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Outlook 2010 not responding on Microsoft Windows 7 64 bit »

I had the most painful experience with Outlook 2010 32 bit on Windows 7 64 bit. Don’t ask me why I installed the 32bit version on the 64 bit OS….the 32 bit CD was just handy on that day.

After opening Outlook for couple of minutes, it would stop responding and I had to kill it using the Task Manager. I applied all latest patches, disabled add-ons and tried several other solutions, including deleting and recreating profiles, but none of the solutions helped. I finally moved over to Thunderbird and it worked great for quite some time. And then I got couple of email attachments, which for some reason got corrupted, when I tried to save them from Thunderbird. This got me worried because I had to ask my client to send me attachments several times, in different formats (PPTX, PPT etc). However, I realized that if opened that email using Outlook (I use IMAP), it had no problem opening the attachments. To make the story short, I realized I had to get back to Outlook. I had no other option.

I then uninstalled the MS Office 32 bit version and installed the 64 bit version and now, everything is working perfect.

Windows 7 SP1 releases on February 22 »

Still on Windows XP? Microsoft announced today the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of SP1 for Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7. While the article does not elaborate on fixes/ enhancements on Win 7 SP1, it discusses Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX features on Windows 2008.

Here is the link to Windows lifecycle fact sheet.

Product Ratings and Reviews »

Not very long ago, people used to buy products, based on the brand name alone. Companies had the luxury of spending lot of advertisement money on promoting their brands, by making eye-catching advertisements. Even if the product itself sucked, people would still buy products that are from great brands. Just like every other thing in life, internet changed this too. Consumers posted their experiences on their websites and blogs. This made it somewhat difficult for companies to just sell their product, just because their brand name is great.

Then came “Review Sites”. Professionals reviewed the products on their websites in great details, sometimes even with a video on You Tube. For buyers, this was great as it gave more insight into the pros and cons of the product they wish to buy. Unfortunately, the trend now seems to be changing. I believe most of these professional review sites, if not all of them, are getting sponsorship from the product companies and that influenced the reviews. You see 4/5 or even 5/5 for products, that really sucked big time.

I now see a new website, with a different approach – ratingscorner.com. They claim that they have a different rating system, that takes care of the issues mentioned earlier. From their About Us page, they say “Our easy to use and exhaustive rating system will focus on better and more objective consumer feedback rather than user reviews or comments that may not be effective decision makers.”

I did try couple of products on their site and it looks really promising. The pages also load fast enough and the content seems to be pretty current. I do hope they make a difference in this space and keep themselves clean and simple.

Google URL Shortener API »

Google joins several others by offering URL shortener API. More about it is here. The good thing about it is that since it is an API, it makes sharing of long URLs, pretty easy.

Microsoft WebMatrix – a free web development environment »

As from the Microsoft website:WebMatrix is everything you need to build Web sites using Windows. It includes IIS Developer Express (a development Web server), ASP.NET (a Web framework), and SQL Server Compact (an embedded database). It streamlines Web site development and makes it easy to start Web sites from popular open-source apps. The skills and code you develop with WebMatrix transition seamlessly to Visual Studio and SQL Server.

Just like XAMPP, WebMatrix provides you a complete web development environment on Windows, that supports both ASP.Net and PHP. WebMatrix supports a new scripting syntax, called Razor for ASP.Net web pages. It also has a built-in SEO report to make the site more visible to search engines. With built-in support for FTP, publishing the site to production environment is also easy.

Online Book Rental, the P2P Way »

Online book rental is now becoming popular on the internet. We recently had the opportunity to work on Silibi whose business model is focussed on peer-to-peer rental. For us, the concept of exchanging books over the internet, using the APIs from ISBNDB, Amazon, USPS and Paypal was very interesting.
We initially used ISBNDB to access the books database and it worked great for us. However, we needed the book image and its weight, so we switched over to Amazon. USPS is seamlessly integrated with the check-out process and shipment labels automatically get generated.  Check it out yourself at Silibi and you will see that the application is very fast, even when it tries to retrieve lot of information from many 3rd party sources.

Video resumes in India »

In the last 3-4 decades, if there is one thing that has not been significantly influenced by technology, it must be resumes. Of course, they have moved from paper based to electronic format, but the content, format etc are pretty much the same. Except for few tech-savvy companies, HR personnel have not yet started experiencing the power of Video resumes.

With internet connection speeds pretty decent nowadays, video resumes are not that painful to download and view. In fact, with advances in the video encoding and streaming technologies, viewing videos online is now a seamless experience. One cannot deny the fact that video resumes offer more insight into the candidates. I have heard ridiculous comments like “Candidates are all staged” in video resumes. Well…so are paper based resumes. In paper based resumes, candidates try to use more prominent keywords, so that job portals can pull them up over other resumes. So, more than the resume content, keywords play a more important role in paper based resumes. In video based resumes, HR personnel get to SEE and HEAR the candidates, without even picking up the phone.

Communication skills are as important  as technical skills: How many times have you worked with an employee with whom communication is very difficult. I know of many employees who are afraid to pick up the telephone to speak to US clients. Interaction within a group improves the overall efficiency of the team.

There are two types of video resumes, where candidates speak about themselves for few minutes. The second one, which is more of an evolution of the first, allows employers to post jobs and set relevant questions to those job profiles. Candidates can answer the questions, at their own convenience. The advantage in the second one is that the candidates are answering to questions that are more relevant . iVirtual (in India) and VIP (in USA) are one of those service providers, who allow employers to post questions and review them later on the web, at their own convenience.