What Does 64-Bit Vista Get Me? April 16, 2009

More bits gets you access to more memory. The processor inside your PC communicates with your system memory (RAM) with numeric addressing. Thus the maximum amount of memory a 32-bit processor can address is 232 bytes, or 4 gigabytes. Newer 64-bit processors—not to mention the 64-bit operating systems that run on them—can address 264 bytes of memory, or
17,179,869,184 gigabytes (16 exabytes) of RAM.(17 million gigabytes may sound like a lot of space now, but it won’t be long before you’ll be taking baby pictures with an 8-gigapixel digital camera.)

Windows NT, released in 1993, was Microsoft’s first fully 32-bit operating system. But it took eight years before the platform, which had since evolved into Windows 2000 and then XP, became mainstream. (For those keeping track, Windows 9x doesn’t count because it was a hybrid OS that ran 32-bit applications on a 16-bit DOS foundation, which was one of the reasons it was so unstable.) 64-bit Windows became a reality in XP, but Vista is Microsoft’s first serious attempt to make 64-bit computing mainstream.

But the question is, how mainstream is it?

While 64-bit Vista can run most 32-bit applications without a problem, it’s not compatible with 32-bit hardware drivers or 32-bit utilities like Windows Explorer extensions (e.g., context menu add-ons). This means that you need a native 64-bit driver for every device on your PC. And since 64-bit Vista won’t load unsigned drivers, finding support for all your hardware may be a bit of a challenge, at least presently. Since most Vista installations
are still 32-bit, most manufacturers aren’t bothering to compile, test, and support 64-bit drivers and software.

Quotes on Women April 16, 2009

Life on the planet is born of woman. God made man stronger but not necessarily more intelligent. He gave women intuition and femininity. And, used properly, that combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I’ve ever met. Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult. A woman has the age she deserves. Well behaved women rarely make history. Some leaders are born women. When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.

Here’s all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid. No book has yet been written in praise of a woman who let her husband and children starve or suffer while she invented even the most useful things, or wrote books, or expressed herself in art, or evolved philosophic systems. There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver. Woman is the companion of man, gifted with equal mental capacity.

Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.

Men need rule books. Women want men to intuit what they want. And only about 2% of men can do that, and most of them are not heterosexual. Men have been found to deny woman intellect; they have credited her with instinct, with intuition, with a capacity to correlate cause and effect much as a dog connects its collar with a walk. Intuition is truly a feminine quality, but women should not mistake rash conclusions for this gift. A lady is smarter than a gentleman, maybe; she can sew a fine seam, she can have a baby, she can use her intuition instead of her brain, but she can’t fold a paper in a crowded train. What passes for woman’s intuition is often nothing more than man’s transparency. So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don’t somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?

Why are women … so much more interesting to men than men are to women? ….. In the faces of men and women I see God.

Quality Of Friendship April 5, 2009

True friendship is very hard to find or gain; but once achieved it safeguards us against all unpredictable woes. I am trying to subtly analyze and qualify different types and stages in fostering friendship; and ways of preserving it.

It is love that generates the seed of aspirations and the seedling of desires to seek acquaintances, that sprouts as friendship, grows as relationship, buds as intimacy, flowers as a rightful duty, ripens and yields as long standing traditions. Knowledge, virtues, love, friendship, refinement, sociability, community life, sense of shame, honour, true pride, worthiness and sublimity are all links of the same chain, each supports and shines with others. It is the unity of senses that flower earnest friendships. Personal acquaintances or contacts are not essential basis for true friendship.

Friendship is not only for pleasure and play; its moral duty is more to caution and correct faults. There has to be unison in sentiments among friends, physical proximity or intimacy are not its prerequisites. A smile is not always the mark of friendship, whereas sentiment of mind is the real repository of lasting ties. Like the hands clasping a slipping robe by instinct, true friends hastens to relieve distress. It sits high on firm ground, seeping its roots deep, unmindful of adversities. Boasting the nature of self and relationships only mars the purity and sanctity of true friendships.

Evaluate your friends. Courting friendship without evaluation is a bad risk; redemption is scarce once it is held. Nourish companions only after having evaluated temperament, tradition, defects and strains of kinship therein held. Descent from a family of noble traits, shyness to shame are qualities of friendship worth seeking at any price. Condemning to tears, preventing wrong deeds and dinning in wisdom are eligible traits. The scale to measure the depth and width of friendship is the behavior in situation of crisis. There are no better gains to aim than wriggling out from companionship of fools, to save oneself from shame.

Guard against the association of idiots, pretenders in winning smiles and cunning tricks, the devious, aliens to community and social order, whose antecedents have not been probed properly, who desert in distress, incompatible in character, lacking manners, who befriends for profit, unfaithful, spoilers of harm and those who do not stick to norms.

how to start Google Chrome in Incognito Mode by default April 5, 2009

So, how to start Google Chrome in Incognito Mode by default or in other words create a shortcut for Google Chrome Incognito Mode in the desktop.
>Place a Google Chrome shortcut on the desktop (or any other desired location).
>Rename the shortcut to any convenient name like – Private Chrome.
>Right click on the shortcut and select ‘Properties’.
>On the ‘Target’ field add an –incognito to the end of program path. (Note: Make sure there is a space between the last apostrophe and the dash)
>Your incognito browser is now ready for launch. If you select ‘New Window’ from settings, you will get a normal non-incognito chrome window.

Find that ’someone’ who gives away your email address to spammers. April 5, 2009

When you give your email address to a website, you hope that they don’t sell or trade your address to a bunch of spammers. Well if they do, here is a simple way to see what sites are responsible for what particular piece of email. This requires you have a Gmail account.

If your Gmail login name was username@gmail.com and you went to samplesite.com to fill out a registration form, instead of just entering username@gmail.com as your email, enter it as username+samplesitecom@gmail.com instead.

When Gmail sees a “+” in an email address, it uses all the characters to the left of the plus sign to know who to send it to. In this example it would still send it to username@gmail.com.

Now whats cool is if you search Gmail for username+samplesitecom, you will see all massages that were sent to that email address.

To see who is responsible for sending a specific message click the Show Details link and you will see the complete address.

Readability Bookmarklet April 3, 2009

A helpful little browser bookmarklet from Arc90 strips all but the main text out of any web page and re-formats its layout, size, and margins, creating a newspaper or novel-like page for easier text digestion.

Head to the Readability page linked below, choose your “Style” (newspaper, novel, eBook, or terminal), your text size, and how wide across the page you want the text to spread. Grab and drag the customized bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar, and click it when you come across text that’s smooshed, oddly formatted, or surrounded by stuff you don’t want to see.

When it works, it does just what it says, and the fonts and rendering are quite relaxing. But it doesn’t catch every site’s text—in fact, Lifehacker and most of its Gawker Network siblings just don’t play.

The bookmarklet is free to grab and use.
Readability [Arc90 Lab Experiments]

Lights made from water bottles April 3, 2009

The video examines how a village in Brazil gets cheap lighting with a simple, smart water bottle hack. It’s a pretty inspiring watch, and you can’t help but love the trash can demonstration. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, this will, of course, only work when you’ve got daylight, but you can always switch to electricity after dark. I’ll go out on a limb and say this may not be practical for lighting your whole home, but this green idea seems perfect for lighting your garage or work shed on the cheap. For more discussion of the finer points of the ins and outs of this DIY (including whether or not it’s actually worth anything), check out the comments on Make’s post.

Lights made from water bottles [Make]

Flickr April 2, 2009

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Email in Indian Languages April 1, 2009

Today I introduced my sister and brother-in-law to Gmail as Google launched a new feature in Gmail that makes it easy to type email in Indian languages.
They were amazed. But I think Google has a long way to go when compared with Quillpad. Quillpad can also predict if multiple words are possible for your input. You can click on the word to select from those options. In addition Quillpad allows you to type English words freely in between Tamil words. It intelligently transliterates them into Tamil. If you are an ardent user of Firefox then we have the Lipikaar FireFox Extension which is also the fastest and takes fewer keystrokes to type than others.
I think, someday we all are going to use touch-screens that will have on-screen keyboards, which can be customized to any language and then the barrier will be broken.

All Fools’ Day April 1, 2009

After a very long time I had an ardently inspirational evening. But the facts are a little low and I’ll have to fathom the depths of our hearts to find the answers to all.
I still remember the day, I was almost into tears, when I was asked to quit for the first time by a watchman of a construction site where I used to wander alone. I didn’t know him, I was speaking to him for the first time. I saw a concerned stranger in him that day. But today I saw a sparkling glimmer in my friend who carefully picked the words to show those same concerns. I have decided to fight myself and stay pure, no matter what, and what a day to redeem my pledge. Its all fools’ day today and this is my first post to this blog.