Harjeet’s Blog

I’ve just been watching the live Mix webcast. There have been some great demos and interesting announcements already!

Internet Explorer 8.0 beta 1 now available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8. The demo showed of this really cool feature around web slices where you can add content such key information from an ebay auction into your favorites toolbar.

Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 is available for download. Silverlight 2.0 is going to be extremely cool as it’ll see the next wave of rich advertising, adaptive bandwidth use and a lot more..

I’ll update this post with more information at the end of the webcast!

Update: Check out the Silverlight 2.0 demo at http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/. This shows off the seadragon or deep zoom technology from MS Research.

Technorati Tags: silverlight,ie8,microsoft,mix

Cenzic an innovative leader in application security risk management, vulnerable assessment, and compliance solutions revealed its Applications Security Trends Report. It’s interesting to see the number of vulnerabilities by web browser. It’s also interesting to see that Denial of Service (DOS) were only 0.2% of the overall attacks and 59% of the attacks were scan or probe related. It’s good to see IE test for fewer vulnerabilities than the others, it’s a promising start and I’ve got a feeling that IE 8.0 will be a whole lot better!

Web-Harmoy.co.uk was just launched. The thought is to find a solution to the gap that exists between web designers and web developers at present. Web designers creatively think of nice designs and when the have a chat with the developer, the communication of what they want is not always crystal clear and technical feasibility needs to be tested. The result is a website that is a little if not very different from what the designer wanted. Microsoft’s Expression suite of products allow designers/developers to work using the same tools so that there is coherence in the process and the result is a website that looks and feels like what the designer and developer intended! Here’s something for a nice chuckle…

Update: Scoble has released a recent video interview that is a lot better than the TED video… Here it is.. This is actually mindblowing!!

Scoble finally told us what made him cry. It’s a Microsoft Research project called the WWTelescope. I haven’t seen the demo for this, but it looks like its software that allows you to explore the universe, flying around wherever you want to go! Scoble also mentions that this uses the Photosynth technology, something I have personally used and seen the demo of and combining satellite imagery with Photosynth would be nothing short of Awesome! What photosynth allows you to do is take totally random images of any place say the big ben at different angles. It then takes these random images and intelligently creates a virtual tour patching these pictures together in a 3 dimensional space! I so want to get my hands on the WWTelescope now!

Update: Cool demo video below from TED

Free software from Microsoft?! What! Yeah, it’s true… Microsoft is giving away full versions of its software to verified students for free! I so wish I was still a student. This is excellent news and the Academic team had been working very hard to get this working! Trust me it wasn’t easy! Here are more details on this:

Today, Microsoft announced an unprecedented software program that we believe will help change the lives of millions of students around the world. The program, Microsoft DreamSpark, is focused on providing millions of college and high school students with no-cost access to the latest Microsoft developer (i.e., versions of Visual Studio, XNA Game Studio), designer tools (Expression Studio) and Microsoft platform resources (i.e., versions of Windows Server and SQL Server).

Microsoft believes in the power of technology to transform education, and Microsoft DreamSpark is another avenue to help the next generation of young leaders seize the opportunity to harness the transformative ability of software. It’s our hope that Microsoft DreamSpark will help students tap into their creative potential and set them on the path to academic and career success.

Currently, the program is accessible by college students in 11 countries including: Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.  In the coming months, the Microsoft DreamSpark team will expand the program’s reach to include high school students and to increase the number of participating countries.

Get your software at http://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/

Many times in the past, I’ve struggled to copy and paste data accurately from the web to excel. I’ve needed to do my analysis in excel and so mostly ended up copying from the web, pasting it in notepad and then pasting it in excel. I used to lose all formatting and the results were not always the best.

So this nifty application from Microsoft Research has got to be one of the most useful for me. It allows you to select one or two instances of the data you want to capture from the web page and then just click on select similar data. The app looks through the page and selects all the data automatically populating the excel sheet. This is brilliant You can download this plugin here. Check out the demo video below:

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Trade across global markets has been nothing short of dramatic over the past couple of days. The WSJ shows a good timeline of how markets fared worldwide. The Indian stock markets halted trade on both days to prevent the markets crashing below a certain percentage. So are we in for a recession in the US? Has the sub-prime crisis fear once again caught up to the markets? FII’s seem to be selling and unwinding all positions in the Indian market. This led to stocks going below their 52 week lows. Is it a good time to buy only time will tell :-). My view on this is that the downfall can’t go on for much longer. There is money waiting in the sidelines that will eventually make its way to the market. If the US economy goes into recession, this may prove to be a blessing in disguise for India as the growth prospects are strong and valuations mouth watering. So the money from FII’s should enter the Indian market regardless. I may be wrong but lets wait and watch!

ok.. so it’s been a long time since I wrote on this blog, but this New Year I resolved to bring life back into this blog! and the first post had to be this video of Bill G’s last day at Microsoft which is coming up soon!

I saw this video first on youtube and must admit that I thought its a fake! Then I checked out the full CES keynote and was amazed to see that this indeed was presented by Bill Gates himself! That is simply awesome! Microsoft IS Cool and this video show’s it! So here’s presenting Billy G…

Bill’s Last Day: The CES Keynote video

Blogmusik was an excellent site. I’ve been using it for a long time now as it allows me to create playlists of my preferred artists and play them online for free so I don’t to buy or pay for quality streaming music. Pandora.com is still going through legal issues and it doesn’t allow you to explicitly choose the artist you want to listen to, this is my new favorite music site! Check it out www.deezer.com.

I knew there would be really cool silverlight enabled sites coming up,  this one is simply brilliant. Tafiti was launched by Microsoft today. It’s a search engine to be used as a research tool where you can search websites, blogs, feeds, news, images, books and more for the information you want. Collect it all, put it together in the form of a collage and share it with others via email or blog. It’s pretty impressive. I tried searching “Harjeet Kumar” on it and the results were very accurately linked to me . That’s not all I searched for though. I also tried putting myself in the position of doing a university coursework, something that I used to do not too long ago. I searched for “Infosys”, put together websites, images, news articles and could even filter down to annual results, HR policies etc. Stacked it all up and it was easy to review. I think its a great start and search and UI have a long way to go. I also think Microsoft’s on to something new! It looks alive and looks “cool”. Check it out at www.tafiti.com