Why I hate windows live GM

If you read this post at newsgang, you'll see a lot of cool new things about windows live search, but this just isn't cool:

14:00 Ask how Microsoft is going to convince late adopters to use Microsoft Search. I tell a story about how it took me years to get my dad to use Google. Brad says that Google is the only brand that has equity in search. Says that most people don’t even know there’s a choice.

Hmmm, reminds me of something some company did with their operating system. I think it was called Windows.

Do NOT tell me "most people don't know there is a choice". Microsoft has, in many occasions, tried to prevent people from having a choice. You could instead say things like "Our strategy is blah blah blah", that would make more sense to me.

To this day, there are people who don't know of any choice, because they buy their PCs and laptops and find windows on them.

You know when will I ever support such a statement? When you start providing choice to your customers, I would love to go buy a PC and have the sales guy ask me "What would I rather use?" at least I can think about using your products.

Of course this being a search engine, it is very easy for someone to switch from Google to windows live, unlike switching OSs. However, it's also very hard to do so, when one company just won the hearts of many many people "Google".

There's just something that isn't right about trying out windows live. Mahalo, even though it's new, I managed to try it, but windows live, no thanks!

To Microsoft : "Enjoy the taste of your own poison".

SCM for Tiny projects

Every time I hear about the importance of SCM, I get this feeling in my gut, why should I use SCM anyway? My project is stupid enough as it is!

Bringing peace to a chaotic project:

I don't think that using SCM is about managing the code only. It's about adding more brains to the project, and making the sum of two brains greater than or equal double the brain power of one person.

To me a SCM should do allow each change to be labelled. It should allow people to work independent of my server. And it should accept the fact that radical changes may happen to the project in the near future(that's why I'm chaotic).

SCMs that I'm considering are darcs and bazaar. I would also like to try out git, but git being only linux-friendly right now, is going to be a problem with windows programes.

I'll be sure to post stuff on all of them soon.

File copying done right

Wait for me, I just need to copy this file!

Couldn't they just replace the time remaining with, you have 3 generations or so left. That just blew me away.

I like what Ubuntu 8.04 have done, they just allow you to minimize it to the tray i.e. I don't even care.

Of course this being almost half way means that I had waited about 40000 days already, right? and why are you telling me 11 hours, do I look like I would care after 40485 days?

Death of a luddite, Rise of the machines

As you may have seen in my blog, I have been doing my final exams, and still am, for the past 2 months. When the exam season started, my father started using the laptop I used to test stuff on and use occasionally. Every time I'd go out for a smoke I would see him sitting on it and, surprisingly, Immersed in something.

My father is your regular dude who goes to work and comes home to have some rest then repeat. However, ever since he got in touch with the internet in more than just using email. New discussions started flaming in the house about how Youtube is better than TV and how Google Sketchup is better than hiring an Autocad designer.

He started thinking about the internet as a platform(yes web 2.0) as opposed to web as an alternative to newspapers, life soon shifted from the world to the inside of a browser. He started evangelizing sharing and collaboration at his work, from what I have seen while walking by him, he used Google docs at home with his colleagues.

What to expect in the near future?

As we progress towards the future, I keep having this feeling of getting closer to a world where, people have a universal machine operated ID, we have our health accounts, blogs, work, art, videos, nearly everything we do is based on the internet right now.

I expect people to have a better quality of living because of the explosion of Web 2.0 ideologies. People who previously sat with no friends will soon join and build their communities, knowledge will start to grow from within the mists of farms and previously Luddite-infested lands.

Of course this may sound a bit late to those of you who aren't among the 29% of Americans who don't even have internet access, but it isn't. I have previously thought we are nearing to the end of evolution of technology, but now, I can only say we are no where near the start of the big picture. I believe what Tim O'Reilly suddenly started to talk about is actually true.

Your site is boring!

I have noticed recently that most online services like iGoogle, twitter, youtube homepage, blogger and many others, give you the ability to customize your page.

Why can't youtube be like that. with youtube you only get to customize the look of your homepage, that is really annoying especially since people at the same company(Google) have managed to give users this flexibility in iGoogle, where you can move around panels and have applications doing all sorts of things run in your iGoogle page, just like Facebook too.

I want to be able to change the position of the related videos section, or the video player itself, maybe throw in a little gadget. Sure you may say things like "This is not what youtube is about", but the power of having a customizable or, in extreme cases, programmable interface is really huge.

I'm sure if the guys working on youtube asked the iGoogle guys for a hand they'll do it for them. Really it starts to get annoying after having the power of customizing everything I get, then going to this site and having to accept it the way it is.

Of course there are exceptions, things like twitter are one of them. Twitter is all about simplicity. You get to write your 140 characters and change the the colors, their goal is "Simplicity". But youtube isn't, because every now and then they keep adding those weird features. So why not get a bit closer and allow the user to customize his YOUTUBE, more.

What is time?

Often times I hear people talk about how much they would have done if they had the time. How much their life could be better now if they had more time. How they failed the exam, because they had no time.

There are others of course who say I succeeded because I had time, and because I have been reading through the same material for 10 years, etc.. I believe these are mere excuses, we just choose to blame something other than ourselves and what thing could beat that mysterious object called "TIME".

If I told you that you have 20 years to work on something, would this affect what you will do to achieve success in that something? Would it affect your attitude towards doing that something?

I think it wont't affect the result, because you have been asked to do something specific. However, since you are so bound to the idea that, the more time the merrier, your attitude must be affected in a good way.

So why is this bad? why should this be a problem for anyone?

We as humans do not control time, we do things and time goes by. We can't be controled by time, our actions aren't a function of time, it is a function of your brain. For people to say I have enough time, is laughable to me.

If you are bound to something you can't control, then you come in to problems when that something does things that aren't in your favor. So when time is little you feel this worry and anxeity and stress. On the other hand if you didn't care about time, which you naturally are doing, you will get the same job done more efficiently, since you spent less time worrying about not having enough time and more time on actually doing the thing.

The problem I'm having is, Why do we even worry about time? If what we do will be the same regardless of what time we have left. Then why waste your precious brain power on worrying.

I need to learn how to KISS like mobaganda*

No more spam, just getting things done, FAST. Mobaganda* really kept it simple.

A while ago, me and my brother wanted to try it out. We wanted to see what this thing can do, besides let us get away without creating an account. So I gave my brother the link to an event and he registered himself with me.

We(the attendees) now have an email, so we can get notified by email if we should wear birthday hats on our way or not. Great job!

This is really an example everyone should try to copy the principles of. The principle here is, don't be an ASS and just let things easier for the user. Now if grandma wants to create some knitting party, she can with mobaganda*, with things like evite, well lets just say she would end up canceling the whole party