Ok, enough tech stuff…..time for some comedy relief.

My wife always reads depressing novels.  Last Christmas I thought I would get her a book to make her laugh for a change.  I ended up ordering “BORAT: Touristic Guidings to Minor Nation of U.S. and A. and Touristic Guidings to Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” from Amazon.  I had previously skimmed through it at a book store and started cracking up in front of everyone.  Unfortunately my wife didn’t find his humor very funny.  I guess I need to stick to depressing novels for her…

I just came across the video shown above, and this seems like another book which would crack me up. It’s a book called “Get Rich Cheating: The Crooked Path to Easy Street” by Jeff Kreisler.

This one is going onto my personal Amazon wish list…..so if any of you are thinking of getting me a present (for say Father’s day coming up shortly), then there’s your tip. 

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Google Wave will be released some time later this year.

It’s tough trying to describe how it works, since it does so much.

Think of it as a merger of: email, blogs, wiki, RSS, real-time collaborative editing (with version control), social networking, project management, ability to embed a Wave on any blog or website, and extensions allowing it to hook into almost anything.

It will act as your central communication hub for almost anything you want to do.

The best way to get a feel for how this will work and the potential of how it can be extended is by watching the above video.  Yes, it’s an 80 minute demo, but that goes to show just how much functionality is available in the product.

[Update]: here’s some short clip videos of the highlights.

Google Wave will be made available as an open source product, meaning that you will be able to host this application yourself within your internal corporate boundary (as well as Google hosting it on the Internet).  If you wish to collaborate with people also hosting Google Wave but located at a different company, then the two Google Wave servers will be able to hook up via federation services.

I’m definitely looking forward to testing this out.

[Update]: here’s a more detailed explanation of the features (link 1, link 2), and you can also read through an interview with the Wave founders (link 1, link 2).

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Current search engine use is split at around 75% to Google, 15% to Yahoo, 5% to Microsoft and 5% to other 2nd tier search engines.

In an attempt to try to challenge Google’s dominance over the search market, Microsoft is about to release Bing.  It is expected to soft-launch in the next few days, and be formally launched on June 3rd.

The main way they will attempt to differentiate themselves from Google is by classifying search results, and allow you to reach the information you are after in a shorter amount of time…..assuming it works as they wish.

Search results are customized based on whether you are doing a search for health, travel, shopping, news or sports.  For example, when you search for a product (eg digital cameras), you will see results which allow you to drill in to comparison pricing, reviews, images, etc.

For certain types of searches, it seems to look promising.  We’ll need to wait a few days before we can play with it and find out.

Microsoft have released a press kit, showing screenshots, fact sheets and a reviewer’s guide.

[Update]: Bing is now live, and initial feedback is surprisingly positive.

[Update 2]: Compare Google and Bing results side by side.

[Update 3]: Bing Travel has launched

[Update 4]: Bing search engine use surpasses Yahoo (for the first time ever), but their rise is short-lived. Only lasts one day.

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(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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Google has just launched a new set of search features which allow you to slice and dice their search results.

Whenever you do a new search, you are now presented with a new “Search options” link.  This allows you to filter your search by different types of results (videos, forums, and reviews), by time (recent, past 24 hours, past week, past year), seeing related searches, a “wonder wheel” view, or a timeline view.

Here’s a short video showing you some of these new features:

When it comes to digging into search trends, Google also has had some other powerful tools available for some time.

Google Trends can show you the top hot recent trends, and it allows you to compare the search traffic volumes over time for a number of search terms.

Google Insights for Search is even more powerful than Google Trends when it comes to the ability to drill into search terms.  The only thing missing from Insights is the list of hot recent search queries; for that you’ll still need to use Google Trends.

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VMware vSphere 4 has been released, which is the next version of VMware ESX 3.5.

The product has 150 new features, and can achieve efficiency savings of around 50% compared to ESX 3.5.

The new product supports: 8 VCPUs, 256 GB RAM per VM, network speeds of 30Gb/s, and over 300K of IOPS.

The product claims to be able to handle even the toughest load types (Oracle databases, etc), aiming to achieve a 100% virtualized environment for customers.

It’s being pushed as the first “cloud operating system” to be available in the market.

This is not to be confused with what most people understand as cloud computing.

vSphere allows you to run private and federated clouds, where the underlying host servers become aggregated into a large pool which can be easily managed.

The new product packaging and pricing options are interesting as well, with prices starting at $166 per processor on the low end, or $3K for being able to run vSphere across 3 physical host servers with data protection, high availability, disaster recovery, simplified management, disk-based backups and other features.

There are also many interesting high-end features available in the enterprise edition packaging.  See the edition comparison matrix for a full breakdown.

This is a big step forward for virtualization technology, and will extend the gap between VMware and Microsoft.

The link below will give you further information on VMware vSphere 4, and also includes a video of the product launch with demonstrations of a few of the powerful new features available.

http://vmware.com/products/vsphere/index.html

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I’ve previously posted about how good the TripIt web service is, and I still use this service every time I have to travel to any location.

In order to get access to my travel itinerary from my iPhone I had previously been using their mobile url (http://m.tripit.com).

The only issue with the above is that you require a live internet connection, since this is using iPhone’s Safari web browser to access the content in a live fashion.  This can prevent you from checking your trip details while you’re on a plane or somewhere without decent internet connectivity.

Fortunately, the TripIt crew have now released a native iPhone application (iTunes app link).  Once it syncs your account info, it is able to store this trip information for easy offline access to your itinerary.

The app is also free, which always goes down well with users.

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I often have people ask me how I get access to various cool private sites months before they launch.

For example, there’s a lot of buzz right now regarding the new Google Voice service, which is being added to Google’s GrandCentral site.

Google Voice is being made available to existing GrandCentral users today, but the catch is that GrandCentral is still in private beta, meaning that it’s not yet open to the public at large.

Well, I’ve been on GrandCentral now for close to a year or so (if I’m not mistaken).

Here’s my dirty little secret: if you want the latest invites to the best private sites, sign up to InviteShare.  You can then add yourself to the waiting list for whichever site you want, and you’ll normally get one.  GrandCentral invites are currently available, but the waiting list is starting to get fairly big due to all of the buzz on Google Voice.

So what are you waiting for?  Go and get on the GrandCentral waiting list over at InviteShare right now! 

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The details for the new version of the iPhone operating system (version 3.0) have just been released.

Most of the user requested features seem to have been added.

Say hello to:

• cut and paste (text and photos)
• foundation to allow 3rd party apps to create turn-by-turn driving navigation (yay!)
• send photos and audio via multimedia messaging (MMS)
• landscape keyboard in other apps such as mail, SMS and notes
• built-in application search/launcher
• search functionality in mail, calendar and the ipod
• notes syncing with iTunes
• new voice memo application
• send and receive files between iPhones/iPods

What’s the downside?……we have to wait a few months to get our hands on it.

Here are some links to further information ( 1 | 2 )

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(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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Exchange and Windows Server geeks: rejoice!

The day has come for you to take down that “I love Bill Gates” poster from the wall and replace it with something a bit more useful.

If you’ve wanted to fill up your walls with Exchange and Windows Server tech posters which are sure to impress the ladiezz, then look no further.

Go ahead and download the posters for Exchange 2007 and Windows Server 2008.

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(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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I’ve been running Windows 7 since the day beta 1 was released.

Although I’ve been very happy so far with Windows 7, it was frustrating not being able to manage Hyper-V natively.  The Hyper-V management tools which you can download from the Microsoft site are built for Windows Vista, and won’t install on Winodws 7.

Microsoft have now released a beta of the Remote Admin Tools for Windows 7.

All you need to do is:

1. Download the Remote Admin Tools for Windows 7
2. Install it
3. Go to: Control Panel => Programs and Features => Turn Windows features on or off
4. Go to: Remote Server Administration Tools => Role Administration Tools => Hyper-V Tools

Once you’ve done that, you’ll find the Hyper-V Manager in your local Admin Tools in Windows 7.

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(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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