Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Did you know, YouTube hosts scores of full-length movies & award-winning documentaries that you can watch online for free? There are movies from around the world in over a dozen genres. There are also a good number of Bollywood flicks there although you may not find your favorite ones. Jennifer informs that there are also other places like Archive.org where you can find good entertaining stuff. There is news that the upcoming Bollywood movie "3 Idiots" will be available online for free after 12 weeks of it's release. Also see: Free print version of Newspapers

The popular bloggers, Jeff Atwood & Phil Haack , lost their respective blog content after their sites went down to a hard drive failure. Interestingly, both of them share the same physical server & host their sites on Virtual Servers on the machine.  The Virtual Hard Drive files (usually referred to as VHD files) which contain the actual data for the virtual machines were always in use and were not being backed up. Haack informs that backing up a live virtual server requires taking advantage of Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). They have both salvaged major portions of their blog content with help from a community of followers. They have candidly admitted their failure & shared their lessons learnt - An untested backup strategy is no backup strategy at all! Test your backups! Every day is International Backup Awareness Day. Have a backup strategy that’s easy to setup. Even if you have managed hosting, you should have your own local backups of the important conten...

It is possible to chat in a number of Indian languages using Google's Transliteration tools. These tools let you type in English & convert the text to the supported Indian language of your choice on the fly. There are at least three ways to GMail Chat in an Indian language - 1. Google India Labs' Transliteration bookmarklets - By dragging a bookmarklet onto the Bookmarks bar (or Link Toolbar in IE) & clicking on it to activate  transliteration, you can transliterate from English to Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. To disable transliteration, click on the bookmarklet again. You can pick the specific bookmarklet from the Project's Home page . Detailed instructions for on storing the bookmarklet are well documented for each of the popular browsers. 2. Transliteration bots - Bots are software applications that run automated tasks. You can invite a bot to chat and then send it the mess...

Google is running a Hindi essay contest called 'Hai Baaton Mein Dum?' till January 31st, 2010. Participants can submit an essay on any of the five topics given below in Hindi language - Entertainment Travel Sports Health Social, Economic and Political issues There is no limit to the number of entries per contestant and there are some 310 prizes to be won! This contest doubles up as a promotion for Google's Knol & it's excellent Transliteration tool . Knol, a Wikipedia style encyclopedia , has received a luke-warm response so far. 

Ever since the Internet took off in a big way towards the end of the last century, it has revolutionized the way we live & work. It is a great platform for selling ideas or products as it provides a level playing field to anyone in the world with Internet access that wishes to leverage the medium. It makes it irrelevant whether someone seeking an online presence is working from a garage or some remote corner of the world. Successful websites have earned their owners unimaginable wealth; far outstripping what traditional companies have earned in decades. Websites that are frivolous & provided only short term value have perished. The dotcom bust of the last decade sunk the fortunes of website owners who took their users for granted with their short sighted strategies. So what makes a successful website? Is building one an obscure art? Paul Boag, a Web development veteran, answers these questions and shares the recipe for building & maintaining a winning website in the b...