Tag: Internet

Compare the speed at which You Tube videos are streamed by your ISP

Post author By Aditya Kane
Post date April 23, 2010
3 Comments on Compare the speed at which You Tube videos are streamed by your ISP

You Tube is a service which was wholly reliant on hi-speed internet connectivity. You Tube started about five years ago when most western countries had broadband easily available. Now hi-speed internet access is readily available around the globe and that has seen You Tube grow exponentially.

But what about your ISP? How fast do videos stream on your browser thanks to your ISP. I sure would like to compare the speed and see where I stand regarding other Internet Service Providers around.

You Tube has a tool called My Speed which actually allows you to check and compare speed of You Tube videos streaming on your connection.

About You Tube Video Speed History

When I used it on my computer it showed Video Speed comparison in the last month. Here my ISP is way below what is average speed for Pune (city where I reside), India and Global speed.
It is useful to note that most time click on a Video and wait till it gets completely stream. While doing so I surf around and check websites. This be slowing down the video streaming speed and I might not get an accurate picture.
I was out of town for a few days in the time it checked for speed variation and my ISP had changed along with City so this might have also had its effect.

So try out You Tube Video Speed History for yourself and compare the speed at with You Tube is streamed over your Internet connection. This is not a speed test for the internet but only for You Tube. You might also want to read up how India compare to the world when it comes to broadband internet.

Tags Interesting Links, Internet, Online Tools, YouTube

Reviews

3 Great free online tools to create mindmaps

Post author By Aditya Kane
Post date April 20, 2010
3 Comments on 3 Great free online tools to create mindmaps

Mind Mapping is basically organizing your thoughts with a detailed diagram so that you do not lose out on anything and basically a great way to give an insights into a plan. We can say a mind map is something similar to a flow chart without the logical operators thrown in. It is more like a visual representation of a plan which with one glance can be understood by another person without much explaining to do.

Here are three great online tools for creating mind maps online and storing them.

#1. Think – Mind Map online App

Think is a great online tool and has a very innovative style of showing the mind map (as you can see in the image below).
It also allows creating private and public mindmaps and this you can do by creating them through Open IDs, Google ID or Yahoo ID.
I liked the classy style of showing links and also the simple and easy way to use the interface.

#2. Text 2 Mind Map

Text 2 Mind Map does exactly what the name suggests. It converts any Text into a Mind Map.
If you are drawing up a list and sub-list this tool is ideal to use. Create your list and sub-lists and let the website map it out.
There is no need to sign in and all you have to do is download the map as a JPEG file.

#3. Ekpenso Mind Map

Ekpenso is a multi-language service to create Mind Maps. It also allows creating public and private Mind Maps.
This website requires you to register and then use the service (It does support Open IDs).
The best part of this website is you can download the map as an image and also as a PDF file. 🙂

I feel creating mind maps is like a advanced version of creating a list of things to do in the future except with mind map tools you can link one to do list to another in innovative ways. 😉

If you liked this you might also like reading about creating interactive online charts. Do try out these tools and let me know what do you think about them. Do share any other similar Mind Mapping tools you use through your comments.

Tags Internet

News

YouTube is the top bandwidth hog

Post author By Aditya Kane
Post date April 19, 2010
11 Comments on YouTube is the top bandwidth hog

I was reading on Mashable a interesting post on a survey done which shows a bit of a snapshot of the websites which companies visit with their super fast internet connections. Obviously here we cannot expect shopping portals or blogs to really dominate but expect Social networking websites along Search websites dominating which websites are visited by the corporate world.

Here below is the list of top 5 websites which hog bandwidth for companies according to Network-Box

YouTube – 10 %
Facebook – 4.5 %
Windows Update – 3.3 %
Yimg (Yahoo!’s image server) – 2.7 %
Google – 2.5 %

I often see many people arguing for and against banning social networking websites as they waste company time and resources according to many management gurus. But clearly shows that at least when it comes to bandwidth You Tube hogs the bandwidth twice as much as Facebook which is 2nd place.

On the other hand Google comes at a paltry 2.5 % which is incredible as most people are searching and that ideally wont be too much bandwidth.

I decided to check how much time I spend on You tube myself and I actually spend quite a bit of time and I am sure even for personal users You Tube must be a top hog of the bandwidth.

So my question is should’nt IT admins ban You Tube rather than Facebook and Orkut ? Or is You Tube very educational but then some can argue so are social networking sites. 😛

What are you thoughts on it? Do drop in your comments to let me know about them. 🙂

Tags Internet, YouTube

Reviews

Billingmanager: Create free online Invoice

Post author By Tushar Tajane
Post date April 6, 2010
2 Comments on Billingmanager: Create free online Invoice

Editor’s Note: This free billing manager is being discontinued by its company and will not be available effective from 1st October 2011

I am not (and I was never) good in writing accounts. I do not understand terms used by Chartered Accountants as terms used by them are difficult to remember. That is the reason – I was looking for a system where I can quickly generate, store, e-mail, print, share, get the revenue overview, manage my Invoices & Estimates.

There were many issues with offline installations. After trying & tiring, I shifted my focus from offline software to online, open source scripts! There were few minor issues for me with these too! For example: security of my server, database maintenance and, etc.

Then while on Google, I found out that there are ready to use billing managers available. I was lit up & began exploring one-by-one. After fairly a lot of fact findings & adding trial invoices with all those systems, I zeroed down to this Billing Manager.

Co-incidentally two days back one my friends who is a Photographer called me up asking, he was looking for an invoicing software. While I was narrating him the details I thought of sharing it with all of you here.

I won’t stick to this particular system for life, but certainly I am going use it until I can buy my own customized paid software.

I have explored it for about seven days now & finding it very handy. It has some very exciting features, which are required by a basic user like me.

It seems like I am on to organize billing data in a better way, and stop worrying about hard disk crashes, etc.

I will quickly share key features now, which are a must-have for non accountant like me:)

1. Easy Interface with simple familiar terms to grasp
2. Nice customizations available with Indian currency
3. Auto computations for services & tax, etc.
4. Capability to print, e-mail & export as a pdf option.
5. Estimates can be adapted to invoices.
6. You can record a payment against invoice & same can be sent as a receipt.

Here are a few screen shots of Billing Manager.

If you’re really interested, then I have a suggestion. You sign-up & test it yourself to see what all you can do with it. It works on low bandwidth & it can be accessed on an iPhone.

If you like it, let me know. If you don’t like it, then It’s not me who formulated this module.

And just in case you’re already using any such billing system, then do let me know. I would like to give it a try!

Link: Billing Manager

Tags Free Services, Internet

Analysis

India Broadband: Where do we stand on a Global Internet Map?

Post author By Tushar Tajane
Post date April 2, 2010
11 Comments on India Broadband: Where do we stand on a Global Internet Map?

These days, we all are talking about Internet speed in India. I am sure that once in every gathering of minimum of 2 friends, they talk about it and discuss where are we (India) lacking, who is offering what speed and at what prices, etc.

We talk, because we see some hope & scope of improvement to speed up our work, communication and entertainment with the use of Internet. We (at least me) feels ashamed when I had told my Internet speed Vs money I pay, to my friends abroad!

It is frustrating when ‘connection times out’ while you’re purchasing online, booking tickets, meeting people, video chatting with families abroad, uploading large files, grabbing knowledge from video tutorial and so on…
(And I did not mention playing multi-player games online here because we simply cannot do it in our bandwidth. )

I can go and have cup of coffee or smoke a cigarette or have a phone call to friends if I am downloading or uploading heavy files! Because I cannot / should not do anything on the computer fearing that connection may get interrupted if I browse or my computer may hang in between then I will have to re-start the whole process!

As we talk and wait (and only wait) for 3G launch in India – Where we stand on Global Internet map – is not pleasing at all.

Here are few details which I obtained from speedtest.net. You can also check your internet speed on this site.
Listed as Rank > Country > Download speed

1. Republic of Korea – 22.49 Mb/s
2. Aland Islands – 18.87 Mb/s
3. Latvia – 17.92 Mb/s
4. Japan – 16.94 Mb/s
5. Romania – 16.17 Mb/s
12. Hong Kong – 11.57 Mb/s
16. Germany – 9.58 Mb/s
24. Singapore – 8.32 Mb/s
25. France – 8.07 Mb/s
28. United States – 7.60 Mb/s
123. Srilanka – 1.49 Mb/s
127.India – 1.45 Mb/s

* This information is excluding tests done with connections used by Colleges and Corporations.

We stand way below at 127th with an average speed of 1.45 Mb/s with a hope to get somewhere within Top 50 countries.

If we look at some Broadband Plans on offer from various ISPs. The most noticing thing about these plans are, speed in ‘KB’s & cost in ‘K’s. It still feels like a luxury to have a faster Internet connection. 8mbps, 24mbps, 30mbps, 50mbps – these kind of numbers are only creating a buzz but nothing beyond it.

While the world is moving fast, moving heavy, getting more HD – How are we going to catch up with them?

I would really appreciate if ISPs provide minimum of 1 MBps & 2 Mbps unlimited plans in current prices of 256 kbps & 512 kbps unlimited plans (not exceeding Rs. 1750/month with taxes) with almost zero downtime – I think this should be enough for now and would be a good stepping stone to tell other countries that yes, we’re coming!

I would really appreciate to know your view on this.

Tags broadband, India, Internet, Speed

News

BSNL gifts Double Speed to it’s Broadband Users (Unlimited Plans only)

Post author By Tushar Tajane
Post date April 1, 2010
64 Comments on BSNL gifts Double Speed to it’s Broadband Users (Unlimited Plans only)

First time, since 2007 I am feeling really cheerful about being a BSNL broadband user! Why?

I went to office in the morning on 30th March 2010. And as a part of the same routine, I have practiced to reset BSNL modem on a regular basis to get uninterrupted Internet connection. But on 3oth it was something different! I started pinging BSNL DNS (which is also I do regularly to see terrible ping durations).

I realized that ping duration was consistent at 7ms! When I started downloading attachments from my email, I was stunned and shocked with joy to see download speed of 110 Kb/sec which used to be at around 60 Kb/sec. I could not believe my eyes but yes it was true. I tested this for almost a day.

Then I started searching all over as if there is something wrong with BSNL! That’s what comes to my mind (and I am sure it happens with many) when it is about them and then I came across the Source of this news!

“Existing landline Broadband customers to taste higher speeds and enjoy fast moving virtually live games like cricket, it has DOUBLED THE SPEEDS for all its customers who have unlimited home usage plans with speeds in the bracket ranging from 256 Kbps to 1 Mbps without any extra charge upto 26th April 2010.”

Which simply means that BSNL is offering double the speed of your existing Unlimited Home Usage Plan.

As a loyal broadband customer of BSNL for such a long time (We had no other option) I was expecting but they did not send email to notify about it. Most of the users are still not aware of this new limited time offer and many users are not getting double speed even if they have Unlimited Home Usage Plans!

Few Pointers:

I am registered for UL 1350 PLUS , which is a 512 kbps unlimited usage plan.
I used to get download speed of about 50~60 kbps max. for http & torrent downloads.

Now:

I am getting 110+ KB/sec speed for torrents & http downloads
Youtube & other videos are streaming extra fast.
I did few speed tests on speedtest.net & it showed me line speed of 1 mbps on most of the time.

Here are few screen shots which might raise your eyebrows for sure, like it did to me. 🙂

My guess is that, since 3G services are very near to their launch, this could be a tech test happening for a month. And if everything goes well they might start giving this higher speed plans by default in the same price! I only hope that is the case. 🙂

Tags broadband, Internet

News

50 MBPS Broadband Connection from Bharti Airtel

Post author By Ankit Puri
Post date March 31, 2010
3 Comments on 50 MBPS Broadband Connection from Bharti Airtel

When ever we talk about broadband connection in India, the most common problem which we will face is broadband speed. The maximum speed which I have personally used from a home user perspective is 2 MBPS. Though Airtel speed on demand let me get 8 MBPS speed in the past but again paying 120rs/hour (2.5$) doesn’t sound affordable to me all the time.

Airtel has launched 2 new broadband plan for Delhi and Gurgaon :

50 MBPS Broadband– Rs. 8999 per month
30 MBPS Broadband– Rs. 7999 per month

The data transfer is not unlimited. 200 GB of free data transfer are allowed in this plan, that mean’s you can download lots of data with blazing speed.

Though this doesn’t seems like affordable by a normal home user but from a business perspective this plan seems to be very much effective. Right now we are using Tata internet connection in our office with backup connection from Airtel.

If you are an Indian broadband user, I will love to know your view on this new broadband plan from Airtel?

Tags Airtel, broadband, Internet, Speed

Reviews

How to Search People On The Web? Use Pipl

Post author By Anshul
Post date March 29, 2010
1 Comment on How to Search People On The Web? Use Pipl

I was searching for an old friend on internet when I came across an interesting site-Pipl. Pipl is a specialized search engine for searching people and the results are quite impressive.

Pipl displays not only links to all of your profiles on social networks, but also blog mentions, publications, photos on Flickr, Picasa etc. It also looks for your name in public records, including property records, and birth databases, and mentions “quick facts” about the person-which are snippets from webpages. A quick search for my name gave one of the quick facts “Anshul Dixit is a part time blogger and a full time software engineer”, which is part of my bio in Devils Workshop.

What makes Pipl different is the fact that it is capable of searching deep web also, something which regular search engines like Google and Yahoo can’t do.

What is Deep Web?

Deep web, also known as “invisible web” refers to a vast amount of data present in online databases that normal search engines like Google can’t reach. It is estimated that the amount of such data in deep web is 500 times that in the “surface web”.

The reason why regular search engines are not able to crawl in deep web is because the data is stored in databases and not on static web pages. Search engines work on the principle of indexing, that is, they crawl the web by following links found in other pages. But since the information in deep web is stored in database, these search engines can’t index it.

How can Pipl help you?

Websites like Flickr, Myspace, Hoovers, Hi5, Friendster, Facebook etc. store personal profile and people related documents in database and not on web pages. So if you were not able to find your lost friend or relative through Google, try Pipl.

Pipl provides four easy ways to look for a contact- Name, e-mail, Username or Phone. Using any of these information you can search for a person. Searching someone through phone number is possible only in US and Canada.

I searched my name in Pipl and this is the result I obtained:

As you can see, the results are categorized according to personal profiles, blogs, websites, publications, and so on.

Some of the uses of Pipl that I can think of are:

1) Searching old friends and relatives.

2) Finding more information about a new acquaintance. With “quick facts” about the person, you can get a rough idea about him.

3) Can be used by companies to get information about a prospective employee. Gives you one more reason why you should be careful before posting anything on internet.

Considering that it is still in beta phase, you can expect some improvements in near future but you might want to check up 5 best search engines for students.

So how are you going to use Pipl?

Link: Pipl

Tags Interesting Links, Internet, Search

Reviews

5 Useful Search Engines For Students

Post author By Anshul
Post date March 29, 2010
6 Comments on 5 Useful Search Engines For Students

Google has become synonymous with search. But who knows better than a student, how many times Google has failed to produce the desired results. You are looking for a well researched article on High Strength Steel for your project and all you get by ‘googling’ is a Wikipedia link you can’t rely upon. You need an eBook for one of your engineering subjects, and what you get is a link to Google books with some sample chapters. These are just a few of the frustrating experience a student goes through.

So if Google can’t provide you with the relevant result, does that mean there is no such information on the web? Well there is. All you need is the right search engine to retrieve it for you.

Here is a list of a few of such search engines.

1) EBook Engine : This is ultimate resource to find free e-books. The website claims that “If your e-book isn’t here, then it is likely you cannot download for free anywhere.”

2) Pdf Geni : This is yet another wonderful search engines for ebooks. You can download a firefox search plugin to use it directly from your browser. The search engine is also compatible with iphone.

3) Wolfram Alpha: It is a “computational knowledge engine which aims to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.” You’ll find it useful for complex math problems. And what’s more, you can download its mobile application to solve your problems on the go.

4) DeepWebTech: If you are looking for some serious articles related to science, business, medical or technology this is the place to go to. It searches for these articles from the “deep web”- the part of the internet that is not crawled by normal search engines like Google. DeepWebTech gets results from the databases of recognized institutes and organizations across the world, something which Google can’t do.

A suggestion- use this if you need in depth information, such as for your engineering project etc.

5) DeepPeep: This is another search engine working on the same lines as deepwebtech. You can get articles from the database of renowned institutes like MIT.

Armed with these search engines, you will easily get through all your college reports and projects. And will stay a step ahead of your peers.

Is there some specific search engine you use apart from Google ? Share it with us through your comments.

Tags Interesting Links, Internet, Search Engine

News

Youtube.com Down with 500 Internal Server Error

Post author By Ankit Puri
Post date March 25, 2010
11 Comments on Youtube.com Down with 500 Internal Server Error

YouTube one of the best and popular video sharing site is down today with giving 500 Internal server error. The reason for downtime is not officially known and we will keep you updated with the latest development on this downtime.

You can check if YouTube is down using DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com. If this service itself goes down, you can use alternative! 😉

Update 1: YouTube is now giving error : Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

Update 2 (added by rahul): YouTube is now giving 502 server error. (What does this error code means?)

Update 3 (added by rahul): YouTube must be down everywhere in the world.

We just checked HTTP headers and found that YouTube is returning 503 server error and server in this case was NS_6.1, i.e. netspace on amazon s3 cloud server. In first screenshot, server signature was Apache.

This may mean that as Apache severs went down, our last request was redirected to backup or another mirror. unfortunately which is also down.