The Problem
It is probable that in your home, more than one person owns an iPod / MP3 player of some description. It is also probable, that one person seems to have been delegated the task of updating everyone’s iPod and managing iTunes.

If you are reading this article…it is probable that you are at least fairly computer literate, and therefore probable that you are that lucky, lucky person in your household.

Sure, being the sole manager of your household’s music has its advantages – you have complete control of your music, you can update your own iPod whenever you want, and I suppose with some clever deviations from the truth you could loosely call yourself a DJ, a sure way to pick up girls in your local club.

However, once your mates start asking why the hell you have the latest McFly album (which you innocently downloaded for your girlfriend / sister / roommate) on your iPod…a better solution is needed.

The Proposal
If you have even a basic wireless network in your home then there is a simple solution. By using what is known as a ‘Network Attached Storage” (NAS), you can attach a hard drive to your home network, on which you can store all of your music.
When you used any of the computers in your house, they would detect the NAS as another hard drive on your computer, meaning that from any PC in the house you could:

Play music
Download music from the iTunes store or other (totally legal, of course) places
Create a new playlist for your iPod
Synchronise your iPod
Sound appealing? If so read on!

The Possibilities…
There are many ways to add a NAS device to your home network - the main one I will discuss here is the simplest – you buy a NAS device, problem solved. These are relatively new, especially to the home market. If you take a look at http://www.scan.co.uk/ you will see a number of them ranging from £86 to £650. None of them there are particularly bad, but personally I use the Western Digital’s MyBook series and have had no problems with them. The instructions you need to follow however will be almost identical regardless of which product you buy in the end. For more info on choosing a NAS please look at the “Choosing a NAS” section at the end of this article.

The Solution
Once you have purchased a NAS (I like that acronym…) you simply plug the Ethernet (usually yellow or blue) cable into your router or modem. If you have a PC connected to the router via Ethernet, as opposed to wirelessly, don’t worry - you don’t need to plug the NAS into the computer directly.
It is beyond the scope of this article to cover plugging the NAS to a plug – if you need help, give your household Microwave company a call…they seem to specialise in telling people how to plug things in (for legal reasons you may have to lie and say its your Microwave by the way….you could try running the term “Network Attached Storage” by them but…)

Anyway – when you power up your PC, the NAS should be pretty much plug and play – the NAS will show up as another hard drive (viewable from My Computer) or possibly a network location, depending on how it was designed.

Either way, now all you have to do is move your music to the new hard drive. First, go to iTunes, click the Advanced tab and then click “Consolidate Library” - this will simply make sure all your files are in one place (My Music for Windows by default), so if you have downloaded files to random places over the years, it will move them to My Music.

Now close iTunes and simply move or copy your music folder into it from your local drive. Once this is done, you may want to delete your local copy to save space, and so you can be sure iTunes is no longer using the ‘old’ library.

Now to add the new library to your home computers simply go to File (in iTunes of course) -> Add folder to library -> select the folder you just copied everything to.

You can now install iTunes on all PCs in your house, and link them to the NAS!

Extra: Choosing a NAS
NAS devices can be a simple “hard drive in a box with an Ethernet port bunged on the back” affair – in which case the only real factor in making a decision is getting a balance between cost and space.

I would recommend you be generous with the storage capacity – a 320gb model is little more expensive than a 160gb in most cases, and it will obviously allow for future expansion of your (totally legal) music library. In addition, you can also use it to store documents, backups etc in the future.

These basic models will typically cost between £80 and £120. If you stretch the budget a little further, you can get the excellent “Asus WL-700gE NAS Appliance” (http://www.trustedreviews.com). This is not only a NAS device, but also a router with firewall, and acts as a “media and print” server – so you can connect all your PCs wirelessly to one printer, and stream TV etc. It can even be used to download files without a computer running through the night! I have not used it myself, but it has excellent write ups.

As stated earlier in the review, if you are looking for a simple NAS box, I’d recommend the Western Digital MyBook series, but LaCie and other companies also produce good devices.

If you have an old hard drive lying about, you should be able to find an adapter to give it an Ethernet port, but by the time you have bought that and an enclosure for it, it would probably be more cost effective to just get a separate NAS device.

If you have any questions , feel free to contact me at james AT pimp-my-ipod DOT com – this is my first article here but I intend to post more and maintain my existing ones to keep them up-to-date.

Step 1: Get the torrent file , this is the file with the .torrent extension and it contains information about where the files are on the torrent network. (for ex, torrentz.com is a worldwide tracker, tamiltorrents.net is a website for tamil stuff)
Step 2: Get a torrent client ( Bitspirit is one nice client)
Step 3: Open the .torrent file using BitSpirit software, it will ask where to save the file, specify the location and the downloading will start.
Note:
Always make sure that a torrent has enough seeders before starting a download (atleast 1).

Technical part:
BitTorrent is a protocol developed by Bran Cohem in April 2001.
In a torrent network, files are not stored on a central server, rather, files are stored with clients and a tracking server holds the information about where the files are on the network and the tracker coordinates the transfer of files between the peers.
Its architecture is as follows,

Data flow -> Actual file to be downloaded.
Index flow -> Flow of index details, ie, where the files are.

Windows Live Writer is my prefered blog authoring and publishing tool, same for lot of people out there.

It is quiet easy to compose and post using Windows Live Writer and I have been doing that for sometime for my WordPress blogs. But for one new site I am using Drupal for the first time and I wanted to configure Windows Live Writer to post “stories”, “pages”, “forum topics” and “blog posts” but there are several small little details which made it a trial and error exercise to configure Drupal to allow me to post all the above mentioned items.

In this post I will document step by step process to go about configuring Windows Live Writer (WLW) to post to Drupal.

This post assumes that you have admin level privileges to the Drupal system.

In order to use this XMLRPC mechanism to post, you need to enable Blog API. Go to Home » Administer » Site configuration and enable Blog APIs:

You can get Windows Live Writer from here. Once you have downloaded Windows Live Writer, go through these series of steps to configure it to post various content types to Drupal. For this illustration I am going to use India SEO Consultants domain.

Step 1:

Do not enter the default domain name but enter the url in the following format: http://<domainname>/node/add/story, replace domain name with your own domain.

Step 2:

Select WordPress 2.2+ from the “Type of weblog that you are using” and in the “Remote posting URL for your weblog” enter http://<domainname>/xmlrpc.php and hit next.

Step 3:

Select what content type you want to add (if you want to add multiple content types from Drupal then you have to carry these steps those many times and they will appear as separate weblog entries in your Windows Live Writer.

Step 4:

It will ask you if it can do a temporary post to check style. Say yes.

Step 5:

Enter a name for your weblog and click “Finish” and you are all set.

Happy drupaling!

Loads of widgets, integration with third party tools using JavaScript APIs, high performance AJAX. All this is causing sites to slow down. Factors which nobody cared about, now need to be looked into to ensure that the site loads faster.

Optimization Techniques

I will present some optimization techniques in several easy to use and understand categories. This will allow you to pick and choose one category and focus on it at any one time.

1. General Optimization Tips
2. Optimization Techniques for Images
3. Optimize HTML on the page
4. Optimize JavaScript and CSS Files
5. Optimization tips for Documents on Websites
6. Tools to help with Optimization

General Optimization Tips

• HTTP Pipelining is used to allow multiple requests to be answered at the same time. By default Internet Explorer allows two connections per hostname, this means you have multiple objects (images/flash etc.) on the page served from the same domain then only two will be loaded at any one time and rest will have to wait. So, if you spread your objects over more host names (ip can be ame) then you leverage this to load more than 2 objects at one given time.
• Enabling gzip compression on your server for JavaScript, css, html and xml will reduce the http response size. (HTTP compression for Apache, IIS 6.0 Compression)
• Add Expires header, this will ensure that the browser does not validate the page on each and every request. Expires headers are most often used with images, but they should be used on all components including scripts, style sheets, and Flash.

Optimization Techniques For Images

Reducing the size of images on your web site will make your site load faster. Images for the web need not be very high quality (until of course you are into some business where quality is a must). Most of the images which I put on sites are in gif format. Here is what you need to do with images on your web site:

• Due to the overhead associated with any new request, one big image file will load faster than two smaller ones which are half its size. If you are loading lot of small images you might be better off using a technique called “CSS Sprites“.
• Save any image for the web using Adobe Photoshop (open any image in Photoshop and use the option “Save for Web..”. Gimp users can save the image in GIF format after opening it . The reduction in size is considerable without much loss of quality for most images.
• I further try another level of compression using the Gif Compressor available online at: http://www.giftools.com/gifcompress.html. This works well in most cases but not always. My advice is to let your image go through this and then check if it works with you.
• Those insisting on using png, can try png compressors like the one available at http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/ or http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~cosmin/pngtech/optipng/to compress png images.
• For jpeg enthusiasts, the online tool http://www.chami.com/jc/. This tool provides you with options and numbers on how the image will look with 90%, 80%.. 10% quality and how long will it take to load. Very useful information for you to have a visual view and decide on which image to use.
• A good document on how to prepare images for the web using Adobe Photoshop.
• SEO TIP: Please make sure that you provide good titles (alt tag) and names for image files so that image search can use effectively. Want to know more read this: Optimizing Images for Search Engines

Besides reducing the size, there are few other things which you can do with images to ensure a faster load experience for end users

Optimize HTML on the page

There is lot of garbage on an html page which is not required. If that fluff is carefully removed, it will give considerable performance gain. Some things to consider for HTML optimization:

• remove all comment tags (unless a necessity)
• Use a strict DTD to enable standards mode for maximum rendering speed
• use divs (if you can) rather than tables
• simplify complex tables as they are rendered slower
• remove unnecessary whitespace characters
• remove unnecessary quotation marks (if you do not care about being xhtml compliant). e.g.,
  <table BORDER=”0? CELLSPACING=”0? CELLPADDING=”0? align=”center”> will be converted to
  <table BORDER=0 CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 align=center>;
• stick to using only the description and keywords meta-tags (unless required)
• NOTE: there are lot of tools out there on the web which can help you accomplish all this. Since I have personally not used any so I won’t recommend.

Optimize JavaScript and CSS Files

For the new generation of Web 2.0 application which use Ajax and nice designs, Javascript and CSS files can be of appreciable size. They should always be in separate file and not inline (that way browsers can cache them). It is always a good option to compress them before linking to them. This way there is less to load. the tools that I use for compressing them are:

• http://javascriptcompressor.com/: just paste in your Javascript code and get the optimized code (works very well and also obfuscates Javascript)
• http://www.cssoptimiser.com/: optimize by the supplying the CSS file URL or by uploading CSS or by cutting and pasting CSS code.

Other tips on CSS and Javascript:

• Put CSS stylesheets inside the head section of an page. This helps page load faster as it is rendered progressively.
• Put Javascript files at the bottom of the page (if possible). This will ensure that content above that will render first.
• Avoid CSS expressions as far as possible. This is because they are evaluated every time the page is rendered, resized, scrolled or even on mouse movements.
• SEO Tip: separating Javascript and CSS code to separate files enables search engines to crawl more of your on page text as it is believed that only top 4K of the text on any page is crawled by search engines.

Optimization tips for Documents on Websites

With increasing amount of PDF and MS Word documents being placed on Websites, their size optimization is also an important requirement.

• Using Acrobat Professional, select Advanced>PDF Optimizer to “right-size” a PDF document (SEO Tip: make sure your PDF document is text based and not image based and you fill in title and meta tags for the PDF document. For more tips on how to optimize PDF documents for search engines read Eleven Tips For Optimizing PDFs For Search Engines)
• Word documents with lot of images can become bulky really fast and will take forever for an user to download the file on the web. You should take some time and optimize the images in the word document using the “Compress Picture” button on the picture toolbar. This results in considerable file size reduction.
• SEO Tip: always name the documents using proper names (e.g. SEO-tips.pdf and not doc1.pdf)

Tools to help with Optimization

• Load Time Analyzer: The Load Time Analyzer allows developers to measure and graph how long web pages take to load in Firefox
• YSlow: YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool.
• http://javascriptcompressor.com/: Javascript compressor
• http://www.cssoptimiser.com/: CSS compressor
• http://www.giftools.com/gifcompress.html : gif compressor
• http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/: png compressor
• http://www.chami.com/jc/: jpg compressor

Batch file is a file which holds a list of commands or instructions that are executed once the batch file is executed. Basically the commands are DOS commands that are executed as if they were executed one by one on the command prompt. Batch files are of great help when you need to repeat a certain task many times. You can just specify what is to be done and it will be done when that batch file is executed.

Before moving further, you must be familiar with DOS because in this post I am going to explain only about batch files. To learn more about DOS commands, check out this link : Ms DOS help and commands

What it can do?

The limiting factor is you and the DOS itself i.e. What we want to do and can it be done through DOS. Not every program supports command line version (it can’t be executed in the command prompt).

Example #1 (Open Multiple Applications)

You need to open up different set of applications depending on what you intend to do. Instead of clicking their icons one by one, you can save time by creating a batch file. For example: If I am in a mood of browsing internet while listening to songs, I can create a batch file with the following content:

start /max C:\Progra~1\Mozill~1\firefox.exe
start /min C:\Progra~1\Google\Google~1\googletalk.exe
start /min C:\Progra~1\Window~2\wmplayer.exe

Start command is used to start window applications. For more info about this command, type start /? at the command prompt. Here, I have assumed that all the programs are installed in their default folder. If you have installed them somewhere else, then make changes accordingly.

Example #2 (Copy files)

You need to copy all the files or certain files whenever you insert a CD/DVD/Pen drive, then you can create a batch file with the following content:

xcopy h:\*.* d:\docs\ /s

It is assumed that h:\ is your source drive (CD/DVD drive or pen drive) and you want to copy all the files to the docs folder residing on D drive.

xcopy h:\*.mp3 d:\songs\ /s

It is assumed that h:\ is your source drive (CD/DVD drive or pen drive) and you want to copy all the mp3s to the songs folder residing on D drive. Again, type xcopy /? at the command prompt for more about this command.

Example #3 (Delete Junk Files)

Following file types are considered as junk files : *.~* ~*.* *.??~ *.— *.tmp *._mp *.old *.bak *.syd *.chk *.gid mscreate.dir *.dmp 0???????.nch

You can make a batch file that scans for them and deletes them with the following content:

del c:\*.~* /s /q
del c:\~*.* /s /q
del c:\*.??~ /s /q
del c:\*.— /s /q
del c:\*.tmp /s /q
del c:\*._mp /s /q
del c:\*.old /s /q
del c:\*.bak /s /q
del c:\*.syd /s /q
del c:\*.chk /s /q
del c:\*.gid /s /q
del c:\mscreate.dir /s /q
del c:\*.dmp /s /q
del c:\0???????.nch /s /q
del c:\windows\temp\*.* /q
del c:\temp\*.* /q
del d:\*.~* /s /q
del d:\~*.* /s /q
del d:\*.??~ /s /q
del d:\*.— /s /q
del d:\*.tmp /s /q
del d:\*._mp /s /q
del d:\*.old /s /q
del d:\*.bak /s /q
del d:\*.syd /s /q
del d:\*.chk /s /q
del d:\*.gid /s /q
del d:\mscreate.dir /s /q
del d:\*.dmp /s /q
del d:\0???????.nch /s /q

Add commands for other partitions in a similar fashion. Again, type del /? at the command prompt for more about this command.

Example #4 (Defagment and Shutdown the computer)

You can make a batch file that defragments the drive you specify and then shutdown the computer. Here is what you need to have it :

defrag c:
defrag d:
shutdown /s /t 10 /c “Defragmentation Complete !”

Add commands for other drives too. Shutdown command shutdown the computer. Again, type shutdown /? at the command prompt for more about this command.

To know more about any command, type command name followed by /? at the command prompt.

For more info regarding batch files, check this link : Batch File Help

You can convert a batch file (*.bat) to a executable file (*.exe) online by this link: Online *.bat to *.exe

Batch File work around the blogosphere:

How to Lock Files and Folders without any Software

Safely Remove Virus from your USB/Thumb/Pen Drive

There is still more left. You can create batch files that can delay, check conditions and do a lot more. Give them a try and you will end up using them. If you face any trouble in implementing a particular thing, feel free to get in touch with me. I will try my best to help you out.

Websense Security Labs explains the spammer Anti-CAPTCHA operations and mass-mailing strategies. Apparently spammers are using combination of different tactics — proper email accounts, visual social engineering, and fast-flux — representing a strategy, explains their resident CAPTCHA expert. It is evident that spammers are working towards defeating anti-spam filters with their tactics