Bink.nu | Microsoft Roaming Favorites Beta

After reading the short description, I think this should be interesting. I hope it does a lot more than just roaming favourites. It should do atleast all that;s done on Del.icio.us and much more. I am not sure what percentage of hard core bloggers and RSS users are still using bookmarks on a regular basis. I for one is hardly touching my bookmarks now. I remember the days when I was ready to pay for services like Blinkx to host my bookmarks and to keep them roaming.I use my bookmarks now a days for bookmarklets, for a bookmark for ‘Route Planner’ website and that’s it. All else goes onto my blog and on Del.icio.us.

Is this the case where Microsoft is trying to create all the nice little services that users are getting used to these days, so that  customers only have to bitch about Microsoft!! They got blogs, search engine that is comparitively good as other search engines, RSS aggregator (or will have soon), tabbed browser and now bookmarks.

By the way how many people are still using Wallop? I don’t see many people using it or talking about it now a days. I think Orkut has faded away as well. I still get many requests for invite to Orkut from my previous blog http://geekswithblogs.net/tpatel but I don’t see a lot of buzz on blogosphere about it.

Will I be able to integrate Microsoft Roaming Favorites into Firefox? I think I will sure want that

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Technical Careers @ Microsoft : Show us why you are the ideal Microsoft Applicant!

This one is a bookmark for myself so that I can later go onto this post.

Windows Server Division WebLog : Free Course on Windows Server 2003 Service Pack One

The site includes free courses and hands on labs for Windows Server 2003 and securing Windows.

 

CompTIA’s IT Professional Membership

I just checked out ‘IT Pro Australia’ website. Sibylle just gave me a green flag to post about IT Pro Australia. Sibylle is “Marketing Coordinataor” for CompTIA Australia. She is also very prompt on responding to email ;).

IT Pro Australia, a program of CompTIA, is the nation’s leading association representing those working in the information and communications technology industry.

Supported by leading organisations in the global IT industry, including Apple, Cisco, CompTIA, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft and many others, IT Pro Australia is a community for IT professionals, offering comprehensive access, advice, benefits and discounts to members.

Applications for membership is open. The site is still in beta and the official launch of IT Pro is on 19th October this year. I think this is a great innitiative if it works as planned. This will be a great place for networking and to gain knowledge about what’s going on in the IT market. Check out the website for more students. Did I mention that even students can be members of IT Pro and get student membership (jeez, I sound like a sales guy now 🙂 ).

I have opted to mentor couple of communities for IT Pro. More details will follow shortly. Check out the website till than. Hey Sibylle, can’t you offer early bird discounts to new members, who sign up in next two weeks or so?

Update:- Sibylle said that there is a TechEd Promotion going on. “Indeed, we do have a Tech.Ed promotion. Whoever signs up as a full member will receive the annual membership at AU$ 50 (instead of AU$ 85)! The promo code is TEAQ305 to be quoted when signing in”

Maslow Self Actualization – unlearn.

This is a good reading for those who believe in constantly improving themselves. A more simpler and shorter version can be found at http://willpower.4mg.com/whatisselfactualisation.html.

Yahoo! Messenger

I just installed the latest version of Yahoo Messenger with Voice. It is fantastic.What did I like the most? I like the new international audibles. Now we have audibles in Indian language and they are hilarious. Ofcourse they have added new audibles under existing categories. Great job Yahoo. Keep up the good work.

Edit:- By the way why can’t developers at Yahoo integrate a feature so that it will show up a message to the users when there is a new version update of Yahoo available?

Backup Del.icio.us with Excel

This is nice little Utility through which I can back up my del.icio.us bookmarks to a Excel Spread Sheet. What I can than do is save it as a html file and host it anywhere I want :).

Firefox Extension: Minimize to tray

I just found this on Vasanth’s Blog while searching for something. This tool is quite handy.

Yahoo! Search blog: Our Blog is Growing Up  And So Has Our Index

Ok, finally Yahoo comes out with figures. I like Yahoo’s search engine facility as well, but than what is it that’s stopping me from making Yahoo Search Engine my home page and default search engine?

1. I just love Google’s UI. Although we can do more with Yahoo’s “My Web”, it’s too crowded and does’nt look neat.

2. I am used to Gmail now and really like it and if I use www.google.com/ig than I don’t have to worry about opening another tab on Firefox to check my email

3. I use Firefox and by default the search engine in use is Google!

4. There is more buzz about Google all the time compared to Yahoo ( I don’t know if it’s a logical thing not to switch to Yahoo because of this)

But what I am going to do now is I am going to install a Firefox extension for Google which has links to other search engines on the top, so I can compare other search engines on the go while I am searching Google.

Steve Lamb’s Blog : How to avoid duplicate computer SIDs when building machines from an image

I’m building a test lab that requires a number of Windows Server 2003 Server Pack 1 virtual machines and hence I’ve built a single image and have replicated it for each instance. To avoid the problem of each machine having the same identity (computer SID) at the O/S level I’m using a cool utility named “NewSID”. John Howard put me onto this utility – it’s cool because it’s so simple and unlike “Sysprep” it doesn’t result in bloated virtual machines and it’s free.

Click here to browse to the “NewSID” section of the excellent SysInternals website to find out more.

This looks very handy.