So Office 2.0 is like Web 2.0, only is more useful for business. Or Office 2.0 is like an online version of the Microsoft Office, only it has neat collaboration features. The truth is that nobody really knows what Office 2.0 really means, incl Wikipedia.

This Friday the gals at DealMaker Media are organizing a great event called "Why Office 2.0 matters?" where we all will find out what Office 2.0 really is and does it really matter?

It will start around 8am in the Microsoft Campus in Mt. View. Be careful, not to leave your notebook unattendant there, as you may find it later preloaded with Windows Vista, which for sure won't be the best thing that could happen to you. After switching to Vista for recording some educational movies for our new design Aurora, Sergey (our lead designer) is rebooting his $2K Core2Duo box few times a day ...

Back to the conference, I'll be presenting our new design Aurora around 11am in the Galileo room. The motto if my presentation is:
Aurora makes the good web design less elitist and more accessible.

In order to prepare for the presentation I took the weekend off (Imagine -- not working on the weekends), but this time I was completely off the gird. I just used the mobile google maps on my Nokia E60 to find my way to the hotel in Tahoe, and that was it. This end up being so disturbing for my two year old Dell, so its battery completely died, just by staying couple of days suspended.

Also I was very proud when I saw how the gals at DealMaker media used SiteKreator to create two of their web sites: DealMaker Media and Under the Radar in just a few days. Wow, our tool can really be useful for someone who don't want to crunch HTML all day (and night) long. There were just some problems with the blog, but we are working on them. For example the blog archive will very soon will be available.

3Tera AppLogic with which I have been involved for the past 3+ years finally got a world-class recognition. They have been selected as Category Breaker by Network World and also listed in the The Top Five Technologies You Need to Know About in '07 next to Amazon by ComputerWorld. All this within a couple of days.

Congratulations are in order to the entire team who made this possible!

Today I deleted my blog! I was actually trying to delete a post, I added for tesing, but after sleeping 2-3h a day for the past week (around SiteKreator 2.2 release ) I accidentally click delete for the entire blog, and then quickly confirmed  "Yes, I'm absolutely sure". After spending half an hour reading the MySQL manual (which are great) I was able to restore the blog (or at least I think I am). This reminds me how badly we need to hook-up the roll-back to the last published version feature in SiteKreator....

Also today I got an interesting email from a person working in one of SiteKreator's main competitors (pretty major one, but not M$) asking questions and reporting problems in the new version. I couldn't imagine having a greater joy in live than seeing people working for your competitors using your product instead of theirs.

And lastly I'll be presenting at Under the Radar > Why office 2.0 matters on March 23 at Microsoft Campus in Mt. View. Drop me line if you want to get a discounted pass.

Sofia, Bulgria

After reading David's excitement from dropping Ubuntu for Vista, I decided to invest some time to check the "latest and gratest" Windows. I didn't wanted to risk any of my existing machines (most of them couldn't run Aero anyway), so I decided to get a decent hardware for this experiment. I got:

• ASUS P5B Deluxe
• Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.4GHz w/ 4Mb cache (Conroe E6600)
• 2GB DDR II 1000Mhz CL4
• Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT
• 320Gb Barracuda 7200.10 SATA disk (3Gb/s)
• Philips 200W 21" monitor wide screen (1680x1050)
• Windows Vista (BillGates Edition)
  

This baby scorred 5.4 in Windows experience test (whatever that means)

The first thing I've noticed was that Vista didn't recognize my wide screen display. Even after installing the drivers from Philps the best I was able to achieve was 1600x1024 (instead the panel's native 1680x1050). I spent few hours trying to fix that without any success, so I'm going to change the monitor to something that's supported by Vista.

I did all my tests on this very blurry display (sooo bad -- it made my eyes hurt)

I'll start with the facy stuff  (as the list will be shorter):

• Task switching with [Win]-[Tab] is great - you get live preview of all windows.
  
  

• The sidebar (which appears to be available for WinXP as well) is also cute, especially if you haven't seen Yahoo's widgets (konfanulator) or Apple's dashboard.

• Live preview of running apps when you roll-over them on the task bar.
• The "start search" in the new start menu is very usefull for finding documents, but I couldn't make it to find applications like cmd.com. It looks like a bad mimic for apple's spotlight.
• The new Open/Save dialog have nice features (but it takes some time to get use to it)
• Folders show preview of what's inside them, which look nice but it's quite unusable even when you use the largest possible icons.
• Integrated WebEx killer (Windows Collaboration)
• Integrated Picasa killer (Windows Photo Gallery)
• Integrated Adobe Premier killer (Windows Movie Maker)

Now let's look at the bad side of Vista:

• I get very annoying popups every time when you start some application that Vista doesn't like (Windows Needs your permission to continue). What's more annoying is the flick of the display when this message appears. It looks like it's changing the vidoe resolution or something like that, but my display shuts down for 0.5 sec and than it comes back. And this appears even when you try to start the device manager or create a folder inside the Start Menu.
  

• If I try to delete application from the task bar, I get the message that has the name of the app twice (did someone tested this at all).
  
  

• Yahoo Mail is not very happy from Vista
  
  
  

• The integreation of RSS feeds between IE7 and Outlook 2007 really sucks. On startup Outlook, ask you to accept to import the RSS feeds. You get one long flat list of RSS feeds. On the top of that there is no real way to remove them, unless you don't remove them one by one (Poor RSS junies like me who have 200+ feeds). And even if you try to import OPML file manually, you again get a flat list (of course you can create the folders manually, but what's the point of OPML then)

• I couldn't make the Weather gadget to work.(it says "service not available" and there is no help what so ever)
• The RSS gadget looks cute, but it's completely useless, as it allows you to look at either all your feeds or just one feed.  And all the feeds need to be setup in IE7, which as I already mention has limitations (can't work with pass-protected feeds).
• Also there is a folder in the start menu called "maintance", which I tried to rename to "Windows" several times without any success (no error message -- it just doesn't do anything). 

Verdict

it's good to play with (if you can find the right hardware for it), but I won't put this on my business notebook. Still Microsoft is too much focused on copying what every one else is doing, instead of invote. And having the inside look at how Microsoft developed something as simple as shutdown interface, I doubt we will see something better (if anything at all) from Microsoft in the future. Maybe I should consider making the switch. Only that all Apple notebooks are very havy (2 X my current Dell X1), which makes big difference when riding Yamaha YZF600 with over 160mph on I280

Lenkov

Sofia, Bulgaria

Today I was introduced (thanks Garnet) to MsDewey - a new frontend to live.com search. It's probably the only search engine that loads about 8Mb in flash video before it can answers your first query. And all this, so the accress Janina Gavankar (a blend of Indian and Dutch descent) to make jokes and comment on your search. The results are not quite usefull, and are hard to navigate, but the movies are fun to watch. Unfortunatly at some point they start repeating. Here are some of the keywords on which Janina seems to react:

Janina Gavankar, Britney Spears, Microsoft, Linux, Google, Storm, halo 2, Blow up, nude, blow me, Jesus, cunt, video games, dominatrix, arts, gmail, terrorist, how to run, iPod, eminem, yo mama, 911, Ricardo, Bruce Willis, Use gun, Ferrari, twins.

You can try some of them few times and you may get different results. Also if you stay idle for a while, Janina will start bitching at you. This is all very funny, but its usefullnes is about the same as of hotornot.com (which became a hit around the end of the bubble).

Also today I've learned (thanks to Kali) a new linux sheel hotkey Alt-[dot]. It brings the arguments of the last executed command. Also I've learned (thanks to Toni) an alternative to Ctrl-R: Alt-P and Alt-N, and also an easy way to make file system snapshot with rsnapshot.