- Beta: http://beta.axelsegebrecht.com/
- Competition: http://beta.axelsegebrecht.com/competitions/win-a-year-of-free-managed-shared-web-hosting/

The minimum amount you need to charge your account with is £10 and I’ll be looking forward to seeing how long that will last me. All I’m running on the Virtual Server is Webmin (control panel), Apache2 with PHP5 including xCache and Zend to improve performance. My site runs on Wordpress CMS which receives on average 150 unique visits a month, generating just about 700 page views. That’s according to Google Analytics anyway and is by no means the whole picture.

So far I’m impressed by how easy and fast the server grid performs. Compared to the cheap VPS the site ran on before, I feel like it has gotten a lot quicker.

Setting up your virtual grid appliance or virtual server is very straight-forward: Just pick a name, an operating system template (i.e. CentOS), add RAM and suitable hard disk space. Then tell the cloud grid system to start your server and lean back waiting for those worker processes to get it done.

All in all it way quick and pain-free. It took just a couple of minutes for the server to be ready. Thanks to a local YUM repo mirror updates and software installs were fast too.

I’ll keep you updated on how my grid hosted virtual server will perform and more importantly how much it’s going to cost. Stay tuned and watch this space.

Once the unique and beloved feature of Facebook, applications are becoming a major nuisance for many friends, even more so due to the absence of any quality controls whatsoever. Hence why one major bone of contention is that removing unwanted applications has become even harder.

Back in the good ol’ days of Facebook 1.0 you simply went into your applications centre and hit “remove”. That was basically it.

With the new Facebook you are presented with a “remove” option that in fact only removes the link or bookmark. Why the Facebook developers thought this might be useful is unclear as it only confuses users because they expect the app to be removed, not just the link to it from their menu.

I think this is a major issue, since removing the link from the applications menu could lead users to think they removed the application when in fact it is still very much active!

Is Facebook duping its users into seemingly removing unwanted applications? What other than complaints could they possibly be getting out of it? Let’s look at a typical Facebook application and see why they might want you to keep applications even if you don’t:

According to Facebook’s help entry on removing applications you should see a “remove application” link. But you don’t because the entry in fact reads that you can find it in the “about” page:

Looking at the options under “edit” in the applications list we find a few sub-menus, lots of options but no “remove this” link:

So back to the applications list we go and click on “about” to finally arrive at controls we want to use.

Notice the “remove” and “block” links on the page. Just removing an application doesn’t mean it’s removed! It can still see and use your details, you will also need to block it in order to get rid of it entirely.

To summarise: Remove link on applications list only removes bookmark. No removal link on the actual application page. Remove link on the “about page” of the application leaves the application able to continue to collect users data.

Maybe I’m just paranoid but I think the reason why Facebook is so keen to keep the new design is because it does exactly what it was designed to do: confuse its users.

Not only do I count Sonny as one of my best friends, he’s also a very creative and professional photographer I often recommend to my clients.

- Website: www.sonnymalhotra.co.uk
- Email: info@sonnymalhotra.co.uk

As djlosh at TapTheHive.com points out, Google retains all rights of content usage published through its browser:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

Source: Google Chrome EULA

Update: Apparently their EULA was in beta too and the offending text has been changed!

Simply install the add-on (Thunderbird Menu -> Tools -> Add-ons -> Install add-on) and then restart Thunderbird.

The backup add-on can be found at Kaosmos website and downloaded for free! It works on all platforms as far as I know (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux).

Here’s a quick step-by-step guide on how to get it working (in my case it’s Thunderbird running on Ma OSX). The screen shots can be enlarged by clicking on them:-

Go to your Thunderbird Tools Menu and select add-ons:

The add-ons screen. Now select “install” from the bottom left corner:

A dialog pops-up asking you for the location of the file. Select it and press “open”:

A security prompt will ask you to confirm whether you really want to install the file. Press “Install now”:

The dialog box will show the installed file and prompt you to restart Thunderbird. Press “Restart Thunderbird”:

After Thunderbird restarted go to your inbox and select the emails you want to export:

Right-click on any of the selected messages to bring up a menu. Go to “Save selected messages” to view the choices:

Select the desired export format. I suggest EML since it’s the easiest way to import emails to other programs. You can also import to Plain Text and HTML if you just want a backup you can read later but not require it to be in any mail program:

A dialog appears, asking you where to save the emails to. Make your choice and press “Choose”:

Now browse to the selected destination to view your exported messages. In my case it’s on a Mac:

Hope this was useful to you. Have a nice day