Do you want to try out all versions of Internet Explorer which are released till date? Then you must surely download the Internet Explorer Collection pack.

This pack is free for download which includes all versions of Internet Explorer from version 1 (4.40.308) to the new Internet Explorer 8 (8.00.6001.18372). All versions of Internet Explorer are standalone and can be installed at the same time on your computer.

This pack also includes the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar 1.00.2188.0. This Toolbar provides a variety of tools which makes troubleshooting of websites a lot easier and is compatible with Internet Explorer 5.0 and higher when using Windows 2000 or higher.

Internet Explorer Collection 1.2.0.2 includes the following versions of IE:

• Internet Explorer 1.0 (4.40.308)
• Internet Explorer 1.5 (0.1.0.10)
• Internet Explorer 2.01 (2.01.046)
• Internet Explorer 3.0 (3.0.1152)
• Internet Explorer 4.01 (4.72.3110.0)
• Internet Explorer 5.01 (5.00.3314.2100)
• Internet Explorer 5.5 (5.51.4807.2300)
• Internet Explorer 6.0 (6.00.2800.1106)
• Internet Explorer 6.0 (6.00.2900.2180)
• Internet Explorer 7.0 (7.00.5730.13)
• Internet Explorer 8.0 (8.00.6001.18372)

This pack is even compatible with Windows 7 and you can download (54.5Mb) this pack from Final Builds Site.

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There are times when you need some help on keeping track of the emails that you send by way of delivery notifications or read receipts but currently, none of the web-based emails, including Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL Mail and many others, offer any kind of delivery notifications or read receipts except rediffmail.com.

Even when you send a message using Microsoft Outlook, Eudora or Lotus Notes (that allow you to request read receipts), the Internet email service would simply ignore the request and you may never get to know if the message was read by the recipients or delivered at all.

There are three ways by which you can know whether your mail has been read by the recipient.

First one is by using a service called SpyPig. It is a simple and freeware online email tracking system that sends you a notification email as soon as the recipient opens and reads your message. The notification email will have details about the IP address and the number of times your email has been read.

Using SpyPig is very simple. Open the SpyPig website and type your email address where you wish to receive the notification and the message title in the notice form. Then choose the tracking image which you want to embed in the email and select the number of times you want to receive notifications.

Next, click the button to create and activate the SpyPig tracking image. Now, just drag and drop the tracking image in your outgoing email message. For SpyPig to work you and the recipient must use HTML-formatted email rather than just a plain-text or rich-text formatted email.

The second option is by using Statcounter. Create a free account in it and go to the install code options, choose invisible tracking button and HTML only counter. Statcounter will now provide you an HTML image snippet that you have to insert inside the body of your HTML email message.

This will be a white GIF image which will be invisible to the human eye and as soon as your friend opens up your email, your statcounter logs will be updated. You will know the details like IP address of his computer and the date time when the email was opened.

The above option won't work if the recipient has configured his email client to block downloading of images from the internet automatically.

The third and the final option is by using Google Analytics. It involves embedding a tracking code as an external link in your email message. Whenever the recipient clicks on that link, Google Analytics will record that the link has been clicked thus indicating that the email has been read.

The advantage of this method is that no image is downloaded on the client's side but it could fail if the recipient doesn't click the hyperlink.

Do leave comments telling which trick helped you better.

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Have you ever thought of accessing your mails without internet connection? Yes, you can. If you're a Gmail user, Google has just announced that you can use Gmail while offline by installing Google Gears, which is a Google plug-in for Firefox and IE that allows storage of certain information so it can be accessed offline.

Once you enable offline Gmail, Google Gears downloads a cache of your mail; then, when ever you have a limited or no connectivity, Gmail can switch to offline mode. You can send and receive messages (which will be saved in your outbox and then will be sent when Gmail detects a connection) and also use other Gmail features as if you're online.

Once this option is established throughout, then follow the below steps to activate this feature,

1) Click Settings and click the Labs tab.
2) Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
3) Click Save Changes.
4) After your browser reloads, you'll see a new "Offline0.1" link in the upper right hand corner of your account, next to your user name. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Google Gears if you don't already have it.

This feature will be unveiled in couple of days in US or UK. For more details visit Gmail blog.

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Kaspersky Lab, the developer of popular anti-virus for Windows has released a technical prototype of the latest anti-virus for Windows 7. The technical prototype is a complex solution for securing computers running under Windows 7. The prototype includes not only an antivirus component but an effective and fully functional firewall and anti-spam filter.

The prototype comes with a new user interface developed to meet the needs of both inexperienced and advanced users.The prototype is based on a new Antivirus engine which provides complete antivirus protection from all types of Internet threats.

“We knew the release of the new version of Windows would be a huge event for the IT community, which is why we were prepared for it,” said Alexey Kalgin, Director Product Marketing, Corporate Business Division, Kaspersky Lab. “Our company has always made support for Microsoft’s new operating systems a top priority. For example Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Windows Vista was released simultaneously with the operating system’s official launch. When Windows Server 2008 was released, Kaspersky Anti-Virus was the only antivirus product on the market certified by Microsoft. Users can now see for themselves how our antivirus protection technologies perform on the new platform.”

Kaspersky Antivirus for Windows 7 includes real time scanner, firewall and anti-spam protection. It is optimized for multi core systems and will be available for both 32bit and 64bit versions of Windows 7.

Download Kaspersky Antivirus Beta For Windows 7.

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Wikipedia: The Missing Manual book written by John Broughton and published by O'Reilly Media, announced the migration of its book about Wikipedia to the English language online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Starting today, the entire contents of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual (O'Reilly, $29.99) will be available freely online for editing and updating just like any Wikipedia entry.

This book contains all the information you need to get started with editing pages on Wikipedia. It gives you practical advice on creating articles and collaborating with fellow editors, improving existing articles, and working with the Wikipedia community to review new articles, mediate disputes, and maintain the site.

“What makes this project different than any of the other zillion books online today is the format we’ve chosen–a wiki,” explains Peter Meyers, Missing Manuals’ managing editor. “Book viewers will be able to do all the same things they do on any other wiki: view the document, edit it, add to it–in short, whatever they want. The book is going to reside in the site’s Help area, naturally, since the book is all about helping people edit and navigate their way around Wikipedia.”

The drive to post “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual” to Wikipedia was spearheaded by author John Broughton. Broughton, a registered editor at Wikipedia since 2005 with more than 20,000 edits under his belt, says he’s looking forward to see what changes and improvements his fellow Wikipedians will make to his book.

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Just as the Encyclopedia Britannica announced they will allow end-users to edit their articles with moderation, however Wikipedia, which has always allowed free-for-all editing at its site, is apparently looking to be clamp down a little tighter on edits at its site.

Wikipedia is apparently considering instituting a new editorial process that would require all updates to be approved by a "reliable" user. The so-called Flagged Revisions process would allow registered, trusted editors to publish changes to the site immediately. All other edits would be sent to a queue and would not be published until they get approved by one of Wikipedia's trusted team of editors.

The proposal comes in the aftermath of a false entry that was posted by a user, saying Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd had died after an inaugural luncheon last week.

On his public discussion page, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said, "This nonsense would have been 100 percent prevented by Flagged Revisions," adding that the system gives the site the flexibility to cover breaking news stories quickly while avoiding some of the shenanigans it's seen in the past.

This system has already been in use since May in the German version of Wikipedia. But Wales himself points out one major problem with the German model, citing delays of up to three weeks before edits get approved and go live.

"Our version should show very minimal delays (less than 1 week, hopefully a lot less)," wrote Wales, "because we will only be using it on a subset of articles, the boundaries of which can be adjusted over time to manage the backlog."

Which subset of articles would be flagged and exactly how those boundaries would be set isn't clear from the discussion.

Wales writes in his comments that 60 percent of users who responded to a poll approved of the move. Wales has asked people opposed to the Flagged Revisions plan to propose other workable solutions to the problem of wiki malfeasance.

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Encyclopedia Britannica President Jorge Cauz said in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald that the encyclopedia's free, online version, Britannica.com, will soon be allowing user edits and additions to its pages.

Registered users will be able to make corrections, or add entirely new sections to encyclopedia pages much like Wikipedia. The big difference, however, is that Britannica.com's editing and approval system will be managed by its own editors and contracted staff instead of power users. This system is not yet live, but according to the Herald should be within the next day or so.

Cauz told the Herald that the big reason for the change is to improve Britannica's search engine optimization and dethrone Wikipedia from its current dominance on Google.com and other search engines. These edits will also be used for the print edition, benefiting those who purchase its 30-plus volume set.

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Many Blogger users face the problem of not having a embedded comment form below their blog post unlike wordpress. But there is a trick by which you can include the embedded comment form after adding few lines of HTML code below your blog post.

Follow the below steps to achieve it:

1) First login to draft.blogger.com or blogger.com with your Google account.

2) Navigate to Settings -> Comments and select the "Embedded below Post" option as shown below.

If you are using uncustomized blogger template, then the above step is enough. For users who are using customized blogger template continue the below steps.

3) Navigate to Layout -> Edit HTML and first take a backup copy of your template. Then check expand widgets and search the following code

<p class='comment-footer'> <b:if cond='data:post.allowComments'> <a expr:href='data:post.addCommentUrl' expr:onclick='data:post.addCommentOnclick'><data:postCommentMsg/></a> </b:if> </p>

3) Now, replace the above code with the following code.

<p class='comment-footer'> <b:if cond='data:post.embedCommentForm'> <b:include data='post' name='comment-form'/> <b:else/> <b:if cond='data:post.allowComments'> <a expr:href='data:post.addCommentUrl' expr:onclick='data:post.addCommentOnclick'><data:postCommentMsg/></a> </b:if> </b:if> </p>

4) Now, save your template and see your blog post having embedded comment form below.

Let me know by writing a comment on this post, how much you liked this post.

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Good News for all Microsoft users who want to try out Windows 7 Beta. The Windows 7 Beta end download date has been extended from January 24th to February 10th.

According to the Windows 7 Team Blog, "the shutdown of general availability for the Windows 7 Beta will occur in 3 phases over the course of the next few weeks:

• Starting January 27th, the Windows 7 page will be updated with a warning that time is running out on downloading the Windows 7 Beta and that we will be limiting downloads shortly. People will be encouraged to register and start the download of the Windows 7 Beta sooner rather than later.

• February 10th, new downloads of the Windows 7 Beta will no longer be available. People who have already started their Windows 7 Beta download and have not yet finished will still be able to finish their download and are encouraged to do so.

• February 12th, people will no longer be able to complete their download of the Windows 7 Beta. Anyone who hasn’t finished downloading the Windows 7 Beta will be unable to do so.

Product keys for the Windows 7 Beta will continue to be available. So if you have the Windows 7 Beta but didn’t get a product key you will be able to do so even after February 12th.

MSDN and TechNet Subscribers will continue to have access to the Windows 7 Beta bits throughout the Windows 7 Beta phase. The above dates do not apply to MSDN and TechNet Subscribers".

In case, if you fail to download the Windows 7 Beta before February 12th, you can still download it from torrents and get the product key from Microsoft.

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A sitemap is a visual or textually organized model of a Web site's content that allows the users to navigate through the site to find the information they are looking for, just as a traditional geographical map helps people find places they are looking for in the real world.

A sitemap is a kind of interactive table of contents, in which each listed item links directly to its counterpart sections of the Web site. Sitemap helps a search engine to index the website content more faster.

Having a sitemap is an optional thing but it is always advisable for a website to have an updated sitemap whenever the website content is changed. Generating sitemap for small website is easy but for website with thousands of web pages, it becomes a difficult task to generate an updated sitemap regularly.

To help webmasters solve this problem, Google webmaster has developed and launched its official Google Sitemap Generator (Beta) Tool. This free tool can be installed on your server and it will create sitemap for your website. This tool is different in lot of features when compared to the existing third party sitemap generator tools.

The features of Google Sitemap Generator are as follows

• Ping to Google Blog Search for new or modified URLs.
• Generates Mobile Sitemaps for mobile-friendly websites.
• Generates Code Search Sitemap.
• Generates XML Sitemap.
• Find new and modified URLs based on web server’s traffic.

In case, if you are a Blogger user, read this article on How to Create Sitemap for Blogger.

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A new way of anti-terror awareness has been launched in Indian city of Hyderabad. Nowadays each and every person has a cell phone with them and its a known fact that the cell phones are used mostly for sending SMS. The Andhra Pradesh state police has introduced a new method for booking the complaints through SMS(Short Messaging Service). Its an alternate way than calling 100 in order to report any complaints.

Any kind of thing can be raised by any person through this. It can be an alert about dangerous objects or suspicious individuals in and around their surroundings or abandoned bags and unattended vehicles parked in busy areas for long hours, among others. This is been majorly initiated in order to clamp down on terror activities in the city.

To make this facility aware for the public, the cops has joined hands with both CDMA and GSM Mobile service providers to send out SMS alerts to all the people. There are certain code letters to be maintained to classify the types of complaints. If a citizen is having a complaint on traffic, he will have to type “t”, followed by a space and the brief complaint. Similarly, for crime related issues one has to type “c”, for harassment of women “w” and for complaints on terror “te”. The number to send the SMS message is - +91-9010100100.

Though this type of experiment has been already done by Kolkata Police during Puja, hope all metro cities in India adopt this type of service soon to fight against terror.

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As we all know, IE is facing an increase in its competitors around the late 2008 with the debut of Mozilla Firefox browser 3.1 and Google Chrome 1.0.

The latest figures released by Net Applications, a company that tracks the browser usage, have shown that in December 2008, Internet Explorer was used by only 68.15% of Internet users, while Firefox has managed to maintain its market share over 20 percent, being used by 21.34% of users. And Apple's Safari pressed on to 7.93 percent, whereas Google's Chrome browser moved to 1.04 percent share, marking the first time the browser has hit the 1 percent milestone.

The browser has lost a massive amount of market share however since it hit its peak in 2003 at 94.43 percent. Even at the beginning of 2008 IE was cited as having just over 77 percent of market share.

Of the top four non-Microsoft browsers, only Opera Software ASA's flagship application failed to grow its share; it stayed at 0.71% in December, the same as in November. While December and November have traditionally been tough months for IE, lets see whether it regains back its share by the release of IE8 in 2009.

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Many people spend time online by watching videos over YouTube website but watching videos online will eat out lot of your bandwidth, hence it is not recommended for those who have dial-up internet connection.

Wouldn't it be better if the Youtube videos can be saved on your Hard drive so that it can be watched will you are offline and you need not have to worry about the bandwidth problem.

First, to save Youtube videos on your Hard drive, you need to have Mozilla Firefox browser installed on your system.

If Firefox is installed on your system then follow the below steps:

1. Play the Youtube video that is to be saved in Firefox.

2. Once the video is fully played, close Firefox.

3. Navigate to “C:\Documents and Settings\User Profile\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\Any Name.default\Cache” (where C: is where the OS is installed, User Profile is the name of the user profile and Any Name can be anything followed by ".default" as folder name).

4. In the Cache folder, rearrange all files by size.

5. Now look for the files with maximum size and its modified time to be around the same time you watched the Youtube video.

6. If you find any files like that then those must be Youtube videos.

7. Change the extension of the files to .flv.

8. Now, play the .flv files in an FLV Player.

Do give your valuable feedback, on how easy was it for you to save the Youtube videos.

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The nonprofit foundation that runs the online encyclopedia Wikipedia announced on Friday that it has met its $6 million fundraising goal, enough to cover operating expenses for the current fiscal year, ending June 30, 2009.

The foundation operates the site without advertising as a matter of principle, making donations critical.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said more than 125,000 people had donated a total of four million dollars since he made an appeal for funds on July 1.

"In addition, we've received major gifts and foundation support totaling two million dollars," Wales said in a thank you letter on the website of his non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

Wales said any further donations beyond the six-million-dollar goal would be placed in a "reserve fund, which will help us to offset operating costs beyond the current fiscal year."

In his donation appeal, Wales said that over the past eight years, more than 150,000 volunteers have contributed over 11 million articles in 265 languages to wikipedia.org.

Wales's online encyclopedia allows anyone with an Internet connection to make entries and edit content.

In a thank-you note posted on the site Friday, Wales told donors, “You have proven that Wikipedia matters to you, and that you support our mission: to bring free knowledge to the planet, free of charge and free of advertising.”

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E-Swecha is a free software project initiated by the Free Software Movement in India and was aimed at developing a free Operating System to, for and by the engineering students. This first Indian operating system is a collaborative work of  hundreds of engineering students in and around Hyderabad. Crucial inputs from a team of academicians, most of them teaching in various engineering colleges has been a major contribution to the project. The name is derieved from "E(ngineering)- Swecha" [Swecha is the telugu word for 'freedom']

Father of free software, Richard Stallman visited Hyderabad on 23rd Dec,2008 to oversee the migration of thousands of  computers to a new "Indian" operating system. E-Swecha is been installed on 21,000 computers across Andhra Pradesh. It is based on the Debian OS Linux, was created by the student community in engineering colleges in Hyderabad and has been in development for a year. The OS is packed with all the tools that engineering students could possibly need on a single platform.

Stallman said that free software use in India was fairly high, though much remained to be done. He said that Kerala took the initiative by migrating computers in its public schools to free software, due to the efforts of the Free Software Foundation of India. While some schools in Karnataka and West Bengal have made the switch, progress was stalled in Andhra Pradesh, Stallman said.

For more details on E-Swecha, see here.

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Every year, Google gives holiday cash gift of $1000 to its employees worldwide. But this year, this tradition is going to change. Instead of giving $1000 cash gift, Google is handing out version of T-Mobile’s G1 Android mobile phone as Christmas gift to its employees worldwide.

The G1 Android phone will be given to 85 percent of Google’s 20,123 global staff in the United States, Western and Central Europe, Canada, Australia, Singapore and Japan, according to an internal email sent to its employees. In the countries where the G1 Android phone has not been released, employees will be receiving $400. This is $600 less than the usual $1000 cash bonus, saving $17 Million for Google.

In an official memo to its employees, Google told them "The holiday bonus is a Google tradition — it’s a great way to thank everyone for their hard work. In the past, we’ve done this in cash. This year, we’ve decided to give Googlers a different kind of present — a Dream phone.”

What's your say on this? is this a Google way of marketing and testing their Android G1 mobile phone?

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As we are aware, the Chrome install is very easy. Even when the security features are concerned, Google claims that Chrome is more secure than IE8. Google says that each tab runs in its own “sandbox,” so that if there’s nasty spyware-type software running on one Web site, it has no access to the rest of your computer, or even the other tabs. Google asserts that this is much stronger protection than Internet Explorer 8 gives you, especially in Windows XP.

But when it comes to speed, Google also ensures that its own services run better in Chrome than in other browsers. Is this part of Google’s great conspiracy? If you had noticed, in Gmail website in IE, you’ll see a link at the top that says "Get Faster Gmail" - it’s placed next to your Gmail user name and highlighted in bold red.

As you could expect to see some tips or tricks to make Gmail faster, but surprisingly that link will lead you to page which contains link to download Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. You can also see a phrase in that page, which says that Gmail will be twice as fast in Google Mail supported browsers.

I wonder whether Gmail website is really that fast on Chrome or is this just an indirect promotion of Google Chrome for IE users?

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As we know, IBM Lotus Symphony has been selected as the Product of the Year 2008 for Desktop Applications. This was announced few weeks back by CRN, a leading industry publication. The editors at the Test Center for CRN evaluated hundreds of products in 2008 out of which IBM Lotus Symphony was ranked first.

IBM Lotus Symphony is a suite of applications for creating, editing, and sharing text, spreadsheet, and other documents. It is a richly-featured set of productivity tools that are intuitive and easy to use and provided at no charge. Users can enjoy the easy-to-use interface and online community for templates, tips and support.

Inspite of all these advantages, IBM is now delivering IBM Symphony's CD at your doorstep for free of cost. Openoffice.org being a 142 MB application, with slow internet connections cannot be downloaded efficiently. Hence, IBM is offering the IBM lotus symphony suite CD door delivered for those who live in India.

Residents of India can just fill in this request form and an IBM Lotus Symphony CD will delivered to your place free of cost. Still, it can also be downloaded from IBM website.

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Currently, iPhone is one of the most popular devices on the market and many people buy it and even take photos using it. By seeing this trend, Hewlett-Packard(HP) has announced a new application for the iPhone and iPod Touch and can be downloaded from App Store for free.

This application is called HP iPrint Photo and allows pictures stored on an iPhone to be printed using HP's inkjet printers attached to a Wi-Fi network.

All you need to do is load up the application in iPhone, view a picture, and tap on it. A few seconds later, it will wirelessly begin printing on your inkjet printer. Images printed with the iPrint application will be of 4 x 6 size.

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As we know, the existing Google Webmaster Tools had support for 26 languages but recently, Google extended its language support to 40 by adding support to 14 new languages. The new languages that is supported are Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Filipino, Greek, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Portuguese (Portugal), Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

Now the total list of languages that are being supported are itemized below along with their universal code.

Arabic (ar)
Bulgarian (bg)
Catalan (ca)
Traditional Chinese (Taiwan) (zh-TW)
Simplified Chinese (zh-CN)
Croatian
Czech (cs)
Danish (da)
Dutch (nl)
English (en)
English UK (en-GB)
Filipino (fil)
Finnish (fi)
French (fr)
German (de)
Greek (el)
Hebrew (iw)
Hindi (hi)
Hungarian (hu)
Indonesian (id)
Italian (it)
Japanese (ja)
Korean (ko)
Latvian (lv)
Lithuanian (lt)
Norwegian (no)
Polish (pl)
Portuguese (Brazilian) (pt-BR)
Portuguese (Portugal) (pt-PT)
Romanian (ro)
Russian (ru)
Serbian (sr)
Slovakian (sk)
Slovenian (sl)
Spanish (es)
Swedish (sv)
Thai (th)
Turkish (tr)
Ukrainian (uk)
Vietnamese (vi)

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