Example:

Europe countries I visited so far

People say that one picture worth more than a thousand words. This is true: just change, or offer charts as alternative to your long and boring tables and you’ll see the result.

What have I done here:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?

• chs=440×220 *dimensions – this is the maximum size for maps
• chd=t:100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100, 100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100 *color levels, one per child (chld)
• cht=t *some default parameter for maps
• chtm=europe *if you want to show just a region
• chco=FFFFFF,FF0000,FFFF00,00FF00 *default color and color limits
• chf=bg,s,EAF7FE *if you want to add a background color for water
• chld=ROBGTRGRITHUESPTFRNLBECHDEATGBPLSLSKNOCZLVLTRUBAMKSIHRGRCYCS *list of children (countries here)

!Note: It seems that google does not map Serbia correctly. The last country listed there is Serbia (RS) and it is not shown on the map. Strangely, changing this to CS is working. Currently waiting for a response from google (from a human, not the search engine )

Related posts:

Pidgin - Instant Messaging – Single client for all protocols, including Oracle internal one.

Launchy - Application Launcher – just press ALT+Space and write a few letters from app name to start it

MPlayer – Movie Player – no GUI, just console, very quick, no need to install codecs. Some issues with external monitor.

Firefox - of course, user since version 0.9 Beta

Dropbox - File Sync – simple sync of some folders between laptops or laptop and desktop. As a bonus files are stored online and you get revisions history

Google Mail – Personal Email – lot of space, even bought extra. Can also use it to read other POP3 accounts, all in a single interface.

Google Reader – RSS reader – the best RSS reader

Google Calendar – Calendar – simple to use, simple to share, to sync. Can also use it to read other calendars.

TripIt – Booking Manager – just forward all the travel plans to Tripit and you’ll have your itinerary ready, published as a web calendar, links to online check-in and other usefull stuff.

Related posts:

After a short google search, I found PC Inspector Smart Recovery who did a brilliant job. Not very fast, but speed was not what I was looking for.
It managed to recover ~200 MB in less than 10 minutes, good enough for a FREE application.

Good luck!

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First I thought it is something hardware. Since I had a dual-boot environment on that machine, I booted in Ubuntu and saw that I had also a gateway there and internet was working seamlessly. So it was all about Windows XP…

After lots of formus read, after reinstalling wireless card driver many times, I finally found a solution here, as
- in Windows XP SP2 some repair options were added through netsh command:

So, open a command prompt (Start->Run->type cmd):
1. Reset WINSOCK entries to installation defaults:

2. Reset TCP/IP stack to installation defaults:

3. Reboot and test.

These commands are not deleting your current network configuration, but a suggestion would be to try just the first command first.
For me it solved the problem.

Good luck!

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Well… seems that somebody thought about this and managed to collect all old versions of 182 programs (so far) and made them public. All licensing terms remain the same.

The link is www.OldVersion.com.

Enjoy!

If you just add bots like:

• en2ro@bot.talk.google.com – English to Romanian
• en2fr@bot.talk.google.com - English to French
• ro2fr@bot.talk.google.com – Romanian to French
• fr2en@bot.talk.google.com – French to English
• the list includes all the languages supported by Google Translate

then you can chat with these “buddies”, telling something in the first language and they will reply with the translation in the second language, something like this:

(2:50:01 PM) andrei: I just want to test you
(2:50:14 PM) en2ro@bot.talk.google.com: Eu doar vreau să vă încerce

Of course it’s not perfect but it’s a very nice feature.

For translating large amounts of text or websites, http://translate.google.com still remain the best choice.

Enjoy!

Enjoy!

It includes lots of fixes like:

• improved “video performance”, although no real hardware acceleration
• battery life improvement
• threaded SMS
• upgraded IE

Nothing breath-taking, but normal things that you should have.

Be careful, this upgrade will erase everything on your phone! The whole process will last around 30 minutes!

Let’s see what we’ve got here:

• Enter your trip details
• Forward your trip confirmations received from your travel agent and he will parse this for you
• Send your confirmation to an email address and get it automatically imported
• See who else within your network you might meet during a certain trip
• Direct links to Online check-in where available, check flight status, weather and maps for your destination
• In the end you will have some statistics like “Days on the road”, “Distance Traveled”, “Cities Visited”

I will definitely use it!

I will start with Pidgin, because it’s my preferred one:
+ easy to install, small installation footprint
+ stable, just few crashes in almost a year of intensive usage
+ lots of protocols know, more than Digsby
+ a Portable Pidgin is available, for running directly from pen drives.
- your status is across all acounts, so you cannot be invisible in YM and Busy in Gtalk
- not the best-looking client

A new-comer, still beta, is Digsby :
+ easy to install, not so tiny installation footprint
+ very nice interface, skins and color themes
+ email and social networking support
- fewer protocols support than Pidgin
- probably because it’s still beta, i experienced lot of crashes
- installation took very long even on a very powerful machine

My opinion is that Digsby is designed for teenagers who are chatting a lot and are intensively using social networking. Pidgin is just a tool that is joining all the accounts within one client. I am successfully using even my corporate Oracle IM within Pidgin.