The Enduring Magic Of Software

"My optimism for the future of computing has never been greater" - Bill gates, in the InformationWeek Magazine

Alternative to MS Powerpoint

Eric Meyer and gang has released a very useful alternative to Microsoft Powerpoint called S⁵. It uses XHTML, CSS and Javascript and thus is very usable and accessible. The feature I like most is that it is very printer friendly. Check it out.

S⁵ is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible. Anyone with even a smidgen of familiarity with HTML or XHTML can look at the markup and figure out how to adapt it to their particular needs. Anyone familiar with CSS can create their own slide show theme. It's totally simple, and it's totally standards-driven.

Webnote - Another Collaboration tool

Webnote is a tool for taking notes on your computer. It allows you to quickly write something down during a meeting, class, or any other time that you have a web browser(IE 6, Mozilla/Firefox, Safari supported) available. You start by creating a workspace and creating notes in the workspace. You can save your workspace at any time and return to them from the same computer or any other computer. You can also share your notes with others by providing the workspace name (or url) to a friend.

The best part, you can create RSS feed of any workspace (consisiting of one or multiple notes). Check it out.

Google Desktop Search

Mother of all Search Engines, Google, delivers a baby for your desktop, Google Desktop. Although in beta version, this thing rocks.

• Find your email, files, web history and chats instantly
• View web pages you've seen, even when you're not online
• Search as easily as you do on Google

It will directly compete with Lookout (bought by Microsoft) for Outlook Searches. While I am very satisfied with Lookout, Google as always takes your attention. I searched for some names using Lookout and Google Desktop and no suprises there, both returned very similar results. You can even Reply, Reply to All, Forward, Compose or View the mail in Outlook, all from the google Search results page. This is very cool. For people who mind installing .Net Framework which is a requirement for Lookout to work, Google will be the de-facto search engine for both WWW and Desktop.

Open Workbench

Free Alternative to Microsoft® Project.

GMail Drive shell extension

Noticed many blogs talking about GMail Drive. Way too cool. More information below:

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium.
GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag'n'drop files to.

Ever since Google started to offer users a GMail e-mail account, which includes storage space of a 1000 megabytes, you have had plenty of storage space but not a lot to fill it up with. With GMail Drive you can easily copy files to your GMail account and retrieve them again.
When you create a new file using GMail Drive, it generates an e-mail and posts it to your account. The e-mail appears in your normal Inbox folder, and the file is attached as an e-mail attachment. GMail Drive periodically checks your mail account (using the GMail search function) to see if new files have arrived and to rebuild the directory structures. But basically GMail Drive acts as any other hard-drive installed on your computer.
You can copy files to and from the GMail Drive folder simply by using drag'n'drop like you're used to with the normal Explorer folders.

Tata Infotech joins Mainframe Migration Alliance

One of the things I was involved in the last few weeks was partnering with Microsoft in the Mainframe Migration Alliance. The Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA) is a group of companies that are working together to help customers migrate workloads off of the mainframe and onto the Microsoft platform. The Alliance represents a group of companies that have their interests aligned in making Mainframe Migrations easier and more efficient for customers. Tata Infotech (company I work for) has a long history of successful Mainframe Migration projects. Many of these migrations have been to the Wintel (MS Windows + Intel) platform (using .NET/Java technologies), so it was but obvious for us to join this alliance. I look forward to working with Microsoft and other alliance partners in helping our Customers move from Mainframe platforms to Windows.

Press Releases
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/sep04/09-28MainFrameMigrationPR.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2004/sep04/09-28MigrationAlliance.asp

Where have I been, Where am I going?

Last few months have been very hectic for me on the work front and whatever time I could take out (very minimal), I tried to spend it with my wife. The result being, it left very little time to blog (both read and write) and other things I love to do. Hopefully, the long work hours will subside and I will get good time to blog.