Just a small shout out to let you guys know that you can use the discount coupon code “linkup” while signing up the excellent online backup service SpiderOak to get a major bump to 10 GB from the 2 GB that they give to normal accounts.

For those who don’t know SpiderOak is a great online data backup service, with its major strengths being truly cross paltform (Mac/Linux/Windows – 32 bit as well as 64 bit), easy interface, rsync like differential backups to save time and disk space, versioned file history, web as well as client interface, unlimited number of devices, unlimited bandwidth, etc etc.

A few people (e.g. Varun) told me my previous post differed from the way how google chrome / Microsoft IE8 handle Incognito (Private Browsing) mode. The main consideration was that while chrome/IE8 don’t write anything to disk at all, the firefox method is an after-effect, i.e., writing to disk and then clearing it up while closing the window. Well, true but nothing is non-rectificable :). So this is a post about a method that one can use to go “really” undercover with firefox. But before we begin, please make sure you have read Part 1 of my post, because here I’ll start from the point where we left off in the earlier post.

Update: Part 2 of this post is now up here to allay some of the drawbacks that were pointed out.

There has been so much hype over the “Incognito” (or Private Browsing) mode of Google Chrome / Microsoft IE8, with many internet users screeming Hallelujiah. But I don’t understand what the hoopla is all about. This mode has always been there in Mozilla firefox as well. You just need to devote less than one minute (yes, you read that right, less than one minute) to set it up. Well, actions are better than words, so here it goes:

I recently wrote a simple answering machine program/plugin for pidgin and someone asked me to port it to 32 bit. So I fired up pidgin within my virtual box installation at work (as I have only a 64 bit machine at home) but couldn’t get it to connect. Tried all sorts of methods found over the net of changing ports etc, set port forwarding in Virtual Box NAT, even switched to using a bridged host interface but still no go. On a whim, installed pidgin in the host, i.e., windows and still the same issue. Hmm, interesting.. But wait, gtalk client works, then what gives.

Guys, for the past few days if you downloaded any “.tar.gz” packages from this site (like my splert or shantz-xwinwrap tools), then you’d have got a corrupt package. Turns out there was some issue with mime-types with my setup. I haven’t been able to resolve it still but have re-upped the packages in “zip” format. Please download them again. I apologize for the inconvenience.