Myspace and Orkut have been many a times dramaticised as competitors in forums and reviews.
My opinion however, on these two cool tools have been different all the while.
If you ask me, orkut and myspace, though sporting similar features(social networking that is) is anatomically and geographically very much distinct.

In my dreams Ive seen Orkut as a Giraffe and Myspace as a Stallion.
Probably these are the reasons what made my dream.

- Giraffe is seen mostly in the African region(I wish if i could add Asia/India too - hope you will excuse!) while the stallion is dominant in the Europe and the US.

- Giraffe has a bizzare anatomy, is seen only in dull blue colours mostly except when monkeys throw “grease like mud” on them. Stallions come in various colours/shapes/frills/tails, templates and the like.

- Nobody has ever heard a Giraffe cry/make noise/sing or use a plugin while stallions are famous for their whinny (music plugins).

If you didn’t quite enjoy my dream - I would like to remind you of Greasemonkey customization plugin for orkut - Myspace music plugins - Myspace layout Templates - Orkut in brazil and India articles - and Myspace CSS junk.

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All of us adore the cool hi-res images that come with Vista - we all love the images for it’s rich quality. Here’s an interesting story behind it.

It’s about the two stock images giants - Getty and Corbis. Getty is the current market leader in stock images while Corbis is the next big player around. Now, Corbis is an interesting pedigree - it belongs to the Microsoft family for the reason that Bill Gates owns it. The two(G and C) are famous for their competition and the cold war between the two.

Apparently, it would be any body’s guess that the images selected for use in the Microsoft Windows Vista collection would be from their own offspring - Corbis. But hey, wait a minute!

Bill Gates decided that a major number of images featured on the Windows Vista installation collection be taken from Getty ! Out of the 12 images, 11 are credited to Getty. This is a move from Microsoft that raised many eye brows. Why would they buy images from their competitor agency when they have their own in-house one?

Here are the image names and their credits

Gerber daisy image: © Microsoft Corporation
Goldfish image: © GK Hart/Vikki Hart/The Image Bank/Getty Images
Sports image: © Ian Mckinnell/Photographer’s Choice/Getty Images
Robot image: © CSA Plastock/Getty Images
Puppy image: © GK & Vikki Hart/Iconica/Getty Images
Chess image: © Gregor Schuster/Iconica/Getty Images
Kitten image: © Peter Cade/Stone/Getty Images
Energy image: © Michael Banks/Stone+/Getty Images
Starfish image: © Wolcott Henry/National Geographic/Getty Images
Green leaf image: © Joel Sartore/National Geographic/Getty Images
Bonsai image: © DAJ/Getty Images
Bass Clef image: © Darren Hopes/Digital Vision/Getty Images

What made him make this move? No answers yet - guess Bill’s been missing the lime light these days.

Thanks - Stockphototalk

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Last day I was doing a search for an old image file on my local disk and I had no luck the first few times - getting desperate, I tried a few alternate file names yet, no luck this time either.

What added to my frustration, more than not finding the file was the Microsoft’s search assistant doggy. All the while during the search, I had to watch his histrionics and this was disgusting!Also, I think it slowed down my system and wasted my time.

How I loved the old Win98 search tool - No assistant, No frills, yet efficient.

Finally I decided to remove the search assistant from my system. Now I have the classic search ON. If you are a fan of the Windows classic search tool here is a work around that will help you get it back!

It’s a registry edit thing - So follow the instructions carefully.

- Goto Start > Run

- Type in “regedit”

- In the registry goto HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\
Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CabinetState

- Right click and add a String Value called “Use Search Asst”

- Again right click on the string and enter the value “no”

- Press F5 to refresh the registry

Goto “Search” and ha - you killed the poor doggy -but for the good

Now you have a fast, efficient no frills attached - good old windows search tool !

Enjoy that bit of Nostalgia.

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Well, what’s world without some colours? Now that you enjoy “gmail” more than any other email application - add some fun and colour to it. Imagine if you could select a theme to your email account, instead of those boring white and white Google colours that remind you of your wednesday drills during school days!

Well, this Firefox extension does just that - It gives you the option of 21 colour themes that you can apply to your Gmail account - Wicked! And it’s not just about colours -

- You can even re arrange a bit - make your navigation menu horizontal(default is vertical)

- Make a floating navigation panel - so that if you have looooong forward email(with those funny pics) you still have the navigation bar near you - dont have to worry scrolling up and down and to and fro.

- Make a icon preview of the attachment - i.e you can know what file type is attached to your mail from the icon, which will be corresponding to the attached one.(would come in handy if you need to skip those ppt ones)

- You can also see a column with your personalized Google homepage right in the inbox.

- Zebra stripes - alternate colours for each email message.

- Get rid of the invite panel window when you don’t need it.

Pretty good application if you’d like to break out of those boring colours and have some fun showing it off to your colleagues.No glitches noted as of now - but i wish if i had the option for some bright colour rather than the dim/pastel colours available at the moment.

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Here’s another good news for the photographers in India, the Indian arena is already doing it’s ground work for some serious business in the coming years. India has managed to penetrate the International scenario, with it’s newly emerged stock photo agencies and it’s strategies.

Here is a proof to the above statement. A Google trends chart that shows a comparison of the search volume for the keyword “stock photography” in 2006,2005 and 2004. Well, the big players are on top positions as expected, but see who’s towards the last(10th position) - India. Now, that’s a sound position for a beginner.
If you look at the statistics for 2005 - India is in the 9th position and in 2004, India is at the 8th position.
It may be logical to predict that since the rank is progressing in a negative manner (2004 -8, 2005 - 9, 2006 -10) you can simply neglect it up the coming years. But that’s not exactly what it means. Google is only showing a comparative analysis, therefore when the search volume in the other regions goes up, the ratio by which it is compared to India becomes thin.

But in effect, if you look at the search volume - it is moving up significantly over the years. For a beginner, this is excellent ground work. If my guess is right, the coming 10 years should see India in the top 5 players list, that is extrapolating the previous years trends.

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Last day i was searching for “How to reduce eye stress” and came across a blog, which was very useful. I thought i might pin it up on my desk, so took a print out of the page and pinned it up on my desk and left a few copies with my colleagues too.

I had in fact copy pasted the whole text area, to Microsoft Word and took the print out. The whole things came out a bit messy. If only that page had a print option(Apart from the right click thing), could i have got a better print.

I noticed that many websites have this option of - “Print this page” link which directly commands your printer to give copies. But, this feature is ignored in blogs! I cannot think of any good reason as to why.

So here i am, just managed to put up a “Print this page” option on the blog and tested it well on Opera/IE/Firefox and Flock.

Here is the script, simply install it on to your blog template.
Step 1.
Copy this to the head section.

<script>

function printWindow()

{

bV = parseInt(navigator.appVersion)

if (bV >= 4) window.print()

}

</script>

Step 2.
Put the following in the body of your page(Where you need the link).
<a href="javascript:printWindow()">Print This Page </a>

Instead of the Print this page, anchor text, you may use an image/icon.
You may also, add it to the Blogger post footers so that if readers find your post interesting and need to keep a hard copy of it - you leave no option blank!

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