Fed up of web Advertisements! Block them all.

Really fed up of Advertisements, go to any forums, or news site and you will find whole lot of ads, even the Yahoo mail has an irritating flash ads all the time coming, and similar is the case with Hotmail and aol. Google itself has adsense service and other sites like Zedo, yahoo and doubleclick do provide web advertising services.... which actually pay the owner of site too... I don't say that its bad that site owners are getting money, But many a times it becomes irritating to read the real stuff. I have seen sites which had over 13 ads on a single page. Moreover these ads can eat up bandwidth who have limited broadband bandwidth connection( ie 1GB per month etc.)

Mozilla Firefox provides with a very good solution for it. Adblock plugin which can be downloaded here can block a whole lot of ad service pulled ads. After installation it shows up in bottom-right corner in firefox. Though initially there are no settings and you have to build your own filters over time, But here is the filter file that has been updated as I browse over Internet. right click the bottom right corner adblock icon and open preferences, and then adblock options -> import filter upload the filter file and you are done.

Disclaimer: this will block the google adsense and you won't see them, if you like them, you can remove that from preferences :).

Finally your eyes are spared from seeing all the crappy ads.

Getting email confirmations

Here is an Interesting thing that I found with Mozilla Thunderbird.
The actual email interfaces as initially developed(RFC and all) allows a mail to get a confirmation as soon it is read by its receiver, back to the sender. But this facility is available in corporate business mail accounts only. The mail sent from free email services like yahoo and gmail don't ask the receiver for any "read confirmations" neither they can reply a "read confirmation" for the mail these free accounts receive.

But here is the thing, I figured a catch to this and here it is. Gmail allows an easy SMTP interface to access and send mails thru its email clients like Thunderbird. so what I do is I just configure Mozilla Thunderbird to receive and sent emails thru my gmail account. Thunderbird has the capability to ask for read confirmation for all the mails sent thru it, and this does the work. so I actually request read confirmation for all my mails, but point to be noted is that "read confirmation receipts" can only be received for mails sent to corporate mail ID's and not to free accounts like yahoo and gmail itself as these don't allow any read confirmations.
Still It solves my purpose, The important mails I send are directly to corporate ppl and I am able to track that , at no extra cost what More I can expect from the free email service. Google Rocks!, It provides complete services to users and finds a complete different channel to get revenue(the ads we see in the sidebar.) Pretty decent enough.
Also Microsoft too offers Windows Live mail client (download here) which can be used to access hotmail(and gmail too) accounts on PC. Effect of competition. Still proprietary so no other email client may use it.


Disclaimer: This is totally receiver's domain dependent, though it has worked for me, but can't say it would work for all domains. If it doesn't work with any domain,Let me knw I will post it here.

Optimization \:)/

Optimization seems to be the keyword for many of the things in the industry, Google asks question and then makes you optimize from n² to nlogn and finally logn. whatever…(lookout for there qns they are really cool though)

I do like things to be optimized, even my life. getting things done with minimum chaos which doesn’t happen normally, Nevertheless, here I am putting some of techniques ,optimizing my 1.4Ghz Computer(yeah it sounds slow, but its actually a fast AMD64 with superb performance).

The first optimizations I normally do just after installing windows is to disable the Animation while minimize and Maximizing windows actually you can see that in the following image, only the checked items I keep on, rest all options I just uncheck for performance.
access this as below —> right click on my computer —> properties —>advanced—>performance settings—>(1st tab itself)
here




I find people going for the costliest hardware they can afford, even when they may not need it. I like optimizing the stuff I already have and using it to max.