It’s been more than two weeks since the last blog post. The fact is, I spent much of that time traveling and wasn’t really around a computer much. :)

Right after WinHEC ended, I made a trip up to San Fransisco and the Bay Area with my family. My grandmother is visiting from India and staying with us for a couple of months, so we wanted to visit some relatives there and show her around the place.

When we got back, my brother flew in from NYC and all of us flew back across the continent to Miami to spend five days in the Florida Keys. We stayed at the Holiday Inn in Key Largo.

Our plan for the first day was to visit the John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park for the glass-bottom boat tour and some snorkeling. My parents and I visited the island of Mauritius several years ago and had the opportunity to see some fantastic ocean life there, so I was quite eager to do something similar again. Unfortunately, all programs were canceled that day due to bad weather, so we decided to drive down to Key West and explore the area along the way instead. As we were driving, I noticed a sign pointing to the Florida Keys Wild Bird Center, so we stopped to check that out. There was quite a variety of birds there, including a talking parrot, and I even got a chance to feed a huge flock of hungry pelicans. :) We spent the rest of the evening just relaxing on one of the beaches in Key West before returning to our hotel in Largo.

The weather still hadn’t cleared up on the second day, so we drove up to Miami to visit the Parrot Jungle Island, which actually houses more than just parrots. Of course, we did see (and feed) lots of different types of parrots as you would expect, but there were monkeys, orangutans, turtles, tortoises, snakes, alligators (even an albino), crocodiles, tigers, a liger, and…well, you get the idea. :) It was actually quite interesting.

On Day 3, the weather was a little better, so the glass-bottom boat tours at Pennekamp were running, but we were warned that the sea was going to be pretty choppy. The trip started off quite well, but as we made our way into the rough open ocean, most people on the boat (including almost all of us) got sea-sick and spent the remainder of the time on the top deck with what the crew jokingly called “party bags.” That should also explain the lack of pictures from day 3. ;) We were all okay by the time we got back to shore, but snorkeling trips were canceled again for obvious reasons. Pity.

On the fourth day, we visited a couple of state parks and beaches, swam in the ocean, and just basically relaxed. Yes, all snorkeling trips were canceled again, thanks to the weather. Oh, and we had the best dinner of the week that night - if you’re ever in the Keys, make sure you visit the Fish House in Key Largo; their seafood is really good, especially the huge king crabs. :)

We didn’t have much time on the fifth day. Everyone was a little tired after all the driving and swimming and walking around, so we woke up late and made our way back to Miami to catch the flight back to LA in the evening.

All in all, a fun and relaxing holiday, and a good change from the usual stuff. Pictures are up in the gallery.

Tags: florida-keys, miami, travel

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I’m attending the Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Los Angeles this week on behalf of OSNN for the second time.

Today was the first day of the conference, and it started out with the customary keynote by Bill Gates, focusing mainly on the evolution of the computer industry, the rapid growth of the portable and mobile devices market, demos of Windows Rally, Windows Home Server, and Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn).

BillG’s keynote was followed by a talk on the “Evolution of Computing” by Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer. The presentation also highlighted some of the ways in which computers and technology can be used effectively in healthcare, especially in rural areas and developing countries.

I’ve posted lots of pictures from the keynote (second-row seating, thanks to the Press pass), and a couple of videos that were played back during BillG’s talk. If you’d like to watch the complete keynotes and demos, the official on-demand webcast (direct link) is also available.

Tags: keynotes, longhorn, microsoft, vista, windows, winhec, winhec07, winhec2007

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The NY Times reports that Facebook will be launching a new free classifieds feature known as the “Marketplace” sometime tomorrow. Users will be able to choose who can view their listings, just like they can set permissions for their profiles today.

It really makes a lot of sense to introduce such a feature into into a well-established social networking service - it’s far more convenient to put up a private classifieds listing on a site that all your friends are already using on an almost daily (even hourly for some!) basis than to get all of them to sign up for a new service just for that purpose, or to individually email all of them. It’ll be interesting to observe how well the new feature fares in the coming months. Do you think you’ll use it?

On a related note, I must say that I’ve been impressed with the way Facebook has been shaping up recently. They’ve been firing on all cylinders, and introduced a slick new design not too long ago. I joined the network back in 2004, then went on a long hiatus for several months, and have recently started using it more often again, especially to reconnect with old friends from Irvine and India.

Related posts: How to get Facebook status updates via IM.

Tags: facebook

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At The Cable Show in Las Vegas this week, the CEO of Comcast demonstrated downstream speeds of ~150 Mb/s on a DOCSIS 3.0 cable connection. The AP reports that a 300 MB video was downloaded in “a few seconds” and a 32 volume encyclopedia and dictionary in under four minutes!

The roll-out of Verizon’s FIOS network has been rather slow because of the need to run new fiber lines to homes. FIOS connections are consequently still available in only a selected number of cities across the country (I’ve been waiting!). On the other hand, cable lines are almost ubiquitous in comparison, so if the new DOCSIS 3.0 standard can leverage the existing infrastructure to deliver such high-speed connections, it definitely has the potential to take the market by storm.

Comcast’s CEO says that this could be available “within less than a couple of years.” I certainly hope so! :)

Tags: cable, docsis, fios, internet

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Microsoft launched the new version of Windows Live Hotmail this Sunday.

As part of the promotional campaign for the launch, four ads have been released, showcasing some of the new features in humorous ways. I thought they were amusing. Take a look. :)

Tags: hotmail, humor, microsoft, windows-live

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A µTorrent forum member named patrickbrans has created a µTorrent Sidebar gadget for Vista that works in conjunction with the µTorrent WebUI.

The docked gadget shows basic download and upload speeds, and includes buttons to start, stop, or pause downloads. The flyout panel displays additional info such as the progress of each download, number of seeds and peers, and so on.

Nicely done.

Tags: bittorrent, gadgets, sidebar, utorrent, vista

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Blogs hosted on WordPress.com have a nice statistics module that integrates into the dashboard. Yesterday, the folks at Automattic released this as a standalone plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs. The developer, Andy Skelton, has more info.

Installing the plugin is really easy - copy the file into the plugins directory, activate it through the dashboard, and enter your WordPress.com API key - a process almost identical to installing Akismet, the excellent comment and trackback spam filtering plugin.

The dashboard page includes most of the statistics that bloggers would be interested in - referrers, top posts, search engine terms, outbound clicks, and incoming links, all laid out in a clean and easy to read format.

One important difference between this plugin and many other stats plugins for WordPress is that the stats aren’t stored in your own database. Instead, a snippet of Javascript code collects the necessary information and passes it on to WordPress.com, decreasing the load on your server during high traffic periods. A downside is that you have to login to your WordPress.com dashboard to view the stats; they’re not integrated into your hosted WordPress setup’s dashboard.

I installed the plugin yesterday and I’m liking it so far. It hasn’t slowed down page loading times at all, and the statistics collected are useful and relevant. I’m using it alongside FeedBurner’s StandardStats feature, which I’ve been using for several months and have been pretty happy with. And, of course, I also use AWStats, which ASO enables on all their packages by default. What can I say? I like numbers and pretty graphs. :)

Tags: awstats, feedburner, statistics, wordpress

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Last week, I sent out Joost invitations to a number of friends and basically to anybody who wanted to try it out. Since then, I’ve been hearing mixed opinions from people about it, so I thought I’d post my thoughts on the subject.

I was first invited to the private beta back when it was still called The Venice Project, and things have certainly come a long way since then. The quality of the service has improved, the client finally runs in Vista without weird workarounds, and several new “channels” have been added.

Unfortunately, I still think that the quality of the content on the network is lacking, and most other people I’ve talked to share that opinion. There are a couple of channels that are interesting to watch now and then, but I’d really like to see more mainstream content - shows that people actually watch every week. ABC and NBC, for instance, already allow people to watch popular shows like LOST and Heroes for free on their respective sites. Partnerships between Joost and these networks could be mutually beneficial - the networks would be able to take advantage of Joost’s excellent peer-to-peer network to stream content and save on bandwidth, and Joost itself would become significantly more appealing to users if it got a handful of popular shows.

Still, there’s a lot to like about Joost. One of the most interesting end-user features for me is the “Channel Chat” widget. Each channel has a separate chatroom where viewers can interact with each other without leaving the full-screen, TV-like Joost interface. Imagine watching an episode of LOST and being able to discuss theories with other viewers in realtime during commercial breaks. I think that would be lots of fun, and would bring a new world of interactivity to television. The infrastructure is already in place, but good content is still missing!

I also like how the video stream resumes from where you left off if you turn off the app and turn it back on later. As Mark from the OSNN forum said, that’s how on-demand TV should always have been.

So yeah, I think Joost has a lot of potential, but it won’t become something I use on a daily basis unless better content begins to show up.

What are your thoughts?

(Still don’t have an invite? Leave a comment here)

Tags: joost, video

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The latest beta version of my preferred SFTP/SCP client, WinSCP, finally includes FTP support.

I wrote about WinSCP last year, and had been using FileZilla or FireFTP when I needed to connect to plain FTP servers. Now that WinSCP includes FTP support (which is, in fact, built on the FileZilla codebase), I no longer need to have multiple clients installed.

If you’ve never tried WinSCP, I would definitely recommend it, especially for the reason I mentioned in my earlier post.

Tags: filezilla, fireftp, ftp, sftp, winscp

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I’ve got more Joost invites to give away, so if you want one, leave a comment here with your name and email address.

Tags: joost, video

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