Sparkle is out. Awesome!

If you are one of those who installed IE 7 BETA 1 and then got a little frustrated every time:

• You open a website with too many cross-scripts and your browser hangs up
• You have 100% CPU utilization every now and then
• You didn't think the RSS reader feature was too much
• You had a few instances of iexplore.exe always running under your processes without any browser window open
• You tried deleting a registry key as mentioned in the IE blog that promised to help you out, but didn't
• You have provided enough feedback to MS now through crash dumps and are now set to wait for the next version, which hopefully will be more stable
• And you don't blame MS at all, because you agreed to install a BETA product

If you were wondering formatting your system is the only option, just read on.

There are multiple options available to get back to good old IE 6:

1. If you were smart enough to set a restore point in Win XP, revert back

2. If you weren't that smart, you still can uninstall IE through the control panel. But hey wait a minute - I can't see IE listed there. Just check on "Show Updates" and under Microsoft Windows XP, you will see Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1.

I got my invite to Live Mail BETA.

Simply fabulous! And my Hotmail ID continues with a 2GB storage space.

Microsoft is turning 30 years old!  Three decades is a long, long time to stay at the top!

Here's a special: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/goingbeyond/indexFlash.html

Do check out the timeline.

I had read about Wine long, long ago. It is heartening to seem them finally dropping a BETA.

Check out http://www.winehq.org/

Wine is a fascinating project. It is an open source implementation of the Windows API on top of the X and Unix platforms. This means that any Windows application can now run on Unix. They also have a program loader allowing Windows apps to run straight out on x86 systems. Cool stuff.

Check out http://appdb.winehq.org/ to see applications that have already run on Wine. Microsoft Money, Paint Shop Pro, several games, Internet Explorer, Dreamweaver, the list is endless.

With Microsoft Windows Services For Unix (which by the way took way less time to develop than the 12-year Wine project - I just had to say that!) and the Wine BETA release, can I dare to say that the desktop is almost unified? 

This is simply mind-blowing!!

For all those who thought start.com was just an imitation, for all those who did not believe, for all those who believed, for all those who thought Microsoft is way behind in the Web 2.0 race, for all those who thought a search giant is the future, for all those who love technology and computing, here's the next big thing - the present redefined and the future.

www.live.com

www.officelive.com

Here's the official announcement: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/nov05/11-01PreviewSoftwareBasedPR.mspx

I love pizza. And there is this Pizza Hut close to where I live in Bangalore which is where I usually order from. Now, I wake up this morning and get to my mail box (read snail mail, not email) and find a nice brochure that read:

Hello Pandurang! Do you know how fresh Pizza is made?

And all of it was printed, not on a paper that was stuck on to the brochure, but actually printed on the face of the brochure. Though I had actually read the content of the brochure in a newspaper advertisement before, this one brought a smile to my face - just to think that they'd gone through the trouble to personalize these brochures and actually deliver them to the right addresses too.

It was a simple 'wow' and will sure go some way in putting Pizza Hut into your list of subconscious favorites. Probably.

Personalization has been around for quite some time now. The most popular personalization gimmicks started when the Internet caught on, with "Welcome, John Smith" messages to personalizing colors, fonts, themes, layouts and content.  All of it simple user profiling - I've coded this functionality many times myself.

But today, that is no longer a 'wow' factor. That's expected. Today's personalization, to create a wow, has to go notches above that.

An example is when Reason magazine printed 40,000 different covers to one issue of their magazine, each carrying a satellite image (similar to what you see in Google maps today) of the subscriber's home. That is ground-breaking personalization.

I think today's users need that kind of personalization to be realized by websites (or portals) like MSN, Yahoo and the like. www.google.com/ig is once again trying to solve an old problem in a more AJAX-based, stylish manner. But the real value-add would be when the personalization was context-based (and I don't mean the user entering search keywords and seeing feeds based on search results - that's just lame because I still have to define the keywords).

The need of the day is personalization that is really personal. Who will provide the answers?