Internet Tips and Tricks

Friday, December 3, 2010

Cleaning your New Computer from Trial Junk with PC Decrapifier

PC Decrapifier is an uninstall utility that is specifically designed to remove common trial and promotional software, that come often installed on a new PC. This includes items such as trial versions of Norton, Corel, MS Office, Quicken etc., as well as promotional desktop icons, AOL installations, OEM home and search pages, browser toolbars, unnecessary startup items and more. The program does not need to be installed, and can run from a USB drive. You can choose the items to be removed from a list, and also create a restore point to undo any changes.

Programs removal supported:

�� AOL Install��

�� AOL UK - AOL 9.0, UK Version��

�� AOL US - AOL 9.0, US Version��

�� BigFix - BigFix monitors your computer for problems and conflicts. It automatically gathers information about the latest bugs, security alerts, and updates from BigFix sites on the Internet. ��

�� Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI��

�� Corel Photo Album 6��

�� Corel Snapfire Plus SE - 30 day trialware��

�� Corel WordPerfect��

�� Dell Search Assistant��

�� Dell URL Assistant - Takes over your search/home page��

�� Digital Content Portal��

�� Earthlink Setup Files��

�� ESPN Motion��

�� Get High Speed Internet!��

�� Google Desktop��

�� Google Toolbar - Adds Google services to your web browser��

�� Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer��

�� HP Rhapsody��

�� Internet Service Offers Launcher��

�� McAfee��

�� Microsoft Office Activation Assistant 2007��

�� Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007��

�� Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003��

�� MS Plus Digital Media Installer��

�� MS Plus Photo Story 2LE��

�� MusicMatch Jukebox

�� MusicMatch Music Services� ��

�� muvee autoProducer 5.0��

�� My HP Games��

�� MyWinLocker - Preinstalled trialware that allows you to encrypt personal data��

�� NetZero Internet Access Installer��

�� Norton AntiSpam��

�� Norton AntiVirus 2005��

�� Norton Ghost 10.0��

�� Norton Internet Security��

�� Norton Protection Center��

�� Norton Security Center��

�� Norton Symantec Live Update - A common component of Norton Symantec products��

�� Office 2003 Trial Assistant��

�� Orange Internet��

�� PC-cillin Internet Security 12 Trend Micro��

�� QuickBooks Trial��

�� Quicken 2006 - Possible Trial Version��

�� Remove Empty Program Folders - Looks for and removes empty 'Program Files' folders��

�� Reset IE Home and Search Pages��

�� Roxio Express Labeler��

�� Roxio MyDVD LE��

�� Roxio RecordNow��

�� Sonic DLA��

�� Sonic RecordNow Audio��

�� Sonic RecordNow Copy��

�� Sonic Update Manager��

�� Tiscali Internet��

�� Travelocity Gadget - Link in the Vista sidebar that shows deals from Travelocity��

�� Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security 14��

�� Vongo��

�� Wanadoo Europe Installer��

�� Wild Tangent Games��

�� Yahoo! Music Jukebox��

�� 1 comments

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Rhyming Assistance with Poem Creation

Wikipedia defines rhyme as a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. Rhymes might be useful not just for professional poets. They can be quite handy, when you try to create a nice greeting, party invitation, or love song. That is cool, and you will see how your rating goes up, when you produce such piece of art. But that is not easy to make it. Words are running away, and you may find it hard to use the proper rhymes during composition. Get some assistance from the Web.

Free online version of Rhymer service offers five types of rhymes:

End Rhymes (blue/shoe)
Words with ending rhyme have the same final vowel sound and following consonant sound(s). For example, if you enter the word laughter under this option, Rhymer retrieves a list of words with the ending sound er (e.g., admirer, doctor, pleasure, scholar, watercolor, and were). Other examples of ending rhyme include:

hat/cat
plate/eight
marigold/buttonholed

This option lets you easily find exact rhymes (words in which the final vowel and consonant sounds are the same) and masculine rhymes (rhyming words with a stressed final syllable).

Last Syllable Rhymes (timber/harbor)
Words with last syllable rhyme have the same sounds following the last syllable boundary (commonly a consonant, a vowel, and another consonant). For example, if you enter the word explain using this option, Rhymer retrieves a list of words with the last syllable sound plain (e.g., aquaplane, biplane, plane, and plain). Other examples of last syllable rhyme include:

humanity/zesty
threw/breakthrough
pleat/complete

This option lets you find masculine rhymes and all other words with final syllables (stressed or unstressed) that rhyme with the word you entered.

Double Rhymes (conviction/prediction)
Words with double rhyme have the same vowel sound in the second-to-last syllable and all following sounds. For example, if you enter the word soaring using this option, Rhymer retrieves a list of words with the sound oring (e.g., adoring, exploring, pouring, scoring, touring, and restoring). Other examples of double rhyme include:

walking/talking
humming/coming
navigator/waiter

This option lets you find feminine rhymes (rhyming words with an unstressed final syllable). Words entered using this option must have at least two syllables.

Beginning Rhymes (physics/fizzle)
Words with beginning rhyme have the same initial consonant sound(s) and the same first vowel sound. For example, if you enter the word plantation using this option, Rhymer retrieves a list of words with the sound pla (e.g., plan, plaque, plaster, and plateau). Other examples of beginning rhyme include:

scenery/cedar
cat/kangaroo
table/tailor

This option lets you find words with initial alliteration (the repetition of initial consonant sounds), initial assonance (the repetition of initial vowel sounds), and front rhyme (the succession of beginning sounds of words).

First Syllable Rhymes (carrot/caring)
Words with first syllable rhyme have the same sounds preceding the first syllable break. For example, if you enter the word explanation using this option, Rhymer retrieves a list of words with the sound ex (e.g., excavate, exhale, expert, and extra). Other examples of first syllable rhyme include:

pantaloons/pantomimes
highlight/hydrant
tulip/twosome

Web site: http://www.rhymer.com/

HTTrack Website Copier

This Thanksgiving Holidays brought me an unpleasant surprise. Coming home from the long and cold weekend, I have found out that my Blogger account was completely blocked and all 18 blogs, I am managing, were disabled. Luckily, the account restoration was smooth, and the blogs reappear immediately after my credentials were confirmed. All blogs, but one, which was claimed to be a splog (spam blog). Even though I am absolutely confident that there was mistake in the spider definition, I cannot be sure that it error is going to be corrected, and the blog is going to be restored. That is one of the major drawbacks of using overly nice, convenient, and free Blogger platform. But even thou I have appealed twice for additional review, the blog can be gone forever.

So, what could I do differently to avoid such situation? Follow the rules? I followed them. Be careful with posted content? I am confident, there was no violation. But, I missed one important step: I failed to backup the blogs. Indeed, if I would have a backup of the blocked blog on my hard drive, I could more or less easy transfer the posts to a different location, another blogging or hosting platform.

Essentially, I started looking for good solution to backup the remaining blogs. While there are several online services available for blogs backup (like Blog Backupr, for example), I decided to shoot for completely independent solution and choose the software, which will allow downloading the entire blog with text, pictures, and comments to my Hard Drive). And I would like to share the utility, I am going to use from now on. Hope you may find it useful as well.

HTTrack is a free (GPL) and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It is able to operate with any website on the Web, including blogs. Software allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure.

Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.

The software has many configuration options for advanced users, but it can be used "out-of-the-box" right away without making any changes to the default settings.

WinHTTrack is the Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Seven release of HTTrack, and WebHTTrack the Linux/Unix/BSD release. Portable version is available, so you do not need to install the utility on your Hard Drive.

Developers Website: http://www.httrack.com/

Downloading page: http://ping.fm/iH1qK

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

What Is Fill or Kill Order?

About Fill or Kill (FOK) order

A Fill or Kill order can be placed with a financial broker when buying a security. This is commonly used in the stock market, commodities market and Forex market.

With this type of order, the buyer specifies that the entire amount of the order must be filled or the broker is to disregard the order entirely. The buyer does not want any partial order fills for this particular order. In many cases, if you do not specify the type of order, and there is not enough of a particular security to fill the order completely, the broker will make a partial fill at that price. This might provide you with only a fraction of the amount of securities that you want to purchase.

A Fill or Kill order differs from immediate or cancel orders in that immediate or cancel orders allow partial executions. The Fill or Kill order in stock trading is an exchange that will never trade partially. It can be very useful when someone wants to buy or sell immediately, but the standard market order is too dangerous (because of possible price fluctuation), as a limit FOK trade will only act if it can immediately fill at the set price or better, which means that it will cancel if it cannot buy or sell all shares at a price that is satisfactory to the investor who set the order.

Fill or Kill Trading Orders

Application

This type of order is commonly used in transactions that involve purchasing large numbers of securities. For example, if you wanted to buy 20,000 shares of a particular stock, at a particular price, you might want to use a fill or kill order so that you do not end up with only 5000 shares of the stock at that price. Not getting a full order could affect your investment strategy in a way that you would dissatisfy you.

Restrictions

Not all brokers and markets accept Fill or Kill orders and many brokers have restrictions in placing these orders like 1) the order must be equal (or exceed) a certain number of stocks, 2) orders can be only placed at market hours, 3) these orders are not allowed at/near market closing, 4) the orders cannot be stop or short orders, etc. Often FOK is considered as a restricted order than useful trading tool.

For example, Fidelity posts the following restrictions for the Fill or Kill orders:

are for 101 shares or more
are only placed during market hours
are good only for the current day
are not allowed for use with stop loss, stop limit, or sell short orders

Examples

Suppose that a stock has been trading at around $5 for the past few hours. An investor looking to purchase 1,000 shares could set a buy limit order with the FOK component, and as soon as the order is enacted, either 1,000 shares will be bought at $5 or less, or none will be bought at all. If enough sellers are available, and the value is within the $5 limit at the time of the order, it will fill completely.

A sell order works the same way. Suppose that an investor is looking to unload 1,000 shares of a stock with a limit price of $10. As soon as the order is placed, it will fill by either unloading all 1,000 shares at $10 or better at once, or it will cancel.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://www.finance-insurance-loans.com/finance/insurance/what-is-a-fill-or-kill-order/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fill_or_kill

https://scs.fidelity.com/webxpress/help/topics/help_definition_f.shtml#fillorkill

http://www.suite101.com/content/what-is-a-fill-or-kill-order-in-stock-trading-a301534

Difficulties for Depression Recognition in Primary Care

To fight the health disorder, it should be properly recognized first. The patient comes to the primary care with his problems, which might be seemingly unrelated to the clear case of the clinical depression, and unfortunately, the recognition of depression success rate in primary care is statistically less than we would like it to be. For example, 50% of people with major depression, identified by independent screening in Great Britain, were not recognized as depressed by the primary physician. The recognition of depression is particularly difficult in certain patient groups such as the physically ill, or in certain cultures, when depression is not socially accepted diagnosis. Yes, in some cultures it is just "normal" to be sad, but clinical depression is much more than cultural specifics, or normal mood swings.

Depression is Often Unrecognized and Undertreated

Numerous studies indicate that 30-70% of cases of major depression are undiagnosed or undertreated in primary care. While some observers note that physicians are more likely to identify severe depression and to miss only milder forms of the illness, recent studies clearly demonstrated that nearly half of the undetected patients with depression in primary care developed suicidal ideation and 53% continued to meet criteria for major depression one year after the index evaluation.

Physician, patient, and system variables probably account for these disturbing findings. Several theories have been offered, including health services issues, sociocultural barriers, poor consumer education, and insufficient physician knowledge level. Patient denial, cognitive impairment, lacking awareness of depressive symptoms, and inability to articulate symptoms compound the difficulties of detecting depression in primary care. Patient nonadherence, resistance to diagnosis, cultural factors, social forces, subtherapeutic dosages of antidepressants, and low insurance reimbursement rates lead to the inadequate treatment of depression. Many employment, health, disability, and life insurance practices discriminate against individuals with mental illness, thereby reinforcing stigma and adversely affecting their socioeconomic status.

Problems for Depression Recognition

There may be a number of possible reasons for a lack of recognition of depression within primary care, both related to the physicians and the patients. Generally these can be summarized as follows:

Patient factors

Patients ignore depression in themselves;
When depressed, older adults may complain less of depressed mood and present somatic symptoms which may not be identified by the clinician;
Physical co-morbidity may also make the interpretation of depressive symptoms difficult. Depressed patients may appear demented, and patients with early dementia may present with depression;
Fear of the stigma of mental illness;
Worry about side effects of medication;
Blaming depression on circumstances, regarding it as 'understandable';
Older adults may misattribute symptoms of major depression for 'old age', ill health or grief;
Although depression is more frequent in women, differential reporting of symptoms may lead to depression being under diagnosed in men;
In some cultures, depression is not considered as socially acceptable disorder, causing patients to cover up the symptoms for the proper diagnostics.

Practitioner factors

Primary care practitioners may lack the necessary skills or confidence to correctly diagnose late-life depression;
Primary care physicians have been shown to view depression as a normal response to difficult circumstances, illnesses or life events and depression may be under diagnosed because of dissatisfaction with the types of treatment that can be offered, especially a lack of availability of psychological interventions;

Physicians typically have little time per patient.

Recommendations for Patients

Unfortunately those patients who go unrecognized and untreated after the primary care visit lose the advantage of starting the instant treatment and getting on track to the recovery.

Please, remember that it is your health and your well-being is on stack, and you should do everything possible to help your primary physician in its diagnosis. Get ready for the conversation, perform several self-checks for depression, if you just suspect that you may have it. Remember, that it is a disorder as any others, and you may significantly improve the quality of your life by accepting it and starting the professional treatment.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://www.euphix.org/object_document/o5838n27170.html

The Atlas of Depression by David S. Baldwin

http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/EHC/ehc75.pdf

http://www.nchph.org/caremodel/decisionsupport/5.7%20Assessment%20and%20Management%20of%20Depression%20in%20Primary%20Care%20Practice.doc

http://fampra.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/3/369.long