Portable Applications

I think you can guess what portable application is. Generally speaking, it is juz application software which is portable and small enough to carry in any portable devices such as USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive or even MP3 player. What if you can carry your favorite IM, email client, web browser, office suite, antivirus program, utilities, PDF reader, games and so on along with you whenever you go. You juz need to plug in your portable device into any PC and use portable applications without the need to re-install them. Sounds cool, doesn’t it?

Now, I’d like to introduce an open source program which you can download and install into your portable device. Once installed, you can use portable applications from your device. Furthermore, you can add in or remove any portable applications like we do in PC. You will get your own ‘portable start menu’ from which you can choose and run applications installed. What I don’t like is that you can only install ‘portable version’ of a particular application, but not a window based application. But as time goes, more portable applications will be added bcoz of the nature of open source. Anyway, we should be satisfied since we can run frequently-used applications and carry them into flash drives along with us.

Safari 3 for Windows users.

Finally, Apple has launched Safari 3 for Windows users. Safari is being hyped as ‘the fastest web browser on any platform’ and it grabs the web pages up to 2 times faster than IE 7 and up to 1.6 times than Mozilla Firefox 2. When it comes to JavaScript performance, it runs 2.8 times faster than IE and 1.6 times than Firefox 2. I don’t know whether those hypes are true. But the fact is that IE is the slowest browser I’ve ever encountered. Firefox is noticeably faster than IE and so is Safari 3. When it comes to user interface of those browsers, I like the stylish interface of Safari most. Read Safari related news.

Vista Start Menu.

If you like Vista-style start menu and your PC doesn’t catch up with requirements to run Vista, this freeware is for you. It’s easy to access programs in menu coz all program short-cuts are divided into groups.

Mahalo

Mahalo for stopping by – Mahalo is Hawaiian word meaning ‘thank you’. I’m not teaching you Hawaiian. Mahalo is the first human-powered search engine managed and powered by a group of so-called Guides who love digging up valuable, informative, spam-free, porn-free and adult-free web sites. They juz sift out the good from the bad and present you hand-picked web sites. So the way they do is a bit different from what search engine does. Search engine uses web bot or spider which literally is special software and lets the bot travel through the web to index web sites. What I like about Mahalo is that it’s pretty useful when I search for a particular topic e.g. wine, java script, php, Bill Gates, yoga, Pirates of the Caribbean and so on. The drawback I think is that it will take some time before Mahalo runs as a one-stop service provider for quality search results bcoz a handful of Guides are trying to dig up universe-like web – which is ridiculous.

High-profile spammer is arrested.

The name of the notorious online ‘actor’ is Robert Alan who was, according to an international anti-spam organization, on a top list of most-wanted spammers and he is one of those top 135 spammers who bombard as much as 80% of our in-boxes. I just don’t think that the number of spam will not decline to a significant level bcoz the arrest of Robert is just ‘a drop in the bucket’ considering the next godfather will take his place. Here is the link to the worst top 10 spammers.

Ref: Spam flows despite high-profile arrest.

Hide Folders.

PC users sometimes need security and privacy. This freeware is a simple program which lets you hide any folders of your choice. All you need to do is you just add folders you want to hide. Having hidden, chosen folders will not be seen in Windows Explorer. In fact, you can’t even search the hidden folders and all the files inside the folders. Read related post on the blog.