Everyone seems to be liking the new version of Internet Explorer 8 and I must agree, it provides a very smooth and interactive browsing experience.

I wouldn’t already compare it to Firefox 3 because IE8 is just in its beta 2 phase but the new features suggest that Firefox 3 is soon going to get a tough competition by its arch-enemy.

Below is a features preview of the new Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 which will allow you to preview and discover some of its amazing new abilities.

Smart Address Bar

The smart address bar in IE8 makes it easy for users to open previously browsed sites by just typing in a portion of the URL. The results are then grouped and the matching text is highlighted.

Furthermore, while browsing a site only the root domain is focused in the address bar while rest of the URL is grayed out.

Improved Tabbed Browsing

Tabs in IE8 have been improved to provide a much more easy browsing experience. In IE8 tabs are automatically grouped together using color codes belonging to the same site. This is much like the Colorful Tabs for Firefox.

Opening new tabs appends them to the group rather than adding them to the end of all the tabs.

Streamlined Finding Option

The new finding option in IE8 is in-line and streamlined much like that of Firefox. Kudos to Microsoft on getting rid of the annoying Find On Page popup dialog which has been bugging users in IE6 and IE7.

Accelerators and WebSlices

Accelerators are services that you access directly from the webpage in the context of what you are doing, letting you bookmark, define, email, map and more with a simple selection.

WebSlices, on the other hand, are Web 3.0 form of RSS Feeds. WebSlices allows user to subscribe to a portion of a website or blog and track any changes in the content.

Unlike web feeds, WebSlices in IE8 allow to track content changes for a part of a website rather than whole. I will be soon posting a tutorial on how to make a WebSlice.

Search Suggestions

The new Search (text) suggestions and Visual Search Suggestions make IE8 even more interesting.

As user searches for a keyword, relevant images and text is displayed which allows user to get single-click access to the web page without having to leave the Search box.

That was a review of some of the features I liked most in Internet Explorer 8, though there are lots more. Please share any of the features you like in the new IE8. Internet Explorer 8 can be downloaded using the link below.

http://www.microsoft.com/ie8

Microsoft has finally released IE8 Beta 2 for public download.

Unlike Internet Explorer Beta 1, the new IE8 Beta 2 is focused more towards users than developers and brings a whole new set of extremely unique features for consumers and enterprises.

Microsoft has been trying hard to regain its lost dignity after other browsers like Firefox and Opera smashed Internet Explorer in terms of usability and features. As it seems, Internet Explorer 8 might be powerful enough to hold back and stay stable in the ever growing browser wars.

IE8 focuses on everyday browsing, safety and platform and introduces some amazing features such as Tab shortcuts, Accelerators and InPrivate Browsing. I will be covering the features in detail in an upcoming post.

IE8 Beta 2 can be downloaded using the link below. Currently it supports 32bit and 64bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008.

http://www.microsoft.com/ie8

A variety of Google Search Tricks which most of the people will find interesting and useful

1. Generate a Productive Search:
The first thing you must do to generate a productive search is think. You need to think about what it is you really want. You really have to search Google for the words or phrases that will be *on the page you want, not for a description of the page or website. So if you are looking for a comparative review of wireless telephones, you will probably get more results from a list of names such as SmartPhone, Audiovox, Motorola, and so on, than the words “comparative review of wireless phones”.

2. Use of Quotation Marks:
Use Quotation marks to force finding a specific phrase. When you surround your phrase with quotation marks, the search engine will only return results exactly matching the entire phrase. This is an extremely powerful search technique, and yet it is not used by the majority of web searchers. If you search on the two words George and Washington, you will get over 8 million results. If you put quotation marks around the entire name, your results will be restricted to about 3 million. And if your search is on “George Washington” “Cherry Tree”, you will only get about 12,600 results. You get the picture. This is especially important if your search contains what are called “stop words” - words that Google is designed to ignore, such as “and” “of” and “the”. By including these inside your quoted phrase, you will get more targeted search results.

3. Use of Plus (+) and Minus (-) Signs:
Use the Plus (+) and Minus (-) Signs. The plus sign just before a search term means “This MUST be found in the search”. Conversely, if you find a lot of search results that include a specific product, word, phrase, or item that you do not want to see, you can put a minus sign before that word or phrase, and those results will be excluded from your search. You can even exclude domains or top-level domains from your search.

4. Using WildCards:
Use the Asterisk (*) As a WildCard search term. Yes, you can insert an asterisk in your search phrase and it will act as a wild card matching any word in that place in the phrase. Not only that, but you can insert more than one asterisk in place of more than one word in your search phrase, up to the limit of ten search words - and the wild card markers are not counted toward this ten word limit.

5. The Site: Command:
Use the site: command. If you are interested in finding examples of the term XMLHttp, but only on sizlopedia.com, then you can create a search like this: site:sizlopedia.com XMLHTTP This will restrict your search to only pages belonging to that web site. You will notice that in regular Google searches, if there are more than two results from that site, the second result will be indented and there will be a link “More results from …” - this automatically uses the site: qualifier. Also, you can search or exclude whole domains. For example, you can search for tampopo dvd site:co.uk or tampopo dvd -site:com (Tampopo is a wonderful Japanese noodle western spoof by director Juzo Itami that is sure to be enjoyed by Americans. If you really want to get educated IMHO, try to avoid watching films out of Hollywood, as they generally stink).

6. Using The Operators:
Use the operators. Besides the site: command, Google understands a range of operators that include filetype: (eg doc, xls, or pdf), intext: and allintext:, intitle: and allintitle:, inurl: and allinurl:, author: (in Google Groups) and location: (in Google News). Google also understands a logical OR, provided it is upper case. This means you can search for a bar in Orlando OR Miami for example. It is useful when targets of searches have alternative or variable spellings: outsourcing bombay OR mumbai. The OR command can be shortened to a vertical bar (|), as in outsourcing bombay | mumbai. Another way of adding alternatives is to use a tilde character (~). Thus if you search for ~food, Google also searches for cooking, cuisine, nutrition, recipes and restaurants. You have a lot of power and flexibility; you just have to make some notes and learn the language that the search engine understands so that you can speak to it. The search engine doesn’t get mad or take offense - provided that you know its language, it will do exactly what you tell it to!

7. Use The Advanced Search Page:
Use the Advanced Search Page. Fortunately, you don’t need to memorize all of the above tricks, since they are conveniently offered to you in various combinations in the Advanced Search option which is always available from the main Google search page.

8. Use Google Groups:
Use Google Groups. Google has the most complete archive of usenet and other news posts going back over 20 years. By simply switching tabs from Web to Groups, your search term(s) will be repeated on the Groups archives. I cannot stress how valuable this can be- many, many times when I have not found a proper result on the web, by simply switching to Google Groups I’ve been able to find exactly what I was looking for.

9. Use New Advanced Search Features:
Use new advanced search features. Google has a number of new features including Google Local, Google News (news items from newspapers and other publications around the globe), Froogle - which searches for the best prices on products, and the Dictionary - to get the spelling and / or definition of a word. In fact, if you may have misspelled a word in your search, Google’s dictionary will remind you with a link that says “Did you really mean XXX?” and clicking that link will correct your search. Google also provides an Images search facility that brings back results filled with actual images on web pages that match your search terms. One of the lastest new offerings as of this writing in October, 2004, is a mobile SMS search that allows you to send an SMS message to google with your search terms for a restaurant and zipcode, somebody’s name and address, or whatever, and get back the results to your cellphone in seconds.

10. Use Correct Characters:
When you are researching something in a foreign (non-English) language, use the correct characters. E.g. the German word “Wörterbuch” (dictionary) — “worterbuch” doesn’t do the job, as it lacks the Umlaut-character.

Westgate Tabernacle Church in Palm Beach County is providing food and shelter for up to 150 people per night. The church provides 500 meals per day of donated food and pays $1000 every month for water. This commendable act should be supported by the county but instead the county is threatening the church with a $1000 per day fine. At issue is a forty-foot by sixty-foot tent the church has erected to help provide shelter for too many homeless men, women and children.

The tent can accommodate a maximum of about seventy five men sleeping on plywood sheets raised a few inches above the ground. Women and small children sleep in two small rooms – 400 square feet and 240 square feet – on collapsible bunk beds. Men fifty-five years old and younger sleep in the tent and everyone else that can be sheltered sleeps in the 2400 square foot sanctuary.

Bishop Avis Hill has been with Westgate Tabernacle for thirteen years and has had opposition from Palm Beach County for seven years. They cannot get a permit for the tent because the code is written only for permanent structures with the required amenities. However, the County Commission could support the church’s efforts by writing them a special exception through the Zoning Board. Any legal help that the county can give should be given because the homeless population is so underserved. The county even sends people to the church that they have no room for. There are other programs but they are inadequate, and the people that do not meet the criteria or there is no room come to Westgate Tabernacle.

The 2007 Annual Report on Homelessness Conditions in Florida released by the Department of Children and Families Office on Homelessness shows that 60,168 homeless were counted in Florida and 1,766 in Palm Beach County. This number was provided by twenty five coalitions throughout the state including the Homeless Coalition of Palm Beach County. In 2006 there were 32,000 beds available to the homeless population from shelters, and transitional and permanent housing. That is an increase of about 2,500 beds since 2003 but still leaves out over 25,000 unsheltered homeless in Florida.

Most of the homeless are men under the age of sixty and nearly half with one or more disabling conditions. About one-quarter of the homeless population can be considered chronically homeless having four or more episodes of homelessness. Two-thirds of homeless people are homeless for more than three months and about forty percent for a year or more. Sixty-eight percent of homeless live in their local communities for more than a year. Most troubling are homeless families with women and children trying to stay together. Thirty-five percent of homeless are female and twenty-one percent are children under the age of eighteen.

Bishop Hill is understandably frustrated with his situation. He said that “this is a heartless generation that cares more for animals than people” and that illegal aliens get better treatment from the state and county than citizens. That is not right – we should be putting our citizens first. Still, there are many people who do care enough to give and get involved and progress is being made. Westgate Tabernacle is located at 1722 Suwanee Drive, West Palm Beach, Florida, 33409, and their phone number is (561) 471-9309.

We upload our photos to Flickr without worrying much about bandwidth or reliability. Imaging you want move all your photos to some other image hosting site or just what a backup of your photos, you can’t download them one by one, its quite time consuming. There are bulk uploading utilities such as Uploadr, but download bulk image downloading is a problem. Maybe the don’t want to waste their bandwidth for downloading images to your machine, so they don’t provide any such utility.

Flickrdown a free application which lets you fetch all your photos (including private photos) with a single shot. You can either select individual photos or select the whole photo set for downloading. An authorization is required before the first download, so that you can download your private photos.

You can also use this utility search photos by tags, groups, email address or usernames and download, so you can download anybody’s public photos quite easily. This utility doesn’t have a fancy user interface, but does the job nicely. All credits must go to Greggman who created this cool little Flickr toy.

via CyberNet

The next version of Internet Explorer (IE8) includes a new security feature which enables you to surf without leaving a trace in your local computer. The second beta of Internet Explorer 8, which was released yesterday, has a security feature called "InPrivate Browsing" which prevents user’s history, cookies and other data from being saved on the user’s computer.

"Have you ever wanted to take your web browsing "off the record"? Perhaps you’re using someone else’s computer and you don’t want them to know which sites you visited" says Internet Explorer Product Manager, Andrew Ziegler in his blog post.

All major browsers (including IE7 and Firefox 3) have an option to erase the history, but now and then you might want to retain information of your browsing history while preventing sensitive stuff from getting logged into the browser history, this is where InPrivate Browsing comes in handy.

Besides letting users anonymously surf, IE8 can also build up a list of websites to block or allow InPrivate subscriptions. This way, users can automatically prevent some specific sites from getting into the history. The number one reason why users want to clear the history is to weed out the signs of p*rn from their browser. Such a subscription based history blocking feature might actually benefit to p*rn viewers.

There is already a similar extension for Firefox - Stealther extension. Although, it’s not as superior as IE8’s new inbuilt feature, it does the job. You can download IE8 Beta 2 from here.

As most people know by now, Google bought FeedBurner, and just recently they have started transitioning all of the feeds from the feedburner.com domain over to feedproxy.google.com… which is where the problems began.

To start off with, the feeds had to be transferred manually by sending an email request, which seemed a little odd… and didn't go well, with my branded feeds.howtogeek.com RSS feeds being completely down for almost a day. They fixed that up quickly…

The second problem I started noticing is that the feed counts almost never work anymore:

Then the Ping FeedBurner form doesn't work anymore, even when using the new Google version. (The old FeedBurner one claims to work but does nothing now that I've switched)

Then I started getting this error when trying to access the feed (for most of the day)

HTTP Error Code: 500

Detail: There was a problem retrieving the feed:
java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Read timed out

If you click on the "reload this page" link you get another error… I don't even know what that is about.

So I started looking in the panel for the FeedMedic alerts, which have pretty much had nothing but errors for a week now. (Note that there's nothing wrong with my feed, and most of the errors were something to do with BigTable or database locks)

That's when I finally found the Contact Feedburner link… which sadly goes to the old form on the feedburner side of things. Since my account is now on the google side, I can't even sign in to fill out a report.

So at this point, there doesn't seem to be any resolution to this, or any decent way to file a report. I'm pushing this out there in case anybody else has an idea.

And yes, I left a message in the Google Group already, which doesn't appear to be frequented by Google employees.

Update: I sent an email over to the original adsense migration people, who finally responded. They say the issue is my hosting provider? That seems really unlikely, and doesn't answer why everything else is broken.

Update: All of my counts are completely set to zero now, including the widget which I've removed.

Update: Now the counts are back.

This article is part of Mysticgeek's Realm, a How-To Geek blog focused on IT geekery.

A cool trick I learned the other day is inserting an audio file into word documents. There are several instances where this comes in handy. Here we will take a look at a couple different ways to insert the sound files into Word 2007.

To insert an existing sound file open Word and click the Insert tab on the Ribbon then in the Text section click on the Object button.

In the Object window click the “Create from File” tab. Then browse to the location of the file you want to add to the document. You can choose to display as an icon as well.

As you can see it is possible to change the sound file icon by default you can choose only three different icons.

However, by not checking that option it will show up as the icon for the default audio player which in my case is VLC. If you send it on to someone else it will still show as your default player’s icon but will play in their default player. All a user needs to do is double click that sound file in the document for it to play.

Another cool way to add sound to a Word document is by inserting a file from Clip Organizer. With the Word document open again select the Insert tab on the Ribbon. In the Illustrations section click on Clip Art. A Clip Art task pane will open and at the bottom click on Organize Clips.

In the Clip Organizer I find it easiest to search for sound clips. On the toolbar select Search and make sure most options are checked where to search. Also, to limit the search to just sounds make sure only sounds is checked for what the results should be.

My search for music resulted in several files to choose from. You can scroll through and preview each one if you want. By searching the online Microsoft Clip Art Database you are searching over 150,000 free images and sounds.

Another thing you might want to try is record a message about your document for co-workers through Sound Recorder or other audio recording program and insert that into a document as well.

This article is part of Mysticgeek's Realm, a How-To Geek blog focused on IT geekery.

Flowcharts are a very good way to get a new idea explained in a presentation. Office 2007 has some great new tools for creating a visual appealing flowchart which can be used from Excel, Word or PowerPoint. Here we will take a look at creating a simple flowchart in Word 2007.

For the sake of this article I am going to start at the top of the document on the right side under the title. Then click Insert then Shapes on the Ribbon to select a shape from the Flowchart section. You can can then draw an outline for the size of this object on the document. You then will see how it will look right away.

To link the shapes on your flow chart there is a multitude of options. Here I am going to use an arrow. To efficiently create the flow chart, it is best to get the basic design first before worrying about the graphic effects. You can always add the effects later.

I choose a quick format for the first shapes, drawn the arrow, and am ready to set up more sections. I just copy and paste the first box and drag it to the appropriate position.

After getting accustomed to selecting shapes and adjusting their positions it’s probably a good idea to start adding text. To add text to the chart simply Right Click on a box and select Add Text from the menu and begin typing away.

The mini formatting toolbar is still available with any text you enter into the chart which comes in handy if you are use to it. If you are not a fan and want to stop it, you can make the mini formatting toolbar stop popping up.

Once you have the basic outline of the flowchart complete, it’s time to add some “pizzazz” to everything. This is done using the Format tab on the Ribbon. Here are a few shots of what you can do. This is the different colors you can make the shapes.

Here are Shadow and 3D effects. The cool thing with Office 2007 is you can just hover the mouse over the different effects and get a preview of how it will look in the document. This saves a lot of time rather than relying on a trial and error approach.

Another feature is inserting Smart Art. This allows you to insert nice pre-designed graphic layouts. You do not need to be graphic design expert to insert professional looking content.

A handy window opens up where you can insert text into the chart which in this case is Radial Cycle. You will see the text as it would appear in the smart art at the same time it’s entered.

A good way to help the graphics in your chart stand out better is to change the background color of the document. This is done from Page Layout and Page Background sections on the Ribbon.

This is a simple flowchart made with the steps and different options shown above.

Now you should have a basic grasp on how to create a flow chart and begin experimenting with the different options available in 2007. Have fun, experiment, and please leave feedback on how you impressed your boss! There has to be a better way to organize those TPS Reports!

This article is part of Mysticgeek's Realm, a How-To Geek blog focused on IT geekery.

Sometimes in your daily work routine you might need some extra features from the Microsoft Office Suite. One way to get extra functionality is through Office Add-Ins. Sometimes these are bundled with Office but not included with the initial installation. These are easily accessed and installed. Here I will show how to install an add-in with Excel.

Open Excel and click on the Office Button and go to Excel Options and then Add-ins.

In the View and Manage Office Add-ins window, near the bottom. make sure “Excel Add-ins” is selected in the drop down box and click Go.

This will open up the Add-Ins window where you can select an appropriate package for your Excel tasks. If you highlight each Add-In you’re provided a quick description of what each one is.

In this instance I installed the Euro Currency Tools. After choosing the one you want click OK and accept the default

You will get a progress message while the add-in is installing.

After the add-in is installed it will be available in the Ribbon. In this case the Euro Currency Tool was place under the Formulas tab other add-ins may vary.

Other times you can install an add-in from downloading an executable from the Microsoft Office site. For Instance previously I wrote about the Save to PDF add-in for Word 2007.

Of course there are also third party add-in programs that usually require purchasing a license after a trial period. You can add a bit of security by making sure add-ins are digitally signed. This is done through the Trust Center. Go to the Office Button \ Options \ Trust Center \ Trust Center Settings and finally Add-Ins.

Here you can add or change settings to your preference. You can even disable them all together.