//beconfused

I was trying to copy a Expression Blend preview over to my thumbdrive and Windows Vista reports that it will take it 25802 days 5 hours. I still smile when I see the following screenshot:

Software is the only product that you actually purchase with the expection that there will be bugs. There are typically 2 types of software - buggy software and very buggy software. It almost seems excusable for companies to sell buggy products.

Oh yeah, it didn’t take 70 years of course. It took just a minute plus.

Everyone is talking about Web 2.0 these days. Honestly, I don’t really like to use that term a lot as it has been overused and has, in my opinion, kinda lost its meaning.

Today, Web 2.0 can mean anything - video content, social networking, social news, social bookmarking, Ajax, Prototype libraries, JSON, accordion visual effects, mash-ups, Ruby on Rails, XML, and whatever.

It’s a marketing term for any webservice that is published after 2005. Google managed to revolutionize the way people understand ‘beta’. Today, some products is following some sort of a perpectual beta idea, meaning it’s just beta forever. That, once again, is pure marketing.

(Facebook has communities for Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web 4.0, Web 5.0 and in case you haven’t noticed - Web �??.0.)

Has the web really changed that much? Sure it has, but it didn’t just come overnight. It came a long way and Web 2.0 describes the awakening - the awakening of ordinary people such as my mom and my elephant - and the reintroduction of these technologies. Magazines that cover whatever Web 2.0 ideas are selling like hotcakes and if you actually read a couple of them you’ll realize none is particularly clear of what Web 2.0 is.

Because it just is so many things! But ultimately, I think Web 2.0 is about you and me addicted to connecting and sharing information. It’s as if we allow ourselves to be part of a whole movement. Just thinking of that scares me, but the thought never fails to make me tingle with excitement.

Currently in beta, Windows Live Messenger 8.5 would sport a new interface. It looks much beta and cooler and has a more consistent Windows Live branding. Check out some of the screenshots that I included.

The Windows Live Messenger sign in window, version 8.0 on the left, 8.5 on the right. Windows Live Messenger 8.5 seems to have a lot more text that people don’t find useful to see. It’s probably the lawyers’ idea.

And of course, the main window. Similarly, 8.0 is on th left, 8.5 on the right. It’s all looking much cleaner and I love it when the interface designers removed the left and right border, it makes the application feel lighter.

Windows Live Messenger 8.0 is at the top and Windows Live Messenger 8.5 is at the bottom. The chat window has little changes, take a look at the Send and Search button. It’s looking better on 8.5. Previously on 8.0, it’s quite space wasting to put it on the right of the chat box.

During my installation, I was told to shut of Windows Explorer, I don’t have any Explorer windows open and in order to continue with the installation, I ended the Explorer.exe.

There really isn’t much changes. Everything works similarly, the interface change is much welcomed though.

You can read more at Inside Windows Live Messenger or get the Windows Live Messenger 8.5 beta here.

Check out this visual acoustic thing. I don’t know what’s the point of this but it looks pretty nonetheless.

_(Random visual acoustics.)_

It sounds terrible I thought, perhaps it’s just me.

[via Daryl's blog]

Google rolls out new version of Google Analytics and it’s looking better than ever!

What is new?

In the new version, your reports have been redesigned for clarity, greater visibility of important metrics, and ease of use. Here are just a few of the features you’ll notice:

• Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
• Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
• Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
• Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.

The new interface has everything the previous interface had and more. In addition, links within reports make it easier to navigate related information and explore your data. (The above is from an email that Google sent me.)

Anyway, let’s take a visual tour of the new interface.

The interface undergoes a tremendous update, first of all. It looks much cleaner, much sleeker and feels faster. I’ll share with you some site statistics meanwhile.

From the above chart, you can see where my visitors are coming from. Not many people come from Asia and the reason is that most people come to this blog for images. I mean, they even took image of my brother’s birthday cake and post it on blogs to wish their friends happy birthday, wish they at least link back sometimes. I don’t block hot linking but I discourage hot-linking by placing a watermark on all my images. (more…)

Just yesterday I reviewed a local website Mallr. I went on to talk to Derek regarding Mallr, the future of Mallr and his double-space habits through Windows Live Messenger.

Mallr is one of the few local internet web site. It’s started by Kevin and Derek with Kevin doing most of the dirty work. It’s cool to have more local websites around.

(Screenshot of Mallr.)

The entire chat transcript

Mr. Dew (Dew): So Derek, just who are you?

Derek from Mallr: A person who is passionate about Technology, sleeps, eats, breathes and works with the Internet. I work at a technology firm that feeds me and in my spare time, I work on Mallr with some of my mates.

Dew: And you’re from Singapore?

Derek: You bet

Dew: Care to tell me more about Mallr? How did it begin?

Derek: That’s interesting. Mallr started out as an idea to capture images of shops within Malls so that people can virtually find what a Mall has. We then evolved into a Reviews site mimicking a certain Yelp.com but food reviews site are in abundant and hardly catch on. We wanted to do something fun yet social where people can contribute stuff. In Singapore, media and news are still very much controlled and limited. So we thought if we could help to liberalize this industry by introducing a ranked news site, that will be cool. Apparently, it turned out to be very similar to a much more popular site - Digg. We haven’t turned back since.

Dew: Wow, it certainly has evolved a lot. Yeah, I noticed it looked like Digg.com. One thing I dislike about Digg.com is that it lacks local news. I never knew what’s trendy locally and Mallr would be helpful for me, hahaa… Let’s talk a little about the programming part. How long did you guys take? Who’s involved and who’s just slacking around?

Derek: We’ve pretty much coded for a few months & toying with a lot of CMS by the time we thought of doing a social news site. It really didn’t take a lot of time probably, 2 weeks to get the thing started. There are a few open source reversed-engineered software out there and looking thru the source helped. Kevin did most of the dirty work. We just aren’t design people to make the interface slick.

Dew: Is that a ready-make CMS that you guys used and it’s all created from a scratch?

Derek: We did model ourselves after a CMS but some of the codes, widgets and images were added separately.

Dew: That’s cool and a lot of work involved. I mentioned before that Mallr would need a bigger community to be successful, any plans on how to achieve that?

Derek: Advertising on beconfused.com is definitely one alternative, no kidding on this. We feel that the local community still does not have the initiative to vote/submit stories. Acquiring users is challenging but the biggest challenge is to acquire active users. Personally, I do not believe social networks grow organically so we probably have to ‘reward’ users in some way or another. (more…)

Windows Vista now has ths really cool tool to adjust the volume of individual applications. It allows me to lower the sound the Operating System actually makes and give my iTunes more priority in volume.

What’s more is that adjusting the overall volume would scale your volume in percentages. That’s something pretty cool. My only complain is the strange interface. I don’t know why the volume control is showing the Device button when I have only one device. And I don’t know how to rid the menu bar.