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Where the heck are we? [via Perceive Designs]

GeoURL may provide the answer.

GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor's blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you.

After adding some meta tags to your blog/website and then adding yourself in their database, You can find blogs/websites close to you.

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Finding System Uptime of Windows XP Professional machine

Today I wanted to find out the total Uptime of my Windows XP Pro machine. Found out that there is a systeminfo command line tool that among other things give you the System Up Time info. Here's a batch file script that you can put down quickly to just extract the System Up Time using the systeminfo command line tool.

@systeminfo | @find "System Up Time:"
@pause

Better still, just download this Uptime.exe and run it on your XP Pro machine. Don't worry about what the System Requirements section says, it runs just fine on XP Pro. Here's the output:

D:\>uptime
\\DM has been up for: 0 day(s), 5 hour(s), 29 minute(s), 54 second(s)

Try the uptime /s switch for some really cool stats.

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Generating revenues off Blogs

Paid Content has an article on business potential of weblogs and how some of the niche weblogs can be acquired by the more traditional media companies. The article has a list of some probable M&A marriages. For e.g. Corante Blog being taken over by Wall Street Journal Online, Gawker by New York Observer etc. It also talks of few blogs that were bought by semi-academic institutions in 2002.

...Romenesko's MediaNews and E-Media Tidbits, bought out by the Poynter Institute; Cyberjournalist.net, by the American Press Institute; and Arts and Letters Daily, bought out by The Chronicle of Higher Education (Wasn't TVSpy a weblog before it was bought by Vault.com?)

The article makes clear what they mean by being bought, which is quite important.

...And let me explain the term "bought" here: this may not necessarily mean exchange of money, but could be a package where the blogger gets a salaried position, or a certain cut out of the ad/subscription revenues and other such combinations. As Mark Glaser recently wrote on OJR: "Best-Case Scenario [in 2003]: Smart bloggers get their due, become famous, and can get paid for what they do. Media companies get it, and start assigning blogs as real jobs and not just extra-curricular activities." Amen!

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Now, This is a stretch

According to this Reuters story, Web Monitoring Gives Clues to Broad Economic Trends. And I thought predicting Economy and Economic trends takes a lot of time (years) and statistical data (years) but apparently I am wrong.

So far, comScore has signed up 20 trading clients, including multibillion-dollar hedge fund investors and several of the major investment banks. Costs for macroeconomic and industry sector data start at $50,000 to $100,000 per year and go up from there. The biggest clients pay upward of a million dollars per year, but prefer to keep their uses secret, comScore officials say.

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Happy New Year

Wishing one and all a Very Happy, Fulfilling, Prosperous, Joyous and Fun-filled New Year 2003 !!

Monica and Deepak

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When will Tech Spending Revive?

John Hagel in his latest blog writes:

...technology companies that move now to reposition their sales and marketing efforts will reap the near-term benefit of increasing sales. ...They will be far more credible when they present their vision for the future direction of technology because they will already have demonstrated their understanding and commitment to addressing the needs of their customers today. Most importantly, these few early moving technology vendors may in fact help to catalyze a broader revival of technology spending.


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Adding Balloon Windows to a .NET Application

Introduction to the BalloonWindow class which allows .NET applications to implement balloon windows similar to what is available in Windows XP. Complete customization allows both the appearence and shape to be configured as well as projecting an alpha-blended shadow.

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HumBlog

HumBlog, that's "We Blog" in Hindi language. That's the name of the Indian Blog Portal that Nilesh and gang are coming out with. Here's the cool layout that Nilesh created for this portal. Now Vikas does his turn and comes out with this beautiful collage. Vikas already has a blog portal which is quite underused at this point of time but of late he has done few improvements to the same, like XML-RPC server called Remocon, Ping feature to this server which in turns pings Weblogs.com and the latest one being Reverse ping from Weblogs.com. This is all good stuff.

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First Blog Anniversary

It's one year since we started Blogging. In this one year we blogged about a lot of things with a concentration on .Net/Web Services/mostly techie stuff. It has been a great experience. Not only did we get to read and learn from other blogs, we also made some really great online friends. A year ago Kottke, Glish, Keep Trying, Scripting News were our favourite blogs. Of these Scripting News remains today with many other added (See the blogroll). Kiruba Shankar's blog was the first Indian blog we remember coming across. He is still churning great blogs.

Year 2002 was the year of weblogs, the year when blogging caught the eyes of mainstream press and we are happy that we became a part of this revolution. Although we would have liked to blog every single day of the year but somehow we don't have Wineristic skills. We will continue blogging next year. Here's looking forward to the next several years of blogging and having you all here with us. Cheers !!

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Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays !!

Monica and Deepak

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Top Ten Trends in 2003

The Red Herring Magazine is out with the forecast of the top ten trends for the next year. The list includes Wireless, Hardware/Software, Venture Capital, Semiconductors, Nanotechnology, Financial Reporting, Telecommunications, Biotechnology, Broadcasting and Broadband. I think one of the trends missing from this list is Outsourcing. 2002 was a big year for Outsourcing and the need to cut operating costs and improve the bottom line will even be stronger in 2003. We should see a steady stream of big companies opting for Offshore Outsourcing.

On a lighter note, what Top ten list is complete without "Web Services"...:)

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Time's Persons of the year 2002

Time's Persons of the year 2002 were announced today and they are the The Whistle-Blowers trio: Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom, Coleen Rowley of FBI and Sherron Watkins of Enron. Read the complete story. One question though, Is it not possible some year that Time does not declare Person(s) of the Year.

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User Agent Accessibility Guidelines

W3C released User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 as a W3C recommendation. The guidelines represent agreement among developers and the disability community on accessibility features needed in browsers and multimedia players used to access the Web.

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At the Tomb of the IUnknown Interface [ via Sam Gentile's Weblog ]

Verity Stob says Bye-Bye to COM in this as usual great article. British Programing Humor at its best.

Sam is singing "Bye Bye Miss American Pie". Well, I am not sure if I can sing that song or not. I am still coding ASP based applications and most of the times COM/COM+ is what constitutes the middleware. There's some more time for me to evolve doing VB.Net/ASP.Net. But yes, I've started humming the chorus part: 

So, bye-bye, Miss American Pie
     drove my chevy to the levee
but the levee was dry,
     and them good old boys were 
drinkin' whiskey and rye
     singin' this'll be the day that I die,
this'll be the day that I die.

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Froogle Google [ via marketingfix]

Froogle, another cool service from Google.

Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google's search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase.

Features I liked: You can search by price, by price range and the results show images of the products along with the the $ values(most of the times). And if you wonder what kind of name Froogle is, here's the answer.