Y!M 8

With the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger 8 beta, Yahoo has once again proved they have most innovative and useful ideas about instant messaging. Major feature of this release as already reported on so many other sites is third party plug-ins. Just to give one example, I installed amazon's plug-in and now I can see amazon wish-list of all 150 contacts of mine just by selecting their name. Such a time saver when buying gift for someone. I do not know any other messenger that comes close to Y!M in terms of useful features, stealth settings, offline messages, VOIP, .. all in one. I have been using Windows Live Messenger 8 Beta as well but Yahoo just beats everything.

Most of my friends use Trilliansince that saves you time from using 4-5 different IM provides like Yahoo, MSN, AIM etc. But then you can't use specific features of any one provider. It would be really nice if I can use all my accounts like AIM, MSN from Yahoo Messenger. Is that too much to ask?

 Update: Actually MSN Live is working on interoperability with Y!M. Will Yahoo follow same?

Office 12

Downloaded and installed Office 2007 Beta 2. Most visible feature is completely redesigned user interface. File menu replaced by office logo. Instead of vertical drop down menus, menu opens horizontal. Default extension for new file (in 2007 format) has an extra "X" for e.g. instead of .doc it is .docx. User interface is very intuitive and I liked it in general. Most annoying thing so far is it takes 2 clicks to open, close and save a document. I plan to use it for my day to day use so will post my experience in detail later.

Google News RSS Feeds Problem

Google news is great. But I don't go to actual website to satisfy my news quest, rather I use their RSS feeds. These feeds work very nice for their standard pages like "World", "Business", "Tech" etc. But when you use feeds for custom news search, it SUCKS, especially for company specific search. Every-time there is a new source that reports same story it adds a new link to that story next time you refresh the feed. So rather then smartly grouping same news related links, it actually adds new entries for news source updated since last time. Sure this may be result of the nature of RSS feeds itself, but yahoo finance seems more mature in this matter. Google financealso gathers company specific news neatly but then they don't have RSS for that. Also I was unable to find link for feedback to google on either news or finance site. Google are you listening?

Google Toolbar 3 Rocks

I installed Google Toolbar Beta 3 for IE. Now I am moving to Philadelphia this weekend on permanent basis, and was looking for housing in nearby areas of my office. The Autolink feature was really really helpful while finding apartments, as it was just one click to find distance and direction from my office. Saved lot of time. SpellCheck is also useful. I use Firefox for majority of my work and let’s hope that these features get ported to Firefox very soon. Everything looked fine except that it never remembered my origin address (its still beta…) and so I had to copy paste it all the times.

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New Version Of IE

Microsoft announced about new version of Internet Explorer, IE7 for WIN XP today. First beta will be released this summer. Interesting time ahead as they compete with Firefox, we consumers will be the winner by getting hand on more innovative products

Suse 9.2 with KDE 3.3

Novell released SUSE Linux 9.2 Prof with KDE 3.3 and GNOME 2.6. The best thing I found while downloading it from one of the mirror is that they provided ready to use CD and DVD Images. I use VMWare and so all I needed to run SUSE 9.2 was just create a new virtual machine put the 9.2 cd in and there it boots in less then 5 minutes!! (On the line of knoppix??) No installation hassles or no hardware compatibility problems (or you can test compatibility on actual hardware Most visible difference from last time is that one can see “A NOVELL BUSINESS” logo everywhere around while booting. If I am not wrong this is the first major version release by Novell SUSE after the take over procedure is completed.

Another thing that I can feel is that GUI is very fast inside my virtual machine then it used to be on 9.1 with KDE 3.2 Also one major problem I had with SUSE 9.1 was making it talk to windows network share via samba and configuring network printers. In versions earlier to 9.1 the default configuration would work just fine but that was not the case with 9.1 I had to dig through all different configuration to make it work. Hopefully this version will do a better job. Will post more about it once I use it more.

NASA’s World Wind 1.2

Check out this really really cool app from NASA, NASA World Wind 1.2
I would love to work on such an interesting appliation, who won’t!! I am installing it right now.

From NASA’s website:
“World Wind allows any user to zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth, leveraging high resolution LandSat imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) elevation data to experience Earth terrain (or any planet with the data) in visually rich 3D, just as if they were really there. Virtually visit anyplace in the world. Look across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps or along the African Sahara.”

Want a job start blogging!!

In this NY Times Article (DNA Sample required) about job offers based on people’s blogging habit. I personally also think that, chances are very high of a job being offered to you will be of your interest if the offering body has read your blog and understands your area of interest and expertise. Nice article. So you still not getting job start blogging

Invisible train

Invisible train!!! , collaborative multi-user Augmented Reality (AR) game. Nice one.

Tablet PC just around $1000?

Check out new version of Averatac’s tablet pc Averatac 3500 that will cost around $1300. Ofcourse it is stripped down in features and has some old AMD processor but it is still a tablet pc. I am really tempted to buy this one. Check more pictures and specifications here.