Season's Greetings...

This year, we have been through many things, but He never faltered in giving us blessings, and families friends to be with us all the way. While talking to a very good friend, i mentioned that Christmas has become less and less important to me, and to be honest, i'm still waiting for that Christmas when I would feel the true, and purest meaning of Christmas. Beyond the lights, beyond the music, beyond the cool breeze, beyond everthing and anything this world has to offer. I am longing for that Christmas day when even if everthing around me is screwed up, i can stop for a minute, close my eyes and say. "This is Christmas..."

Here's hoping the best and most meaningful Christmas for you and your families....

Merry Christmas everyone!

Yahoo acquires del.icio.us

FAKINA!

That's it, i'm officially giving Yahoo the Social web champion trophy. They're such a friggin' slick company buyers that I think they're going to rule the social web revolution should it take off really well (beyond the gates of geekdom).

They just bought del.icio.us! Honestly, my google-fan heart is really broken coz this would be the second kick-ass web 2.0 app that I really wanted for Google to buy. Flickr, of course being the first one. I don't care if social search (yahoo's bet) will rule over insanely-smart, purely algorithm-based search (google's) or not. I love del.icio.us (and flickr) and now my geek dream of seeing them integrated with Google's services just crumbled before my eyes.

And please, o please, no "you're such a geek" comments. Tell me something i don't know. And if my ranting over "some crappy website with a very hard-to-type URL being bought by Yahoo" gives you the impression that I need to seek help, then "Hello there! Welcome to my world. " :P Now if you'll excuse me while i lick my wounds...

Looking at the bigger picture, i don't see del.icio.us fitting in the Google grand scheme of things anyway....(cough! bitter cough!).

Gmail updates

• You can now see RSS Clips right in your inbox (technically, right at the top). this feature has been selectively launched before.


• Word, OpenOffice(!) and PDF attachements can now be viewed directly as HTML,


• Shortcuts for addresses and tracking numbers,


• and the previously launched Virus scanning feature (which is soo transparent some people might not even notice it)

on the other side of the fence, for those who got in to the New Yahoo Mail beta (the two of you) a full-pledged integrated RSS Reader feature has just been added to the beta service.

now back to work...

Google: Ten Golden Rules

Written by Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Hal Varian - the 10 Golden rules that Google follow in handling knowledge workers....

on the Don't evil section:

...nobody throws chairs at Google, unlike management practices used at some other well-known technology companies. We foster to create an atmosphere of tolerance and respect, not a company full of yes men.

Heh.

Angel was reading the article in front of my boss (at work) and at the end of the article, my boss quipped, albeit jokingly: "Para pala tayong Google eh". haha. I just laughed, the Google fan that I am. And i responded, with angel: "actually oo nga sir." Truth be told, my boss has no experience in managing knowledge workers in the field of IT. He has been a true-blue engineer all his career life. Chose to remain as an engineer working as an engineer, and refused to go up the corporate ladder. Somehow though, he gets the part about catering to knowledge workers' needs, and it's no surprise that he does, he's a very kind and rational man. Angel and I really enjoy everything in our work. Free meals, Free swimming sessions twice a week, super flexi time, we can work at home if we have to and a lot of other little stuff that i probably missed out.

Instant Apply in Firefox Options

One of the things that I really like about how the Mac user interface is designed is that in its preferences windows, changes are applied on the fly. Of course, Firefox 1.5, being the good platform (whichever one) app-citizen that it is, has implemented this instant-apply feature in its mac and linux versions. But in the Windows world, where the mighty (and ambiguous) OK/APPLY button rules, things are still the same...(yawn) But i really like the transparency of the instant-apply feature. It's a good thing the firefox guys gave us the option enable this in the Windows version of Firefox as well.

to do this, take a trip to your bestfriend about:config page and set browser.preferences.instantApply to true

look ma, no OK button!

I've been testing the pre-release builds for weeks now (even installed it on my stinky officemate's machine without her permission), and finally, it's here!

A few of the new things in the front-end:

• blazingly fast BACK and FORWARD buttons..
  
• draggable tabs
• Clear Private Data (CTRL-SHIFT-DEL) is your friend. ;)
• prettier options dialog
• a very robust and modern update mechanism (full reinstall is a thing of the past now)
  
• prettier Error pages (die! error dialogs die!)

Here's the comprehensive What's New page.

Gtalkr

update: added the link.


Next to flickr, this by far is one of the niftiest flash-based web app that i can remember. Heck, i like it so much that i gave my gmail password away even if it's a third party app, and not affiliated with Google... for now hehe.

Gtalkr is a web-based implementation of Google Talk, plus a few additional quirks, like a view of your Gmail inbox, extensions.... definitely worth checking out. No voice yet, though.

-picked up from Pinoy Tech Blog, thru the Pinoy Tech Scence planet. Still with me?

Excuses Excuses

Our small blog commnunity has been pretty quiet for a while now..

Seriously, what's your excuse for not blogging?

Task management

Angel's cork board. Priorities, priorities...