Last.fm - the social music website has been testing a new revamped interface for quite some time. Until now it was limited only to beta testers. Yesterday, they started rolling out the new interface to a normal last.fm members. After, playing around with it for more than a day I must say, I am impressed.

The interface has been revamped. It’s cleaner and better organised thatn before. But to me it just looks a bit too bland and simplistic. The Top Artists and Top Tracks chart is now tabbed and only displays the top 10 results by default. You can choose to see charts for Last 7 days/3 months/6 months/12 months/all time. The best thing is that all the charts are updated in real time! The reccomendation engine seems to have improved, and now every artist’s page features a list of similar artists.
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Comment spam is something every blogger has to endure on a daily basis. The default antispam plugin - Akismet, does a decent job of filtering, but it’s known to get it wrong. And to manually dig out the legitimate comments from hundreds of spam comments is no mean task. Recently, I reviewed two better alternatives to Akismet. However, even with Defensio and Typepad Antispam the aforementioned problems remain. As a result most bloggers are forced to implement multiple antispam techniques. The most popular ones being -

Challenge-response tests : These tests attempt to distinguish a human from a bot by analyzing their response to a server generated question. The most popular implementation is captcha, which asks the user to retype a sequence of letters displayed in an image. While this may help you in reducing the number of spam comments, it will also aggravate your readers and discourage them from commenting. Due to this more bloggers are switching to less annoying challenge-response tests like Challenge

Even with these newer plugins the main problem remains - the commenter is made to put in extra effort. Not only that, a significantly large number of spam comments manage to get through these challenge-response tests.
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Personality analysis tests are certainly nothing new. But Signal Pattern is attempting to take it to the next level by making the process more scientific, detailed and social. After having completed the test, I would definitely admit that it’s one of the most detailed personality assessment test I have ever taken. In fact I doubt that many people would even have the patience to answer all 100 questions.

One unique characteristic of Signal Patterns is that instead of rigidly classifying you into group x or group y, it attempts to analyze the prominence of 45 unique traits in your personality. After you complete the survey you would be provided a visual representation of the top 10 traits (or all 45 if you wish) accompanied by a lengthy text explaining the traits in greater detail. Signal Patterns then takes it to the next step by making the whole process more social in true Web 2.0 style. You can invite your friends and compare each other’s personality. Again, Signal Patterns impresses with it’s advanced reporting options. There are three reporting modes which allows you to discover your similarities as well dissimilarities with your friend.
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Virus.gr has released the results of Antivirus shootout conducted on June 21, 2008. Forty-nine antimalware products were tested by them using 246705 virus samples. This test was conducted by virusp, a private virus collector.

Top 5 single-engine Premium Antivirus products :

4. Kaspersky version 8.0.0.357 - 97.95%
5. eScan version 9.0.742.1 - 97.44%
6. The Shield 2008 - 97.43%
7. AntiVir version 8.1.00.331 Premium - 97.13%
8. Ashampoo version 1.61 - 97.09%

Top 4 single-engine Free Antivirus products :

10. AntiVir version 8.1.00.295 Classic - 95.54%
11. AVG version 8.0.100 Free - 94.85%
13. Avast version 4.8.1201 Professional - 93.78% (virus.gr claims avast free uses the same engine hence would have identical result)
16. BitDefender version 10 Free - 91.32%
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Spam is undoubtedly one of the biggest nuisance on the web. It’s everywhere - its in your mailbox, its in your blog comments, its there on social bookmarking sites and so on. While spam filters continue to wage their war against spam, spammers are getting creative - often with hilarious results. A twitter hash-tag service spamlet collects all such spam messages for your viewing pleasure.
Here are some of the gems I came across :

did you know that the big bang theory started with my big bad bazooka?
Upgrade your hardware now. Small men, do not give up hope, your time is here right here.
A key from her bedroom is in your pants”
enlarge your pole with wonder pills
power in your pants
Victory is yours when its big
Tiny droopy dingdong requires a massive correction with herbs.
Big Ben just got bigger and I am enjoying every inch of it.

If you have a spam you would like to share simply add the prefix #spamlet and twit it. And yeah dont forget to follow me on twitter.

[via Mashable]

The regular uninstaller of an application often leaves behind useless files and registry entries. This is one of the primary causes behind loss in performance of Windows over time. Not only that, the default Add/Remove applet is slow and as bare-bones as it gets. Here are five alternatives you should consider.

MyUninstaller from Nirsoft is a no-frills add/remove replacement whose main objective is to give you a light weight replacement to the default interface with a few extra features thrown in. You can delete invalid entries, save list of installed programs, sort the installed programs according to various parameters etc. Its certainly not feature rich but hey its only a 43 KB download and is still better than the default add remove interface.

Download MyUninstaller (42.42 KB)
Platforms Supported : All versions of Windows
Version Reviewed : 1.40

Free Uninstaller is another simplistic Add/Remove programs alternative.

It provides a vastly improved interface which highlights system entries in blue and invalid entries in red. You can lookup more information about any software or its manufacturer from the web (Google, Yahoo and Live Search are supported). Other features include the ability to uninstall multiple programs together, to delete invalid entries, to backup registry, to export list of installed, to sort installed softwares according to various parameters.

Download Free Uninstaller (311 KB)
Platforms Supported : All versions of Windows
Version Reviewed : 1.1

MyUninstaller and Free Uninstaller are better than the default Add/Remove programs. But they simply provide a new UI and doesn’t improve the uninstall process as such. Now, I shall move on to more serious options.
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Google has added a new functionality to their Google Trends Product which will allow you to view estimated traffic data for individual websites. Till now Google Trends allowed you to compare only popularity of search queries. Google says that it estimates the traffic trends by combining data from a variety of sources such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.

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Time for another edition of Tiny Utilities : Small is Good. In each edition I review 3 tiny but extremely useful freeware. Do check out the previous editions if you missed them.

For a software that’s smaller than 400kB, XNeat Windows Manager is incredibly feature packed. Here are some of the things it does -

Allows you to re-arrange the taskbar buttons (ala Taskbar Shuffle).
Allows you to pin a window i.e. make it always appear on top.
Allows you to send any taskbar button to the system tray. This is a very handy feature, if you do a lot of multitasking, as this prevents the taskbar from getting crowded.
Allows you to make any window transparent (opacity can be set to any value between 0 and 100).
Allows you to hide a window. A hidden window can be restored via the taskbar context menu or Hot Menu.
Replaces the default Task Switcher (Alt+Tab) in Windows XP and Vista (Flip3D) with something similar to Expose (found in OSX) which is much more intuitive and productive.
Adds a hot menu (accessible via Win+Space hotkey) to quickly launch and switch between programs.
Modifies the “Save As Dialogue”. Adds a Date button which appends the date to the file name. Additionally when you try to save a file with same name as an existing file you get a clone option. This appends a number to the file and saves it.

The extensive feature list along with it’s incredibly small memory footprint makes XNeat Windows Manager a must have software.

Download XNeat WIndows Manager (373 KB)
Platforms Supported : Windows XP , Vista 32 bit
Version Reviewed : 2.5.0.85

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