Another nice feature, unrevealed in Internet Explorer 7: Adding your own search providers is quite easy. When you select the drop down menu at your search box, you can select your currently installed search providers.

To add more, select Find More Providers… from the menu.

Now, go to your favorite search engine and perform a search for TEST. I did this for the Beolingus translation provider. Paste the URL from the previous source and specify a name for your new search provider.

That’s the XML used for the installation. Press install and can directly access this search provider using the search box in IE 7.

<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
  <ShortName>Beolingus</ShortName> 
  <Description>Beolingus provider</Description> 
  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding> 
  <Url type="text/html" template="http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de/dings.cgi?lang=en&service=deen&opterrors=0&optpro=0&query={searchTerms}&iservice=&comment=" /> 
</OpenSearchDescription>

If you want to modify the settings later, you can do so using Tools / Internet Options / Change Search Defaults Settings.

It was the first time I played with these settings of Internet Explorer and I am quite surprised in a positive way about it.

Live Maps came up with a new feature where you can find your Synths on the map. However, not easy to find whilst looking the first time for it.

To get the Photosynth collections, zoom into any area of interest, and select Collections and Explore Collections from the upper right menus.

On the left side you can choose from which collections the results should be displayed. The fourth icon provides a list of Synths from the region in the viewed area.

Today, I tried it the first time...

"Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier."

It looks very lightweight, though. Reminds me to the early beginnings of Netscape and Internet Explorer. It gives you the impression that it's quite fast. However, during rendering it looks a bit like Safari.

For some pages that look quite nice in Firefox and Internet Explorer, rendering also behaves a bit odd. So, is this one more browser we have to test our Web application against?

One feature provided is the creation of application shortcuts on your desktop that will open the Web site in its own, plain window. Very nice but failed several times when I tried. not sure if it's worth switching from Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Source: http://www.google.com/chrome

I did a third Synth, this time I got it 100% synthy. In this try, I used about 30 images of Karlsruhe, I did during a night session. I also used a panorama, I created out of a few of this images. This seems to be a quite good approach to help Photosynth to create the good Synth.

I've also used the first time the map feature you can find at your Synth's page.

You simply select the place, where your Synth belongs to and save it along with it.

For a while now there is a new release of RSS Bandit out there. So, finally I did upgrade my installation. The nice thing about RSS Bandit is indeed its very nice integration with Windows Live Writer, del.icio.us, Twitter... any alternatives out there? Wondering what anybody else is using...

Today, I finally got my root server. So I performed my very first root login for a long time.

The master plan however is quite simple

1. Got root
2. Install VMware
3. Install a Windows Server 2008
4. Move my existing site to the new server

So, my very first action was to request a new RIPE subnet. Unlike in your private LAN, you cannot simply assign randomly some IP to any machine. Nothing else I can do until the subnet is assigned.

I just checked out the Kartoo [1] map using aheil as query. Interesting links and relations are found by this tool. But I do not have any clue how ww.cwea.org is realted to the whole map.

click to enlarge

[1] http://www.kartoo.com/

On the German Microsoft TechNet website you can find a online book called TCP/IP-Grundlagen für Microsoft Windows [1]. Unfortunately there are not all chapters published, yet.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/germany/technet/datenbank/articles/600579.mspx

I had same chats about Ajax, JavaScript development, and of course testing and debugging of JavaScript. Looks like with the Sun Java Studio Creator 2 [1] some of these task can be accomplished. As soon as I have some time left, I will check this.

[1] http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/javatools/jscreator/index.jsp