MidnightBSD is a FreeBSD 6 fork aimed at providing an easy-to-use desktop experience. It aims to provide a GNUstep desktop with a solid BSD core. MidnightBSD contains both BSD and GPL licensed code. License: BSD License (revised) Changes This version focuses on adding hardware for newer devices including ATI, Nvidia, and Intel SATA controllers. A great deal of work was put into creating packages, with over 2000 packages available via FTP. There are 2 CDs of packages plus X11 on disc 1. Software update includes

• gcc 3.4.6
• BIND 9.4.2-p1
• Sendmail, bzip2 and OpenSSH 5.0p1.

The pcc compiler has been added (i386). GNU cpio has been replaced with the BSD licensed version. cpdup and mksh have been added. There are IPv6 fixes.

Lucas Holt, main developer of MidnightBSD said

Users who install kde from the ISOs will be able to enable graphical login on bootup. A script now runs on the first boot asking to enable bsdstats and ‘graphical desktop environment’. If the script finds kdm, it will enable it automatically. If you select yes without KDE, it will install and enable slim login manager. I would greatly appreciate users installing bsdstats so that we can get a better idea on usage.

List of features you will get in MidnightBSD 0.2.1 GCC 3.4.6 Bind 9.4.2-p1 Sendmail Bzip2 OpenSSH 5.0p1 PPC compiler added (i386) Removal of gnu cpio for BSD licensed version cpdup added IPv6 fixes mksh added

Five major points of MidnightBSD are:

1. Setup a binary update system. Therefore, users do not need to compile patches or new releases to get security updates or bug fixes.
2. Integrate GNUstep into the system, but maintain BSD licensing on its own code whenever possible. The kernel and most userland software must be BSD licensed.
3. Create an easy to use BSD-powered desktop environment, with basic functionality and a full graphical administration interface.
4. Incorporate new technologies from other BSD projects that may interest desktop users, such as OpenBSD’s OpenNNTP, OpenSSH, and wireless drivers.
5. Create its own ports system, based on the popular FreeBSD ports.

Source : MidnightBSD 0.2.1-RELEASE

After the Google’s official announcement that the new browser is Chrome and launching of this browser was imminent. It’s not an elaborate hoax. It’s a bona fide product and it will be available for download from Tuesday so Google is launching a beta version of its own Web browser in more than 100 countries. This browser window is streamlined and simple,for most of the users It’s not only a tool to run the important stuff the pages, sites and applications that make up the Web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast and much batter.It provides a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of Web applications and also responsible for Better speed and improved protection from rogue sites.By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites.It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

The development team said

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser to search, chat, email, online shopping, banking, browsing and many more, so we need a browser that not just only a browser but also a modern platform for web pages and applications. Today we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better.Google Chrome this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and we’re also working hard to develop versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust. So by this Google Chrome the web gets better with more options and innovation.

Chrome will feature enhanced address-bar features, including a new format for tabs, the ability to view Web pages as thumbnails, and other new features meant to make web browsing faster. The browser, of course, will integrate various Google services in it.Chrome isolates web pages with errors so users can close only the flawed pages without having to shut down the entire application while also receiving better protection from rogue. Google touted Chrome as being more stable and better at running complex web applications

Competition in the browser sector has increased substantially. The top player remains Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but its market share has dropped from more than 90 percent a few years ago to today’s nearly 75 percent.In second place is the open-source programme  Firefox with a share of nearly 20 percent. Another strong competitor is Apple Inc’s Safari. Like Firefox, Chrome is to be released as open-source software, Google said. Such software can be further developed and improved by independent programmers.

Youtube users now add Subtitles and Captions to their Videos on Youtube . Adding captions and Subtitles is optional but adding subtitle and captions to YouTube video make your videos available to as many people as possible.Captions and subtitles make videos accessible to a wider audience by allowing people who cannot otherwise understand the audio track to follow, especially those who are hard of hearing or speak other languages.

How do I add or edit captions/subtitles?

To add captions or subtitles to one of your videos, you’ll need to have files with the captions/subtitles in them. You can purchase software to let you create these files or ask other companies to do this for you, often for a small fee.At the moment, each file can only contain one caption/subtitle track in a single language. To add multiple language tracks to a single video, please upload each file separately for that video.

Once you have the files, log in to your YouTube account to upload them:

1. Click the "My Account" link in the upper right-hand corner of every page.
2. Click "My Videos". You will go to a page showing your uploaded videos.
3. Find the video to add captions/subtitles to, then click the Video name or thumbnail image.
4. Scroll down to the "Captions and Subtitles" section (bottom left).
5. Upload your captions/subtitles file!

To learn more about the information in each captions/subtitles file, read below.

We currently support a simple subtitle format that is compatible with the formats known as SubViewer (*.SUB) and SubRip (*.SRT). Although you can upload your captions/subtitles in any format, only supported formats will be displayed properly on the playback page.

The supported format consists of text divided into separate caption (or subtitle) segments in chronological order. Each caption must have three parts:

1. A timecode
2. The caption text
3. A blank line

Timecode: Specifies when the caption should be shown and for how long.

Time is measured from the start of the video in these units:

• HH - Hours, starting at 00
• MM - Minutes (00-59)
• SS - Seconds (00-59)
• FS - Fractional Seconds (0-999)

We support these timecode constructs:

• HH:MM:SS.FS,HH:MM:SS.FS - Caption display starts at the first time and stops at the second time. This is compatible with the SubViewer format.
• HH:MM:SS,FS –> HH:MM:SS,FS - Caption display starts at the first time and stops at the second time. For complete compatibility with the SubRip format, a "subtitle number" can also precede this timecode.
• HH:MM:SS.FS - Caption display starts at this time, but no stop time is defined. We’ll try to work out an appropriate stop time.

Caption text: One or more lines of text. This text must be UTF-8 encoded so that any language can be supported.

Blank line: A blank line is used to mark the end of each caption.

Examples:

• 0:01:23.000,0:01:25.000
  Text shown at 1 minute 23 seconds into the video, for 2 seconds
• 0:02:20.250,0:02:23.8
  Text shown at 2 min 20.25 sec, until 2 min 23.8 sec
• 0:03:14.159
  Text shown at 3 min 14.159 sec for an undefined length of time.

If your uploaded captions/subtitles are not available for online playback after a few hours, they may be in a format we don’t yet support or there may be something wrong with your encoding.

Microsoft Office Outlook is one of the best E-Mail client software available in the market and recently Microsoft office labs also made available one add-on to prioritize and mange E-Mail in your inbox. There are some other tools also that help  can help us to Manage, Organize and Prioritize our outlook inbox more effectively one of the Add-on that I found is ClearContext.Currently ClearContext comes in two versions Personal and ClearContext IMS Pro. Let’s have a look into the features of both of these versions.

ClearContext Personal: ClearContext personal is an Outlook add-on that help Outlook users to manage, organize and prioritize their inbox. Some of the features of ClearContext personal Outlook Add-on are

View and Explore Contacts and Attachments: ClearContext makes viewing contacts, attachments and notifications really easy when you view E-mail’s in your outlook inbox. Apart from this their are some other tasks you can perform like See attachments and contacts from emails in each folder, Sort, save, and forward those attachments.and Create distribution lists, meeting requests, etc. from those contacts.

Explore and Preview Attachments: Viewing attachments is the feature that i find really good because it gives you feeling like that we are viewing attachments in windows explorer.

Intelligently process your automated emails - automatically: Their are a lot of automatically generated emails comes to your inbox and these emails makes life really difficult for us to manage inbox. ClearContext Notification Managers automatically move these emails out of your inbox into a categorized view so you can quickly process notifications without constant interruptions.  Use ClearContext templates or easily create your own customized notification managers.

ClearContext Personal Demo

As the tagline of upcoming Bollywood flick, Karzzzz says, “Vengeance is back”. Firefox 3 was really a top notch browser, which helped Mozilla, making its presence much dominant, than IE. But, Microsoft is back, with their new version of IE, competing for the “Best Browser for Windows” title, yet again.

Beta version of IE is officially available for download on Microsoft’s site, for quite a time now. For past few days, we went on testing this new iteration of IE, and for a sweet surprise, it actually surpassed our expectations. Obviously we don’t expect very much from IE, since the launch of Firefox 3, but still IE 8 is quite comparable to FF3, in terms of stability, security, faster loading, crash recovery and other such useful features. Only thing that IE still lacks is the number of addons available to download, to customize your experience the way you want it. Here is what we found about this new browser in the market.

1. Security :- A really important issue, with any browser. IE8 definitely, is quite an improvement in this area, over its previous version. It easily clears the Acid test, making sure, that your experience with web is quite secure. Since its a beta version only, it definitely needs further improvement to be as secure as FF3, but still we have to wait a little more to see if IE8 is really secure and bug free.
2. GUI :- Just by the looks, one can say, that it is made according to Windows Vista’s looks, which feels really catchy, than FF3’s default GUI. Although, FF3 has got some addons to improve its looks, in its arsenal, but on Windows Vista, IE8 definitely feels better than FF3. In beta version, though, we found few GUI issues, that were there in previous version of IE also, worth mentioning. The worst of all is the top menu bar, which takes up a full line, and shows only six menus. It would have been nice, if we can change its size just like a toolbar. Maximum no. of tabs shown at a time should have been less, so that tabs are easily.
3. Faster loading :- Well, sorry Mozilla fans. But i have tried IE8 on a very old configuration too. It loads really faster than FF3. And it is even better at memory management. FF3 takes up nearly double memory space, for same 6 tabs, compared to IE8. Really a nice work, by guys at Redmond.
4. Tabbed browsing :- A ripoff of FF3’s offering, its really well implemented. Tab grouping is another nice aspect, offered inbuilt in IE8, although for Firefox, add ons are available.
5. Crash Recovery :- Something every one wanted to see in IE, after it has already being implemented in all other competing browsers. Finally with this iteration of IE, its here, and to much of our relief, it works flawlessly. And even better, it just doesn’t asks for restoring your previous session once like in FF3, but gives you an option to come back to your previous session, anytime, during the next session. So, even if crashed, and next time, you by mistake clicked on cancel instead of Restore, not everything is lost. Also, re opening a closed tab, is finally supported. Again, a rip off of Firefox’s offering, but a point scored for IE8, nonetheless.
6. Address bar & Search bar :- Again a copy from FF3’s feature list. Address bar displays results from your web history, RSS feeds too, just like FF3. May be they should add desktop search, too alongwith this browser, just like Vista’s start menu. Although search bar is defaulted to Live Search, with an option to change it to other search providers, but still when we tried adding Google in that list, it just didn’t accepted it. Adding Wikipedia, amazon, etc. too was a lot of pain. We can expect to get this issue resolved, in final version. Still, displaying web results alongwith thumbnails, is real cool, and should be copied in FF3 too.
7. Accelerators :- Nice innovation really. Although, adding other accelerators is a real pain, but that is just a bug, waiting for a fix. Anyways, it was really helpful to use those accelerators, really. I was easily able to cut down on my internet usage by 15% easily. Really helpful for everyone.
8. Webslices :- Once again, a very innovative thought. It lets you get the latest info on a webpage without even navigating to it. Really a useful way, to keep an eye on stock quotes, or your favourite news site, or may be on a bid you placed at amazon. It is really useful and at times cool enough. Although, since this is just a new idea, not many websites are available which offers creating webslices of their pages. May be soon enough, we will see a better implementation of this feature, and a lot more sites, supporting it. Firefox developers, time to write one more add on for your FF3, this feature is a real killer.
9. Safety Filter :- Have you ever got this warning that this page may harm your computer, while navigating from Google’s search result page. But wait, what if you would have come to that link directly. Definitely, this issue needs to be addressed. And here we have it. The same malicious web filter, in Google search engine, has been made redundant with this Safety filter in IE8. One more feature, we would like to see in FF3 as an add on.
10. Performance :- Apart from Javascript, every where else, FF3 came crashing down to IE8. IE8 is twice as faster in rendering any graphically extensive site, than FF3. With Microsoft trying hard to gain an upperhand in graphically intensive sites, with its light weight Silverlight, on for Adobe’s Flash player, this high difference in performance is obvious. Something where FF3 needs to play catch up soon.
11. InPrivate mode :- Also called “porn mode” by nearly everyone, this feature is once again, a nice innovative idea. As expected, not even a single information is stored about your web browsing, even if it crashes. That means if you visited a site, that crashed IE while in InPrivate mode, sorry to say, but Automatic Crash Recovery won’t help. Obviously that’s what we call a good implementation. One more point scored for IE8.

In all, IE8 is a very good browser, worth upgrading if you are using IE 7 or previous versions. It is not so secure as other browsers, but still enough secure for a regular user. And the other new good features provided alongside rip offs of features from other browsers, make it real worth giving a try. Switching from FF3, would not be a good option at this point as IE8 still lacks proper implementation, and few bugs are waiting to be taken care of. But that may soon change, once the final version is out, which is expected to be much stable and bug free. Its time to see, which one of these two browsers, get more of user’s attention. With google’s Chrome set to be released soon, this war is really going to be tough, which is definitely a good news for users.

Welcome to all techies of Bhopal at the platform   provided by Microsoft India technical communities.

Microsoft technical communities provide opportunities  to interact with Microsoft employees, experts, and your peers in order to share knowledge and news about Microsoft products and related technologies.This technical community provide a variety of ways to get answers to your questions, solutions to problems, and share your own expertise.

This community is a great platform to come together to learn about Microsoft technologies, to network with their peers and to foster a sense of community and using the same technologies. For knowing about the community program u can click on the link given below-

http://www.microsoft.com/india/communities/default.aspx

Bhopal User Groups exist to help facilitate education and knowledge exchange among developers, architects  managers and students with an interest in Microsoft’s technologies. You can join the community to get access to related newsgroups, technical chats, tips and tricks, and other useful content geared toward helping you address technical issues and learning how to use Microsoft products more effectively.

To join the community of Bhopal user group, you can click on the link given below-

Microsoft Bhopal User Group

This post is Written by Microsoft Bhopal User Group Lead : Harshita Shukla

Firefox the only big threat to Microsoft Internet Explore is now extended it’s deal with Google till 2011. This means that Google will be the default search provider for Mozilla Firefox browser. Users after installing the Firefox browser can change the default search provider , means user can choose any search provider but most of time users won’t change the default search provider.

This deal left one question : Google says Microsoft can’t use Live search as a default search provider for Internet Explorer but Google is paying a good amount of money to Mozilla for having Google as their default search provider. In both the cases users can easily change the search provider.?

Last year, Baker said that she would not hesitate to walk away from the lucrative partnership if that was what was necessary to remain independent. Baker said in an interview with Computerworld in October 2007

We’ve spent a lot of time and energy making sure that Google understands that it cannot turn us into an arm of Google," . "If the protection of [our independence] would come into conflict with Google, or any of our search partners, we would opt for the community who built Firefox and love Firefox.

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video in a standardized format. An RSS (a format for delivering regularly changing web content) document is called a Feed, Web Feed or Channel RSS. RSS Feeds can be read using software called and RSS reader, Feed Reader or RSS Aggregator .Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.

Benefits and Reasons for using RSS: RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site’s email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly.

You might have noticed that most of the blogger publish partial RSS feeds. The reason of using partial RSS feeds is, the fear of loosing revenue and impression. Blogger who are not facilitated with AdSense for RSS feeds are scared of the fact that the readers won’t visit their blog if they publish full RSS feeds but really they don’t know Full text feeds can help in generating higher revenues for blogger.

As people subscribe to feeds, they subscribe to more feeds. And that means they’re consuming more content, which means that each click out of the feed reader is taking the reader away from more content. In other words, feed reading is Consumption-oriented, not transitionally focused.

Four important reason to use full RSS feeds as compared to partial RSS feeds

• Whenever you publish the full RSS feeds, it excites the readers and drives them to visit your blog. Readers visit your blog to comment and participate in the discussion. Partial feeds may not excite the readers much as such feeds don’t convey the real theme of the post
• Sometimes chances may be that your blog server is down for maintenance. In such situations full text feeds may be of great help keeping your readers in touch with your blog
• Moreover the RSS feed readers are mostly geeks and have a number of feeds to read, they don’t bother to click that extra link to read the whole post( unless the post is by an A-List blogger)
• How do you feel when a pop-up opens when you visit a web site? Very annoying!! Ain’t that ? This is because you need to click an extra button to comfortably view the page. Same is the case with partial RSS feeds. It is very annoying for the readers to click an extra link in order to view the full post.

Most of use access Internet through cables connection and get a very good Internet speed but what if we can access Internet as mobile internet means where we go we have our own Internet access and and also if we can get a very good Internet speed sp what we call it a mobile internet Is this possible ? yes is it because dongle  a product that I found on the Broadband Expert Website is really good.

Dongle is just like an USB device that can help you to access Internet from different service providers including Vodafone, T-Mobile and 3 Mobile. They also offer a very good comparison chart for all service providers. There is no information available that we can use this from Indian service providers also.

Today when I see that Microsoft Affiliate Network Website images are not displaying on my blog then I am wondering that is my Microsoft Affiliate Network account is closed. I send one mail to the representative and try to login into my account but I got error message that “Service is not available”.