I was surprised that Microsoft Live Search had managed to gain market share from Google and Yahoo according to recent comScore ratings. It was attributed to the Live Search Club. A place where you play games, earn tickets and get prizes.

The games were setup with a search box at the bottom so that when you were looking for information you could continently do the search within the same page. So during a game a player would do many searches on the internet. Also once in a while, it would do a search on its own and show the results (for example, when you’ve solved something, it would do a related image search).

I guess this is an effective way to get people to use live search and get used to it. However, to me it only

Here is a little command that I came across when I was looking for a quick and easy way to delete some old log files from my system.

C:\>forfiles /?

FORFILES [/P pathname] [/M searchmask] [/S]
         [/C command] [/D [+ | -] {MM/dd/yyyy | dd}]

Description:
    Selects a file (or set of files) and executes a
    command on that file. This is helpful for batch jobs.

As the command descriptions suggests, its great for using in a .bat file, so I put following line in a cleanLogs.bat file, and scheduled a task to run the batch job every weekend to clean up my system of old and unwanted logs.

forfiles /p E:\Logs\ /s /m *.log /d -60 /c "cmd /c del @path"

forfiles.exe is a tool that has existed in old res kits and has been moved to the standard installation of the newer Microsoft operating systems like Windows Vista and Windows 2003.

Its Official. Google has acquired FeedBurner.

I've been running the released version of DasBlog 1.9 [DasBlog 1.9.6264] from just about the time it was released (on the 264th day of 2006). It’s been more than six months and I finally do have my SLT ADSL connection, so I upgraded my blog to one of the more recent DasBlog daily builds.

One of the more attractive new features I noticed at once was under the “Spammer Settings“. It is that DasBlog now supports the comment spam killer Akismet.

What’s cool about it is that its free for personal use, so to get this working in DasBlog all you need to do is get yourself something called an "API key" to activate and use it.

To get a key:
 1) Logging to your WordPress.com account or Create yourself an account (creating an account only would do, without creating a blog).
 2) Go to "Your profile" (“Your profile” is located under "Users")
 3) Copy your WordPress.Com API key from it.

So, after you have your key in the DasBlog Akismet configuration and have things working; when a comment is made DasBlog will submit it to the Akismet web service which in-turn will tell DasBlog if its spam or not.

After having it setup I tried it out by entering a “spammy” comment. After submitting the comment I saw a message saying “Your comment has been received and is under review for potential violation of site guidelines. Do not re-submit.”, so I guess its all good. 

On the other-hand spammers will keep re-submitting till one gets through; because its not like they will listen just because we say to what we say "Do not re-submit"! However Akismet sounds very confident when it says:

"...without giving too much of the secret sauce away, we can safely say that it would be pretty difficult to poison Akismet. We use dozens of factors to determine the spamminess of a submission, and we also have an identity attached to everyone using and contributing to the system, which allows us to do some interesting things with weighting and clustering activity."

Very feisty, I love it.

Google shifted gears to venture a little deeper into the desktop by launching Google Gears(Beta), an exciting and new open source project that will bring offline capabilities to web applications via a browser extension. Google Reader was the first to put this new technology into use with an offline mode.

"Google Gears builds on the web's existing programming model by introducing new JavaScript APIs for sophisticated data storage, application caching, and multi-threading features. With these APIs, developers can bring offline capabilities to even their most complex web applications. Google Gears works with all major browsers on all major platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux." - Google Press Center

Google Docs and Gmail seem to be the other obvious candidates to enable offline capabilities. This also means a "Google Office" product could be just around the corner. However, even if there eventually is such a product I don't think its going to compete with the likes of MS Office but instead cater to a different section of end users with different needs.

A very exciting technology that Microsoft calls “Microsoft Surface” was unveiled at the All Things Digital conference by Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer. It’s a “coffee table” that not only is a multi touch interface but it can also recognize what’s kept on it.

Although multi-touch interfaces like the ones that Jeff Han from Perceptive Pixel has been developing for years or the iPhone interface have been around now, what sets the “Microsoft Surface” apart is its unique ability to recognize objects like cell phones, cameras or even a beer glasses that are kept on top of it. Not only recognizing but knowing what to do with it!

If you thought new Apple iPhone was cool, this is going to blow your mind! It may essentially revolutionize the way we interact with computers in the future.

The product is currently being targeted at Restaurants, Hotels, Retail Locations and Casino Resorts, so we’d not be able to get our hands on one just yet. But eventually the prices would come down we’d have one at every household. In Sri Lanka we’re still working on getting electricity to every home. So it may take a while.

Last Friday we headed down to the Majestic cinema to watch the latest action of the web slinging superhero in Spiderman 3. Although the film itself did not live up to my expectations, going to the cinema proved to be a decent way to escape the heat of Colombo.

The film starts showing our friendly neighbourhood Spider having settled down to a nice rhythm in love with the girl of his dreams, studies on track and also managing his superhero duties pretty well. Then the story gets scattered in too many directions and seems all over the place.

The other thing that struck me is that Peter Parker needs to take up some crying lessons; he was terrible at it. Merill who was in the next seat promptly suggested that Peter should take lessons from Shah Rukh Khan!

The action, animations and special effects where pretty decent. In that sence it was it was a decent enough movie. Kids are bound to like it more than the adults. So, if you’re interested you can book your tickets at www.Etickets.lk which now includes the Savoy Cinema, Majestic Cinema and the Liberty Cinema. Alternatively there is mticket; a new service from Dialog GSM exclusively for its post-paid customers, where you can dial 444 and make a reservation. I haven’t  tried it yet so I’m not sure how good it is.

No offence to you ladies.. this is just another one "From my inbox":

A man was lying on a blanket at the beach He had no arms or legs.  Three women were walking past and felt sorry for the poor man.

The first woman said "Have you ever had a hug"
The man said "No", So she gave him a hug and walked on.

The second woman said "Have you ever had a kiss".
The man said "No", So she gave him a kiss and walked on.

The third woman walked over to him, knelt down and whispered in his ear, "Have you ever been f****d?
The fellow looked up in amazement and said "No". The woman smiled and said "You will be when the tide comes in."

..the new name of the Google Personalized Homepage.

About a couple of weeks back, Google went "back to basics" by renaming Froogle as Google Product Search because the name had caused confusion for some because by not clearly describing what the product does. Now the "Google Personalized Homepage" is re-named to "iGoogle".

First of all, congratulations to the Australian Cricket team on winning the Cricket World Cup 2007. They were the dominant team in the tournament, so it was in fact a deserving win for Ricky Ponting and his team. Australia has now won the cup for the third time in a row which is really quite amazing.

That said, I’m very proud to say that the Sri Lankan Cricket team led by Mahela Jayawardana did exceptionally well in this tournament from the start, right up to the finals held yesterday at Kensington Oval, Bridgetown, Barbados . They were looking a really good side with a lot of talent and confidence. It seemed that Sri Lanka was going to be the only team that had what it takes to bring down the Aussies from where they were; but of course Adam Gilchrist's amazing batting display of 149 off just 104 saw that none of that was to happen yesterday.

So the Aussies got off hook easily yesterday, but Sri Lanka is going to be right back at you come the next Cricket World Cup in 2011, so be prepared! You’ve been warned.