Yahoo! Search has transitioned to Bing in the US and will be rolling out elsewhere as part of the agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo! where Bing will be the search engine powering Yahoo! and Yahoo! managing the ad sales for searches originating from its search site as well as from Bing’s own site.

This is part of the efforts from Yahoo! to focus more on it’s key areas as well as a joint effort by the companies to take on Google which is the reigning search engine.

Just when I thought I loved the Firefox 4 Beta that I have been using since the past 2 months now, Bam! Mozilla outs beta number 4. The latest has made me await the final release ever more anxiously!

A look at the key features in Beta 4:

• Firefox Sync plugin is now integrated with the browser itself. For the uninitiated, FF Sync allows you to sync your browser data between two computers or even between your smartphones. A great tool if you ask me. You can either setup sync with FF server or your own (Custom) server.
• Another Hot Feature is the Tab Groups or Firefox Panorama (previously called Tab Candy). I discovered this only today, I must admit. You can manage tab groups either by right-clicking on the tab and clicking on “Move This Tab To > Create New Group” or if you have menus enabled (visible) by default, then simply go to the “View Menu > Group Your Tabs” and voila! you arrange your tabs as per your liking. You can also use Ctrl+Space for quick access to Panorama. Watch this video showing off great features of Panorama.

Other than these, I feel performance has indeed improved over the previous Beta release. For more info, check out the full release notes.

My heartiest well wishes to all of you on the occasion of India’s Independence Day (which is on 15th August). May our motherland, India, reach heights of success and achievements.

I pray to Almighty Allah for making our country overcome all the odds and succeed in all the avenues and be at the forefront of freedom for which we Indians have stood.

Freedom, as everyone should know, is in our blood. To fight for and uphold the values of freedom will and should always be the first concern for us Indians.

So, go out and do good deeds on this I-Day and raise the bar for other countries/communities to follow.

iPod touch 3G

Well, its been quite a while since I mentioned my adventures with my iPod touch 3G. It has been an experience through which I realized that I was better off without an iPhone.

Imagine an environment where you follow what one man has to say. You see what this man visualizes. And, you do what this man follows! Totally undemocratic, right? That’s exactly what I feel when I am using my iPod. Yes, there are goodies on it. And, there maybe some good stuff you can do with it. But, you still are stuck with diktats! There’s nothing that will change that. You cannot do things as you like with the device that you have paid for!

I’m happy that Saurik jailbroke this device with his little Cydia App. A jailbroken iPod is indeed a geek’s productivity center. Other than that, you get many good apps from Cydia itself.

While I have described quite some experience of mine, I would like to mention here that my iPod 3G is already jailbroken! I used the Spirit Jail Break to free my phone and ever since then I haven’t looked back.

Yes, I’m still using OS 3.1.3 as i didn’t feel like upgrading to the new version yet. Not having a jailbreak available for the iPod touch 3G on iOS4 didn’t help the cause either.

Other than all this, there’s a peculiar limitation from iTunes that prevents you from syncing the iPod on more than 3 authorised computers. This, even when I own the iPod, the apps, the computers and the music library. What could be the justification offered for this? Nothing.

But anyway, the discoveries go on as I march forward into the nether-realms of  Apple’s iPod. Before I sign off, I must say that some of the games are really good. I loved Angry Birds a lot. So, there it is. So, I sign off for now. Until the next entry on this, Ciao!!!!

As with all the good things that could have happened to our beloved country, you gotta give it to the politicians to spoil the celebrations!

Suresh Kalmadi (Image Courtesy: Times Of India)

As if the preparations for the Common Wealth Games (CWG) wasn’t enough, we have started reading and hearing daily bytes of the corruption (obviously with the ‘blessings’ of the high & mighty politicians) trickling in. The web is spread so wide that it’s surprising. It has acted as the perfect disgrace for a rising country called India.

No one from the government seems to be ready to talk about CWG. No statement from anyone has come in yet. Suresh Kalmadi, the man in the eye of the CWG storm seems answer-less to all the allegations that are coming up.

It is only in India that Mr. Kalmadi continues to head the CWG Organising Committee despite all this. What has happened to the moral responsibility of this man? (even if there is no proof of his involvement in all of this which I honestly doubt).

Even the PM hasn’t reacted to all this.

I request the hon’ble Prime Minister of  India to intervene on this matter and make Mr. Kalmadi resign to avoid further embarrassment for our nation.

Well just when you thought I was not really around, I write an article! This one is indeed special. It denotes about 6 years of my unrelenting support of the browser I really love.

It is totally impartial. Let me tell you that even though I haven’t been able to write an article on the blog, but I have been up to many things lately. One of them being usage of Firefox 4 Beta 1. Well, just yesterday I got a prompt to upgrade to Beta 2 of FF4. I did. And, voila! App Tabs dawn on me. This is indeed a great feature. I am just loving it.

Not to talk about the other great features that are available in FF4 B2 like:

• Tabs are on top (yep, above the awesome bar)
• App Tabs (Small persistent tabs used for mail, twitter, facebook and other essential stuff that’s always open with us and that stay safely in the leftmost corner giving you more real estate for other activities. Find out more.
• Better HTML5 Support
• Search for open tabs right from the address bar
• Plus much more

Find out about more exciting features in the release notes for Firefox 4 beta 2.

Well, before I proceed on explaining you what to do, I must warn you that this article is for use by advanced users. Although, the changes (that will be made according to this article) are reversible, I advise caution.

Ok, many of you corporate network users are aware that there are proxies running on your networks to allow access to the internet. If you happen to be one of the those unlucky chums, this article is for you.

First up, we need to find out if you have a Wi-Fi access point for your network. If yes, then you need to find out the security access settings (if security is enabled) and second, if this is a DHCP network or you have to manually configure the settings?

Your choices will be (after you log on to the network):

1. If Wi-Fi access point is DHCP enabled, then your phone should automatically acquire an IP for use on the network and you are good to go.
2. If the Wi-Fi access point is not DHCP enabled, then you need to get the IP for your phone. (we will address the manual configuration later when we configure the proxy)

OK. So far so good. Now, if your phone got an IP automatically (as per pt. #1 above) then you would look to set your proxy settings. While people who need to assign an IP manually, need to follow an extra step as follows:

1. Open your Menu ( this is done by pressing the menu key on your N97 mini) and then to “Settings”
2. Under “Settings” Go to > “Connectivity” > “Destinations” and finally to “Internet”. (phew!!! that was looooong!!!)
3. Now, select the access point from the list that you want to configure. Let’s call it “CORP” (in this example).  Now, open CORP settings by clicking on it two times (like you double left-click on your PC).
4. You will now see the settings for the access point. That’s good. Now, click on options button at the bottom left of the screen and select “Advanced Settings” from the list. This will take you to the advanced settings.
5. In Advanced Settings, You will now see four settings, namely IPv4 settings, IPv6 settings, Proxy Server Address and Proxy port number.
6. For those whose phone already has an IP set by DHCP, please set the proxy server and proxy port here and then just click OK or Back and close the settings screen and return to the Home Screen and you are finished and ready to use your network at work. For those whose phone needs manual assigning of an IP, please go to next step.
7. For setting the phone’s network IP manually, click on the IPv4 settings option in the Advanced settings from step 5.
8. Now, click on Phone IP address and set the IP that you got from your network administrator. Click OK and then set the network DNS by going to DNS addresses and then setting your primary and secondary DNS (if any). Click on OK and exit and then return to Advanced settings menu and set your proxy address and proxy port if you haven’t already done so. That’s it!

There you go. No one told me how to do it. I found out and now I share the same info with you people. Hope you liked it! Please share your comments and don’t forget to tell your friends about this blog!

Ok. Well, technically this is day 4 but practically it is day 2 as I spent two days without being able to use the iPod (as I was busy with office work).

So, with that behind us, I would like to mention a couple of things I noticed in my iPod touch as compared to my N97 mini. Please note that the comparison that I am making between the two devices is limited solely to the UI and other app stuff.

This doesn’t consider the phone, GPS, and other such stuff not present on the iPod touch.

Well, moving on, I must say that most of the apps I use on my N97 mini are available for the iPhone OS also (and which I mentioned on my first post). Having said that, I must mention that I was impressed by the following on my iPod touch:

• Good internet experience when compared to the slow built-in browser of the N97 mini.
• Great touch response (again an area where Nokia does not deliver as expected in a high end device like the N97 mini)
• Good email client (Nokia’s email client is ok but compared to the iPod’s, it still needs to smoothen out some things). Not to mention that I could access my corporate email on the iPod (you see, my corporate email is not on exchange but third-party managed). Nokia’s Email service doesn’t support my work email as of now. (boo -hooo!!)
• Wi-Fi configuration is really great and also supports most of the diverse authentication protocols I have come across when I visit my project sites (Nokia are you listening on this one?). Even though my Nokia N97 mini has configuration options for a proxy but the authentication given to the phone doesn’t work well, it seems. I am still verifying many more options on the iPod and therefore more on this as days pass by.
• Good processor on the iPod makes it quite responsive (Nokia could have done a lot better if they had used a 600Mhz+ processor on the N97 mini themselves).
• Pinch zooming and other features are good.

Following is what I found quite bad and annoying and made me grateful to not have purchased an iPhone and instead proved my decision to stick to my N97 mini a worthy one. So, here’s a list of things that are bad with the iPod/iPhone:

• The first and the worst: Connect to iTunes to make your device functional and notify Apple of the activation. Not really acceptable, but do we have a choice? Nokia, you are superb…
• Landscape mode is only selectively available in selected apps. This means that there ain’t no landscape mode usage except for some areas like: Safari, Mail, Photos and Video Playback. Other than this, portrait mode is locked in! And they had been blaming Nokia for putting the N900 in a sort of landscape mode lock! Hypocrisy at play here, I guess.
• No good accessories support. I bought a dock which was advertised as “iPod touch compatible” but the stupid thing rejects is as “This accessory is not supported by this iPod”. Damn!
• No multi-tasking (should be solved when I get OS 4)
• No camera (Very very disappointing)
• No GPS (iPod uses the “known” Wi-Fi connection to know your current location) which means that the presence of maps is useless!
• No out of the box full featured apps or games (as opposed to what Nokia offers and has spoilt us with, over the years!)
• No good support (Everything’s covered under a “very limited” warranty as per Apple’s claim). When I asked the retailer at the time of purchase about support, he said I had to go to him and he would then ask for an email approval from the actual Apple service provider (in Riyadh) and then send my device to them by courier (after they approve!). Lousy, you say? Yep, very lousy. Compared to this, Nokia has got us covered (literally!).

Well, that’s a huge list of things I found in 2 days. More to come at a later date. See you then.

Finally, I managed to get myself a brand new iPod Touch 3G, 32GB version! Great thing. But the moment I purchased it, I have been thinking of installing all kinds of stuff on it. Already my music library has been transferred to it. Over 5 Gigs of Indian & English Songs. Plus, apps for Y! Messenger, Skype, Fring, Twitter and Facebook!

My iPod checklist for the days to come:

• Jailbreak
• Install more and more apps
• Configure Mail accounts
• Load my contacts
• More social apps
• Lot’s of games!
• Plus much more exploring to be done

Looks like my path’s cut out. iPod touch was something I had been looking forward to adding to my list of gadgets! Finally, iGot iPod. iPhone can wait until the time I can test all the functionalities of the iPhone OS and compare the same with Nokia’s Symbian OS s60 v5 which is running great on my Nokia N97 Mini.

Comparisons are inevitable. But all that can wait until later. I would be posting comparisons as soon as I am aware of the differences between the two softwares. And, see what all the fuss is about.

In the meatime, I need people to help me jailbreak my iPod touch with OS 3.1.3 installed (yea, I have been googling all day). Any suggestions guys?

Looks like finally we Nokia/Yahoo! users are in for some treat. As per the official blog post, Nokia and Yahoo! are partnering once again (they had previously partnered to offer Yahoo! Go on N series Handsets most notably the likes of N70, N95 and so on).

So, you must be wondering, what’s in it for us: the users? Here’s a brief from the post I would like to reproduce for you:

As part of the alliance Nokia will be the exclusive provider of Yahoo!’s maps and navigation services, branded as “powered by Ovi.” Nokia brings its ample experience in top-drawer, location-based products and maps to Yahoo!’s users. In turn, Yahoo! will become the exclusive global provider of Nokia’s Ovi Mail and Ovi Chat services, branded as “powered by Yahoo!.” Yahoo! brings its expertise in world-class internet offerings to the table for Ovi users.

From what I see, this pact is a kind of “switching of services” pact between the two giants. Nokia’s Maps services would power Yahoo! Maps as “powered by Ovi Maps” and Ovi Mail/Chat would be run by Yahoo! in return (also to be credited as “Powered By Yahoo!”).

For us Nokia and Yahoo! users, we would definitely gain. Especially, the crowd which owns Nokia phones and use Yahoo! services.

I can’t wait to see the difference that this pact would bring to the overall user experience.

Both the companies are at a difficult juncture in their remarkable success paths. Nokia is facing an onslaught from the various wannabes and they are well equipped indeed (And, you thought being an industry leader was easy! Nokia should learn lessons in industry dominance from Intel), while Yahoo! has been struggling to expand its profits by focussing on areas where it holds expertise. (Fact: Yahoo! is still the most visited homepage on the internet today).

Let’s see what comes out of this exciting collaboration.

Links of Use:

• Yahoo! Yodel Anecdotal (Official Yahoo! Corporate blog)
• Nokia Conversations (Official Nokia Blog)