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. Continue Reading...

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. Continue Reading...

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. Continue Reading...

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. Continue Reading...