Internet

I installed Zimbra as my mail server a couple of days ago.

AJAX stands for Asynchronus Javascript and XML.
It's a web application development technique. Traditional web applications had many limitations because of restrictions of the browser capabilities. Today however browsers like IE5 and FireFox can run Javascript natively and fetch arbitrary data through XMLRPC interface (which is not supported by all browers). This allows a web application to update only certain parts of the web page wihout the need to refresh the whole page again and again when something changes.

What is WebMailCompose? It's a Firefox extension and it can be found here. What does it do?

Tell me how may times you have faced the following situation: You are reading an interesting article and now you want to share it with your friends, so you need to open another browser window (or tab) or go to your already open window (or tab) where you are already logged into your favorite web based mail account. You click on compose, type in the subject, cut-paste the link of the article you were reading and then send it.

Google has created a new 'News Reader', while this is just another web based RSS News Reader, what is different about it is the user interface. Again google has created something really nice to use. Google seems to get the AJAX technology pretty well. Gmail is very good example of that, and now News Reader too.

I found a new tool called w.blogger. It's a desktop blogging client. It lets you write your blog on your PC and then post it to your site. It supports several APIs. This blog is just a first test of this application. I am going to try and include a screenshot of this window at the end of this post to show how it looks. That will also be a good test of this blog client's capabilities.

Gmail is really wonderful. The interface is excellent! Gmail has completely changed the way webmail works. It relies heavily on javascript and loads extremely fast. The concept of labels takes a while to understand but once you get used to it, it really simplifies the whole webmail experience.

I have been using VOIP phone in my house for more than 2 months now. There have been no issues yet. I'm using the service from Lingo. This is very nice. I get all the great features of normal phone including Caller-ID, Call-Waiting, Simultaneous Ring, Call forwarding, Voice Mail and many more which can only be offered in a VoIP phone. For example I can set rules that allow me to forward calls to my cell phone when I'm not home (or only during certain time etc.). My voice mail can be automatically forwarded as an mp3 attachment to my email. I will never have to change my phone number again. All I really need is Internet connection. With broadband becoming ubiquitus this should not be a problem in the future.

Have you heard about Google Maps? It's a very innovative way to see and browse maps which is a lot different than how other map sites (MapQuest, MapsOnUs, MapPoint) do. The most interesting part is the map that is shown to you always fits in your browser window and is made up of tiles. You can drag with mouse on the map to pan it in all four directions. Everytime you pan, the unshown tiles are downloaded and shown to you. All the tiles at each resolution are fixed. So if you use a map of a small area over and over again most of the tiles won't even need to be downloaded as they are already cached by your web browser. This reduces the network traffic and improves the user experience.

SPAM is becoming such a big problem and I don't see any comprehensive industry-wide solution emerging anytime soon... there's a lot of talk but very little action...

I know there are a few solutions in the works but why are they taking so long?