Talking About Windows

Find out what the industry and Microsoft Engineers are saying about the next OS from Microsoft, Windows 7.

Link:
http://talkingaboutwindows.com/

PowerPoint and TIFF file viewing from Google in Gmail

A few months ago, we added fast online viewing of PDFs in your browser. As of today, that same viewer now supports TIFF and Microsoft PowerPoint document formats too: you can now view TIFF and PPT files online, directly in your browser, without having to save the files to your computer and without needing to buy, install, or wait for any special software to start up.

We've had a "View as slideshow" option for PowerPoint files for a while; now we've integrated this conversion technology into the same viewer that we use for PDFs and TIFFs.

Cool. Wonder if this will expand my trick for converting Office documents to HTML file.

Link:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/....

Convert Audio and Video from a website

FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec - the leading audio/video codec library.

This is how websites setup tools for performing audio and video conversions. Want to have users upload video that is then converted to a Flash video? FFmpeg can handle it.

Link:
http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/index.html

Five Best Malware Removal Tools

The internet—unfortunately—isn't a never-ending buffet of secure open-source software and Bollywood-style musicals starring LOLCats. There are people and organizations that delight in stealing your personal data, hijacking your computer, and making a general nuisance of themselves through malicious software. This week we're highlighting the top five tools for removing software with ill-intentions from you PC.

Link:
http://lifehacker.com/5227896/...

Opera's homepage is a tribute to the past

Check out Opera's homepage:
http://www.opera.com/

3 Options to protect your child while online

Child Safe Email with ZooBuh: Your child can now have a safe email account, giving you complete peace of mind. Parents have the ability to control and monitor their children's activities from anywhere.

NetNanny: Net Nanny Products from ContentWatch provide Internet Protection software, including parental controls and internet filtering software, computer cleaning utilities, anti-phishing controls, and more.

CyberPatrol: CyberPatrol lets you use the Internet safely. Our parental control and internet filter products and services help you block websites, monitor internet use, control internet access, and stop online predators and cyberbullying.

Window 7 to include XP Mode

Windows XP Mode is specifically designed to help small businesses move to Windows 7. Windows XP Mode provides you with the flexibility to run many older productivity applications on a Windows 7 based PC.

All you need to do is to install suitable applications directly in Windows XP Mode which is a virtual Windows XP environment running under Windows Virtual PC. The applications will be published to the Windows 7 desktop and then you can run them directly from Windows 7.

Still have to get used to the new interface, for those who have not moved to Vista.

Link:
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/...

Yahoo! Closing GeoCities Web Hosting

Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) is quietly closing down the long-standing free web hosting service GeoCities (geocities.yahoo.com), according to a report that appeared today on TechCrunch.

A notice appearing on the GeoCities homepage says accounts are no longer available, adding, “after careful consideration, we have decided to close GeoCities later this year,” and promising to share more details later this summer.

Link:
http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/...

Change the software in your media player with RockBox

Rockbox is an Open Source replacement firmware for portable digital audio players

Supported Players:

• Apple: 1st through 5.5th generation iPod, iPod Mini and 1st generation iPod Nano
  (not the Shuffle, 2nd/3rd/4th gen Nano, Classic or Touch)
• Archos: Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2 and Ondio
• Cowon: iAudio X5, X5V, X5L, M5, M5L, M3 and M3L
• iriver: iHP100 series, H100 series, H300 series and H10 series
• Olympus: M:Robe 100
• SanDisk: Sansa c200 series, e200 series and e200R series (not the AMS models)
• Toshiba: Gigabeat X and F series (not the S series)

Link:
http://www.rockbox.org/

Printable coupons from RetailMeNot

ReatilMeNot is now supporting printable coupons in your local area. Just visit the webpage, choose what you're looking for and a location. Printable coupons are displayed on a Google Map.

My main concern with any of these coupon printing websites, aside from the actual vendor, is the trust that the coupon is actually valid. Already RetailMeNot is becoming infested with 3rd party coupon websites. This will probably continue until it becomes useless.

Try it for yourself and let me know if you actually found and used a coupon from the website.

Link:
http://www.retailmenot.com/printable

Google News Timeline

Google News Timeline is a web application that organizes search results chronologically. It allows users to view news and other data sources on a browsable, graphical timeline. Available data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and information about various types of media, like music albums and movies.

Try your birthday. Limited results for me, but there were results.

Link:
http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/

Check out more of what Google has to offer at the Big List of Google

Will Oracle own MySQL?

Oracle Corporation is to buy Sun Microsystems for $9.50 a share in a deal valued at approximately $7.4 billion, just a few weeks after a deal by IBM to buy Sun fell apart. It looks like Oracle will pay a premium of $2.81 a share, or 42%, over Sun Micro’s closing price of $6.69 a share on Friday.

Oracle said the deal is valued at $5.6 billion excluding cash and debt. Oracle is calling Sun’s Java “the most important software” it has ever acquired. The deal, which is expected to close in the Summer and was unanimously approved by Sun’s board of directors, has massive implications for the future openness of Java and MySQL.

What's going to happen to MySQL?

Link:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/20/...

Gmail Now Tells You Who You Want To Email

Not sure who else to add to that group email? Gmail Labs now has a useful “suggest more recipients” feature that suggests contacts that you might want to include in a group email based on the people you’ve grouped together as email recipients in the past.

For example, if you often send family emails to your mother, father, husband, sister and brother, when you start composing an email to your mother and father, Gmail will suggest adding your sister, husband and brother. The feature is triggered only after you’ve added at least two recipients to the email.

Link:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/17/...

Find out where you ranked in Google when someone clicked your link

Your analytics software can already tell you a lot about the traffic you’re getting from natural search: which search engines are sending traffic, what keywords are sending traffic, which pages are getting the most search engine traffic. But wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly where in the search results your page appeared when the user clicked?

Google has confirmed speculation originally published by Patrick Altoft that their new referrer string does include ranking data.

Link:
http://searchengineland.com/...

SaveAllAttachments for Microsoft Outlook 2007

This outlook add-in adds the missing feature in Microsoft outlook which allows you to save and with option to remove all attachments from multiple emails at once.

Link:
http://www.netpro.biz/saveallattachmentsol2007.html

[ found on LifeRocks ]

Easily check if your system is infected with Conficker

Just load the site and read the chart.

Link:
http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/...

Microsoft Sync Framework

Introducing the Microsoft Sync Framework – a comprehensive synchronization platform enabling collaboration and offline for applications, services and devices with support for any data type, any data store, any transfer protocol, and network topology.

Link:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sync/default.aspx

Happy Easter!

Create great looking word clouds with Wordle

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Link:
http://www.wordle.net/

CircuitCity.com is coming back?

This is on the CircuitCity.com website:

CircuitCity.com is also temporarily closed, although we anticipate the website will reopen in the coming weeks. Please check back for updates.

What does this mean? Is Circuit City not dead?

Oldest domains around

The oldest three:

• symbolics.com (registered 03/15/85)
• bbn.com (registered 04/24/85)
• think.com (registered 05/24/85)

See all 100 here:
http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/...

Video: Sixth Sense Machine

Another great TED talk. Watch this and then check out the other TED talks.

Easily add Flash charts to your website with Open Flash Chart

Open Flash Chart is a dead simple way to add featrure rich Flash charts to your website, with your data through one of many technologies (like PHP).

Open Flash Chart offers:

• Tooltips
• Re-size the charts
• Save the chart as an image
• Highlight or emphasize one (or many) points
• Can be used with technologies like PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, .NET, Google Web Toolkit and JAVA
  

Link:
http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart-2

Latest website from Veign

Very happy to release a new website called Primal Management. I really like the way this website came out and think it will do the book justice.

Check out the website and check out the book, Primal Management.

Zero-day vulnerability in PowerPoint spawns Microsoft alert

Security Advisory 969136 describes the new problem as one that can allow remote code execution if the file recipient opens an infected file. The Microsoft Security Research & Defense blog is rather more useful (not to mention straightforward -- yes, they're seeing it out in the wild, used in targeted attacks), recommending several defensive maneuvers while we await a patch.

Link:
http://www.betanews.com/article/...

Google uncloaks once-secret server

Google's big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers--each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.

They show the inside of a Google module data-center - very smart designing.

Link:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

Create random number sets at Research Randomizer

Research Randomizer is designed for researchers and students who want a quick way to generate random numbers or assign participants to experimental conditions. Research Randomizer can be used in a wide variety of situations, including psychology experiments, medical trials, and survey research. The program uses a JavaScript random number generator to produce customized sets of random numbers.

Link:
http://www.randomizer.org/