FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) is a cool Firefox addon, that enables you to backup your Firefox extensions.  It will actually rebuild your extensions individually into installable .xpi files, that enables you to synchronize between office and home PC.

This extension is available for Firefox 3.x.

As claimed by the addon description, FEBE backs up your extensions, themes, and (optionally) your bookmarks, preferences, passwords, cookies and just about everything else Firefox offers (it can even backup/restore your entire profile).

Another nice feature, is that it enables backing up directly to your Box account.  This facilitates easy sharing and portability.

Happy Independence day to all readers! But, how independent are we, constantly dreading about a mishap on the independence day; how independent are we, when an educated corporate woman working late in the night, can be mishandled by miscreants; how independent are we, in the hands of corrupt politicians. But that’s a separate topic altogether, which this post is not meant for.

One can do good to the society in two ways - By starting to do something good for the society or By stopping something that he/she is already doing.

Just a few tips on stopping something that you might be already doing (if not, you are the man!), which might be better for the society around you.

• Stop scattering litter and trash in public. Use proper bins provided, all the time! (even for a piece of paper or a chewing gum)
• Stop lighting the cancer stick (a.k.a. cigarette) in public. Use them at your peril, only at specified secluded zones or at your home!
• Stop jumping traffic lights. You definitely know how good it is, when someone abides rules and paves way for you!
• Avoid listening to loud or noisy music in public. This also includes unpleasant or over-pleasant ring tones on your “spare-only-at-sleep” gadget
• Avoid as much possible, the use of four wheelers and two wheelers. Thumb rule - Try to see if you can use a two wheeler, when you feel like using the car. Try to see if you can walk, when you feel like using the two wheeler. By the way, how long has it been, since you rode a bicycle?

Many of us should be able to do all these, with least effort. Let’s try to make India sound, smell and look, clean!

Hello readers…

Check out my new technology blog at - http://ashwinkumarc.co.cc/blog

You can subscribe to the feeds through - RSS Feed

Your feedback is my strength.  Feel free to comment about the appearance and the content of the blog.  Would love to hear from you…

Google Blog Search is yet another Google Labs product.  This enables you to search for keywords, across the blogging community.

Once a search is performed, results are returned in a new page.  You can filter the search results based on the time of the post – for instance, you can view only those posts, that were posted in the Last hour.

I have searched for ‘bangalore local’ and it gave me the following results page.

Another cool feature is that, from the results you can do the following:

• Create a RSS/Atom feed out of the results. For instance, you can create a feed that brings you local news from Bangalore
• Create a Google Blog Email Alert (more on this in my future post)

Digg has officially released its toolbar for Firefox 3, which would highly simplify the way the users digg, comment and submit posts.

This toolbar fits nicely under the firefox navigation bar, just above the Google toolbar (in case you have it).

In case you are navigating to a new page, that has never been digged, you can see the ‘Submit’ button in the toolbar.

If the current page has already been digged, you can see the ‘Digg it’ and ‘Add comments’ buttons.

Also, the toolbar displays the popular stories at the bottom of the browser. It displays the information in 3 styles - Bottom Bar (my favorite), Inner popup, Outer popup. You can customize the topics from which to retrieve information.

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More on this:
New Firefox 3 Digg Extension Released

Microsoft has called for Beta testers for Internet Explorer 8, which is due to ship later this year.

You can follow the instruction here to participate in the Beta testing.

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More on this:

Microsoft solicits more IE 8 beta testers

Gmail Web clips brings news bits from your favorite sources, right in to your inbox.



Gmail, by default, picks up news items from popular sources. You can edit and include the feeds of your choice.  Navigate to Settings -> Web Clips to edit your settings. Also, the news is filtered based on the mail contents, when reading an e-mail.

Adobe’s solution for online document editing, storage and sharing - Adobe Buzzword (Beta)

Powered by Flex, it provides a rich user interface for editing and storing your documents in Adobe’s secure server. It supports sharing of these documents with other users (a.k.a. collaborators), inspired by Google Docs. Also, one can export document in PDF, DOC and other popular formats.

Buzzword has two views - Document Organizer and Editor. Document Organizer enables one to view created and shared documents. Editor view enables one to edit documents.

User Interface is clutter free and one can find a lot of Ajaxian effects. I have been bogged down for sometime with Google Docs’, due to speed issues. Should give Buzzword a try. Register for free with Acrobat.com and try! Sure, you will not regret.

WOX, which expands to Web Objects in XML is one another serializer for Java Objects to XML and vice versa.  In my opinion, I find XStream a little heavy and you can give this a try, if your requirements are light.

It supports all essential data types - Primitives, Arrays, Lists and Maps.  Another nice feature is the interoperability it provides, between C# and Java.  Objects in C# can be serialized into XML, which can be deserialized in Java and vice versa.

They have highlighted many features of WOX.  But following are the ones, I would bet for.

• Requires no class modifications
• Interoperability Java and C#
• WOX Data types and Collection classes
• Small footprint (Only 1 jar and size is about 25k)

There are many other features, which I am yet to try out.  Appears to be clean and simple!

AllTop is a news mashup site that claims to bring all latest news, across topics to your desktop. Guy Kawasaki, a well known blogger and strategist, is supposed to be the brain behind this.

Essentially, this is “one site fits all” - that covers a wide range of categories. For instance, there is a category for “PHP”, where another one exists for “Wine”.

Once you enter into a category, a scroll over of links under a source, will display the headline of a particular news item. Interested readers can click on the links to read further.

Appears to be a cool website, but RSS feeds are conspicuous by their absence!

Further changes that would make it much cooler…

• Currently, all categories are organized alphabetically. Instead, the organization must be customizable to the user. I can choose to group all Web 2.0 categories together. Currently there is no such flexibility
• On selecting a category entire page is reloaded and shows only the contents of the category. Instead, they can try partial page reloading (thus retaining the categories page)