Forex Technology Blog

I just got this email from Anand Jagannathan, CEO of Kriyari Inc., a venture funded company based in Silicon Valley. They have just launched a new consumer shopping site, iStorez.

iStorez is a unique consumer shopping site that collects and organizes shopping newsletters from hundreds of stores and brands and presents them as ‘on demand’, visual and searchable storefronts. At iStorez, visitors can discover the latest products, browse current promotions and find special deals at their favorite stores.

A very neat feature of iStorez is that any visitor can quickly create a shopper profile and add their favorite stores to this profile. Now, iStorez will deliver a peronalized shopping experience, everytime the visitor comes back to the site. iStorez combines a ‘patent pending’ storefront creation engine with Web 2.0 technologies to deliver continually fresh, relevant and unique content into a visitor’s personal mall.

Qtrax, a new legal online file-sharing service that allows fans to download songs for free, will launch with 25 million to 30 million copyrighted tracks with backing from major labels.

The free service will be funded through advertising revenue that Qtrax will share with the music companies.

Qtrax executives said the company’s digital rights management technology will count the number of times each song has been played in order to fairly compensate artists and rights’ holders, without restricting consumer use.

The company has focused on ensuring that its network is free of spyware or adware such as pop-ups common on many peer-to-peer networks to improve the customer experience.

Valentine’s Day is the perfect time to show that special someone you care; however, finding the perfect gift can be challenging. Last year, an estimated 214 million roses were produced for Valentine’s Day (Insight Floral Trends Consumer Tracking Study). And while flowers and candy will always remain a Valentine’s Day staple, this year, try creating an even more personalized gift or the perfect date by using the latest in digital technology.

RadioShack offers several creative ideas for Valentine’s Day, from using a digital camcorder to shoot a customized love note for your Valentine to sending them on a romantic scavenger hunt using a GPS device.

We’re all looking for better performance from our PCs, right? Whether you have a snazzy new computer or a trusty PC with a few years under its belt, there are ways to make it run more efficiently. Here are some ideas for both Windows Vista and Windows XP, starting with this article on how to optimize Windows Vista for better performance.

Pinpoint performance bottlenecks in Windows Vista
More ways to improve performance with Windows Vista
6 ways to speed up your Windows XP-based PC
Turn off certain features to make Windows XP run faster
Maintenance tasks for better performance with Windows XP

I finally figured out why the Sarotech DVP-260 Media Player could not be detected by my laptop. It was coz there was a power drain by the other USB ports that had a notebook cooling pad and USB hub connected to it. Once I took those out, the Sarotech DVP-260 Media Player could be detected by my WinXP on the DELL and the correct driver was installed. Phew. Its pretty crazy. The disk sounded a bit cuckoo and it made a weird noise. Thank goodness it works now.

Wow, I never knew bloggers were even in Davos ? They are having the World Economic Forum over there now and Robert Scoble aka Super ex blogger for Microsoft was fiddling around the video and even had breakfast with the shy Mark Zuckerberg. He even blogged at the Google booth ? Gee, this guys are so lucky! Read about his day here

I am still having problems with my Sarotech Digital JukeBox abigs DVP-260 Media Player and the old 60GB Western Digital (WD WD600 WD Scorpio) hdd. It still won’t detect correctly on my laptop.

1. I’ve tried to format the 60GB WD hdd as Fat32 via fdisk but it won’t do that since its bigger than 32GB. (Windows can only format FAT32 up to 32 Gb)
2. Then I tried formatting the WD drive as NTFS but when I plug in the hdd into the Sarotech DVP-260 Media Player and attach it to my laptop, the error “Drive cannot start occurs”
3. Then I downloaded the mkdosfs for Windows to format the WD drive again as FAT32 and the same error above still occurs – “Drive cannot start occurs”

I am going out of my mind. I need to get a second-hand Hitachi or Samsung hdd drive to try on the Sarotech DVP-260 Media Player. Will be trying to get one at a shop in Tesco Puchong tomorrow. Wish me luck

Format FAT32 with Linux mkdosfs for Windows NT/ Windows 2K/ Windows XP.

Windows NT based systems are limited to 32GB as the maximum size of the FAT32 file systems they can create. But these systems can use larger FAT32 file systems fine if you create these on some other system. This is not necessarily a problem for fixed disk drives, as one would probably format these using the NTFS file system anyways. But on removable media like external firewire disks it is often desireable to format these using the FAT32 format for exchanging data with non-Windows systems. If you still have a bootable Windows 98/ME on your system you can boot this and create the large FAT32 file system using the older Windows version. As rebooting is inconvenient and I do have only XP on my system, I ported the Linux mkdosfs command line tool to Windows. This tool allows you to format FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB from the Windows NT/2K/XP command line. To format drive X: one would type:

c:\>mkdosfs -v -F 32 -n volname X:

The option -v is for verbose execution, -F 32 for FAT32 (16 is the default) and -n volname is the desired volume label. Mkdosfs determines the volume size from the partition table. For advanced usage consult the manual page in the zip archive or run mkdosfs without arguments to print the usage information.

Download the mkdosfs.zip archive containing a compiled Windows binary or download the dosfstools-2.11.src.zip archive containing the source code.

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I just went to Digital Mall , PJ about 7pm and bought a Digital JukeBox abigs DVP-260 for RM390 (RM409.50 after adding in 2% for Visa charges) . I thought it was for steal until I saw Moresales was selling it for RM 403.00 that includes shipping. Arrhhh…The original tagged price for that media player at Digital Mall was Rm450. Sometimes, not everything is cheaper at Digital Mall. So next time sure the Net before you buy something.

The Sarotech Digital JukeBox 2.5″ abigs DVP-254 is going for a lower price of RM 369. Oh well, I can’t regret so much since I can now watch my torrent files in front of the TV instead of my small 19 inch LCD TV.

Update : 26 Jan 2008
I tried to use my old 60GB Western Digital (WD WD600 WD Scorpio) hdd with the DVP-260 Media Player but my laptop won’t detect it. I suspect the root cause could be WinXp unable to format the drive to Fat32. I will be downloading the SwissKnife V3.22 to format the hdd to Fat 32 to see if that works. SwissKnife V3.22 allows you to format FAT32 partitions also when they are larger than 32GB (Windows can only format FAT32 up to 32 Gb).

SwissKnife V3.22

If you are looking for an external hard disk drive solution that can be used interchangeably between Windows XP, Windows 98, Mac OS and Linux, there is only one way to prepare the hard disk and SwissKnife does it for you. You can create, delete and format partitions on your hard disk drives in one smooth, simple process. While the product has been tested up to 400GB, it should support hard disks of up to 2048GB. SwissKnife allows creation of FAT32 & NTFS partitions. FAT16 option is provided for compatibility. Supports Internal interfaces such as IDE and SCSI and External interfaces such as Hi-Speed USB, Parallel port, PCMCIA, USB On-The-Go, Firewire®, SATA interfaces etc. Creates Fixed and Removable Disk Format types.

Version 3.09 adds support for NTFS and features resizable windows. Upon completion, the drive icons will be dynamically updated on your computer!