Raju Vegesna's Blog

I am not sure about you, but I wasted few hours trying to get Safari on my Windows XP system work with no luck. This is what shows up when I try top open Safari on my windows machine.

Yes, it doesnt show any text in the browser. When I hover my mouse on the menus or when I click somewhere some text is shown. Also, look at how Apple’s website is rendered. I tried installing it few times to find the same result. I tried 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 too. What pissed me most is, it screwed up my iTunes installation. I had to do a fresh install of my iTunes again. For now, I’ll stick with Maxthon as my favorite browser on Windows.

Safari on my iMac is a different story. I love it. I find it much faster than Firefox and Flock. I really hope Apple will fix all these annoying bugs soon.

If you looked at Spock (I didn’t try it, but the screenshots show its capabilities), you’ll notice that it can be a very powerful people search engine. You can check out the review @ TechCrunch and O’Reilly’s Blog.

This is a great vertical in search to be in my opinion (compared to blog search etc). My prediction….these guys will be aquired by Google. If Yahoo or MS makes their move first, Google might be in trouble unless they are already working on something similar. I am sure Google’s team is already talking to them.

I recently purchased Apple TV…while I’d have preferred a lower price tag, I am happy with its features. I am not going to write about its features here. Instead, let me mention couple of points. The best feature according to me is, it let me put my home theater to full use. While I have all my songs on my iMac, it certainly doesnt have the best audio system. But with iTv, I can put my home theatre to full use. That according to me is the best feature. Now to something I dont like…

I knew that Apple TV supports 802.11n. So I enabled 802.11n in my iMac (purchased from Apple Store $1.99) and only then I noticed that Apple TV and my iMac doesnt communicate with each other directly and instead they go through my access point which is still 802.11g. I dont understand this…why cant Apple make these two communicate with each other using n? Instead, apple is asking us to purchase their Access Point (they call it as Airport Extreme Base Station).

Did you have any comments on your Apple TV?

You must have known about Yahoo announcing Unlimited storage for Y! Mail. As a happy Yahoo Mail user, I am glad to see this move from them. Frankly, I didnt expect it from Yahoo.

Interesting part is, this announcement comes 3 days before Gmail’s third Birthday where Google is supposed to bump up their storage to 3.5 GB. It’ll be interesting to see what Google’s response will be.

While all these email (and storage) providers promise vast amount of storage, on an average no one really uses complete storage space provided. While most of power users will use major part of offered storage, an average joe mostly is using less than 10%. There are more average Joe’s than power users.

Anyway, love this move from Y!

I created couple of videos recently and uploaded them to YouTube only to notice that the video quality is no where close to what I wanted. I then uploaded the same video to Google Video and noticed that it was even worse (is it because of the viewer size?). I then registered @ Revver, uploaded my videos and found that the quality was better than both YouTube and Google Video. So I thought I was done. think I am happy. But wait….a day later, I get an email from Revver team saying…

We regret to inform you that due to a minor glitch in a recent upgrade we performed on the Revver service, the username that you registered with was actually unavailable at the time you registered.

So from then on, I dont have access to my account at Revver. But then, the videos I uploaded do exist on their servers under the same user name which belong to some other person. Anyway, I am not going back to Revver….and then Zoli recommend Vimeo and Grouper. I tried Vimeo first (primarily because I liked its interface) and found that it has much better quality than YouTube, Google Video and Revver. I decided to go with it….so you’ll see my video on Zoho Meeting and Zoho Sheet posted on Vimeo. I wish they provided better stats on videos.

If you are using the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress and tried embedding video, I am sure you know what I am talking about. Thats pain. This video I found in YouTube was very helpful. Just change to the basic editor and make your post embedding video.

When I tried this in my other blog, it worked fine. But it doesnt work on my wordpress.com blog.

Hmmm.

At the Web 2.0 conference last year Eric Schmidt mentioned whatever apps they have (word processor, spreadsheet etc) are not office apps. To quote Eric Schmidt…

We don’t call it an office suite. It’s not targeted at the [Microsoft] Office–we never made that claim. For many people, it would be just as easy to have computers in the cloud store information you use every day.

But, wouldn’t it be nice if Google is consistent with their positioning? If you search for ‘Online Office’ in Google, you’ll see Google advertising itself as ‘Office Tools from Google’.

Earlier last year I remember Brin mentioning that they dont plan to do any office suite….and we know what they did late last year. One theme is very consistent from Google….all the officials are inconsistent .

First it was iPhone rumours that were confirmed and then now it is Gphone. According to Engadget, Google confirms that Gphone is under works and is targeting the developing countries.

We know that Eric Schmidt is a board member of Apple and I wonder if this suggestion came from Steve to Eric to conquer the low end of the market while iPhone takes up the high end . Anyway, I cant wait to see what Gphone offers and whats unique about it. Lets see how this unfolds.