Google SearchWiki

I didn’t even realize Google has launch a new feature that called Google SearchWiki back in late November 2008 until suddenly I notice how my result page changed today.

I guess maybe Google slowly rolling out SearchWiki feature to some random user or continent.

I remember Matt Cutt talking about this ages ago but I didn’t have the opportunity to test it out at that time.

This is something I have been waiting for a long time. I always hate some website that manipulate search engine weakness to be on the result page. I don’t want spam site appear on my search result page. Their website really give nothing to me other than junk and full of advertisement.

Now they are gone FOREVER (at least for me).

The result that you modified will be only seen by you – it doesn’t effect other user search result (I guess this the most dreamed feature by spammer LOL). And that is perfectly fine, I don’t really care what other people see anyway but I do believe Google care.

Here is some screenshot from my search

google-searchwiki-info

And you can even leave comment on each result in Google SearchWiki

google-searchwiki-with-comment

I am curious how long have you guys already have this feature? Am I the last people who get this feature?

GMail Themes: What it Looks Like on Different Browser?

Previously I post on the Gmail new feature: Gmail themes and there is a comment that said maybe Gmail themes won’t be available for Internet Explorer user.

Curious with it then I decided to run Gmail on 3 different browsers on my machine. So here is the result.

gmail_themes_on_internet_explorer_8beta_64bit 
Gmail themes on Internet Explorer 8 Beta 64bit

gmail_themes_on_google_chrome
Gmail themes on Google Chrome

gmail_themes_on_minefield_64bit
Gmail themes on Minefield 64bit

As you can see Chrome and Minefield display themes as it supposed to be seen but on IE it really suck.

See the pencil, coffee stain and the flowers picture cut off. And there is no darker background to make the top menu stand out.

I don’t understand this, why can’t just Microsoft people create a standard browser as others do. I believe it is not they are not capable of doing so, or maybe it is just another marketing tactic even though I don’t know what it is.

On the latest IE 8 still didn’t show much improvement. Why did they care to make incognito function (called InPrivate Browsing in IE) and some other stilly function that only a small percentage of user will use while they can’t even render standard CSS properly.

Colorful GMAIL: Fabulous Themes

This morning I woke up and fire up my browser to check email I got some nice notification when I log on.

Gmail got themes!!

Gmail fans have been building unofficial extensions to spice up their inboxes for a while, but up til now themes haven’t been an integral part of Gmail. We wanted to go beyond simple color customization, so out of the 30 odd themes we’re launching today, there’s a shiny theme with chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, nature themes that change scenery over time, weather driven themes that can rain on your mailbox, and fun characters to keep you in good company. There’s even an old school ascii theme (Terminal) which was the result of a bet between two engineers — it’s not exactly practical, but it’s great for testing out your geek cred. We’ve also done a minor facelift to Gmail’s default look to make it crisper and cleaner — you might notice a few colors and pixels shifted around here and there.

At the moment you can choose from 30 fabulous themes.

 skins_grid

Here is what my Gmail looks like at the moment.

gmail_with_themes

If you still haven’t notice this change, you can check in your Gmail setting. There should be new tab there named “themes”.

The first 15 themes only just color play while the other 15 themes really unique themes. Must be a lot of effort have been put into this. I think all of them really beautiful and I can’t decide which one to use.

REMARK:
If the tab still not appear in your settings maybe you have to wait for a few days. As always Google will roll out the new feature slowly in-case somebody will spot some nasty bug :p

Microsoft Windows Live Messenger 9.0 Features Leaked

Microsoft’s next generation of its instant messenger; Windows Live Messenger formerly known as MSN Messenger will new security feature in version 9.0 to report and block user who send unwanted message or spam, known as SPIM (Spam Over Instant Message)

Another big feature is Multiple Points of Presence (MPOP) which is basically means you can login to Windows Live Messenger from different location/computer without logging out another instance of Windows Live Messenger on the other computer. Previously, whenever you login your account on different computer with the same account still logged in on the other computer, the instance on the other computer will be forced to logout.

Some of the other new features:

  • Signature sounds - I’m still not sure how this will looks like.
  • Per contact sounds - Choose different sounds for different contact.
  • Animated Avatar - Now you can use GIF format images for your avatar/display picture.
  • URL Status Message – URL now clickable.

From what I can see about these new features is Windows Live Messenger will be even more bloated. I already stopped using Windows Live Messenger a few years back (it still known as MSN Messenger at that time) mainly because it consumed too much resource. Every new version will become less responsive and use too much memory and only featuring feature which is not so crucial for normal IM use.

Via: infoworld

Bill Gates share his Microsoft Office Experience

Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and founder sharing his thought about how he use latest office suite, Microsoft Office 2007.

People are often curious about which applications and technology I use, and if there are features in the new version of Office that have changed the way I work. Without a doubt, the 2007 Microsoft Office system enables me to get my work done more easily and quickly than before.

If you visit my office, you will probably notice right away that I have three large flat screen displays that sit together and are synchronized so they work like a single very wide display. The large display area enables me to work very efficiently. I keep my Outlook 2007 Inbox open on the screen to the left so I can see new messages as they come in. I usually have the message or document that I’m currently reading or writing in the center screen. The screen on the right is where I have room to open up a browser or look at a document that someone has sent me in e-mail.

I spend the majority of my time communicating with colleagues, customers, and partners. As a result, Outlook is the application that I use the most. I receive about 100 e-mail messages per day from Microsoft employees, and many more from customers and partners.

It’s very important that I hear what people think about our products and our company. Yet I need to balance that against the very real risk of information overload from all the e-mail that I receive. The advances we made in Outlook 2007 for filtering, rules, and search folders have made it much easier to manage my e-mail than before, especially because so much happens automatically once I’ve set everything up.

A great thing is that all my voice mail, faxes, and even instant messages are sent to my Outlook Inbox using our unified communications technology. Another important feature of unified communications that we have integrated into Office applications is presence and identity. That means I can always tell at a glance whether the person I need to get in touch with is available or not.

One change to Outlook that I appreciate is tasks are now integrated with how I view my calendar. Before the 2007 Office release, I never used the Outlook task feature, but now that tasks are automatically added to my calendar, it makes it much easier to stay on top of the important things I need to do.

Source: Office Hours

As for me generally I really love this latest Microsoft Office 2007, how they try to make each of their software can communicate with each other. Such as, you can send you email from Outlook 2007 to OneNote 2007, ability to synchronize task between Outlook and OneNote and also ability to blog from OneNote.

My only problem and the only one is this latest 2007 suite not memory friendly. I know to put also those nice feature need a lot of resource, but I think the cause is the .NET framework. As you can see, all latest Microsoft products was written in .NET and .NET is not resource friendly not to mention slower performance compared to native language based applications.

Currently my PC setup is P4 1.6GHz and 1GB RAM, launching multiple office applications is a nightmare. Maybe all Microsoft’s engineer got high-end machine so they didn’t notice this drawback, but IMHO they should think not all people have the latest hardware setup to fulfill Office Suite recommendation.

Firefox and Firefox 3 Beta 1 Memory Usage

It looks like not only me feel Firefox that consumed too much memory than it should, Duncan Riley from techcrunch.com also feel the same way. This is snippet Duncan expressing his displeasure to what his beloved browser had become.

Then my love affair with Firefox started to end. Firefox 1.5 (and the earlier versions, I started at 0.7) never skipped a beat, and unlike IE it had tabs, which were a god send to me as it was to many others. Mozilla launched Firefox 2.0, and suddenly my internet experience started to sour. I’m a heavy tab user, so it’s not unusual for me to have 15, 20 and even more tabs open, it’s how I read my feeds in the morning, opening up the stories that interest me for later reading. Firefox had what has been called by others “memory leaks,” which in laymen’s terms meant that it tripped out your memory on a PC, froze up and crashed…and far too regularly. I became a Mac user this year, and the first thing I did when I started up OS X for the first time was to download Firefox, hoping that perhaps it was a PC problem. It wasn’t. Same memory problems, same crashes. Mac fanboys told me that it was my fault for using plugins, so I deleted Firefox and started again without the plugins. Same problems, constant freezing (even with 4gb on a MacPro) and crashes. I switched to Safari for a time, and as much as it was a decent browser, it doesn’t play nice with all sites, in particular with the WYSIWIG backend on Wordpress blogs. Then came Flock 1.0. I’d never been a Flock fan before, always believing it to be nothing more than Firefox with plugins (Flock is based on the Firefox engine). Having watched the demo at TechCrunch 40 I downloaded the beta of Flock 1.0 and surfed away without incident. Some how the folks at Flock had tweaked the underlying Firefox engine to stop the memory issues.

Firefox 3 Beta 1: The Memory Use Says It All

I also once, a Firefox fan until I found Maxthon. The main reason I switch browser is memory consuming. At that time I only have 512MB of RAM and I am heavy multi-tasking guy and heavy tab user. Usually my PC will on 24/7 so it is normal for me to have 30+ tabs with Maxthon, this something that I can call impossible with Firefox.

To give you some idea how different their memory consuming, I got screenshot for you.

firefox-and-maxthon-memory-usage

As you can see from the screenshot above Firefox using nearly 50MB of memory and I just start it, with only one default tab opened while for Maxthon I have around 10 tabs opened.

If you know some dirty trick for freeing some memory by minimizing the application, Firefox just have no effect with that trick. I don’t know how the developer code Firefox but I think 99% of Windows applications will clear their memory when minimized.

Actually I got a lot more to talk about this matter, but I don’t have enough time currently so, maybe I will continue my humble opinions later.

Restore Deleted Show Desktop Icon

recover-deleted-show-desktop-icon Are you the one of the many of us that accidently deleted Show Desktop icon from Quick Launch bar and wondering how can you get that Show Desktop command back? If you are one of those, then you are lucky because I am going to show you how you can create your beloved Show Desktop back.

Creating New Show Desktop Icon from Scratch

  1. Open a new instance of Windows Notepad. Start –> All programs –> Accessories –> Notepad or type Notepad from run box.
  2. Copy and paste code below into your Notepad
    [Shell]
    Command=2
    IconFile=explorer.exe,3
    [Taskbar]
    Command=ToggleDesktop 
  3. From Notepad file menu, select save and give Show Desktop.scf as the filename.
  4. You can choose wherever you want to save but I recommended you to safe on desktop so it is easier for you to execute next step.
  5. Drag and drop your newly created Show Desktop.scf icon into the Quick Launch bar or alternatively you can copy and paste into it.

Done! You just recover your deleted Show Desktop icon.

Another Method of Creating Show Desktop Icon

This method that I am going to show you is much simpler than the previous one and will produce exactly the result. Let’s get started.

  1. Click on start button and click Run
  2. Type regsvr32 /n /i:U shell32.dll and hit Enter.
  3. Wait until message box shown below appear and click ok.RegSvr32_001
  4. We are done here! Congratulation!

Alternatively, you do the step above from windows command line utility; CMD. Just type the code, hit enter and wait for the confirmation box.

That’s all, we have successfully learn two method of restoring deleted Show Desktop icon. I hope someone learn something from this :D