Windows Vista : Cool Stuff packaged
Windows Vista has got a new cool package skin now. No more naggy names and technical names on the package. The colors are very decent and cool to eyes.
You can view the high resolution box shots out here…
My Photoblog
Well, I am back from a hectic + cool vacation spent in Coorg Valley. I would be writing a detailed travelog on my visit (I should write atleast for the enthusiasts who might wanna visit Coorg in future..). Meanwhile I am a bit busy in shaping up the snaps I have clicked during the visit. I am updating my photoblog with some of them.
Windows Vista Team finds a new place to blog…
No..its no longer “blogs.msdn.com/windowsvista” and that sleepy community server templated blog 
Windows Vista team has skinned thier blog with a shiny Windows Vista skin..
Visit : www.windowsvistablog.com
You can also read Jim Alchin’s post about the new Team blog here
Via: Scobleizer
Microsoft clears the clouds over Vista Licensing
Since a week, there are too many discussions around Windows Vista licensing. It has created enough ripples in existing windows user community and had given much boost to anti-MS activists.
According to the licensing terms, if you buy a windows vista, the license will be tightly coupled with your hardware and can be activated only once. Any hardware change such as HDD, Main board etc would require a new license again. This has created a fearsome ripple in user community. A normal windows user might not want to install Vista over many machines many times. But many of the Windows enthusiasts and geeks does this many many times. They change hardware, try new hardware and re-install OS many times. The new licensing terms would cause a big hit to these activities.
Today Microsoft has cleared the clouds over the licensing terms, while talking to a hardware tech news website “bit-tech” and said that “Windows Vista will not require a system re-activation unless the hard drive and one other component is changed. This means that enthusiasts will be able to swap CPUs, memory and graphics cards out without any worry about having to re-activate with MS, either on the internet or by phone.”
Read more about the story here..
and @ Engadget
How to take professional looking photos ?
With out a professional camera and a professional ? You must have seen some amazing effect in most of the professional photographer’s snaps. I used to wonder many times, how could I get that kind of effect and used to think I must buy a EOS/SLR camera for that along with cool lens and filters. I tried some of the tricks at my CoolClicks photoblog too.
Today I happend to read this cool tutorial on How to create Professional looking photos with out a professional. Very interesting one. There are many tips for photographers as well.
Read more here at Taking Professional Looking Photos Without a Professional
Who wins the race?
I hear many people seriously discussing about IE 7 Vs Firefox on speed. Why only IE Vs FF? FireFox is really that much faster than IE or any other browsers? Is there any browsers out there to compete? Well, you are wrong if you think Fire Fox is an ultimate killer in Performance. Infact it stands in 3rd place in speed test.
Based on the above speed tests, Opera seems to be a clear winner in performance on windows platform. Internet Explorer is more performant than FireFox except in script speed. Read more on the Original Srory on Browsers Speed wars
Indic support in Yahoo Messenger
Yahoo messenger has announced that it will be supporting Indic languages in thier new Yahoo messenger with Voice. Yahoo has come up with various plugins to support tabbed chatting and chatting in Indic languages like Hindi, Telugu, Marathi and Tamil. You can see how telugu plugin works in Yahoo messenger as shown below.
You can download the Indic chat plugin “Jhol” from here.
Infy started Corporate Blogging
Indian IT Giant “Infosys” (INFY) has entered the big world of Blogging with thier corporate blogging @ InfosysBlogs. This is a MovableType hosted blogging system. Currently I can see two major blogs on Infosys blogs system..
One is dedicated for Microsoft technologies and can be reached at http://infosysblogs.com/microsoft/
Another blog was dedicated to corporate lessons, Industry strategies and management lessons…This can be reached @ http://www.infosysblogs.com/thinkflat/
India Rising
One Billion Reasons to care…What makes India so diversified in this World ? What is the secret behind it’s power of economy? Watch this..
Pick your SongBird to play the music
Songbird, a cool Open source & Cross platform desktop music player software is out to play all the music you wanted now. Songbirdnest has released the RC3 of Songbird 0.2 Just now.
You can download the Songbird 0.2 RC3 here. and check the cool features too.
Some of the coolest feature i liked are…
Build Custom mixes….now you can become a DJ of your own room…
Play the web …Treats webpages as playlists
Super Slim Mini-Mode…Hide your player up to whatever size…
Watch this screencast to learn more about this cool little bird…
You know one thing? – It was build on the same platform as Fire Fox. 
Bug in Fire Fox 2 RSS Subscriber ?
I observed this weird behavior in FireFox 2 today. Not sure If this is a bug or an existing by design feature. If it is by design, it is weird. Apparently there is a problem in default behavior of RSS subscriber in Fire Fox 2 RC1, which it is not able to recognize the subscribed feeds. Due to this problem, you will encounter a stupid dialog to add your RSS feed in an endless loop and you can never reach a page you visited already.
How to Repro :
01. Open Fire Fox 2 RC1, visit any blog
02. Click on RSS icon of the blog as shown below..
03. A RSS feed reader will be shown to you. Here you can subscribe to this feed and make Live Bookmarks as a default RSS subscriber. Check the checkbox and subscribe to the feed.
04. Now click on any link on the same page (RSS display page). That will take you to some blog post.
05. Now if you want to read one more post, you may want to go back to RSS page and click on another link. Try to hit “Back” button. You can never go back to that RSS feed page again regardless whatever you click on the below shown dialog..
Why this could be a Bug ?
When I subscribe a feed in firefox, I would expect that firefox does remembers that and does not throw the dialog to add that feed again and again. Ideally this dialog should not be shown as my feed was already subscribed and I just want to read that feed.
Browse Digg Stories right from Live Toolbar
If you have a Digg.com Syndrome (checking digg.com for every 10 mins), This will serve your purpose for sure. You can keep an eye on Digg.com stories in all categories right from your browser’s Windows Live Toolbar with out browsing all those digg.com pages.
How to get stock information for multiple symbols?
Today while doing some random search on live.com, I found this cool feature. I must be unaware of this feature of live.com. Live.com provides stock price information for multiple ticker symbols if you provide them as follows..
Click here : msft goog yhoo infy quote
Cool ! Is’nt it?
You can add as many ticker symbols as you want to the above query too. So get all of your stock tickets in a row and search as shown below and bookmark that page. Bingo ! your daily stock mornitoring page is ready !
Amaron…Lasts long…Really Long…Ting Tong
This is one of my favorite advertisement in India. Really funny and very creative.
Writely is in action : docs.google.com
Today, Google has injected it’s aquired document technology “Writely” in to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, an Online Office workspace from google. This is one more BETA from Google. But I should say, this product was well tested as a Beta when it was “Writely”.
The first thing I noticed is, Google wants to clearly differentiate between docs and spreadsheets. In a standard office environment, we call every working document as a document. I wonder what could be the logic behind seperating Docs & Spreadsheets. If Docs are word, open office writer documents, what they would call “Presentations”. That’s a big question.
Let’s discect what is up there in Google Docs !
Usability Perspective : Google has converted the Writely interface totally in to it’s own style of navigation. I am convinced by the look and feel, but I am not feeling good on removing some of the cool options from Writely and the navigation style of Writely. You can see the earlier navigation system of Writely Here..
You can read CNET’s detailed review on Writely here.
There is an advantage as well with google style navigation. That is nothing but, the famous gmail style navigation that most of the google users live in and out in thier daily life.
Google docs gives you a defaul folder view named “Active Documents”. This is a place where you are currently working on active documents and spread sheets. The “All Documents” folder view displays all the documents in one place as shown below.
I was quite happy to see all of my “Writely” documents are back in my vault with out any problem.
Colloboration & Publishing : Google docs scores a high rank in colloboration and publishing. There are plenty of cool options for document sharing, versioning too. Currently Google docs can support HTML, TXT, DOC (MS), RTF, ODT (Open Office), SXW (Star Office), CSV, XLS (MS), ODS (Open Office). These are the most commonly used office documents across world.
In future, we can expect more formats like Office 2007 formats, more Open Office documents and support for Office Services.
Once I uploaded a new document, Google docs has opened that document for me and provided two tabs to colloborate and publish. I was confused to distinguish between these two options but later understood that Colloborate is more like Publishing the document privately along with some credentials to edit it.
So when you “Publish” a document, that document will be published on Internet instantaneously. So be careful with this option. But you always will have a choice to stop publishing/ Re-publish the document at the published location..
(e.g http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ahcjzxxxxxxxxxx…).
Alternatively you can publish your document to any supported blog engine. This means that you can Google docs as a Blog editor as well. . And you can publish a RSS feed for all of your pubic documents.
Quality : As I mentioned earlier in this post, the quality is much high in constrast with other Google Betas like GMail; as this product was well tested in it’s earlier life itself. But Google has removed the cool Beta Meter which was a part of Writely. I think Google is still working on skinning Writely as I can see some error messages like this…
Overall Rating : 
Windows Vista Wide Open
TIMES has some coverage on Windows Vista’s debut and features. Read more here
Developers, Comments and Fun
If you are a developer at any time in your life, you should have written atleast one crazy line of comment in your code. If not..well, may be you are not a developer at all..:-) Just kidding !
After the launch of Google code search, a new fun started and floating around netizens is to dig through the billion lines of code written by developers across world.
Someone found Winzip’s serial key generator algorithm too.
But the fun part of this code search comes in action, when you try to search certain keywords…
some of the comments that I found
169: /* these aren’t actually used. if they are, we’re screwed */ struct protoent {
252: ### mark that we screwed up ###
/* If you f*** with this, update ret_from_syscall code too. */
295: I will not discuss it here (though, I am really pissed off at this stupid requirement making rthdr idea useless)
406: # # _why:: Go nuts! Have a pony parade! #
85: while 1: # Good morning. We just woke up. # The first thing we need is a new connection.
/* “The horror, the horror … ” */ /* Marlon Brando – Appocalypse Now */
639: /**************************************************************************** Open a file – exposing the full horror of the NT API
