Have you ever think of running an operating system on top of another. If you are a Windows user then you might want some great features of Linux OS. Similarly, if you are Linux user then you might want to work on MS Word. Virtualization will cater all your needs be it software development, running one OS on another, configuration testing and document creation. It will allows you to install new Operating Systems on the same machine and the best thing is that you don’t have to worry about hard disk formats and other pre install software or losing any data.

Virtualization is creation of Virtual Machines which can emulate hardware in software or in other words it is the creation of virtual version of something such as a hardware platform, operating system, storage device, or network resources (from Wikipedia). Virtualization is achieved or created with the help of software and this particular software allows you to install any number of OS on your system without using the available hardware directly.

How Does Virtualization Work?

As you already know that Virtualization is created with the help of software. This software is nothing but a program that creates an environment or platform wherein it emulates and imitates different hardware components like RAM, Hard disk, Network Card, Processor etc. Virtualization creates an illusion where an Operating System starts believing that it is using or utilizing the various hardware component of the computer system.

Virtualization is achieved using software that creates a virtual environment which looks real but isn’t. Following are some information you have to configure while creating a new Virtual Machine.

• You need to configure the amount of RAM which will be reserved by the software from the real RAM.

• You need to configure the size of hard disk you want to allocate to the virtual machine.

• You need to configure the number of network adapters the virtual machine will have.

• You need to tell the virtual machine whether it should access removable devices.

• You need to tell the virtual machine whether it can play audio or video.

When you are running an OS over the top of another on your machine the whole environment acts like a HOST and GUEST OS. The real operating system acts as a HOST and the OS run by virtualization software acts as a GUEST OS.

The entire load balancing is actually done by the HOST operating system.

Types of Virtualization

There are mainly three types of virtualization.

• Full virtualization
• OS level virtualization
• Paravirtualization

Full virtualization

As the name suggests everything in a system is virtualized which includes the processor, storage, networking components etc. Virtual Box, VMware are example of “Full Virtualization” solutions.

OS Level virtualization

In this type of virtualization only applications are run inside the software. In this case the application is given a platform to work. Isolation is created and the application is made to believe that it is the only thing running on the system.

Paravirtualization

It’s a semi-virtualized environment created for the guset OS. A modified guest OS is created using a hypervisor. “The intent of the modified interface is to reduce the portion of the guest’s execution time spent performing operations which are substantially more difficult to run in a virtual environment compared to a non-virtualized environment. The paravirtualization provides specially defined ‘hooks’ to allow the guest(s) and host to request and acknowledge these tasks, which would otherwise be executed in the virtual domain (where execution performance is worse). A successful paravirtualized platform may allow the virtual machine monitor (VMM) to be simpler (by relocating execution of critical tasks from the virtual domain to the host domain), and/or reduce the overall performance degradation of machine-execution inside the virtual-guest.”(Source: Wikipedia)

Advantages Of Virtualization

• One of the biggest advantages of virtualization is scalability i.e. the ability to expand. Whenever there is excessive load on some part of application in a server you can easily create a similar virtual environment on a different server and configure the setup.

• Hardware maintenance cost is reduced because you don’t need many servers to install different applications.

• You can save a huge amount of energy by running one physical server instead of many and less power backup is required.

• You can get faster and safer backups by taking live snapshot while server is running.

• You will get centralized monitoring of your resources as virtualization provides easy way of connecting and maintaining your virtual servers.

So that’s all about virtualization. Hope you get some understanding of virtualization. So what do you think of this amazing technology?

You and I live out a large part of our lives in Social Networking websites be it on Facebook or twitter. We share images, updates our thoughts and important moments with our friends and family. In short these sites are now a part of our daily lives. All of this important data is beyond our reach and therefore it becomes important for us to have some safety measures in place. In this post I will share some methods and tools which will help you to backup your vital data.

Backup Your Facebook Account Information

You don’t need any tool to backup your Facebook data, Facebook allows you to back up all your data without using any third party application. Login to your Facebook account and go to Account > Account Settings using the top right menu.

Go to the account settings and scroll down a bit, you’ll find a link which says “Download a copy of your Facebook data”. Once you click on it, Facebook will tell you what the backup will contain. Backup includes your photos, wall posts, messages and chats. To begin the process click on “Start My Archive”. After completion you will receive an email when your archive is ready for download. You will receive an HTML version of your account. Make sure you save this data carefully on our system.

Backup Your Twitter Account

Twitter always deletes your old tweets and you lose majority of your tweets. Only 3,200 of your recent tweets are available online. You can’t afford to lose them because you crafted these tweets on your own. You don’t need to worry about losing your tweets because there are many services such as http://backupmytweets.com and http://tweetbackup.com which will help you to save all your tweets on your system.

Backup Your LinkedIn Information

LinkedIn is a vital source for building professional connections because they might be excellent resources in the future. All this information is residing on a website over which you have no control. Therefore you should periodically exports and save your connections.

Here are some steps that will help you in exporting your LinkedIn Information.

• First of all sign into your LinkedIn Account

• Click on “Contacts” link located at the top left of the page.

• You will see a list of your connections.

• At the bottom of this list you will see a link to “Export Connections”. Click on it and select the file type in which you’d like to save this information.

• Now save this file on your computer.

Backup Your Flickr Photos

Flickr is one of the best and largest photo sharing website. This website let you upload photos for free and provides a good control over who does or does not see the pics that you’re uploading.

Flickr has an awesome community which gives a plenty of resources in finding our perfect photo. All of the features are just great but one thing that is still lacking is to let users take a backup of their Flickr Photos from the site itself.

There are many third party tools available that will help you to take backup of your images. Here are such two great tools available.

Flump

Flump is a simple application that allows you to download all of the public photos for a specific Flickr account.This application doesn’t provide you with an option to download particular images. Login using your Flickr account and select the folder you want to download your pics to.

Flickr Edit

Flickr Edit is Java based desktop application that allows you to display and edit your photos in different ways. It allows you to download or upload your photos to and from Flickr.

Here are some features of Flickr Edit.

• Display your Recent, Favorites, Contacts and Group photos

• Search photos based on date and tag

• Backup your Flickr Photos and Sets

• Upload new photos to Flickr

• Edit Photo and Set info, add comments to Photos and Sets

• Delete photos or Sets

• View a photo or selected photos slideshow

• Switch between multiple Flickr users

Download Your Online Social Life With SocialSafe

SocialSafe is one of the best software for downloading your Facebook Timeline, Twitter, Linkedin and Google+ accounts.

The best thing about this software is that you can download all your Social Network accounts in one place. Check out the feature page for more details.

Check Out The Video For More Details

Hope you liked this post. Please do share how you guys manage your data on Social Networking websites. Do you backup your data periodically or just let these sites manage all your data?

If you own a Smartphone then you desperately want some good applications that can help easing your life a bit. In this post I am sharing some cool apps that you should have on your Smartphone. All these applications can be downloaded for free.

iOnRoad Augmented Driving For Anroid

This application is the best companion for you while you are driving your vehicle. This application keeps an eye on the road in front via the Smartphone’s camera. It alerts the driver if he is in danger and avoids collisions from happening on the roads.

There will be a loud beep alert as well as a text alert when the distance to the car in front becomes less and thereby avoiding collision.

There is a auto driving detection feature that automatically start up the application when you start driving.

Get more information about this application here

Winter Wake Up

A very great application which is best suited for winters. Winter comes with unpredicted weather conditions and imagine if you have a plan for a morning walk but when you wake up in the morning you find out snowfall everywhere. Here this application comes for your rescue.

Winter Wake Up will check the weather online some time before the alarm time that you had set and modify your alarm time. This application is available for iOS and Anroid platforms.

You can download this application for Android here and for iOS check this link.

TuneIn Radio – Best Online Radio

Tune is the best radio application for smarphones. You can browse and listen to radio from wherever you are. TuneIn offers over 50,000 stations and 1.2 million on demand programs.

Download TuneIn Radio for Anroid Here

Download TuneIn Radio for iOS here

You have already come across the terms like shared hosting and dedicated hosting but cloud hosting is the latest and hottest term in web hosting arena. Cloud hosting has changed the way applications and users interact with each other.

Difference between single Server Hosting and Cloud Hosting

Shared hosting and dedicated hosting has been there from quite a time. If one machine is serving multiple websites then it’s basically a shared hosting and it’s a cheap way to get started with a website. In dedicated hosting one machine will serve only one website. In these two types of hosting you can’t go beyond a single machine. In order to bypass this problem Cloud Hosting came into existence where instead of having a single machine serving a single website, you have different computers serving different websites.

Cloud Hosting: One website, Many Instances

In cloud hosting a website could be running on any number of servers at a given time. It’s basically used to balance the load on your website i.e. other instances of your website could be launched to ease the burden. Cloud hosting ensures that no server is overloaded and the end user can easily access the website without any downtime.

How Cloud Hosting Works

Suppose a user types an address of a website in his browser. At this particular point of time there is no way to find where the website is hosted. As you know in Cloud hosting a single website can be hosted on many different machines so tracing the IP is of no use.

After some time as users are kept on increasing on website multiple instances of the website are created across multiple servers which are connected through the cloud hosting setup. Load balancing is most important aspect of Cloud hosting setup and that’s the reason why Cloud hosting came into existence i.e. to ensure that the end user can continue accessing the website transparently.

Cloud Computing Explained

VLC player is one of the most versatile multimedia player that plays most multimedia files including DVD, Audio CD, VCD and various streaming protocols. One of the most interesting thing about VLC is that you don’t need any codec packs in order to play MPEG-2, H.264, DivX and MPEG-4 files. VLC is completely free open source cross-platform multimedia player.

VLC can do more than just playing multimedia files. You can even convert many video and audio files using VLC. Here is brief step by step tutorial to convert multimedia files using VLC player.

• Open VLC player application and choose convert/save under media tab.
  

• Now choose the file you want to convert from your local hard drive.
  

• After selecting the file click convert/save button and you will be provided with options for file conversion. Check the file name checkbox and choose your destination where you want to save the file. Please give the extension to the desired file name like filename.mp3, filename.mp4 i.e. the name of the format in which you want to save the file.Now from profile menu select the multimedia format in which you want to convert the current file i.e. to convert your file in mp3 format select mp3 from the options and similarly you can choose the other given format.
  

• After that hit the save button and VLC will start converting your file.
  

• Your file is now saved at the location you have previously chosen.

Now you don’t need any other paid application to convert your multimedia files. VLC is exactly what you need.

Content is king and Google want that you put the king on top of your website and drag the ads beneath. Right, Google has announced that it will penalize sites with pages that are loaded heavy with ads and mainly above the fold. The main reason for this algorithm update is mainly based on user experience while browsing such sites which have heavy ads above the fold and they find it difficult to see the actual content.

Now the main question is how can you decide how much ads are sufficient? Google won’t tell you that but you can use Google Browser Size Tool to understand how much content can be visible at first glance.

This update is really opposite to what we have seen in the Google Adsense heatmap overview. But if you really care about your visitors then certainly this is the best move from Google.

How To Fix Your Google Adsense Ads

If you previously placed two or more ad units above the fold then you should move them below the content and make sure that content should be visible in first glance. In other terms the ratio of your ads should be low in relation with the content. Now that you have made the necessary changes don’t expect the results immediately as Google will re-crawl your website to access the changes.

Its all about content and now those days are gone when webmasters simply filled their websites with ads. So it’s a suggestion that make necessary changes as soon as possible before this penalty can hit you.

If you have a blog or a website you always want some images or photos to make your website more appealing in eyes of your visitors and keeping your visitors attention intact while they browse your blog or website. But it is very important to know that obtaining and using images on your website or blog isn’t that easy because maximum of images are copyrighted. So it’s very important to understand that what you can and cannot do.

Using Images found on Flickr

Here I will try to explain how you can use Flickr images on your own website or blog. Flickr is a great resource for finding different images and photos that you can use freely on your website. But you have to understand that many images on Flickr come with certain restrictions.

How You Can Use Flickr Images

Using images from Flickr on your website or blog is not a very difficult task but before using them you should check out the license type for a particular image which you will be using on your website.

Flickr images comes under two main licenses:

• Copyrighted

• Creative Common License

Copyrighted License

If you find a “C” symbol with a circle around it, then the image is copyrighted and you cannot use it. This particular information is normally located underneath the “License” in the sidebar. If you really like an image which you found that you want to use and is copyrighted, you can directly contact the photographer using Flickr mail.

Creative Commons License

A creative commons license provides us a way where we can use other’s people stuff on our website but with some rules in place. On Flickr, the images have different forms of licenses that have different rules for how you can use them.
 

The Attribution License allows you to copy, distribute, tweak, remix and publish even commercially as long as you give credit to it.

There are over 25 million images which come under this license so you have a good choice to search within this particular license if you want some images for your blog or website.

In order to use images for this particular license you have to put a link back to the original web page on Flickr where the images come from.
 

The Attribution-NoDervs License is more or less same as the last one, except that you cannot alter, change or tweak the original image i.e. you don’t have permission to change or modify the image according to your needs and when you publish the image on your blog or website it should be in its original form.

Images under this license can be used commercially and you must give the credit to the original creator by putting a link back on your blog or website.
 

As the name suggest Attribution-Noncommercial License you can use the images and even remix, tweak, modify but only for non-commercial purposes. If you are making money from your website you cannot use this license and you should opt for a commercial license.
 

The Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs is most restrictive license i.e. it allows you to use the images on your blog or website provided images are in their original form and you should use them only for non commercial purpose.

In short you cannot tweak, modify or mix images and along with that you cannot use them commercially.

The Attribution-ShareAlike License let’s you to remix, tweak and modify even for commercial purposes but after you create those new images, they will be under the same license and someone else can freely use your images provided they use it in the same way as you did.

In short every new image must have the similar license as the original one.

The Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike is same as above, except you cannot use the images commercially.

Hope you understood the concept of using images from Flickr. Flickr is a great resource for obtaining images for your blog or website provided you carefully read the license before using any image.

Online web directories are the best medium to generate backlinks for your website and it’s quite an easy task to execute. There are thousands of free online directories available but you have to be very careful when submitting your website to these directories. Always pick up the directory which holds some authority or have a decent page rank. A mass submission is not recommended as many webmasters thinks that merely submitting websites into directories will automatically boost their website’s ranking.

Planning Your Directory Submission

Before submitting to online directories or search engines prepare your submission material carefully. Prepare your content in a good and logical manner in a separate text file. Each directory has their own submission guidelines so prepare your content accordingly. Be sure to spell check all your content which you will submit. A typical directory has the following fields which need to be filled in order to complete the submission process.

• Page Title

• Description

• Keywords

• URL

• Category and Subcategory

• Contact Information

Page title is one of the most important element so be very sure to choose the most relevant title. Don’t put several keyphrases in your title instead restrict to only one most important keyphrase for which you want your website to rank. You have to prepare different page titles for individual pages of your website.

Description should be of the right length for each directories and it is a good idea to write description of different length because different directories allow different description sizes. Always use keywords in your description and make sure your description flows naturally.

Keywords should be relevant for the individual page submission and use only four to five keywords. Pick up the best combination of keywords which are relevant to the page content.

For each submission you have to provide different URL.

Choose your category which is relevant to your website because if you submit your website in different category the editor of directory might disapprove your submission.

It generally takes a longer time to be indexed in a directory because most of the directories are reviewed manually before adding it to database. So be sure to add only relevant information about your website and it is only the editors who decide if your page have a worth before they include it.

Always make a habit of making a database of your directory submission in excel so that you can know where you have submitted your directories. Be very sure to verify your directory submission by going through your email where you have received a verification link because most of the directories send a verification link in your email.

Best Tool For Filling Directory Submission

I have personally used Roboform tool which is the best form filling tool available. You can set your title, description, keywords, email and other information by making an identity. You can make different identities for different urls. It will save a lot of time as you don’t have to enter your information in each directory manually. Roboform will create a toolbar on your browser and you can set your identities right on this toolbar.

RAM or Random Access Memory is responsible for how fast your computer system can perform when you are running applications on your system at any one time. When you install more software or applications on your computer system, your system begins to slowdown. Therefore you can install more RAM in your computer system to increase its performance.

Installing RAM is quite an easy task but you have to know certain things so that you can install your RAM in a right way. The main problem is to know which type of memory your computer system uses. You can use one of the best software to know which type of memory your system uses and the software is CPUID.

CPUID will gather all information about your system like type of CPU, memory type and your mainboard. Download CPU id for windows

After being certain you have the right RAM, you are now ready to install the RAM in your computer system. Following are a step by step Procedures to install RAM in your desktop based computer system.

• Make sure you have turnoff your system and unplug all peripherals.

• Now remove the side panel of your desktop computer and place it in a safe place.
  

• Before you touch anything inside your system unit be sure to remove electrical static charge from your body by touching any unpainted metal surface like your door knob.

• Now locate the memory socket to install the new memory chips.
  

• Pull the clip and slide the RAM chips in the respective memory banks. Now push the clips back over the memory chips.
  

• Check that memory chips are well placed in the memory banks by moving it from side to side.

• Reconnect all peripherals and cover your system panel and reboot your computer system. You have now successfully installed new RAM in your computer system.

Increasing RAM will certainly boost your computer performance and you will notice how fast your application opens.

Keyword research is one of the most crucial parameter of any search engine marketing campaign. There are several tools available where you can research for keywords.  But have you ever thought of Google’s wonder wheel for searching your best keywords. Here I am providing you a short method to use wonder wheel for choosing your best and potential keywords.

Where is wonder wheel located?

Search for any keyword in Google and when results are displayed you will find the wonder wheel in left column under all results category.

How to Find Keywords Using Wonder Wheel

For using wonder wheel just enter any search term or keyword in Google search. I will start with a keyword “web development”. Now after hitting the search button and when results are being displayed just click on the wonder wheel link and you will find that wonder wheel has divided the keyword into eight related keywords type.

Now you got eight variations of your main keyword which will certainly helps you in finding out and targeting the keywords for your webpage or website. You can even go into deeper analysis of the eight keywords which are displayed. Click on any keyword from the eight and you will again get a wonder wheel displaying another sets of keywords.

Let’s click on the keyword “web development services” and you will see the following results.

From these examples you can see how this tool can help you in finding the best keywords for your website. Please use this method for choosing your keywords and share your experience with me.