As some of you know, I completed my last quarter at UCLA on Friday last week, and I'm back home for a long vacation. The formal graduation event is in June, and I'm planning to attend since I'll probably still be in the area at the time.

So now that I officially hold a Computer Science degree, what comes next? I've thought about pursuing further studies - either an M.S. or an MBA - sometime in the future, but I feel that I'd like to spend some time out in the industry before I decide which path I want to take. I spent the last two summers working as a software engineering intern, first at Symantec in Santa Monica, and then at Google's Mountain View headquarters. Both those internships were undoubtedly the most enjoyable and rewarding learning experiences I've had during the last four years.

This time, I'll be trying something a little different. Last December, I accepted an offer from Morgan Stanley and will be joining their technology division in the Distributed Systems Development track in August this year. This will be my first opportunity to experience what it's like to work in a software development team at one of the largest investment banking and financial services firms in the world. The headquarters are located at Times Square, right in the heart of New York city, which is all the more exciting to a city-lover like me.

Since I graduated early, I have four months of holidays ahead of me. I was a little too busy last month to make any plans, so during the next few weeks, I'll be figuring out what I'm going to do until I leave California for NYC in July. Fun times ahead! :)

Today, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech) in San Diego, Microsoft's Live Labs arm introduced Deepfish, a new browser for Windows Mobile devices.

Deepfish is a new type of mobile information browsing experience, aimed at preserving the rich layout and full form of documents on mobile devices while providing novel ways of effectively navigating that content on small screens. Deepfish's unique interface enables you to zoom in and out of page, quickly getting to the areas you are interested in without screen length after screen length of scrolling. A consequence of Deepfish's multi-resolution approach to browsing pages is that it loads a thumbnail of pages initially and then only what is needed for more detail when requested or in the background as you browse the initial the view, resulting in substantially quicker load times for most pages.

I remember seeing a leaked video of this sometime last year, but an official Technology Preview build is now available on the Live Labs site. I downloaded and tested it on my T-Mobile MDA and Sprint/Palm Treo 700wx earlier today. Here are some screenshots that I took of Deepfish rendering the NY Times front page, with a comparison shot of Pocket IE doing the same:


The first image shows Pocket IE's poor attempt at rendering a page that's not designed for mobile devices. Navigating through this page is a nightmare, even on a touch/stylus-enabled PocketPC device. On the other hand, as you can see in the second screenshot, Deepfish does a great job of compressing the entire page to fit the device's QVGA screen, with help from a server-side service. When you want to zoom into a section, you simply push the middle-button on the D-pad and a translucent box appears on the screen that you can freely move around with the D-pad or your finger/stylus. The last image shows the zoomed-in version of the page that is clearly legible and contains hyperlinks that you can click. The Flash demo video shows how it all works.

Being a Technology Preview, this build of Deepfish is a little rough around the edges. For example, the edges of the screen show distortion lines when the zoom window touches them. Zooming out doesn't always work properly on my Treo 700wx, but is fine on the MDA. Performance is a little slow on my MDA, although that's probably because of the slower OMAP850 processor and EDGE data connection; it works much better on the faster 700wx with Sprint's speedy EV-DO network.

With that said, I think Deepfish is off to a great start. I've tried a number of third-party Windows Mobile browsers, and I think this one has the potential to be the best one by a long shot once all the issues are resolved, and support for cookies/javascript is added in.

If you've got a WM 5+ device, Deepfish is worth taking a look at. This build will only be available to a limited number of testers, so if you're interested, I suggest signing up and getting your activation code soon.

Update: Srinath Vasireddy, a Live Labs Lead Program Manager, has left a comment here, informing me that the band of lines along the edges is not a bug. See the comments for more info on this. Thanks, Srinath.

There has been a lot of discussion on the web during the last couple of weeks about a revised fee schedule released by the Copyright Royalty Board, following a lobbying effort by everyone's beloved organization - the RIAA. These increased fees could potentially make it impossible for many internet radio stations to remain in business.

If you're a fan of music, you've probably heard of Pandora, the free internet radio service that lets you discover new music similar to the songs that you already enjoy. Last week, Tim Westergren, Pandora's founder, published a blog post about the effects of the new fees on the service, and how we, as users, can try to help. A follow-up post from this week also includes a link to an online petition.

I'm not sure how effective a petition is going to be, but taking a few minutes to sign it is the least we can do to show our support for a great service like Pandora, as well as numerous other independent internet radio stations that will be affected by this new ruling too. It would be a real shame to see them go away.

Most of you have probably seen the little "Take back the web" Firefox promotional buttons at some point. Firefox is a pretty feature-rich browser by itself, but extensions like Greasemonkeyreally do put you in control of your browsing experience.

If you've never heard about Greasemonkey before, it's described as an addon that "allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript."

Once you install the extension, check out userscript.org, a massive repository of scripts that you can download and use. I've been using Greasemonkey for a long time now, and I still continue to discover really useful scripts all the time. This one, for instance, automatically backs up any text you enter into a textarea and restores it if it's lost for some reason (a great complement to session saver). Here's one that disables those annoying inline IntelliTXT ads. And here's a really cool one that automatically displays any image links using the "lightbox" effect. That's just a small sample of the many useful scripts out there.

There are similar add-ons for other browsers like IE and Safari too. Just remember that not all scripts in the userscripts.org repository will be compatible with them.

Take back the web, indeed. :)

The Twitter hype machine has been firing on all cylinders lately. Some people think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, while others dismiss it off as being a yet another useless time-sink for the Web 2.0 generation. Me? I simply think it's interesting and fun. :)

Back in January, I wrote about some of the things that made Twitter appealing to me. Since then, I've discovered some other reasons why I still enjoy using it.

As Brandon points out, unlike many other social networking services, everyone's Twitter status updates are shared with everyone else (unless you switch to "friends-only" mode). The nice thing about this is that as the network grows, you can start looking at updates from people in your extended network - your friends' friends, whom you might not necessarily know directly. Over the last few weeks, I've made some new "friends" with similar interests and found new blogs with interesting content that I might have not discovered otherwise. Unlike Scoble and Pirillo, I don't plan on befriending virtually the entire blogosphere (1044 friends?! I simply wouldn't be able to keep up and get any real work done!), but for me, Twitter is an interesting way to find new people, new blogs, and get fresh perspectives on things.

Facebook and Twitter share a similar "status updates" feature, but they currently serve two very different purposes for me. Facebook lets me keep in touch with old friends from high school and friends from university, while Twitter seems to have become my network of fellow-geeks and "e-friends," many of whom I've never actually met in person, but who are great people to know nonetheless.

If you read this blog and you're on Twitter, feel free to add me as a friend. And if you're not, why not try it out? :)