Technically Speaking

I was recently invited to participate in a beta for FareCast. This site predicts the cost of airfare to certain cities based on current prices, past prices and forecasts the likelihood of the price going in any certain direction or maintaining constant.

The idea is to help you find the best time to purchase your tickets, not just the best time to travel.

From the little bit of browsing I have done this service looks to be a great way to look for airline tickets.

You enter the city you are leaving from and the destination along with the number of travelers and the length of your stay, then farecast goes to work to make recommendations as to when you might buy your tickets. It also provides links to multiple airline websites. When you click to purchase the tickets, you are directed to the airlines website to do so.

The site is in private beta right now and has limitations in features. I did find a graphic showing a bit about what the results look like, and have posted it below:

I am very excited about this service for booking or planning vacations in advance. Those who travel alot on business or personal trips could gain quite alot from a service like this.

Have you ever found yourself burried in voicemail messages? Whether you are out of the house for a few minutes or in an area with no cell reception, surely there have been days where you didnt get your voicemail as readily as you might have liked. I know this happens to me occasionally.

Being a VoIP user, I like getting email notifications of any voicemail messages I receive… this allows me to listen to the messages from anywhere I have Internet access and removes the need for me to check in with the VoIP provider’s site to see if there are messages for me to listen to. However, for my cellular phone there is no email convenience feature to email me when I have a new message. Or is there?

There is a solution out there that doesnt cost anything for its basic service. The website is called GotVoice and allows you to setup your cellular phone or traditional home phone to have its voicemail retrieved and emailed to you. You can play the message right from the email. Unified messaging for non-IP telephony.

The service works by collecting information about your phone when you set up your account. You tell GotVoice your phone number and voicemail pin number, and it calls your phone based on a schedule you configure and retrieve’s messages. Then it emails them to you.

You can sign up for plus service, which emails the voicemail message(s) as email attachments in MP3 format, and allows more checks per day (10 checks per day, up from 3 with the free service) or Premium service, which will deliver voicemail in an RSS feed and allow playback from Itunes (or an RSS Reader) and carries 24 checks per day.

The basic service allows you to listen to voicemail from your account, you click on a link in the email and the GotVoice web player pops up and plays new messages.

The service is secured by user supplied login/password that is stored in a database, configured and set by the user.

Also, with the free service you will get ads on the account screen and in the emails received denoting messages.

Basic service is free, Plus service is 4.95/month and Premium service is 9.95/month. From the limited use I have had with the service it seems pretty cool. We will see how it goes for a few days, sounds like a cool idea though.

I was sifting through subscriptions in my newsreader (not Outlook 2007) and came across an article reminding me that Office 2007 will allow you to blog from Word and publish directly to your site.

Fortunately Word Press is one of the blogs supported by this feature.

To set up word blogging you need to download and install Office 2007 beta 2 from http://www.microsoft.com. Then open Word 2007 and click on the Office menu at the very top left of the window (see image below).

The thing in the image that looks like the office logo… that is a menu for general purposes. Print, Open, New, and Publish are in there.

Once you click there, select Publish and from there choose Blog

You will then be prompted to configure your blog settings, Username, password, URL and blog type. Once this is done and saved, the word interface will change to add a space for post title and a publish button.

Note: When you choose a blog host of Other, the screen above will appear empty so you can fill in custom settings. The help me fill out this section link will provide a good deal of information for correctly entering the API and the URL for your blog. Word press uses MetaWebLog and http://www.yoursite.com/<wordpress>/xmlrpc.php

Another cool feature… Spell checker. Your blog posts will be checked as you type just like any other word document, which eliminates the need to copy the word document into the blog post screen.

I have used this feature once, for this post, but will make use of it as the posts here grow. It is a step in the right direction, we will see If additional features are added for RTM.

Note: Uploading pictures doesn’t work as of yet, could be a word press setting preventing this, but I will keep trying. And the date on word posted items is way wrong. I got 12-31-1969 for this originally and edited it on the site to correct.. not huge, but in need of work.

The snazzy new Office application from Redmond hit Public Beta this week and the downloads of the application numbered quite high. I of course was quick to get the software. I thought I might go through some of the things I have found so far (which isnt many but I will post more as they come to me).

The Excel 2007 application is sweet. It uses tabs with mouseover rather than traditional menus (shown below)

Excel also uses this mouse over styling to show you things like conditional formatting so you do not have to commit to the choice without viewing it, which is rather nice. The conditional formatting options are also improved, you can use in cell coloring to draw users to certain data or KPI style stoplights to present key items.

External data display is also improved. When using pivot tables to showcase external items you are allowed to drill into the results of the dataset. You can show or hide additional details.

Traditional tables allow for advanced sorting, even/odd row colors and are very easy to use/create

An example of a table with applied conditional formatting is shown below:

Another nice thing, since we have a table above that could grow as John Doe’s sales increase, is that Microsoft has gotten rid of the 65000 row limit on worksheets.

Have you ever been to a website and wanted to share it with your friends?

Sure, we have all been there and have all probably emailed the sites we like to dozens of other people in an attempt to pass the sites along. What about surfing the Internet from home and then visiting someone else’s house wishing you could remember the site about the chicken recipie you were on last Saturday so you could share it with Aunt Mary to whom you forgot to email it.

What if there were a way to share bookmarks as you add them?

Both Symantec and Mcafee have confirmed a trojan going around on the Internet in which the trojan exploits unpatched Word vulnerabilities.

Be very mindful of any word documents downloaded from the Internet… only opening those you absolutely trust.

For more information see the link below:

http://vil.mcafeesecurity.com/vil/content/v_139539.htm

The overall risk of infection is very low, but being careful of any files from the Internet is never a bad idea

In todays fastmoving, over busy society many people do not want to take the time to read the news. Sure it is available in many formats from print to television to radio to the newest of the available choices, the Internet.

Many sites have sprung up to provide news, Fox News, CNN, and the other major and even local news companies. Portal sites like Yahoo, MSN, and Google have also come up with ways to bring you as much news as you might need everyday. This technology is great, I for one would rather read the relevant news on the Internet than sit in front of the television or pay to get the newspaper every morning.

What if there were a way to bring all of the news from the websites you visit everyday into one place where you could read them all at once? How easy would that make things?

The way this is done is through a web protocol called RSS or Really Simple Syndication. When content to be syndicated is produced, an rss file or feed is produced. This feed is kept in a file separate from the original URL. This file uses a formatting language to organize information into titles and brief descriptions. Similar to what you might see on a news site. The Internet users who wish to read this content then subscribe to the contents feed.

When you subscribe to a feed, your web portal or desktop reader will check in with the feed at specified intervals for new content, when the feed is updated… presto, you have new things to read. No surfing, searching, or extended browsing required.

Sites such as the one you are reading now, known as webblogs, can also publish RSS feeds. The software used to create the content for the webpage also creates its RSS feed. You can subscribe to the feed for this site and other weblogs just like other news sites.

Sites are denoted as having a feed have a link to that feed, usually displayed by an orange RSS icon like this .

A feeds file contains a snippet of information about the article, or can contain the entire item depending on the publisher. The content is formatted in a human readable and very loose way, keep in mind when you look at the actual feed file in your browser you will probably send email telling me that it isnt very readable. So we will spare the boring technical graphic (for now).

When feeds are pulled in by Yahoo’s News reader (available through my.yahoo.com with a free account) they are displayed as shown below:

There is a company out on the Internet that gets RSS and aggregation, aggregation is the buzzword used by many to describe the process of pulling in content from various sources. The company is called NewsGator. They have an online reader, much like the yahoo reader, but focused on RSS and in my opinion easier to use. That reader is shown below:

And for those of you who like an application outside your browser to investigate this technology, Newsgator produces a few desktop applications for reading the news. There is Feed Demon for Windows and Net News Wire for the Macintosh. These applications have free trial periods of 30 days and a cost of $29.95 following the trial period (clicking on the name of the app above will download the trial to your PC). They also have tutorials that go past the scope of this article.

A Feed Demon screenshot is shown below:

Now that I have opened up the idea of RSS and News readers I hope you will look at this new technology. When you first begin playing with the applications or protocols there may be some questions as to where to find feeds… in truth, google, yahoo, and other searches would provide many results however there are a few search engines just for this type of thing. One of these is www.icerocket.com. You can search the web, blogs, myspace.com and other things.

Note: Feed Demon and the NewsGator online reader will let you search for feeds on a specific topic if you do not know the address of the feed.

So we have looked at what RSS is and a little about how it works, but what can it do for you?

It has been quite a bit since I have put any new ideas up here for your reading and learning enjoyment, I am quite sorry for that.  I am hoping to be better at it in the coming weeks.

Today I thought I would look at something that I have been asked a few times by co-workers, “what are ‘cookies’ and why are they on my computer?”

Cookies, the electronic kind, arent flavored with chocolate chips or molasses nor are they consumed en masse around the holidays. 

Electronic cookies are snippets of information from a website that are stored on your computer to aid the website in remembering who you are.  This way, content can be arranged to fit your preference or your password can be remembered to allow you to login as soon as you get to www.mycoolwebstuff.com.

When a website that uses cookies loads, it will look for the existence of a cookie that it generated on your PC.  The cookie file typically contains the web address and some information about your last visit there.  Once found, the computer can log you in, populate your username and password so you can login, or customize the current page according to previous preferences.

Note: When looking to identify a site that uses cookies, the easiest way is to look for the remember me checkbox under neath the login area.

Cookies are relatively safe to use while online because in most cases only the site that placed the cookie will have any idea it is there and know what to do with it when it is found.  You can instruct your browser to clear the contents of the cookies folder or delete all existing cookies as frequently as you like or tell it not to use cookies at all.  The latter is generally a little too excessive in the fact that some cookies, just like at christmas, are never a bad thing.

Always be mindful of the sites you visit, if you are unsure you can always delete cookies after visiting a site.