Archive for the_time('F Y')


27 April 2006 in General | Comments (4)

There is plenty of chatter about Live.com and how it [sucks|rocks] from various NZ .Net bloggers.

I’ll stay away from the discussion other than to say I like that they’re trying new things – it’s better than nothing. Now, what I would like to see is the general experience being more like NetVibes. Again, trawling through my statistics I found I’ve had several hundred hits from http://www.netvibes.com

In terms of portals (which I don’t personally love) it’s pretty cool. The multiple tabs (drag the widgets onto them), the fact I can name the page what I want etc – it all seems a lot smoother than Live.com.

Anyway, that’s all I really wanted to say for now :) Like everyone else I’ll try and get my post Code Camp review out soon.

– JD

Average Rating: 5 out of 5 based on 242 user reviews.


26 April 2006 in Windows | Comments (2)

Internet Explorer 7.0 Logo

Finally Microsoft have released a copy of Internet Explorer 7.0 that runs on Windows
2003 without hacks :) Officially this is Beta 2.

I installed it last night and had no problems with it wrecking my networking stack – looked good. Integration between Office 2007 and IE 7 seems to already be baked in (Outlook asked if I wanted to have IE and Outlook share the same RSS feeds).

Click here to download Internet Explorer 7.0

– JD

Average Rating: 4.5 out of 5 based on 271 user reviews.


23 April 2006 in .Net | Comments (0)

Visual Studio 2005

One of the questions that was raised at Code Camp was “what is the version of Visual Studio after Orcas called?”

Around the middle of 2005 it was announced that the version after Orcas would be called “Hawaii”. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this turns out to be wrong or it gets changed but there seems to be considerably discussion about that name floating around.

EWeek Article: “Hawaii”: A visual studio paradise for developers?

- JD

P.S. Microsoft really have got us all hanging out for the leading edge haven’t they? It seems people don’t care about the next best thing – but the next next best thing :)

Average Rating: 4.8 out of 5 based on 203 user reviews.


20 April 2006 in Blogging | Comments (4)

I was reviewing my referral information for my blog today and noticed a few hits from a website called TechTalkBlogs.

The site looks like a pretty clean and after looking under the “Australian Bloggers” I found that they are consuming my feed and allowing people to rate them. Based on the other users on the list that somebody has borrowed Nic’s fantastic NZ .Net Bloggers OPML and imported it into this site.

I couldn’t find out much about the intention of the website (other than to syndicate sites) but it’s an official Microsoft site.

I always love seeing my blog being pimped on the internet :)

- JD

Average Rating: 4.9 out of 5 based on 180 user reviews.


20 April 2006 in Google | Comments (0)

Just some general Google news for today :)

Google have released their newest search appliance – Onebox. Onebox pulls data from multiple repositories into one place where previously the Search Appliance could search file systems and web sites but didn’t help achieve Google’s mission of “organising all the worlds information”.

Onebox is the product of working with third party vendors to provide a much more complete view of enterprise data. This includes now searching over Cisco Meeting Place Express, Cognos (BI tools), Employease (HR tools), NetSuite (more BI tools), Oracle (HR, ERP, CRM and SCM applications), Salesforce.com (CRM) and SAS (yet more BI tools).

Bringing this data out of proprietary repositories can only be a good thing for the end users and Google have started opening up the API for the Search Appliance (if this would make it easy to pull data from it or provide data to it I’m not sure at the moment). Hopefully more vendors provide interfaces for the Onebox to utilise (Aftermail? :) )

Of course we’re still waiting for Google to make any of their search appliances available in New Zealand (come on! It’s been years since they debuted!). I’d also like to hear how well the appliance integrates the results and ranks them. Hopefully they’re all in one nice structured list that is relevant but that’s considerably easier to say than actually do.

Update: After some more reading it appears that they simply integrate links (Like “Web”, “Images”, “Groups” etc) into the Google Search so that they include the other repositories. They don’t look to integrate the results.

Press release: Google adds secure search across popular business applications.
Google blog link: Google launches exciting new search appliance.

- JD

Average Rating: 4.4 out of 5 based on 259 user reviews.


18 April 2006 in Microsoft | Comments (1)

One thing that I’ve recently found useful in Outlook is how you can have it pre-populate your calendar with holidays for your country. I told my flatmate about this and thought I should post the instructions in case anybody else doesn’t know how to do it.

  1. Fire up Outlook
  2. Click “Tools” then “Options” on the menu
  3. Click “Calendar Options”
  4. Click “Add Holidays…” (near the middle of the form)
  5. Put a tick in “New Zealand” and click “OK”
  6. Done :)

This works in both Office 2003 and Office 2007 (Perhaps earlier ones too but I haven’t tested). Speaking of which I’ll hopefully post a few Office 2007 entries as time goes on :)

- JD

Average Rating: 4.9 out of 5 based on 172 user reviews.


12 April 2006 in Google | Comments (0)

A nice new feature has been added to Google Analytics over night – time zones. One thing that has been a mild cosmetic annoyance is that the times don’t match up (so, for example, my traffic seems heaviest at midnight).

Google Analytics TimeZone

It will cause a slight skew in your data for the change (it’s not retrospective). So far I can’t seem to get it to change as it complains I’m not verified but I assume that will be ironed out.

Also other Analytics users don’t seem to see this option yet (“I see dead features”).

Good to see this being added.

– JD

Average Rating: 4.7 out of 5 based on 227 user reviews.


11 April 2006 in Google | Comments (1)

So I decided to play around with Google Adsense. I love Google Analytics and a lot of what it offers is around how AdSense is working so I thought I’d see what else I can learn from it :) I don’t expect I’ll make anything from it though.

I thought I’d post a comment though that I’ve found the Google AdSense Deluxe plugin for WordPress. It seems like a really simple plugin to stick in and enable all sorts of advert management on your site. If you’re using WordPress and are thinking of using AdSense I’d endorse it :)

Check out Google AdSense Deluxe here.

Anyway, back to our normal programming…

- JD

Average Rating: 4.7 out of 5 based on 235 user reviews.