Skype UB for Mac

Yay! Skype, an application that I dearly love and appreciate finally has UB (universal binary- which means you can run this application on Intel mac's without having extra software (rosetta) running)... so it runs faster, way more faster. And now I can use it without a problem. Except one thing is missing, who can I talk to?

But I usually use Skype to talk to many friends, and developers all over the world sometimes to get suggestions for something that I'm working on or even help. Since everybody uses computers these days, it's become the telephone of today (although the same can be said for VoIP). And may be that's why some countries are trying to block it because who wouldn't want some free long distance calls? And some companies are even creating gadgets for skype... but I'm not sure if it is going to be a reality.

And in other news, wasn't the Macbook supposed to be released today? I guess Apple tricked us all... again.

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Am I good or what?

In business class today we were playing the fictionary 'business/entrepreneur' game over at JA. Interestingly enough my team was mostly made up of people who didn't speak English as their first language (also commonly known as ESL students) but that didn't matter... because they were smart.

So today we started playing the game, and sure enough we had a strategy... a good one. Our plan was to make companies feel like they shouldn't change anything and if they kept doing what they were doing... they would do fine. And of course, it worked like a charm.

Until the last quarter we didn't attempt to get the first place, however we stayed in second place although getting first place was quite possible. But when the last quarter came, we changed everything in our plan, so that we could be the company. Unfortunately I can't tell you the strategy yet. Mainly because the game isn't done yet and we are going to be playing another one soon, and giving out my plans would make me a traitor. And when you are a president of a group then that's the last thing you would want!

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Got Milk Mic?

How come nobody seems to have a microphone with them... almost nobody in my group (in business class) doesn't seem to have a microphone. Then how am I going to make a podcast over Skype? I guess I will have to use the computer at school (they're good but I don't think they have Audition). Along with that, I don't think I will have enough time to edit and so on.

Oh well I guess there's nothing I can do about it. I wonder how many people don't have a microphone (and no the ones in web cams don't count).

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Scary Movie 4 was hilarious

If there is one movie that you can watch I would recommend Scary Movie 4... by far. Although it doesn't have a theme as such (well it's a mixture of other scary movies) it is downright hilarious, and I can't stop laughing. If you've watched other movies like the grudge or the village, then it's going to be even more funny, you'll see when you decide to go and see the movie.

I've watched other movies (like RV) as well however this one wins my vote for one of the best right now. I still can't stop laughing...

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Firefox - The Blinking Cursor Problem

Quick Answer: Press the F7 key, and turn off Caret Browsing

Long Answer:
Recently I was reinstalling Firefox, because I was trying to check if reinstalling it is going to ruin my profile (like it did last time) or not. After all that was done and I opened up Firefox and went to browse around I noticed that the cursor started blinking on the screen.

Now, since I've played around quite a bit with Firefox, I didn't panic because I instantly knew that it was a feature called 'caret browsing' (not really... :) it took me a while to figure out what in the world it was!). The main reason that Firefox has this feature is that you can select text with your keyboard.


If you want to get rid of this the solution is simple... press F7 (or read the next paragraph if you are on a mac and your F7 key is mapped to something else.. if you press F7 it should work on your mac too but just in case it doesn't)! And if you want to turn it on again then you need to do the same as well. So now when you see blinking cursors on the screen when you are browsing through web pages don't freak out... it's just caret browsing.

Oh and as Long Island Nurse points out, pressing F7 isn't the only way. You can also type in "about:config" in the address bar and then type in "caret" in the filter box and simply double click to change the option from "true" (which means turn on caret browsing) to "false" (which means turn off caret browsing). Thanks Long Island Nurse!

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How to start Podcasting

Today in class we talked a little bit about podcasting, and this is just a quick note to tell you that I will soon write up an article on how to do that.

However before I do that you might want to take a look at Audacity and get familiar with it... because that is what the tutorial is going to be based on. So go on and download it (you also might want to get the LAME encoder pack) and get ready for podcasting! And if you are going to do a podcast with someone far away I suggest you also get Skype and get familiar with that as well.

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Sphere is here

Today I was just browsing through the net (just like any other day) and I realized that Google blogsearch wasn't the only one out there. First I must say that Sphere a San Fransisco based start up has a great site design, very intuitive and easily navigable and I absolutely love (well it's not perfect, but close enough) their gradient selection, it reminds me of the Visual Studio site. And by the looks of it since Google is looking out for more programmers I don't think their blog search is going to look as good as Sphere any time soon. The same goes for technorati, although technorati does seem to show only the most recent posts made by bloggers.

In ability to search through blogs is just as good. And I've actually got a couple of hits from Sphere already! Along with that all the posts are indexed from the past 4 months, so you can easily search through all the different posts I've put up. By default it only searches through the posts put up in the last week though however this can easily be changed by changing the setting to 'last four months'. Choosing the 'custom range' option is also a good way of getting more of what you want.

However, when I compared the search results with the Google Blogsearch Sphere didn't do all that well. For example I searched on 'iPod Shuffle Problems' one of the top posts in this blog on Blogsearch and my post was the 9th post. On Sphere it wasn't even there. Why? Because it wasn't indexed yet because this post was made a while ago... This experiment was also repeated on technorati (using normal settings) with similar results as Sphere, my post wasn't to be seen anywhere. Along with that for some reason technorati seemed to be down when I was trying to search.

So I guess it is safe to say that each have their own advantages and disadvantages... and Sphere might turn out to be the better one if they can do a great job of indexing (since right now they are out to get new servers I believe) and probably try to implement some light-weight AJAX (i.e. AJAX that doesn't take too much time to load) to give it a little web 2.0 pizzaz (but too much web 2.0 is bad as well). Therefore, right now I think Google Blogsearch is the best if you want to search through blogs in particular in general although results might vary.

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