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

RightLoad, FTP Upload Never Been Easier

RightLoad, FTP Upload never been easier

If you own a web server or have been working with it, you must have been using some kind of FTP client to make your jobs done and your life easier. While full featured FTP client very useful for managing your FTP server and files, it is RightLoad come in handy when the situation is you just want to upload a small quantity of documents or images.

What is RightLoad?

RightLoad is a small program that allows you to quickly upload files directly from a Windows folder to your server. Instead of using a complicated FTP client just to upload a few pictures, you just right-click on the files, select the server and target folder and RightLoad will do the rest for you. When all files have been uploaded, RightLoad will automatically generate a list of different links to the files, ready to be copied into your post or website. [source: official RightLoad website]

How RightLoad work

Right is a context based application, that’s mean the best way of using it is by accessing to trough context menu (or mostly known as right click), but you still can run it the normal way by double clicking its icon and do drag and drop to start transfer.

rightload-from-context-menu

As you can see from the screenshot above, this is how we access RightLoad most of the time. You can select one file, multiple files, or even folder to upload.

When you first launch RightLoad, you will be prompted to fill a FTP account that will be used as default account. You can setup as many servers as you want and for each server you can also setup as many folders as you want under that specific server (like my screenshot above).

What make it different from normal FTP client?

The feature I love the most is it will format from FTP format to HTTP format. For example, let say you upload a file name logo.jpg to folder temporary, when uploaded you will get FTP format URL such as ftp://user:password@ftp.kuntau.net/public_html/temporary/logo.jpg then if you want to share whatever you uploaded with others you have to reformat the URL to http://kuntau.net/temporary/logo.jpg format, so they can view the document properly and for you not to reveal your login also!

rightload-offer-various-formatting-when-upload-completed

What RightLoad do for you is, it will automatically do the formatting for you and pre-highlighted it on upload complete so what only left for you is pressing ctrl + c to copy the URL.

As you can see from screenshot above also, it come predefined with several common tags for forum and website use such as [URL] tag, [IMG] tag, <a> and <img>. When you click any of this tag, the links on the left side will be converted to corresponding tag.

create-thumbnail-with-rightload

Another handy feature included is it will automatically detect if you are uploading image and it will offer you to create thumbnail for easy posting on website or forum. You can also specify default thumbnail size in the options menu.

That is what I can review about this marvelous tiny but useful freeware. If you are interested visit its download page and experience it yourself, it is free; nothing to lose on your side.

Show Hidden Files in All Windows, The Complete Reference

While this can be done in a blink of eyes for all geeks out there, but there is some portion of normal human being that doesn’t know how to do this. Here is the complete reference how to show hidden files on windows for ALL versions of Microsoft Windows ever created. This list is not all my work, I refer to some other website out there for Windows version that I don’t have or I never use.

Show hidden files on Windows Vista

  1. Click on the start button ( the rounded Windows logo)
  2. Click on Control Panel, then click on Appearance and Personalization, finally click on Folder Options
  3. In Folder Options window, click on view tab.
  4. Under Advanced Settings click on Show hidden files and folders radio button to select.
  5. Uncheck Hide protected operating system files.
  6. Click OK to accept and apply those changes

Show hidden files on Windows XP

  1. Launch My Computer or Windows Explorer.
  2. Under Tools menu bar, click on Folder Options.
  3. In Folder Options window, click on view tab.
  4. Check Display the content of system folder checkbox.
  5. Click on Show hidden files and folders radio button.
  6. Uncheck Hide protected operating system files.
  7. Click OK to accept and apply changes

Show hidden files on Windows Server 2003

  1. Launch My Computer or Windows Explorer.
  2. Under Tools menu bar, click on Folder Options.
  3. In Folder Options window, click on view tab.
  4. Check Display the content of system folder checkbox.
  5. Click on Show hidden files and folders radio button.
  6. Uncheck Hide protected operating system files.
  7. Click OK to accept and apply changes.

Show hidden files on Windows 2000

  1. Launch My Computer or Windows Explorer.
  2. Under Tools menu bar, click on Folder Options.
  3. In Folder Options window, click on view tab.
  4. Click on Show hidden files and folders radio button.
  5. Uncheck Hide protected operating system files.
  6. Click OK to accept and apply changes.

Show hidden files on Windows ME

  1. Launch My Computer or Windows Explorer.
  2. Under Tools menu bar, click on Folder Options.
  3. In Folder Options window, click on view tab.
  4. Click on Show hidden files and folders radio button.
  5. Uncheck Hide protected operating system files.
  6. Click OK to accept and apply changes.

Show hidden files on Windows NT

  1. Launch My Computer or Windows Explorer.
  2. Under View menu click on Options.
  3. In Options window, click on View tab.
  4. Scroll down a bit, look for Show all files radio button.
  5. Click OK to accept and apply changes.

Show hidden files on Windows 98

  1. Launch My Computer or Windows Explorer.
  2. Under View menu click on Folder Options.
  3. In Options window, click on View tab.
  4. Scroll down a bit, look for Show all files radio button.
  5. Click OK to accept and apply changes.

Show hidden files on Windows 95

  1. Launch My Computer or Windows Explorer.
  2. Under View menu click on Options.
  3. In Options window, click on View tab.
  4. Scroll down a bit, look for Show all files radio button.
  5. Click OK to accept and apply changes.

Reminder

Under Windows XP and above, showing protected operating system files can be very dangerous since it show you all the files critically needed by the operating system. Any single wrong move can bring you disaster and nightmare, and potentially you have to re-format your hard disk drive.

On the other hand, malicious software always using this technique to hide itself from you since this kind of files + hidden flag can’t be found by normal search and delete command. System file status can be achieved by applying flag s to the file.

I hope someone can find this list useful.

YouTube Announced Multi-Video Upload System

YouTube team just announced on their official blog the brand new Multi-Video Upload system that allowed you to upload up to 10 minutes in length and 1 GB in size. This new file size limit only for the new Multi-Video Upload, single video upload still limited to old file size limit; 100MB.

I just tried to en-queue a total of 45 videos in the list and I got no complain from this system, so I jump to conclusion that this new Multi-Video can upload unlimited or very large number of videos simultaneously.

image 
The coolest thing about this new YouTube multi-video upload system is, it use AJAX technology extensively. When you add a new video to the list, the new video will be automatically added to bottom of the list and the list itself will stretch accordingly; no more page whole page load, that just very convenient. The same goes when you want to add video title, description or keyword just click on the text as image above and it will turn into editbox!

The edit options link above used if you want to add more video options such as video category, broadcast options, date and map options and sharing options.

Aside from the cool thing there is also downside IMHO, for me I would prefer stand alone win32 program rather than web base application because a lot of thing can happen with browser; browser crash or hang and all your hard work just gone like that. Different with stand alone application which you have more control over the situation, not to mention a lot of better feature can be implement surpass the limitation of web application.

Anyway, if you decide to use the multi-video upload feature, just go to the installer webpage to install the plugin.