One thing everyone of us would agree is that the pop-ups/ads are annoying. Its even more annoying if there are too many ads on your favourite web portal. There is a hack to it!
Lets say you like http:///www.sify.com/ but you dont like to see their annoying ads. The idea is to find their ad-server. Major portal have separate ad servers which they use to display their ads. For example sify has ads.sify.com as their ad server. If we are able to block our browser request to these ad servers there will be no ads to the browser!
So what I did was to simply edit the C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file using notepad and add the following entry:
127.0.0.1 ads.sify.com
Now, ads.sify.com is mapped to loopback address so your browser would fail making a request and you wont see an ad. To find out the ad server you want to block visit the portal right-click on an image and you can find the domain!
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Thursday, March 24, 2005
AOL, Yahoo, MSN and Google -- few years later - some predictions?
We all know that Yahoo, AOL, MSN and Google are competing with each other in providing individual web based services including IM, e-mail, calendar, maps, search, video conferencing, virtual meetings, collaborative video etc. The services they provide are targeted towards individual web users (including tech savvy and novice users). A novice computer user needs all these services with a word processor and a spreadsheet program. It would be no surprise if these companies are already investigating to build an online office suite.
Presently, these companies are letting us get accustomed to these services to help them test their products. There is nothing free in this world and once these services are completely developed, we will be made to pay. Some people call this foot-in-the-door marketing.
In about 3-5 years from now, a visit to one of these portals will require authentication which itself can be a retinal scan. They will provide ample storage space and tools to seamlessly share your documents/pictures/music/movie and folders. The other cool features could be high-resolution video conferencing, virtual meetings, collaborative applications etc. With the spread of high-speed networks and innovation in client/server-side technologies the performance of these portals will enhance tremendously and give an desktop like user experience.
Technology is the key to achieve the above mentioned user experience. Technically speaking user-experience is an aspect of client-side computing. In the recent past there had been great innovations in server-side and middleware technologies, but little has be done to improve client-side. But its very clear that presently the industry is focused on Avalon XAML, Ajax and similar technologies which utilize the client to achieve greater user experience. These technologies are in their initial stages and would take couple of years to get matured. I am sure thre are going to be some common frameworks built for Ajax and there by writing DHTML code by hand would become a thing of the past. Lets wait and see how things shape up in reality!
Presently, these companies are letting us get accustomed to these services to help them test their products. There is nothing free in this world and once these services are completely developed, we will be made to pay. Some people call this foot-in-the-door marketing.
In about 3-5 years from now, a visit to one of these portals will require authentication which itself can be a retinal scan. They will provide ample storage space and tools to seamlessly share your documents/pictures/music/movie and folders. The other cool features could be high-resolution video conferencing, virtual meetings, collaborative applications etc. With the spread of high-speed networks and innovation in client/server-side technologies the performance of these portals will enhance tremendously and give an desktop like user experience.
Technology is the key to achieve the above mentioned user experience. Technically speaking user-experience is an aspect of client-side computing. In the recent past there had been great innovations in server-side and middleware technologies, but little has be done to improve client-side. But its very clear that presently the industry is focused on Avalon XAML, Ajax and similar technologies which utilize the client to achieve greater user experience. These technologies are in their initial stages and would take couple of years to get matured. I am sure thre are going to be some common frameworks built for Ajax and there by writing DHTML code by hand would become a thing of the past. Lets wait and see how things shape up in reality!
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
greasemonkey -- firefox extension
greasymonkey is a cool firefox extension making your FireFox browser more smarter! The extension lets you add "user scripts" (DHTML scripts) by which you can bring more dynamic features to your website. The extension now ships with two such scripts one of which would recognize valid links and make them hyperlinks in a page. The other script "ununderline" would remove underlines from pages and italize them so that they dont anymore look like hyperlinks!
IBM releases spam fighter!
Yesterday, IBM released FairUCE (which stands for "Fair use of Unsolicited Commercial Email") which filters spam by verifying sender identity instead of filtering content. The difference between this and existing technologies in fighting spam is that FairUCE doesnt look at the content of the mail but looks at who sends it and their reputation. It doesnt stop by filtering the email but also tries to attack the spammers by sending the spam back to smmers! Quite agressive!
IBM reports that the technology is not end-user ready but admin's can paly with it. It available for download from alphaWorks!.
IBM reports that the technology is not end-user ready but admin's can paly with it. It available for download from alphaWorks!.
Monday, March 21, 2005
Networking - made easy!
If you have a small windows network at home/small office then you might want to have a click here. Network Magic from PureNetworks is a cool tool to maintain your home network.
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