IT Masala

It’s petaDishoom’s first anniversary! For the past year, we’ve been your go-to source for everything from advice about living a cruelty-free lifestyle to info about getting active for animals. We’ve also been your source for the latest breaking dhamaka on the hottest trends and the hottest animal-friendly musicians, like Shaan, Kailash Kher, Shibani Kashyap, Palash Sen, Nitin Malik and Vishal Dadlani.

In honour of their anniversary and the awesome Indian singers who inspire PETA to challenge cruel, outdated attitudes about animals, they are giving all the dedicated “Dishoomers” a chance to win an iPod! Just fill out the form and you could be the lucky one to walk away with this awesome prize.

Contest Ends :  31 May

Demographics : (If you’re outside India, we’re sorry but this contest is not for you. Head over to peta2 for your chance to win other great goodies.)

so get rockin’!

[ PETA Contest ] [ PETA ] [ Volunteer @ PETA ]

Ever felt to have your picture on WIRED magazine cover page !! Now you can do it. This might be the cover page of maybe March 3000…its absolute fun ..!!

This is nice fun , put in anything you want and make your own cover page .. This is what i made !.. Headlines on WIRED in the year 3000 !! 

njoy !

Note : This is a nice way of free advertising ,  called viral advertising !.. This way all the three are benefited here. WIRED magazine , XMPie , XEROX. ( Free advertisement ….)..anyway for us its enjoyment..so Just dot it !

To create your own Wired magazine cover click here:
http://www.wired.com/promo/xerox

Microsoft Corp., as part of its outreach to the open-source community, has released a new official Windows Media Player plug-in for Firefox 2.0 that resolves problems with the older one.

The plug-in enables Windows Media Player to work on Firefox for Windows Vista and resolves known issues with the old one, wrote Hank Janssen, the program manager for Port 25, Microsoft's software lab that works with open source, on a company blog Monday.

The plug-in, available on Firefox's add-on site, is compatible with the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the XP SP2 and Vista OSes.

Note : Microsoft is working on another plug-in for Firefox.

There is however one known issue with the new plugin as noted on the Port25 site:

There is a known issue if you are using Firefox version 2.0.0.3 on Windows Vista with the installer failing with error code -203. To work around this simply restart Firefox (you will get a notification that Windows Vista will be changing the Firefox compatibility settings) and then install again - the second time should succeed.

I did not experience this problem and in fact had no problems at all installing the plug-in on Firefox 2.0.0.3 on XP. 

A video from MSNBC.com playing perfectly well inside the WMP 11 Plug-in for Firefox. I often had trouble viewing videos on sites who stream in Windows-based formats.

"Is Microsoft competing with Linux and OSS" Janssen writes. "You bet they are. Is Microsoft working to better interface with some of the Linux and OSS products? …

It took a long time for this to happen but finally their is a WMP plugin for Firefox. !

[ Mozilla Plugins Page ] [ Download Plugin ] [ Microsoft Software Labs ]

Long Live Open Source ! 

Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said on Tuesday Google is set to introduce software for creating meeting presentations online, offering a twist on Microsoft Corp.'s popular PowerPoint tool.

Google is adding presentation software as a new feature to Google Docs, a collection of Web-based product tools such as word-processing, spreadsheets, e-mail and home page publishing that offers an alternative to Microsoft Office, Schmidt said.

"We don't think so. The reason is it doesn't have all the functionality nor is it intended to have all the functionality of Microsoft Office," Schmidt said in response to an interviewer's question at the Web 2.0 Expo conference here.

Google acquired Tonic (San Francisco based Java PowerPoint® Specialists ) recently and this is what they commented :

They have some great technology for presentation creation and document conversion, and it will be a great addition as we add presentation sharing and collaboration capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

via [ google blog ] 

Windows/Mac/Linux (All platforms): Free, open source application Shoka is a PDF library manager with a difference.

Shoka has been designed to perform full text searches on all documents in your Shoka library and share documents over LAN, it comes with a simple and attractive graphical interface.

Shoka has some nice features like tagging and smartlists. There is something wrong with the windows version of Shoka. I am not able to use it properly. Tools like Google Desktop already do similar thing of indexing but for exclusive managing of pdf's Shoka is great.

Note : It needs JavaWebStart.  

[ Shoka ] [ Download ] [ Java ]

After getting huge responses for his "Fire in I"  theme, Aseem has released it to the public. His work is commendable. The theme looks simply gorgeous.It makes you feel the Indian in you !. Making such themes takes lots of efforts,its nice to see a pure "Indian Theme". As far as i know its the first and only one, unique "Indian" based WordPress theme. Below is a screenshot of the " Fire in I" theme.

I liked the header the most , its fantastic ..great work ! The bullet looks cool !

The theme is licensed under Creative Commons.

We want more : this is a request to Aseem - try to include these in the next release.

- Full width theme option

- 3 column option

- change the edge chain on the right with something more elegant ! 

Go ahead ! Download it .Use it . flaunt it… Be an Indian ! A WordPress Indian

[ Demo here ]  [ Download here ]  [ Aseem's Blog ] [ About Aseem ]

Give a refreshing look to your desktop. Download the new set of icons from VistaIcons.com. They provide high quality icons in the PNG and ICO formats. Icons have a maximum size of 256 x 256 pixels, making them suitable for high-DPI displays.

Some of the packages :

VISTA STYLE ICONS ( Download )

ALPHA VISTA PACK ( Download )

IVISTA ICON PACK ( Download )

AEROVISTA ( Download )

VISTAICO AERO PACK ( Download )

You must be fed up sometimes of slow loading of Youtube videos, here is a tool which can accelerate the loading of videos to your pc . The streaming becomes much faster.This software will make your YouTube videos stream faster and play smoother by reducing buffering time and video interruptions.

SpeedBit Video Accelerator for YouTube makes your videos stream faster and play smoother, reducing buffering problems and video "hiccups". The unique video search lets you find the latest and hottest videos around the web, and the "Recently Accelerated" list gives you instant access to the last videos played.SpeedBit Video Accelerator is a product from the creators of Download Accelerator Plus (DAP).

Want to know How SpeedBit Video Accelerator works?

Click here for more info.

System Requirements: 

OS: Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows XP
Browser: FireFox 1.5, FireFox 2.0, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7

Note : This does not support vista, although it does work fine on XP.

You can check out how Speedbit works and you can download it here. This is a must if you are on a dial up and still want to enjoy watching some wonderful YouTube videos.

via [ speedbit ] 

This type of shortening the url is a cool option to avoid long url's while sending a mail or putting a url link on the forums,blogs,websites etc or to some friend or something. I usually use tinyurl which is my favorite. 

I tried some real big url's and it worked out fine. Still its the same thing , i mean the way it reduces the pain of those long url's , the style of shortening is similar to tinyurl. DwarfUrl provides a unique id for everybody (obviously) for every long url .

For example : Long Url : Move cursor here to see the long url.

This loong url is made short like this .:http://dwarfurl.com/281dd

They even have their own Firefox Extension(plugin).

Note : At present their extension doesn't automatically add itself to your toolbar.You must goto View->Toolbars->Customize to add it to one of your toolbars. Go get the dwarfURL Firefox plugin here.

Happy shortening !

[ dwarfURL ] 

SpiceJet is giving away Free Ticket Every 99th online Ticket Absolutely Free !!!

Conditions :

- Offer for all sectors (including Goa) and bookings made till 15th April 2007.  

- Every lucky winner will get the entire ticket amount (including taxes and surcharge) reversed to his/her credit card. 

- Not applicable for bookings made through travel agents / online travel portals.

- Winners will be informed individually and on www.spicejet.com

- Offer restricted to first 25 lucky winners everyday

Be Spicy & Get Lucky  . Go Get it.

via [ SpiceJet ]