This post will be about Windows Live Messenger – WLM. Call me oldstyle, but I liked the lightness of WLM 8.1. Hadn’t even bothered moving to 8.5.

What do I see today? I cannot connect to WLM because of a forced phased phorsed upgrade instruction from Microsoft to correct a security flaw that had cropped up. Now, I’ve finally decided to upgrade to WLM 2009 and I’ll give you my first impressions.

I think Microsoft has gone haywire. I want to download WLM and what I get is a bloated package of 135MB something with tons of apps that I don’t want. What the hell is that strategy? I refused to comply and searched for a Standalone Installer. Softpedia came to the rescue. The installer there is just WLM in a 24MB package. Much better.

Update: Note you may also need to install other files to get the standalone working, most notably contacts.msi to solve a 80x error message. These, and some info, are available at this MyDigitalLife post.

The installation goes smoothly. Nothing to complain here.

There are some issues with the new WLM 2009 which I don’t particularly like:

• It’s bloated! 8.1 used to take 15MBish of RAM. 2009 takes 36MB! It’s not terribly bad, but I still like my applications slim.
• The interface is weird. I’ve been taught that the eye reads from left to right. What the display pictures are doing in the left instead of the right is beyond my understanding. I’d think that the chat text is more important than the display pictures. That’s not what MS thinks apparently. Good thing is, you can hide the display pics like before.
• Whenever I open any menu, there’s a lag where my PC freezes for a bit. I don’t know if it’s just me, or for everyone else too.

The good points are:

• Probably more secured.
• More customizable, specially for the layout and contact list. E.g. The size of the display pictures can be changed in the list.
• Reworked color schemes. The color frames around the display pictures indicating status is a good idea.
• Generally more organized and pleasing to the eye.
• The interface, despite some weird points, is better. Moving the emoticons and other icons down the conversation box and removal of the send button, etc… saves space.
• You can now display “What you are listening” and your “personal message” at the same time.
• You can sign in from multiple computers at the same time, and sign off them remotely.

Most things are already updated to work with WLM 2009, like for those of you who use MessengerPlus, it’s already up to date.

That’s about it. I’m not terribly satisfied with the WLM 2009. I liked the 8.1 interface best, but I am forced to use 2009. Let’s hope it’s as good as 8.1.

Your views on this, if you use WLM?

This article comes from GeekScribes

Phased Upgrade of Windows Live Messenger 8.x

September marks the 10th anniversary of the godlike search engine Google, repository-of-the-Internets-and-universal-knowledge *bows*. However, the exact date seems to be a variable! More info on that at Techcrunch.

*Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake. For more on Google’s history:
http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

Source: Google Support

The folks with the “Don’t be evil” motto want to celebrate their creation’s birthday by helping the world. So? They have launched a project called “Project 10 to the 100th”, or Project 10100. Quite a Googlish-name if you ask me!

Basically, you suggest some ideas that will help the greatest number of people possible, in any way possible (or so I guess). Then, you go on that website above, and post it there. You may even post a 30-seconds video to back your concepts.

Then? Google has put aside $10 million to kickstart the Top 5 ideas it receives. The public will be able to short select 20 semi-finalist ideas, and a board will select the Top 5 out of those.

There are a number of categories in which you can participate, which are (as listed on the Project 10100 page):

• Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
• Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
• Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
• Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
• Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
• Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
• Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
• Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don’t fit into any category at all.

That’s basically it. Now you can go suggest some ideas if you have some, or pass the message around. The closing date for ideas submission is 20th October!

Time for some fun. If you want to know how Google was born, bred and evolved, you can check out this interesting timeline of what Google’s been up to in the last 10 years. Here’s Google’s Tenth Birthday page too.

Seriously, I can’t imagine life online without Google. It’s been saving my rear for the last 10 years now! A big thanks and:

HAPPY 10th BIRTHDAY GOOGLE!

This article comes from GeekScribes

Google turns 10, Wants to help people with $10m

Google just released the Beta version of its browser, called Google Chrome (why chrome anyways?). Since a few days, I’ve been seeing that pokeball-like logo all over the Internets and I thought I must add my piece of text to the already long list of blog posts about the newest browser out there. Seriously, nearly 12 million results on Google when I search for “Google Chrome”.

What’s the hype about it? Everybody is “Chrome released”, “Chrome does that”, “Chrome does this”, “Chrome makes tea”, bla bla… Let’s see… Before I move on, I need to say that Chrome is released under BSD license, and it’s Open-Source!

Statcounter reports something interesting. In one day, Chrome captured 1% of market share, as you can see from the picture below. Amazing, I say. Most surprising is the fact that Firefox (a favourite), Safari and other browsers are losing ground, while IE is gaining.

Well, after all, it’s not that surprising. Why? Because with every new Windows install, you get a free browser, Internet Explorer. Yay! So with every new Windows install, you can assume that there is a new IE user out there (who has not discovered Chrome or Firefox yet). And yeah, Internet Explorer 8 was just released so this has to be counted too.

Coming back to Chrome, what’s so interesting about it? It’s just a browser, a piece of software like so many out there. For example, how does it surpass Firefox, one browser that the World has given much love to?

Here’s what I think Chrome does better than Firefox:

• Memory management! My Firefox (bloated with tons of addons) takes 163MB with around 10 tabs open (WTF!!) while on load, Chrome takes a measly 10MB of memory. That should make me a convert, but not yet. (try about:memory in Chrome’s address bar btw! )
  • Try “about:internets” in the bar now… “no quotes!” There are more of those “about” tricks. Go see Lifehacker.
• Chrome is fast! Blazingly fast!! Sites load fast, the browser loads fast (<1 second on my PC). Sites load faster than Firefox too, by some Google magic. I dunno why, but it happens.

  

• Chrome, being made by Google, is tightly integrated with Google. The address bar acts like an address bar (doh!) and a search bar, all in one. A bit like Firefox’s bar, but works kind of better. One thing I liked with Chrome is that it’s not just restricted to Google as a search engine. You can choose which search engine to use in the properties. Thumbs up Google for allowing competition.
• Chrome looks good. It’s pleasing to the eye, but that’s just me. I like the minimalist layout.
• Chrome is good at download management. There’s the “download sidebar” which tells you download progress directly in your sidebar. This is available in Firefox too, via addons. Chrome has it in-built.
• Incognito mode: This allows you to create a new window, and whatever you do in it doesn’t get recorded to history. Cookies are deleted on window-closing. This is especially useful if you want to plan birthday surprises (according to Google), or if you want to browse pr0n without your parents knowing (according to me).
• Tab dragging: You can drag tabs out of windows to create new windows, or merge tabs in a window. This kind of management is really useful for tab-crazy guys like me.
• Speed-dial like feature for commonly visited pages on new tab creation. This gives you thumbnails of your favourite sites so you can access them fast, without having to use bookmarks or type the address.
• Built-in task manager to handle unresponsive tabs and close them if needs be. Good move here Chrome.
• Built-in phishing protection. Now you will probably know if somebody is trying to steal your account or data.

There are other features available on Chrome’s home, so I’ll let you read them there. I just listed some here.

But this is how Firefox does things better than Chrome (since I’m a Firefox fan)

• Firefox has addons that let’s it do anything it wants. Manage tabs like you want with Tabmix, manage downloads with DownThemAll, find website bugs with Firebug, get website shots with ScreenGrab! Hell, you can even make Firefox do GUI prototyping with Pencil! It’s no longer a browser after a while.
  • Chrome has no support for addons (yet). This is good (less memory usage) and bad (less functions).
• Firefox has in-built support for RSS, something which is lacking in Google Chrome.
• Firefox can do what Chrome can do with the help of Addons. Yes. For example, AutoDial gives you the favourite-sites features in Firefox. Not very pretty, but it works.

So why Chrome? Because it’s an alternative. We’ve been using Firefox, Opera, Safari or some other browsers like Maxthon. Now we got a new contender, and it has some good features and performance figures to give us. Why not make good use of it? And when it comes from search-engine-giant Google, we gotta give it some serious looks.

For people who make heavy use of Google (me), Chrome is a real life-saver, due to its tight integration with Google. You can rapidly search for things on Google in Chrome, and it also gives you suggestions when typing addresses, which really rocks. Oh, another good reason to love Chrome: The Comic Book! Way to go for creativity!

There have been some privacy concerns with Chrome though, like a controversial clause in the End-User License Agreement (EULA) that says that whatever you do in Chrome, Google owns it. Like if I made this post in Chrome, Google would own “The Content”. This was changed recently, so no fears now.

Now, there is some claims that the address bar will send data to Google, and that 2% of this data will be kept.

Let’s wait and see what other browsers have to say to Chrome grabbing market share. (Firefox could learn some good things from Chrome, like memory management.)

Your views please? Do you use Chrome? Are you going to use it? Comments awaited!

Ps. As you may have seen, GeekScribes has no new posts for quite a while. Remember about me telling you that we were students? Well, Uni is really taking our time (Assignments! Too many of them!), and we are not finding time to post. But when we do, you will have good content, rest assured. If not, feel free to remind us.

This article comes from GeekScribes

Behold Chrome: New contender in Browser Wars Arena!

Customers are continuing to desert Orange’s ADSL offerings, the firm’s results revealed today.

In the six months to 30 June 44,000 net broadband subscribers quit the firm, leaving it with 1.06 million. Orange said its UK broadband customer base was “levelling off”, but figures released in February showed that just 4,000 net subscribers were lost in the last three months of 2007. On its own numbers, Orange’s decline is accelerating.

Despite the toughening economic conditions, the rest of the big six ISPs have maintained the positive trend in their customer base as the market approaches saturation. Orange has claimed that its failure to capitalise on market growth is a deliberate strategy to allow it to sort out problems with its network.

Revenues for the UK Home Communication Services unit, which also includes fixed line voice telephony, fell 7.7 per cent. Much of the sales slide was due to the industry-wide decline in traditional home telephone usage. The proportion of margin-boosting unbundled ADSL lines rose from 23 per cent last year to 40 per cent, however.

I’m not very surprised though, considering the huge amounts of complaints made by Orange users in Mauritius.

Well, I hope that this “exodus” of subscribers as The Register termed it will influence the folks at Orange MU to offer some better services instead of low speed connections (megabit for the masses is a dream!) and weird capping and monitoring policies.

Comments please?

This article comes from GeekScribes

Orange UK sees subscribers leave

No more captchas – higher flexibility for premium-users

July 02, 2008

By eliminating the captchas we simplified the use of RapidShare’s free services significantly. In addition, free-users can now upload and download bigger files (up to 200 megabyte). Anyhow, to protect RapidShare from congestion caused by automated downloading, we limited the maximum download speed for free-users to 500 kilobit per second. To compensate for that, they do not have to wait anymore until starting a succeeding download.

Premium-users now profit from more flexibility regarding the download volume: It used to be limited to 10 gigabyte per day and can be “saved” now to a maximum of 50 Gigabyte. As a consequence, the volume that was not used is transferred to the following day automatically, up to a maximum of 50 gigabyte. If the complete download capacity is used up during one day, the premium-user is able to save another 10 gigabyte the following day.

(Source)

Enjoy yer leeching mateys for now, yer have no lame captchas. (Ok, sorry for my lame attempt at pirate speech).

This really simplifies downloading off Rapidshare, and I wonder how and if download managers can be used now. Previously, there was competition to see who can crack the RS captchas, now that’s a non-issue.

Oh by the way, the download timer is still there, so you will still have to wait. I’m sure somebody, somewhere will figure out a way to beat that.

Regarding the speed limits and the download limit, I doubt it really affects us Mauritians. Firstly, 500Kbps download speed limit doesn’t matter. Most of us have 128Kbps, or 512Kbps. It’s not that bad. 128Kbps folks will probably be enjoying full speed.

The 10GB limit is plain off-limits to us. I doubt anybody can download 10GBs in Mauritius with our available connections (unless you are an godly haxx0r).

Overall, I find that it’s a good move from Rapidshare to promote its services. But with limits like 10GB per day, or cumulative 50GB, isn’t Rapidshare directly condoning piracy? I don’t think your videos, documents and free music that you may share with others will amount to 10GB daily, will it?

Let’s see your views.

This article comes from GeekScribes

Rapidshare loves you: No Captchas now!