There she is, staring back at me, looking all pretty...


More pictures here on OSNN...
Initial thoughts and a few more pics coming up later tonight!

I've been tracking the Zen Micro shipment using Bloglines (along with all my other RSS feed...how convenient), and it's already arrived at Cerritos, CA. I'm guessing it should be delivered either later today or within the next couple of days. I won't be back home until Friday night though.

So anyway, I figured I'd start checking out some podcasts, now that I have a device that I can carry along anywhere. I already have a few in my mind that I'm going to subscribe to, but I'm looking for suggestions. What are your favorite podcasts...ones that you would recommend?

Software recommendations would also help. Russ recommended iPodder a while ago, so I'm definitely going to give that a try. If you know of any other good ones (that work with Windows XP), let me know. :)

Update: The Micro has been delivered! Can't wait to check it out on Friday night.

While on the topic of maps...we just bought this nifty little GPS unit this weekend and tested it out while driving back to uni. The small, yellow GPS unit sticks on to the windshield of the car so that it can get a clear view of the sky. The other end plugs into the USB port of the laptop and works with their Street Atlas USA software.

Like many other GPS units, it gives you voice directions, but a really cool feature is voice recognition. You can say something like "Computer, where is my next turn?" or "Computer, where am I?" and it'll give you the appropriate response. Sounds like something from the movies, eh? Cool stuff. :D

Microsoft sends news today that founder Bill Gates has announced a MSN Virtual Earth service is to debut in the summer. The service is promised to provide:

* Satellite images with 45-degree-angle views of buildings and neighborhoods
* Satellite images with street map overlays
* Ability to add local data layers, such as showing local businesses or restaurants

The service will allow users to choose from a number of different data types plus allow people to contribute their own information. The announcement came today at the D3 conference happening this week.

Source: SearchEngineWatch

"Eagle Eye" view looks amazing! Check out the screenshots.

Update: John Battelle has more info on his blog.
Also, according to an article on CNET, "the service will also include a Wiki-like feature that lets visitors and business owners add information about local services to the database." This might be something that'll really give them an upper-hand over other similar local search services, including Google's. There's more info coming soon.

Update 2: Scoble just posted a link to a video interview with the some members of this team on Channel9. I'll have to check this out tomorrow morning. :)

As promised, here it is. :)


Download: Mirror #1, Mirror #2 (1.64MB)

Update: HTML version is now available.

So my brother decided to buy me a digital audio player for my birthday, and asked me to pick which one I wanted. I spent about two weeks debating with myself, and after reading numerous reviews and taking several factors into account (yes, the user-replaceable battery played a big role), I finally took the plunge and decided to go with the slick little 5GB silver Creative Zen Micro (pictured below).


It should be here in about 10 days. Exciting! :)

Let me start off by saying the movie was very entertaining. Definitely worth checking out. But what adds to fun is the whole experience, starting from waiting in long lines to sitting there in the theater waiting for the movie to start.

Ten of us got there about three hours before midnight. The line was already pretty long, but we were better off than the people going to the theater two streets down. Their line was at least three times as long as ours was. :D So anyway, we picked up the tickets we had pre-ordered online, then picked up some food from the nearby Subway, and sat there waiting in line.


It's always amusing to see all the die-hard fans dressed in costumes, walking around wielding lightsabers. We saw a couple of Darth Vaders, and this guy walking around with a huge 17" Powerbook recording the whole thing with his iSight. Hahaha...

Once we were finally in the theater, you could literally sense how restless everyone was - the continuous hum of people talking, lightsabers turning on and off every two minutes, shouting and cheering etc. It was great! :D

So yeah, if you're planning to watch it, do it sometime within the next couple of days. You need to watch this in a theater filled with fans. It's an experience in and of itself. It actually makes waiting in long lines fun. :P

LOS ANGELES -- May 17, 2005 -- Today at Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2005, Microsoft Corp. and Pepsi-Cola North America announced a U.S. promotion to put the Xbox 360 (TM) next-generation video game and entertainment system from Microsoft into the hands of thousands of lucky people before the console hits store shelves. Beginning Aug. 28, Mountain Dew, Pepsi's intense citrus soft drink, and Xbox® will select a winner of an Xbox 360 console every 10 minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for nine weeks straight in the "Every 10 Minutes" promotion.

To play, consumers will collect codes found under the caps of Mountain Dew and other participating Pepsi products, and enter codes in a personal online account at http://www.every10minutes.com. Participants will be able to choose which 10-minute drawing to enter, and can spread codes across different drawings or stockpile codes and put them all toward one drawing. In addition, codes entered will automatically earn the participants points toward obtaining collectible merchandise and gear.

Oh boy, I can already see the outcome...

LOS ANGELES -- Aug 29, 2005 -- Soda consumption rates have skyrocketed beyond belief. Analysts believe this sudden trend can be attributed to the "Xbox-factor" - a sudden and insatiable urge to consume as many bottles of soda as possible in a desperate attempt to win a shiny new Xbox 360, Microsoft's next-generation gaming console. No deaths due to overconsumption have been reported so far, although there have been sightings of angry mobs of drooling geeks chasing individuals triumphantly wielding winning bottle-caps.

My brother just turned 25 today. Big man!
You can leave a message for him on his blog.

"Three years after the Battle of Geonosis, the Clone Wars are coming to a close. Obi-Wan Kenobi, now a general, is sent by the Republic to bring down remaining Separatists Count Dooku and General Grievous. And Chancellor Palpatine has become corrupt, proclaiming himself Emperor, and, with Anakin Skywalker's help, begins to turn the Republic into the Galactic Empire. As Anakin ultimately becomes the evil we know as Darth Vader, Padme goes into hiding, and, at the end of one war, another conflict we know all too well is about to begin."

Launches tomorrow! Got tickets for the first screening at midnight. The lines are going to be huge! It's probably one of the most anticipated movies this year, and it seems to be faring really well on every review that I've looked at so far. I'm not one of those die-hard Star Wars junkies, but this should be very interesting nonetheless. :)

The final build of the MSN Toolbar Suite with MSN Desktop Search, now known as MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search, has been released. Since I'm only interested in the desktop search aspect of the app, I'll just refer to it as Windows Desktop Search from this point on.

The new build is what a final release should look like - it includes tons of improvements and changes. It's really wonderful to see how well the team has responded to user feedback - I think almost every feature-request that I sent in has actually been incorporated into this build. I'm seriously amazed.

Stay tuned for a new in-depth review. I wrote one for the beta. This build damn well deserves one too. :)

My VS 2005 Beta 2 kit just arrived in the mail today. Apart from Visual Studio itself, which I'm pretty excited about, it also includes a SQL Server 2005 CTP DVD that I probably won't end doing much with.



Now excuse me while I go install it and play with all the geeky goodness. :D

The official PDC 2005 site is up (thanks for the heads up Bink!)

Join developers at the 2005 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, where the next waves of Windows "Longhorn" features and Microsoft Office System platform will be unveiled. Go deep with the community on building new applications from the ground up, or taking advantage of new features from existing applications.

Be a part of the conversation on the future of software that powers the edge of the network, where the most innovation is happening today, and where we live, work, and play. Dig into new edge technologies for visualization, collaboration, information organization, knowledge management, peer networking, digital media, identity, development tools, and Web services.

WinHEC was great this year. I had a chance to meet some very cool people and learned lots of new stuff. I hope I can make it to PDC in September as well, especially since it's right here in Los Angeles. Still a few months away...we'll see how things pan out.

By the way, did anyone notice that WinFS is back on the agenda? Interesting. :)

A couple of days ago, Yahoo! launched a new subscription-based music service based on Microsoft's Janus DRM, similar to Napster To Go and Rhapsody. The really cool thing about this is that unlike the others, the monthly subscription fee is extremely reasonable ($6.99/mo billed monthly, $4.99/mo for an annual subscription), and it gives you access to an entire library of over a million songs.

Subscription services might not appeal to everyone, but for those that are willing to give it a try (at $6.99, it doesn't hurt!), it's a nice way to sample lots of music for a month if you're bored of your existing tunes or just want to discover something new. Since it's based on a subscription model, you're essentially renting the music you listen to, but if you do find tracks that you like, they're 79c a piece from Yahoo (or you can always obtain them elsewhere). And of course, you can also load up any PlaysForSure device that supports subscription services, like those from Creative, Dell, Rio, Sony, etc.

I'll leave you with a great post by Omar Shahine. :)

Most Firefox users have probably heard of the two critical flaws that were recently discovered in the browser. Candidate builds of Firefox 1.0.4 are now available that fix the issues. Remember that these are not final builds and may contain bugs. With that said, I haven't noticed any quirks yet.

Download: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux

If you prefer not to download pre-release builds, make sure you read the Mozilla advisory and take appropriate action.

Update: The final 1.0.4 builds have been released. Download them from the Firefox product page.

Haha, this site is really well done. The opening sequence is amusing (and quite true!), and the videos are very funny. :D

Coincidentally, I was just showing a friend some of the capabilities of OneNote on Friday evening. You can download a free 60 day trial version from the site if you don't already have it. I love OneNote. Now all I need is a Tablet PC to go with it!

Thanks to Marc for the link. :)

I tend to use MSN Desktop Search extensively throughout the day to launch apps and find files quickly. By default, the deskbar, consisting of a textbox and two buttons on either side, is placed on the taskbar, right next to the notification area. At a resolution of 1024x768 on a laptop screen, it wastes precious taskbar space, so I've been using the deskbar as a floating toolbar on the desktop ever since the first beta release, with the two buttons removed using a registry hack.

Recently, I thought it would be nice to have just a the textbox without the MSN logo (I tend to like clean, minimal stuff). To see what my current setup looks like, take a look at the following screenshot:


So here's how to remove the MSN logo from the text box:

1. Assuming that MSN Toolbar Suite is installed in its default location, open the file C:\Program Files\MSN Toolbar Suite\DB\[version]\en-us\dbres.dll in Resource Hacker.
2. Open Bitmap>240. Right click "1033" and select "Save [Bitmap:240:1033]" to save the .bmp file to a temporary folder. Don't close ResHacker yet.
   
3. Open up the bitmap in an image editor (MSPaint should suffice for our purpose) and paint the whole image white. Save the bitmap.
4. Right click "1033" under 240 again, select "Replace Resource," and replace it with the modified bitmap. Do the same for Bitmap>32240>1033.
   
5. Save the file (Resource Hacker should automatically create a backup of the original file), and reboot.

That's it. Now you have a nice, plain textbox that you can place anywhere you like. :)

Thanks for the best wishes, everyone! So I guess this means I'm no longer considered a teenager. :)

I've spent pretty much all of today in class, working on programming assignments, and in meetings, so there hasn't been any time for fun/partying just yet. Been really busy after I got back from Seattle last week. For those of you who sent me greetings through email - I promise I'll get back to you before the weekend. I just want to write something more than simply a "thank you" and I'm really fighting against time right now.

Anyways, back to studying for midterms...

Adam Nathan demonstrates how XAML and Avalon can be used to spice up something as simple at Hearts, one of the little card games that ships with Windows. The screenshots below compare the Hearts app in Windows XP to a new implementation based on Avalon.


Check out Adam's blog for more screenshots, as well as sample code snippets that you can download and play with. The source code is compatible with the latest Avalon CTP that was released a couple of months ago.

This is just one simple example of what Avalon will bring to the Windows desktop. What will be even more interesting to see is how software developers will use these new capabilities to create great applications with clean, sharp and resolution-independent user interfaces.

I blogged about the 6 new Longhorn fonts back in March. Well, they're included in the WinHEC build, and the folks over at UXEvolutions have posted them online for those who don't have a copy of LH 5048.

I've been using them for the past few days, and I especially like Consolas and Corbel. Consolas, as I had mentioned earlier, is a great monospaced font for coding. Corbel is a very clean sans serif font that I'm now using for menus and icon labels throughout the OS. Times New Roman can also be finally replaced with either Cambria or Constantia, two very readable serif fonts in the collection. :)

Try them out. They should work on any OS, but they'll probably look best when Longhorn ships with the new ClearType improvements.

Those of you who were keeping tabs on this year's WinHEC will remember the LightWave 3D demos that were showcased during the BillG keynote on Monday.

NewTek has now made the 32-bit and 64-bit demo videos of the "angels" publicly available on their FTP server. Take a look at these breathtaking clips and notice the amazing difference between the two versions. The 64-bit version includes a whopping 141 creatures and shows a much greater level of detail with volumetric lighting, particulate matter, and richer textures as compared to the 32-bit version that includes just 11 creatures. (Note that you will need a decently powerful machine to view these clips without experiencing any glitches)

You may also want to read NewTek's official press release for more info.