Jay’s Weblog

• Golf Masters at Augusta. Hope there will be a head-to-head between Phil Mickelson and Tiger. I’m betting on Tiger. Get the latest updates from BBC Live Masters.
• ATI’s next sound card to include sound chip. The R600 combines HD video and HD sound into a single HDMI output feed. Apparently this is one of the requirements of Vista’s DRM.
• 8-core (That’s 2 x quad-core) Mac Pro released. Nice to have one under my desk. This uses the new Intel ‘Clovertown’ processors.
• Another WS-Mess, check out Tim Bray’s rant on WS-Federation.
• How to make a perfect cuppa tea like the British do.

• Next Generation Intel Processors (codenamed penryn) to support faster virtualisation and massive 6 MB L2 on-chip cache. The TechReport compares today’s generation processors and concludes that Intel is currently ahead in the CPU wars against AMD.
• Study finds that the brain is genetically shaped for acquiring moral values.
• Digg clone in Malaysia. Do what the Malaysians do best.
• Article and video in popular mechanics on flying the Airbus A380.
• Blogger Kathy Sierra receives death threats. She subsequently cancels her appearance at a Tech conference and stops blogging.
• Top 6 lists of programming top 10 lists.
• Zimbra Desktop launch. Offline webapps (oxymoron) starting to take off ? See also Slingshot for Rails and Adobe Apollo. BTW, Firefox 3.0 is supposed to have support for offline webapps.
• Beginners guide to OpenID phishing. If you don’t know what OpenID is, here is an excellent video explaining OpenID and another video on how to use it.
• Malaysian DVD pirates put out bounty for two dogs.
• Spanning Sync offers two-way synchronisation between iCal and Google Calender. Blerghhh … I use Outlook now.

Like every technophobe and serious IT professional, I feel that keeping abreast with the latest tech news and IT trends is part of my every-day tasks. For this purpose, I use an RSS reader that gathers news headlines in the form of RSS feeds from a multitude of web sites. The RSS reader then allows me to quickly glance through the collected headlines without having to visit each and every website.

I’ve recently made a switch from Vienna to Google Reader as my RSS reader of choice. This is because I need to synchronise my daily reads at work and from home. Vienna is a really good news reader but since it’s a standalone application, I can’t use it at work, unlike the web-based Google Reader. Switching was really easy, all I had to do was to export my feeds using OPML from Vienna to Google Reader. The Google Reader interface is easy to use and functions like any other standalone RSS reader. So far, the only feature I miss is the ability to search feeds.

One of the features I like about Google Reader is the ability to share articles that I like. The lower right column of my blog contains items that I have marked as ’share’ in Google Reader. I think this is particularly useful for like-minded people to share the latest stuff that they find interesting on the web. Another useful feature of Google Reader is the ‘Add Star’ option for every feed. This allows me to quickly glance through my feeds (100+ per day) and ‘Star’ interesting/lengthy ones for later reading.

From today, posts that come under the ‘Starred’ category will contain news and article links that I find interesting, amusing, or thought-provoking. This category will be very much like Kiyo’s ‘Ten things I didn’t know last week’. The purpose of this is to share ’stuff’ with friends and colleagues, (hopefully) get some reader feedback, and for future references (How many times have you lost a link to something you thought was Interesting ?).