Hi Friends, I would be blogging regularly in http://www.techsmartlife.com, please feel free to visit the site and give your valuable comments in TechSmartLife.com. This blog "Chaks Ubuntu" is my personal blog and will continue exist.

Working on a New Web Site – TechSmartLife

Well, last week i decided to blog at least once per day and also kept the “Post A Day 2011″ button on the sidebar. Things are not working as expected and i could not kept my word. I became very busy in my office work and the remaining time i am spending on a technical, lifestyle related website Tech Smart Life. We are planning to cover different tutorials on different technologies and also we are covering more on reviews of different software.  Since some more friends are also contributing to Tech Smart Life, you can expect more regular updates from that site. Most of my posts in my blog “Chaks Ubuntu” would be added to the new Tech Smart Life website and hey, i am also contributing to that web site along with this regular blog.  That would be my first work on a website and probably i would work more on such activity in future too.

I spent almost a complete week on researching different sites for finalizing the website name, hosting providers and payment methods etc., I am also going to blog on the experience i had in this exercise. I will also tell you why we choose the DreamHost as the hosting provider. Hope my experience would help somebody who wanted to start their own website.

Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Released

Ubuntu 11.10 is available for download. Before downloading or upgrading you can take the official online demonstration of Ubuntu 11.10. This Linux distribution, based on Debian, is also known by the code name Oneiric Ocelot.

Yesterday Ubuntu offered an upgrade to 11.10 from the earlier version 11.04 via Ubuntu automatic update. You can also upgrade using the Ubuntu Update Manager. Some interesting changes are available in this new version. In Ubuntu 11.10, we find the Unity interface  for the GNOME 3.2 desktop environment. Of-course the Unity desktop was also available in 11.04 or ”Natty Narwhal” too and many Ubuntu users did not like the change at that time. We are sure you would like it this time.

Unity desktop: Unity has had a few noticeable improvements made to the Dashboard and the Launcher. You can find files quickly with the Unity search. Ubuntu software center is updated with new look and it contains more applications, new categories are added. The application management in Software Center looking very impressive. You can also easily drag and drop the applications to the launcher for easy access. The left side launcher width is increased little bit.

Some Default Apps: In terms of default applications, we find Firefox 7.0 and Thunderbird 7.0 from Mozilla, LibreOffice 3.4.3, and the Deja Dup automatic backup program is found in the system tools. It also has the cloud based Ubuntu One backup solution as earlier.

New Display Manager:  Ubuntu 11.10 welcomes the user with a new login screen which uses LigthDM instead of the GDM display manager. Under the hood, everything is powered by the Linux 3.0.3 kernel, which brings with it multiple architectures support. Also it enables you to login Ubuntu as Guest user without entering any password. Enabling this Guest session by default is a little bit concerning point for many users.

Overall this version of Ubuntu looks very good. Ubuntu 11.10 Update using Update Manager, or regular download.

Ashampoo Registry Cleaner – Free Download Today

 

Ashampoo is giving their Registry Cleaner software for free today only via GiveawayOfTheDay. If you are using windows operating system and doing software installations and un-installations frequently, you would have noticed that your system became unbearably  slow. This is because your windows registry is grown in huge size due to many software do not completely remove their entries from the registry.  Ashampoo is one of the good system tools maker and they developed a product to clean your windows registry. If you want to grab this software for free, you need to act fast and install the software with in next 20 hours from now. The download is available in the above GiveawayOfTheDay website. While installing make sure the below points.

1. Download the software from the link provided in the Giveaway Of The Day site

2. Run the Executable and Accept the Terms & Conditions

3. Make sure you select the “Custom Installation” and uncheck the checkboxes otherwise the software install some browser toolbar and  changes your browser homepage.

4. Once completed with installation you would be redirected to their website for registration. You have to enter your email id here. My suggestion is you provide your secondary email address here in order to avoid any spams in future.

The Terms & Conditions specifically says that the software you download and install during the Giveaway period comes with the following important limitations:
1) No free technical support

2) No free upgrades to future versions

3) Strictly non-commercial usage

So, go and download it now.

I have used many other software earlier for cleaning my windows registry, but this software looks little faster in finding the inconsistency in the registry.

If you know some reported inconsistency is not really an issue, then you can ask the “Ashampoo Registry Cleaner ” to give exception to that entry (right click and select the last option in the reported issues) so that when you run the tool again, it won’t be reported.

If you by mistakenly mentioned some inconsistency as exception, then you can always go to Options–> Exceptions Tab and select all the exceptions and click on Remove button.

Ashampoo Registry Cleaner can also take the backup of the registry before performing any action on it. You can restore the registry back to its earlier state in case if something goes wrong.

There are few good points missing from this application in my view.  The Reporting, which allows only a text report of inconsistencies. A HTML report would be attractive for this kind of software.

Note: You have to be very careful while using any registry cleaner software. Always take backup of your windows system before running any process which require administration privileges.

Keyboard Not Working in Ubuntu Login Screen – Fix

I am not so good in Ubuntu and Linux but worked on Unix OS few years back. I thought it is good time to start looking at Ubuntu and concentrate more towards open-source apps.  I dual installed Ubuntu on my existing windows 7 laptop using Ubuntu Live CD few months back. I started  exploring the OS to get to know about its features.

Everything was fine till last week, but suddenly from last week onwards I was not able to log-in to Ubuntu because the key board stopped  working in the Log-in screen. In the Log-in screen there is a “Universal Access Preferences”  icon on the right bottom of the screen which shows the options to select the on-screen keyboard. I tried using this on-screen visual Key board but no asterisk characters were entered in the password field even with this tool. I Googled  about this but could not find any satisfactory solution. Someone mentioned in some website that it could be a security mechanism that Ubuntu is not displaying the ‘*’ in the password field just to avoid some one watching you how many characters you are entering, but i think this is not correct. I also tried to resolve this issue by fixing the packages from the recovery screen. But this also did not fix the problem.

Yesterday again  I stared looking into the Universal Access Preferences screen and started reading all the options. The last option which was “selected/checked” which reads ” Press and hold keys to accept them (Slow Keys)”. I unchecked that option and yes, the Ubuntu started accepting the password and showing the * in the field now. In-case you are also facing the same problem, it is worth to check this option once before trying any other suggestions.

Google Doodle – Art Clokey

  This is one of the best doodle displayed on Google. Clicking on each letter would display one character with animation. You can see multiple characters animating at the same time  when you click on the letters with no delay. Today is Clokey’s 90th birthday and we are remembering him through the doodle displayed on Google. Mr. Clokey is the man behind the popular TV show character Gumby.  Art Clokey worked with clay and produced many works of art in the medium of film. Gumbasia, The very first stop motion clay animation movie by Art Clokey. He was also the first to introduce the use of clay models of objects, animals and people in television commercials and also in stop motion movies. Art Clokey died in his sleep on January 8, 2010 due to a recurrent bladder infection. I am seeing this doodle when accessed google.co.in and google.com domains. It should also be available in the rest of the world.  The Pop Herald says it is available in America.

You can find the Google’s old doodles here

 

Comodo TrustConnect – Free VPN

It has been more than a month since I started using TrustConnect a free VPN – ‘Virtual Private Network’ service from Comodo a well-known name in PC security tools segment. I am also fan of their other free tools like Firewall and Internet Security with Antivirus. I thought it would be the right time to give review of this cool VPN service. For those friends who are not aware of what VPN is, In one term, VPN masks your actual IP address provided by your Internet Service Provider and assigns another IP address to protect your online identity. So, what is it for us? You can automatically get the answer to the question about how an IP address reveals your identity, if you open-up any IP finding sites like whatismyipaddress.

The VPN creates a protective shield around your Internet Connection, by encrypting all your Internet traffic it prevents others from attacking or scanning your system from the local network that you’re using to connect to the Internet.  It  would do so by assigning another IP address which may belong to another country. So when the IP address finding tools looks to find your details by analyzing the IP address, what they really get is false information about your IP address, your  location/region and your Internet Service Provider etc., Usually any good VPN service is not 100% free, there would be some restrictions. The free account of TrustConnect comes with a monthly cap of 10GB which is very much sufficient for normal web browsing and also has Ads which will be displayed on the top of every page where ever possible. After reaching the cap your service account get blocked till the next month. In the next month your account would be activated again and you have another 10GB for that month. My VPN connection got terminated abruptly only once during my usage In the last one month. And of course TrustConnect gave the message in a pop-up window. And i could able to reconnect after few minutes. Apart of this small inconvenience i am very happy about this service.You can also view the usage statistics from your service account online in Comodo website.

You can sign-up for the FREE TrustConnect VPN by accessing the FREE TructConnect. I am not finding this URL directly in Comodo website now, but can be found in google search.

Downlod link for Comodo TrustConnect Installation file:

Comodo TrustConnect for Windows

Along with this i am also using another free VPN service proXPN alternatively, which is having another type of limit to the free version. I may probably give my review about this tool later.

Know the distance and auto fare by sending SMS – A txtWeb service

Usually any website which is providing different services would expect user to log-in to their website to use their services. Optionally few sites allow to user there services without log-in to their websites. Well, we have here one more website which allows us to use their services by sending SMS (short message service) .

Getting services by sending SMS  is not a new concept. We already saw such services particularly in the  Information Services sites like asklaila. But this website txtWeb taken a different form of handling services. Today IndianExpress published an article about one such service which is developed by Bangalore-based Ideophone Technosol Pvt Ltd, a start-up software applications firm. This service runs on SMS and the requester has to send sms to 9243342000.  The good thing with this txtWeb website is,  anyone can develop a custom services using their core services. One such interesting  ”autofare” application which was developed by the co-founder of Ideophone “Sandeep Bhaskar“.  The next time when you are travelling in autorickshaw and you feel the auto you are in has a faulty meter or you suspect that the autowala is making roundtrip to our destination, and you have a fancy smartphone you can track the distance and the fare in real time. Even you can use this service to know the distance between the two points of travel and the approximate fare  just by sending an sms keyword ‘@autofare’ and send it  to 9243342000. Earlier I used to depend on Google Maps service to get the information on distance and a manual calculation of approaximate fare.   and Ideophone will get back with a summary of the total distance, the likely tariff and the major landmarks on the way that are stored in their database.  This service surely will help in knowing the distance and rough fare. But you cannot use this result to fight against the autowala , you know why? because they have a handful of explanations to make to convince. Very long back when i had the same situation and i found that the meter is showing Rs. 80/- more than the actual, the driver said he has taken indirect routes to eliminate traffic, and i have no idea how to calculate this ‘indirect’ route so, simply paid and walked away.

Example usage of this application as mentioned in their website. I tried with my own query string (@autofare bangalore, madiwala, sarjapura) which did not result any reply even after waiting 15 minutes. So, i changed the query string to (@autofare Bangalore, Madiwala, Sarjapura Road) which gave me some results but appears like the target is taken wrongly. Instead of “Sarjapura Road” it has taken “Rd” (may be a short form for Road and ignored the Sarjapura) and gave the directions to “Hosa Road”. The service has to improve more to be used by people new to that place.

eg: @autofare Mumbai, Powai, Bandra    -  (and send it to 9243342000) Gives the approximate auto fare from Powai to Bandra in Mumbai city

Sample Response:

Auto Fare Details for Mumbai

From: Powai, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

To: Bandra West, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Distance: 19.4 km(s)

Tariff: Rs. 157.2 (approx)

Important Landmarks:

Adi Shankaracharya Marg

Jogeshwari Vikhroli Link Rd

Krantiveer Lakhuji salve Marg

Mahakali Caves Rd

Jeejamata Rd

Western Express Hwy/NH 8

S V Rd

Hill Road

St Peter’s Rd

Google Chrome – Detachable Tabs

I started using Google’s Chrome  for the last 2 days. And I liked it very much because of its faster load and execution. Rearranging the tabs is a common feature in any tabbed browser like IE-7, Firefox. Chrome is gone little bit ahead and it offers detachable/attachable tabs. Yes, we can detach and reattach the tabs, and here is how…

1. Open multiple tabs as shown below

 

2. Click on the tab to be separated, hold the mouse and drag little down or up. Now the Chrome visually shows the tabs position as shown below

3. Once you see the above window, Release the mouse button.

We can also (re)attach the multiple chrome windows to a single window-with-tabs, by following the similar approach, but this time it should be reverse. We should drag the 2nd window’s tab (not the window itself) to the first window’s tab location to make it as a tab.

The Task Manager of Google’s Chrome browser is common for all Chrome windows. To invoke the task manager press Shift + ESC button on any active Chrome window.

Firefox 3.0.1 Crashed :(

My Firefox 3.0.1 is always getting crashed on my windows box. I never open more than 5 tabs when browsing, not sure of what exactly the cause but it is happening when accessing the http://java.sys-con.com web site.

The firefox’s built-in crash reporter is not able to send the details to firebox behind the proxy server. I updated to 3.0.2 today. May be this should resolve the issue.

And the technical details about the crash are

**************************************************

Add-ons: {0AC54906-5413-4C81-B446-07929BC39C25}:0.7.1,bettergmail2@ginatrapani.org:0.6.1,{63df8e21-711c-4074-a257-b065cadc28d8}:1.9.3,{DDC359D1-844A-42a7-9AA1-88A850A938A8}:1.0.3,{daf44bf7-a45e-4450-979c-91cf07434c3d}:1.5.1,firebug@software.joehewitt.com:1.2.0,{89506680-e3f4-484c-a2c0-ed711d481eda}:0.9.4.9,{a7c6cf7f-112c-4500-a7ea-39801a327e5f}:1.0.2,firegestures@xuldev.org:1.1.3.1,{cc85cd4e-5a5b-4eda-a25c-bdaffa93b406}:0.1,{e4a8a97b-f2ed-450b-b12d-ee082ba24781}:0.8.20080609.0,{77b819fa-95ad-4f2c-ac7c-486b356188a9}:1.5.20080823,{1A2D0EC4-75F5-4c91-89C4-3656F6E44B68}:0.3.1,{c33c5b47-69c8-45a4-a5e0-af85bbe628dd}:1.5.6.1,{cf15270e-cf08-4def-b4ea-6a5ac23f3bca}:2.0.5,{338e0b96-2285-4424-b4c8-e25560750fa3}:2.1,fireloop@drawloop.com:1.07,share@mahalo.com:4.0.1,{3e450467-892a-45b8-9ed8-90e8d3bf2ad7}:0.4.13,{37E4D8EA-8BDA-4831-8EA1-89053939A250}:2.0.0.0,pronounce@netgents.com:1.1,{F807FACD-E46A-4793-B345-D58CB177673C}:2.3.2,firefox-extension@shareaholic.com:1.4.1,{29c4afe1-db19-4298-8785-fcc94d1d6c1d}:0.4.2008061601,{46551EC9-40F0-4e47-8E18-8E5CF550CFB8}:0.5.7,{5B280457-4290-40c2-9441-EA647775F824}:0.13,{ded0fc70-7215-4802-afeb-b2982d3e7225}:2.9.1,{1DEAE5AA-E19E-458b-9C8C-73CB651B9A58}:2.9.1,{5c8bfb7c-9a54-11dc-8314-0800200c9a66}:3.0.1,{972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd}:3.0.1,HiVisGnome@edhume.googlepages.com:2.9.1,{F8DA5A34-B011-4b27-8581-87FDBBDF3698}:1.6.4,{069FB356-C69F-7349-D092-AB28AF836D0E}:0.8.100,{07b2a769-ed19-4483-87ce-c643914c81bb}:2.0.0.38
BuildID: 2008070208
CrashTime: 1220009367
InstallTime: 1216132023
ProductName: Firefox
StartupTime: 1219990603
Theme: PhoenityReborn
URL: http://java.sys-con.com/node/303726
UserID: 3f3ffd2d-ec05-4e32-a720-76de3adf1f4a
Vendor: Mozilla
Version: 3.0.1

This report also contains technical information about the state of the application when it crashed.

**************************************************

Human Egg formation captured

The moment a human egg is released from a woman’s ovary has been caught on photographic camera for the first time. The amazing footage was captured by Gynecologist Dr Jacques Donnez spotted it on the monitor during hysterectomy operation to a forty-five year old Belgium women. The images, which have been released by New Scientist magazine, have been described as a "fascinating insight" into "the beginnings of life". ‘The previous images on the same subject were taken on based on Ultra Sound scanning and are very fuzzy’ the New Scientist explains.

The reddish swelling seen in the image is a follicle, from which the egg (in yellow color) is released prior to its journey up the Fallopian tubes to the womb. Fertile women release one or more eggs every month, but until now, only animal ovulation has been recorded in detail. Dr Donnez said that some theories had suggested an "explosive" release for the egg, but the ovulation he witnessed took 15 minutes to complete.

[BBC News]