Running Commentary

The first two days of Sun Tech Days India have already finished. It is Netbeans and Open Solaris day on 3rd and final day, that is today! Pics For those who don't know, Sun Tech Days is a worldwide Java developers' conference organized by Sun Microsystems and its India leg 2007 was held in Hyderabad and really had people coming from far and wide. It is being held in Hyderabad International Convention Center, Hyderabad and thousands have attended it. There have been keynote sessions from Sun, Oracle and VMWare. I attended only one keynote from Oracle, which was grandiously titled, 'Next Generation platform'. Oracle flaunts the fact that it's products follow all the open standards and that many of its products and standards support or leverage the open source. Continuing on the same lines, this keynote proposed integration of JavaEE 5 (EJB 3.0 specially) , SOA 2.0 and Web 2.0 to develop a new generation application development platform. And what can be better than be...

Larry Dignan made a good point about innovation in this post: Do your part: Visit an alternative search engine by ZDNet 's Larry Dignan -- Charles S. Knight has compiled a handy list of the top 100 alternative search engines on Read/Write Web. The one problem: No one has time to check them out. Indeed, Knight notes that people use the four main search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com) for 99.9% of their searches. That fact leads to another [...] So I decided to give a try to atleast a couple of search engines mentioned in that blog. I tried Fazzle.com and then I tried to compare the relevance of results (put more simply, I tried to check if I am able to find what I want to, on first page) with Big Daddy of them all, Google. Honestly speaking my faith on Google was somewhat shaken: Fazzle was showing better results! But Google obviously has its strengths so now though Fazzle is my default search engine in IE7, Google Desktop's floating bar is also present on my desktop....

Microsoft has been sprucing its Live.com services lately, though things are yet a little patchy and at times they simply won't work! I saw a nice feature in Live Mail today. If you get a .mp3/.wma file as an attachment, you can directly play the file from your inbox. Live Mail shows a play-pause-volume toolbar in the message. I don't know if it works for other media formats as well. I just wish they could make the actions a bit faster. Switching views (like moving from Inbox to Sent to Folders) is much slower than GMail or Yahoo! Mail.And why was it showing a mail from IRCTC.co.in as phishing attempt? That message didn't even ask me to login anywhere! If you are using Live.com, then you can select many more gadgets which are available in Live Gallery. Microsoft seems to be positioning Live as a one stop shop for all the users of MSN Space, Live.com and Vista users who have got Sidebar on their desktops. However the number of gadgets is still much lesser as compared to Googl...

If you have been singing praises of Google for Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets and Google Calendar, I would recommend that you test other options as well. 30boxes.com : Hailed by Kiko.com (First online calendar service, that went out of business and ultimately put itself for sale on Amazon, and hence created more news than they ever did while still in business!) as the reason they were outdone. It may not be 'your life', but still a good for everything service. You can add entries, search through them, share with your friends ('buddies'), subscribe in Google, Yahoo etc. There is even a 'webtop' (looks pretty much same as the Goowy webtop) BillMonk.com : Ah, this is something I am in real love with! If you are sharing flat with other roommates, or sharing the expenses of your sunday dinner with 5 other colleagues or have been exchanging novels with friends and find it a little incovenient to keep a track of who-has-to-pay-how-much-to-whom and who-spent-how-much...