Techkeyla: 2008 May

IMAP vs POP. And the winner is GMail

Posted on: 28-05-2008

Category : google

IMAP

GMail has been on a roll with its continuous enhancements and additions to its ever-existent good value. Sounds like I’m selling it to you and Google is paying me to do it. LOL. No. GMail IS the preferred free mail service of the geeks (which means pretty much the world of internet for me). Frankly, I hardly see anyone using the annoying, heavier,taking-more-time-to-load and the graphically extravagant Yahoos and Live inboxes. And then, when you think that GOOG has done it all, they come up with IMAP integration. Unlike the normal notion, it has NOTHING to do with Apple and the I in IMAP is in CAPITAL LETTERS. Right, so we did have POP before for GMail integration with your mobile mail accessing device ( smart phones, PDAs, Blackberry et al, oh yeah I wouldn’t forget the iPhone with the small ‘i’). But what was annoying there was that, the read mails in your device/Mail Client didn’t reflect in the actual inbox when you access it from your laptop/workstation (another politically correct statement-which spans across PC-typically Windows users, Linux users and Mac users). Not anymore.

Enter IMAP. The two way communication path. In the words of Sze-jun Tsai from the GMail Blog ;

A two-way communication path (IMAP). Unlike with POP, your devices talk back to our servers and sync your changes automatically with IMAP. When you sign in to your Gmail account in a web browser, actions you’ve taken on your email client or mobile device (like putting a message in a ‘work’ folder) will also appear in Gmail (your message will already have a ‘work’ label on it). This all happens automatically once you set up IMAP, so you don’t have to read or sort all your mail twice. This is really helpful when accessing Gmail from multiple devices.

Now, besides the obvious advantage of synchronising the usage of GMail across your portable device and your not-so portable device, there are some more added features. Like, the ability to use filters and Labels, and yes, the changes are synchronised over all accessible points of GMail. That means, if you create a label name in your Thunderbird, it would be visible on your Inbox on your laptop, as well as your Blackberry/iPhone-saving you irritation and time.

Setting up IMAP is as easy as 1, 2,3..Follow the simple steps below.
1.Sign in to GMail, go to Settings, Click Forwarding and POP/IMAP and Enable IMAP.
2.Configure your IMAP client.
3.Save changes.

4th invisible step: Moonwalk with a Happy face. LOL.

Windows Hack: How to hide files in a JPG image

Posted on: 25-05-2008

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Category : how to

Tags: hack, how to, windows

Yes, you read that right. And that is possible. Any type of file, any extension, any number and any size can be secretly embedded in a JPEG image. We’ll show you how. So, how will it be when it is embedded? The image will still exist and will show the properties of the original image file. As in, you’ll be able to view the image as well as view its thumbnail etc. The only difference is in the shell menu , where you’ll be having an extra option to Extract your JPG file which will extract the hidden files in the JPG. Here’s how to do it.

Now, first have your secret files ready. Whatever you want to hide in that one random picture. Select all of them and zip them using a normal archiving software like Winzip, Winrar etc. Once that is done, let’s say the archive file is Secret.rar, and the JPG file is Normal.JPG in which the files are to be hidden. Keep them in a single folder. Now go to the Run prompt (Windows +R) and type cmd to go to the command prompt. Change the directory to go the folder where you have the archive file and the JPG image. (You know how to do that, right?)

So we are here now. Type the following command. Say we are in a folder “2hide” in the C: drive. So the command would be:

C:\2hide> COPY /B <image name> + <archive> <new filename JPG image>

e.g. here it would be, C:\2hide> COPY /B Normal.jpg + Secret.rar newNormal.jpg

And press enter. We are done with the command prompt so type exit to say goodbye. Now you can go ahead and delete the original files, except for the newly formed Image. Right click on it , and you’ll now get the option of extracting it. Extract the image to get the hidden files. Of course, you can go to higher levels of hiding by walking the extra mile of compressing over and over again with different extensions and then adding it to the image. Or even, deleting the initial bytes from the header in a Hex editor. But do remember to save the deleted line in a notepad and save it in a safe place.

So, how was that?

How to Sprout? A step by step guide

Posted on: 25-05-2008

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Category : blogging, how to, web 2.0

Tags: blogging, how to, internet, resources, web 2.0

Sprout is an online content creating tool which enables users to create sophisticated multimedia web content on the fly in a very quick and easy way. It is as easy as probably MS Paint. Just drag and drop. Sprout is for free and the best part is you can just go ahead and create your sprout without signing up for an account. The signing up does come into the picture when you want to save your sprout, publish and manage it. We’ll cover all those steps here in this post. But first, let’s build some demo sprouts and check out how cool they are. Go to the official website here, and click on Get Started. You will get the option of just go ahead and start building your sprout, or sign up for an account. I’ll first create a few sprouts just for the testing purposes.

So, now you’ll be on a page where there are a few templates to choose from. And well, you can choose to start from a blank slate as well. You can preview each template to choose one suitable to your tastes or just go to a blank slate if you experiment with all the options. It is all in flash, so do remember that you would require a Flash plugin to your browser (Flash 9 is recommended on the website). And yes, it supports only IE 7 and above, Firefox 2.0+, Safari 3.x +. Cool, so we have given a title to the project, and it is now at Step -1: Creation of the Project. I have chosen a blank slate and am building a sample sprout for this post titled Techkeyla (surprise!!).First, you can choose a suitable size of the page. The options available are just more than enough and you can choose from standard Youtube video sizes to Adsense head banner sizes to even full pages of 960X800. I have chosen a Youtube video size as I am including it in the post itself. Now you can add some really cool stuff. Right from Google Charts to Videos to Slideshows. And even polls and News Feeds.I’ll add a slideshow and the images that I have used are from my website itself. You can really go nuts with the options that are available, and creating flash based widgets have never been so much fun and easy.

Next up, is step 2: Saving and then Publishing. So, I guess, it’s time to create an account. And now that it is done, I can go ahead and publish my Sprout entitled-Techkeyla . It’s just another flash slideshow, but you all know it is so much more than that. Hope you like the slideshow which is a journey of my past posts in images.

And yes, these Sprouts can be published across many platforms viz. Facebook, Orkut,Bebo, Blogger, MySpace ,you get it. I’m really looking forward to creating some really cool ones . Hope you enjoy sprouting as well.

Links for 2008-05-22

Posted on: 22-05-2008

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Category : links

Tags: links for the day

Dots Don’t Matter in Gmail

Make Outlook open when Windows starts

Digg Owner Kevin Rose at Work

Can Microsoft Be As Cool As Apple?

Links for 2008-05-18

Posted on: 18-05-2008

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Category : links

Tags: links for the day

Why to Use Mozilla Firefox and Download Latest Firefox

Freeware PDF Unlocker 1.0.4

10 Most Beautiful Looking Linux Desktop.

Winrar Password Recovery Tool Released !!

Watch out for Ipod news, views and reviews

Mozilla Firefox 3 RC1 is here

Posted on: 18-05-2008

(1)

Category : firefox

Tags: firefox, intro, open source

Firefox

So it has been a year and a half since the last major release of the favorite browser of many- Firefox. We have gone through the different levels of Beta versions for the last couple of months, and now it has finally arrived. The Release candidate 1. There has already been a lot of buzz going on about the many improvements in this version, and here we are discussing them.

Mozilla’s implementation of JavaScript in the new version is claimed to be twice as faster compared to its predecessor. Now, we all know the magnitude of the usage of JavaScript in web content today. And in a way, that is why it makes Firefox WORK. And yes, they have introduced a Memory Cycle Collector (more on that here), which frees memory which is no more used by any modules. For example, if Firefox is kept open and idle for hours, it would no longer suck unnecessary memory- resulting in more Support from us Fanbois. Yayy!! Oh, and yes, PGO-Profile Guided Optimisations -available only for Windows at the moment, designed for significant upgrading of performance.

The Auto Complete Address Bar is way too cool. And guess what, it ain’t limited to just popular web-addresses, but also to Favorites, History and Tags. And now to the most important addition feature- PLACES.

Places is a Bookmark and History Manager. For people like us, who have cluttered Bookmark Bars and Bookmarks scattered everywhere, this is our Kryptonite. It is powered by SQL Lite, (which is also Open Source, and is a lightweight search engine with robust querying capabilities). It is where you can search your History, Tags and Bookmarks and yes, even search a particular Search as Smart Search. And in case you are wondering what Tag am I talking about for so long, Tagging is a new feature on Firefox 3. Much like what we do with blog posts , or Delicious or StumbleUpon, here we do it on our browser.

And yes, apart from all of the above mentioned points, it has got a new UI suited for your OS, an Addon Manager, a more secure Anti-Forgery Site Blocker.Phew. But yes, it has its share of bugs, and they are here in this link of the release notes. Apart from that, you’d like to read the following posts as well.

Full review of Firefox RC1.

Ostatic: A guided tour of Firefox RC1

Gmail Gets BOOSTED

Posted on: 14-05-2008

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Category : google

Tags: gmail, google

Our older friendly GMail gave us a new user mail experience compared to the other services that were available. Firstly, it concentrated on one important point and that was- Mail. Inbox is all about how simple and fast we can load the inbox and get to our mails. Not some fancy graphic flashing on the top or some widget loading on and on and on. But with the new version of GMail, we have been encountering certain problems. For example, in sending attachments, or open large mails, or mails with image links etc. We have all seen the irritating message ” This is taking longer than usual”. I even faced other problems like my Chat becoming disabled all of a sudden, or the other error message ” System encountered an error”.

The New GMail Blog post assures GMail users to not face the above mentioned problems anymore and even feel an enhanced user experience. According to the post by Wiltse Carpenter, GMail’s load time has seen a 20% reduction compared to when they started the service. Hmm, hard to believe. But I would like to. Anyway, the technical details of how the reduction of performance time has been implemented is given on the blog. Although, I would like to include an excerpt of it.

We spent hours poring over these traces to see exactly what was happening between the browser and Gmail during the sign-in sequence, and we found that there were between fourteen and twenty-four HTTP requests required to load an inbox and display it. To put these numbers in perspective, a popular network news site’s home page required about a 180 requests to fully load when I checked it yesterday. But when we examined our requests, we realized that we could do better. We decided to attack the problem from several directions at once: reduce the number of overall requests, make more of the requests cacheable by the browser, and reduce the overhead of each request.

So did they finally achieve it? Find out on the blog.