Technical

Disaster recovery process for Live Journal Blogging Service

Tejas Patel — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 22:01:00 GMT

Live Journal lost it's power the other day and here is a post martem of what happened and what the guys at Live Journal did to restore the service back. Good lessons on disaster recovery. This has turned out more complicated than I thought it would be. Now I will have more respect for the people behind these kind of services.

VIA Adam Kalsey

Tejas Patel

Now we will get VoIP SPAM

Tejas Patel — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 19:50:00 GMT

SPIT is what the new term is for SPAM which comes through VoIP. SPIT stands for Spam over Internet Telephony. Now intruders and spammers can insert SPIT onto our VoIP systems too. More details can be found from this article on Business Times.

Tejas Patel

Hear your Google search results on Speegle

Tejas Patel — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 16:38:00 GMT

Using Speegle one can listen to the search results searched through Google Search engine, that too in different voices. Interesting I would say. Just thinking about this technology, will people like to integrate this technology into their website or blogs? I can see people integrating this technology on their blogs, where a voice similar to their's will read out the posts and can even read the comments in a separate voice. Won't this give a more personal touch?

The other option is, when people create a post on their blog, they can also upload a voice version of their post in their own voice. This way, the true emotions of the author will be felt when he was writing that post. When people post comments to the post, they could have a option of uploading their comments in their own voice. Well more time and bandwith will be consumed, but it could be worth it! Yes, this is something very similar to podcasting, but here people can enjoy the post in both the versions, the text as well as the voice. If people start reading the post and they think it is a interesting, then they can download the voice file and listen you talk. Just imagine Bill Gates commenting on your blog in his own voice! With the podcasts, not all podcasts are interesting and I won't know that until I have heard the whole podcast and they swear and delete the podcast.

Tejas Patel

My view on the 'beta software'

Tejas Patel — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 21:48:00 GMT

Robert Scoble points to Joe Wilcox's article on Microsoft riding on the beta train. My say on this is, beta software are good. Here are my thoughts on them. Mind you I am no software developer or anything. I am just a end consumer most of the times who loves to try on new things and recommend it to people from time to time when they are looking for solutions. So forgive me developers if I don't understand your so called 'software development cycle'.

Beta software helps out to fix initial bugs as a large number of audience is looking at the software, which otherwise will be fixed and released as updates lateron
Beta software increases the awareness of the software and it's capabilities
Developers can get a lot of input from the end users during Beta testing
Developers get to enhance their products and broaden the product scope during the alpha and beta phase

What I don't like about beta software and services is:

It seems to be never ending time limit to beta. I think the companies should post a date when that beta software or service will go into a full working production system. Here I can complain about Gmail, we have been using it for months now, but not many people know (end users) when it will come out of beta phase. I have met people who would refuse to use Gmail as their primary email as they don't know when it will come out of the beta phase. They are scared that the idea might just get scraped after all!
Not all the developers/companies tell you about the changes and enhancements made to the software/service when a beta product is updated. I think if the companies tell you what they have enhanced or updated than it works more in their favour than of customers.
I would agree that Companies should not have array of beta software on the line, I think this can be difficult for big development houses like Microsoft, but...

Any more points?

Tejas Patel

10 minutes playing with Desktop Search tools

Tejas Patel — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:55:00 GMT

Today I took the chance to trial out Yahoo Desktop Search and MSN Desktop Search along with Google Desktop Search. I already had 'Lookout' and 'Blinkx' installed on my system.

Yahoo Desktop Search: - I know this one is in beta, but guys make installation screens a bit better. The indexing was faster and there was simultaneous indexing done on different things i.e. email and documents and stuff ( I could see that). The things I liked about this tool was the feature of search as you type and also the integration of file viewers into the tool itself. With this feature I don't have to necessarily open Adobe Acrobat just for viewing what was in the file. I like that this can index mostly all kind of widely used file types. The integration of the search tool into Outlook can be handy as well. The ability to limit the index file size is very helpful, afterall I don't want to have a index file which is 10 GB in size!

The thing I did not necessarily like is that this tool has no integration on the web. I am sure Yahoo can tell us many good reasons for this, but having it integrated with the browser is very helpful in day to day searching. Is there any other neat feature that I should have looked at?

MSN Desktop Suite: - Although this tool came out more than what I expected from Microsoft, there are many things that I do not like. I am forced to install their whole suite of tools which I dont' want to. Firefox does not recognise the fact that Desktop Search is installed and so I cannot use Firefox to search my local files. Is this Microsoft's way of forcing us to use Internet Explorer? I wish I could add and remove document types for indexing!

Good things that I like about the tool is it's integration with browser ( I wish this can be done for browsers other than IE) and also Deskbar. What I would suggest is rather than having it only on taskbar, people should have the option of letting the search bar floating on the desktop where ever they like. I prefer not to waste precious space on my taskbar with such big tool boxes. I like what they have done on MSN Desktop Search page in the browser. I can limit my searches by the type of document, which is a good thing. I am in love with the web interface that is designed for Desktop searches.

With this tool and the new MSN Search portal, they are giving people a good reason to switch over their primary search engine.

Google Desktop Search: - After checking the above tools, I think Google should release a new update to their software soon. They are a bit behind I think on the features offered by their tool. I don't like the tool, as it takes a lot of hard disk space in the form of index file and it seems that my machine is always busy while not in use ( this might be because I have big hard disks that need to be indexed).

Lookout: - I am still in love with this tool and am not planning to move away from this tool in the coming days.

Blinkx: - The tool is good, but is there any special reason I should still keep on trying or using this tool, seeing the features of other tools as mentioned above?

For now I will keep on using MSN Desktop Search and Lookout. What are your opinions?

Tejas Patel

The buzz is 'other' search engines are getting famous

Tejas Patel — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 18:06:00 GMT

I read Eric's article 'Google loosing grounds to Competitors'. The statistics look a bit serious to me. MSN Search is getting better and better and Yahoo Search is improving too. I go to both the search engines every now and than and try them out. Yes they are improving. Yahoo is giving me much more better search results compared to last time. Personally I am still with Google as my main search engine. I want to migrate to other engines (read as try them out thoroughly), but need really a good reason as to why I should migrate to other search engines. I cannot find any good reason for now.

By the way, still have to try MSN Desktop Search tool and Yahoo Desktop Search tool. Are there any special features in them compared to Google Desktop Search?

Tejas Patel

Installed Microsoft Anti-Spyware Beta

Tejas Patel — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 01:56:00 GMT

I had to try this. Since I came back from holidays I heard from people that Microsoft came out with a anti-spyware program. They said they won't be trying it soon as it was still in Beta. Well I could not wait nor do I care of it breaking anything on my system. So I searched for it and here it was. The installation was smooth. I started the scan and it finished scanning 15200 files on my system (Intelligent Quick Scan) in 1 mintue 30 seconds on my system. As my system is well protected by firewall and stuff, there were no spyware found on the system. I have tried some other Spyware programs before but this one is neat. 5 minutes of roaming around the system should make one familiar with the features and functionalities of the system. Well I like this application as I now won't have to install 2-3 different small apps. I used to use 'Hijackthis' and 'Lavasoft Anti-spyware' before to clean out all the spyware from my system.

Specially I liked the System tools (which contains System Explorer & Browser Hijack Restore) & Privacy tools section of this application. I think Browser Hijack Restore and Privacy tools can be handy to most of the people and can be used on a daily basis. If I continue to use this tool, I can use these features on a tool on a daily basis. I can delete my traces from my system (superficially) while leaving for home from office and while going to bed at home. Well I look forward to see a better product with better and more features in the future. Not sure if the rumours are right or wrong, but I have heard that Microsoft is going to charge for this tool as soon as this tool comes out of Beta.

A recommended tool to try out.

Tejas Patel

Site Of The Day/ "Rate My Diagram" site

Tejas Patel — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 21:32:00 GMT

OK, trying to come back in action now. While I am going through pending posts (which is about 200000 posts) I came throw J-Walk Blog's post which links to Ratemynetworkdiagram.com . Yes I like the concept. People can see the diagrams and learn a lot from them. What I would recommend is people should explain their diagram too, so it becomes simple for viewers to understand why the network was designed in a particular way.

Tejas Patel

I was undermining Firefox

Tejas Patel — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 04:04:00 GMT

I think I was undermining Firefox for all this while and was just neglecting and ignoring the hype around it. I was speaking of my Microsoft developer friends and engineers (they mainly use Microsoft products) and they said that around 50-60 of them have nearly abandoned Internet Explorer and now use Firefox browser for 95% of their browsing. Not all of them are located in Australia, but they are scattered in different locations. One of the guys even took the liberty of showing me off the features of FireFox.

In the evening I met one of my non technical friends and although he has very little knowledge on security side of computers, he was boosting a lot on how secure Firefox is. To top it up I read this article which was few days back “Firefox smashes funding target” on ZDNet.

People have a new shine in their eyes as they were talking on Firefox and as they talk of how good it is, which is good. IE team, do you have any plans for innovating IE, if yes than why not reveal it? I don't think you guys are motivating your users enough to stick their loyalty to you guys.

Tejas Patel

Download the OneNote 2003 Trial

Tejas Patel — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 03:29:00 GMT

Download or trial 60 day trial of Microsoft OneNote 2003. I love the product and it's worth a try. With the powertoys it's much more fun.

Tejas Patel