CSS Acid Test : Who passed it ?
Today I have installed latest Internet explorer 7 beta 2. Quite stable build and more performant and sleek than previous build. Liked the RSS auto updations as well (you dont have to run IE for this. It shares the common RSS store with Outlook 2007). Then I thought of giving it a CSS acid test. Voila ! IE 7 Beta 2 is not there yet 
. See the attached screenshot. With curiousity I did the same test for the other 2 brothers FireFox 1.5.0.2 and Opera 9 Beta. Opera 9 Beta stands as the winner in this Acid Test 2. If you are wondering how to they test, visit this detailed article on CSS Browser Acid Test. All three browsers have passed the reference rendering test successfully.
Yahoo Mail Beta > Gmail > Live Mail
Sounds silly?, but I found it is not. Today I happend to use my yahoo account using the cute and cool Yahoo mail beta. Yahoo literally striked back (not on spam ofc 
). I was so excited to see Yahoo mail beta, and yahoo did not screwed my excitement. Thanks to yahoo guys.
The first thing I observed in YMB (let me use this acronym, i am sick of using beta all the time as suffix) is the smartest real estate management on page. They have packed everything in a sleek design (see the screenshot) and added a tower AD at the extereme right side which is not distracting the user attention at all.
My biggest frustration with windows live mail is the way it uses space for ADs. Windows Live Mail uses the space just like free ice cream. 30% of screen size was dedicated for ADs and you will observe that they load ADs before your inbox. I am wondering who is working on usability science here. And more over the ADs will keep on change the positions based on your navigation(full view/partial view). Lets think from AD publisher perspective…Why any one on this earth would like to publish thier AD on windows live mail which shows the verticle ADs 80% visible at first sight. (see the screenshot).
Gmail lacks the powerful email management which is available in the above 2 mail systems. You need to be a geek or smart fellow to figure out a way to manage tags as folders in Gmail. The most powerfull feature which is rocking out there in gmail is the threaded view of mails but nothing else. Gmail is becoming slower day by day, still not yet out from Beta quality(I wonder what time they would take to deliver quality?). I rated Gmail in No 2 based on the performance in contrast with YMB. YMB looks like a perf champ to me. Truely awesome. what about WLMB ? Ahaa 
. Bit better than WLM's old build. Still I get atleast 2 failures a day. I dont think they will plan for a scale-up plan for WLM so soon. But I found WLMB has been improved a lot on catching SPAM. It's unline our old hotmail. Now Gmail is becoming the bulls eye for Spammers.
Check out this interesting experiment on Spam efficiency of Gmail..
SPAM my Gmail : An experiment with Gmail SPAM
I have my own screen shot which is driving me nuts these days. I have uninstalled my gmail notifier because of this spam. Gmail does'nt seem to be having basic filteration of spam keywords like "free university degree" etc.
Offcourse YMB is still bad on Catching SPAM. My bulk mail gets filled up and my inbox too nothing but with spam mails.
I will do some more experiments with these 3 brothers and come up with my findings. Please share your findings here.
Did you Spleak yet ?
One more excellent bot for your MSN Messenger. But unlike encarta@conversagent.com bot, this one makes your day totally fun filled and informative all the time. Just add "spleak@hotmail.com" and enjoy the features it supports.
FYI : I lied to it as if I am under the age of 13, and was denied forever to chat. I have requested the BOT many ways and got the age change in her memory about me. So becareful
Don’t forget to check out those cool ringtones for your mobile too
Boot camp reveals OSX facts?
The Inquirer reports that Bootcamp reveals the OSX performance benchmarks with Windows XP side by side. The original story was written by Penny Arcade. They have installed windows xp on mac pro and did a bench mark on the game "World of Warcrafts".
But i dont think this stops me from buying a pro .
What is the best job in America ?
Money Magazine has come up with interesting survey results. According to them its "Software Engineer". In thier words
Why it’s great Software
engineers are needed in virtually every part of the economy, making this one of
the fastest-growing job titles in the U.S. Even so, it’s not for
everybody.
Designing, developing and testing computer programs requires
some pretty advanced math skills and creative problem-solving ability. If you’ve
got them, though, you can work and live where you want: Telecommuting is quickly
becoming widespread.
The profession skews young — the
up-all-night-coding thing gets tired — but consulting and management positions
aren’t hard to come by once you’re experienced.
Here is the data to prove "SE" as a best job in America…Read more
Web 2.0 has been around for decades?
Very interesting interview with Gary Flake, Director of Microsoft’s web 2.0 stuff "Live Labs". John Battle did a nice interview with this guy here.
Some comments from Gary on Web 2.0 as follows…
"Many folks within MS are now realizing that a lot of the stuff that’s
real about Web 2.0 — not the fluffy buzzwords but the fundamental and important
parts — have actually been part of MS’s core vision and mission for
*decades*."
Yes, I agree with this partially (because, I know MS has been doing this since decades, but not sure if its a part of vision and all). We can see web 2.0 traces right from windows explorer. Web publishing wizards, connecting to a web folder as easy as you connect to your network drive, Programmable web interactions in Office suite or whatever. If we can treat Web 2.0 as an up trend of Internet Services & User Centric customization using standards, Microsoft certainly has started this long time back but failed to market as good as Oreilly.
AJAX and all this UI libraries have been there since years as a part of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer DHTML documentation and object model. Ofcouse those are not cross browser compatible . The fact that strongly supports Gary’s point is…for web 2.0 applications, we have’nt done anything new to browsers, javascript or HTML. All we did is…we found a new way to reach customer by taking advantages of advancements in Internet like broadband and matured standards of communication.
technorati tags: web2.0, microsoft, windiwslive, live
BarCamp Hyderabad, I was there !
I was too excited to attend BarCamp Hyderabad this weekend (8th, april, 2006). I have some good experiences with this cool community meet to share.
I happend to reach the venue (IIIT campus) at around 2:50 PM. The city has become like a furnace due to high temperature, but something like high spirit and enthusiam made me attend this meet
When I entered in to the Unconference hall, I realized that I am not one of very few crazy people to attend a conference under 40 degrees celcious. We had around 150 registered members attended I guess. To be frank, i expected only 15+ members since i had some previous experiences with developer communities in hyderabad.
The BarCamp hyderabad took life when Mr Ramesh loganathan started it with his key note speech explaining about BarCamp and Web 2.0. It was a cool talk, straight to the point, with out wasting any more time the sessions are started in a sequence after his speech.
The first session was given by Jay Pullur, CEO, Pramati on oppertunities in Web 2.0. I was very much impressed by this man's talk and they way he is putting things together to make it a sense. I felt he should have taken a session on "REST" rather than this session. His experience as a CEO truly reflected in his speech. A very good start for BarCamp Hyderabad indeed.
The next session is on "Economics of Web 2.0", by Rajan. This session was started with my favourite Matrix visuals (not sure if it matched the session content, I am still confused on that…pardon my ignorance). But this talk seemed to be like a Economics Geek session for me. To understand this session, we must be able to know the web economics and e-commerce at basics atleast. This is my personal opinion anyway. In one of the slide he mentioned that according to someone's rule we should manage attention rather than information. I feel, it is 100% true in web 2.0 context. I agree that web 2.0's main goals is to drive user to choose the information that needs thier attention. But we should be managing the information all the time in web, regardless of user's choice. There should be a ratio of share between managing user's attention and information, rather than carving our economy models towards just "Managing attention". This may lead to death of web one more time after dotcom bubble burst.
Next session is about TUI (Tangible UI). The only one satisfaction I got from this session is "I got to know what is TUI" and happend to see some cool gadget videos and how unit level Phidgets communicate to each. I feel the presenter could not be able to make a point relating that study to Web 2.0.
Next talk is by Dr Vishan Garg, IIIT suggesting there should be an economy model that yields money to the original authors than the publishers and how we can leverage Web 2.0. Very nice topic but very badly dragged in to a side talk on how to get money for articles and papers, rather than how to enable a channel for that using Web 2.0.
The next talk is by Dr Kamaal, IIIT on having a virtual Web Operating system. The idea is pretty old and very similiar to systems like VMware, and Virtual Server but Dr. Kamaal, successfully made his session very interesting by explaining the idea of implementation in slides. I found some hazy concepts behind this session. How a Client can use a Web OS with a browser and with no hardware ? This point was not answered at all. And I was given an answer by Dr. Kamaal that he never heard anything like VMWare or Virtual Server before when i asked him if this idea is very similiar to those application. On a seperate note : Virtual Server can host upto 64 different Operating systems on one big server and can be accessed by anywhere in this world.
The later session was given by Pramati team on XForms. I dont know how this concept was related to Web 2.0 at all. Thier concept is very cool, very similiar to what .NET ASMX pages does under the hoods, but how come it is related to internet architecture of next generation?
At this point I was disappointed by the way sessions are tossing balls over heads and left the conference at midst due to some personal emergencies.
I felt bad to miss 2 sessions particulary.
01. Yahoo UI Libraries ( I was very impressed by this package from Yahoo (very poor documentation ofcourse)).
02. Cordys session on AJAX and XForms …My apologies to Anand Radhakrishnan. Anand.. I missed your session here too
My overall experience:
01. Certainly a very good start for BarCamp hyderabad.
02. There is a lack of planning on session sequence and choosing topics..(I think we have too much of liberty in giving any session on any topic on this earth ).
03. Thanks to the hosting team, they did a marvelous job.
04. Thanks for the cool T-Shirt, CAP, pen and Pad. Some good quality stuff
05. I did not lost a single byte of my energy or passion about this Unconference, I will be waiting for next meet to meet these geeks.
06. One funny thing : Some guys got too excited to see live.com and they started advocating live.com in every possible occasion. I think they should look at other competitive sites and technologies too before making a point.
technorati tags: web2.0, barcamphyderabad, IIIT
Microsoft tops the Global Top 10 Brands
According to a survey carried by a brand consultancy Millward Brown Optimor, listed Microsoft on top of world's most powerful brands using thier Brandz(tm) data that provides data for more than 30,000 brands across globe. The stats are as follows.
BRANDZ™ Top 10 (value in $million):
1. Microsoft – 62,039
2. GE – 55,834
3. Coca-Cola – 41,406
4. China Mobile – 39,168
5. Marlboro – 38,510
6. Wal-Mart – 37,567
7. Google – 37,445
8. IBM – 36,084
9. Citibank – 31,028
10. Toyota – 30,201
Source: Millward Brown Optimor (including data from BRANDZ™, Euromonitor International, and Bloomberg)
Top 10 Global Brands
Top 10 Brands in Technology Industry
GTalk with a hook on Internet Explorer ?
Now this looks funny though there is no other go for BlackBerry as of now. Blackberry phones now can be used to connect to GTalk services and have fun. But the they have made it deployable only via an activex installation
Make sure you have the correct version of Internet Explorer before you go ahead with this installation.
technorati tags: gtalk, blackberry, ie
Hyderabad’s BarCamp is all set to rock !
BarCamp Hyderabad is all set to meet on coming saturday (April 8th, 2006). an except from the barcamp site should give you some idea if you are wondering what is this all about.
"Barcamp Hyderabad is in the series of BarCamps being organized around the world- an adhoc Technology “Unconference” format. Here there are no spectators and everyone participates.
Learn more about "Unconference". You can regsiter here as an attendee here
New : Developer’s salary survey is here…
This looks cool. I am assuming these are p.a salaries. This study was published in the lastest issue of Game developer magazine.
PROGRAMMING
Technical Director: $104,738
Lead Programmer: $81,591
Programmer / Engineer: $73, 618
A Superfast search experience
I have tried similiar tools before, but I think I will stick to this cool tool for some time. Browster is a browser plugin (both IE and FF), uses prefetch to give you a one stop search result navigation in the most possible coolest way.
Wanna try Windows Live Messenger Beta ?
Now you dont have to wait for an invitation from your buddy.
Go grab your beta of WLM
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