Satish | Technotip.org

Free Microsoft Software for Students

Microsoft DreamSpark Student Program, gives free software to college and high school students worldwide, and has now expanded to India. Bill Gates was in India and among other initiatives, he launched the DreamSpark program for all technical students in India.

If you are a student(anywhere in the world) then just go ahead and check www.dreamspark.com whether your country is listed or not. If listed:
Sign In using your Windows Live ID. Get verified as a student. The system is linked to schools and organizations around the world that can confirm student status. Simply choose your country and organization, enter your info and hit submit. Download your products. Some files are quite large, so make sure you have the bandwidth and enough space to bring them to your machine.
It supports the latest versions of both Internet Explorer and Firefox for your download.
Microsoft-free-software
Other Free Tools:
Microsoft-free-tools
If you are in India, you can download it online or else visit the Microsoft program partners like NIIT, Aptech and Hughes Net Fusion Centers – Simply show your college identity card and collect your free DVD containing the Microsoft software package.

Eligibility(To get the software for FREE):
Undergraduates or graduate students with their college ID card, are eligible to receive free software.
*They will expanded this exclusive offer to high school students(of India) by early 2009.

This program is active in many other countries. Checkout dreamspark.com, to know whether this offer is available in your country or not. If this offer is not available in your country, then wait till Bill Gates comes to your country! or just send a request to include this offer to your country students, hope Microsoft will here it.

[ Don’t be surprised, if someone(refuse to give you the Free Microsoft software DVD) at the Microsoft program partners like NIIT, Aptech and Hughes Net Fusion Centers do not know about this offer by Microsoft! Just bring them to this article and show them all the websites link we have given in this article. ]

Use Notepad(.bat) to Shutdown your PC(Windows Only)

Today we shall see some tricks to shutdown your computer by clicking on a file that you will be creating, using notepad or any other text editor.

Open a notepad. Save it as ILOVEU.bat (any name with file extension .bat), now copy and paste below codes into the notepad and save it again..

@echo off
c:
cls
echo hey wana be friends?
pause
echo did u say no???????????
pause
echo u r hacked
echo Type some message!
shutdown -s -t 30 -c “f*ck off”

As soon as someone clicks on this .bat file, these below popup’s will be displayed..

dos-prompt-program
shut-down-bat

Other options that you can use along with the shutdown command are :
To shutdown computer -> “shutdown -s”
To restart computer -> “shutdown -r”
To logoff computer -> “shutdown -l”
To halt a restart/shutdown –> “shutdown -a”
You can use all these commands directly in DOS prompt or in a script.

You can add some more features to this notepad by reading the help topics in your dos prompt.

Just type help after you enter the dos prompt ( C:\>help ).

Not recommended:
If you remove the pause statement from above code and put this file in the startup( C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup or C:\Documents and Settings\current user\Start Menu\Programs\Startup ) folder, then your computer will shutdown(automatically) when this file loads at startup.

This article is written to teach you the method to troubleshoot your computer yourself, if someone uses this technique and creates problem in your computer.

Solution:-
Just enter into the dos mode(pre-boot mode, using any bootable disks), and search for any file with .bat extension in Startup folder. And if found, just delete it and restart your computer and it will work normally 🙂

These type of files are being sent by some anonymous people in IMs and also as attachments in emails. This could create some irritating problem and you may loose some data on your computer that you have not saved. So be careful when you get a file with .bat file extension. Better not to click on it.

Keyboard Shortcuts: In WordPress 2.7 and In Future Versions

Sadly WordPress 2.7 will not be released on Nov 10th, as per the schedule. But the first public beta of WordPress 2.7 is already ready for downloading and testing. Join the thousands of people already testing 2.7 by downloading 2.7 Beta 1. As previously mentioned on this blog, wp-2.7 is bringing a new visual design. This design is almost completely implemented, but there are still a few areas that aren’t quite finished in Beta 1.

If you are using the wp-2.7 Beta 1 you can enable the keyboard short cuts( and the same procedure apply for the final release software ) by visiting the Profile panel in Administration > Users > Your Profile. Check the Keyboard Shortcuts checkbox to enable keyboard shortcuts for comment moderation.

letter j key, or letter k key, to start navigating.

After that,

Pressing j moves the current selection (light-blue background) down.
Pressing k moves the current selection (light-blue background) up.
Pressing a approves the currently selected comment.
Pressing s marks the current comment as spam.
Pressing d deletes the current comment.
Pressing u unapproves the currently selected comment, placing it back into moderation.
Pressing r initiates an inline reply to the current comment (you can press Esc to cancel the reply).
Pressing q activates “Quick Edit” which allows for rapid inline editing of the current comment.

Source : Wp-Codex

These shortcuts will be really a boon for those getting high comments or spams 🙂 on their blog.

Keyboard shortcuts make the work finish faster and saves a lot of time.

Add colourful wordings, videos, smilies, links to your Orkut profile and scraps

I have been getting many emails from my readers (who read my about me section in Orkut) about how to write colorful letters in orkut profile and scarps?
We had thought that this is a small thing that almost everybody using orkut will be knowing. But to our surprise many people wanted to know about it, so here we go:-

Scraps to friends
Now, you can paste in photos, videos, audio, and flash widgets in scraps to your friends. Here’s how:
Add images

Copy and paste urls ending in .jpg, .gif, .png or .bmp and the image will appear in the scrap.
for example, http://example.com/example.jpg
Add videos from YouTube:
Copy and paste the url and the video will appear in the scrap.
for example, http://youtube.com/watch?v=videoid
Add podcast/audio:
Copy and paste the url of an audio file and an audio player will appear in the scrap.
for example, http://example.com/example.mp3
Add html-embeddable objects:
Create or upload your content at sites such as photobucket.com, imageshack.com, rockyou.com or slide.com. Copy and paste the html embed code to share it with your friends.

Scraps to everyone(See below image for the symbols)

To change the font color of your text, type the name of the color you wish to use in brackets.

Ex:- [ColorName]Your text that you want to see in red color[/ColorName]
[red]Text will appear in Red, in Orktu[/red]

To show an emoticon, type the key shown above for each emoticon in brackets.
To make text bold, italic, or underlined, use [b], [i] and [u] accordingly.
To make a word a link, use [link]…[/link]

I am [red]feeling[/red] [b][i]lucky[/i][/b] ! [:)] –> I am feeling lucky !
[link=http://www.orkut.com]orkut[/link] –> orkut [http://www.orkut.com]
[link]http://www.orkut.com[/link] –> http://www.orkut.com
Source:- Orkut

These are some of the basic things to make your scraps and about me section of Orkut colorful and attractive. And if you like any thing in someothers scarp book or about me section and you have no idea of how to do it, then you can just select the whole thing, drag and drop into your scrap book[Not recommended. Do something creative yourself]

Traffic Strategies PART 4: Promote stories which link to you

Digg, stumble, (share/Vote) those stories on the web which link to your blog homepage or to any of your articles. Vote for it, if its really interesting. If its just a bulk link back to many sites, then you will be hurting your reputation by voting or sharing such stories, as it will not be an interesting thing for others to read(in social book marking sites).
Following this strategy, you get traffic indirectly to your blog. Atleast people will read your blog title or URL in the article you Digg or stumble or Buzz! or to whatever site you submit the story. This brings their attention towards your website URL or its name, the next time when they see your blog title/name or URL(which seems to be familiar to them).

And its also good for your Digg, Stumble, Buzz etc profiles, if you submit stories from different URLs.. As all these networking sites have some tracking systems to track the self promotion and they may even ban or suspend(temporarily or even permanently) your blog URL(and not just your profile!) for submitting all the stories from your own blog.

Following this strategy would increase the (referral visitors) visitors trust level as someone is linking to you, and there is every chance of them becoming your loyal readers, if they like your blog for some reasons.

This strategy is not a “get heavy traffic over night” trick. This will bring in some quality readers to your blog over time.

This is one of the strategies that has worked so well on our blog. And be cautious while submitting stores that link to your blog. See that you don’t over do it and/or only submit stories when someone links to you. This will surly annoy your followers in social book marking sites as well, and you may endup with no followers.

Be smart, use this strategy once in a while and be active in all sites where you share/promote good stories on the web.

Happy spammers-Orkut allows Export contacts in CSV format

Spammers job is to keep collecting email address of active internet users until they get a deal(spamming), so that they can mint some money from those spam mails.

I know a guy in India, who asked me 75$ and he could send my blog link to 5 lakh people in one day. And he was very good at convincing. He told that I would get back my money from the one day of campaign with him(spamming).
But guys, I don’t like spammers. And I hate when someone interferes in my privacy without my permission, so how could I interfere in someone else privacy!

One sad part is, these spammers are very intelligent. They know all sorts of things from where they can get the email ID’s of active internet users.

Now anyone can get large number of active email ID’s from Orkut!
Log in to orkut, then click ‘Friends’ along the top navigation. Next, click ‘Download your contacts’ on the bottom of the page to save your contacts as a CSV file.

In Orkut, its not so difficult to add 1000 friends(which is the limitation presently, but we hope Orkut will soon remove this limitation too) by creating a fake account(in the name of a girl and with a sexi pic in the profile). After creating some 10 accounts you can keep checking these accounts and just accept the friend request you get. There are applications which will help you to accept all the friend requests in one click. So by a month are so, you will be acquiring 1000 contacts in each of the profiles i.e., 10 x 1000 = 10000 / month. Now just goto ‘Friends’ link in the top navigation. Next, click ‘Download your contacts’ on the bottom of the page to save your contacts as a CSV file. SO you will have 10000 active email contacts per month.

Now the “Big G’s” “Orkut” is a hot place for spammers to get the email ID’s of the most active internet users. Because, people who are using social networking sites are mostly addicted to that social networking site and they check it almost every day like a daily ritual.

To prevent spammers from getting your email ID for some extent:
Don’t accept/send friend request of/to those who put fake sexi pics in their profiles(to attract others).
And observe their activities before sending/accepting request.

I have been getting lot of spams to one of my ID and the others had just 2 or 4 spams. So I wondered why only one ID is getting full of spam mails?
So we did a bit of research and found that, the same spam messages where present in many peoples orkut scrap books, and finally we could get to know the source of spam and discovered that the guy who spammed us, got our ID from Orkut.

And I am sure, Orkut is one of the main place where these spammers collected huge number of active email ID’s.
So be careful the next time you send/receive a friend request in Orkut or any other social networking sites.

Orkut adds a Family Friendly Feature – “Safety Filter”

Social networking site is a place where we can connect with people and have a good, healthy relationship with. If these sites become like porn sites, then where is the meaning for social networking ?

Its good that Google has come forward to implement this feature in its famous social networking site Orkut.

Google is changing things in Orkut so fast and its improving almost day by day. And We can say that Orkut would surly be a tough competitor for Top 1 place in social networking sites, in the coming days.

This “SAFETY FILTER” feature is automatically turned on in all profiles and you can turn it off anytime by going to “settings”. You turn it off or on, orkut’s tough policies against explicit content will still be in place.

The new “Safety Filter” automatically screens for content that may not violate Orkut Community Standards. With the “Safety Filter” on, whenever you come across a page with photos or text that you might be bothered by (such as sexually suggestive phrases or images) , you’ll receive a warning and the mature content will be replaced by special icons. No filter is 100% accurate, so if you see a page that you think should be blocked, just flag it as always and let the Orkut team know about it.

Orkut has been criticized and even sued in courts of India, not so much for sexually explicit content, but for political content, including communities on the site that criticize the country or some of its politicians.

The filter in Orkut is however oriented to filtering out sexual content and not political content. Filtering political content is far more difficult as there is always a gray area as to when the filter would come in the way of freedom of speech, – said Rahul Kulkarni, product manager at Google India, on Thursday.

Feature Rich Google Analytics Gets Richer By Integrating Adsense ($)

Google has heard the voice of all people who wanted the Adsense and Analytics integration, and finally integrated them, as most of us had guessed.

Google is gradually rolling out this functionality to publishers, and you’ll see an invitation link at the top of your ‘Overview’ and ‘Advanced Reports’ pages when it’s been enabled for your account.

click above image to enlarge
And Google is also rolling out some advance features to its analytics:

click above image to enlarge

With this integration, we can get huge benefits:
Actually, we need to find more use of these feature rich resource using our creativity.

Discover untapped markets. Use the geographies report to determine which regions are under-represented in your site’s user base. Optimize your site’s content to attract more of these under-represented users.
Drive high-earning traffic to your site. Use the ‘Referring sites’ report to determine where the users who are making you the most money are coming from. Focus your efforts on getting traffic from these sources.
Delve deeper into AdSense reports. Use the visualization feature to look at trends in your site’s AdSense performance over time, or by time of day.

Some advance features available is Google-Analytics also include:

Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reports, a data export API (private beta), integrated reporting for AdSense publishers (private beta), multi-dimensional data visualizations called “Motion Charts,” and an updated user and administrative interface.

Integrated Reporting with AdSense:

click above image to enlarge
Learn how to link your AdSense account with a Google Analytics account, and for a glimpse at the new reports, take a look at this video:

If this feature is not yet active in your account then be patent, Google is busy rolling out this feature to all of us.

Our myths:-[ Hope this was a pure coincidence. Don’t take this myth seriously, I just wanted to share the coincidence incident with you people 🙂 ]
Put your analytics code to your blog/website where you have put your adsense ads(after you link your adsense and analytics accounts), and Google will start trusting your blog/site more and your earnings will also increase, as Google can identify[almost all user activity in your blog] valid and invalid clicks on your blog more accurately, easily and faster. [Believe it or not, we could see a sudden raise in our Adsense earnings just 30 minutes after we put analytics codes into our blog. — Might be a coincidence.]
Its like surrendering almost all information of your blog to Google. Now Google Search algorithm will also improve a lot due to Google Adsense and Google Analytics Integration.