The Web and it's Changing Paradigm

Edit PDFs without Acrobat

2007-10-21T22:34:00.001-07:00

You cannot edit or recreate the PDF file unless the source documents are available. Agree, Adobe Acrobat does allow you apply numerous modifications to your existing PDF documents (like editing text, changing font attributes, inserting images and more), Acrobat is an extremely expensive software. If you are on a budget and wish to edit PDF documents without Acrobat, the easiest option is to make edits in the original document itself and recreate the PDF using Google Docs or any of the free PDF writers. When that is is not an option because you don't have the PDF source files, the PDFill PDF Editor can help you manipulate PDF documents though it may work with password protected PDFs.

The PDF Editor is freeware and lets you make basic changes to PDF files - you can reorder the sequence of pages, crop a PDF page, add text information in header and footer, add image stamps or even merge multiple PDFs into one.

PDFill PDF editor is still limited like it won't let you edit that phone number or address in the PDF - another option is to download a trial version of Adobe Acrobat Professional - it works like a charm for 30 days.

My current Firefox extensions...

2007-09-15T11:55:00.001-07:00

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:

Google Browser Sync
Google Notebook
Greasemonkey
Live Page Rank
Real Player Browser record Plugin
Scribefire (I am using this to blog this post)
ShowIP
StumbleUpon
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...

2007-09-14T01:45:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-14T01:26:00.001-07:00

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..

2007-09-11T10:30:00.001-07:00

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

How about something as sexy as this...

2007-09-06T21:59:00.001-07:00

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....

2007-09-04T22:16:00.001-07:00

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...

2007-09-03T11:24:00.001-07:00

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).....

Really Caught up..

2007-08-31T10:44:00.001-07:00

I don't know when this happened, but I am not the same person anymore. I just got to know from Nik that Ubuntu has come up with a new alpha release code named gutsy gibbon. Call it for the flavor of open source or strong community support, none of the Linux distros have excited me more than Ubuntu. More about gutsy gibbon.

The first thing that I am going to go today is hit www.torrentz.com and search for partition magic for Vista. Install it. Simultaneously download gutsy gibbon and get back to my good old days of playing with Linux. I am sure I haven't lost a technique to prove myself worthy of being "Crusader of open source". Long live community development. Peace!

Never shop at indiaplaza.in-Part II

2007-08-26T12:11:00.001-07:00

What a service. Those sorry bas****s are yet to deliver my shipment even after 20 days when the shipment time promised was 10 days. I am still waiting for the shipment to arrive. With the kind of experience I am having I am sure those Ass****s haven't even shipped my product.

I am lodging a complaint with the Consumer Online Resources & Empowerment Centre

Affirmative NEVER SHOP AT INDIAPLAZA.IN.

Finetune

2007-08-26T11:00:00.001-07:00

I think over a period of time I have become too critical of technology and new stuff coming up. However, not that critical as well. How about a wonderful site that caters to your need of unlimited music. A very dynamic site with amazing features and music.

The site in question is Finetune. A very nice site I came across as an alternative to pandora.com. Unfortunately, pandora doesn't allow music anymore to people outside US. Kind of racism. IP filtering is the basic idea with which the site filters it's traffic. However, there's an alternative. I am not comparing the 2 services because I've hardly used finetune.

Another great feature of finetune is it's desktop player. It requires Adobe AIR. So in case you want to have music right at your desktop you might wanna check out Finetune Desktop. Free stuff rocks ! Peace......

Did a presentation

2007-08-18T23:40:00.000-07:00

Did a PPT.

builtwith.com

2007-08-16T22:12:00.001-07:00

I am taking the idea to post this story from Nikhil's blog. Builtwith.com is a site that gives a complete picture of what technologies a site is using foe web development. What my nice friend miss out on his post was a builtwith analysis of builtwith.com. Here's the summary for the same.

Analytics and Tracking

Google Analytics

Google
Analytics offers a host of compelling features and benefits for
everyone from senior executives and advertising and marketing
professionals to site owners and content developers.

Other popular sites using Google Analytics include
globalsurfari.com, gennit.com, wordpress.com, readwriteweb.com, billycorgan.info and g2007.com.

40.43% of all profiled sites use Google Analytics.

Reinvigorate

Reinvigorate
is an up to date site stats tool. measure. analyze. evolve. Snoop, a
downloadable application allows you to track users in real time.

3.62% of all profiled sites use Reinvigorate.

Javascript Libraries

Yahoo User Interface

The
Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls,
written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications
using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX.

1.79% of all profiled sites use Yahoo User Interface.

Widgets

AddThis

Widgets that allows visitors to save and promote builtwith.com

0.6% of all profiled sites use AddThis.

Digg

builtwith.com contains digg code to provide 'digg' functionality from this page.

2.72% of all profiled sites use Digg.

Frameworks

ASP.NET

ASP.NET
is a web application framework marketed by Microsoft that programmers
can use to build dynamic web sites, web applications and XML web
services. It is part of Microsoft's .NET platform and is the successor
to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology.

Other popular sites using ASP.NET include
gennit.com, multicore.amd.com, streetadvisor.com, nescafe.com, ajaxpro.info and workedhere.com.

14.47% of all profiled sites use ASP.NET.

Advertising

Google Adsense

A contextual advertising solution for builtwith.com delivering Google AdWords ads that are relevant to site content pages.

Other popular sites using Google Adsense include
globalsurfari.com, billycorgan.info, feedmyapp.com, longboardlife.com, walkjogrun.net and nasdaq.com.

11.89% of all profiled sites use Google Adsense.

Content Delivery Network

Yahoo CDN

builtwith.com uses Yahoo's API content delivery network to reduce stress of javascript downloads on the host server.

0.94% of all profiled sites use Yahoo CDN.

Aggregation Functionality

FeedBurner

builtwith.com
links to FeedBurner which is the leading provider of media distribution
and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds.

Other popular sites using FeedBurner include
readwriteweb.com, ebin.wordpress.com, 43folders.com, feedmyapp.com, script.aculo.us and blog..

7.23% of all profiled sites use FeedBurner.

RSS

builtwith.com
supports RSS; a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently
updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts.

Other popular sites using RSS include
gennit.com, wordpress.com, readwriteweb.com, billycorgan.info, g2007.com and ebin.wordpress.com.

34.3% of all profiled sites use RSS.

Document Information

OpenSearch

The
OpenSearch description document format can be used to describe a search
engine so that it can be used by search client applications.

5.7% of all profiled sites use OpenSearch.

XHTML Transitional

builtwith.com claims XHTML Transitional status (check).
XHTML 1.0 Transitional is the same as HTML 4.01 Transitional, but
follows XML syntax rules. It supports everything found in XHTML 1.0
Strict, but also permits the use of a number of elements and attributes
that are judged presentational, in order to ease the transition from
HTML 3.2 and earlier. These include center, u, strike, and applet.

42.38% of all profiled sites use XHTML Transitional.

Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading
Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the
presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most
common application is to style web pages written in HTML

Javascript

JavaScript
is a scripting language most often used for client-side web
development. Its proper name is ECMAScript, though "JavaScript" is much
more commonly used. builtwith.com uses JavaScript.

96.09% of all profiled sites use Javascript.

I Had a Visitor..

2007-08-09T03:12:00.001-07:00

Wow! I cannot believe I had a Flock ambassador visiting my other blog and commenting on the post where I talked about Flock. Here is comment section of the post that talks about Flock. Evan Hamilton is the person who commented on the post. He also has a blog that's actually pretty related to my interest areas as well. And I thought I could be lazy and get away from regular blogging. But these kinds of visitors are the one's who encourage me to blog. And yeah trust me blogging about things other than the theme of your blog pays of sometimes.

Testing Zoundry

2007-08-09T00:27:00.000-07:00

I was suggested by Nikhil to test Zoundry as a Blogging Software and I am posting this post using Zoundry. I am yet to explore the functionalitty of this piece of software. Any comments on this will be much appreciated.

Technorati : Blogger, Zoundry

Cool Web 2.0 Template

2007-08-08T12:07:00.001-07:00

I've just finished installing the Neo Template on my blog and it looks awesome. I'll need some feed back though. Please keep commenting.

Never shop at indiaplaza.in

2007-08-03T00:19:00.001-07:00

If you are wondering why am I writing this post; the reason is because I faced the consequence of trying to shop online with a pathetic online store called as indiaplaza.in. Let me tell you the whole story. I was working for Google Hyderabad, before I moved to Gurgaon for my PhD. I got some gift voucher from my team at Google as a reward for achieving some milestone. The gift vouchers were to be redeemed at indiaplaza.in. I had Rs. 7500/- worth of gift voucher. And I wanted to buy a home theater worth Rs 12499.

I redeemed my gift voucher of Rs 7500 and the rest Rs 4999 I chose to pay through cheque. Now as I checked out I saw that they'll ship me my stuff once they'll receive the cheque and will be able to en-cash it. I realized this could take more than 20 days for my stuff to reach me (including the 10 days of shipment time indiaplaza talks about). So I chose to cancel the order and use my debit card instead. Now comes the funny part. I canceled the order and now I cannot redeem my gift vouchers as it says I've zero balance to redeem the amount. I called up their customer care at my expense and I get the wonderful news that they are going to take 4 days for revoking the redeemable amount. Are we talking about information age and internet shopping. This whole shit defeats the purpose of online shopping.

Another irony of all this sad experience is that I wrote them (customerservice@indiaplaza.in, info@indiaplaza.in) a mail yesterday evening and I am yet to hear from them. Following is the copy of the mail I sent them:

I just talked to your customer care, on my bloody expense of making a phone call (because ideally, it should be a toll free number). I was told by your customer care executive that it will take 4 freaking days to make my gift vouchers redeemable again. Are we talking about online shopping? What kind of a pathetic company you guys run. I canceled my order 010820070431 because I wanted to use my debit card so that I can avoid the delay of you receiving my cheque and can have my order shipped instantaneously.

I am sorry to say but this bullshit of taking 4 days defeats the purpose of having an online shopping company like yours and me doing online shopping with a company like yours. I am very disappointed by this and might not think of shopping with you guys. I am going to also ask my company Google India to stop buying gift coupons from you because others from my company will face a similar problem like this. I am going to mark this mail to the person in Google responsible for buying gift coupons for our company. I am going to blog about the pathetic service on my blog and you can see the story in couple of hours at

http://bloggingtheweb.blogspot.com

Thank you very much for the excellent online shopping experience that you are providing.

A really angry customer,
Vivek

I am waiting to hear from some moron sitting there and reading mails, if they are not busy licking somebody's a**.

Ipod Projector..

2007-07-27T02:54:00.001-07:00

Get ready to be rattled by the new Nano Projection technology.Explay is a technology company that develops the world's smallest projector. The company's product is a projector engine which is small enough to fit inside a mobile device or housed in a separate pocket size accessory unit that is connected to a mobile device (e.g. cellular phone, digital camera, Personal Media Player, etc.).

This is the company that is going to bring the power the of Nano-Technology on to your Ipod, mobile phones or anything that is small enough to fit your pocket and is an electronic device. So next time you have a beautiful movies (pirated) on you mobile device or Ipod you know the best way to watch it and impress someone special.

Wireless USBs

2007-07-26T01:55:00.001-07:00

Are we looking at another device that's making itself less tedious by going wireless. Yes! it's the time for USBs to go wireless. D-link is going to launch it's wireless USB device. Everything that connects to your computer using USB will be wireless in near future. However, you'll just have to connect the wireless USB Adapter to your PC and bang every device that uses USB goes wireless.

The DUB-9240 Wireless USB Kit is expected to ship in Q4 and will cost around $200. Pricing for the DUB-2240 Wireless hub and DUB-1210 wireless adapter will be around $100 each.

Another dashing idea ! - Paid Comments

2007-07-25T10:49:00.001-07:00

I was running through a couple of blogs and was hit to this post which I never thought would be possible. Marketers; yes I mean the SEMs (Search Engine Marketers) have reached a point where they'll do everything to get the inlinks from other sites, even if they are ignorant about the fact that most of the free hosts today are having nofollow on their comments sections. Ladies and Gentlemen bow down to the concept of paid comments. I am not citing the site here for the fact I am not the big advocate of paid posts and this guy (the blog where I read about paid comments) is into paid posting.

I don't have something personal about this guy but I don't like the fact that web journalism is getting poisoned by this activity, even if they disclose that they are into paid posts or advertorials. I am not getting into the details of whether paid comments are ethical or not. May be they are good marketing weapon (at least for the SEMs who suffer from the myopia) but the very fact that they are driven by the sense to make money and forced commenting behaviour takes away the essense of web journalism/blogs.

Chicken Foot

2007-07-25T08:15:00.001-07:00

No!, it is not a delicious delicacy as part of chicken. This is a Firefox extension. Chickenfoot is Firefox extension that puts a programming environment in the browser's sidebar so you can write scripts to manipulate web pages and automate web browsing. In Chickenfoot, scripts are written in a superset of Javascript that includes special functions specific to web tasks.

This is too useful for people who want to execute something on a page. It's more or less like the popular greasemonkey extension but it has a different flavor as it differs in the way you can execute a piece of code as you are coding on a given page. It has libraries you can import and get a functionality flawlessly.

I am giving an example of a script which I use to bypass the firewall that blocks sites (false +ve in too many cases) on my LAN. I just have to run that trigger on the page and the links on that page go via a proxy that is thankfully not blocked .

Here's the code:

include('prototype.js');
var links = $$('a');
for(var
i=0;i<links.length;i++) {
var src = links[i].href;
src =
src.replace("http://","http/");
links[i].setAttribute("href", "http://www.xoxy.com/cgiproxy/nph-proxy.pl/010110A/"
+ src);
}

Let me know, if someone needs to know how to configure this in their chickenfoot editor.

Get Im-ified.

2007-07-18T12:19:00.001-07:00

Although this is an old story and quite an old product launch, the technology is worth keeping an eye on. I am talking about a new IM based reminder service named imified. Did I just say reminder service ! Apologize me for giving a narrow scope for the product that might just be the next revolutionizing technology.

Let me talk a little more about it. But before that let me ask you a question that might sound stupid and give an impression of my high levels of ignorance which might be a bliss in my case. How many of you use Instant Messengers? If you think that's stupid enough, let me ask you another question. How many of you use AIM, MSN and Gtalk/Jabber? No points for guessing and this time I'll feel offended if you'll question me, "what the hell is wrong with you moron; why are you not naming the king of all IMs Yahoo?" I have a reason to not mention yahoo messenger here. So if you guys use IMs other than Yahoo as mention above please continue reading. For the people who cannot think beyond Yahoo Messenger, I am afraid you'll have to stop reading as this post will not bring any sort of enlightenment to you. Because Yahoo! doesn't support Imified.

Imified is a new concept and who else will be better able to define it than the site itself which says, "IMified is an instant messenger buddy that works across all major IM
networks and offers access to a growing number of web applications, as
well as productivity tools like notes, reminders, and todo's. Imified
helps you get things done faster."

I'd suggest all you nerdies to check out the developers section because Imified has come out with it's own API and you can develop your own widgets for Imified.

The world of Widgets..

2007-07-17T02:57:00.001-07:00

With the advancement of Web 2.0 the way a site's interface is designed has taken a new dimension. I came across a beautiful web 2.0 site named widgetbox. The site has amazing widget for blogger, typepad, mysapce and others. They are driven by the power of social network and user generated content.

The Widgetbox Remote Gallery feature enables users to embed a selected number of widgets from third party developers and provide over 10,000 widgets from the Widgetbox main gallery, giving their users the ability to easily find and use widgets.

So if you are looking for some really cool gadgets to make your site look smart widgetbox.com is the place to visit.