Friday, March 7, 2008

Bye bye blogger

This is my first blog and blogger is really the best tool for beginners who want to create a blog.

But as i blogged more and more, I felt blogger is inadequate to meet my needs and hence I decided to switch here

If you are a blogger user, i recommend you to try wordpress.com to host your blog.

I've a small writeup which might be helpful to you.

Anyway, thanks for reading my blog and providing your valuable comments.

You are most welcome to read my new blog.

Thank you once again.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Resize/create windows partitions safely

You are running windows, and you have one or few partitions.
Sometime back, you feel that your "C" drive is running out of space or your "F" drive has simply too much space.
To put it simple, you want to partition your harddisk which is running windows.

Well, there are many free and commercial tools out there which might help your cause. Spell partition and immediately "Partition Magic" will come into your mind. I've used Partition Magic and I must admit that it's a very good tool. It helps you to safely create new partitions, resize existing partitions, delete unwanted partitions etc.

But Partition Magic is an expensive tool which most of us cannot afford. (Atleast for personal use). Is there any alternative for Partition Magic which can safely do all the jobs or atleast some of the jobs that that Partition Magic do?

Well, you need to meet a friend here from unexpected quarters. Yes, it's linux. You might think, "How can linux help me in anyway to partition my hard disk?. I use windows and I don't want to install linux".

The answer is, you can partition your hard disk without disturbing windows and without installing linux.


And your companion here is Ubuntu linux. However you have two options before proceeding further:
- get free ubuntu livecd from ubuntu site
- if you are impatient, download ubuntu for free from ubuntu site and burn it to a cd yourself. (Please follow the instructions about how to write ubuntu "iso" image to a cd from ubuntu website)

Once you have the "live cd" in your hands, partitioning your hard disk is just a matter of inserting the "live cd" into your cd drive!!!

Step 1:
Ubuntu "Live CD" is nothing but a "real" operating system in a cd rom. To use it, you must configure your "boot sequence" (normally by pressing "F2" key when you machine starts). Configure your "boot sequence", so that your system attempts to "boot from cd" first, if there is any bootable cd in your cd drive.

Once you did this, insert the Ubuntu "Live CD" into your cd rom and start your machine. Ubuntu "Live CD" will not boot and will show you a startup screen with some options. Don't worry, select the option "Install Ubuntu in safe graphics mode" and press "enter".

Now you can see a "live" ubuntu desktop. (This might take some time, so please wait.)

Step 2:
Click the menu "System -> Administration -> Partition Editor" from the top most taskbar. This will open the ubuntu partion editor application. Some of you might find it similar to Partition Magic.

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Creating tamil word documents without spending a penny

Last week, one of my church member asked my help to translate an english document to tamil. Eventhough I had no experience in any kind of tamil typing whatsoever, I accepted that offer to try something.

Quite some time back, I blogged about Google transliteration tool which is available online.I thought of trying it for this activity.

Google transliteration helps you to type in english and transliterate into tamil. (Please note that it's not translation).

I did the translation myself with the help of some online english to tamil dictionaries.

And finally, I needed some formatting and suddenly Google Docs came to my mind. What more, Google Docs helps you to even share your online document.

And Google Docs also provides option to export your document into formats like pdf, msword, openoffice etc..

With these tools, you can create decent looking tamil documents.

(Please note that google transliteration uses unicode characters)

Resources:
Google Transliteration
Google Docs
English to Tamil Dictionary