Sometimes I happen to hate myself for loving little geeky applications. In the past I used to play with WindowBlinds and WindowFX from Stardocks. I had this period (like 80% of geeky PC users) when I wanted my Windows to look and act like a Mac. That’s when I adopted FlyaKite. Well you’ll see i’m still using it!! Just gotten used to it.

Few days ago, I discovered ReflexVision. This tiny application is a windows switcher. People usually use Alt+Tab. This one goes a bit further and makes the thing really smooth and eye candy.
A good thing is that it really doesn’t take much of your RAM.
When you download it, you have got 100 uses for free.
This shareware only costs $9.99.
I thought that would be a nice occasion to set up the little video demo below (only 1:05)

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I was browsing Yahoo! Answers and suddenly I saw the “highest” avatar I have even seen. See, the normal size of an avatar is a little square right? If you have set up your avatar in the options, it will show next to your question. If you do not have an avatar, you will get a grey square.
Well it seem there might be a flaw in this module!!!

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I stumpled upon this Cnet article in which it is stated that, at the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, Chris Sacca, head of business development for Google, revealed:

We are not going to be selling music

For over a year, many facts have been unveiled to prove that Google was indeed going to open a music store, and this is only an example taken from an article on Cnet blog:

The most recent evidence is adding “/music” to google.com’s robots.txt file, meaning that such a subdirectory is expected to be created any time.
We also noticed this odd behavior earlier today. No “google.com/music” Web site exists on the public Internet. But searching Google’s index for “google.com/music” yields a different result than the standard “Sorry, no information is available for the URL” error message. - Declan McCullagh

Would I want Google to open a webbased music store? Honestly, I do not think this would change my life at all. In fact I am not so much into buying music. Don’t get me wrong I’m not downloading much either. In fact, I just stream it from Yahoo! Music Unllimited.
Some say they really care about owning the music. Some say they would never buy music online but would rather get a CD to own the music “for real” (?).

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A hot topic on the blogsphere this week was Microsoft’s demo of Photosynth. This new software, not yet released, will enable us to take different pictures and minlge them a 3D environment. A link between two pictures is realized by focusing on a similar element that is displayed in both of them to create an effect of panorama. Basically the recurrent element in the two different view of this element will be merged in a 3D frame {...]

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At the very beginning of my recent experience on Ubuntu Linux I had to do many researches to undertand the logic behind this new system. It is not easy to move to a completly new platform when you have been using Microsoft Windows for over ten years…
Once I was set up with Ubuntu, I played around with it for a month. And I then quickly got my way around. But then I was like “so what?”. It’s not any faster than Windows and you find less software for Linux. So, I could not find any reasons that would make me stick to it… Funny enough some people are convinced that it is still more valuable than XP but nevertheless they either have a dual boot or are using VMWare server or Wine to emulate XP… I say either you take it, either you leave it!!

So as I said, the switch might very well disturb you in the first days. A common question asked by beginners is

How do you install a new program on Ubuntu Linux?

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Chris Price, a former blogger of the Unofficial Yahoo! Weblog who recently moved to Download Squad, wrote an article that caught my attention: All this talk about online storage, but where’s Yahoo?? This is a question that I have been asking myself for quite a long time actually. this is also a question that I had been writing on when I was at InsideYahoo.net.
True it is odd that Yahoo! did not announce a product to compete with the soon-to-be-released GDrive and Live Drive.
Back in February, when I paid a visit to Yahoo! I asked the question: “And what about the Briefcase, what is going to be like? Are there any plans to give it a facelift?”. The answer simply was “no”. I was a bit surprised and tried to further the discussion. My interlocutor, whose name I am not going to mention over here, told me that they had not received any informations concerning the future of the product and that it was not listed among the services that were to be upgraded. I thought this person might have been subjected to some non-disclosure agreements, which I would perfectly understand, but then why was i able to preview our Messenger 8 concept 6 months before its release (and yeh, that was hard not to tell the world about it!!)

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Ernie Hsiung, a web developper at Yahoo and who has been working on the Yahoo! 360 platform, created a nice plugin for users of the Yahoo! Music Jukebox, formely known as the Yahoo! Music Engine.

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I am really shocked to see such a product coming out. My Space Guardian Toolbar could have been a nice addition for users of My Space. It offers what look like to be very cool features including:
- Search Using Your Favorite Search Engine
- Automatically Login to MySpace
- Track eMails, Inviations, Friend Requests
- Notifies You When Friends Add to Your Page
- Make/Receive Skype Calls from Your Toolbar
- Communicate with Your Friends with Video

But here is the thing: they do not stop there.
They are entertaining people’s paranoïa - not to say increasing it to a frightening level. With the toolbar, here is what you will be able to do:
- Map Sexual Predators in Your Neighborhood
- Find Sexual Predators with Photo Search
- Send Predator Maps to Your Friends
- Report Suspected Predators

First, I understand there might be differences between the United States of America and France (or Europe). In the past, I was already shocked to learn that people are be able to identify the house ex- sexual aggressors after they spent their time in prison. Many people would then move to another neighborhood. It reminds me a lot about the Scarlet Letter worn by sinful people during the Puritan ages and Hester Prynne’s exclusion from the rest of the society…but hey, that was few centuries ago!!! Isn’t it time to evolve a little bit?

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About frour years ago, when I started to get interested in computing and webservices, I wanted to find a way to deeply control the visual appearance of my computer. I believe most of today’s geek have had this early stage. So I was tweaking the Windows XP registry applying chages found here and there in magazines.
Then I discovered Stardock. Stardock is a company that provides tools to enrich the user experience by creating various visual effects. The most popular software offered by the company probably is WindowBlinds which main rival is Style XP from TGTSoft. WindowBlinds was on my wishlist for Christmas and I got it from….the girlfriend I used to be with in those days… I guess you can’t imagine how she regretted buying this stuff for me!! I spent several hours downloading themes; oh and of course I didn’t find the right one!!
I think it was last year when I bought the WindowFX application from the same company. As its name suggests, WindowFX give you control on the windows by adding effects when you open/close/drag it on the screen.
Many people complain that those kind of softwares are eating up a lot of RAM. I have never really experience this kind of problems because I am not using very heavy applications.

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Jr from Y! Cool Thing just made my day!! I discovered this fantastic lightweight MP3 streamer offered by del.icio.us

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Yahoo! recently announced a partnership with Norton to distribute their suite of protective tools, Norton Internet Security. The product is now available for download.
The suite includes: Norton Anti-Virus, Norton Personal Firewall, Privacy Control, Norton anti-spam, Parental control.

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I tend to disagree a lot with most of the articles published over at the Register.co.uk. Their well-know anti-Microsoft attitude whenever the company announces a product has turned into an immature childish attitude. Seeing the number of unread articles on my Bloglines I was like “ok let’s see what they wrote.” Surprisingly enough, an article caught my attention. It is entitled: “Women love gadgets, survey shows“. Yeh!

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I have received my invitation to try out WidgetBox. This is a new service that enables to choose among different series of widgets to put on your website/blog. There are various categories to browse (Medias, Fun, Communication…). Some of the stuff you find over there look promising. Overall the widgets are good, however, not good enough for me to use. Most of them are branded utilities and were based on famous websites (NewsVines, Technorati, Jotspot, Pixrat, Yahoo!, Reddit, last.fm…..).

How to boost the number of Meebo users? Simply by creating this marvellous widget. Meebo is a webbased multimessenger service. I created an account few months ago gathering my GTalk, Yahoo and MSN accounts. In the past I would have just sticked to Yahoo Messenger. Today, the interoperability with MSN is cool but not yet really finished.[...]

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I read the new over at Techcrunch. Yahoo! has launched another blog blog but this time, it is the official corporate blog: Yodel Anectodal. For someone like me who has been actively following the company, this is undoubtingly a great place to watch. Though I don’t have enough time to continue my work over at Inside Yahoo! I keep an eye on all their product blog.
You will read bits of news about the company and the discussion will be yours by bringing your feedbacks.[...]

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Yeh, I am really disappointed by the service they provide and the road they’re hitting. The last entries at the Yahoo! 360 blog feature the last addition to the web software, including a how-to embbed videos in a post or the addition of a quick chat module.
Unfortunately it seems to me that team has failed to solve the major problems over their service. Yahoo! 360 has been around for a year and a half and it is still under bêta. In my opinion a bêta product should focus on the main features and stop implementing cool but secondary tools.[...]

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