Indian Govt Takes The Open Source Route

 The Indian Government has been talking of the open source-based systems for long, but for the first time it is working on a policy on the use of operating systems and device drivers in all new e-governance projects.          
Friday, July 08, 2011:   According to the latest draft policy on e-governance, all new projects must work on open source operating systems only. The draft Policy On Device Drivers For Procurement Of Hardware For e-governance says, “Government of India (GOI) endeavours to provide e-governance services, which are technology-neutral, cost effective, interoperable and vendor-neutral. GOI Policy on open standards is a step towards meeting this objective in the development of e-governance applications.” The policy shall apply to all the new e-governance projects as well as the existing ones.
   



 The need for such a policy was felt because while implementing open source, there is a possibility of non-availability of device drivers for all general purpose operating systems. “Hence, there is a need for a policy by GOI for procurement of computers and associated peripherals to empower the implementation of e-governance projects with neutrality to all general purpose OS,” states the draft.

The draft clarifies the reason for covering both computers and peripherals. According to the document, most parts of the computer, in general, work with the recent stable versions of Windows and Linux operating systems. However, some of the devices internal to computers may require drivers, which should adhere. The policy has to be applicable to them also, for example, webcam, inbuilt speakers. Other devices (like printer, scanner) are external to computers. Hence both computers and peripherals are covered in the policy, in addition to the drivers of external peripherals to ensure the complete-working of the computer system.

The Department of Information Technology (DIT) has demanded the following from the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

1. The computers shall be capable of running on all general purpose operating systems.
2. OEMs shall provide drivers for computers and peripherals, which are capable of running on all general purpose OS.
3. The drivers of computers and peripherals for GNU/Linux (one of the general purpose OS) shall satisfy any of the following conditions:

a. The source code, build procedure and installation instructions for the drivers must be made available as per any of the open source software (OSS) licences listed. Computers and peripherals must be operational using these drivers in the latest stable Linux-kernel. It implies that in case, the source code, build procedure and installation instructions for the drivers are made available as per any of the open source software licences listed in the policy, and if these are accepted in the latest stable Linux-kernel, then it is expected to work in any of the Linux-distributions.

b. The source code, build procedure and installation instructions for the drivers must comply with LSB-3.0 or higher versions and accepted by any of the Linux-distributions. The compliance with LSB-3.0 or higher versions is opted because the current stable version of Debian distribution (Version 6.0 Squeeze) is compliant with LSB Version 3.2, and not LSB Version 4.0.

c. In case only binaries are made available for the drivers, then they shall be Linux-compatible; in addition, kernel dependent binaries must adhere to the specifications of the latest stable Linux-Kernel.

As mentioned above, the adherence to any one of the three conditions is sufficient when considering Linux OS. The reason cited for this is: "The source code of the device driver for the Linux operating system is made available through two approaches, (a) under open source licences (b) LSB compliance, as indicated in the policy. From any of the two approaches, binary for the device driver can be built. Third approach is to use the binary of the device driver provided by the vendor as per the policy requirements."

The open source licences demanded in the policy are:

1. Apache License, Version 2.0
2. Eclipse Public License- v 1.0
3. European Union Public License (EUPL v.1.1)
4. GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2)
5. GNU General Public License, version 3 (GPLv3)
6. Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL 1.1)
7. The BSD License
8. The GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 (LGPLv2.1)
9. The GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3.0 (LGPLv3)
10. The MIT License
11. Any other licence which gives freedom to copy, modify and redistribute driver source code without any restrictions.

The draft policy clarifies the demand for so many open source licences. It says, “The widely used OSS licences are listed along with generic open source software licence which gives freedom to copy, modify and redistribute driver source code without any restrictions. Hence the driver is made available by building the executable from the available source-code under any one of the listed licences.”

Source: www.efytimes.com

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Text-to-Speech Conversion

Really bored on reading your favorite ebook/pdf/text files or listen to blogs/websites like podcast.Want to hang out something like read out  or   automatically listen to these  textyour Windows / Mac/Linux.Then you should go for  text to speech conversion functionality. Ofcourse primarily there is a Narrator tool(Speech recoginition Tool) built into your  OS platform.But if some times it lacks any  advanced functionality ,then you should  online for alternative tools.First let's focus on some tips that you could use Offline.

 

Hear PDF files loud in Adobe Reader

You can easily achieve  text to speech functionality within Adobe Reader program. It has integrated text to speech conversion feature that makes text audible without any ned to install additional software. To get started, make sure PC has latest version Adobe reader installed. Open PDF file in Adobe Reader.. Goto View > Read out loud > Click on Activate Read Out Loud. Alternatively use the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+Y.. Now goto View > Read out loud > Click on Read this page only or either use the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+V. For reading to the end of the document goto View > Read out loud > Click on Read to end of Document or either use the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+B.To know more on Adobe TTS tool visit Adobe TTS .

 

Now just have some alternative  Programs that can be downloaded and used offline.Following are few free text to speech programs that you can use for listening to text and saving them as audio files.

• Alive Text to Speech
  

A Text-to-Speech software, which can read Text in any application, and convert text to speech, or convert text to MP3, WAV, OGG or VOX files. This text to speech lets you listen to the Text in Emails, web pages, news articles, PDF, Word or Excel Documents,etc. Just highlight the Text your want to hear, and then press Ctrl + C to hear it.Alive Text to Speech enables you to convert Text to MP3, WAV, OGG, or VOX files with a single right click. It is very simple and easy to use. Just right click on files in the Windows Explorer, select "Convert to MP3″ (or WAV, OGG, and VOX) and convert them using your predefined settings.Alive Text to Speech allows advanced users to finish conversions with Command Line. You can download more voices from the Internet. In addition, Alive Text to Speech Toolbar will be installed into Internet Explorer, with the this toolbar, you can read webpages, or convert webpages into MP3, WAV, OGG or VOX files.

• Balabolka
  

A  neat full featured free software for text to speech conversion. This program can read the clipboard content, view the text from DOC, EPUB, FB2, HTML, ODT, PDF and RTF files. It also allows you to save the on-screen text as WAV, MP3, OGG or WMA file.

• Natural Reader
  

Offer free Windows and Mac version of its text to speech software. It allows you to listen to any text on your PC. Just select text within any Word processing application and then click Play button on the floating bar of the Natural Reader program.

• eSpeak
  

A  free command line tool for reading text on your Windows or Linux system. It includes different Voices, whose characteristics can be altered. You can also produce speech output as a WAV file using this tool. It is a small free software program that support number of languages.

• Speakonia
  

It reads aloud any given text with just one mouse click!Speakonia The reading can be paused, resumed and can be exported to a wave file. In addition Speakonia is able to fetch webpages through an internal http interface and read them aloud for you. You can even have your mails read to you using the "Clipboard Reading" feature.

• Panopreter Basic
  

It  is a free and easy to use text to speech software program. It can read text file, rft file, MS word document and html web page with the voice you select. It supports batch file conversion and allows you to create audio files in wave(.wav) and MP3(.mp3) format. It also support multiple languages including: Support English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese and more.

Also  try or Checkout Sayz Me ,flamereader and Ultra Hal TSS free text to speech reader software for Windows.

Now Instead of offline use or downloading any software let's go live online, also integrate text to speech functionality  to blogs/websites.

• Zamsar
  

Zamzar has been favorite online conversion service that allows you to convert files into different format without having to download any software. It has added new conversion feature of 'text to speech'. You can upload any text document and convert it into audio format allowing you to listen to its contents.you can upload any document of either format including: doc, docx, odt, pdf, pub, txt, wpd, wps and Microsoft Works document. You can perform this conversion with usual 4 step procedure. First browse the text file from computer, second select the output format as mp3, third enter your email ID and fourth hit the convert button. You will receive converted final in your email delivered by Zamzar real quick

• YakiToMe
  

It allows you to convert text files into Mp3 or Wav audio files which can downloaded in mp3 format. Using this free web service you can listen to work documents, homework, PowerPoint presentations, emails, RSS feeds, blogs and novels. It can speak multiple languages like English, Spanish, French, German

• SpokenText
  

It allows you to record PDF, Word, plain text, PowerPoint files, ,RSS news feeds, emails and web pages, and converts them to speech automatically. You can download your recording as an iPod book or mp3 file. Every member gets a personal podcast URL , which you can use to download recordings to iTunes or your iPod.

• PedioPhon
  
  
   

It is a free Text-To-Speech Converter for Wikipedia articles. It can read out Wikipedia articles to you while you perform your daily chores. Besides streaming audio you can also download the audio recording for easy playback on your mp3 player or mobile phone. No registration or installation required and very easy to use.

• BlogBard
  

If you are tired of reading RSS feed content, then BlogBard is the alternative you need. With BlogBard you can turn any news/feed to a personalized radio. You can integrate it with your blog using a widget. It also offer integration with Google Reader and Bloglines

• ReadTheWords
  

Another free web based alternative to convert text into speeach. It allows you to listen to your Reading Online, download mp3 to your Ipod, post Your Reading in Website or Blog and turn Your Reading into a Podcast. Lot of options to play around with your text in audio format.

• Voiceforge
  
  

An online TTS service from Cepstral. What makes them different is they have 50 voices. As well, Cepstral actually owns the engine and creates the voices which gives them a lot of latitude to serve diverse customer needs.A bit more enterprise then your other examples, but well worth listening!VoiceForge makes online TTS easy through our hosted speech API. You send us text, tell us the voice and we return an MP3 – yes it's that simple. Register as a developer and we'll be happy to share documentation, code examples and expertise on our hosted speech API and service.Vozme let your blog post speak while SpokenText Online tool can convert webpages, ppts, WordFiles into speech format.

• Vozme
  

Type anything in English or Spanish and hear it as an audio stream. You can also download the audio in MP3 format.Best part for bloggers and webmasters: You can add it to your website or blog. After a adding a small code, a button with label 'hear this post' will appear next to each post. Clicking on that button,you can hear to respective post.

Alternatively check out  Zabaware , imtranslator and ispeech.

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A Tool To Check Your Search Rankings

Searching on Google for your keywords is indeed the simplest way to check your rankings, but it is not an effective one, because the search results you get on Google might not be the same that other people are getting.

Let's suppose that you have a blog about celebrities, and that the main keyword you are targeting is "photos of celebrities."
You could go to Google and search for "photos of celebrities", and then check the position where your blog will appear. The problem is that the rankings you'll see there are influenced by factors like your IP address, the language of your computer, your past search history and so on. This is part of an innovation Google introduced a while ago called "Personalized Search."
  For example, your blog might appear in the 5th position when you search for "photos of celebrities", but this is so because you

often click on your own website, so Google is artificially increasing the rankings of your blog when you search for it.



For all other people, however, your blog might be appearing in the 20th or 30th position.

So how do you find your real search rankings? There is a tool called Scroogle that you can use for this purpose. Here is the
link: http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm

It is basically a Google scraper that will get the search results from Google with an anonymous IP address, without storing cookies, without storing search-term records and so on.

When you run a search query on Scroogle, therefore, Google won't have any past data about it, so the results will be the ones seen by the average Internet user.

You can make Scroogle show 100 results at a time, and after that you'll just need to find where your website is positioned.

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How To Find Broken Links on Your Site?

Broken links are nothing more than links inside your website that point to pages that don't exist. Maybe you deleted the page because it was not relevant anymore, or maybe your simply used a wrong URL when creating the link. Fact is that when a user clicks on one of those links he will see a frustrating 404 error page. 

It is easy to see how broken links can negatively affect the user experience inside your site. Apart from annoying your human visitors, though, broken links also upset search engine bots, and if your site has too many of them your search rankings might suffer.

For these reasons I recommend that you check for broken links on your site at least twice a year.

Now if you have a large blog or website it would be impossible to check all the links manually right? Luckily there is a great tool that you can use for this purpose, called Xenu's Link Sleuth, or simply Xenu.

Don't worry you won't need to pay anything, just download it and install on your computer (it only runs on Windows).

Here is the official site: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

The design of the site is horrible, I know, but it is a legitimate project.

Once you have the tool running, just type the URL of your website and it will start crawling all the links. Link verification is done on "normal" links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, and so on.

You will be able to follow the process, and in the end you will see a report with all the broken links, redirects, valid URLs and more.

It is really a nifty piece of software, and a must have on the tool-belt of any webmaster.

Make sure to visit again at http://www.anilkmishra.blogspot.com, for latest trends and techniques in ICT.

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5 Free PC-Cleaning Downloads

Is your PC slowing you down? Try these to fasten and smarten up your comp, and live with your laptop happily forever…

    From the huge number of free downloads and tools available to tweak your PC to make it boot up faster, here are five featured free downloads which are really easy to use. Web search each title in the list and see carefully as to which tool suits your needs the best. 

   Also note that none of these are Mac-compatible.

Soluto

Soluto is a freeware programme for the operating systems of PCs. Although no system requirements are specified on the website’s page,the program has been tested on a 32 bit machine and it ran flawlessly. It’s main function is to speed up you boot time – and that it does.


Smart Defrag
This is a tiny PC-compatible utility sized at only 1.8 MB. When you run the program, you can view all your hard drive partitions. Click on the partition you feel is responding slowly, and perform an analysis to see if any files require defragmentation.

 
Fontfrenzy

Your computer comes loaded with a huge number of fonts you will probably never use. To clean up these redundant fonts, you could employ any one of countless font managers available on the web. The suggested one, however, would be Font-Frenzy – a font manager with some extra font cleaning features. FontFrenzy is a freeware sized at only 490 KB and is compatible with your PC. When you load it, the programme shows all fonts installed on your computer. 



 USB Write Protect
A flash drive virus works by writing itself onto your flash drive. If you could somehow temporarily disable the writing permissions on your drive, your flash drive would be more secure. At the same time, you will be unable to accidentally delete or modify the flash drive’s contents. USB Write Protect is a tiny utility sized at only 11KB. You download the archive, extract it, and run the .exe file in it.



Bvckup




 Bvckup is a programme currently in its beta that works with Windows Operating Systems. The programme has a number of interfaces and functionality features which set it apart from applications that perform the same auto-syncing tasks. 
   

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