How to use window 7 themes in xp and vista?

First, launch the official Windows 7 themes directory and download some of the themes you like to your Windows XP or Vista desktop.

These files have a unique .themepack extension which is just another zip format containing all of the elements of a theme including the background images, Aero glass colors, sounds, cursors, icons, screen savers, etc.

To use these files on an older version of Windows, you first need to extract them as only Windows 7 can natively understand the themepack format. You can either change the file extension of the Windows 7 theme file from .themepack to .cab and then extract the files with a right-click, or install the free 7-Zip utility as 7-Zip can automatically hand the themepack file format.

Once extracted, your theme files will now be in a new folder that has the same name as your original themepack.

Aero Glass Border and Desktop Backgrounds

Now that you have all the required files, its time to activate the Windows 7 theme on your non-Windows 7 computer.

If your computer is running Windows Vista that supports Aero, simply double-click the .theme file that is present in the them folder you just extracted.   This will set your windows border glass to the color of the Windows 7 theme and your wallpaper to the default background of the theme. However, this background picture will disappear when you reboot your computer, so you need to set that as a permanent background.

Windows XP does not support Aero glass, but you can still use the background images from downloaded Windows 7 theme on your XP desktop. You can find the backgrounds inside the themepack folder itself or in a sub-folder named DesktopBackground. Pick any image, right click on it, and select “Set as Desktop Background.”

Windows 7 like Desktop Slideshows for XP and Vista

Most Windows 7 themes consist of multiple background images and Windows 7 will automatically change your desktop background at periodic intervals using one of the images from the themepack. Windows Vista and XP do not support desktop slideshows, but you can easily bring that feature use the excellent and free John’s Background Switcher program.

To create a desktop slideshow, click the add button and choose “A folder on your computer.” Now select the Windows 7 theme folder that contains all the background images. The program allows lot of tweaking but you can skip that because the default settings are very similar to what you need for simulating Windows 7 behavior on your XP or Vista computer.

However, John’s Background Switcher by default shows the name of the image in the top right hand corner of the picture.   To remove this, click the “More…” button that has a gear icon on it. Uncheck the box beside the 3rd entry which says “Show picture info on the top-right corner of the screen.” Now click Ok, and then click Ok in the main window, and your desktop slideshow is all ready.

For RSS-enabled Windows 7 Themes

Some Windows 7 themes download images from the internet (via RSS feeds) when switching desktop backgrounds.

To know if the theme you are looking to port on your Vista or XP computer uses RSS or not, open the .theme file in a text editor like Notepad. Then search for the string “RssFeed” without the quotes. If you find that string, copy the link address of the RSS feed and, you can then use the “RSS photo feed” option in John’s Background Switcher program to create an RSS powered desktop slideshow on your XP or Vista machines.

Windows 7 Sounds, Cursor, Screensavers, etc.

Most Windows 7 themes only contain a glass color and desktop backgrounds.   However, some may contain screensavers, sounds, cursors, and icons as well. The good part is that you can use the elements on your Vista / XP theme as well.

Sounds - You can copy the sound files (.wav) to the default media folder (C:\Windows\Media), and if you have set the Windows 7 theme in Windows Vista as described above, it will automatically these sounds. Else, you will have to manually change your sounds from the Control Panel.

Icons - If the Windows 7 theme that you plan to use with XP or Vista contains a different set of desktop and system icons (.ico files), you may follow the directions below to apply them on your version of Windows:

A. For Windows Vista – Right-click on the desktop, select Personalize and choose “Change Desktop Icons.” Select the items you which to change, click “Change Icons,” and browse to the location of new icons that are part of the Windows 7 theme.

B. For Windows XP – Right-click on the desktop, select Properties and choose “Customize Desktop” under the Desktop tab. Select the items you wish to change, click “Change Icon,” and browse to the location of the icons from your theme.

To change icons of individual programs, simply right-click on the program shortcut on your desktop, select Properties, and click the button that says “Change Icon” in the Shortcut tab. Browse to the location of the icon extract from the Windows 7 theme and select the one you want to apply.

Screensavers – For using a Windows 7 screensaver inside XP or Vista, just copy the relevant screensaver files (.scr) into your Windows system folder usually located at C:\Windows\System32.   Now, change your system screensaver using the usual method. Please remember that not all Windows 7 screensavers will work correctly on previous versions of Windows.

How to edit the pdf files?

The PDF file format was originally created by Adobe in the early ’90s and there are now over 700+ million PDF documents on the Internet according to Google (search for filetype:pdf).

There are several reasons why the PDF file format is so popular for exchanging all sorts of documents including presentations, CAD Drawings, invoices and even legal forms.

• PDF files are generally more compact (smaller in size) than the source document and they preserve the original formatting.
• Unlike Word and other popular document formats, the content of a PDF file cannot be modified easily. You can also prevent other users from printing or copying text from PDF documents.
• You can open a PDF file on any computer or mobile device with free software like Adobe Acrobat Reader. Google Chrome can read PDFs without requiring plugins and it can create PDF'S.

Edit PDF Files using Free Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat

While PDF Files are “read only” by default, there are ways by which you can edit certain elements* of a PDF document for free without requiring the source files or any of the commercial PDF editing tools like Adobe Acrobat.

We will primarily focus on tools that let you alter the actual contents of a PDF file>. If you are looking to manipulate the PDF file structure itself like rearranging pages or merging multiple PDFs into one, please refer to this detailed Adobe PDF Guide.

An Online PDF Editor for Basic Tasks

Sometimes you need to make minor changes to a PDF file. For instance, you may want to hide your personal phone number from a PDF file before uploading it online or may want to annotate a page with notes and freehand drawings.

You can perform such edits in a PDF easily with PDFEscape.com, an online PDF editor that is free and also lets you edit password-protected PDF documents in the browser.

With PDF Escape, you can hide* parts of a PDF file using the whiteout tool or add annotations with the help of custom shapes, arrows, text boxes and sticky notes. You can add hyperlinks to other PDF pages / web documents.

[*] Hiding is different from redaction because here we aren’t changing the associated metadata of a PDF file but just hiding certain visible parts of a PDF file by pasting an opaque rectangle over that region so that the stuff beneath the rectangle stays invisible.

Change Metadata of PDF Files

If you would like to edit the meta-data associated* with a PDF document, check out Becy PDFMetaEdit. This is a free utility that can help you edit properties of a PDF document including the title, author name, creation data, keywords, etc.

The tool can also be used for removing PDF passwords as well as for encrypting PDF documents such that only users who know the password can read the contents of your PDF files. And since this PDF metadata plus bookmarks editor can be executed from the command line, you can use it to update information in multiple PDF files in a batch.

[*] If you planning to post your PDF files on the web, you should consider adding proper metadata to all the files as that will help improve the organic rankings of your PDF files in Google search results.

Edit the Text of a PDF File

If you want to edit the text in a PDF file but don’t have access to the source documents, your best bet is that you convert the PDF file into an editable Word document or an Excel spreadsheet depending on the contents of the PDF.

Then edit these converted PDFs in Microsoft Office (or Google Docs) and export the modified files back into PDF format using any PDF writer.

If your PDF document is mostly text, you may use the desktop version of Stanza to convert that PDF into a Word document. If the document includes images, charts, tables and other complex formatting, try the online PDF to Word converter from BCL Research or the one from NitroPDF – the former offers instant conversion while the latter service can take up to a day though its yields more accurate results.

Advanced PDF Editing (Images, text, etc.)

Now that you know the basic PDF editing tools, let’s look at another set of PDF editors that are also free but can help you do some more advanced editing like replacing images on a PDF file, adding signatures, removing blocks of text without breaking the flow of the document, etc.

First there’s PDF XChange, a free PDF viewer and editor that you also may use for typing text directly on any PDF page. PDF XChange also supports image stamps so you may use the tool for signing PDF files or for inserting images anywhere on a PDF page.

Then you have Inkscape, a free vector drawing tool (like Adobe Illustrator) that can natively import and export PDF content.

With Inkscape, you can select any object on a PDF page (including text, graphics, tables, etc.) and move them to a different location or even remove them permanently from the PDF file. You can also annotate PDF files with Inkscape or draw freehand on a page using the built-in pencil tool.

The next tool in the category of advanced PDF editors is OpenOffice Draw with the PDFImport extension. OpenOffice Draw supports inline editing so you can easily fix typos in a PDF document or make formatting related changes like replacing color, increasing or decreasing the text size, replacing the default font-family, etc.

Like Inkscape, the OpenOffice toolbox also includes support for annotations, shapes, images, tables, charts, etc. but here you have more choices and the software also looks less complex.

The OpenOffice suite is a little bulky (they don’t provide a standalone installer for Draw) but if you have the bandwidth, OpenOffice is the best tool for manipulating PDF documents when you don’t have the budget for Adobe Acrobat.

A Lean GreenTech Approach

                                          

I am a greentech enthusiast and I have been closely following the greentech VC investment landscape. The VCs like Kleiner Perkins who have had a large greentech portfolio including companies such as Bloom Energy are scaling down on greentech investment. Their current investment is not likely to get any returns close to what a VC would expect. The fundamental challenge with such greentech (excluding software) investment is that they are open ended capital-intensive; you just don't know home much time it would take to build the technology/product, how much it would cost, and how much you would be able to sell it for. The market fluctuations make things even worse. This is not only true in the case of start-ups but also true for the large companies; Applied Materials' grand plan to revolutionize thin-film solar business ended up in a bust.

There's a different way to approach this monumental challenge.

Just look at how open source has evolved. It started out as non-commercial academia projects where a few individuals challenged the way the existing systems behaved and created new systems. These open source projects found corporate sponsors who embraced them and helped them find a permanent home. This also resulted in a vibrant ecosystem around it to extend those projects. A few entrepreneurs looked at these open source projects and built companies to commercialize them with the help of VC funding. Time after time, this business model has worked. Technologists are great at building technology, companies are great at throwing money at people, entrepreneurs are great at extending and combining existing technology to create new products, and VCs are great at funding those companies to help entrepreneurs build businesses. What VCs are not good at is doling out very large sum of money to bet on technology that doesn't yet exist.

If we need to make it work, we need a three-way relationship. People in academia should work on capital-intensive greentech technology projects that are funded by corporations through traditional grants. These projects should become available in public domain with an open source like license or even a commercial license. The entrepreneurs can license these technology, open source or not, and raise venture money to build a profitable business. The companies that are constantly contributing their greentech initiatives to public domain should continue to do so. Facebook's Open Compute project is gaining traction in its second year and Google continues to share their green data center design.

The important aspect is to differentiate technology from a product. The VCs are not that good at investing into (non-software) technology but are certainly good at investing into products. For many greentech companies, technology is a key piece such as a battery, a specific kind of a solar film, a fuel cell etc. Commercializing this technology is a completely different story. This requires setting up key partnerships such as eBay's new data center using Bloombox and Israeli government committing to a nationwide all-electric car infrastructure with Better Place.

Many large companies have set up their incubators or "labs" to find something that is fundamentally disruptive that could help their business. Later, there have been a very few success stories of these incubators or labs because the start-up world is way more efficient to do what big companies want to do. These labs are also torn between technology and products. My suggestion to them would be to go back to what they were good at - hiring great scientists from academia and working with academia on the next-generation technology to create a business model by either using that technology in your products or to license it to others who want to build business. This shifts the investment from a few VCs to a relatively large number of corporations.

What we really need is a lean greentech approach.

Analytics First- ENTERPISE APPLICATIONS

This is the story of Tim Zimmer who has been working as a technician for one of the large appliance store chains. His job is to attend service calls for washers and dryers. He has seen a lot in his life; a lot has changed but a few things have stayed the same.

The 80's saw a rise of homegrown IT systems and 90's was the decade of standardized backend automation where a few large vendors as well as quite a few small vendors built and sold solutions to automate a whole bunch of backend processes. Tim experienced this firsthand. He started getting printed invoices that he could hand out to his customers. He also heard his buddies in finance talking about a week-long training class to learn "computers" and some tools to make journal entries. Tim's life didn't change much. He would still get a list of customers handed out to him in the morning. He would go visit them. He would turn-in a part-request form manually for the parts he didn't carry in his truck and life went on. Not knowing what might be a better way to work Tim always knew there must be a better way. Automation did help the companies run their business faster and helped increased their revenue and margins but the lives of their employees such as Tim didn't change much.

Mid to late 90's saw the rise of CRM and Self-Service HCM where vendors started referring to "resources" as "capital" without really changing the fundamental design of their products. Tim heard about some sales guys entering information into such systems after they had talked to their customers. They didn't quite like the system, but their supervisors and their supervisors' supervisors had asked them to do so. Tim thought somehow the company must benefit out of this but he didn't see his buddies' lives get any better. He did receive a rugged laptop to enter information about his tickets and resolutions. The tool still required him to enter a lot of data, screen by screen. He didn't really like the tool and the tool didn't make him any better or smarter, but he had no other choice but to use it.

Tim heard that the management gets weekly reports of all the service calls that he makes. He was told that the parts department uses this information to create a "part bucket" for each region. He thought it doesn't make any sense - by the time the management receives the part information, analyzes it, and gives me parts, I'm already on a few calls where I am running out of parts that I need. He also received an email from "Center of Excellence" (he couldn't tell what it is, but guessed, "must be those IT guys") whether he would like to receive some reports. He inquired. The lead time for what he thought was a simple report, once he submits a request, was 8-10 weeks and that "project" would require three levels of approval. He saw no value in it and decided not to pursue. While watching a football game, over beer, his buddy in IT told him that the "management" has bought very expensive software to run these reports and they are hiring a lot of people who would understand how to use it.

One day, he received a tablet. And he thought this must be yet another devious idea by his management to make him do more work that doesn't really help him or his customers. A fancy toy, he thought. For the first time in his life, the company positively surprised him. The tablet came with an app that did what he thought the tool should have done all along. As soon as he launched the app it showed him a graphical view of his service calls and parts required for those calls based on the historic analysis of those appliances. It showed him which trucks has what parts and which of his team members are better of visiting what set of customers based on their skill-set and their demonstrated ability in having solved those problems in the past. Tim makes a couple of clicks to analyze that data, drills down into line-item detail in realtime, and accepts recommendations with one click. He assigns the service calls to his team-members and drives his truck to a customer that he assigned to himself. As soon as he is done he pulls out his tablet. He clicks a button to acknowledge the completion of a service call. He is presented with new analysis updated in realtime with available parts in his truck as well as in his teammates' trucks. He clicks around, makes some decisions, cranks up the radio in his truck, and he is off to help the next customer. No more filling out any long meaningless screens. His view of his management has changed for good for the very first time. 

 

As the world is moving towards building mobile-first or mobile-only applications I am proposing to build analytics-first enterprise applications that are mobile-only. Finally, we have access to sophisticated big data products, frameworks, and solutions that can help analyze large volume of data in real time. The large scale hardware — commodity, specialized, or virtualized — are accessible to the developers to do some amazing things. We are at an inflection point. There is no need to discriminate between transactional and analytic workload. Navigating from aggregated results to line-item details should just be one click instead of punching out into a separate system. There are many processes, if re-imagined without any pre-conceived bias, would start with an analysis at the very first click and will guide the user to a more fine-grained data-entry or decision-making screens. If mobile-first is the mindset to get the 20% of the scenarios of your application right that are used 80% of the times, the analytics-first is a design that should thrive to move the 20% of the decision-making workflows used 80% of the time that currently throw the end users into the maze of data entries and beautiful but completely isolated, outdated, and useless reports.

Let's rethink enterprise applications. Today's analytics is an end result of years of neglect to better understand human needs to analyze and decide as opposed to decide and analyze. Analytics should not be a category by itself disconnected from the workflows and processes that the applications have automated for years to make businesses better. Analytics should be an integral part of an application, not embedded, not contextual, but a lead-in.

Online Shopping Portal(CASE STUDY- BY A SENIOR Mr. Vinesh Balan)

Note : To all those looking up for this project, I'm putting up my version of the Portal. Please DO NOT upload it as it is. Every single statement of a Project can vary person to person. And if you are planning to upload it as it is, please keep in Mind that I'm doing a project in PHP for the first time. I had very little time to work it out and only Internet to Help. The Coding is not complete, and represents only the skeleton of the Study. However to those who are interested to know how to approach the Case Study, Please do go through the Follow and Enjoy. And I would like to have comments from a PHP Expert as well!

 For the past few weeks people had been happily skipping over the Courses given in Aspire, but all realised the difficulty once Aspire put up a Case Study - To develop an Online Shopping Portal. The Case study goes as follows.

Scenario: Online Shopping Portal 

XYZ.com wants to create an online shopping portal for managing its registered customers and their shopping.

The customers need to register themselves first before they do shopping using the shopping portal. However, everyone, whether registered or not, can view the various products along with the prices listed in the portal.

The registered customers, after logging in, are allowed to place order for one or more products from the products listed in the portal. Once the order is placed, the customer gets a reference order number and the order status should be “order in process”.

The customers can track their order using the given reference number.

The management of XYZ.com should be able to modify the order status of a particular reference order number to “shipped” once the products are shipped to the shipping address entered by the customer at the time of placing the order.

Can you help XYZ.com to realize their dream of having an online shopping portal?

Steps to be followed

 1. Create the interface for the XYZ.com shopping portal using HTML/XHTML and CSS. 

 2. Implement the client side validations using JavaScript. 

 3. Create the tables using MySQL. 

 4. Implement the functionality using the server side scripting language, PHP. 

 5. Integrate all the above tasks and make the XYZ.com shopping portal functional. 

Note: Please zip your casestudy files and upload it here. You can submit only one file

 First Sight - ? DANGER! Yes, that's what will come to your mind. Only a week was given to submit this case study, and I believe 90% aspirants relied on others to complete this project. So how difficult is this case study? I would say a bit difficult if you tend to implement a full fledged shopping portal. But I do not think TCS requires us to do that, they just need to know how good our Software minds are trained. Its funny that this Case study was my Major Project in B.Tech.

  Looking for the codes? Pretty sure you are scrolling up and down, but more than codes, I'm writing this down for those who are interested in knowing how to approach the Case study. Yes codes will be available at the end, you can scroll down for that.

  So let's begin to give a thought for the project, where do we start? NO, not coding. First you need to split it up, else the whole project will eat you up alive. Here is how I split it up -

• User Details
• Order Details
• Product Details[Optional]

Now pick up one by one.

User Details

 Now look back at the requirement, you can basically find out Users need to do 3 things

• Register in the Portal
• Registered Users can Order items
• Registered Users can Check Status

Now what exactly does Register mean? It simply means your details are stored in the Database, and you have a Username and Password to verify it. Now here comes the requirement of designing the Database. At one shot, you realise that it requires the attributes - Username and Password. And then think what all details do you give while registering to a site? Summing them up, I created a simple database with the following attributes

• Username
• Password
• First Name
• Email Id
• Address
• Phone Number

You can add more, which are of course optional.

Now that you have designed the Database, time to give a thought on how many Pages do you need for these functionalities? Let me jot down a few -

• A Login Form
• Registrations Form

Only two? Yes, and of course you can add more like Forgot Password, Welcome Page etc. I'm pretty sure you will be having an idea of the contents of these two pages. These pages require mainly two functionalities -

• Login
• Register

Login function would check upon if the Username and Password provided are correct, and Register would Insert the details of the New user into the table!

That's IT! You just designed a module of the Case study! Now to the coding, I'm not including much details, I've attached the Files at the end, refer and catch up.

Note : Make sure you use Javascript to Validate the Text boxes in Register Page.

Order Details

 The reason why I put up Product Details as Optional is because that part essentially only contains a Database.

• Products

We can have a wide range of attributes for this table, but for our basic needs, these would do

• Prod_id
• Prod_name
• Price

That would comprise of our second Table.

The next part is a bit more difficult than the ones we went through[Idea is easy, a bit difficult to code]. Order Details require us to avail Registered Users to Order items, and provide them with a Reference Id. So lets first create the Table. It will contain the following attributes- 

• Ref_id
• Prod_name/Prod_id
• Quantity
• Total Price
• Status

And what about the required page?

• Order Page where all items would be highlighted
• A Page where you display the Items ordered
• A page to Check the Status of Transaction

So in short, a user Logs in, get to the Page where the Products are displayed. Then he selects the required products and Orders it, where he receives a Unique Reference id. Using that id, he can keep track of the transaction.

Again - That's IT! Now coming to the coding part, I'm doing something on PHP for the first time, and under unfavorable surroundings as well. Even after being Blank about PHP, I gave a shot on it and completed[atleast the Skeleton] of the case study in less than 12 hours. To work on PHP, you need to download Wamp server. Download it here -wampserver.com. Copy the files into the folder ...wamp/www. I had created the Databases right through MySQL, so make sure you do that right too.

Forgive my mistakes, lets learn together. I would love to have comments from a PHP Expert! Leave a comment if you have any Queries!

Online Shopping Portal -  Download Here

TCS bags 8-year contract from UK govt for 350m pounds

TCS   has bagged a eight-year contract from the UK government worth 350 million pounds, which deals with modernization of the newly formed Disclosure and Barring services (DBS). As per newsreports, UK based provider Capita TCS was in the running for the contrat but lost out to TCS. 
The order is the first exception to the UK government policy of not awarding any public sector contract greater than GBP100mn to a single vendor, except in exceptional circumstances. The contract is expected to start in 2013.

At 11:45 hrs Tata Consultancy Services was quoting at Rs 1,295.00, down Rs 20.05, or 1.52%.

TCS management refused to comment on market speculation but British outsourcing firm Capita admitted on Wednesday it had lost out on a new government contract to run criminal records checks after the Home Office pursued talks with a rival supplier. The trade union representing staff under Capita's existing contract said the coalition government is likely to award the deal to Tata Consultancy Services, part of India's salt-to-steel conglomerate Tata Group. Analysts also expected TCS to get the nod.

Capita has run the UK's Criminal Records Bureau disclosure service for over 10 years under a deal worth around 400 million pounds (USD 650 million), and had hoped to secure a similar contract to support the replacement Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS).

"Capita is disappointed not to have been selected by the Home Office to support DBS," it said in a statement on Wednesday. "We will now work with the CRB, and its new partner, to enable the smooth transfer of the service." . 

However, the UK's Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents Capita's CRB staff, said the Home Office had indicated in July its "intention to award" the DBS contract to IT firm TCS. While there was no immediate response from TCS, analysts at Shore Capital said they believed the new supplier may be Tata, which already has operations based in Liverpool, from where the existing contract is primarily delivered.

Espirito Santo analyst David Brockton said the market had expected bad news for Capita after the contract award was delayed earlier this year. "We remain cautious on Capita as we believe there will be greater competition for back office outsourced solutions, as supported by the fact that another supplier has been favoured to win the DBS contract."

The DBS is the merger of the Criminal Records Bureau, which helps employers make safer recruitment decisions, and the Independent Safeguarding Authority, which prevents unsuitable people from working with vulnerable groups, including children. Capita said pending the finalisation of a full handover of the services to the new supplier the CRB would extend its contract with the firm beyond the current expiry date of March 31, 2013 - probably until June next year at the earliest.

In July Capita, whose contracts range from managing over 21 million life and pension policies to providing radios for Britain's emergency services, posted a 10 percent rise in first half profit and said work with central and local government was piling up.

With inputs from reuters