Even if you have a hard disk with hundreds of GBs, you will run out of space soon. At that time you want to see what is taking most of the space. Using Windows Explorer and going to each folder is a time consuming job. Several years back I got introduced to a tool called "Tree Size" that displays chart like bars against each folder so that you can easily see the usage. Today I found a free tool to do the same thing better - WinDirStat. Apart from bars, it displays a beautiful squarisish picture of the usage based on file types. Check it out.

I came across this brilliant site called "Geonames.org" - a Geographical database for download free of charge containing over eight million geographical names. The site allows you to search for any city or place or postal code and the best part is all of this is also available through a number of webservices and a daily database export. This can be useful while you are developing a website and have to get input of a city or determine a place in a transaction.

Check out these examples:

1. Chennai
2. 600017 (Postal Code in India)

GeoNames was founded by Marc Wick. Marc is a self-employed software engineer living in Switzerland. Thanks to Marc Wick & the other volunteers of the site.

Both in my home and work I have powerful 8GB Quad-Core Desktops running Windows Vista x64 and I love the machines. I use extensively Windows Live Writer for writing my blog posts and Live Messenger for IM. Now they come as a single install package (Windows Live Suite) easy to install. When you try to install it on 64-bit Windows the installer fails. I then found this article on how to get the individual MSI files and install the programs from C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\WindowsLiveInstaller\MsiSources.

The most common question I get about Tamil Unicode / Tamil IT is how do I input Tamil text in Windows?.  Over the years my answer has varied and if you ask others it certainly varies between individuals and their choices. There are plethora of choices now available:

1. My first in the list will be Murasu Anjal. If you are using Windows 2000 or older this is the best software out there. Rock Solid and supports multiple keyboard formats, has convertors for various encoding and the paid version ships with high-quality Tamil Fonts. Unfortunately my good friend Muthu Nedumaran hasn't updated Anjal for Windows Vista and x64 platform.
2. Inbuilt IME in Windows 2000, 2003, XP & Vista. The upside to this is that OS out of box solution and downside it supports only ISCII layout.
3. Microsoft's Indic IME 1 (v5.0) from BhashaIndia.com. The upside is that it supports multiple keyboard styles, downside it is buggy and not works in all software.
4. Keyman software and plug-ins for Tamil. The upside is that Keyman is a very popular IME framework that support hundreds of languages. Downside the plug-ins are made by individuals as voluntary effort and may not be without errors.
5. E-Kalappai - This is another variation of Keyman and is widely popular in blogosphere.
6. Azhagi - Works well, supports multiple keyboard formats. Unfortunately only the paid version supports input into Microsoft Office and other applications.
7. Finally, this is what I am using nowadays - NHM Writer. This software is from my another friend Badri Seshadri's publishing firm New Horizon Media. Thanks to NHM you have a free Tamil Keyboard Software (less than 1MB download) that works in Windows XP, 2003, Vista & Vista x64. It works across applications as it uses Windows Text Services Framework (TSF)

My earlier blog posts on related items:

• Enabling Tamil Inputs and Fonts
• Indic Languages in Microsoft Software
• Read multiple encoding Tamil pages in Firefox
• Indian Language Open type fonts

Though Microsoft Silverlight is a cool technology, it pales in front of Adobe Flash (98% of browsers have it) in terms of availability. It is not an unique MS problem, it is a problem for any new offering when there is an incumbent who has a majority market share. To change this requires education, awareness creation and put it in front of users at many as possible in exchange for an added value to them. I was pleased to see Microsoft doing some steps in this direction (unlike their pathetically nil action to have .NET Framework Runtime in desktops widespread in its earlier days) by having a beta of Silverlight enhanced downloads when people come to MS Download Center site. 

Sometimes you are stuck by not able to delete the file because some application unknown to you is holding the file lock. This freeware (Unlocker) helps you in those scenarios. I haven't tried it yet, use it at your own risk !

What looked impressive for me is the GUI listing of all applications having locks over files in a folder.

Windows Live Search seems to have introduced a video search recently. When I searched "Vishwak" the results page impressed me - you can mouse over on a result image and see the video playing in place with audio. Surprisingly it included results from Google's YouTube as well and playing it in a Live branded page.

Microsoft have released for some time now preinstalled and preconfigured Virtual Images (in Virtual PC VHD format) of Exchange Server and SQL Server for evaluation. The list is expanded to cover many more of MS softwares including ISA Server, BizTalk, System Center, Windows Server 2008, Vista Enterprise and Office 2007. There are also candidates that are time consuming to install and configure like MOSS 2007 & VS 2005 Team System. With these images, all you have to do is download them and run the VHD files with Virtual PC or Virtual Server (both are free from Microsoft). It can't get easier than this.

At some point I guess all server software will come in this fashion, even for production environments. Whether it is Windows or Linux, Server software are becoming more and more complex to configure and secure that it is only logical for Product companies to give them precooked and ready to eat.

You can download the images from microsoft.com/vpc

As I posted in the past if you need to do screen shots then you can use the free Zabgrab or if you are using Windows Vista the Snipping tool. But what if you want to capture a web page that scrolls for multiple pages. The hands-on winner to do is the award winning Snag-It!. The other day on a Windows Server 2003, I wanted to do a screen capture and for some reasons Snag-It, refused to launch and kept crashing. So I looked for an alternative and found this article on another tool (free) called WebShot that also allows programmatic API to do the same. Tried it and my problem was solved.

Nowadays I access my mailbox in Hotmail mostly through Windows Live Mail client. So I didn't notice the increase in storage until I saw this post. All Hotmail users are supposed to have got their mailboxes upgraded to 5GB of space and Hotmail Plus (paid) users like me get 10GB of space. I thought 2GB in GMail was lot of space, now what do I do with 10GB?. Will GMail now give 100GB or like Rediff/IndiaTimes offer unlimited storage, let us wait and see.

When you thought most of the basic innovations are done in the web search (at least to what is searchable on the WWW) there comes a new feature from Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft. That is the power of competition.

Last month it was Microsoft's turn, where Windows Live Search team posted about the enhancements they have done in their image search. This one is interesting - it allows you to look into the photos and describe about the image inside. For example I can say, show me only Black and White Images (filter:bw) or only images with face closeups (filter:face).

Google too has these features, but I found the face filter to work well in the Windows Live Search.

To say it politely I am not for forwarding an email beyond the first level - there are few exceptions that warrant few levels of forward. Recently I got an email forwarded from a company, in that in between in one of the forwards it had unpleasant words. The person who sent me the mail should've deleted the thread and just sent the final items he had to say to me. Instead he forwarded without going through carefully, I objected to derogative words used which hurt me. He came back and apologized. This could've become a big issue when it is between companies and can lead to law suits.

I started to do this post to leave you with the screenshot below showing an email I received from one of my friends - which was forwarded to 12 levels. If I was interested in harvesting email IDs - I could've easily got about 200+ IDs from this single email!

Sometimes you want to identify a SPAM message source or just to find out who left that blog comment you might want to know to whom the IP block has been assigned. Though it is difficult to pinpoint it to an individual organization (especially SMEs who will have only few IP numbers or Dial-up/Home users where the IPs will be in their ISP's names) there is a service that can give you some information. You can American Registry for Internet Numbers Whois Service or Asia-Pacific NIC's Whois Service. Use one of the services and input the IP address for which you are interested to find the block owner.

My official (Vishwak) email is configured with Office Outlook for last 6 years+. My personal, blog and newsletters are with Hotmail. And I have been a paid Hotmail user for years, so I read my Hotmail through Outlook Express ON & OFF. When about a year back Microsoft came out with Windows Live Mail Desktop (now desktop is dropped and for short WLM) I switched to that. With Hotmail, WLM works great - it syncs up all folders in Hotmail including Inbox, Sent Items, Junk e-mail, Deleted Items, Drafts & custom folders.

I like a lot the new Yahoo! Web 2.0 Mail interface. This email ID is being used by me for a lot of my memberships including INFITT, so I wanted the convenience of using it offline with WLM. Yahoo! mail doesn't expose Web Interface, so you need to use conventional POP3/SMTP interfaces. Yahoo! requires you to be a Paid user for that - so I paid $20 or so per year. I could easily get the POP3/Inbox configured, but sending emails was becoming an issue. Finally here is the configuration that works for me:  

And recently when I wanted WLM to be moved from my desktop to my Laptop so that I carry the emails with me. Yahoo! mail works with SMTP, so it doesn't sync the Sent Items folder from WLM to Yahoo! mail online. Though WLM did have an export option, it didn't work - pains of using a Beta software . After few tries I found a quick 'n' dirty way to solve it. I dragged all the mails from Sent Items of Yahoo! account in WLM to a new folder I created under Hotmail account in WLM. Installed WLM in my laptop, synched my Hotmail account. Then I configured the Yahoo! account in WLM, did the reverse process of Hotmail folder to Yahoo! Sent Items. In short, I used Hotmail as a backup and restore for Yahoo! mail

If you are using any of the Microsoft Search tools like MOSS 2007, Desktop Search, Vista Search, SQL Server FreeText Search or Indexing Server you will need a piece of software called IFilter. IFilter is a set of DLLs designed for each file format that you want to be indexed and searched.

Microsoft ships for their file formats in Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) when you install the Office Suite in the machine. Out of box, the search tools include for IFilters for Text, HTMLs, etc. But if you need to index additional file formats most commonly for PDF (Adobe  Acrobat) you will need to download IFilters for them and install. The installation will not give you any User-Interface Application or will you need to configure anything. Just install the IFilter package and reboot your machine or indexing service. That's it.

The sources for getting IFilters are many, I have listed few of them below:

• FoxIt Software IFilter - Download here (32 and 64bit). This supports 64bit of Vista and Windows XP, many of the other IFilters don't
• Adobe's own IFilter for PDF files - Download here. If you have the Free Acrobat Reader 8.0 or so you will get the IFilter also pre installed along with it  
• Search Windows Live Gallery for more IFilters here. Here you will find for PDF and several other file formats

The built-in file download applet in any of the browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari or Opera) leaves much to be desired. They don't support accelerated downloads (parallel downloads), most of their resume function don't work as advertised. So you will need to use a 3rd party download manager especially for huge file downloads. The 3rd Party applications since they hook into browser process they tend to slow or destabilize the browsers. Over the years, I have found GetRight to be the best download managers. 

After I moved to Windows Vista on a 64-bit Hardware I wanted something less resource hungry and with less frequent updates. I found Free Download Manager and I have been pleased with its performance for last several months. Check it out and the best part FDM is free and it is spyware free.

Many times when you technical documents or just presentation you will find useful wanting to capture some portions from the screen. Earlier in November 2004 I had written about using OneNote 2003 to do it and in October 2004 I had posted about using a freeware Zabgrab to it.

Though OneNote (esp. OneNote 2007) will work with Windows Vista, Zabgrab doesn't. So in my laptop with OneNote 2007 I don't have a problem, but when I am using a Vista machine without what to do?. Apple Mac 10.x have an easy to use Screen grab tool in-built in the system menu.

The good news is Windows Vista bundles (out of box) a great screen capture tool called "Snipping Tool". The tool helps you to Capture a portion of your screen so you can save, annotate, or share the image.

 
(Thanks to my colleague Murari Rajagopal for telling me about this useful applet)

You can find the Snipping Tool either via Start > Accessories > Snipping Tool or by simply typing Snip into any Search window. But it is easy to create a shortcut for it by using the path %SystemRoot%\system32\SnippingTool.exe. This path should work in all Windows Vista (32 bit) editions. It also has rudimentary painting (pen) tool. The tool allows you to copy the URL associated with a screen area and you can control this in your application through this API

Over the last few months I noticed tons of SPAM entries in the trackback lists in this blog. I realized it is better to switch off “Enable trackback service” in your dasBlog configuration:

But what about existing SPAM entries that are already present in the blog. I found it to be very tedious to delete every SPAM Trackback URL manually. That’s when I decided to have a tool written to address this issue. You can download this Free Open Source Application from here. Run the application and point it to your das-Blog content folder, it will read all the *.dayfeedback files and display all the unique domains in the Trackback URLs. Then in one go you can clean up all the *.dayfeedback XML files.

The Source Code (Visual Studio 2005 Project) can be downloaded from here. Please note the application is in Beta and no major code-audits and reviews have been done on that; so I strongly recommend you to take a backup of your content folder before using it. Download the application from here

Designing Windows Application UI with Visio: I had this application to be written by one of my team members in Vishwak. The Engineer understood the functionality and came back quickly with a working prototype. But the User Interface left much to be desired - it was a typical Geeky UI, it required me to select a check-box for each entry (I had to select 20,000 Checkboxes in a grid for the entries in my blog). So I decided to re-do it. I started writing the User Interface suggestions as a Word Document, that's when I thought there should be a better way to do this. Though we have Visio extensively for UML, Flow-Chart, Network diagrams, DB Designs I haven't personally used it for UI Design. I thought let me give it a try and picked up Visio 2007 and started doing the UI design with it, with the help of my Delivery Manager (Chandra) on Visio techniques I completed it in 20 minutes or so. The Engineer understood this instantly and the next day I had the application completed (Download the UI here in Visio format or in PDF format)

At the end, I felt good that I learned a new item (Visio for UI) today.

With the hundreds of usernames and password every typical Internet user has to remember, it is necessary to use a Password Manager. A typical Password manager is an application with a secure database that will store and retrieve hundreds of Usernames and Passwords with one key “Password“. Most of these tools have high level of security measures ensured to protect the passwords stored, both from in-memory and from-disk attacks.

I have been initially using Password Safe, then moved to Keith Brown's Password Minder that we extended in Vishwak. Password Minder was not managed by a community and we also didn't want to commit resources to keep the project alive - earlier 3 years back Password Minder filled a vacancy neatly. As a result the application has bugs that needs to be fixed in our extension and poor Windows Vista compatibility. In Open-Source now you have lots of Password Managers which have more features, works across platforms, offers better security - most important has vibrant communities behind them that keeps the projects updated regularly.

I have weight between the choice of commiting resources to fix Password Minder or to move to a new application.In the end, I decided to move. After evaluation of many products, I have ended my search with KeePass. This is a perfect Password Manager that offers state of the art security, works on multiple platform (Windows, Windows Mobile, Linux, MacOS, J2ME, PalmOS) and very easy to use.

I still run Password Minder, but every time I need to access a site that is in Password Minder I first recreate it in KeePass, delete it in Password minder. This way I hope to fully move to KeePass in few weeks.

One challenge while you are blogging is to find appropriate photos (stock images) that are free for usage. While Google and MSN Image Searches will list images, they may not come with right to use. I normally try and substitute with the photos I have taken - of course this is not possible always. For these scenarios I found these sites that offer Royalty Free Images.

1. Stock.XCHNG (Tons of Free Images)
2. Morguefile (Also free images)
3. iStockPhoto (Not free, but Affordable prices)
4. Corbis (Excellent images but expensive)
5. GettyImages (One more Paid Site with good images)

I have been using dasBlog Software for running this blog ever from its start. I am extremely pleased with the software, its:

• ease of use
• ease of backup. just zip four folders - SiteConfig, Content, Logs & Themes
• zero-install. just xcopy, no databases to install or configure and
• price point (free!)

In the last 4 years I never had problems with dasBlog, it just worked, Period. Yesterday night was different - my blog was down overnight, and it was purely my fault.

I have been following Scott Hanselman's blog about the daily builds of dasBlog, supporting Windows Live Writer Beta2 and Akimset Comments Spam support. I got adventurous, kept copying various daily builds; on top of it I posted some pre-dated posts from Windows Live Writer Beta 2. I suppose I somehow managed to corrupt the data-files for last two days. Today morning I realized my goof-ups, deleted two days data files, came back to release version of dasBlog, posted the two entries back. (Kiran: If you are wondering what happened to your comment, you know what happened now!).

Today when I visited the Sourceforge data repository for the dasBlog builds, I saw that I could nominate my favourite project to their Sourceforge.net 2007 Awards. I went ahead and nominated dasBlog to "Best Technical Design" category. I request all other users of dasBlog to do the same. 

Finally, after nine months dasBlog is getting a new fully supported release. All the new features like Akimset support, Windows Live Writer Beta 2 Support and more are expected in the release on 18th June 2007. That's good news and I am waiting...

BTW, I went nuts doing this post. As everytime I submitted, all the images were coming broken. It turns out dasBlog replaces all occurence of its name as hyperlinks and it can be configured in the settings.

This post is about three items related to blogging.

Windows Live Writer Beta 2

Microsoft have finally released the new version (Beta 2) of Windows Live Writer. I consider Live Writer to the best software from Windows Live team. After their initial release - no news from them for almost a year now. It was as bad as dead, and I thought it is one of those Microsoft's experiments that don't make it. Writer is probably the software I use most after Explorer, Outlook, Internet Explorer in that order. I am happy to see the project living and improvements made in the new version. And it supports dasBlog better than ever.  Windows Live Writer (and the new Messenger 8.5) introduces a new installation UI that gets displayed on the Right Hand Bottom of the screen area - this is unlike the regular installers which take up center of the screen and disturb your regular work.

30 Guidelines for a Good Blog

Since I have been blogging for few years now, people  ask me about what are the guidelines to follow when you start a blog. I always got away by saying keep posting often, don't just post links and don't talk about work. Today this need is solved with Scott Hanselman posting an excellent list of "30 Guidelines for a good blog". Scott Hanselman is one of my fellow Microsoft Regional Directors and a regular technical blogger.

What is a Blog?

About a year back (I read this only today) John C.Dvorak has commented on how large sites push out ordinary web pages and call them blog. He was expressing in this column his anger on the loose usage of the term "Blog" and what he expects to be in a good blog.

Since I blog on my own website I don't visit my Windows Live Spaces*  that often. When I logged in today by chance, I was surprised to see the amount of improvements that has happened there - including the number of gadgets, customization options, layout and the growing feature list. I only wish they make it more easy for novices - by making things simpler and less of a clutter.

I liked the What's new feature, which shows when the blogs of my contacts got updated. The best part is it automatically picked my contacts from my Messenger list - which is a good approximation of people I know personally and whose blogs I will be interested to track closely.

* I wanted to say My Spaces, but that might mean a different website than the one I am referring!

Microsoft is releasing a suite of Designer products for Web and Windows called "Expressions". These products promise to make the designer and developer collabration lot easier that it is today. Unfortunately when first announced they decided not to include Expressions in MSDN subscriptions. MSDN Subscriptions are the most common way Microsoft developers and partners get access to Microsoft Software.

Through the Microsoft Regional Director program, we "RDs" made our disappointment known to Microsoft and why it is important for Developers to get access to "Designer" tools. Fortunately Microsoft listened to us and other similar voices and through