Archive for the_time('F Y')


26 January 2006 in Intergen & Tools | Comments (4)

With my decreased posting while working in Christchurch I thought I would share some various things I’ve found. First there was the Firefox extension, now there is http://www.meebo.com.

Meebo is a “Web 2.0″ application that allows you to chat on MSN/AIM/ICQ/Jabber through your browser. Now normally I would avoid anything that labelled itself “Web 2.0″ simply because I’m not fan of meaningless buzzwords however this is a very cool application.

At first I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy using Meebo but over the time I’ve been here it has grown on me – it’s so much less intrusive to have a web application for chat than what MSN has become these days. It was great getting notifications up the screen every time somebody logged on… back when you only had 10 contacts and you’re friends were still discovering this new fangled internet thing. These days I have well over 150 contacts and I just don’t need to be notified everytime somebody comes online. Meebo – probably not intentionally – has solved this problem for me. I should add that there is probably an option to turn off the notifications but I can’t check since I don’t have normal MSN here :-)

Geek pointed out that he doesn’t quite “get” Firefox. That’s fine, I didn’t like Mozilla but did really enjoy FireBird (precursor to FireFox). I guess you just need to gel with something. The reason I bring this up is because I’ve found that Meebo (and perhaps other modern web applications) seem to be a bit more sluggish in IE and certainly IE starts to die if I run applications like that for many hours on end. I hope IE 7 is a bit better.

Anyway – Meebo is certainly cool enough to deserve a mention. Hat tip to John Lewis.

- JD

Average Rating: 4.8 out of 5 based on 191 user reviews.


19 January 2006 in Tools | Comments (4)

If you’re like me, you use firefox quite a lot. The only problem is that some webpages won’t work too well in Firefox (Outlook on the web for one really annoys me).

This plugin allows you to open links in a new tab and use the IE rendering engine to display it, all the while staying inside FireFox. Very cool.

Strongly recomended for anyone who uses Firefox a lot :-)

- JD

Average Rating: 4.4 out of 5 based on 299 user reviews.


13 January 2006 in Blogging & Search Technology | Comments (0)

I’ve been meaning to post some more entries now I’m back from Holiday however I was promptly shipped off to Christchurch for several weeks and don’t have the normal tools I use to post (I’m not a fan of web editing). Any .Net folks in Christchurch who subscribe to my blog want to catch up for a drink?

Anyway, small update:

There is a new build of MSN Enterprise Search out that resolves issues relating to email not being completely indexed properly.

I only post this as some people reading my blog may have installed MSN Enterprise search.

Get the update here: MSN Enterprise Search Update

- JD

Average Rating: 4.4 out of 5 based on 158 user reviews.