A couple of days ago, I picked up a Canon PowerShot A430 at a local electronics store. I had been on the lookout for a nice digital camera during the last couple of weeks, and after considering the options, this one seemed to fit the requirements nicely.


As you can tell from the picture (taken with my T-Mobile MDA), it's quite small - about the size of my palm - so it should be convenient to carry around. I took some pictures yesterday in different lighting conditions and they all came out really well. There are a bunch of shooting modes like Color Accents, Color Swap etc. that add some spiffy effects to the pictures as they're taken. There's also a Super Macro mode for macro shots, and the pictures come out crystal clear. I still have to try out the video mode and some of the other features.

I'll probably end up taking lots of pictures while I'm here in the Bay area during the next three months. First day of work tomorrow. Totally looking forward to it. :)

Pictures are up. :)

I'm here in the Yosemite Valley with my parents and brother on a short holiday until the middle of the week. It's a beautiful place, with lots of greenery, lots of waterfalls, and massive, monolithic rock formations. A nice change of scenery, and very refreshing. From here, we'll be going to the East Bay area to spend a few days with some of our relatives until the weekend. Then my parents and brother are heading back to LA, without me. Silicon Valley will be my "home" for the rest of the summer. ;)

Updates might be a little scarce this week. Be back with more details soon...

Had the last two finals today. My third year is officially over. Booyah!

Three months of summer break lie ahead. What are the plans? Some of you know already. The rest of you will find out soon enough. :)

Long Zheng has put up some great screencasts (QuickTime H.264) of Vista Beta 2 running on a Toshiba M400 Tablet PC to demonstrate some of the new features - Aero Glass, file management, guided help, Tablet functionality, Sidebar, improved search, and Media Center.

You don't really get a feel for what Vista is like simply by looking at screenshots on the web, so if you haven't had a chance to actually install and play with Beta 2 yet, I'm sure you'll enjoy watching the screencasts. Nice job, Long! :)

As many of you may have realized, Microsoft's servers have been swamped ever since the Vista Beta 2 CPP went live last week. The demand has been seriously overwhelming.

If you were a little late, and you've still not managed to get the build, you might want to try VistaTorrent. Chris Pirillo and Jake Ludington took it upon themselves to get a torrent up, along with the MD5 hash so that you can make sure you've got the real deal.

This weekend, Scoble confirmed that he's leaving Microsoft to join PodTech.net, a startup in Silicon Valley. Rumours began spreading on Saturday night, a few days before Robert was ready to let everyone know, and by Sunday morning, Techmeme was just flooded.

I've only met Scoble a couple of times at conferences, but it's still a little sad to see one of Microsoft's most well-known, prolific and candid bloggers leaving the company. He did a really great job during his time there, and was largely responsible for some big changes within the company. I'm sure his team is going to miss having him around, and that the PodTech folks are very excited to have him on-board.

Good luck to the Scobleizer as he moves on to start something new! :)

I've lost count of the number of people who have asked me when a public beta of Vista was going to be released. Well, the wait is finally over (almost...), and although there's no official release page up yet, the public Beta 2 builds (x86 and x64) are live on Microsoft's servers.

German and Japanese ISOs are also available. Just replace the "en" in the above URL with "de" and "jp" respectively.

Update: The official preview page is up. Read the information provided, and sign in to receive your product key before downloading the build.

So as expected, Google Spreadsheets launched this morning as a limited beta, and the web has been brimming with opinions about the new service ever since. One one side, you have the folks (including several news outlets) who think this the Excel-killer. On the other side, there are those who believe that there's simply no use for something like this when Microsoft Office and free alternatives like OpenOffice are already available.

I think labelling such an early version of the service a failure is a bit short-sighted. At the same time, calling it an Excel-killer is just plain silly. Instead, how about a different perspective? From an end-user's standpoint, I personally see Google Spreadsheets as a complementary service to desktop applications like Microsoft Office. Office is a solid, mature application suite that has virtually become the standard for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, among other things. It's going to be hard, if not impossible, for a brand new web app to achieve feature-parity with a desktop application that's been around for more than a decade.

At the same time, Google Spreadsheets gives users something that the standalone version of Office lacks - realtime, collaborative editing, and document sharing. Of course, that's what SharePoint is for, I hear some people say, but that's an additional investment over and above the cost of Office itself - you need to pay a monthly/yearly fee for a managed SharePoint hosting service, or you need to purchase a Windows Server 2003 license and set up your own SharePoint server.

The fact that Google Spreadsheets allows users to freely import and export to Excel means that it's actually adding value to Office rather than pulling existing users away from it. You could, for example, use Google's service to edit some files on a public computer connected to the internet anywhere in the world, save them, and download them when you're back at your desktop. Or you could collaboratively work on populating the data in a spreadsheet for a project with a group of friends, and then export your work to Excel if you need to create charts or pivot tables. If all you had was a standalone copy of Office, you'd have to email files back and forth, and merging contents would be messy, tedious and time-consuming. There are so many scenarios in which having a free, online collaborative editing service like Spreadsheets just makes life simpler.

Often, people's obsession with picking winners and losers makes them blind to the fact that two products or services from two different companies can sometimes work really well together. I think this is one perfect example where that's the case.

Google plans to make an online, collaborative spreadsheet application available to a limited number of users tomorrow, according to an article in the WSJ (registration required) and New York Times.

A "sneak peek" is up already, along with a first-come, first-served signup form. If you're interested, be sure to sign up soon! :)

Search engines are odd beasts, I tell you.

A few months ago, when I was trying to decide which search engine API to use for the search box on this site, I did a few tests and realized that MSN Search was probably the best choice for a site-specific search box at the time for a couple of reasons. About four months have gone by, so I decided to do a quick re-evaluation of the big three (Google, Yahoo!, MSN), and found that things have changed quite a bit since then. Read on.

First, I tried the good old "desktop search" and "ski-trip" queries again on the three search engines, and was pleased to find that the actual WDS review page comes up as the first result on all three of them now, as it should. Great! The "ski-trip" search gets more interesting though. Google does the best here, listing two of the three NYC ski-trip picture gallery links right on top, which is precisely what I would want people to see first (although having the third page in there too wouldn't hurt!). MSN is the runner-up this time, listing only the second page of the gallery at the top, which I thought was rather odd; listing the first page would have made more sense here. Yahoo! falls behind in this test, listing the first page of the gallery, but only as the very last search result.

The freshness tests had to obviously be changed this time. The last post about the shoutbox hasn't appeared in the results of any of the three search engines yet. Makes sense. So I tried looking for "gravatars" to see if the May 30th post shows up in any of the results. MSN and Yahoo! find nothing this time, while Google lists both the index and archive pages in its results. Excellent.

Like last time, I did some more varied tests on all three engines, and again found that the results were mostly consistent across the board. Google came out as the top dog this time, with MSN still doing better than Y! in most cases. I'll be observing the results and playing around some more during the next couple of days to decide whether I need to switch things around. Fortunately, all three search APIs are quite similar to each other, so pulling out MSN and plugging in Google or Y! shouldn't take much time and effort. :)