If 45-degree "Eagle Eye" aerial imagery wasn't close enough to the ground for you, here's something even closer. The Virtual Earth team has now started rolling out street-level imagery into the new Windows Live Local Tech Preview.

It's only available for the Seattle and San Fransisco areas at the moment, but damn, you can "drive" around the city with your keyboard, and see what it would look like from the windshield of a car!

Here's a nice tutorial that walks you through the basics of creating a Firefox extension.

Had a stellar idea for a brand new extension, but didn't know how to get started? Well, here you go... :)

A few days ago, people stumbled upon a new viral marketing site, and a WHOIS revealed that the domain belonged to Microsoft. Then came a surge of speculation, and after a few hints were dropped by people within the company, it was determined that this had something to do with a new device that Microsoft will be announcing later this week.

People continued to dig around for more hints, until finally, someone discovered an actual promotional video.. And it looks sweet. Really, really sweet. Think of it as an ultra-portable TabletPC-like device, about the size of a small notepad, that functions as a digital media player (with a nice, big screen for video), a portable gaming device (was that Halo in the video?!), a scratchpad/notebook/journal, a PDA, a GPS unit, and more. The video does a great job highlighting various different scenarios in which it can be used. From what I could tell, it even seems to have built-in Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity, so that you can tether it to your cellphone's data connection when you're out in the middle of nowhere, or use a broadband connection over WiFi when you're close to home or a public access-point. Smart.



More details are expected to show up on the Origami site on March 2nd. I just hope it's priced well too, whenever it makes its way into the market. As much as I'd love to have one (assuming it's as awesome as it looks in the video), I can't really pick one up anytime soon, but I'd really like to see something like this take-off. The utility value, especially for students, would be incredible.

I've been using Outlook almost daily for years, but here's a great little gem that I had no idea about until Omar Shahine mentioned it today.

Apparently, the Date/Time control in Outlook includes a natural language parser that converts phrases like "next Friday" into the appropriate date.



It's a small thing, but it's useful enough that I thought it was worth sharing. :)

Mary Jo Foley today reports that Build 5308 will be the February Vista CTP, and is scheduled for release to beta testers this week.

I could have just told you seventeen days ago, but where's the fun in that? ;)

When Microsoft acquired Giant's Antispyware product and released the first beta of what became Microsoft AntiSpyware, I was pretty impressed. It was a good, solid product with a number of useful features that no other free anti-malware application had. Realtime monitoring in a free product was a huge plus, and a community-driven effort through SpyNet was a great idea.

Then Microsoft decided to call the product Windows Defender and announced that it would be a part of Windows Vista. Now Beta 2 of Defender has been released for XP, and it almost looks like a brand new product. Fortunately, most of the changes are for the better. The UI has been greatly simplified, and the whole app has been redesigned to be as unobstrusive as possible. In fact, once installed, you won't even know it's running, because the icon in the system notification area disappears and comes up only when the user's action is required. The number of popup notifications has been significantly reduced as well, so when you see an alert now, you'll know it's important.

I was also really glad to see a native 64-bit version. It seems like Microsoft is finally taking XP x64 seriously. First the IntelliPoint and IntelliType software, and now this. All that's left for me is an x64 version of Windows Desktop Search. I hope that's in the pipeline too.

Paul's got a review of Beta 2 with lots of screenshots on WinSuperSite as well.

Yesterday, Yahoo! launched two brand new libraries for Design Patterns and User Interfaces. The Design Pattern libary describes some elegant solutions to common design and UI problems for web applications, and the User Interface library consists of freely downloadable JavaScript utilities and snippets for building rich web-apps. Lots of cool, AJAX-y goodness in there.

As some of you might know, Yahoo is powered primarily by FreeBSD servers, so it's nice to see that the UI library components have been released under the BSD license.

When I get some time, I'm going to have to take a look and see if there are any libraries that I could make use of on this blog or any of my other web dev projects.

At the same time, Yahoo also launched a new User Interface blog, and there are already a number of interesting posts about various design patterns. Subscribed!

A few months ago, Google acquired Urchin and launched Google Analytics, a service for web traffic analysis. I was one of the early adopters, but soon realized that my own, homebrew tracking system was giving me more relevant information about what visitors are looking for when they come here, and what they find most interesting. I found that Analytics was a little too broad for my needs, and consequently, I haven't logged into my account for weeks.

Now Measure Map has become a part of Google too and is expected to launch soon. While Analytics applies to websites in general, Measure Map seems to be targeting blogs in particular, which makes me think this might be a better match for my needs. The site doesn't have any specifics yet, but I've signed up for a notification when it becomes available.

Sean Alexander points to an interesting little teaser video for IE 7. It's creative, it's different, and it's a refreshing departure from typical promo videos that rattle off about every little new feature. And it's all that without being snide and jeering.

I like it! Good job to whoever was responsible. :)

A lone Chinese dude down at UCSD tries to figure out why asian girls date white guys, but why white girls don't date asian guys - Wong Fu Productions presents, "Yellow Fever" :D

Props to Dahlia for the link.

Ok, this is sweet. Short story for the impatient: CoComment is now fully supported on this blog, and everything works the way it should! :)

Long story for the curious: The issues that I described in my previous post were due to one basic fact - there was too much guesswork involved in harvesting the necessary information. Different blogs and blogging engines have different naming schemes and ways of passing data around. Coming up with a way to selectively extract information based on the type of blog is tricky, and even then, it may pick up incomplete or incorrect information if the author has made some changes to their template, as we noticed.

Eliminating the guesswork, as you might guess, makes the process much more reliable. Merlin from the CoComment team decided that one way to do this would be to ask blog authors to explicitly define a set of variables in a JavaScript block that contain most of the information the CoComment bookmarklet needs to complete its task successfully. Of course, the values for these variables can be dynamically generated using PHP, ASP etc. For more information on how to implement this, take a look at this post on the CoComment TeamBlog.

So basically, what did I do to make this blog work with CoComment? First, I had to change the naming convention of the comment form to match the one used by TypePad, which is just one of the many blogging engines already supported by CoComment. That was what I did yesterday to get the basic functionality working. Now to fix the "untitled" problem and the clumping issue, I had to explicitly define variables that store the blog title, the post title, and the complete URL, including the unique post identifier, so that the bookmarklet could extract this information. Since the guesswork had been eliminated, everything worked perfectly. :)

So go ahead - leave a comment, and test it out if you want.

Update: CoComment is now fully supported on this blog. See the next post for more information.
--------

In my earlier post, I mentioned that the comments system on this blog was not compatible with CoComment.

Well, it looks like I've made some progress. If you use the bookmarklet now, you should notice the little CoComment icon appearing next to the submit button. Submitting the comment will, in fact, add it to your CoComment tracker! :) But there are a couple of problems.

Firstly, you'll notice that the blog title appears as "untitled" in your tracker. A number of other blogs seem to be having the same problem, and it has to do with the way the blog and post titles are extracted from the page. The CoComment devs are looking for a better way to handle this.

The second problem arises from the fact that I don't have separate post pages on this blog. Because of this, only the name of the page (for example, 2006_02_01_archives.php) is extracted as the post URL, and the unique post ID that's passed as an argument is ignored. The effect is that if you left a comment under this post, and another comment under the post before this one, they would both be clumped together in your CoComment tracker as if both comments were made in response to a single post, which is obviously not the case. Interestingly enough, the CoComment team blog has the same problem, so I'm hoping it'll be fixed soon. If they can find a way to extract the entire URL, including the unique post ID, that should do it. I've reported this on their forum, explaining the situation.

So basically, if you decide to use the bookmarklet with this blog, keep in mind that you'll see comments on your tracker that have nothing to do with the comments you posted or the posts they were in response to. What you'll essentially end up with, for the moment, is a list containing any and all comments posted to this blog in a given month, which is probably better than having nothing at all, but I'm just letting you know in advance. :)

Oh, and if you find that you're forgetting to click the bookmarklet before submitting comments, check out the Automatic CoComment script for Greasemonkey. It auto-discovers compatible comment forms, so you don't have to remember to click the bookmarklet each time. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension, but IE users should be able to use Trixie for the same purpose with the same script (not tested yet).

Remember the post about a Flip3D clone coming for XP? Looks like it's here. So the latest version of TopDesk includes functionality that mimics both Exposé from OS X and Flip3D from Vista on a Windows XP system.

I haven't tried it yet, but the videos look pretty impressive.

I wrote about 30 Boxes, a new web-based calendaring system, on Friday.

If you go to the site now, you'll notice that it prompts you for a username and password before you can proceed. Enter the username "beta" and password "tester" (without the quotes, of course) to login with the test/sample account.

Once you're in, you can sign up for your own account if you're interested in using it. :)

Scoble posts about a new service called CoComment that lets you keep track of all the comments that you make on other blogs that you read, and any other responses that may follow.

It's a great idea. I tend to lose track of comments that I leave sometimes, and this looks like a nice way to have one single, centralized place to keep track of all of them and follow up if necessary.

It's currently an invite-only beta. I managed to sign up with a code, so I'll be trying it out soon.

Update: I just posted my first comment on Brandon's blog using this. It's pretty straightforward. You fill out the comments form as you normally would, click the CoComment bookmarklet, and submit the form. The comment then automatically gets added to your CoComment account.

You can find my comments page here. Yeah, being one of the first few users, I managed to grab the username "Kunal" before anyone else could this time. :)

Also, if you do get an account, it won't work with this blog yet. I don't use the standard Blogger comment system. CoComment currently only works with Blogger, MSN Spaces, MySpace, TypePad, Wordpress and Xanga blogs. I might be able to make it work with this blog once they make the necessary tools available.

30 Boxes, an upcoming, "Web 2.0" calendaring service has been receiving a lot of attention on the web this week. Thomas Hawk has a detailed preview, including a few screenshots, of what he calls the "best calendar ever."

I can see how an online calendar with good social networking capabilities could be really useful for some people, but looking at my own calendar in Outlook 2003, I realize that almost all of the data in there is private - deadlines, exam dates, and other events and appointments that probably really wouldn't be of any use to anyone else I know. So I'm not quite sure I need a social calendar just yet.

I've also found that even with the advent of many fancy new "Web 2.0" apps, I generally tend to prefer rich-client, desktop applications for most purposes (feed aggregation probably being the only exception). Now don't get me wrong - I think many of the new web-apps are really cool and definitely have their advantages. But if you ask me to choose between Word and Writely, for example, I'll take Word, please. Outlook or webmail? Outlook, no question.

Even then, I'm quite curious to try 30 Boxes when it launches this Sunday. I might even consider using it as a backup store if it can somehow sync with Outlook, just like I forward copies of all my email to my Gmail account. And if everyone's raving about it, there must be something special about it. Should be interesting. :)

This might seem totally random, but I'm just going to leave this string of (not-so-random) characters here. You're welcome to try and figure out just what the heck it is, and what it means. I may or may not come back to this post sometime later this month, depending on the situation.

ac9edbbe0533cef12e50fd6fb6cfde52

If this seems completely weird and cryptic to you, don't worry about it. ;)

Walter from the IE7 team has posted a great piece of news on the IEBlog today. The Windows RSS Platform, which is supposed to be a part of Windows Vista, will now also be included with IE 7 for Windows XP and Server 2003.

I attended Amar Gandhi's session on "Windows Vista: Building RSS-enabled applications" at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC '05) in September last year, and was impressed by how simple and powerful the platform and API is. Integrating RSS capabilities into applications becomes a breeze, so developers can focus their time and attention on additional features and other important aspects like useability. The common feed store and the sync engine are also great for end-users because they essentially allow you to maintain one single feed list that can be used by every RSS-enabled application on the system, rather than having to subscribe individually in every one of them or having to manually import and export OPML files. You can read my report on the RSS platform from the PDC to find out more about all this, in case you missed it the first time around.

While one can argue that back-porting features to XP that used to be Vista-exclusives undermines the upcoming OS, there's still so much more to Vista. I think this is a great move. If the RSS platform were a Vista-only feature as originally planned, we'd see fewer developers actually making use of it since it would mean their apps would be restricted to Vista. Now that it's available on XP, the probability of it being widely adopted suddenly becomes much higher.