Having recently moved to India after spending 10 years in US, I was fascinated to see how SMS technology has captivated the Indian mass. I used to feel totally SMS-ignorant. To bring myself up to speed and to understand how SMS actually works technically, I began my quest on acquiring SMS knowledge. I will be sharing here whatever I learn.

SMS or Short Message Service is a technique of transmitting short text messages to and from a mobile device or Internet. The text messages are limited to 160 characters.

The SMS sent by a mobile device is received by a SMSC (Short Message Service Center). The SMSC contacts the HLR (Home Location Register) to locate the recipient customer. If the recipient is unavailable, the message is stored in SMSC and delivery attempted later when the device is active.

The above procedure is a simple explanation of how SMS works in a single network. The problem arises when there are multiple carriers and each uses a unique SMSC protocol. This is where SMS Gateway comes into the picture. It provides SMS connectivity between different SMSC protocols so that different carriers can communicate with each other. This is further explained in the illustration below:

(SMSC₁ :SMS Center for Carrier 1
 SMSC₂ :SMS Center for Carrier 2)

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The Walt Disney Internet Group is making available daily comic strips and full-length stories on mobile phones in India. ‘

In the daily comic category, one can choose “Mickey” and/or “Winnie the Pooh” while the first full book available for download will be “Pirate of the Caribbean”.

Aptly called “Disney Mobics”, the daily comics strips will be available for download for Rs. 3 for Reliance Users. the entire story will be available to Hutch and Airtel users for Rs. 50.

Mobile users with GPRS capability can download the comics from http://wap.disney.in. Mobile users can find tons of fun things from Disney at the site: http://www.disney.in/mobile/

A startup http://www.rokcomics.com/ allows you to create and serve comic strips for mobile devices.

ROK Comics is lining up a range of material from Manga and Sci-Fi comics to old classic strips including Garfield, Doonesbury and Ninja Turtles. These can be selected from the ROK Comics website and delivered to your phone via MMS.

This should be an interesting service and should be fun for the young crown to create their very own personal comic strips or even deliver messages through comic strips.

Source: (Rediff, Tech.co.uk)

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I download Google Pack as soon as I install windows on any PC/Notebook. Besides getting lot of useful software, I also get protection for my machine with free Norton Security Scan.

This ensures peace of mind from virus, worms and Trojans.

If you want to explore further more free antivirus options, please read this: Compilation of Free Antivirus Options

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Google news has launched an image version of their news site which can be accessed here.

Here is a snapshot of the new interface:

When you hover over any image, the animated slider on the right updates to show you the text of the news. you can also click on “related images” (circled in red on the image above) to see news related to the current news in images.

Source: GoogleSystem

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Google Blogsearch, a search engine dedicated to searching blogs, provides the ability for you to monitor latest and top posts for keywords of your choice by subscribing to RSS feed of the search results.

Let us say you wanted to search for “Search Engine Optimization Tools” and want to keep a watch on search results through your regular RSS reader.

What you do is  the following:

• Search for the keyword at Google Blogsearch
• On the left hand side you will get the option to subscribe using various method
  • Email Alerts
  • RSS | Atom
• You can subscribe to the search results using RSS or Atom

The good thing is you can customize your blog search results for the dates of your choice and then subscribe. The options are:

• Last hour
• Last 12 hours
• Last day
• Past week
• Past month
• Anytime
• Choose Dates

This allows you to customize your subscription to monitor only blog posts in last day/12 hours etc.

 Google also provides the ability to add this RSS feed into your Google Reader in one click (can be found at the bottom of the page)

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It is always recommended with AJAX solutions that you put href attribute of the link tag to the server side version of the same functionality and put the JavaScript in the onclick event for that link tag. That way users using your site will get the AJAX experience and the search engines will execute the server side version of the code (making your side SEO friendly)

Orca is an AJAX forum without AJAX problems. The “Back” button does work, bookmarks do work, permalinks do work and yes, it is search engine friendly. A dream solution for current web 2.0 applications.

A very nice explanation on how they have achieved this can be found at: Creating An SEO Friendly Site Using AJAX.

What  I liked the most was their solution for the back button problem!

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Fedora is Linux operating system. It came into being when RedHat went commercial with their Linux distribution. It is an open source software.

There is a very detailed article (spanning 8 pages with graphic illustrations) titled : The Perfect Desktop - Fedora 7 which shows how to setup a Linux machine and with what software so that it is a complete replacement for Windows. The best part is that all the software on Fedora (including Fedora) is free!

Download Fedora 7

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Having problems with Windows Vista and/or Windows XP? Do not know what to do? Try Tech Support Guy Forums where you get free help for Windows Vista, XP and much more.

It is a forum where you can register for free and post your troubleshooting or general question(s) and get answers for free. The quality of answers is pretty good.

You can also browse the Microsoft Vista Support Forums for answers to your questions or post your questions. Assisted vista support from Microsoft (email, chat, phone) is also available, some of which might be free depending on your Vista license and when it was purchased. They have a tool which takes the product identification number of your OS and tells you if you qualify for free support.

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