So I wanted to find a tool that would do fast folder comparisons. Searching on Google gave me a lot of useless stuff most of them related to fast folder access or folder comparison but not ‘fast folder comparison’.
On a whim I switched live.com and lo and behold I was presented with UltraCompare in the search results with this to say:
Save time by performing an extremely fast folder comparison using just the sizes and timestamps of corresponding files.
Even a quoted search for “fast folder comparison” returns 8 results in Live but just 2 in Google.
Will I switch to Live search? No.
But something to keep in mind when I’m not getting the results I want on Google.
BTW: The Google Search Wiki is certainly intriguing. I totally dig neat Ajax stuff.
I’ve been wanting to start a personal blog for sometime and finally went ahead with it.
This post though is not about my personal blog but rather about which platform I chose. I’ve been blogging for nearly five years now and went the geek way and hosted my platform. But I’m now fed up with having to maintain the stuff myself whenever new versions are released.
I really wanted to use MSN Live Spaces since it had the nice integration with Messenger and the new Live bits that were going to be released excited me. But after spending a couple of hours tinkering with it I was finally put off by the obnoxious advertising. Not only were they flashy images, there were two of them a big banner as well as one on the right hand.
I was debating between Blogger and WordPress and then went ahead with Blogger as I could host it on my own domain. Other things that pushed me towards Google was that I already had my email hosted at Google, Feedburner integration.
On a side note, for those interested, my personal blog is at http://merill.blogspot.com until I get Custom Domains with Yahoo sorted out. But hey Blogger has permanent redirects so there’s nothing to worry. Really.
In 2004 BillG made a statement that spam will be solved in two years. In 2008 I can prove that it is.
Here’s how my Inbox looks today.
That’s 19,326 spam message caught in the last 30 days. Not a single spam slipped through and nothing was falsely flagged.
What he wouldn’t be happy about though is that it wasn’t his team that solved it but the guys over at GMail.
The Windows Live Mail client, unfortunately, flags my own messages as Junk.
Find out which web pages are linking to you by using the linkdomain: operator like this.
While the Live search caters to end users, Yahoo’s search is geared towards webmasters and gives much more detail and lets you switch between various views.
Hmm.. the other search engine?
Joe Wilcox of Microsoft Monitor joins the ever growing group that keeps raving about Google Reader.
He touches on one of the key aspects in product design where many software products falter.
Little details matter, when evaluating the simplicity and complexity attributes. Unlike other readers that generally require users to mark or set preferences to mark feeds read, Google Reader automatically marks them read as the reader advances from one retrieved post to another. When the user scrolls down to the end of the page of cached feeds, Google Reader automatically refreshes the browser with new feeds.
These functions work by default, without the user setting preferences. I see this as sign of Google designing for common tasks. By contrast, I see Microsoft often overly focused on customization. That’s fine if the customization is a layer removed and the fundamental design principle is providing the most utility for the most people.
When developing a product it’s always easier to simply add dialogs and let the user decide than taking the time and effort to figure out how your product is going to be actually used by the end user.
The Office and IE teams at Microsoft seem to have learnt this lesson and have gone the whole hog and removed even the menus.
[Posted using Microsoft Word 2007]
Well I never thought I would say this but I’ve just bid goodbye to RssBandit my feedreader for the last three years and completely switched over to Google Reader.
The deciding factor was that I could read all my feeds from home. Google Reader is way fast over dial-up than RssBandit simply because the heavy lifting is done on the server.
If I had better bandwidth, would I have switched? I think it’s time someone wroteup a serious WPF XBAP that does feed reading. I’m betting on Newsgator to do this. Wait, that’s a super cool project to work on…
If your currently working on more than one project take a couple of minutes to read Jeff Atwoord’s post on multi-tasking. He concludes with:
I’ve often pushed back on demands to work on multiple projects at the same time. It can be difficult to say no, because software developers are notoriously prone to the occupational hazard of optimism.
We typically overestimate how much we’ll actually get done, and multi-tasking exaggerates our own internal biases even more. Whenever possible, avoid interruptions and avoid working on more than one project at the same time. If it’s unavoidable, be brutally honest with yourself– and your stakeholders– about how much you can actually get done under multi-tasking conditions. It’s probably less than you think.
For those of you who installed Trixie after reading my earlier post, you should now really look into Turnabout, one of the key reasons being that the developer of Trixie has stopped work on it. See Dare’s post for the low down.
Tim Bray from Sun Microsystems posts ten reasons why blogging is good for your career.
- You have to get noticed to get promoted.
- You have to get noticed to get hired.
- It really impresses people when you say “Oh, I’ve written about that, just google for XXX and I’m on the top page” or “Oh, just google my name.”
- No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.
- Bloggers are better-informed than non-bloggers. Knowing more is a career advantage.
- Knowing more also means you’re more likely to hear about interesting jobs coming open.
- Networking is good for your career. Blogging is a good way to meet people.
- If you’re an engineer, blogging puts you in intimate contact with a worse-is-better 80/20 success story. Understanding this mode of technology adoption can only help you.
- If you’re in marketing, you’ll need to understand how its rules are changing as a result of the current whirlwind, which nobody does, but bloggers are at least somewhat less baffled.
- It’s a lot harder to fire someone who has a public voice, because it will be noticed.
So what are you waiting for? Head over to one of the many free bloggining sites and start your own blog. Where can I go your asking? Try Google’s blogger.com or MSN’s spaces.msn.com
UPDATE: For those of you who don’t know, Tim Bray is the father/co-inventor of XML.
This is the last leg of my long trip back to Colombo. It’s really cool that the Changi Airport at Singapore has free internet access.
What have I been doing the past 48hrs of travelling, well I’ve been reading Code Complete by Steven McCowell. Unfortunately I made a mistake when I ordered the book and ended up with the original version rather than the recently released Code Complete 2 book.
The book is heavy on procedural programming but it’s amazing that a lot of the concepts and practical advice is still applicable to the real world applications that we write today. Code Complete 2 is a book that should be on the desk of every developer, not only is it a good read, it’s a good handbook to refer to.
