Sourabh’s blog

I was always the one of those who used to hate installing Adobe Acrobat Reader for reading pdf’s. Foxit PDF reader is just what I need to open pdf files - simple, minimalistic and no nonsense. I dont need any of the Adobe’s Compatibility with browsers to open pdf’s - the only time when my system hangs. Nor do I want to delete files form the plugin’s directory to speed up the Acrobat Reader’s loading times. Even the seventh installment just gave a false feeling of loading pdf’s quickly , all thanks to the constant large memory footprint even while you were not opening the proggie. Foxit PDF Reader with the version 1.3 release Build 1522 seems a lot better in rendering pages. Earlier while dealing with files with 200+ pages and fast scrolling the proggie would just crash. But that is no longer the case.

Earlier versions were a mere single exe file program with no setup. So if you are like me who downloads in some weird corners of your hdd, it can get a little messy. Finally the developers decided to give it a simple setup/install function like with all other program. Now I have a cute nice little icon in my fav. colors - blue and orange to add some colors to my otherwise dead desktop with a plain black background.

If you just read pdf’s offline, Foxit PDF Reader is a hell lotta better option than the bloated counterpart. No harm in trying it out if you havent. A mere 1.1 MB.

Get Foxit PDF Reader

No, its not a name of a book from TMH or O’Reilly. Its the time taken for my get hooked on to Ubuntu. I managed to complete my Ubuntu download on Sunday evening in approx. 22 hrs. Within no time, I burnt a disc and installed it. Installation was a breeze, this was the first time I had installed a debian distro. Installation went on smoothly, took me about half an hour to get into the desktop.

Ubuntu turned out to be one of the very few distros in which I managed to configure my net connection. This wasnt the first time, I tried to get familiar with a linux distro, but as it turns out I have finally found a nice distro to be using regularly. With all the help from Atul (techno_funky) who himself got versed with the OS in the last few weeks, I managed to get some basic help. So thats done with the 24 hrs part.

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The Nero 6.6.0.18 release has been around for quite a while but I just had been delaying downloading the same from the time it was released. There was a lil bug in the old version which I had been using that didnt display the track-info correctly in the Audio Cds. So finally decided to download the 6.6.0.18 release yesterday. And damn, theres a new release of Nero in the name of 6.6.1.4 within hours of my download. Anyways, looking at the bright side - atleast Nero continues to update Nero 6 even after the 7’s release.

There are two choice to choose from when it comes to Instant Messengers. Two( Y!M or MSN) mainly because most of your friends on one and/or both of these mostly. A couple of weeks back, I got bored of Y!M for some unknown reasons, tried to work on MSN Network. And as we all know it, bloatware is the name usually coined with MSN Messengers and nothing seems to be more closer to reality. Even the Ver. 8 beta is just not for me. Mainly 2 reasons! The first reason is quite obvious and secondly its a nightmare with those working on a low resolutions. Even on 1024×768, the basic MSN windows takes a lotta space on screen, large buddy avatars in the contact list, the sidebar links - all consume a lotta space leaving with very little space to work around. Even in the conversation window, a few messages and the whole window gets filled up. So even a small brief talk with a friend requires vigorous scrolling to know where you started from. Lastly, even after 8 installments of MSN Messenger, you can only use the default 16 colors for your conversatio text. If you have to change the colors, you have to use third party tools. Cool isn’t it?

What do you do if you dont like it, obviously use some third party client. Started using GAIM on a regular basis, and for some strange reasons i get logged out every other hour, apparently for no reasons. Downloads run just fine, browsing gives no problem and in the middle of no where, GAIM just logs out. And this has been happening a lotta times to be just a coincidence. May be there would be a problem with my ISP, but earlier Yahoo used to run just fine! Why not the same with MSN?

This so freakin annoying to see those ‘ You have been disconnected from so and so servers at xx : xx : xx time’ in GAIM. I cant do anything but curse MSN for this. All cauz of their servers or whatever reason behind it. May be things are just leading for me to stop using MSN too.

After all the speculations and rumours that had been going around in the tech-world about Google entering the IM arena, its not too much of a surprise when Google entered this sphere of the Internet early this morning. Many would agree like me that this was on the cards and always bound to happen some time in the near future. Over the last one year, Google has really come of age with its new, revolutionary and vast range of services like a whooping free 2Gb of email space through Gmail, maps, shopping information, news, desktop search, and now IM and VoIP. And more aptly the service has been named Google Talk.

Brief Lookup:

The installation file of the Google Talk is a mere 900 Kb and can be downloaded from here. The new IM is based on the Jabber/XMPP protocol. Currently the new IM has native support only for Windows users. But since its based on the Jabber/XMPP protocol- GAIM, Trillian, iChat, Adium and Psi can be used to connect to the new network. However the Voice chat services would for now be natively only for the Windows users. The Gmail Id and Password are used to sign in the the Google Talk Beta.

Installation and Interface:

The installtion of Google Talk doesnt take anything more than a few seconds. The OS supported are from Win2k onwards as a result those stuck with Windows 98 wouldn’t be fortunate enough to try this new Instant Manager. The Google Talk beta interface is very clean, sleek and appealing for starters. The very first thing that I noticed with the Interface was it wasnt bloated with features and advertisements. The interface has no ads, stock ticker, news info, weather info, even links to allied Google services. The Messenger in its first beta installment is pretty much low on features and provides only text/voice chat services. Google Talk beta does not include emoticons (unlike Yahoo and MSN Messenger), video or file transfer support, conference and smileys as yet.

Here is a pic depicting the actual messenger Contact List. The Inbox, Settings and the Help tabs are seen at the top-right of the messenger window. The Add Friend tab is seen at the bottom right. The Whole color combination is the same typical Google style as seen in their search engine and other sites. Sadly the links in the Status cannot be linked to actually open the webpages as seen in the Y!M. You can also find a Search Contacts tab in here.

This is the status side bar seen to change the status. Besides the common status messages you can have custom status and other two features as seen below.

The in-comming voice calls and the actual voice chat menu showing the speaker and microphone volumes are as seen below.

Now lets talk about the actual Message window. Its a plain, simple and tiny little square window. It seriously lacks the feature to show whether the particular person is online or not. When you get a couple of messages to gether the message windows stack together and adjoint themselves.

The add a new contact to your list and approval to add are quite simple too.

Settings:

Lots of controls and settings can be found in the settings box. Here you can add people to your blocked list so they will not be able to contact you via Google Talk beta. You can also choose if you want Google Talk beta to launch at Windows startup or not, manage notifications (such as new Gmail email), and save your recent chat history. Due to the presence of an inbuily Gmail notifier which checks for new mails you no longer need the same and it gets uninstalled if you had it installed previously during the installtion.

Tweaks/Hidden features:

At first glace, the IM from the search engine biggie seemed to be plain same text mode and soon to be monotonous in looks due to no text formatting. However as yet, I have found *TEXT* to be displayed in bold as TEXT and _TEXT_ to be displayed as TEXT. So atleast there are ways to get Bold and Italics in our messages. I am quite sure that there may be many other hidden features which are not quite apparent to change the font color/enable smileys, and other formatting but only time will let them unreveal themselves. Or mebbe the following versions to this beta . would feature them.

Final Words:

So is Google Talk, Just another IM client? Probably yes in my opinion as of now. Lets accept that there is nothing great in it which sets it apart from other IM/VoIP Services. Apart from undistorted voice chats on a 64kbps connection there isnt anything to crib about. But the status and legacy which Google enjoys, no one can have second thoughts about the fact that ‘ Whatever they touch, would turn into Gold’ due to the kind of fan-following it enjoys. There is no doubt that if Google wants they can surely come up with a Instant Messenger client that can very well challenge the likes of Yahoo, Msn and AOL counterparts. Other thing to be looked out is, Whether its gonna be the same old story with the Google Messenger too - ‘ The Forever Beta’ strategy. To end it on a positive note, I would be very happy if the subsequent (ofcourse beta :p ) versions have smileys, Conference support, File transfers and I wont for sure not mind google ads, as they would benefit both the people using messenger and ofcouse Google. Only time will tell what we have in store and whats the possible future of Instant Messengers.