Microsoft using FireFox Icon!

Microsoft is planning to use the FireFox RSS icon in IE7 and OutLook 12.

What is great about this news is that Microsoft actually asked the community in the first place, and then worked with the Firefox team to make it happen.

The best Linux Desktop for Business: UBUNTU

ZDNet has been testing Linux for business, trying to work out what the best distro for small businesses. After testing Mandriva, Novell Linux, Red Hat Desktop, SUSE Linux and Ubuntu Linux, Ubuntu came out as the winner.

BreezyBadger

Finally, the waiting is over... I received 5 copies of the newest version of Ubuntu (v 5.10) a couple of days ago. I tried the Live CD first and decided to install it in my home PC. The installation is same as I explained in my previous post. It comes with the latest versions of OpenOffice and FireFox which is great. Other than that, it is more or less the same thing as before...

My Blog Visitors....

more than 60% of visitors are from Asia...

My Desktop Thermo

I made this cool desktop thermo using DS1820 which is plugged into DS9097U – DB9 Com Port adapter. I got these samples from Maxim Dallas Semiconductors a long time ago but couldn’t find enough time to play around. The program is done using C# after so many trial and error efforts. It is based on the OneWireAPI.dll which can be downloaded here. The program nicely sits inside the system tray and displays the temperature when the mouse pointer hovered on to the icon. (the icon is made by me which is not in great shape…).


I have two units of DS1820s at home which are plugged into the same port, one is on the CRT (it heats up a lot; so that I can turn on the fan) and the other one lying on the desk monitoring the room temperature. The one shown in the picture is the unit in my office. (otherwise, how could I be at 23.94 Celsius; normally it’s 28-30 Celsius outside). If anyone interested about this, I am willing to share my knowledge. (even the software).

I am .mp3

Which File Extension are You?

Ubuntu wins best Distribution Award.

At the UK Linux & Open Source Awards dinner held on October 5th, Ubuntu was awarded the Reader Award for best distribution. Debian and Red Hat were also on the short list.

Ubuntu was also nominated in the embedded/mobile solution category (with HP for the custom Ubuntu/HP work) and the corporate contribution category.

Not only that, it was among the best 100 products of 2005.

My Search Engine...!

Search...

Ubuntu Linux

I think most of the people are now tired of using Microsoft products specially their lousy OS and IE. That's why everybody jumps into other products when they get a chance. A very good example is FireFox. I think now it's the turn of OS. Linux is there for some time but is still limited to enthusiasts and Pros. I could remember how I installed Linux in my 486 in 1999. It took more than a week to get the job done compiling some of the drivers manually. The monitor gave me the greatest headache since the X windows system didn't recognize it. I couldn't play around much since my knowledge was limited and the applications were rare. After that, I have used random versions of RedHat Linux in couple of times but it didn't hit the spot.

I heard about Ubuntu Linux by accident when I was searching for Debian Linux. I read a couple of reviews about Ubuntu and thought of giving it a try. So I downloaded the version 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog) and installed it in my home PC which already has two windows versions; Windows XP (for gaming) and Windows 2003 Server (for development). The installation process was quiet and took around 30 minutes. It recognized all my hardware including AC97 surround sound card, GeForce 440MX video card and on board LAN which was a bit surprise.

Ubuntu really impressed me. It's very very simple. Good for a beginner who is shifting towards Linux from Windows. This installation comes with several applications like Open Office 1.1, several games, multimedia applications and networking tools. But it didn't recognize my existing NTFS partitions which was sad. I had to mount them manually and are read only which is a downfall. Overall, I am happy about Ubuntu and waiting to see the next stable version 5.10 (BreezyBadger) in October.

Happy B'day...!

Google's official Birthday is September 7, 1998. Amazing, it's my wife's birthday too. Happy Birthday to both of you.

GoogleNet

Google is planning to develop a parallel internet called GoogleNet.
Google already knows enough to blackmail enyone through it's programmes.

1) Knows what we think -- through Blogspot.
2) Knows what's on our hard drives -- through Desktop Search.
3) Knows who we talk to and what we say -- through GMail and Google Talk
4) Knows where we are or where we plan to go -- through Google Earth
5) Knows what we're interested in -- through Google Search

The list will complete when they develop a web browser and an OS.

Lazy and Dumb programmers...

If you want to be a GOOD programmer, you must be dumb and lazy. Here is the reason.

10th Anniversary

Yes, today is the 10th anniversary of Windows 95, the first version to include a START button. Hereis a list of Start buttons from Windows 95 to Windows Vista to commemorate this date.

Google Wildcard Search.

Another Google thing...! Wildcard search...

A wildcard in a Google search query can be indicated by an asterisk and will match one or more entire words of text so that the query matches a contiguous sequence of words.
For example, a search for [ cooking * classes ] will match the phrases "cooking school classes" and "cooking and wine tasting classes."
One common use of the asterisk is to fill in the blanks for a query that corresponds to a question: [the parachute was invented by *].
Also, more than one asterisk can be used, such as [vitamin * is good for *].

Longhorn -> Windows Vista

The official new name for the Longhorn OS is going to be Windows Vista but the path seems to be not yet cleared.

"Terminal"... Can this happen in real life?

When I saw Tom Hanks movie "The Terminal", I didn't think it could happen in real life. But I was wrong. Read this

Blog Image

Blogger.com now supports Image uploading for its bloggers upto 300mb. I uploaded all my images via various image hosting sites before. So, this is kind'a bonus...

This picture is completely irrelevent for this post but I couldn't find anything else to demonstrate...

Windows Timeline

Visit this site to see screenshots of windows from windows v.1 to windows xp. This is the first time I saw Windows V.1 and V.2. Surely it has come a long way...

Lost in Sri Lanka? Use Google Maps...

Google Maps has Satellite images of Sri Lanka now. Check this out. They might have higher resolution maps in the future.

The Sith Sense

AMAZING....! Lord Vedar just read my mind. Try this flash test yourself.

SAMSUNG's 5MP Camera Phone

Check this out.

PC Magazine's choice: 100 Best Products of 2005

PC Magazine announces 100 best products of the year 2005. Can anybody guess what came 1st & 2nd? My personal choice, FireFox and GMail... coool...
Read the full list here.

Quote of the Day!

If everything is coming your way,
you're in the wrong lane!

SONY cybershot DSC-S60

Waiting is over... my SONY Camera came home yesterday. Although it was delivered to my wife's office at USA on 12th April, we couldn't find someone to bring it here until yesterday. (more than 6 weeks... price dropped by $40 during the time... sigh...).



The total package costs me a little bit more than $380. The camera is $249 and the rest is spend on 512BM memory stick pro and an accessories kit comprises of a cute carrying bag, a memory stick case and a battery charger with two batteries. I didn't have much time to play around with it but the initial photos impressed me very much. These are reasons made me choose this partcular camera.

Cost: The camera is not that expensive. Only $249.
Lens: Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar Lens. This is a high quality german origin lens which helps to produce crystal clear, sharp images
Real Image Processor: This dramatically improves the response time.
2" LCD: This is really impressive. Very large LCD screen.
5 area Multipoint Auto Focus:Focusing is easy.
32MB internal Memory: Can shoot even without a Memory Card
Better Battery Life: Can shoot upto 100 shots with its AA size Alcaline batteries or more than 300 with NiMH batteries.
4.1 Mega pixel: Well, this is not that high MP level but sufficient for my needs.
and other SONY gadgematics. Full specs here.

Hmmm... since I have a camera, why shouldn't I publish some pictures of my personal belongings on the web. Well, I'll open another blog for this and let you know the address when it is done.

Google Tip:

Want some ebooks? Oh, yeah... google does that easily. Another power searching lesson coming right up.
Google: -inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" +("/ebooks"|"/book") +(chm|pdf|zip)

What does all of this mean? The -inurl htm and -inul html is attempting to get rid of regular webpages and show just index pages. Looking for index of in the title is doing the same. Using the pipe ( | ) tells google to look for something OR something else. Here we are telling google to look for book or ebook directories... and we have listed several common ebook formats (zip, pdf, chf).

If you would like to look for a particular author or title just tack it to the end of your search.

GATES VS. GOOGLE ... Search and Destroy!!!

Pretty good (and lengthy) article on how Microsoft might be in big trouble if Google keeps expanding at its current rate.
The full article is here and I've extracted some pin points.

The darling of search is moving into software—and that's Microsoft's turf.

Today Google isn't just a hugely successful search engine; it has morphed into a software company and is emerging as a major threat to Microsoft's dominance. You can use Google software with any Internet browser to search the web and your desktop for just about anything; send and store up to two gigabytes of e-mail via Gmail (Hotmail, Microsoft's rival free e-mail service, offers 250 megabytes, a fraction of that); manage, edit, and send digital photographs using Google's Picasa software, easily the best PC photo software out there; and, through Google's Blogger, create, post online, and print formatted documents—all without applications from Microsoft.

But the idea that Google will one day marginalize Microsoft's operating system and bypass Windows applications is already starting to become reality. The most paranoid people at Microsoft even think "Google Office" is inevitable. Google is taking over operating system features too, like desktop search. There are fewer uses for the start button in Windows now that Google's desktop search can locate any program, document, photo, music file, or e-mail on a computer.

Microsoft's ambitious new operating system, code-named Longhorn, is more than a year late, even after having been scaled back. Linux, the free operating system that Gates once scoffed at, is fighting Microsoft for share in both the server and desktop markets, forcing the company to do the unthinkable: offer customer discounts. Last year it had to spend $1 billion to rewrite thousands of lines of code to make its programs less susceptible to viruses. Its Xbox gaming console is winning raves from players but has yet to make serious money. Meanwhile, Apple has stolen the show in online music with its hugely popular iPod and iTunes Music Store. Plus, the recently released Firefox browser, which can be downloaded free, has forced Gates to reconstitute an Internet Explorer development team. Indeed, four years have passed since Microsoft released a piece of software that generated the kind of buzz Google seems to generate every month.

Every month it seems as if Google hires away one of Microsoft's top developers. Before Google's IPO last fall, Microsoft executives dismissed this brain drain as a function of greed. But when the exodus continued after the IPO—especially when Marc Lucovsky, one of the chief architects of Windows, bolted for Google—it was clear that Microsoft had a bigger problem on its hands. As of March, roughly 100 Microsofties had left for its search nemesis.
"the first question out of their mouths was 'You're not going to Google, are you?' "

many of the most influential people at Google are hardened Microsoft warriors. Schmidt battled Gates as CTO of Sun Microsystems and CEO of Novell in the 1990s. Omid Kordestani, Google's head of ad sales, was a top executive at Netscape. Three of Google's directors, Ram Shriram, John Doerr, and Michael Moritz, have been on the front lines of Silicon Valley's war with Microsoft over the years.

Microsoft has a long, dramatic history of being a fast follower, rarely first in a market but ultimately providing the most accessible and practical solution, then outmarketing competitors. The company hasn't always played by the rules, but when it has gone after a market, it has done so quickly and aggressively. Current and former executives of companies like Apple, WordPerfect, Lotus, Novell, and of course Netscape can attest to that.

Windows wasn't better than the Macintosh; Word didn't improve on WordPerfect, or Excel on Lotus. Even Explorer was only as good as Netscape. Microsoft's genius was integrating them seamlessly to make them easier for customers to default to, and then using its marketing, distribution, and pricing clout. It won by attacking competitors' business models, not their technology.

Microsoft's array of weapons has so far proved next to useless against Google.

All the same, Microsoft is taking longer to catch Google than anyone could have imagined—and it will take longer still. Unless it can deliver search that is plainly better, most users won't bother to switch, says Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy. He adds, "Google is a huge brand. From where I sit, it's their game to lose." The competition could well test Gates' patience as never before. In spring 2003 he told one of his executives, "These Google guys, they want to be billionaires and rock stars and go to conferences and all that. Let's see if they still want to run the business in two or three years." Well, two years have passed, and so far, they sure do.

Hard drive gets all flashy

ElectronicsWeekly.com Reports

A hybrid memory system, combining a hard drive and flash memory, has been demonstrated by Samsung and Microsoft.
The aim is to combine the fast read/write access times of NAND flash with the storage capacity of a rotating hard drive.
By using the 1Gbit flash as a cache for the hard drive, the drive does not need to spin continuously. When the write buffer is full, the drive is spun up and data written to magnetic storage.
Boot up times can also be reduced, claimed the firms, by using the flash as a boot buffer during shut-down.
Microsoft calls the device a hybrid hard drive (HHD). It is designed to work with Longhorn, the next generation of Windows.
"Hybrid drive architecture... is an advancement that will improve the performance and reliability of any computer using the Windows Longhorn operating system," said Tom Phillips, general manager of Microsoft's Windows group.

I, ROBOT

Spooner (Detective):
"Can a robot write a symphony?" "Can a robot take a blank canvas and turn it into a masterpiece?"

Sonny (Robot):
"Can you?"

I, Robot

YagooHoogle...!

With YagooHoogle, you can search the two best search engines at once, saving you time and effort.

Another Blog...

I am starting a new blog (http://jokesblog.blogspot.com) dedicated for Jokes and humor contents which I receive via Email. I think I will update this blog frequently since I get a whole lot of them daily. Hope you will enjoy it...

Ten reasons why I am Blogging

Tim Bray from Sun Microsystems posts ten reasons why blogging is good for your career.

1. You have to get noticed to get promoted.
2. You have to get noticed to get hired.
3. It really impresses people when you say “Oh, I’ve written about that, just google for XXX and I’m on the top page” or “Oh, just google my name.”
4. No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.
5. Bloggers are better-informed than non-bloggers. Knowing more is a career advantage.
6. Knowing more also means you’re more likely to hear about interesting jobs coming open.
7. Networking is good for your career. Blogging is a good way to meet people.
8. If you’re an engineer, blogging puts you in intimate contact with a worse-is-better 80/20 success story. Understanding this mode of technology adoption can only help you.
9. If you’re in marketing, you’ll need to understand how its rules are changing as a result of the current whirlwind, which nobody does, but bloggers are at least somewhat less baffled.
10. It’s a lot harder to fire someone who has a public voice, because it will be noticed.

So go ahead... start your own blog. Try Google's blogger.com or MSN’s spaces.msn.com

(For those of you who don't know, Tim Bray is the father/co-inventor of XML.)

.NET

I stepped into the .NET arena completing my first "Hello World" project using vb.net. It is a sales order, purchase order processing and validating programme which is of the ideal size for a beginner. It took nearly a week (using my spare time) to complete but two days work for a veteran. At first, it was a nightmare to switch from VB6 to .net since the gap between the two was wider than I thought. But later on, when I got used to it, I felt that .NET is really cool and a powerful environment where you can do virtually anything you like. Well, I think, finally vb programmers will get some respect & recognition which they deserve since older days.

I didnt see much difference between VB.NET & C#.NET other than the syntax. The structure is the same and share a common set of libraries. Since I have some C++ & Delphi experience, it is not a bad idea to do the same project using C#. Now, where do I want to go today?

No more Spam...!

I was using Spartacus Spam Guard to filter spam mail with Outlook but it was successful somewhere around 80%. In otherwords, I get 10-15 spams everyday no matter how hard I trained Spartacus to diagnose them. I tried Spambayes a couple of days ago and the results were AMAZING... not a single spam in my Inbox. It's a FREE tool but does not support Outlook Express (sigh for most of you, I know).

Bye bye CDs.... & DVDs...??

DVD was introduced to the market in late nineties replacing CDs simply because of the storage capacity. (4.7GB single layer and 8GB double layer). Now the same thing is going to happen to DVD because of the latest revolutionary product in optical storage devices.

Blue-ray also known as Blue-ray Disk (BD) is the next generation optical disk format which can hold up to 27GB of data (single layer) and 57GB in double layer. BD players support CD & DVD as well. The best thing is it can write while reading…

Google Browser

Hoooreh.... Google is going to develop a web browser . Seems to be its more or less like FireFox. Anyway, it's Google....

FireFox…. Sets fire

OK folks… once again I switched my Browser… It’s Mozilla FireFox this time. (Hope this is the last one). I was using Opera for the last two months but some web sites didn’t appear well specially GMail which I use heavily. I had to use IE & Opera side by side which is irritating sometimes.

FireFox is good in every aspect when compared with Opera. It has almost all the features of Opera and more than that. (IE is not worth to mention even) Tabbed browsing, live bookmarks, integrated search, adding extensions, lovely themes and it is FREE…

The other reason I hate IE is, its vulnerability to spyware and adware. Both FireFox and Opera are free from those malicious software.

Tsunami… What next?

Everybody is more concerned about natural disasters these days. We see a lot of new faces in media lecturing about Tsunamis, Earthquakes, Hurricanes, inside out. Thanks to them, now we can sit even for a PhD examination. But, I didn’t hear much about what measures we must take before, during and after an earthquake. I doubt the awareness of these things among the general public. I found this earthquake safety guidebook which is distributed in schools at California and why shouldn’t we? We must act before something happens.

Meanwhile, some predict earthquakes using occult methods (scientifically, no one is successful in predicting earthquakes). Last week, a person gave a call to our office saying that he predicts an earthquake in this month. He has come to this conclusion by examining soil taken from various places in the country. He wanted to put his predictions on a web page. My boss explained him the procedure he must go through in order to create a web site but he was in a hurry to put his information right that moment. There was no any other option than putting it on someone else’s web site and my boss asked me whether I can put it in my blog.

But I had other ideas. We created a new blog for him and posted the first entry just like he wanted. For some reason, he didn’t give us the exact date or a place where it might happen which made his information utter useless rubbish.

Prince of Persia – Warrior Within…!

The newest in the Prince of Persia series, Warrior Within, with more blood, more gore than ever. I still remember how I played Prince of Persia V1.0 in my XT (8086 processor) with 640kb RAM, low density Floppy (no hard disk), sound came from PC speaker but it ran without a glitch. That was a long time back, early nineties. It took me more than three moths to complete the whole mission of saving the Princess. Then came Prince of Persia 2, Prince of Persia 3D, Prince of Persia the Sands of Time. Warrior Within is the latest. It needs GeForce 4FX Graphics and lots of processing power, surely has come a long way.

The story line is deviated from saving the princess to eliminate Dhaka, an immortal power. And the prince is more acrobatic and can handle two weapons at the same time but easy to control, what they call “Free form Combat”.

Don’t know much about the game yet, still in the first two levels. Got to go now… Have to kill the bad guys….!