Last week, I gave away two Joost beta invitations to the first two people who asked. Well, I've got two more this week, so if you want one, the same procedure applies.

Leave a comment here, or use the contact form to send me an email. I'll need your name and email address to send you the invitation.

Update: Both invites are gone again. If you're still on the lookout, keep watching. I'll post again when I get some more. :)

Update 2: Just got two more. Up for grabs!

Update 3: All gone again!

Sometimes I wonder what the marketing folks at the big tech corps are smoking these days.

On one hand, you have Apple, dishing out more of its usual obnoxious, competition-bashing crap, and on the other, you have Microsoft putting up these huge banners all over the place that just make you go - "WTF?"

For example...


Jake Ludington asks, "what the hell is my 'Wow' and why do I need to defend it?" That's exactly what I asked myself when I saw that billboard on the way to LA on Monday.

Come on, people. You can do way better than this!

Chris Pirillo just linked to this impressive video via Twitter today.

In the video, Jeff Han and Phil Davidson from Perceptive Pixel demo a really cool multi-touch driven user interface. There are examples showing how you could navigate through Google Earth, explore tree structures, manage photos and videos, surf the web, etc.


I remembered another video I had seen on Channel 9 back in October of 2004, in which Andy Wilson from MSR demonstrated an early prototype of a multi-touch UI called Touchlight. "Minority Report becoming a reality," I had commented in that thread. :)

When Xerox PARC developed the graphical user interface in the late 1970s, it was a breakthrough that totally changed the face of modern computing. Since then, there hasn't been anything equally revolutionary in HCI design. Do you think multi-touch based interfaces, combined with advances in speech recognition, could be the next big thing? Whatever the future holds, I do think our generation is going to experience some really fascinating stuff in this area in the years to come. :)

Heheh. Good one, Long. :)

I don't use my nine year old Windows Live Mail Hotmail account for anything other than Messenger and Xbox Live anymore. But today, when Messenger notified me that I had 30 new emails, I had to go check. And what did I see?


Every single one of those 30 emails is spam. No, not tricky, legitimate-looking spam. Blatantly obvious "Viagra" and "Rolex Replicas" spam. And they're all in my inbox. And yes, the junk mail setting is properly set to "Standard" mode.

For comparison's sake, my Gmail account (which, again, I only use for GTalk) has 309 pieces of spam, all of which were rightfully banished to the "Spam" folder. The built-in IMF filter on our Exchange server is also remarkably effective.

So what's up, Microsoft? Is this a temporary glitch, or is the Hotmail spam filter really, really bad?

I really like Firefox for its features and flexibility.
But then it decides to go crazy on me once in a while, doing things like this...

In many ways, search in Windows Vista is quite a bit nicer than what it used to be in XP with Windows Desktop Search installed - search boxes in different parts of the system, like Explorer and Control Panel windows, are context-sensitive; low priority I/O reduces the performance hit of indexing to almost nothing; search folders are easy to create and are first-class citizens in the system; and so on.

However, there's one feature that I've been missing ever since I migrated my machines over to Vista - aliases. In my review of WDS back in 2005, I described the deskbar as "the run dialog on steroids" and wrote - "one of the unique features of Windows Desktop Search that none of the other desktop search apps have is the concept of aliasing. This is a killer feature for power-users."

Oddly enough, Microsoft didn't include the ability to create custom aliases out-of-the-box in Vista. Start++, a just-released, super-useful tool, adds that missing piece back in, along with some goodies of its own. I'll let Brandon describe it in detail. I love how it integrates with the command shell, and Search Actions are just awesome.

You definitely want to check this out. Vista should have shipped with something like this built-in. Nicely done, Brandon! :)

Just a quick note while the site is still up -

It looks like my web host, 1and1, has been having some issues since yesterday. Pingdom has been repeatedly sending me emails notifying me of site downtime. 1and1's main page is showing a "Service Temporarily Unavailable" message at the moment.

Not sure what's going on, but connectivity to this site might be pretty intermittent until the problem is fixed. Just a heads up.

I've been meaning to post this for a while, but I keep forgetting.

I've got two Joost beta invitations to give away. The first two people to either leave a comment here, or send me a message through the contact form get in. I'll need your first and last name, and an email address.

A Mac (Intel) version has also been available since last week, by the way.

Update: Both invitations have been claimed.

For those of you who are still running Windows XP (and I know many of you are), Windows Desktop Search 3.01 has just been released today. This is an update to v3.0 that was released last Fall.

Brandon has all the details, including download links.

WDS was one of my "must-have" apps on XP. If you've never used it, I suggest taking a look at my review. The document hasn't been updated recently (and won't be, since I've fully migrated over to Windows Vista now), but most of the information in there should still be valid and applicable.

If you use Windows Live Messenger, there's a good chance you've heard of Mess.be, the Messenger customization community. Last week, "dwergs" from Mess sent me an email, expressing interest in Twessenger after reading my initial post about it. I think he was also the first person to try it out after I released it.

Then, Twessenger made it to the front page of Mess.be yesterday:

Here's something cool for the 24/7 Messer, something I've been waiting for to be developed since a couple of weeks. If you're anything like me and stay logged in continuously for days and days -even when you're out- you sometimes read instant messages like "Are you there?" or "Where are you going tonight?" only when you return. Not everyone's always strict with his or her Messenger status, you see. But what if you could alter your Personal Status Message from any remote location with the use of your mobile phone? Enter: Twessenger, an add-in for Windows Live Messenger written by Kunal Kundaje.

Twessenger makes use of the popular Twitter service, which allows its users to let others know what exactly they're up to. So all you need to do is sign up for an account at Twitter, make sure the "Protect my updates" box in your profile account is unticked and find your Twitter ID (it's the six digit number in your Flash badge code or at the end of the Favorites URL).

Then download and install Twessenger, add the add-in to Windows Live Messenger, and enter your Twitter ID in its settings (refer to the README.TXT inside the ZIP-file for all you need to know, really). Finally, when you enable it you'll see your Personal Status Message turn into your latest "Tweet" (updates appear in about a minute). You can add Tweets from your phone's browser, or if you do not have a data subscription you can text them to a UK or US-based phone number.

You can use this for realtime presence management, current location indication or just for sharing random thoughts and impressions with your contacts.

Thanks, dwergs!

According to their stats, it's been downloaded 175 times (at the time of this post) in the first ~14 hours. That's not including direct downloads from the Twessenger page. :)

I've received some nice feedback so far, and I'm glad people are finding this useful. Feel free to continue sending in your comments, suggestions, and any bugs that you may find using the contact form.

Thanks to Marc at Office Evolution for bringing this to my attention.

It looks like Dell has launched a site called IdeaStorm, where people can submit ideas for new Dell products and services, and vote for their favorite ones. The voting system works a lot like digg, where the most popular items move up to the top of the list.

Several folks are asking Dell for a Tablet PC, which is something I've wanted to see for a long time too. As Marc suggests, Dell's entry into the Tablet PC market would definitely be a good boost for the platform in general. Besides, Dell notebooks are already some of the most widespread machines among the student population, a segment of the market that would benefit the most from the features that Tablet PCs have to offer.

I've been using my Gateway Tablet on campus for the last several months, and I find it so much more versatile compared to paper now. I can insert additional space between paragraphs on-the-fly in OneNote (great when your professor makes a disorganized mess on the whiteboard!), easily intersperse diagrams and equations with text, and search through vast amounts of handwritten notes almost instantly when I need to before exams, etc.

If you'd like to see a Dell Tablet too, go vote for the idea. There's a lot of other good feedback, including requests for machines with less pre-installed software. So check out the site and vote for the things that you'd like to see.

Hahaha! You gotta check out this video on YouTube. :D

The first version of Twessenger, the Twitter add-in for Windows Live Messenger, is now up! Along with a hastily-thrown-together web page. :)

The add-in has been tested with Messenger 8.1.0178.00, the latest available public version. If you have comments, feedback, feature requests, or bug reports, use the contact form to send me a message.

Happy Twittering. :)

I blogged about Twitter, the fun little "global status message" service, last month, and I've been using it quite frequently since then.

I wanted my IM status messages to reflect my latest Twitter tweets, but since I was pretty busy during the last few weeks, I was mostly hoping someone else would do it. I found some plugins for Adium and iChat, but nothing for us Windows folks.

So here's my contribution to the Twitter community - Twessenger, an add-in for Windows Live Messenger, written in C#. :)


As you can see, it's almost complete. I just have to clean up a few things, package it up into a nice installer, and it'll be ready for release. Stay tuned.

And if you're not already on Twitter, sign up and add me. :)

"U.S. Daylight Saving Time Changes in 2007 -- In August of 2005, the United States Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, which changes the dates of both the start and end of daylight saving time (DST); DST will now start three weeks earlier (2:00 A.M. on the second Sunday in March) and will end one week later (2:00 A.M. on the first Sunday in November) than past years."

HTC has released official patches for some of the most common Windows Mobile devices. If you have a smartphone or PPC phone, download and install the patch from HTC's support page.

Update: Coincidentally, Microsoft just released these updates a few minutes ago as well. Smartphone and PocketPC versions are available for download.

On Tuesday, I posted my thoughts on the third alternative in Steve Jobs' letter about DRM in the online music space. While getting rid of DRM completely is something that everyone obviously wants, I do admit - it's unlikely that it's going to happen anytime soon. I hope I'm wrong.

So one needs to step back and think about the alternatives. Apple's closed FairPlay DRM model has been under a fair amount of criticism recently. It's something I've personally never been fond of at all either. In his letter, Jobs argues against opening up the model and licensing it to partners, claiming that it would result in a higher probability of the DRM system getting compromised. However, is this really true?

Ars Technica's Ken Fisher examines Jobs' claim by comparing FairPlay against Microsoft's open DRM model (codenamed Janus), and shows how FairPlay was compromised more often than Janus in the same timeframe, although Janus was being used by several Microsoft partners. Jon Johansen (aka DVD Jon), who became famous for breaking FairPlay several times, also weighs in with his thoughts, dismissing Jobs' claim. It's an interesting perspective, and one that I'm more inclined to agree with.

What do you think? Does Jobs' argument really hold true against the facts that have been presented? If we put aside the thought of an ideal world where DRM ceases to exist, would you rather have Apple license FairPlay to partners for the sake of interoperability, or would you prefer that it be left just the way it is today?

Yahoo! just launched a new service called Pipes today. Pipes is described as:

...a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

The service basically allows you to pull in data from various sources and perform interesting operations on it. You could do something as simple as merging all the official Yahoo! blog feeds into a single one, or something more funky, like pulling in content from the NY Times, and using keywords to find related photos on Flickr. Then, of course, you can generate a new RSS feed for your mashup and subscribe to it in an aggregator, or use the processed result-set as input to a larger application (or another Pipe!).

There are plenty of possibilities for useful and interesting mashups, and Pipes is a tool that aims to make the process of creating them more accessible, even to non-programmers, through a friendlier visual environment.

I haven't had a chance to dive in deeper yet (maybe this weekend...), but it looks like a nicely designed tool, especially well-done for a first version of something that hasn't been done before. If you try it out and create any fun and useful feeds, leave a comment and let me know. :)

Steve Jobs posted his thoughts on digital music sales and DRM earlier today.

It's a well-written piece that mentions some of the problems with closed DRM models, including Apple's own FairPlay. Jobs also proposes a few alternatives that could be used to address these problems in the future, and his third suggestion is especially interesting:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store.

This is what consumers have been asking for all along. As Steve later points out, DRM really hasn't worked out for anybody, including the music industry. Most people simply find it too restrictive, and have opted for alternatives like ripping CDs and downloading music from P2P networks like BitTorrent.

Skeptics have posted various conjectures regarding the true intent behind Jobs' letter (check Techmeme if you're interested), especially related to the recent lawsuits in Europe against FairPlay. And some of them might even be right. Nevertheless, the fact that this was posted out in public for everyone to see tells me that Apple is at least thinking in the right direction. If the industry giants joined forces on this one, I'm confident that they could put enough pressure on the music companies to make them eventually give in and be more reasonable. After all, the digital music revolution would have never come about without companies like Apple and Microsoft, and I'm sure the music companies are fully aware of that fact.

Anyway, you should read the complete article. I have to commend Jobs for at least getting the ball rolling. Now let's see where things go from here...

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard about the fatal flaw in Windows Vista's speech recognition system by now. Symantec is expected to release Norton SpeakerMute, a new product designed to protect Vista users against this dangerous issue.

This week, two more serious vulnerabilities were discovered that could lead to nasty consequences, as described in the report.

If users somehow come across malicious source code and decide to copy, paste, compile and execute within Visual Studio, the resulting application could change wallpapers, block access to YouTube, increase the volume and other serious irreversible damages to the computer system.

Block access to YouTube?! I bet those sneaky Microsofties did this on purpose, just to drive traffic to MSN Soapbox instead.

This is just shameful. I've had it with Microsoft. I can't take this any more. I'm setting my Vista DVDs on fire tonight, throwing away my boring, pie-chart creating PC, and picking up a Mac first thing tomorrow morning!