MSN.co.in home page and their obsessions

I think its high time for MSN India team to change thier domain name msn.co.in to “msnads.co.in” or “msnbollywood.co.in”. Look at this stupid home page which is supposed to be a start page for any indian to know as per expectations from any portal like www.msn.com.

Right from the top of the page, I have marked all ADs in Yellow Boxes and Movie information in Red boxes. As per my observation MSN.co.in covers or contains only 10% of thier home page which is “information”. And the remaining stuff is all about aishwarya and salman khan, may be the cute pics of sameera reddy etc…. I am attaching the home page for your reference below… (I did not digged in to MSN Channels much…) – Click on the image to see the original image.

The funniest part is filling this page with various technical web sites like windows update etc.

Dear MSN India…Do you have any idea about your audience? Do you think they are running after bollywood actors and actresses pics and wallpapers all the time. You got to think about the future as many self made portals like live.com, google homepage are coming on the way. Please try to understand the word “Entertainment”, it’s not just movies & Wallpapers for sure 🙂

Bye Bye FireFox 1.5

I have decided to live with out FireFox 1.5 for some time. Its giving pathetic performance in loading the pages or any other complex rendering. I found IE is better than FireFox 1.5 in performance, though it crashes very often.

May be I will consider Firefox again after major performance fixes. Till then Bye Bye FireFox !

Acoustical Liberation of books in public domain

Don’t get scared of that long and serious title 🙂 Because its a project’s name which can make  you feel so happy to know more about.

Tech Crunch reports about the Hugh McGuire’s goal is to make all public domain (expired copyright) books available free online in audio format. The project is named LibriVox. Thanks to Hugh not for naming it after “Pod” mania. I would like to suggest him to use “Audiocast” or “Voxcast” instead of the term “Podcast“.

 Anyway, Thanks very much and Best Wishes to Hugh McGuire. Its a great effort.

Remembrance Week – 26th December, 2005 – 1st January, 2006

Click on the above image to know more and help more.

Google fails here buddy

I was trying this W3C Markup validation tool and found some shocking facts..(validated for HTML 4.0 transitional standards)

“Google fails in W3C Quality standards with 51 errors”

Now you can see what happens if a Ph.D guy develops a web page 🙂 LOL.

live.com also failed this test with 19 errors

msn.com passed this test…wow

microsoft.com passed the test

The great “Open” Slashdot.org denied to be tested 🙂

Oracle.com failed with 33 errors

Sun.com fails with 14 errors..

MSN Search has passed

Blogs.msdn.com failed miserably with 87 errors

Hey, now Sony plays WMA

Good news is that Sony started to incorporate Windows Media Support to its coolest gadget range. Now I dont have to depend on that so called ATTRAC format.

Engadget reports that Sony has released a new firmware to support WMA.

The Chronicles of Narnia : The Lion, The Witch, The Wardrobe and Me

This weekend I happend to watch the much hyped The Chronicles of Narnia. I heard and read lot of stuff about this movie, especially about the money they spent on visual effects, but to be on real experience, this movie will defenetely make you feel so disappointed. I would rate this movie a 3.0/5.0 on home theatre systems, may be a 3.5 for theatre. except the perfection in animal talk. The art direction looks very very poor and lazy. If you compare the visual effects from LOTR or Harry Potter, you may not find this movie is so great in Visual effects too.

The only point what could make you happy is the performance by Georgie Henley who played Lucy Pevensie with an extrordinary talent to express emotions. Love you Georgie…you are too sweet 🙂

Plug & Play my memory

I would love to see this feature on human brains…

Windows Vista December CTP (Customer Technology Preview) introduces this amazing feature “Use my memory stick as RAM”. This feature was demoed by Jim Alchin at PDC 2005. In short…You connect your thumb drive to your vista PC and it will start using that memory as RAM upon your approval..Bingo :-). Think of a situation where you need to play some game on your laptop and you dont have much memory left on slots…Just buy any 50$ memory stick and plug it.:-) and enjoy the Game.

Some technology downtrends !

Since last 2 weeks, there are few technology downtrends news has been floating around in technogallis.(I used “Galli” in hindi context :-)). First one is the downtrend shades for Java language. After businessweek reported java’s downfall in corporate choice for mission critical applications, its now Linux Insiders turn to report .NET Momentum in the same space.

Some of the comments/excerpts from the story

“But even in corporations, Java can’t rest on its laurels. “You see that technology migrates from hackers to innovative users and eventually to the mainstream,” says Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media.”

“An earlier Jupiter Research report showed that 62 percent of midsize businesses have adopted .NET vs. 36 percent for IBM’s WebSphere technology, which is based on Java.”

Sun acknowledges that .NET is picking up steam in corporations. “There will be more than one language out there,” says Sun’s Loiacono. “Plus, it’s Microsoft. They’ll be a player.” Still, he believes Java and .NET are essentially in a dead heat and denies that .NET has pulled out into the lead.

“Montgomery acknowledges that Microsoft hasn’t done well with the Web 2.0 set, but he expects that to change. It has released a test version of server software that enables Web developers to easily use AJAX on top of Windows.(sudhakar : Nothing but Atlas framework for ASP.NET)”  

So what’s the next downfall, believe that boy, its the shiny shiny Oracle…

Bloomberg reports that shares of Oracle corp fell as much as 60 cents or 4.7% and the database growth also trailed 24%. “Chief Financial Officer Safra Catz yesterday said Microsoft Corp., which last month unveiled its new SQL Server, is a significant competitor in the $7.79 billion market. Oracle’s database growth in the three months ended Nov. 30 followed a 2 percent increase in the first quarter, when the company blamed Microsoft for increased competition.” 

RedHerring also report a similiar story:

“Oracle has been taking a beating because newer open-source competitors such as MySQL, and other larger competitors such as Microsoft and IBM, are aggressively targeting the market. “Mostly, the biggest competitor is Microsoft, which had a new release of SQL Server this quarter,â€? said Mr. Barnicle.(An analyst with Pacific Crest Securities)”

So, guys, be happy 🙂 Because you are going to gain always from Techno Wars between giants.

Yahoo comes with clarity in email id

Yep, now with “dot” facility with in email address.

I have created a cool email id now, and waiting to use Yahoo Mail Beta client very soon. Thanks very much yahoo…:-)

In to Vibes

Except few unicode problems NetVibes seems to be a prmosing competition for Google home page and Start.com. Looks very simple and user intuitive.

The coolest attraction is …its avaiable in Hindi…:-)

check my homepage for netvibes here…

 

Dynosaurs Vs Nano Robots

Here I should quote my own words, when I talk to some of my friends on the world famous linux, and world’s most infamous windows (for numerous unavoidable, undebatable, non-stoppable discussions :-)), I quote this line..”Why do you compare windows and linux at all, its just like comparing a dynosaur (considering the age of the base code written for linux) and Robots. But I agree to a point “A Dynosaur’s stupid oval egg is more precious and valuable than a Honda dancing Robot” 🙂

FireFox Pug follows you where ever you go…

got any idea  after looking at  the  picture?  Yes  despite of the bitter truth that Hutch network does’nt follow even like a small street dog, the little pug in this  cute AD follows the boy wherever go goes. Now  its the time for FireFox to play the PUG role.  I  have tried this Portable  FireFox 1.5 last  weekend and fell in love with it. You know what?  There is not registry hell , no need to install it  with admin previleges .  Just  carry the hole  folder in an  USB Stick  and you got  your  FireFox Pug.

You can carry all of your extensions, bookmarks and user settings with your portable firefox. I am trying this portable Abi word as well, looks very promising particularly when you need to do some word related things in cybercafes very securely.

So…Wanna master Ajax ?

Well, IBM developerworks has got an excellent series of articles for you

Chapter 1 : Introduction to Ajax

Del.icio.us 🙂 Is’nt It ?

IBM Researcher John Vlissides (GOF) Dies…

Heard of patterns anytime? Then you must have heard “GOF…a.k.a Gang Of Four” in ABCDs of patterns itself. Now its a sad news for GoF lovers…one of the GoF members and IBM Researcher John Vlissides died on Nov 24th this year.

Washington Post reports… 

MS Community Web Feed Directory – Beta

Now MS Caught up with this beta fever…They have releases the Web Feeds Directory. I am glad to see atleast they have hosted this thier MSDN Labs :-). The best advantage of “Beta” is : You can run your software with bugs as long as you want with out any law suits are disbutes…

Along with this, one more cool site (I wanted this always…as a developer) Microsoft Community Search was launched. So will this be able to beat Google in searching Microsoft communities and MS product content? I have heard from many developer saying MSDN Documentation is world class and a ocean and google is best in searching that ocean :-). So it means, if you own a sea, make sure that you have a better fish net to search that. I also wonder why this community search is limited to Microsoft’s blogs only???? If they want to call it as “Community” Search? They should extend this to MSDN Newsgroups, MSDN User Group threads, other Microsoft product blogs too..Right ?

Windows Live Local is Live !

Just now I have tried this Windows Live Local. It did’nt made me feel so great for first 10 mins. But when I tried a search on New York, I got to see this amazing Bird View Navigation with directions from one point to other point. You can actually navigate in other 8 directions based on your directions map.

Hope to the same application in GPS Car navigation…
Google has one application very similiar to this already here…Google Transit. I found google’s directions with suggestions on time, more usefull in a typical american’s busy life. And the brilliant catch is the cost of the transit..wow where is this world going by the way…:-)

Even though the bird view feature in google transit is not showing high res view like windows live, its a good idea of having the main route in the background and navigate the directions on specific points. But you would need a laptop or Pocket PC buddy 🙂

Here is a suggestion for MS and Google…there should be an option to save these directions in an animated flash movie and carry in laptop or any hand held device. Even voice based directions in a sequence also would be good.

Bill @ India – 1

Watch the webcast of Bill Gates talking @ CII-CEOs forum, Maurya Sheraton, New Delhi

Bill Gates with Sam Pitroda

Changed the theme for my blog

Just for a chance 🙂 But this stupid template does’nt have the link for login page :S

So I got to remember this page name : wp-login.php

Better Bananas, Nicer Mosquitoes

BillG cracked a joke on bananas & mosquitoes in his own visionary way.

“I’ve been applying my imagination to the synergies of this,” he said. “We could have sorghum that cures latent tuberculosis. We could have mosquitoes that spread vitamin A. And most important, we could have bananas that never need to be kept cold.”

Bill Gates has pledged $450 million to long-shot research projects in global health.

Read more here