January 2005 Archives

There was a time when blogs (known as Weblogs in those ancient times) were considered a personal diary, relegated to chatty teenagers. Then as more people found out about them, they began typing away. I myself keep a blog on the my personal site and find it therapeutic and liberating to freely express my views on a variety of topics.

As blogging gathered critical mass, companies started to show interest. Now many news and information sites have a heavy blog presence as well, manned by their editors and other contributors. Our own company saw a slow start to blogging, but now we have a number of power bloggers who contribute to the wealth of our online existence.

Many people now get their daily news from blogs, but one of the areas that blogs have begun to encroach on Web pages is what's known as trackback. This is a means by which a blog site can be notified when another blogger makes a mention of them in the form of a url link. Generally, the notification involves a summary of data to be passed back to the mentioned blog site and most sites choose to display this information, in effect providing a link back to the blogger's post. It's a courtesy move in response to the mention. By the way, trackback was devised and promoted by the renowned blog software maker, Movable Type.

Now many sites have decided to incorporate trackback in their own pages, and we now provide this service to our readers. When you read our pages on tmcnet.com, feel free to reference them in your blogs and if your blogging software is equipped with auto-discovery, we will receive your message (known as Ping). To view the trackbacks or get the Ping url (to trackback manually) just click on on the our pages.

Remember .NET? The cutting edge, unifying, all encompassing platform Microsoft launched a few years ago?
It was perhaps one of the most confusing and blurry marketing ideas ever to come out of Redmond. And no matter how hard Microsoft tried to clarify this grand vision, the befuddlement just got worse. Finally Microsoft threw in the towel and backtracked on calling everything under the sun, "everything under the sun".NET.

Along with the .NET hoopla, the Passport service was being showcased as the de-facto authentication scheme. It would allow third party Web sites to login users through Passport and leave the authentication and access job to Microsoft. The idea wasn't new by any means. Single sign-on has been the aspiration of the authentication industry for decades, but alas, Passport wasn't meant to be the proverbial silver bullet.

eBay was one of the more prominent companies who initially signed up for Passport services in addition to their own authentication method. But I always wondered, why would a vendor entrust its valuable customer information to Microsoft. I guess eBay must have been having the same doubts. As of January 24th, they are dropping the Passport service from their login screen. If not the death knell, this is a giant blow to an already waning product.

Meanwhile .NET has mostly been forgotten by the public, save one area. It is still much alive in the development community and with the next version of .NET development Framework 2.0, and Visual Studio 2005 on the horizon, it has the development community, myself included, abuzz. The .NET vision has never been clearer.

Desktop Search has become all the rage these days, and for a good reason. After people discovered that they can seemingly search the Web faster and more efficiently than the contents of their own PC's, the search companies decided to use some of their search technologies to help users find stuff in their own backyard, i.e. files stored on their own hard drives.

For years the only choice for Windows users to search their local files has been the standard Microsoft Search program which comes bundled with Windows. It does the job,
But it's minimalist, clunky, and painfully slow. Microsoft tried to address the speed issue by marrying the search program with the Index Server (a service that indexes the local files), but while this has boosted the performance of search it is still woefully lacking in utility, features, and robustness.

There has been a need for a better search software for quite a while. Enter the big three search outfits, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN with their own search programs, known as Desktop Search.

Not too long ago I installed Google's Desktop Search and I was initially happy with its performance and flexibility. But Google's program is limited in the file types it could index and the interface is, well, Googlish, as in plain and simple and no frills. Perhaps Google's strength in its Web search simplicity was just too bland for me when it came to searching locally. I soon lost interest and forgot about desktop search, until today when I downloaded the Yahoo's incarnation of the desktop search program, and my reaction so far is, wow!

Available in beta version, this program does an impressive job of indexing the local files as well as Outlook messages. It has the intelligence to recognize over 200 different file formats and it can index everything in its path. The interface looks fresh, functional, and fast. In little time I had it configured to index my entire hard drive and after it was done with its initial scan, I tested it with a number of keywords. Who knew searching could be so much fun? It's blazing fast and the results are presented in a nice format. I am sold. Yahoo's Desktop Search has now replaced Google's program in my program tray and I feel absolutely empowered having such a tool at my beck and call.

You can download Yahoo! Desktop Search for Windows from here.
Read the press release.

It was only a matter of time, but Microsoft's concerted mobilization against hackers has started to pay dividends. Today, that dividend manifested itself in the form of an anti-spyware program, aptly named Microsoft AntiSpyware. The program (currently in its first Beta) is available for free from Microsoft's Web site.

Windows Users have a number of choices to battle spyware today. They come in free and paid flavors from a number of companies and I bet these companies are not so sanguine about this new release from Microsoft.

Installing and configuring the program was a breeze and then I had it run a quick scan. It identified one low-risk program (with a nice summary) and gave me a few options to deal with it. For the time being I configured it to run a deep scan every mid-night and check for new updates. Exiting the program, it silently went into an icon state, nestling itself with the rest of the resident programs in the Tray area.

For me, the Microsoft AntiSpyware program is too new to have a definitive opinion about, but my first impression was a positive one. One more thing, the program also contains a tool to wipe clean many hidden areas that record user's activity and whereabouts, including Internet Explorer history, visited links, and recently opened documents by other program. It's a great tool for a paranoid like me.

You can download Microsoft AntiSpyware from here.