Featured Download

I am a download addict. I simply love downloading stuff from the internet. Internet has grown so huge, that these days with a little intelligence and using the power of Google anyone can find everything they want on the Internet.

Needless to say, the rise of Online File Storage sites such as Rapidshare,Megaupload,hotfile, Fileserve etc along with torrents has only made downloading more easy. Having said that, am pretty sure that most of you….who aren’t much of a techie…but interested in downloading or are new to it, won’t know about external Download managers. Well, to explain in short, download mangers are external software’s that help manage your list of download externally…Some of the features appealing in these managers are ‘pause and resume’ facility, keeping track of completed downloads and managing the downloads depending on type of object being downloaded

Moreover, these download mangers have options to optimize the speed you receive for downloading. Though a simple Google search for free download managers would give you a dozen of options, FDM(Free Download Manager) is my personal favourite. It is a powerful, easy-to-use and absolutely free download accelerator and manager. Moreover, FDM is 100% safe, open-source software distributed under GPL license.

Above is a screenshot of the FDM application. You can see many options/tabs in the window. There are many sort options on the left hand side. Also, the downloads could be sorted on basis of categories.

Some of the most appealing features of this software is

• Resuming broken download
• Ability to monitor IE,Firefox,Chrome and other browsers
• Flash Video download
• Bit torrent Support
• Site Manager
• Upload Manager
• Traffic mode – Easy,Medium,Heavy mode downloads
• Option to adjust number of simultaneous downloads and connections to be made for server
• Has a portable version also
• HTML spider
• A user community to give feedback on the downloaded file

All the above features i listed are my personal favourites and the main reason because of which am faithful to using FDM for the past 5 years. i have tried several other download managers too but for me, FDM features beats them all.The full list of features is cited here.

Free Download Manager

Download FDM and try out how it works out for you. feel free to share your valuable feedback later here.

For all YouTube watchers, am sure everyone by now knows ways to download YouTube videos. There are several ways to download videos, however by far, this is the most simplest way in the form of a plugin.

‘Easy YouTube Video Downloader’ is a plugin for Firefox browser that helps you download videos in various formats like .flv, .mp4, .3gp, HD etc. It is a very useful plugin and it seamless integrates itself below the YouTube video you are currently watching (look at the pic below)

On clicking the ‘Download As’ button you will be presented with various formats in which you would like to download.

Its the easiest YouTube video downloader ever, single click non-intrusive direct download buttons for FLV, 3GP, MP3, MP4, 720p HD and 1080p Full-HD qualities

Plugin: Easy YouTube Video Downloader

Brute force is a common attack these days apart from phishing attacks. What happens in brute force is the attacker first tries to find some basic information about yourself. This is not a difficult task considering that these days public is more open to reveal personal information in social networking sites like Facebook, Friendster,MySpace,Orkut etc..Once the attacker gets such information, he tries to guess your password out of it. This method isn’t difficult and most times it is found effective since people usually formulate their password based on family,places names etc.

However one drawback of this method is that the attacker has to use permutation combination to guess the password and that means more time and attempts to do it successfully. This is where ‘Login lockdown’ comes into picture. This is a very effective plugin for WordPress which  blocks out the  IP address after repeated attempts to hack it.

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I joined Cognizant as a fresher somewhere around 7 months before and after being in the IT company for this long, one latest trend or craze I have seen is for UNIX. UNIX language is basically a shell language and programming in UNIX involves shell scripting. Both are difficult to understand and it takes time to get a grip on it since in UNIX you don’t get the luxury of a GUI unlike Windows, which most of us are accustomed too.

That really makes UNIX developers very rare in market and also they are  the highly paid ones . Mastering UNIX is a slow and steady process. Its more of getting accustomed to it than understanding it. For this you need a lot of practice. Not many of us have the option of installing a full fledged flavour of UNIX on our machine and that makes it difficult to practice it.

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Recently, for my personal project purpose I came across a application that wasn’t quite working well with Windows 7. Because of this problem I was prompted towards finding a solution that could well,help me retain to my favourite OS as well as sort out this ‘one’ application problem too.

I researched my favourite search engine ‘Google’ for this and found out a very interesting fact about Windows 7. Windows 7 – the way the creators have build it,has an inner ability to run Windows Xp in a complete virtual environment. This is what Microsoft calls it as ‘WinXp mode’ and Windows Virtual PC is the application that runs this mode

Here is a quote from VMLite software site about the need for XPMode within Windows 7

To improve application compatibility on Windows 7, and to ease the transition from older Windows operating systems to Windows 7, is crucial for the success of Windows 7, and Microsoft has done tremendous works to achieve such a goal. First, Windows 7 ships a large number of device drivers to for better hardware support. Microsoft also provides a free tool call “Windows 7 Upgrade Adviser" that will run on your current PC prior to Windows 7 upgrade and it predicts if there are known incompatibilities with third-party programs and hardware. For those are reliant on their legacy applications, Windows 7 adds a new feature called Windows XP Mode allows applications that are only compatible with XP run as virtual applications in Windows 7 in the same desktop.

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For all those who are real addicted to IRC chatting,can now find solace in chatting within the Mozilla browser. Chatzilla is a IRC client offered as a Firefox plugin.

What makes this plugin real useful is that its easy to use and it  allows you select amongst some of the most popular IRC servers such as Dalnet,Undernet etc.

ChatZilla provides all the usual IRC client features: multiple servers, a built-in list of standard networks, easy searching and sorting of available channels, logging, and DCC chat and file transfers, plus easy customization with JavaScript plug-ins and CSS styling.

The developer of this extension describes this as

A clean, easy to use and highly extensible Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client.

The application is designed in Javascript and outer design is using CSS and HTML.It’s irc channel is – “irc://irc.mozilla.org/chatzilla”

Connecting to a server is very simple. Selecting and managing your nickname too is self intuitive. Also after joining a server,one can go under ‘Edit’ –> ‘Join Channel’ to select one of the several thousand channels available

So install Chatzilla plugin and enjoy limitless chat now!!!

Please give your valuable comments below on how you felt about this plugin

After the release of Firefox 3.6,it is now Google’s turn to release their stable version of Google Chrome – Chrome 4.0. Chrome has recently gained a lot of exposure in the browser market since they released their extension gallery

Google’s Official Blog states

Today we’re excited to introduce a new stable release of Google Chrome for Windows, which includes two of the browser’s most frequently requested features: extensions and bookmark sync.

Extensions let you add new features and functions to your browser. Some provide one-click access to some of your favorite web applications like eBay and digg, or news and information sources such as NPR and Time.com. Others are useful tweaks for performing common online tasks such as browsing photos, getting directions or shopping.Now you can browse over 1,500 in our extensions gallery and install them on the stable version of Google Chrome.

Bookmark sync is a handy feature for those of you who use several computers — say, a laptop at work and a desktop at home. You can enable bookmark sync to synchronize your bookmarks on all of your computers so that when you create a bookmark on one computer, it’s automatically added across all your computers. This means that you won’t need to manually recreate the bookmark each time you switch computers.

If you’re on a PC and haven’t tried Google Chrome yet, you can download Google Chrome and give all these new features a whirl.

Download Google Chrome

Download Google Chrome 4.0 Offline Installer

The next time you come across a pdf file which asks for a password to open….don’t worry,for now you have AnyBizSoft PDF Password remover.And that too,for FREE

AnyBizSoft PDF Password Remover is designed to remove the password and restrictions of PDF files. You can grab this application for free, which usually costs $19.95.

AnyBizSoft PDF Password Remover Features

• Remove password from your encrypted PDF file instantly
• Support PDF decryption in Windows 7
• 2 decryption modes – Batch and Right-click decryption modes
• Standalone, no Adobe Reader needed

This offer is available for a limited time and expires on February 24 2010. Click on the link below to get to the offer page.

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