My current Firefox extensions...

I have been waiting to write a post on one of the best browsers I have known. I am a great fan of open source and even bigger of Firefox; most people also call it mozilla which is pretty ignorant because mozilla is much bigger an umbrella which also has Firefox. But I'd safely be able to say without any offense to anyone that today Firefox is much bigger a brand has overtaken the mozilla brand. I can boast of the fact that I am a pretty old user of Firefox. Actually since Firefox 0.6 version and today it's 2.0.0.6. Of course 2.0.0.6 is the public stable release release. However there are alpha versions of Firefox available; code name Gran Paradiso. Earlier this project was code named minefield. Wow I remember the details :).

For all those who have little idea about what Firefox is; Firefox is an open source browser just like Internet Explorer (Actually much better than Internet Explorer from Microsoft). Let me not even bother to compare the two because Firefox wins it with no competition. However, Firefox is open source that means it's free and it's source is open for you to modify and customize. I won't do that coz of my sorry incapabilities to understand the world of coding. However, for coding challenged people like me, Firefox has something very unique called as extensions. I love extensions coz they make Firefox a unique and powerful platform to rediscover web. I also can boast that I have some experience in writing Firefox extensions. I have written one when I was in Google. Let's not discuss the details as it is deemed classified :).

Let me tell you something that there are thousands of extensions out there at:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:1

and it is impossible to test and try each of the extension unless you are crazy and have reached the state of being obsessed. Let me also tell you that your favorite list of extensions will keep changing as per your needs. Right now my favorite extensions (not in that order) are:

1. Google Browser Sync
2. Google Notebook
3. Greasemonkey
4. Live Page Rank
5. Real Player Browser record Plugin
6. Scribefire (I am using this to blog this post)
7. ShowIP
8. StumbleUpon
9. Zotero

Do I need to describe what these extensions do? I don't think so ! Let's see how many of you will try the extensions !

Long live Open Source and the power of Community....Amen!

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Extension, opensource, Vivek Kumar, Research, Research at MDI

This is not bad at all...

I mean what is the importance of your name in Google. If found this pretty amazing today that my analytics suggested that people who reached my blog had 2 visitors who used vivek kumar as Google query. So I thought of checking it myself. I did a search on Google (google.co.in) and found that my blog with my name in of the posts features 49th in the result. I think it's not all that bad :)

Technorati Tags: vivek kumar, google, research at MDI, research

advanced search — query date range

OK if any of you read Matt Cutts blog, then you must have already seen a post on this new advance search feature that's been added to Google. If you haven't and want to read what the heck is this all about, here you go. The new feature that's been added by Google is to search the pages for a particular query using the operator as_qdr (tentatively stands for advanced search — query date range) in address bar of Google.

OK if that's too tough to understand let's take an example. Let's say you are searching for the query research at MDI and you want to search for pages resulting using this query over last 2 weeks. All you have to do is just type the following in your address bar:

http://www.google.com/search?q=research+at+MDI&as_qdr=w2

You might wanna check out the first result :)

Of course I have used this example to show that over the past 2 weeks google has indexed around 26000 pages and the top result is from my blog. This also suggests that Google has crawled my blog in the last week 2 week. I am smart and I have not used as_qdr=w1 because my blog hasn't been crawled in last week.

The parameters that the operator as_qdr takes is as follows (scraping it from Matts Blog)

d[number] - past number of days (e.g.: d10)

w[number] - past number of weeks

y[number] - past number of years

So next time you want to refine your search and impress your colleagues and/or your clients feel free to boast about your uncanny knack of being a smart Google operators user.

Technorati Tags: as_qdr, advanced search — query date range, google, research at mdi, research

And who said linux wasn't eye-candy..

Ignorance is bliss but not always. Definitely not when you have not tried any of the latest distros of linux. Linux beats the eye-candy effect of any of the operating systems. Be it Microsoft Vista or a Mac. Don't believe me. See for yourself.

This is not even close to my average level of creativity. What you see is my desktop of Ubuntu 7.04 popularly called as Feisty Fawn. There has been an alpha release of Ubuntu 7.10 code named gutsy gibbon. But I have not upgraded as the support for the repositories is missing.

The fading fire that you see in this picture is not part of the wallpaper but is a functionality of beryl window manager. When a window is closed it fades away like the one is above picture. I could not capture the wobbly desktop effects. This is a true master piece. More and more softwares are being supported. As you can see there is Adobe reader, skype and opera to name a few.

To capture the essence of what I feel about open source, I have made an entry for ubunutu in vista's boot loader as "Crusader of Free World".

Let there be piece and people get more chances of unleashing the power of community development.

Technorati Tags: Ubuntu, Feisty, Research, linux

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How about something as sexy as this...

Caution: This post might lead to very addictive music listening habits. In case you are already one of those people who cannot live without music, this post might just make you transfer some funds to my account. I stumbled across a site called as musicovery.com. This site is about a music player right into your browser and you don't need to register or do any other kind of bullshit like downloading stuff.

This cool stuff just sits in your browser and plays the kind of music you want. I am still doing some feature testing of this and will keep posting about the stuff you can do. As of now it has to key features like genre of music and you can select option as per your mood in that genre. Then you have a time line and I find this out of this world.

Faster Acrobat....

How many times have you wished that your Acrobat Reader/Pro could open up at the speed of light. The reason for a slower loading of Adobe Acrobat is, the software takes more cpu cycles to load plugins that let us do various functions. So, if you want to speed things up you can try to use this method:

1) Browse into Adobe Acrobat Reader’s program folder. Example:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0

2) Open ‘plugins’ folder, select all (keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+A) and cut (Ctrl+X) the files to a backup folder. The idea is to let ‘plugins’ folder to be empty so that the additional features won’t load.

Never think that you are smart...

I know that we all are smart and there is no denying of this fact. But being over smart sometime makes you realize that it would have been better if you were ignorant. And if I can use the copyright phrase of my good friend Paul that "Ignorance is a Bliss".

OK coming down to the point. Well a couple of days back I tried something in which I thought I was a wizard. I tried installing Ubuntu gutsy gibbon (Thanks to Nikhil) without reading the instruction. I thought it was like a cake walk as it was in Windows XP. Now for windows XP you get good partitionning tools (thanks to torrents for the pirated stuff), but for Vista there is none. However, Vista has it's own tool called shrink. So, installing Ubuntu I messed up with my partition table and screwed up all the partitions. Thankfully I got back all the important docs doing some recovery.

Make sure if any one of you run the native partitions made using Vista, please follow the instructions at

http://apcmag.com/5046/how_to_dual_boot_vista_with_linux_vista_installed_first

May be you'll not lose your super sexy rare collection of songs from eskobar and other artists. Plus the tonnes of movies you have downloaded (why else do we need a laptop with 120 Gigs of Hard disk).

As the good saying goes "Better to be safe than worried (screwed up).....