Personal Finance Manager

Personal Finance Manager has been developed to help you manage your finances by enabling you to record transaction and budget information within accounts.

You use PFM to record income and expenditure so that you can reconcile each account against a statement. As you record each transaction PFM calculates a balance and with the aid of a checking check box you can indicate if a transaction has been reconciled.

You can also register payments that can be automatically debited or credited on given dates. You also have the option to create budgets which allows you to register each transactions value to one or more of these. The facility to copy or move selected transactions between accounts helps you to reduce repetitive entries.

Reporting facilities allow you to display graphs, pie charts, balance plots and multiple page colour reports that can be displayed, printed and exported into many popular formats.

Some of the other features include the ability to UN-delete deleted transactions, create multiple accounts, move copy transactions between accounts, manual column width adjustment and multiple budget transaction allocations. Fully encrypted database with password protection.

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Health Monitor

If you have diabetes, hypertension, or other chronic medical conditions, you no doubt know the value of tracking your blood sugar, blood pressure, and other health metrics. Health Monitor is an easy-to-use program that lets you record a variety of types of health information and track it over time.

Health Monitor comes with two sample users, so it's easy to see how the program works before you create a profile for yourself and get started. The interface is arranged in six tabs: Summary, Readings, Charts, Reports, Users and Help.

We created a new profile for ourselves, entering our name, sex, date of birth, and height, as well as the metrics that we wanted to track with Health Monitor. Options include blood pressure, pulse, weight, cholesterol, triglycerides, uric acid, blood sugar, and body mass index. Users can also choose metric or standard units of measurement.

Once we'd created our profile, we simply entered our data for each of our selected metrics. The Summary tab displayed color-coded graphs for each metric, with a pointer indicating our score and whether it was in the low, normal, prehigh, or high category. Users can also create charts and reports summarizing the health information over a selected period of time, and these can be printed for your own records or to share with your doctor.

The Help tab contains information about some of the finer points of using Health Monitor, but overall, we found the program quite easy to master, and we didn't need any help getting started. We think that Health Monitor is a great choice for anyone seeking an easy way to keep track of important health information.

Health Monitor comes as a RAR file. It installs a desktop icon without asking and leaves a folder behind upon removal.

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NFC-enabled Lumia 610 :NOKIA

Nokia and Microsoft are jointly jumping onto the NFC bandwagon with the next version of the Lumia 610.

Slated to debut in Europe sometime this summer, the new version of the 610 will be the first Windows Phone handset to let users pay for goods on the go via NFC. The phone has already been certified for use with both MasterCard's PayPass and Visa PayWave, according to Nokia.

European carrier Orange will be the first provider to offer the NFC-enabled 610, which will be able to read NFC tags at the point of sale and pair with other NFC accessories.

Moving beyond just mobile payments, the phone will be able to use NFC as an alternative to Bluetooth by communicating with other devices around the home. As one example, the 610 could tap into NFC to pipe music to Nokia's wireless Play 360 speakers.

"Nokia continues to lead the field in NFC with this latest implementation on the Windows Phone platform, in which we have the full support of Orange," Ilari Nurmi, head of product marketing for Nokia's Smart Devices business unit," said in a statemdent. "We're bringing NFC right across our portfolio, and together with our ever-growing range of NFC accessories we're making it easy for people to connect via a single tap. We're also enabling operators and other service providers to build NFC payment and ticketing solutions on top of our smartphones."

This is hardly Nokia's first foray into NFC. The Finnish handset maker has been equipping itsSymbian phones with the mobile payments technology. But it is a first for Microsoft's mobile OS, with the 610 the first NFC-equipped Windows Phone handset, courtesy of Nokia.

Though years in the making, NFC has been slow to ramp up, especially in the United States. Businesses, banks, phone makers, and carriers have all been trying to work together to push the technology and convince consumers of its ease of use. Google already offers NFC in a few of its smartphones. But until more major devices (ahem, the iPhone) support the technology, its adoption will likely move ahead slowly.

Still, the move could pay off for Nokia and Microsoft, which need to distinguish the Lumia lineup from the competition if they expect to make any headway in the mobile marketplace.

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Instagram for Android

Instagram for Android recently welcomed some camera bug fixes, and now it’s here with fresh support for Wi-Fi phones, tablets and SD cards. According to the official Instagram support center, the app has graduated to v1.0.3 and includes all of the aforementioned attributes.
With this new upgrade, current and prospective users of the same can access the software on tablets and Wi-Fi enabled handsets as well. Another add-on is the support for app installation on SD cards, primarily to expand the storage options for users. An audio mute bug surfacing during capture has also been restored along with the introduction of a handful of improvements to minor glitches.
Having been launched less than a week back, the app was much talked about ever since the news of an upcoming Android edition slipped out. Mobile photos can be customized owing to the range of special effects arriving with the application that has been on the iOS scene for quite some time now.
Those accessing the app can share and ‘like’ their friends’ pictures with simple taps. Hoarding free custom designed borders and filters, it allows instant sharing to popular sites like Foursquare, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, a feature called Lux offers more detailed images and strives to make these more colorful.


Arriving will complete front and back camera compatibility, the app is supposed to rub along nicely with Android v2.2 and higher devices which support OpenGL ES 2. With Instagram for iPhone requiring no introduction at present, this software works pretty much along the same lines for users of Google’s mobile OS.


Flickr support is touted to arrive soon enough, and we’re not ruling out that the next update could come bundled with it. Meanwhile, Instagram for Android can be downloaded via the Google Play store.

By: mobilator.com

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MySQL now has two user conferences

There was the MySQL conference to get technical presentations by the many great Oracle/MySQL technical staff who will not be in attendance at Percona Live. There will also be a strong community presence in speaking at Oracle Connect in September. While Oracle was organizing a dedicated MySQL event in April for the community with all vendors including Percona to replace the conference dropped by long term partner O’Reilly (kudos for many years of great events), Percona decided to go at it without including Oracle, the owners and developers of MySQL.

It is difficult to keep up with all the community events Oracle is now running including multiple OTN MySQL Developer days per month across the US and Europe. I will be speaking at the upcoming OTN NY event in April, the Rocky Mountain Training Day in May, and hopefully the MySQL Innovation day in June. Get the full list at Upcoming MySQL Events (http://mysql.com/news-and-events/events/).

Indeed MySQL content and presentations have also been represented at Oracle Open World for a number of years. 2011 was a very large turnout and many MySQL presentations. As a senior consultant for MySQL Inc I manned a MySQL booth at OOW exhibition hall back in 2007, prior to both Sun and Oracle acquisitions.

By: Planet.MySQL

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Intel ships SSDs that help laptops boot faster

April 05, 2012, 7:43 PM — Intel has started shipping a new series of small-capacity solid-state drives (SSDs) that can be used in laptops to reduce boot times and load applications more quickly.
SSDs provide faster access to data than traditional hard disk drives, which means they can help to speed up boot times. But SSDs are also more expensive, and they currently have smaller storage capacities.
Offering smaller SSDs that act as a temporary storage cache to get computers started is a cost-effective way of getting SSD performance into laptops, said Jim Handy, director at Objective Analysis. Many PC makers are offering the smaller SSDs, while retaining the slower and more power-hungry hard drives as primary storage.
"It's fast boot and fast program launch," Handy said.
The SSDs should also improve battery life, Handy said, since their presence reduces the time the hard disk drive needs to be spinning.
Intel already offered a family of small SSDs, but it says the new models operate faster.
The new 313 series drives come in capacities of 20GB and 24GB. Intel has started shipping the drives to computer makers but has not officially announced them, an Intel spokeswoman said.
The 20GB SSD 313 was priced at US$113 on Amazon.com, while the 24GB version was $138.
The new SSDs are also designed for use in ultrabooks, according to a product page on Intel's website. Intel wants ultrabooks to be always connected and more responsive, and SSDs play a role in enabling those features.
The SSD 313 works with Intel's Smart Response technology, which moves frequently used programs to the SSD for quicker loading, Intel said in a brochure on the company's website.
The SSDs also work with Intel's Smart Connect technology, which lets ultrabooks stay connected to the Internet in a kind of "sleep mode" so that email and social network feeds can continue to be updated. The SSDs also reduce the wait time for computers to sync with the cloud, Intel said.
Intel already sold a similar line of SSDs introduced last year, but the new devices operate more quickly. The 20GB 313 model has a sequential read/write speed of up to 220MB per second, while the 24GB model can reach 160MB per second. The older 311 models topped out at 200MB per second.
The new SSDs are being made using a 25-nanometer manufacturing process, while their predecessor was made using a 34-nm process. The new drives are also single-level cell (SLC) drives, in which one bit of data is stored per cell. Intel says the SLC SSDs offer 10 times more endurance than multi-level cell (MLC) SSDs, in which bits of data are stored at multiple levels in each cell. Most of Intel's high-capacity SSD 500 and 700 series are MLC SSDs.

By Agam Shah, IDG News Service 

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Google now providing business analytics for Maps

Google this week has released a new API for its Maps application designed to give businesses some basic analytics over how visitors to their websites interact with their customized maps. Google says the API is similar to existing Google Analytics programs that help companies determine how users utilize their company websites. Google has integrated the new Maps API into its Google Enterprise Support Portal, so it will fit in with other Analytics programs that businesses currently run.
Among other things, the Maps API gives users insight into what zoom level users most commonly use when looking at the map, thus giving companies the ability to make it their default zoom setting; how often users pan around on the map to find what they're looking for, thus giving companies the opportunity to re-center their maps to meet customer needs; and how shifting the display angles on a company's default map increases or decreases user activity.

By:  Network World 

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