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karthiik 4:04 pm on November 4, 2006 | 0 | # |

Fellas, have you noticed the Romeo Chat at the bottom of this page? Meebo is a web 2.0 app. It lets you sign into your IM’s from a web page without the IM client installed! Plus, if you are signed on to Meebo, and you are visiting Chennai Romeos, you can chat with other meebo users who are reading our site!!

How cool is that??? So after you sign-up, next time you are here surfing around.. make sure you login to Meebo and maybe we can chat a little!

Also, Ravi. S asked a while back about how to keep track of what’s going on in this site. Some of the recent comments do appear in the side bar. If you are looking for comprehensive info on what’s been going on over the last month, get into the Dashboard and now WordPress has a neat way of displaying current activity!! I just love it…
karthiik 3:05 pm on November 4, 2006 | 7 | # |

If you are like me and try to keep track of your task lists at work and at home and on the quest for keeping things organized.. look no further! I think I have found the holy grail!!

Everyone has heard about Wikipedia and there wiki’s popping up everywhere. From this was born TiddlyWiki. From Wikipedia,

TiddlyWiki is a single self-contained HTML file that includes CSS and JavaScript code. When the user downloads it to their PC, TiddlyWiki can save the entered information by overwriting itself on the user’s disk, at the user’s request.

It is a non-linear way of storing information. The great thing about it is it’s portability. Because it’s all in a single html file, you can email it to yourself or store it in a USB flash drive or put it up in a web server and you can access it anywhere!!

Now you know what TiddlyWiki is. let’s move on to a another method for an organized nirvana called Getting Things Done by David Allen. Again from the Wikipedia,

GTD rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of their mind and get them recorded somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate fully on actually performing those tasks.

I came across an application which was a marriage between TiddlyWiki and GTD naturally named GTD TiddlyWiki on Lifehacker. That article has some nice instructions on how to get started with this. This was really nice but after reading the comments in that article I came across another variant called the Monkey GTD.

GTD TW was nice but lacked a way to organize tasks into Contexts/Projects and checking them off as I got done with them. Monkey GTD has a snazzy Dashboard with checkboxes for tasks which you can check off as you finish them. It was not very intuitive to start with.. but after playing with it for a couple of days, I am addcited to it now!!

I started using the MonkeyGTD and shuttling them between work and home through mailing it to my Gmail account. But, soon it seemed like a lot of work. Now, I had to remember to email myself at the end of the day and again email myself from home before I leave to work! There’s got be an elegant solution. How about hosting it on a web server and accessing it anywhere? Voila.. a great innovative idea right? I felt like Archimedes.. Not!

TiddlySpot has already done it and they offer various flavors of TiddlyWiki including MonkeyGTD. And for FREE.. yep free as in beer! And the registration can’t eb any easier.. it takes 10 secs to get your own site. You can make it public or private!

If anyone is interested in learning how to get started with MonkeyGTD, please leave a comment and I will follow up with a post on how to use it! I am not claiming to be an expert but I can share my experiences..

Get organized now!!
karthiik 11:57 pm on October 24, 2006 | 0 | # |

A lot of discussion is going on in the nether world about the browser war!! IE 7 has been available for download for a few days now. And Firefox 2.0 has just been released into the wild!!

Actually, I read about a mistake by the Mozilla foundation by mistakenly making the new download page public a couple of days back!!

Anyways, go ahead and enjoy all the goodness that Firefox 2.0 has to offer. All I can say is that they have taken something good and turned it to even better!!

I will write about what I think about the new version shortly! Stay tuned..
karthiik 5:29 pm on October 10, 2006 | 2 | # |

Now, you can call about 50 countries from the US for free with Future Phone. Here is the low-down.. you call a long-distance number in Iowa and just enter the country code and international number.

It sucks that they don’t have India in the list yet.. but if you have friends in any of the other 50 countries this is a sweet deal! If they did, I can see 2 things happening. One, lot of Indians here getting richer by saving money on those millions of phone cards that we buy . Two, Future Phone is bound to go bankrupt!

Anyways, do you guys know Shyam’s number? I think it is time to call Germany! ;-p
karthiik 12:08 pm on October 10, 2006 | 0 | # |

I just came across this cool extension and it just made Firefox all the more loveable!! Of course it is going to make my list iof favorite Firefox extensions.
You have seen the news ticker streaming across the bottom of your tv screen, right? Now, you can have your own news ticker in Firefox with this extension!

It is totally customizable. You can have all your RSS feeds or just the ones you want to scroll in the bottom of your browser!!
karthiik 9:34 pm on October 4, 2006 | 2 | # |

You are probably using RSS feeds (livemarks) with your firefox browser! If you aren’t check out the Wikipedia link. In short, it facilitates checking updates to a website without ever going to the website.

I have a long list of feeds that I subscribe to and in the habit of catching up with them every week. I started using RSS feed in my browser and soon enough I have like 10 folders with almost 60 sites that I subscribe to. No, I don’t waste time on the internet, atleast not all the time. The sites I subscribe to vary from news, linux, oracle, java and tech related sites.

When I am at work, I use Akregator in my linux desktop to read my feeds. It is a KDE based RSS reader that supports exporting and importing feeds from Firefox in OPML format. I am still looking for a better reader for linux and open for suggestions..

But, whenever I was away from home or work, I was missing these links that I always had. There were online bookmarking sites that were available and I had tried a few of them. In fact, Google which never ceases to amaze me, had an online rss reader called Google Reader but I wasn’t impressed. Because, it didn’t have any way of organizing your feeds. But, they have seriously overhauled Google Reader and boy I gotta say Google has come through again and I just love it!

It supports folders now and I can even share exciting stuff I come across with just a URL! And, to demonstrate its ability I have created a link in our Blogroll to a page named ‘Sweet Deals’. I am going to share the cool deals I come across on the Internet I would like the Chennai Romeos to pitch in to suggest how we can use this feature! Let run your imagination wild.. but before that try Google Reader for yourself!
karthiik 5:41 pm on September 25, 2006 | 1 | # |
Did I get anyone to try firefox yet if you already haven’t? If you have installed it and played with it, here is a list of must-have extensions that will make you love it even more. I already mentioned a couple of these in my last post.
- Adblock: Obviously it blocks those pesky popup ads.
- Adblock Filterset.G Updater: Provides you with a pre-installed and updated list of sites to block.
- Mouse Gestures: This changes the way you browse. No more clicking the back, forward, refesh buttons. You just right click and move to the left to go back; move to the right to go forward; you get the idea, right? It’s sweet.
- Fasterfox: Supposed to provide performance tweaks.
- IE Tab: For sites that don’t render well in Firefox, you can view the site in IE right within Firefox just with a click of this button. Yes, you don’t have to ever open IE again, well atleast not in its own window.
- Update Notifier: Has nice icons to show you if your extensions/themes have newer versions available.
- Tab Mix Plus: Provides more confgurations for your tabbed browsing.
- Restart Firefox: Easy one-click restart. Very handy.
- FEBE/CLEO: You can backup and restore everything in your firefox with this extension combo. I use this to make my browsers at work, home look alike and have the same extensions installed!
I like the following extensions as well..
- PDF download: Gives you nice option to open any links to a pdf document to open separately in Adobe or inside firefox or as a web page.
- Image Zoom: Lets you zoom any image in a web page with a right-click and scroll button in your mouse!
- Colorful tabs: Helps the tabs stand-out if you are like me and have 20 tabs open at the same time!
- Back to Top: Go to the bottom or top of the page with one click.
- Gmail Manager: Like it says in the name..
- Dictionary tooltip: For those forgotten GRE words!!
- Feedview: Makes your RSS feeds look nicer.
- OPML Support: If you use linux or other feed readers, OPML\nis a bettr supported format and you can export/import your rss feeds in\nthat format.
Special mention:
- Stumble Upon: This is an awesome way to kill time on the internet! This extension lets you specify categories of web sites you like. Then it lets you ’stumble upon’ web sites in those categories rated top by other uesrs. I have across some really cool sites through this that I have never come across by googling!!
If you are into web development.. these extensions are great to have:
- Web Developer: Provides a lot of tools helpful in development.
- Tamper Data: View/modify HTTP headers, etc. It also acts like IE Watcher and you can view the http traffic from your browser.
- View Source Chart: Creates a nice colored chart of your rendered source.
- X-ray: You can see the tags in the source code without leaving the page.
- Colorzilla: No more guessing what colors you are looking at in a page. Use this extension to point at a color in the page and get the hex codes or the opposite.
If you have any extension that you would like me to add to this list, just drop a line in the comments. Also, I will update this page as I find extensions that make the cut to get into this list!! So, bookmark this post if you want!
karthiik 10:20 pm on September 22, 2006 | 1 | # |
I am a big fan of firefox and I have been trying to get everyone I know to use it (yes Kanna, you!).

It is free and open source! You can customize it to your heart’s content.. here are some of the things I love about it!
- Tabbed browsing: This was the killer feature that made me switch from IE before I realized its full power!
- Extensions: There are millions of them or atleast thousands of them and I will talk about my favorites soon. I check my gmail, local weather, current chennai time, etc right from my browser thanks to extensions.
- Themes: I change the way Firefox looks depending on my mood! Right now, I am using SphereGnome.
- Block Popups: Newer IE does this as well but wait till you see what a couple of extensions can do! With Adblock and Adblock Filterset.G Updater , you automatically get a huge list of websites to be blocked. Think about this.. your other option is to block sites with bad popups manually as you encounter them than to have it done for you with up-to-date data!!
- Livemarks: This is a way to keep track of websites, blogs you like without having to go to the site! I will talk about RSS and similar stuff in a future post.
Go ahead download and try Firefox! I guarantee you that you will love it, if you surf the web a lot like I do.. or I will give you you money back. Oh wait, it is free! ;-p

Still not convinced? Check out Top Ten Reasons to Switch to Firefox.
karthiik 4:37 pm on September 22, 2006 | 4 | # |
Wow is all I can say when I look around the web. There is so much hapenning at a blindingly fast pace and there is only so much time one can spend on the web following them!

The thing that strikes me as the coolest is how varied are the ways to disseminate information and connect to other people in the web! If you have heard about digg, slashdot, flickr, myspace, etc. you know what I am talking about. If you can’t wait to find out what they are, just google (it’s a transitive verb now) them or for the un-initiated, don’t worry, I’m going to bore you to death talking about them in the coming weeks!

How about we talk about some of the some-new, some-not-so-new, some-you-better-know-this-by-now stuff?

Here are some of the things that cross my mind that we can talk about here..
- Mozilla Firefox/Opera – IE isn’t everything
- RSS – I love the way you read!
- Social networking – Feel the need to connect to people?
- Web 2.0
- AJAX – Techie talk
- Google Galore
- Web sites to stay informed
- Personal PC – Stop paying for that anti-virus and everything else!
- Blogging! – Who cares if we did it or not?
- Firefox extensions – the best of the best!!
I’m a firefox fan and you will know why in my next post!

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karthiik 4:04 pm on November 4, 2006 | 0 | # |

karthiik 3:05 pm on November 4, 2006 | 7 | # |

karthiik 11:57 pm on October 24, 2006 | 0 | # |

karthiik 5:29 pm on October 10, 2006 | 2 | # |

karthiik 12:08 pm on October 10, 2006 | 0 | # |

karthiik 9:34 pm on October 4, 2006 | 2 | # |

karthiik 5:41 pm on September 25, 2006 | 1 | # |

karthiik 10:20 pm on September 22, 2006 | 1 | # |

karthiik 4:37 pm on September 22, 2006 | 4 | # |

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