June 2006

One of the cool new features introduced in Windows Vista is Speech Recognition. The feature allows you to control your computer through voice. You can dictate documents and e-mail messages, fill out forms on the web using voice commands, and manage Windows Vista and applications by saying what you see. In older version of Windows this was accomplished by using third party software such as E-Speaking and Say Now. There are other commercial applications like Dragon Naturally speaking from Nuance which is very powerful , but on the downside the price is pretty high. Before you get started using Speech Recognition, you need to have a microphone hooked up to the computer (Obvious ...

From the past few hours the Gmail service is down. This is the message displayed when I try to access my GMail. I tried to login to Google Talk (GT). To my surprise I was presented with a blank buddy list. No contacts were displayed in GT window but my status was shown as �Online� As far as I know Google Talk is dependent on Gmail for the following 3 reasons It logs into the mailbox and displays a list of new mails Contacts are retrieved from the GMail address book and are displayed in the Google Talk Window Save your chat histories Now if Gmail service is down, definitely the above 3 ...

Today I was guided to a new financial portal called Stockhive. It is founded by Yogi Kulkarni, a software developer by profession and an investor by vocation. Yogi is supported in this venture by Ajey Gore - an IT infrastructure specialist, Ayatana Holdings India Pvt. Ltd. and by ThoughtWorks Technologies (India) Pvt. Ltd. - a software consultancy pioneering in Agile methodologies. The site is still in “Beta” and according to the site it provides investors with tools for fundamental and technical analysis. The signup form is pretty simple and in the beta phase the membership is free. Since “ThoughtWorks” is in the above equation, my feeling is that this site has been ...

Google today announced the testing of a new feature in Picasa through which user can share photos online. The feature is called Picasa Web Albums. Picasa is Google’s free desktop photo management software, and I have been using this for quite some time, Other than the basic organizing features, I especially like the “Timeline” feature in Picasa. With Picasa Web Albums you can pick a bunch of your photos from and upload them into a web album in a couple of clicks. Once they are online, it’s pretty easy share them – just click the “Share” button. Check my first web album here : http://picasaweb.google.com/venukb/Flowers Here is what you need to do to share photos ...

Finally I was able to download the beta 2 release of Windows Vista. The ISO was a massive 3.125 GB file and it was quite an adventure downloading such a big file in a bandwidth constrained India. I initiated the download on Friday (June 9) 11 PM and my download manager (Free Download Manager) cribbed that it could not download a file more than 2GB !! (I could not use the default AKAMAI download manager since I was getting the message saying the servers are experiencing high level of demand.) So I downloaded another “download manager” called Internet download manager. The download started at about 11:30 PM and it ...

The launch of Google Spreadsheet (GS) has put more focus on “online spreadsheets”. In my previous post on GS, I had mentioned about the online spreadsheets such as NumSum, ZohoSheet, JotSpot Tracker, iRows. The comment by Zoho in my previous post made me have a look at their application. As of now both GS and Zoho cannot be compared since Google is still adding a lot of features like charting etc and even Zoho is still in Beta stage. Here is a look at Zoho and its features Zoho provides basic spreadsheet functionalities along with features like sharing, tagging and publishing content. You can: Import and Export Excel files Share sheets ...

Windows Vista Beta 2 is now available for public download at the following link: http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/beta2/en/x86/download.htm However when I tried to download I got the following message :-( (Guess I need to wait for few more hours)

Tags: Windows Vista Beta 2

Two days back Google released a sneak peek preview of Google Spreadsheet. Google hasn’t opened up the “Ajax spreadsheet” to the general public yet. In order to try, you need to request an invitation. As of now there have been 4 products released in Google’s Online Office Suite Writely (Word) Notebook (One Note) Page Creator (FrontPage) Spreadsheet (Excel) However the Google spreadsheet is far away compared to Excel in terms of features. The unique feature of GS is supposed to be the ability to collaboratively edit a spreadsheet online. Here are few snapshots Main Screen (I opened a xls file from my computer and ...

After a long time I landed in PVR today, with the intent of watching “The Da Vinci Code”. I went at around 7 and I was pretty sure of getting a seat for the 10 PM show. I was surprised to find that it was a total sellout for the complete day. The movie is already in its second week and I expected the crowd to be less. Damn ! I hope I can see the movie before Karnataka also decides to ban the movie. Inside Man was another movie that released this week. The trailers had definitely raised my interest and it was also a movie directed by ...

PC World has released its annual list of Top 100 products of the year. Additionally it has also listed the Best and Worst companies of 2005. Yahoo has been rated the Web Company of the Year. It has been mentioned that even though Google gets lot of attention, its Yahoo that is getting things accomplished. Apple with its iPod’s, Boot Camp and Intel Based Mac’s has been named the Hardware company of the Year. Adobe is the Software company of the Year And the worst company of the year – Any Guesses ? The “coveted” award goes to Sony !! This is what PC world has to say about ...