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Carry on with the earlier thread.. Topic closed.

Try O & O Defrag - I've been using it over a long time. It does all you want plus more... of course, it's a licensed tool, but worth every penny You can get it from: https://www.oo-software.com/en/

Reports have been flooding in from everywhere regarding Google's experimentation with the new "Ads by Google" logo and mostly they consist of grumbles about how it's going to (or already have) reduce the CTR (Click-Through-Rate) drastically. However as far as I've noticed, Google seems to understand this factor and been trying to make the logo as unobtrusive as possible, by blending it to suit the colour palette of your ads. The logo's that have appeared on my site so far look like... and Read further on this at my blog... Google experimenting with the âAds by Googleâ link in AdSense Further musings on Googleâs experimentation with the AdSense logo My CTR so far seems unaffected. Anybody else experienced negatives/positives owing to this logo?? Feedbacks & comments on this will be great !!! Regards, m^e

The plugin you're talking about is called AdSense Deluxe+ brought to you by Acme Technologies. I haven't really studied their code so far - but I don't think it'll be all that difficult using the referral code with their product. They take whatever raw adsense code you provide and insert it in your desired location in the posts. However, as far as I know their ads placement is limited to posts only while the one I came up with acts as a sidebar widget, which you can drag & drop and place anywhere in your sidebars.

I believe I've been one late dude to join hands and wish everyone a Merry Christmas.. well, as they say - better late than never So.. my heartfelt Season's Greetings and best wishes for a Very Bright & Prosperous New Year ahead to all of you Cheers m^e

Are you using Firefox and have the AdBlock Plus extension installed ?? That might be the problem as AdBlock Plus is enabled by default for all pages. You've to disable it for my domain to be able to see the ads...Regards,m^e

Preamble: Google AdSense Referrals are pretty cool in a way as they contribute well in topping up on your daily AdSense earnings. Moreover, they're quite unobtrusive and can be placed anywhere on the page without interfering with the content much. According to me they're best placed in the side-bar and since I'm using a widget enabled theme I got down to searching for a widget plug-in that would let me to do just that. If you don't know how a AdSense Referral looks like, here's a snapshot… Anyway, I found plenty of AdSense widget plug-ins that allow you to display the text-ads anywhere on the side-bars. None of the plug-ins I found were cut-out for Referral Ads only, but with some minor modifications one could use the available ones to show referrals too. Google provides you with 4 different kinds of referrals at the moment and my idea was to keep rotating between all of them randomly, thus presenting your visitors with a wider range of choice to pick from. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a single one in this category and hence with whatever limited knowledge of WordPress I have, I got down to writing one of my own. The idea was to use the mt_rand function of PHP which … "uses a random number generator with known characteristics using the Mersenne Twister, which will produce random numbers four times faster than what the average libc rand()." provides. … and generate a number between 1 & 4 and use that number as a key to an array holding the google_cpa_choice code for the four different referrals. Pretty easy, eh ? Every time a visitor loads the page containing this widget in the sidebar, a new random number is generated, thus showing a different referral (most of the time). I say most of the time here, since occasionally the generated random numbers might overlap showing the same referral consecutively for a couple of times. When it came to the implementing the idea part, I was at a total loss as I'd no clue about writing sidebar widgets. However, I'm extremely adept at making meaning out of existing code and modifying it to suit my purposes. I acquired half my PHP knowledge that way. So even here, I picked a AdSense widget plug-in that seemed the easiest to decipher and recode. The plug-in I chose was Google AdSense Widget written by Mike Smullin. It took me about half-an-hour to read through the code and another one hour to get it to do what I wanted. The result was GARR or Google AdSense Referral Rotator, which I'm sharing with you here. Requires: Wordpress Sidebar Widgets Plugin Download: Google AdSense Referral Rotator Widget Installation: Installation is really easy. Unzip the file and upload the contents to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory. In the Administrative Control Panel, go to the Plugins tab and Activate the widget. It will now show up in the Sidebar Widgets screen under the Presentation menu. It'll be located in the spare widget tray. You can simply drag and drop it on to any sidebar you wish. Once placed in a sidebar you'll notice a small icon next to the widget title. Click on that to open the configuration panel. Here's a screenshot of the panel… Enter your AdSense client ID (google_ad_client) here.The default referral ad size (google_ad_width x google_ad_height) is set to a small button 120 x 60 pixels. You're free to modify it any of the other standard sizes supported by Google.Make sure you modify the google_ad_format too in case you change the width and height. The available referral ad formats can be viewed by logging into your own AdSense account and visiting this page. You'll notice a separate section below the general parameters with four fields titled Referral#1, Referral#2 and so on… they contain the ad code for the four different referral types available through AdSense at the moment.If there are further referrals added in future, I'll upgrade the plug-in to reflect that. In fact I'll try to modify the widget to enable users to add as many referrals as they want. Once done with your settings, click on the close (X) button and Save the settings…and you're done. Now your widget will show up in the sidebar and display different referrals on every page load. Live Example: If you want to see a live example, navigate to the Home link of my site and you can see the widget in action on the right-most sidebar around the middle of the page right after the Categories. If you refresh the page a couple of times, you'll notice that you're shown a different referral on most occasions. Any Problems? If you face any problems with installation / configuration, feel free to leave a comment and I'll try to reply as soon as possible. Comments & Feedbacks are more than welcome…

It was only a matter of time before Skype, the popular VoIP software was made a target by virus authors. Websense, a leading internet security firm has discovered a worm that propagates through Skype Chat - the inbuilt instant messaging tool. The worm which probably originated somewhere in the Asia-Pacific region (with a high likelihood of being Korea) prompts users to download and run a file called sp.exe. Once run a spyware gets installed - which can then steal login credentials and other sensitive information. It can even connect to remote servers to download additional malwares. Reports about the number of affected people are yet to come in. Source: http://news.a.com.com/

For a long while I’ve been plagued by the limitations of the Windows Clipboard. First of all you can copy only one object at a time (once you copy a second one, it replaces the first) and absolutely no retentivity. For instance, if I needed to copy a couple of things over and over again, I’d no way of making them stick to the clipboard and switching between them while pasting. This gets extremely annoying/frustrating at times - specially during forum moderation. There are loads of Clipboard Enhancement Utilities that allow you to store multiple items.. namely CLCL, Clipboard Magic, Clipboard Recorder, Clippy 2001, DzSoft Paste & Save, and Yankee Clipper III etc. However, most of these have big limitations when it comes to the number of items you can store and/or the type of data stored in the clipboard. If you’re willing to shell out about $34.95 you can always get ClipMate, which is the leading shareware in this category. Now, that’s now what we want, do we ?? A free, preferably open-source option seems a much more viable option, albeit without compromising on the features. What we need is an all rounder Clipboard enhancement solution and Ditto provides you with just that. Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ….. Ditto relies on the fast & compact SQLite embeddable database engine to store an unlimited (or user-defined) number of clipboard items. A simple hotkey (Ctrl + ` by default) brings up the Ditto window which lists all the copied items till date. You can scroll through the list and perform quick-searches to get to any particular item too. You can even neatly categorise the copied items into folders of your choice. You can assign hotkeys for the first 10 copied items too making pasting them a breeze. Ditto captures every kind of data from the clipboard - be it formatted or unformatted text, graphics, files - virtually anything. The location of the SQLite database can be specified from the Ditto configuration panel - enabling you to maintain the database at an alternate location. This means, in case you need to reformat the partition containing Windows and/or your Program Files directory - none of your clipboard data is lost. Once you reinstall windows, you can make Ditto point to the old database location and all your previous items are back in a jiffy. Moreover, Ditto doesn’t limit the copying to a single computer. If you’re on a network, you can setup Ditto to transmit and share your copied items with others on the network (running Ditto of course). Copied data is transmitted in encrypted form for added security. In effect, your clipboard is reflected on whichever computer on the network you want making Ditto a truly unique solution. Here’s the standard list of features from their site: Easy to use interface Search and paste previous copy entries Keep multiple computer’s clipboards in sync Data is encrypted when sent over the network Accessed from tray icon or global hot key Select entry by double click, enter key or drag drop Paste into any window that excepts standard copy/paste entries Display thumbnail of copied images in list Full Unicode support (display foreign characters) UTF-8 support for language files (create language files in any language) Note: Ditto requires DAO to be installed. This tool is a hot favourite of mine and another of the must downloads. Article published priorly at Chaos Laboratory on December 19, 2006

Unfortunately this one is meant ONLY for capturing MSN Webcam streams. However, if you're a coder yourself, you can easily come up with an alternative for the other streams using WinPcap and libmimic. I've studied the APIs and they don't sound very complicated. Just need some time to get started on one myself.Cheers,m^e

Very frequently I engage in lively video conversations with family & friends through MSN and invariably occasions arose when I felt the need to capture whole conversations or at least short video clips. You just can’t let some memorable moments slip by like that… I searched far and wide for tools / plug-ins that would allow me to make good-quality captures and tried hundreds of them. A simple Google search would bring you upon a horde of such sites claiming to have the perfect tool for you. However, I was thoroughly disappointed with their offerings… save one. A little on the capture mechanism employed by the Webcam recorders. 99% of them - free ones or paid/licensed ones are nothing but simple screen capture tools. Such software enable you to either capture either the whole screen or part of the screen (video window) over a long period of time and save to popular video encoded format. When you’re viewing the webcam streams in full-screen mode, this is still acceptable.. but windowed mode spells the doom for such tools. Since you’ve to define a certain region of a conversation window to capture, that particular window has always got to be on the top of all others. If you keep switching between many different chat / browser windows the software will start capturing whatever if finds in a similar region in those windows. Secondly, if your internet link is not of a decent speed, your video will most likely be kind of choppy as frames come in late or get totally dropped at times. These softwares have no way of knowing about dropped/late frames and keep writing blindly to the disk. Thus they turn out very poorly recorded videos. A couple of examples of such tools are: Bulent’s Screen Recorder v1.5a (Freeware) CamStudio Keep in mind, these aren’t bad by any means - they’re very good as live screen capture tools, but simply not efficient video capturing utilities. This is where MSN Webcam Recorder comes in. I found it by a chance discovery sitting quietly several pages down on a Google search. At that time it was still in the early stages of development - but while reading about it’s features it sounded pretty promising. For a change, this little freeware tool captured the video packets directly as they streamed into your system and did not rely on blunt screen capturing. For this it employs WinPcap - a freeware low-level Windows based packet capturing tool which allows applications to capture network packets bypassing the protocol stack - thus enabling the applications to grab raw data packets and do as they saw fit with them. This approach permits MSN Webcam Recorder to grab the packets even before they are shown in the MSN window itself. To quote the author… It sees the Webcam video the same way MSN does, and reproduces it with a more accurate time correction. You can also watch a live video in another window, the size you want it to be, so you’re not stuck with MSN’s conversation window and its small size! Standard features: Once installed, it sits in your system tray and can be made to load up automatically at startup. Whenever it detects a MSN Webcam stream - either originating at your computer or coming in from someone’s else’s system to yours, it automatically starts recording them in libmimic format resulting in very small file sizes. You’ve got the option of halting and restarting the recording of a stream whenever you feel like. You cannot play the recorded files directly in any media player - but once you’re done with the recording, you can instruct the software to re-encode any of those streams in many different formats/codec (including .avi,.mpeg etc.) as supported by your system. You can playback the recorded stream prior to conversion to a standard format using the inbuilt stream player in the software so as to ascertain the quality of your recording. In fact, you can play the streams live even while they’re being recorded. All the recorded streams are automatically added to a list, from where you can pick and choose and play at will. While the interface is a little cryptic and confusing for first time users and leaves a lot to be desired, overall this is the very BEST MSN Webcam recorder I’ve come across and a FREE one too. This one is a must download !! Article published priorly at Chaos Laboratory on December 18, 2006

Al Shugart - the founer of Seagate and a pioneer in the disk drive industry has passed away last Tuesday owing to complications during a heart surgery. I dont have much to add to this myself.. so here's the quoted article..

Try SQLite ( http://www.sqlite.org/ '> http://www.sqlite.org/ ) - one of the very best in free & open-source embeddable SQL compliant databases.. I use it for every single one of my standalone applications. MySQ can easily be set-up on a standalone PC, but it still has to be setup as a Service/Daemon and will act the same way as a remote server. For small applications, this is too much of an overkill and SQLite gives you a decent way out here.. You can manipulate SQLite databases using the C++ API (which is kind of messy) or you can take the easier way out by using some wrappers which provide you with standard classes for manipulating SQLite DBs.. here are a few: http://www.sqlite.org/cvstrac/wiki?p=SqliteWrappers https://s https://s - The COMPLETE List http://www.ch-werner.de/javasqlite/overview-summary.html https://l https://l http://freecode.com/projects/java_sqlite/ Hope this helps

First of all you've to declare the particular fields in MySQL that store Hebrew to be of the hebrew character collation. The collation is named hebrew. If you don't do this, those fields won't be able to store hebrew.. You can easily use some open-source tool like SQLYog from https://www.webyog.com/ '> https://www.webyog.com/ and manipulate your database to declare a particular field to be of the hebrew collation. Or, as TavoxPeru stated, you can set the whole table to Hebrew collation and not bother about any particular field. If you do so, you can still store a mix of Hebrew and English in the same table.. Setting a table or a field to a particular character-collation means enabling it to store that character-set apart from english. Here's a short list of the collations available in MySQL: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/charset-mysql.html https://l'>https://l https://l'>https://l'>http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/charset-mysql.html https://l'>https://l https://l'>https://l and their collation codes. Secondly, while accessing the database, you've to pass CHARSET=utf8 along with the connection string, so that MySQL hands out the results in UTF8 format to php and not just plain ASCII encoding..

Arizona based https://p'>https://p https://p'>https://p'>Ten Ships has announced the first public beta of their all new product http://www.ajaxdns.com/ '>AjaxDNS, which is an Ajax framework … … for any systems administrator, support technician, or anyone that needs quick network and domain tools and analysis. The features offered are: Live DNS Whois Search IP Whois HTTP Headers RBL Search Ping DNS Traversal Here's a screenshot… https://g'>https://g https://g'>https://g' alt='Posted Image' class='bbc_img' /> Looks quite cool and queries even faster. I say, give it a try

This one's quite old but really funny.. It's an imaginary portrayal of what Google might be in future (2084). The picture is self-explanatory. Here goes.... https://g'>https://g https://g'>https://g' alt='Posted Image' class='bbc_img' />https://f'>https://f https://f'>https://f' alt='Posted Image' class='bbc_img' />https://f'>https://f https://f'>https://f' alt='Posted Image' class='bbc_img' /> By RANDY SIEGEL Randy Siegel is the president and publisher of Parade Publications. Source: https://l'>https://l https://l'>https://l'>http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ https://l'>https://l https://l'>https://l Any thoughts ??

With the much awaited official release of http://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/devpreview_releasenotes/projects/devpreview/releasenotes/ '>Firefox 3.0 Alpha our favourite browser has finally managed to pass the http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/ '>Acid Test. Codenamed Grand Paradiso, starting from this version Firefox implements the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine and boasts https://g'>https://g https://g'>https://g'>heavily refactored reflow algorithms that improve Firefox layout functionality and resolve some long-standing CSS bugs. https://l'>https://l https://l'>https://l https://l'>https://l' title='E-mail Link' class='bbc_email'>Ryan Paul at https://m'>https://m https://m'>https://m'>arstechnica has provided us with an great insight into these improvements... Read the http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2006/12/8409/ '>full article ...

Google's at it again and this time with a much-needed patent search engine. It sports the same minimalistic interface that's a trademark of Google and allows you to perform fulltext searches on a database of over 7 million patents and view the details of each patent along with all the drawings / sketches. The scanned pages of the original patents are displayed in a PDF-like format with the ability to zoom in/out Apparently it uses the same underlying technology as Google Book Search. For those who've cracked their skulls over the notorious USPTO search engine this one is a mere breeze Here's a screenshot: Check out some funky patents that came up by default on the search page... Candy Forming Machine Chicken Breeding Machine Artificial Plant

A new limited edition mobile phone from Goldvish, the Swiss cell-phone maker has beat the Vertu collection to being the world's costliest phone ever. If you thought that the Vertu was mind-bogglingly expensive, think twice. This particular collection called PLATO and referred to as "Le million" PIECE UNQIUE was awarded a Guiness World Record for the unique distinction of being the Most Expensive & Most Exclusive handset worldwide. Since this is a limited edition, only 100 sets will be made and distributed around the world. According to current pricing, this handset costs approximately USD 1,270,000 - that's right ! Close to one point three million dollars. The sets are encased with 120 carats of diamonds, made of white gold, sport sapphire glass displays and incorporate the advanced quad-band technology. According to Goldvish, these sets are a "fusion of exclusive Swiss watch-making and high-tech, combined with the type of after-sales service that only a high-end luxury brand can give." The phone was featured recently at the Millionaire's Fair in Moscow. Personally, even if I had the money to buy one of these, I wonder if I'd feel safe at all walking around with one. I'd probably need to be flanked by a mini-army of heavily-armed security-men at all times

Done. OpaQue unsuspended it for you.. Today there was a SPAM flood - over 4-5K emails containing just the word "SPAM SPAM" mailed to Asta root. Apparently they originated from the following three accounts: Vyoma Chesso xdstudi I personally vouched for the first two and hence they were unsuspended.. You guys better watch out what's going on with your accounts.. Cheers, m^e

Just as an interesting footnote... the MySQL GUI program that I've been an avid fan of - the one which I've sung praises for, profoundly in my earlier posts in this thread has gone Open Source recently (Community Edition only).. Get your hands on the all new SQLYog 5.2 Comunity Edition along with source-code ( https://www.webyog.com/ ) This one's a MUST TRY.

Are you sure you want to do this? In case these IDs act as references (FOREIGN KEYS) to other tables - that might collapse the whole database structure and create a lot of orphaned/mis-linked records - and that's not desirable at all.Anyways, I believe I'd come across a statement which does what you want - but can't recall it at the moment. Let me jog my memory a bit and I'll get back to you.

I beg to differ here - bigtime Coming from a family of doctors. I'd been educated and made drug-wise/aware from very early on so that I didn't do the same mistake that every second person does - i.e. treat drugs as a taboo subject and dismiss them altogether without knowing the real reason (mostly socio-political) behind the m being labelled as "illegal". I was told to keep away from drugs in general because of the "addiction factor", but not without knowing how each of them affect you physiologically & psychologically. While I agree with you on the Heroin point - as it's extremely addictive in a physiological manner - none of the other drugs you mentioned are as horrid as you described in real life. Keep in mind that most of the so called "illegal" drugs were actually used as medicine at some point of time or the other but finally struck from the list because of their addictive nature. Problem lies with the fact that people overuse and abuse drugs at will and get dependent on them. As for pot/weed/marijuana - those claims are entirely baseless. Pot is known to somewhat affect short-term memory but as for long term-memory and Alzheimers - those are just mere speculations. In fact, pot is one of the most ancient & most-widely used healing drugs. It's medical uses cover the following diseases: Most of the diseases listed above are exactly opposite in nature as to the symptoms/side-effect of marijuana you've described here. LSD - is a little understood drug and has found it's own niche in the creative world. Many of the modern-day creative and innovative geniuses were known to dabble in LSD or Acid (as it is more popularly known) and draw inspiration from it. Personally I've known some mathematical gurus who've even completed their PhD thesis on an Acid high However, LSD has a trade-off - it's produces some sort of neuro-toxins that do affect your memory - but only if you take it in massive doses. A little known fact is that there are potentially 100 times more harmful drugs on a medical practitioners list than any of the common street drugs - and these are given out regularly under prescriptions. The difference with them and street drugs is that they're handed out in limited quantity over a short treatment phase and that these drugs don't produce a HIGH as the street drugs do. The drug-high is what gets people hooked onto them. For example, did you know that the common cough syrup if taken with the same regularity as marijuana (smoking daily) can cause severe liver damage comapred to the negligible side-effects of pot !! If the classification of drugs were left to doctors alone - they'd rank it far below alcohol in terms of harmfulness. Errrm.. maybe I should stop now If I were left to this - I'd go on rambling for ever and ever... I was looking for a good conclusion - but being unable to find any I'll quote a passage from the drugs policy library that kind of summarizes the point I wished to put forward.

There's hardly anything I can add to this article - you've to see for yourself. The prototypes are quite interesting and some of them stemmed out of really cool ideas. Read the full article and see the prototype pictures: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

An astronomical computing mechanism consisting of really complex gear systems dating back to 2nd Century B.C. (150-100 B.C.) has taken the computer scientists by surprise. Apparently this device was recovered from an ancient shipwreck about a century ago. Recently the device has been thoroughly re-examined using ultra-modern imaging systems and 3D X-Ray tomography revealing loads of inscriptions which enabled the scientists to reconstruct most of the gear mechanism. The system, named The Antikythera Mechanism is often called the World's First Computer. The investigations revealed an an âunexpected degree of technical sophistication for the period" and surprisingly âmuch of the mind-boggling technological sophistication available in some parts of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman world was simply not transmitted further.â Read full article... The Greeks probably had never heard of of the "ISO Standardized Documentation" ...