How sweet! Now you don’t even need Gtalk desktop installer for voice chat, both voice and video are available on browser based Gmail chat. All you have to do is, grab this plugin and start rolling. Well ofcos’ you need a webcam.

Just click on the new “Video & more” menu in a Gmail chat window and select “Start video chat” or “Start voice chat.” You can switch to a full screen view or pop out the chat window and change the size and positioning as you wish. Of course, not everyone has a webcam, but even if you don’t, you can still have voice conversations alongside your email and regular chat.

Watch the demo video and read detail here. I haven’t tried it yet. I’ll give it a shot once I get home. Not too excited about video but voice on gmail is good enough for me. That would reduce the pain of having to install a desktop program just for voice chat.
Thanks google team for this new feature.

Got this link via N3 post, “Turn your name into a face“, and thought I’m gonna try it as well. Quite amusing how those faces turn out from your name.

Here is the true face behind “May Hnin Phyu“.

Oh lord, did I just see a beard? The mouth and the hair look quite similar but I don’t have a beard for sure. (more…)

I came across this “C# Yellow Book” by Rob Miles, MVP and a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at University of Hull, and thought of sharing.

I think this would be good introductory reading for those of us learning C#

The C# Book is used by the Department of Computer Science in the University of Hull as the basis of the First Year programming course.

Download: Rob Miles CSharp Yellow Book 2008.pdf(1.4M)

I rolled his blog also; he posts pop quizzes every now and then.

Just spreading this wonderful opportunity to all those travel bloggers who like to visit Indonesia and participate in this event. Early this year, I went to Bali for similar event; I had a great time there, met lots of people and learn new things. I wish I could go again, but I doubt it since I’m not really a travel blogger. Anyhow…the following is an abstract from the GV email I got, read on for detail info as well:

Indonesian Bloggers are having the 2nd national gathering next month on the November 22nd, last year we managed to get 500 bloggers from all over Indonesia to come.

This year hopefully we can get up to 1000 bloggers to attend the whole day event. The theme for this year is blogging for society.

Leading to that, as a part of the program to promote Indonesia tourism, supported by Indonesian Ministry of Cultural and Tourism, we would like to invite several international bloggers from any country to come and have a trip to three cities (Bali, Jogjakarta, Jakarta) in Indonesia leading to the event.

We are looking for bloggers (travel bloggers) that can post their experience, photos, people they meet, basically blogging about Indonesia and Indonesian people, and join the event.

The period for this trip is between Nov 17 – Nov 22 2009 and this is the itinerary:

1. Denpasar, Bali (Mon, Nov 17 – Tue, Nov 18)
2. Jogjakarta (Wed, Nov 19 – Thu, Nov 20)
3. Jakarta (Fri, Nov 21 – Sat, Nov 22)

All expense will be covered, including flight ticket from your country to Indonesia and back.

And read more about the event in detail below. Their site is fully in Indonesian language but this is from email attachment and it’s in English, so dumping it directly here.

(more…)

Just going through my feeds and this one interests me. There is an announcement of the next version of Visual Studio and .Net Framework: Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0.

Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 mark the next generation of developer tools from Microsoft. Designed to address the latest needs of developers, Visual Studio and the .NET Framework deliver key innovations in the following pillars:

• Democratizing Application Lifecycle Management
  Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) crosses many roles within an organization and traditionally not every one of the roles has been an equal player in the process. Visual Studio Team System 2010 continues to build the platform for functional equality and shared commitment across an organization’s ALM process.
• Enabling emerging trends
  Every year the industry develops new technologies and new trends. With Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft delivers tooling and framework support for the latest innovations in application architecture, development and deployment.
• Inspiring developer delight
  Ever since the first release of Visual Studio, Microsoft has set the bar for developer productivity and flexibility. Visual Studio 2010 continues to deliver on the core developer experience by significantly improving upon it for roles involved with the software development process.
• Riding the next generation platform wave
  Microsoft continues to invest in the market leading operating system, productivity application and server platforms to deliver increased customer value in these offerings. With Visual Studio 2010 customers will have the tooling support needed to create amazing solutions around these technologies.
• Breakthrough Departmental Applications
  Customers continue to build applications that span from department to the enterprise. Visual Studio 2010 will ensure development is supported across this wide spectrum of applications.

Here is a full overview of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 and some more reading on vSTS 2010 (code-name “Rosario”): What’s new in Visual Studio Team System 2010. Read some more detail announcement on Somasegar’s (senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft) post: What’s next for Visual Studio and .NET FX?

Ok, that’s about it for now.

I haven’t been following any news, feeds or even personal emails. Just now I ran through GV flags quickly and found this one interesting so checked out the link. It really makes me smile so just sharing here. Some GVers translated back into various languages haha. Amusing indeed.

You’re No One If You’re Not On Twitter – The Twitter song.

You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter
And if you aren’t there already you’ve missed it
If you haven’t been bookmarked, retweeted and blogged
You might as well not have existed

In the old days it was all about achievements
Collecting all your trophies in a shrine
Then everybody came across the internet
And suddenly you had to be online

A home page was all you really needed
To seem like a success but not a geek
As long as you updated semi-annually
And checked your email once or twice a week

You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter…

Technology was moving rather quickly
And the next thing you needed was a blog
With intimate and detailed press releases
And now and then a photo of your dog

More recently the students brought us Facebook
And everybody has a hundred friends
The parties in the photos look amazing
They’re not so great but everyone pretends

You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter…

Now you need to publish every movement
And every single thought to cross your mind
I’m told the Twitterverse is full of rubbish
But most of us are actually quite refined

We validate each other’s insecurities
And brag about the gadgets that we’ve bought
We laugh out loud at every hint of jolliness
And try to self-promote without being caught

You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter…

So are you somebody or nobody? Are you on twitter yet? Oh yes, luckly I’m someone on twitter. LOL

There is a video, mp3 download, TShirt and a few other stuffs about the Twitter song. Better go check out at I Hate Morning site.

Nothing much, just dropping a short post during lunch time. I rolled 2 new blogs to my GReader recently. The first one is “Geek Dreams” written by Shiva; he recently commented on some of my posts and that’s how I visited/came to know his blog. And the second one is “Geek What” by Tony Chung; I came across his blog via Shiva’s blogroll links.

I don’t normally roll all commenters’ blogs but ofcos’ those I’m interested in only. (Well I do roll a lot of not so interesting blogs as well just for the sake of tracking news for GV). Here are the things that make me want to roll these guys’ blogs. First impression counts seriously.

“Geek Dreams” got me with this dashing green frog. Where was he from again? hmm I think I’ve seen him on Sesame Street or something…There’s not much information in the “About” page but I did a bit of looking around and thought this guy must be someone linked to Paradise Not Found gang since he links to one of the members from the Paradise Not Found.

He also got some interesting posts about the concerts he went to and how he got IPhone etc. But the thing that make me laugh was this post where he gone crazy over Chris Martin’s hand gesture.

Woooohoooooooo!!!!! Oh my fucking god chris martin waved at me!!! Feel like a giddy school girl right now!! He saw me!!!! He saw me!!!! He waved back!!!!! Chris martin waved!!!! Don’t care if u call me crazy..chris martin waved at me!!!

There he really cracks me up. Obviously he seems crazy about Chris Martin, I wonder what he would do if Chris Martin shakes hand with him. Now that something I like to see. Alright, good enough, rolling now.

First impression on “Geek What” is that the site look pretty neat and informative. You can see his photo and a short intro on the header. Ok, seem like we are in the same age and somewhat similar tastes, he got my attention from there. He got pretty good write up on “About” page too, you get to understand more about the blogger. Anyways, I checked his about page only after I rolled his blog. I rolled him straight after checking out his very first vlog post. Actually I was thinking of trying out vlogging as well after reading much about citizen media and video blogging posts on GV and Raising Voices. So I thought, so this person just started it, I might as well learn some stuffs from him like what kind of thing he vlogs about blar blah. And I go click, click and there he is…

So what do you think? He accomplished his 1st vlog splendidly didn’t he, he did make people smile, at least I smiled, no, I LOL. I had a great laughing at his video. Actually I rewind and watched it 3 times (serious!) and every times he never failed to amuse me. That’s it, he got me with this one video, I just have to roll you boy. LOL

It’s a pity, I couldn’t see comment box on the post. I guess my Firefox Adblock Plus must have blocked it. He uses some kind of comment system and I can only see that on IE.

Do check his vlog post as well, the write up is fun too. I hope he doesn’t mind me embedding his video here.

Alrite that’s it I guess.