More annoying pop-ups

Can someone tell me how to get rid of pop-ups from the Times of India website? This is a recent development. Earlier I never had this problem in Firefox. Now I see the message saying "Firefox prevented the site from opening a pop-up...." but I still get the stupid pop-up. Btw, I don't have this problem on any other website (barring http://www.chennaionline.com)

Thunderbird: Searching for attachments

I have been using Thunderbird email program for a while now. Its great! The other day, I was trying to search for emails with attachments and couldn't figure out how to do it. I tried searching the Thurderbird site and didn't find anything there on this. Any Thunderbird experts out there?

Google Talk

Ok, now Google is in the IM/internet voice chat business as well. Its starting to get a little boring. After all the cool search stuff, they seem to be just looking around, seeing what's there and come up with cool variations. Its about time they came up with something drastically new and game changing. I love Gmail, Google Maps, Add Content, Google Video, Google Custom Home page and other old wine in new bottles from Google.

Frankly, I am starting to get a little bored with Google's new stuff. No wonder people are starting to refer to Google as the new evil empire. Does the world need one more IM? One more free email? One more MyYahoo? One more Blogger? One more social networking site? One more Yahoo finance? Oh well...

New Word Plug-in for Blogger!

This is a test using the new MS-Word plug-in for blogger. This is really cool!

Thunderbird is cool

I switched to using Thunderbird (I have been using MS Outlook Express for many years now) a few months back. Its look and feel is very much "Outlook Express like" with lots of cool features as a bonus. So if you are an Outlook Express user, the switch is painless.

The Junk handling capability is especially welcome and powerful in this day and age of relentless junk mail. Search capability is excellent. Since the move to Thunderbird I have been exploring new features more than I ever did in Outlook Express. So this is not necessarily a Thunderbird vs Outlook Express report. Instead its just a re-assurance for anyone contemplating a switch.

Google's Add Content

Check out Google's Add Content feature on the Google customizable home page. Pretty neat stuff. Slowly but surely Google's customizable home page is heading towards becoming an improved more hip My Yahoo clone. Its funny how Google started of with search and is slowly incorporating all the generic portal features but with their own clever spin: free email, customizable home page, maps etc. etc.

Zopa: Borrow money from others via the web

Check out this site. Very interesting concept. I saw it mentioned in Business 2.0 magazine. Currently based in Europe.

IE6 doesn't like Google Maps

I use IE6 on Windows 2000. I mostly use Firefox except in a few cases where I use IE. I went to http://maps.google.com in IE and viola! the browser crashed with the familar "send" , "dont send" links. This is repeatable. Wonder what IE7 has in store! Crash Google video, maybe! :-)

If you are wondering what this image is about, I was just trying the new add image feature in blogger, way cool stuff!

Google video viewing: A Quick take

Google released a video viewing capability. The results of any search are a bunch of screen shots of the video starting at several points during the actual complete video -- i.e., start of 1 minute, 10 minutes etc. You also have the ability to search within that video produced by the original search. Double clicking on the screenshots gives you the video in full screen mode. You can also sign up to upload your own videos for potential inclusion in future versions of Google videos. I am sure there are a lot many more wonderful features that go with this service.

As always, pretty cool, but from the first look of it, appears quite preliminary. The search was very slow and very often results were returned with screen shots but no video! Try searching for "Bachchan on Charlie Rose". You have to go through a couple of screen before you find the text "Video is currently not available". (this text can be more "in your face").

Firefox: Tabbed browsing problems

Everyone is raving about the tabbed browsing feature in Firefox. While I do agree that its a powerful and cool feature, I have noticed a couple of shortcomings. Firefox turns into a memory hog and slows down the machine when you have a number of tabs. Secondly, when you click the dreaded x mark to kill a tab it doesn't prompt you. Instead it just kills the tab without prompting! On more than one occasion I have lost useful work because of this. I wish they would prompt the user before killing the tab! Firefox is nevertheless a cool browser! (at least until MS IE 7.0 is out!)

Gmail having trouble?

I find Gmail down quite often these days. A couple of weekends back, I was just about to leave my place for lunch to a friend's place and the directions were on my gmail and it was down! An extra phone call was sufficient to ride over this crisis, but it sure sounds like Gmail is running into some maintenance crisis issues of its own!

Google Custom Home Page

Tried out the new Google custom home page feature. As always, simple, yet cool. The drag and move feature is way cool. Unlike my Yahoo (where there are simply too many options), I like the fact that the options are relatively few to start with (I'm sure they'll expand over time!). The ability to have Gmail on the home page saves a few extra clicks. It will be really cool if Google adds Blogger and a couple of other common applications (say a spreadsheet, and presentation software) to be run online.

The Google News page customization was a little annoying. I customized it a couple of times (I saved it too!), and yet when I re-started Firefox, the customization was gone! Oh well...the price (not quite, mostly frustration!) you pay for being an early adopter.

Error when publishing to this blog

001 java.io.IOException: EOF while reading from control connection

I got this error when trying to publish to my blog. So I am trying to publish another piece and see if it goes through...

Man, All these browsers!

Netscape, IE, Firefox, Safari etc etc. and each of their versions, extensions and what not! Testing websites and applications on each of these has become quite a task. Check out Rediff (a pretty popular site) on Firefox. The home page is pretty messed up. It has been so for quite a few months now. Or maybe its something unique to my PC.

Its about time someone (Microsoft, huh??) came out with a master browsers (Netscape seems to be trying this with its new release) and destroyed all other browsers once and for all. It will make everyone's life so much easier on the net. There was an article some years back in Time magazine (I think) where the writer suggested that we give all the software business on the planet to Microsoft, then the next time we have trouble we'll have only one company to blame! (Of course, it could be a hardware issue!).

p.s: Btw, can someone tell me how to prevent pop-ups from this site! I use Firefox for the most part and sometimes IE.

Impressive win for Netflix

Check out this story about Wal-Mart's deal with Netflix. Truly an impressive victory for Netflix. Its amazing how a small company with an innovative idea is able to hang on to its lead in the market. It will be interesting to see how this whole space shapes up. I suspect that either Netflix might be forced to expand beyond DVD rentals or might eventually get swallowed up by the Amazons of the world.

p.s: Netflix desi collection of late has improved significantly (especially Hindi).

Adobe-Macromedia acquisition

I think this is a smart move on the part of both companies. Macromedia is reaching a point were an imminent threat from Microsoft is inevitable. Adobe on the other hand has always seen Microsoft as a threat. Coming together of these two companies gives Adobe a solid installed base of users and whole bunch of new products. Macromedia on the other hand can develop a more comprehensive strategy to counter the threat from Microsoft by being part of Adobe's suite of products. Besides, Macromedia has so many products now accumulated from so many acquisitions over the years, that its a good time to evaluate its long list of products. The only downside in my opinion is that historically large mergers have never worked. And of course, some users will suffer because Adobe is sure to end of life some Macromedia products. While Microsoft is all focused on IE and Search, its nice to see parts of the software industry joining forces to beat them in other areas.

Windows Update-Firefox problems?

I installed the latest Windows update yesterday. Since then my Firefox browser icons have started to look rather weird. All the icons appear to have a black/dark colored square around them! Anyone seen a similar problem? Any ideas?

Google Maps: Classy Stuff

Check out Google Maps. Slowly these folks seems to be offering everything that the portals of dot com days offer/used to offer, but with a distinctive class of their own. Here are some initial observations.

• Just as Gmail, Google Maps are easy to use once you get a hang of it.
  
• The satellite pictures are way cool!
• The maps views when you zoom in are nice and uncluttered and show you the street names very clearly.
  
• You can select the map that appears after you type in your start and end points and actually move it around with your mouse. Check it out, enough to give goose bumps!
  
• No matter what you do to the map, the directions that appear on the right of the screen always remain. This is a really nice feature, as opposed to the whole page refreshing.
• The links to start address and end address lets you zoom in on specific related to the roads at the two end points. Very useful feature.
  
• The ability to fire up the satellite picture within the inset/pop-up window while the map remains in the background is simply awesome.
  
• Can't seem to print only the directions without the map view.
  
• I could not figure out the use of "Link to this page" feature. Didn't see it in the help either. I didn't spend too much time (who cares to read manuals anyway!) trying to figure this out.
  

Overall, I love Google Maps. Its amazing how these guys repeatedly figure out a better way to offer existing services. Impressive stuff!

High-tech and Silicon Valley

There is an article in today's Mercury News about how the San Jose Vice Mayor Cindy Chavez is struggling simply to get some content online and frustrated about it. Being in the Silicon Valley does not make everything automatically hi-tech!

Another example from my personal experience is Silicon Valley Bank's online banking system. You would expect them to have the coolest online banking facility given that they are based in the valley and their bread and butter revolves around start-ups. But God, their online banking system sucks big time, and they charge for it!!

Yet another example, is the lobby of many high tech companies. When you go in they check your bags, collect your laptop tags etc etc. But unfortunately, everytime you go in, they have to manually enter your name, company name etc. At a min I would assume that this manual process need not occur each and everytime! If my name is entered in the system as a visitor, shouldn't you store it for retrieval at least for a brief period of time, say a month or two? So we don't have to go through this exercise of spelling out your details every single time?

Other examples that come to mind. Doctor's offices in general are mostly paper based. Most restaurants never bother to track their customers and their dining patterns.

Being in Silicon Valley does not make everything automatically hi-tech. So I am not surprised at the Vice Mayor's predicament.

Lost bookmarks, email folders!

I was shutting down my computer. Yahoo IM was on. And then it happened...my computer frooze. I was in a hurry, so I had to forcefully shut it down. Then, later I turned on my computer, and guess what. All my email folders in Outlook Express have disaapeared, my bookmarks in both IE and Firefox have disappeared. I did some web searches to find out about fixes, nothing has helped (getting bookmarks.bak from the application data folder didn't help). My email folders are not much of an issue, since I use IMAP. But my bookmarks are a big source of grief. I had just cleaned it up, re-organized it etc. Btw, I did install the latest Windows update before this happened.

Any ideas will be hugely appreciated.