Google tricks

Below is a list of our top ten Google tricks many people who use Google don't know about.

Definitions
Pull up the definition of the word by typing define followed by the word you want the definition for. For example, typing: define bravura would display the definition of that word.

Local search
Visit Google Local enter the area you want to search and the keyword of the place you want to find. For example, typing: restaurant at the above link would display local restaurants.

Phone number lookup
Enter a full phone number with area code to display the name and address associated with that phone number.

Find weather and movies
Type "weather" or "movies" followed by a zip code or city and state to display current weather conditions or movie theaters in your area. For example, typing weather 84101 gives you the current weather conditions for Salt Lake City, UT and the next four days. Typing movies 84101 would give you a link for show times for movies in that area.

Track airline flight and packages
Enter the airline and flight number to display the status of an airline flight and it's arrival time. For example, type: delta 123 to display this flight information if available. Google can also give a direct link to package tracking information if you enter a UPS, FedEx or USPS tracking number.

Translate
Translate text, a full web page, or search by using the Google Language Tools.

Pages linked to you
See what other web pages are linking to your website or blog by typing link: followed by your URL. For example, typing link:http://www.computerhope.com displays all pages linking to Computer Hope.

Find PDF results only
Add fileType: to your search to display results that only match a certain file type. For example, if you wanted to display PDF results only type: "dell xps" fileType:pdf -- this is a great way to find online manuals.

Calculator
Use the Google Search engine as a calculator by typing a math problem in the search. For example, typing: 100 + 200 would display results as 300.

Stocks
Quickly get to a stock quote price, chart, and related links by typing the stock symbol in Google. For example, typing: msft will display the stock information for Microsoft.

Why Become a Paperless Office?

There is a clear environmental need for paperless offices. The paper industry is one of the world‘s major polluting industries and one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gases with over 900 million trees cut done annually. The EPA reports that paper is the number-one material thrown away, comprising 40% of our waste stream.
In addition to environmental impacts, paper is time consuming to manage. Record keeping constitutes more than 90% of all office activity. Studies indicate that of the paper filed, over 80% is never referenced again!
Essentially becoming a paperless office could reap the benefits of improved efficiency and effectiveness, reduce cost, and improve the brand and image of the company by becoming a better corporate environmental steward.
Four Steps to a Paperless Office.
1. Create a Document Management System.
This important step means creating a simple way to manage electronic data. An office needs a system of sharing data:
1) use a hard-drive server or
2) install document management software.
2. Improve Printer Efficiency
Employees who print their electronic data create their own paper pile up. The easier and more convenient it is to print, the more likely it is that paper use will increase. One way to reduce paper use is to remove individual and desktop printers. By making printing less convenient, employees begin to be more mindful before printing their data.
3. Provide Technology Options
An easy and convenient method to scan documents makes it so workers can scan and email documents instead of making multiple paper copies. Scanning important paper documents, such as company historical documents, into an electronic format makes for simplified electronic filing and retrieval. Scanning also works well for paper files that are compiled from various sources that need to be saved as one document in one place.
4. Automate Processes
Improving paper efficiency means accomplishing the same task using less paper. Determine which paper-based processes are inefficient and could be improved with automation. Of course, when some processes are automated they become more costly and time consuming; therefore, stay focused on the processes that are vital and used frequently. Automation is a good investment only if it lowers costs, reduces time, and improves efficiency and effectiveness of business operations. The key is to have the right balance.
Engage Your Employees in the Process
When companies begin their‘‘paperles‘‘ initiatives, they must remember to consider the change employees will face. As much as workers hate paper, they also love it! Not only do you need to provide IT systems, tools, and policies, but also it is important to create the paperless culture within your firm. Organizations must inform and engage their staff in the value of becoming paperless so each member will buy into the goal and purpose.

Drupal and Word press are the most popular content management systems (CMS) online. Which are open source and built on PHP + MySQL. These vary significantly in terms of features, capability, flexibility and ease of use. Below, we‘ll take a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages these. Advantages of Drupal.

--> Flexible: Want a simple blog with a static front page? Drupal can handle that. Want a powerful backend that can support hundreds of thousands of pages and millions of users every month? Sure, Drupal can do that as well. The software is powerful and flexible.
--> Developer Friendly: The basic Drupal installation is fairly bare-bones. Developers are encouraged to create their own solutions. While this doesn‘t make it very friendly for lay users, it promises a range of possibilities for developers.
--> Enterprise Friendly: Strong version control and ACL capabilities make Drupal the CMS of choice for enterprise customers. The software can also handle hundreds of thousands of pages of content with ease.
--> Stability: Drupal scales effortlessly and is stable even when serving thousands of users simultaneously.
Disadvantages of Drupal
Usbility: Drupal is not the most user-friendly platform and it has a high learning curve. Platforms like WordPress and Joomla are significantly easier to use, although they don‘t offer the power and options that Drupal does. The good news though is that the new release of Drupal 7 is addressing some of the usability concerns and should be an easier adaptation for newer administrators.
Lack of Free Plugins: Plugins in Drupal are called ‘modules‘. Because of its enterprise-first roots, most good modules are not free.
Lack of Themes: A barebones Drupal installation looks like a desert after a drought. The lack of themes doesn‘t make things any better. You will have to find a good designer if you want your website to look attractive when using Drupal.
Advantages of Word press:
Multiple Authors: WordPress was built from the ground-up to accommodate multiple authors - a crucial feature for any serious publication.
Huge Plugin Library: WordPress is an open-source developer community, which has developed hundreds of thousands of plugins for it. There are few things WordPress can‘t do with its extensive library of plugins.
User-Friendly: WordPress UI is easy to use and highly intuitive, even for first-time bloggers. You can drop a theme, add a few plugins, and start blogging within minutes.
Strong SEO Capabilities: With plugins like All in One SEO, you can start blogging straight away without worrying about on-page SEO.
Easy Customization: WordPress theming system is designed for easy-customization. Anyone with a little grasp of HTML and CSS can customize WordPress themes to fit their needs.
Flexibility: WordPress can be made to do virtually anything - run an e-commerce store, host a video site, serve as a portfolio or work as a company blog by its plugins and customized themes.
Disadvantages:
Security: As the category leading software with millions of installations, WordPress is often the target of hackers. The software itself isn‘t very secure out of the box and you will have to install third-party plugins to boost your WordPress installation‘s security.
Incompatibility with Older Plugins: The WordPress team constantly releases new updates to fix security loopholes and patch problems. These updates are often incompatible with older plugins. If your site relies on older plugins, you may have to hold off on updating (which makes your site all the more susceptible to hack attacks).
Limited Design Options: Even though WordPress is infinitely customizable, most WordPress installations still look like WordPress installations. Although recent updates and improvements in plugins/themes have rectified this problem somewhat, WordPress is still hampered by limited design options.
Limited Content Management Capabilities: WordPress was originally designed as a blogging platform. This has affected its ability to handle large amounts of content. If you plan to publish hundreds of blog posts per week, you may find the default WordPress backend a little underwhelming for such high content volume.

So, you are new to Android?
Awsome, welcome, we hope you have a lot of fun programming, experimenting and having with it.
Oh, you don't know how to get started? Well, no problem, that's what we are here for. We'll help you a little on the way to some awsome multi million Euro/dollar/yen/yuan/rupi/golden coin/... selling application for your favorite platform.

First of all: Do you know java?
No? Well no problem! The first thing you want to do to know how to develop Android applications (well actually they are called task in Android, but you'll learn more about that later, and well, nobody calls them tasks anyway ), is learning Java. Sun, the company behind Java, has some awsome tutorials on their site. I'll give you the links to the tutorials you really should go through:
Getting started
Learning the Java language
Essential Java classes (mostly the part about exceptions, you are going to need this!)
And for last mandatory tutorial there's the tutorial about event handling, because without events, there's no GUI!

If you are really serious about Android (and thus Java) development, you should really go through all tutorials there are on the Sun site. This doesn't mean you are going to need every tutorial for android (Like the Swing and AWT), but they teach you a lot of usefull stuff for Java desktop development and good coding practises.

This may seem a lot to read, and well it kinda is, but you should not forget, you are learning how to use a brand new platform here!
As you know Java now, you can read the next section too!

Yes you say? Awsome, then let's go over to the android developers website. First you need to download the SDK. Then when it's done, I have some more stuff to read for you. It's the Android documentation or the "docs". Why should you read them? Well fairly simple, do you still know when you learned to drive? Didn't you have to learn the Traffic laws of your country? And didn't you have to do some exam before you got your drivers licence? This is the same, except there isn't a certificate for Android (yet?), though there are for Java. You can't just start developing Android applications before knowing what Android is or how it works. You should have some basic knowledge of what you're dealing with.

I'll specifically say what you need to read:
What is android? (You don't need to know this in depth, but if you have read this, you have some knowledge about how Android came together.)
Getting Started (This is VERY imporatant. It goes over the basic aspects of Android development. Be sure to read this, and also be sure to do the Notepad tutorial, it might be one of the most important pieces of tutorial there are on Android!)
Developing Applications (Also very important as it explains how to implement User Interfaces, storing/retrieving data and internationalisation)
As with the Java turorials, if you are really serious about developing for Android you should read everything, though I understand if you first want to develop some simple things first, before really diving in to the deep.

Then if you have all this, I have 1 last thing you should do: Start up the emulator (you should have read about this in the gettings started), and start the "Api demo". Then try every single app there is in this api demo, as it has a lot of example applications about basic android stuff, and the best thing: The source of the api demos are in the SDK you downloaded before! This "samples" directory in the SDK is one of the most valuable resources the SDK delivers, as it has hands on examples of a lot of features the SDK delivers to you.

K, so you did everything I sugested? Awsome, then I have a tip for you. As you are developing, you are probably going to need a lot of help using specific features about the SDK. So, one thing almost every developer does, is opening a browser window and leave it open for the duration of your coding time on one of the Reference Information pages.

So now you are almost set. Yes almost, there's a couple more things before you are a real Android Pro, but most of them, you'll learn in the process, but the one I'm going to describe now, is the single most important thing to learn when developing any application for any platform: debugging. Android has pretty good debugging system. When developing an application, you are going to see a lot of these error messages: "The application <task name> has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again." This message doesn't say anything about the error which caused the application to to "stop unexpectedly". That's where the Android Log comes in. This log holds information about every thing in the system that logs messages to the log. To see the log, open up a command line window and go to the android sdk's directory and then to tools. Then type in "adb logcat". And you'll see a LOT of text scrolling by. Now, as you should have developed some Java applications before, you'd probably seen Java stackdumps before, so that's what you'll be looking for, to determine what caused the "unexpected stop" of your application.

I hope you are rolling now on this great platform, and I hope to see you on the forums, I'll be glad to help you out when you have some problems. But be sure to search the forums before posting a question and try to help out others with their problems, as that's what forums are all about: helping eachother out.

Have a lot of fun coding!