Microsoft gets IT

Microsoft, the object of hatred for a large geek pop (and wannabes), is actually far from over. They are as fierce competitor as one can be. Latest evidence – Microsoft creating a YouTube channel for promotion of Vista and Live brands. Significance of YouTube here is that YouTube belongs to its “enemy” Google. That’s atypical for an “an underdog beats the incumbent” story, so it very well might not be one.

Tafiti

Tafiti, Microsoft’s experimental search site built on Silverlight: pretty pretty, and beautiful tree visualization of search results. (As a programmer, I’ve experimented with tree visualization of search results in the past, but, personally I don’t find them very useful.)

However, Tafiti seems to be just too pretty to be used regularly, too intimidating. It doesn’t have that comfortable workhorse feel of Google search or even Microsoft’s Live search for that matter.

Butterfly Effect

Skype Blog on Skype’s outage over last week (blaming re-boots after regular Tuesday Windows updates):

“The abnormally high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.”

Too far-fetched to be true!

[Update] : Skype blog clarifies the Mircosoft connection, and that they don’t blame Microsoft for the catastrophe.

Inline Seach: Cool IE Add-On

I hate modal “Find” of IE, which MS chose not to change even in IE7. So here is one cool add-on by IEForge for Firefox-like inline search functionality in IE.

MSDN Down

Is MSDN DDoS‘d? It has been down for at least last 2 hours.

Firefox Gaining Market Share

Firefox has been gaining browser market share really fast, it seems. January statistics are 31% for Firefox compared to 42.3% for IE6 and 13.3% for IE7. Even though Firefox has its share of issues/bugs (features ), and I like IE7′s beautiful rendering of fonts, I would love to see Firefox gaining some more market and mind share.

Clearification

Clearification – this viral marketing campaign for Windows Vista is very well executed creative marketing stuff coming out of Microsoft. It’s a clever 6 part video series. Not sure, it’s doing any good to Vista, or is viral at all, but I rate it pretty high on creativity scale.

“Time is the fourth dimension…for now”

Finding Jim Gray

Fascinating stuff. Amazon has put up a Mechanical Turk task to help find Jim Gray, the Turing Award winner missing since Jan 28, 07 in the sea, by letting people scan and analyze satellite imagery to locate his 40ft (6px-by-2px) yacht.

XBOX 360 Ad

This is freaking awesome. Don’t know why this is supposed to be banned.

Saving Streaming Windows Media

Many times (or always?) the videos (especially wmv) streaming over internet are not downloadable as Windows Media Player disables the save menu. Windows Media files are usually served through an .asx metafile. ASX is a simple XML format which stores the path to media file(s) to play. e.g.

<ASX version="3.0">
     <Entry>
        <ref href="mms://rx-lvl3-wa37.rbn.com/farm/*/ibmpdc/pdc/open
                   /wmdemand/mar06/rtoranzo/anthem-v125.wmv"/>
     </Entry>
</ASX>

Now, the media files are served over mms protocol, which cannot be saved directly. Here comes the saviour FlashGet. Just put this mms url in FlashGet’s ‘URL’ field and save the file. Done!