Personalized Pages

I’m a big fan of Personalized Pages, which I use to subscribe to feeds from all around the Web, and view them in one single Web page, which is a pretty convenient way to allow me to keep myself updated with recent news.

But when using Firefox 3.0, the Personalized Page service I was currently using, Windows Live Personalized Experience, wouldn’t work nicely. Some of the feeds couldn’t be loaded and I am no longer able to navigate to the various tabs I have.

Thus, I went and tested out the various Personalized Page services like iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes and Pageflakes, to decide which service to migrate to, and these are my thoughts.

iGoogle

Pros:

• Google Reader as RSS reader
• Loads of widgets available
• Able to view feeds contents directly by clicking the + beside the listed titles
• Close integration with other Google services (Gmail, etc)

Cons:

• Ugly GUI
• Unable to customize layout (Fixed number of columns)
• lack of beautiful theme choices
• Search bar taking up loads of screen space, (I can Google stuff with my Web browser)
• adding stuff is troublesome
• No OPML import or export (containing all my feeds)
• Unable to drag and rearrange order of tabs.

Awesome Interview with Scott Guthrie by Tim Anderson

Tim Anderson has just posted an awesome interview with Scott Guthrie, where they talked about many cool geek stuff like LINQ, ASP.NET, Silverlight, and WPF.

I finally understand why they’re going crazy about LINQ, that allows the use dynamic SQL to perform CRUD operations on other databases like MySQL and SQLite, that’s the next best thing to seeing the functionality of stored procedures in free databases!

Tim was great in pointing out certain issues that many have always wondered about Microsoft’s vision of Silverlight, and based on what Scott says, it could be fair to say that Microsoft is definitely sticking by their word in enabling the delivery of Silverlight across different platforms and browsers.

There was also comparison of Silverlight between different technologies like WPF, Google Gears, Adobe AIR, and of course, Flash and Flex, where some very very good points were pointed out, like whether or not XBAPs are still viable now that Silverlight is out in the streets.

Especially loved this part:

“I’ve seen comments from Mac users that have used the Silverlight 1.0 release, say for the Halo 3 streaming video, to the effect that “I didn’t think video on the web worked this well, and I’m pretty shocked that when I right-clicked on the control it says Microsoft.”

This is the link to the Halo 3 trailer powered by Silverlight, (the original version is still Flash though) I’ve never seen Silverlight work on Macs, could anyone justify that statement?

Silverlight… is a surname!

I was looking for journals and white papers for my seminar, and I found a great load of white papers from ZDNet, and when I was googl’ing journals, I found Google’s Scholar service, and I was like, GREAT, searching journals with Google, hard work made easy with the Web, absolutely brilliant!

Silverlight is still pretty new, so I don’t think I would be able to get any journals on it, but then I couldn’t help it, I had to try my luck, so I went on and typed “silverlight” and VIOLA! Guess what I found?

Lookie here! J. Silverlight, man, I never expected to see anyone with Silverlight as his surname!

No idea what he would think of Microsoft Silverlight though, what you do you guys think?

Life working for Google and Microsoft?

This is currently one of the hottest posts on the net, and the funny thing is, this blog only has one post! And one of the most controversial posts ever! Check it out, definitely interesting 

The following has been making the rounds on just about every internal email list I belong to in Microsoft. Here it is to share a little insight with the rest of the world. Microsoft is an amazingly transparent company. Google is not. Any peek is a good peek.

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Many of you were asking for the feedback I received from my interview with the former Google employee I hired into ABC Development as a Sr.SDE. Here it is. This candidate is also a former MS employee who left the company and founded a “Start-up” called XYZ. XYZ was purchased by Google and he was hired on as a Senior Software Engineer II / Technical Lead. Here is his take on Google’s environment as well as areas Microsoft should consider improving in order to be more competitive.

Enjoy

(Taken from Life at Google – the Microsoftie Perspective, June 24th 2007)

Check it out here!

Vista SP1 coming soon….thanks to Google?

 

(Taken from shuzak.com)

Just saw this interesting bit from the PC World newsletters, and in fact it’s pretty interesting news, where Microsoft was not the one announcing their SP1, but from the U.S. Department of Justice, mainly because of accusations of monopolization (ahem..ahem, isn’t that what they are heading towards?) of not only the operating system market, but further branching out to other markets, threatening other  (Face the facts people, this is the real world!) Well, do expect its release around the end of this year. (Hopefully they’ll include a more customizable UAC, which currently doesn’t allow me to open Visual Studio with Expression Blend!)