Paint .NET is back on stage (not a beta)

Yes, It’s no longer a Beta program now. If you wonder WTH is Paint.NET ??? It is a small (3.1 MB) application, which was written by students of washington state university. Paint.NET is being considered as a serious compitetor for many of the comercial photo editing software available right now.

The things i liked most in PDN…

01. very small in installation

02. Free…Free…Free

03. Faster…Easier to learn

Paint .NET 2.6 runs on .NET 2.0 framework. Check the below feature list.

Paint.NET v2.6

Released: February 24th, 2006 – Download

This release is an upgrade of v2.5 that utilizes the brand
new .NET Framework v2.0 runtime. It introduces full 64-bit
support, an aesthetically updated user interface, better
performance, a new "Curves" adjustment, and seven new layer
blend modes.

What’s new in Paint.NET v2.6?

• Full 64-bit support, for both x64 and
  Itanium systems
• New "Curves" adjustment for editing an
  image’s color curves
• Seven new layer blend modes: Color Burn,
  Color Dodge, Reflect, Glow, Overlay, Negation, and Xor
• Aesthetic improvements to the entire user
  interface
• Better performance, especially for 64-bit
  systems
• Zooming, esp. with the mouse wheel, has
  been enhanced
• Rewritten layer composition engine is now
  mathematically correct, and faster
• Deployment via AD/GPO is now much easier
  (use /createMsi with setup package)
• User interface now works correctly in
  high-DPI (120dpi, 144dpi, 196dpi)
• Layers window list is no longer "upside
  down"
• Upgraded to use .NET Framework 2.0
• Many other
  improvements and fixes

 

technorati tags: paint.net, .net2.0, washington, university.net

Beware of any Digital Video Content

That’s because digital video content is expected to provide the next major
opportunity for computer hackers.

According to Search security" Consultants Robert Baldwin and Kevin Kingdon told an 2006 RSA Security
Conference audience last week that video and audio content that bypasses
firewalls and security software to play directly on a consumer’s machine is
particularly dangerous."

Read more here

 

 

 

technorati tags: security, RSA, digital, video, content, hackers

Awesome ASP.NET RSS Toolkit

This is just awesome and a one stop  toolkit , if  you are planning to use RSS in your ASP.NET  applications.

Via Scottgu

 

technorati tags: rss, asp.net2.0, whidbey, rsstoolkit

First moments with google pages

I liked it ! 🙂 very much…very clean and simple…I have created my first page here…

http://sudhakar.googlepages.com/home

I had seen a demo of Microsoft Office Live Essentials on officelive.com, and found a similiar concept of creating your home page with just clicks. But i think if I try to compare these two services, it will be like comparing apples to oranges only.

Office live essentials looks more like a streamlined interface for your business needs and colloboration, but google pages are bit different from that aspect. Possibly its more similiar to yahoo’s geocities…

Now the question is : How google is going to use Google pages ??? By building a parallel google web?  I can see some future integrations form google on the same concepts..

01. Integration of Gtalk status on google pages
02. Targeting Google Ads for google pages
03. Google gadgets for google pages
04. API for Google pages
05. Frontpage support & other publishing support

 

technorati tags: google, googlepages, web2.0

Go Flock : Revitalized

The web 2.0 featured Flock is back on stage again…This time it looks quite impressive with lot of bug fixes, inbuilt blogging and flickr features. Flock comes with a search box defaulted to Yahoo !. That’s a quite noticable :-). The features I liked most in Flock are…

• Inbuilt blogging with technorati tag support
• Flickr support (Drag & drop pics from Flickr to your blog post)

Go download the latest Flock 0.5.11 (9.5 MB) 

technorati tags: flickr, flock, yahoo, web20, web2.0

Help BBC with your CPU

SETI Home, Google helix and now it’s BBC turn to ask for your CPU time for one of the big distributed computing projects "BBC Climate Challenge project", all you need to do is, to install a 10 MB satellite software which downloads chunks of data from servers and analyzes using your CPU’s Idle time.

I am giving my 2 CPUs for this project with full time running. Let’s help planet earth’s biggest climate analysis.

technorati tags: Distributed, Computing

Are you Egocentric ?

Wired reports the Secret Cause of the Flame wars in the world of email trails. Which is nothing but egocentrism. I think this is a very common problem in the world of uncertainity and untrust. There are two things to notice here..When you read a mail…

01. You cannot interpret the email in exactly the same way the author wants.

02. You cannot interpret the email with out having your pre calculated perceptions and assumptions.

The first point is very usual thing until unless the author uses some alternatives to express his emotions in email. I feel that is not the problem with text, but the timing of the email. Emails are sent in absence of sense of time or mood of the reciever and the reader may interpret that email in anyway based on his mood and perspection. The reason behind this explanation is "SMS".

If you can treat SMS as a mini mail or chunk of email, nothing in this world can beat SMS in expressing your emotion and message, just in simple plain text with a limit of 160 characters per messages. That’s possible because, the author is aware of the mood and right time to send it …in one word…right context.

In many cases, a better email etiquette helps to avoid the egocentricism in others. Too much of formality, deep explanations, beating around bush are the biggest problems in many of the emails that cause this problem. a smiley always helps your reader to understand your tone of email. dont forget it !

technorati tags: email, communication

Windows Defender Beta 2 is out !

Yes, the re-incarnated Microsoft Anti Spyware is now available as Windows Defender Beta 2 for customers. The web site shows that it has got 25+ million active customers. That’s not a bad number. You can download WDB2 here

Before you install this, I suggest you to read this and comparision chart of other anti spyware software with WDB2.

Right now, I have OneCare installed on my laptop and I am very happy with it’s performance, so I will not be installing one more Anti-Spyware software again. The fun part i found here is …the web site structure 🙂

/security/spyware/software/…. 🙂 WDB2 is not a spyware. I wish it should be "/security/antispyware/software"…

technorati tags: spyware, antispyware, defender, microsoft, malware

Yahoo readies Ajax library for developers

Excerpt : 

Yahoo ! UI Library : "The Yahoo! User Interface Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, HTML and AJAX. The UI Library Utilities facilitate the implementation of rich client-side features by enhancing and normalizing the developer’s interface to important elements of the browser infrastructure (such as events, in-page HTTP requests and the DOM). The Yahoo UI Library Controls produce visual, interactive user interface elements on the page with just a few lines of code and an included CSS file. All the components in the Yahoo! User Interface Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses."

technorati tags: Yahoo, web2.0, ajax, UIlibrary, XMLDOM

Now, It’s Motorola’s turn…

This is one more good win from Microsoft’s windows audio and mobile. Now it’s Motorola turn after Palm to line up with products using MS technology. Motorola is now going gear up thier mobile phones with windows media technology. more on REUTERS.

Now the war between WMA and AAC is going to be more interesting…:-)

Addictive Google Toolbar

Since the early days of google toolbar, I was a fan of this toolbar, I have it on all of my laptops and desktops. It’s not that I am a lazy guy to type google.com and search, but having that toolbar right on the top of webpage gives me some confidence to me. I never felt that it is talking some space of my view at all…

Now Google toolbar is stepping in to web 2.0 world. Now its coming with add-in support. Add-in support is not a new feature as such…MSN toolbar has been supporting add-ins since long, but I feel, it could’nt make it to the consumer’s heart.

Let’s look at what Google Toolbar “beta” is going to do…

01. Custom buttons : You can add as many as buttons you want to google toolbar now. You can create your custom button on the fly in minutes. 🙂 and ofcourse can redistribute it. Soon we can expect many of the websites with a tiny button “Add this site button to your Google toolbar”

 2. Adding Site RSS as a button

3. Adding buttons from Google button gallery

 

4. Key word suggestions

I am expecting a good appreciation from Internet toolbar users for this particular version.

Google blog points to a stale url in blogroll

Well, they say “What we’re reading”, but pointing to scobleizer on a stale url which is no longer valid for fresh content..

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

Pageflakes…Atlas in action

If you are wondering what the heck is Atlas…Atlas is a Javascript, RPC method call (So called “Ajax”) framework which was developed by Microsoft on ASP.NET 2.0. Read more about Atlas here

One of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) in ASP .NET, Omar Al Zabir has build an interesting website using this framework on ASP .NET 2.0 platform. Its called PageFlakes…

Seems very cool in the self made homepage range of websites like start.com, live.com, google homepage etc…PageFlakes also comes with a SDK to develop your own Flakes…thats more interesting..

WikiWorld out there

I can see people getting addicted to wikipedia around are increasing day by day 🙂

well, it’s a good news. I found some of these wikipedia extention websites more addictive..

Quotes : http://en.wikiquote.org

Books : http://en.wikibooks.org

GoWiki !

Hyderabad DevCommunity 2.0

You can never imagine that a massive number of 450 developers gather at place for a non-corporate event like Community Launch. Some of the snaps…

(The Launch Team)

Some of the cool moments are blogged here

http://blogs.msdn.com/onyourmark

http://weblogs.asp.net/anjanaram/archive/2006/02/05/437370.aspx

http://www.mugh.net/

Sidebar will be back on Vista in Feb

We have seen Sidebar in earlier Windows longhorn builds and it was disappeared for some time later. The upcoming beta of Windows Vista is going to be decoarated again with a shiny sleek sidebar again.

Sidebar was designed moreover like a mini platform where you can develop tiny side applications to display quick information. With Sidebar, Microsoft is targeting the 16:9 wide screen monitors. Read more on News.com

What a day!

In one word to put…The Community Rocked the Launch at hyderabad, india on 4th feb right from 9:00 AM to 6:30 PM.

Fully packed auditorium with more than 450 professional developers and 5+ hours of techo streams flown across blazing through brainstorming discussions & quizzing. The hyderabad community proved it again that they sit in front rows when it comes to grab the technology afresh.

Thanks to all the passionated developers who made MUGH Rock today.