spills.
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Refilling the cartridges Locate the fill holes on the cartridges. Their position STEP differs from one cartridge to another. Refer to the manual bundled along with the refilling kit for this information.
01
For HP cartridges, the fill holes are underneath the STEP sticker on the top of the cartridge. Take a sharp object – a cutter for example – and lift one edge of the sticker to expose the holes under it.
02 03 STEP
You’ll see five holes. Refer to the refilling manual to find out which one corresponds to which colour.
far as it will go. Once the needle is in, hold the syringe upright and open the STEP top cap so that the ink flows down. Close the cap once the ink level in the cartridge reaches the lower mark,
06
07 STEP
08 STEP
Tilt the cartridge and the syringe to the horizontal position, and pull the needle out. Repeat the above steps for each colour and for the black cartridge.
TIPS
Now, take refill syringe. Each syringe is demarcarted into STEP three parts. Each part equals one refill. Hence, each syringe gives you three refills.
04 05 STEP
Never place your finger on the circuit when holding the cartridge
n Do not remove the sticker completely. Just pull out three-fouths of it, so that you can cover the holes again.
Remove the rubber cap covering the tip of the syringe, place the tip near the fill hole and slowly insert the needle as
n After removing the rubber cap, hold the refill syringe horizotally to avoid ink spills.
n To avoid wastage, close the top cap before the ink level in the syringe reaches the next marker.
n Do not overfill the cartridge. This can lead to leakage.
n Wait for some time before pulling out the needle so that the ink in it is soaked up by the sponge in the cartridge. Peel the sticker from one corner using a sharp blade
Open the top cap so that ink flows due to gravity
Post-refilling procedure Put the refilled cartridges back into the bay and close the top lid. Try printing some documents with varying colours and text. If the colours are not properly reproduced, clean the nozzle.
01 STEP
02
Remove the cartridges as mentioned in the earlier steps, and put them upside down on a table.
Take out the t i s s u e STEP p r o v i d e d along with the kit, and put some drops of its cleaning fluid on it.
03
n To clean the nozzle using hte printer driver, use Clean Cartridges service found in printer properties dialog under Services tab.
n Do not wipe the nozzle with the
Place the nozzle area on the
STEP wet tissue for a few minutes.
tissue, as this might damage the nozzle. Just place it on the tissue, and apply enough pressure on the nozzle so that it comes in full contact withe the wet tissue.
Replace the cartridge, and take some more printouts. If STEP the colours appear faded, or you observe horizontal handing, try clearing the nozzzle via the printer driver.
04
Analysis Quality-wise, the results were rather astonishing. There was hardly any difference between the two text printouts. The combidocument differences were significant, with the genuine cartridge yielding better sharpness and reproduction of details. The refilled ink also took some seconds to dry on normal paper. This characteristic, drying time, might be what’s responsible for the differences in quality between the two combi-document outputs.
Place the cartridge as shown above to clean the nozzle
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Staying connected Browsers that will let you get your daily dose of the net, on your mobile...
A
few years ago, WAP (wireless application protocol) was considered a luxury, and a lot of us had the “My service provider’s cooler than yours,” arguments, based solely on the cost of internet access. I was, at one point, paying Rs 499 per month to get internet access on my phone. When it comes to electronics and technology, the meek mobile phone has inherited the Earth. With a rather large percentage of people owning one, it’s obvious to everyone that networking the world is easiest achieved through mobile devices. Unfortunately, things aren’t as simple as hooking everyone up with a mobile internet connection. We have the goal – connect the world; get them on the net. We have the technology: GPRS, EDGE, 3G, Wi-Fi, etc. However, as is usually the case, software plays spoilsport.
Just browsing No two phone manufacturers seem to agree on any one browser. Although it may not seem like a problem, it actually wouldn’t hurt for someone to have a Microsoft-like strangle-hold on mobile browsers – the way IE is on the desktop. Before you gawk in disbelief at that statement, finish reading the article and perhaps it will begin to make sense. Basically, there is a need for standards, as the lack of them is confusing everyone – you, me, developers, mobile manufacturers, ISPs; effectively chucking a rather large spanner in the works.
Order to chaos Thankfully, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium, founded by Tim Berners-Lee) is trying to set some standards here, and ensure that we all have similar experiences when browsing the mobile web, no matter what handsets we use. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to browse the mobile web the same way we
ACID 3 TEST
“The Mobile Web Initiative’s goal is to make browsing the Web from mobile devices a reality. W3C and mobile industry leaders are working together to improve Web content production and access for mobile users and the greater Web.” Tim Berners-Lee Internet Inventor / W3C Director www.w3.org
do on our desktops? Barring a few sites that are “optimised” for Internet Explorer, the “desktop web”, is basically standardised. When it comes to mobile browsers, however, the reality is quite the opposite. Apart from the W3C, the Web Standards project is also involved in creating tests that browsers (especially mobile browsers) need to pass before they can claim to conform to standards. More information in the box “Acid3 test”.
The Web Standards Project has a battery of tests to verify how a browser follows the accepted web standards, and how a browser displays them. Standards are important for the web, and the WSP is doing its bit to try and get all major browsers to conform to set guidelines. Even those of you who use a desktop to surf the net will have come across some site or the other that just breaks when you view it — with text that refuses to stay in its box, images that refuse to resize right, or menus that seem to act all crazy. Sometimes it’s the site’s coder who have screwed up, but sometimes, it’s your browser that’s coughed and died, because it just doesn’t support a certain web standard. If everyone followed standards, you could just use your favourite browser, visit any site, and never have to see terribly broken layouts or renders. The Acid3 test is supposed to tell you whether your browser is following the coding rules, or not. Anyone can run the Acid3 test by visiting http://acid3.acidtests.org. More information on the various Acid tests are available at www.webstandards.org.
Browsers passing Acid 3 test Web Google Chrome 4.0 Safari 4.0 Opera 10 Epiphany 2.28.0
Mobile Iris Browser 1.1.4
Mobile Browsers
Bolt Browser 1.6
Let’s take a look at what’s on offer for those of you who can’t wait to get online from your mobiles.
Opera Mobile 9.7 Other Google Earth 5.2.1
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Android Google’s open source initiative brought us the Android mobile O S , a n d although there aren’t too many devices that run it just yet, you can count on Google’s past success in everything they do to ensure that this will change soon. Android’s browser has got some rave reviews from early adopters. It uses the WebKit rendering engine, which is basically an API that Apple derived from the KHTML software library that is used in KDE’s Konqueror browser. The browser is fast, renders well, and with WebKit promising to be one of the few to pass the Acid3 test soon, there are certainly not going to be too many formatting errors. The android browser scores 93/100 in the Acid3 test.
Safari Mobile users will have used this if they coughed up the dough for an iPhone, or an iPod Touch, and they will be perhaps the most content of all us mobile net junkies. Safari is the best mobile browser yet — it is fast, renders impeccably, scrolls and zooms beautifully, and since it’s found on Apple devices, the multi-touch really makes it simple for anyone to use. It’s still got a long way to go though — it needs to add Flash support, passes the Acid3 test (100/100) but does incorrect rendering in Safari Mobile 4.0. Opera Mobile This is Opera’s Windows mobile and Symbian browser, which is bundled in some devices, and available for download for all others. Opera have their own closed-source browser engine called Presto, and as you can see from the desktop version’s results, the Acid3 results, although not perfect, seem to suggest that Presto certainly follows more web standards than the rest. Opera Mobile 9.5 beta scores 73/100 in Acid3, and the tests it fails are less likely to affect page layouts. A look at the screenshots should tell you what you need to know.
Nokia Symbian 60 Nokia’s S60-based phones use a browser that’s also based on WebKit, like Android and Safari, but somehow it
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doesn’t do as well as its cousins. It scores 47/100 in the Acid3 test, and generally does not feel as fast and smooth (rendering) as its cousins. The one good feature it does add, which its cousins need to seriously think about, is Flash Lite support. There’s still a lot of tweaking needed, and Flash-lite on our test phone (a Nokia E51) was buggy and slow because it ate a lot of resources – but at least it worked. There are some decent Flash Lite applications available, just make sure you don’t use any of the screensavers – they just eat into your battery life.
Internet Explorer IE on Windows Mobile is a barely able to render anything properly. If you thought Acid3 tests scores for its desktop version were bad, you have no clue how bad, bad can be. With so many sites breaking, it doesn’t make sense to even bother here. It’s obvious that IE has a long way to go before it’s suitable for smaller screens. For now, we’d rather urge Windows Mobile users to download Opera Mobile, which may not run as well as it does on Symbian, but at least you’ll be able to surf the net!
Opera Mini The best part about Opera Mini is that it can be installed on almost any mobile device – whether the iPhone, any Symbian device or even the run of the mill, everyday (Java-enabled) mobile phone. Opera mini is specialised for small-screen browsing, and renders really well. Opera Mini scores 80/100 in the Acid3 test, which is commendable. Mini uses Opera servers to compress, reformat and optimise data for your small screen, which results in faster page transfers, and little or no processing power required on your end. Unlike Opera Mobile, where your mobile does all the processing and page rendering, Mini lets a server farm somewhere in cyber space worry about
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all that, and just displays content on your screen. It’s also a good application for those on a pay-per-use data plan, because, for all practical purposes, Mini zips (as in compression, and speed) the net for you, saving you precious bandwidth and time. I for one am thankful for it, because I barely get 2 or 3 KBps over my pathetic GPRS connection, but can still do everything I need to online, from anywhere, using Mini.
Firefox for Mobile Firefox for m o b i l e (codenamed Fennec) is the name of the build of the Mozilla Firefox web browser for ARM devices such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants. Firefox for mobile 1.0 uses the same version of the Gecko layout engine as Firefox 3.6. Its features include tabbed browsing, password manager, location-aware browsing, and the ability to synchronize with the user's computer Firefox browser using Firefox Sync as well as Flash. It is currently available for Nokia Maemo. The browser is optimized for the Nokia N900, it is also available on Nokia N810 and N800 Internet Tablets. A beta release of version 4.0 for Android and an alpha of version 1.1 for Windows Mobile are available. Since it uses same layout engine as of desktop Firefox, it does well on Acid Test and score 97/100 for Firefox 4.
Now what? As usual, there needs to be some logical conclusion to the whole thing, right? Wrong. We still have a long way to go before the “mobile web” is as accessible as the “desktop web”. Recent news reports have suggested that the number of mobile users globally (and especially in India), are increasing exponentially. Much before we have one laptop per child we might end up having one mobile per child, and this is something that all mobile service providers are well aware of. The mobile is the new PC, and everyone and their uncles are hopping on to the mobile space to try something. While this is great news for those of us who love the convenience of mobile connectivity, all we can do is hope that groups like the W3C and the WSP succeed in encouraging the use of standards in mobile browsers.
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things I can teach you about Twitter
be social.play nice.get extra credit.pay attention.be prepared
T
you’re the bad-guy, you’re always the bad-guy and if you consistently insult people via Twitter, you’ll quickly gain a reputation as a loud mouth bully. If you have something to say, remember the 2 C’s – Creative Criticism. If you’ve got a problem with someone or something, be polite and say it gently. At least that way you get to voice your opinion and help someone out too!
Teens are really social and as Twitter is an extremely sociable platform, it only makes sense that I as a teen can teach you a few things about the microblogging service.
Get that Extra-Credit
here are plenty of things that being a teenager I could teach you about Twitter.
A lot of people take the wrong approach to Twitter, using it for a constant stream of spam links and selfpromotion but if you intend to use Twitter for communications, networking and marketing this is not very effective.
Be Social School is miserable. Lessons, tests and detentions from teachers who you don’t like and who don’t like you. Majority of teens who you speak to will agree that school is a bore. The one way to get through it is to have some friends to help you to pass the time. But how do you make friends? It’s by talking and being social of course. Twitter is the same, if you’re using it for communication, make sure that you reply to every DM, @reply and though provoking tweet that you get in your timeline. It’s the only way that you can make friends and gain follows as well as influence on the site. Not only this, but being social can result in great opportunities because of your network and creating this loyal group of followers will increase the likelihood of people ReTweeeting our links, making more people aware of you through their marketing.
Play Nice Think about your school days. Remember that there was that bully in the playground who was mean to everyone? When it comes to Twitter, don’t be that guy. As if us teens didn’t dislike school enough without the addition of overbearing thugs annoying us in corridors! Here’s a life lesson: once
Take it from me, your lessons are a whole lot easier when your teachers like you. For any teenager in any class there’s a meanie who is rude to the teacher and has no manners. That kid
part of an assessment. The lesson plan was the easy part but what I found difficult about it was that they wouldn’t pay attention for very long. It’s obvious that you learn more when you give something your entire focus, not getting distracted at all, especially in school but this same technique can definitely be applied to Twitter. If you pay attention to Twitter, you’ll notice when people are talking about certain trends which means that they’ll be using search engines to search for them too. You’ll be able to harness that extra traffic potential by writing great posts about the latest ‘in-thing’ that the Internet is into.
Be Prepared The worst thing in high school is to show up to a lesson unprepared. Everyone’s experienced that moment when the fear hits, and the sheer look of horror slowly creeps upon your face as you realize that the homework that you spent an entire weekend on, lays on a work-table, at home, miles out of reach because you simply forgot to prepare the night before and put it in your bag, ready to take to school. Knowing what you’re using Twitter for can really help. Using it for marketing? Know and prepare what links you’ll be sharing when you get a flood of new followers. What about communication? Be ready to jump in and get involved with the ‘happening’ discussions, this will also help to make you look like an expert in your field too. If you’re a Twitter networker, preparing to reply to your followers can let them know that you appreciate them!
practically lives in detention! There’s always a teacher’s pet too, who showers the teacher in compliments. That kid is a genius. With Twitter, compliments get you everywhere. @reply lovely messages (only if you mean them!) and watch as your followers attempt to create relationships with you, who is obviously a nice, kind-hearted person. You’ll also increase your chance of being followed as more people will tell their followers to follow you!
Social media is new and exciting, but it comes down to interacting with others in a respectful, supportive manner. Remember, it’s a “community.”
Pay Attention
Zaid Aijaz
Recently, I got the chance to make a screencast/video tutorial to my peers as
Zaid Aijaz is a student and writes about technology at www.kashtech.info
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Sanguine Infotech Pvt Ltd From Software development to networking & communications to trainings & education services, Sanguine has it all.
S
ANGUINE INFOTECH PVT LTD (SAN) is an IT services, business process outsourcing and consulting organization. Sanguine is mainly operating from its own newly developed park in Srinagar at Alliance Campus, apart from having offices at Delhi and Netherlands.
We have a Optic Fiber Network laid across Srinagar and adjoining districts, for our customers. We are providing Kashmir Valley inter-town network and intra-city connectivity based upon client requirements. The network is created in a loop architecture and finally developed into a mesh architecture to provide in-build redundancy.
Founded in 2003, by a group of privately funded engineers, the firm had initially been involved in software development and has over the years diversified into a limited company providing a comprehensive range of IT services, customized software and data management solutions. The customers include individuals, organizations, and companies in India, USA and Netherlands. “Our guiding philosophy is still to form alliances with world class technology companies and using the lower local cost of operations and quicker roundabout times, provide cost effective solutions and services across the world”, said, Anis, one of the founders. Sanguine combines its cost efficient and nimble operational costs, flexible delivery model and clear business insights with the technological expertise of the renowned alliance partners to offer competitive advantage to its customers and partners. “The alliances enable us to deliver technological solutions and enhanced customized services to help customers (individuals and companies) incorporate IT, data and software solutions effectively while improving their Operational efficiencies”, said Anis. Sanguine has technological and strategy tie-ups with Wipro Infotech, EliteCore Technologies, Hughes Communications ,PGCIL (Power Grid Corporation of India Ltd.), Motorola Inc., Educational Testing Service (ETS), USA and Prometric Inc. USA. “Our relationship with clients is based on the principles of honesty, quality of work, quick turnaround-time and total commitment to customer needs. We are
proud of a reputation that was developed over the years by offering a friendly and flexible approach, which ensures longterm partnerships with clients,” echoes Anis. Sanguine is offering its services under Five different brands. The brand San-D is used for data management services, San-S for customized software and web development, San-C for Communication Services while as SanE is used for trainings and education services. With a dedicated set of professionals driven by passion to deliver value, Sanguine ensures that the clients are able to combine the scope and efficiencies of its processes and methodologies to achieve their goals at a definite cost and time advantage. "We have the right combination of people, processes and resources to ensure faster deployment of client projects", said one of its founders. “Custom software and Web development have been our focus ever since the company came into existence,” said Anis. From database design to e-commerce solutions to Website design and development, Sanguine delivers cost effective and reliable systems. Our expertise in IT outsourcing in general and software outsourcing in particular is our competitive edge. Sanguine offers consulting services on an onsite, offsite and offshore basis. A cadre of highly motivated and trained software engineers, deployment engineers, network architects and project managers make Sanguine People. Their areas of expertise include Education, internet/intranet applications, service and utility and many more. The expertise that they posses embraces a wide range of custom programming skills involving the latest and most effective development technologies, such as .NET (ASP.NET, C#, VB.NET), XML , PHP and many more. Among the consulting people are experts in JAVA, C++, C, DCOM, MTS, CORBA, PHP, AJAX etc, who have working experience on UNIX, LINUX, NT, VMS, Legacy
profile 9419422263 systems and many other platforms. The Sanguine People can perform the full gamut of activities from Architectural Analysis, thorough design, Coding, Implementations, maintenance and other consulting activities. This to a great extent defines the quality and reliability of the custom software applications that Sanguine develops. Sanguine's networking market primarily consists of small-medium business (SMB) clients 5 to 200 computers, public sector government organizations and school and higher educational institutions. “We posses advance network certifications such as MCSE, CCNA, CCDA, CCNP, MCNE, CCA, ASE, A+, etc. Our real-world experience with small to enterprise sized clients coupled with practical network expertise and business skills allow us to create business infrastructures that are reliable, manageable, and capable of sustaining the most demanding ebusiness environments,” said Anis. With experience of working in
Redhat, Linux and Windows NT/2000/2003 (Windows family) network operating systems, San-N have managed to build a solid team of networking professionals that come from various backgrounds and expand the creative potential of the company. Sanguine through its Sanguine Connect-San-C is venturing in developing valley's MPLS VPN Network that uses wireless on the last mile. “Sanguine is registered with the Department of Telecommunications, Ministry of Communications, Government of India and has been granted a IP-1 License to provide assets such as dark Fibers, Right of way, Towers and other infrastructures to enable/facilitate the carriage of voice a n d n o n - v o i c e messages/telecommunication traffic and maintenance of the same. “We have a Optic Fiber Network laid across Srinagar and adjoining districts, for our customers. We have established a POP at our park which has access to
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unlimited bandwidth. The connectivity is provided to corporate, government organizations, institutes and other clients in an extremely short time frame. We are providing Kashmir Valley inter-town network and intracity connectivity based upon client requirements. The network is created in a loop architecture and finally developed into a mesh architecture to provide in-build redundancy. The network is managed on MPLS enabled network and includes voice, data and vi d e o n e t w o r ks . T h e l a s t m i l e connectivity is entirely based on wireless and radio/microwave solutions also”, said Anis. Technological advancements and Internet in IT have evolved and changed the whole paradigm of how companies do business. This shift has also created needs for specialists in the field of Engineering and IT who are not only trained but certified internationally. Sanguine has taken initiative in this regard and first such tie-up has come in association with Prometric Inc. which is
authorized by American Educational Testing Service (ETS) for conducting online examinations for Global Certifications of global brands like Microsoft, Cisco, Sun, Oracle, Test of English as Foreign Language (TOEFLiBT), Graduate Record Examination (GRE) that are prerequisites for aspirants willing to study abroad More than 500 students have appeared for such certifications from this testing centre which has already helped the aspirants itself saving a lot of effort and time. “Earlier the nearest available Testing Center was in New Delhi, more than 1000 kms. away which was a real pain for the aspirants. We are on the move for making the centre authorized for many other such certifications”, Anis said. Sanguine’s recent successful and ongoing projects include: n
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Kashmir University Wide Area Network (KUWAN) – e-Governance Project University of Kashmir
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Custom software and Web development have been our focus ever since the company came into existence.
n
Web Portal Design & Development – Sheri Kashmir Agricultural University of Science & Technology (SKUAST)
n
Web Portal Design & Development – J&K Planning & Development
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CMS based Website Development: Research Center of Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School USA
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Design & Development of eInvoiceware & Online Publishing System: Web Based Software Developed for Qbil B.V, Netherlands
n
1 Giga-byte Optical Fiber Based Connectivity to Research Labs in J&K : National Knowledge Network (NKN) Project
Department.
Sanguine has the start of art infrastructure at their park, Alliance Campus, which comprises of state of the art workstations, high speed ISDN connection, 24 hours security, CCTVs fitted office, 24 hours power backup and 2 Mbps V-Sat connectivity. More information can be found at their website www.san.net.in
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Q A &
Having trouble with computers, we will try to deal with all the computer niggles and nags here. Email questions at questions@globekashmir.com Disabled Windows Task Manager My Task Manager is disabled. How do I re-enable it? Please Help.
XP, an error occurs every time saying access to the desktop is denied. I tried refreshing the desktop, but each time the same error appears. When I start the machine (for the first time only), the screen pauses nearly a minute to get to the logon screen every time. Is this problem only occurring because of the two operating systems? When I use a single operating system, it works fine. I have the minimum number of startup programs and I have also modified the start-up using Bootvis. I have also cleared up all dust from my cabinet and checked the power supply but of no use. I have recently upgraded my machine. The system configuration:
A: First, open a run window. Type in gpedit.msc. Then, go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Ctrl+Alt+Del Options. Doubleclick on Remove Task Manager. Select disable. Your problem should then be solved.
Access denied to my own desktop! I use a dual-OS setup with Windows Vista Ultimate and Microsoft Windows XP. When I was using Vista, I opened the Windows folder in the XP installation and it prompted me for the security check permissions. Now when I log on to
Processor: Pentium Dual-Core 2 GHz Motherboard: Gigabyte 945GCM Memory: 2 GB A: The problems you are facing with accessing partitions and data in the Windows folder is because of the permissions set for each operating system. Preferably, use the exact login information for both the operating systems. Access for the folder might have been set to a particular account on XP. Therefore, when you use a different
user account on Vista, you are prompted for authentication information. The fix now can be to create a new user account, preferably a common username and password to both operating systems. The excess time taken to access the login window might also have to do with the access restrictions set. The Access Denied errors might be because you changed the rights and permissions for the Windows XP folders.
Can’t read Ubuntu partitions I have installed Windows XP (SP2), Windows Vista (Ultimate) and Linux(Ubuntu). I have one problem. I dedicated one drive for the Linux installation. Now, that drive is not shown when I use Windows XP or Vista. All my drives are shown when I boot into Linux. How can I use my drive in Windows if it is possible without formatting Linux. I have dedicated 73 GB to that Linux drive.
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Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 Memory: 2 GB
How do I host a web site?
A: Windows cannot recognise the partition formatted with Linux file systems whereas Linux supports the FAT/NTFS file systems. This is why you cannot see your Linux partition under Windows.
I have a static IP and want to host a web site on my PC. I have Vista Home Premium installed. I have also registered two domain names. Please guide me how to host a web site on my PC.
Problems with opening PDF files When I try to download documents from a site, a message “Adobe Reader — File does not begin with %PDF” appears and I’m unable to get the file from the site. I have installed Adobe Acr obat Reader 9.0 on Window s XP Professional. A: Try re-installing Adobe Reader 9. See if this fixes the problem. If you really need to download PDF files from your browser, right-click on the link to the PDF and click Save Link As. Save the file on your drive, then use Adobe Reader to open it. If you continue having trouble using Adobe Reader, you can also try a free PDF reader such as Foxit Reader from www.foxitsoftware.com.
Problem with playing certain formats I have downloaded a WMV file, but I can’t play it. I have also tried converting it to AVI or MPEG, but I get some error messages. A: WMV is Windows Media Video and is supported by the Windows operating system. The only reason you may not be able to play it is if the video you downloaded is encoded using WMV 10 codecs. You can download and install the codecs and also the latest version of
A: Hosting a web site requires decent bandwidth depending on the amount of traffic you plan on getting. Still, hosting a web host is simple and there’s plenty of methods to choose from. If you just have to host a basic set of pages without a MySQL server or a PHP environment setup, then something as small and free as AnalogX Simpleserver (http://www.analogx.com/contents/ download/network/sswww.htm) or Abyss Web Server (http://www. aprelium.com/abyssws/) will do. If you want the complete thing, downloading XAMPP for Windows is recommended. It comes with Apache, the web server, MySQL, PHP, Perl and everything you require. Once you have the web server installed and setup, simply login to the account on the domain provider’s control panel and redirect the domains to your static IP.
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Windows Media Player from Microsoft’s web site.
My system configuration is:
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Securely passing on files I want to write a CD containing my personal information and give it to a friend. I want it to be secure so that the data can only be read by my friend. Is there any simple software that I can use to encrypt it? Also, I read in the magazine that to prevent most viruses from activating I should create a write-protected file AUTORUN.INF. The problem is that I don’t know how to create a write protected file. I went to the properties window and ticked on the read only button but I don’t think it works.
A: A simple and secure way to send files on a CD to your friend might be to use an archiving tool such as 7Zip, WinZip or WinRAR. Set a password to the archive and it should be fairly secure. To create a write-protected file, start a command prompt by clicking on Start > Run and typing cmd. Go to the drive or partition you want to create the file by typing E: assuming that E is your flash drive. Type copy con autorun.inf and press [Enter]. Type [Ctrl] + [Z] and press [Enter]. Then, type attrib +r +s +h autorun.inf. This will set the file to be hidden, readonly and also a system file.
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