Legal & Full-length movies on YouTube

Did you know, YouTube hosts scores of full-length movies & award-winning documentaries that you can watch online for free? There are movies from around the world in over a dozen genres. There are also a good number of Bollywood flicks there although you may not find your favorite ones.

Jennifer informs that there are also other places like Archive.org where you can find good entertaining stuff.

There is news that the upcoming Bollywood movie "3 Idiots" will be available online for free after 12 weeks of it's release.

Also see:
Free print version of Newspapers

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Test your backups

The popular bloggers, Jeff Atwood & Phil Haack, lost their respective blog content after their sites went down to a hard drive failure. Interestingly, both of them share the same physical server & host their sites on Virtual Servers on the machine.  The Virtual Hard Drive files (usually referred to as VHD files) which contain the actual data for the virtual machines were always in use and were not being backed up. Haack informs that backing up a live virtual server requires taking advantage of Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

They have both salvaged major portions of their blog content with help from a community of followers. They have candidly admitted their failure & shared their lessons learnt -

• An untested backup strategy is no backup strategy at all! Test your backups!
• Every day is International Backup Awareness Day.
• Have a backup strategy that’s easy to setup.
• Even if you have managed hosting, you should have your own local backups of the important content in your site.
• If you can only back up one thing on your public website, it should be the images.
• There are few organizations spidering and storing images on the web. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is one of them

Also see:
Tips on ASP.NET Hosting & Deployment
HOW TO get back a missing web page or website

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HOW TO GMail Chat in an Indian language

It is possible to chat in a number of Indian languages using Google's Transliteration tools. These tools let you type in English & convert the text to the supported Indian language of your choice on the fly.

There are at least three ways to GMail Chat in an Indian language -

1. Google India Labs' Transliteration bookmarklets - By dragging a bookmarklet onto the Bookmarks bar (or Link Toolbar in IE) & clicking on it to activate  transliteration, you can transliterate from English to Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. To disable transliteration, click on the bookmarklet again. You can pick the specific bookmarklet from the Project's Home page. Detailed instructions for on storing the bookmarklet are well documented for each of the popular browsers.

2. Transliteration bots - Bots are software applications that run automated tasks. You can invite a bot to chat and then send it the message in English that you want to transliterate.

The bot will respond by sending you the transliterated text. There are seperate bots for Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. They are identified by different email addresses.

You can even invite a bot to a group chat with a friend so that he sees the message you have typed in English in an Indian language as well. The bot responds in real-time with the transliterated text.

3. Firefox Google Transliteration Extension - Lets you transliterate from English to (currently) Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. Install the Extension in Firefox 3 or above. After the browser is restarted for the Extension to take effect, it will show up in the status bar.

 While you have GMail Chat open, select one of the Indian languages in the combo box of the Extension that you want to chat in. Use Ctrl+G to disable transliteration. The advantage this technique has over the others is that you can easily switch between English & Indian language with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+G

This extension enables transliteration for textareas and input text fields in any web page using Google AJAX Language API.

Update: Google Transliteration now supports seventeen languages and that includes not just Indian languages (the original motivation for the tool) but also global languages like Arabic, Greek, Nepali, Persian, Russian and Serbian.

Also see:
HOW TO view only the unread messages in your Gmail inbox

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Google contest to promote Hindi on the Web, Knol & Transliteration tool

Google is running a Hindi essay contest called 'Hai Baaton Mein Dum?' till January 31st, 2010. Participants can submit an essay on any of the five topics given below in Hindi language -

• Entertainment
• Travel
• Sports
• Health
• Social, Economic and Political issues

There is no limit to the number of entries per contestant and there are some 310 prizes to be won!

This contest doubles up as a promotion for Google's Knol & it's excellent Transliteration tool.

Knol, a Wikipedia style encyclopedia, has received a luke-warm response so far. 

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Book Review: Website Owner's Manual

Ever since the Internet took off in a big way towards the end of the last century, it has revolutionized the way we live & work. It is a great platform for selling ideas or products as it provides a level playing field to anyone in the world with Internet access that wishes to leverage the medium. It makes it irrelevant whether someone seeking an online presence is working from a garage or some remote corner of the world.

Successful websites have earned their owners unimaginable wealth; far outstripping what traditional companies have earned in decades. Websites that are frivolous & provided only short term value have perished. The dotcom bust of the last decade sunk the fortunes of website owners who took their users for granted with their short sighted strategies.

So what makes a successful website? Is building one an obscure art?

Paul Boag, a Web development veteran, answers these questions and shares the recipe for building & maintaining a winning website in the book Website Owner's Manual. It is a one of a kind book that consolidates key topics that a website owner needs to be aware of. It covers diverse themes like planning the site, selecting the team, creating website content,  handling it's design, aesthetics and development, usability, managing traffic, using Content Management Systems, Search Engine Optimization, hosting etc. There are also practical tips throughout the book. Sample these -

To quickly find out who is linking to your competition, you can type the following into Google link:http://www.yourCompetition.com

The first paragraph of the page should provide a summary of everything that follows, allowing the user to quickly ascertain if the page is relevant.

The author's writing style is breezy & informal. The cartoons that go with the content are thoughtful & keep the content light. I liked the mini website case studies spread throughout the book that highlight best practices, pitfalls and items of special interest.

I have known small business owners, entrepreneurs, non technical professionals (like doctors, academicians) who appreciate the power of websites to further their goals but lack the technical expertise to leverage the Web. This book can be a good introductory manual for such people.

I have been a honorary reviewer of this book while it was in the draft stage and I'm happy with the way the book has come out finally.

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