For those who didn’t know already, I am currently at Rockville, Maryland (USA). Whenever you are in the US, you will realize the importance of online maps (and offline too at times) and the way these maps can familiarize you quickly with an unknown territory.

Mapquest and Yahoo were probably the forerunners of online maps till Google came around. Google Maps and Google Earth were simply too good and they used some neat AJAX-ing to get the wonderful effect of these “sliding maps” when you moved around.

Yesterday I was talking to Rosh, who was busy looking to see if he could see a satellite image of me when he was talking to me over the phone, and then I told him that MSN Virtual Earth is also a good alternative.

I had myself visited MSN Virtual Earth very long ago, and so decided to check it out. For one, MSN Virtual Earth now powers Windows Live Local and the interface seemed very confusing some time ago. But now it all makes sense.

It is simply the best web-based map tool interface – and I’m not being partial. The Scratch Pad is such a wonderful concept. I hate it when I have to keep typing the address again and again in other tools once you’ve moved elsewhere.

The best feature of all is the “Bird’s Eye View”. Seeing is definitely believing here – you got to see it to appreciate it. It gives you a much clearer idea of the map than the satellite map which shows you the rooftops of buildings that you wouldn’t anyway be able to see.

I also like the nifty tools and the neat menu interface on the top. Also try the directions when you are viewing in bird’s eye view, the map shows you step-wise landmarks of where you have to take a right or a left.

To the friends at Redmond – GREAT WORK!

With no particular intention of looking at something in particular, I was looking at a few blogs and came across KPL - Kid's Programming Language. An official website is hosted at www.kidsprogramminglanguage.com and MSDN has a few articles on KPL (owing to the fact that it is developed using C# - if you didn't know, MSDN has a section called coding4fun which has to do with Game Programming and stuff).

Now, KPL is pretty interesting. It is a language with editor and all, and is pretty simple. I am not quite sure how easy it would be for kids to work with, but I guess if somebody has the aptitude, they could pick it up pretty soon.

KPL revived some memories of my own younger days. I was in school when I first got introduced to programming. BASIC used to be the language for kids then and I got a hang of BASIC pretty soon. BASIC continued to be my favourite language for a long time and I worked with various BASIC interpreters - BASICA, Microsoft QBASIC and the others that shipped in floppy disks at that time.

I still think kids can learn a lot more with BASIC. I have met many kids and students of late who were born in the Windows era. They have absolutely no exposure to DOS - not that I blame them. But DOS was fun. BASIC was great fun - screen modes, sounds, animation and all.

I wish there was still a version of BASIC (not Visual Basic) floating around for the kids. KPL is probably attempting to take that place, but it is not quite BASIC, arguably the first PC computer language and the one Bill Gates himself coded in years ago.

UPDATE: Check this Channel 9 post on KPL: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=166995

Manoj G is the latest addition to thinkingMS. Great to have him included.

At the moment, www.thinkingMS.com/manoj is just a migration of his older Brinkster site.  He'll be updating the site shortly and creating his own space.

Manoj also blogs on http://msmvps.com/manoj/

Welcome Manoj!

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.