.farshid sedghi’s personal blog.

Update - Had the wrong link to the interview. Corrected now.

Baha’i International Radio (Payame-e-Doost) interviewed me (in Persian) on the topic of Internet and technology. you can listen to it here…it starts at 09 min 10 sec.

Found a cool Firefox extension that makes searches a lot more efficient. It’s called PeteSearch and shows whether your search terms are included in the results or not including if files no longer exist (see below image to get an idea). Works for a host of search engines.

In my continued quest to answer the two never ending questions (1. what’s it like working for Microsoft & 2. what exactly do you do?) from friends, family and others here is another post answering the second question, i.e. what does a Microsoft Program Manager do?

The Swedish Professor, Hans Rosling gives a very captivating and fascinating talk on the world health, population, finances etc purley based on data. Although 20 mins, it flew by watching the video.

There is a patch to speed up Outlook 2007 performance. Go get it as it does not get pushed out through Windows Update (at least not yet). [via Scott Hanselman]

As of today, MSN Hotmail, the popular email service becomes Windows Live Hotmail. So apart from pretty colors and pictures, what has changed? Here is a summary.

The term Web 2.0 has been around for a few years now and I remember when first heard about it, I had the exact same feeling about it as I had when I first heard about Microsoft .NET. Both terms were too abstract and no one/website had a coherent and concise explanation of what it was or what it did or more importantly how it can be implemented in actual software development. (read .net white paper to see what I mean)

And in my opinion if you can’t explain something (in this context technology) in a understandable manner, it is usually indication of it being a marketing ploy (since it either useless or is far from being ready for the market so whoever is trying to promote it is also trying to give themselves an option to decide it later). There are other reasons behind vague tech terms as well and Joel attributes it to Architecture Astronauts.

Here is a 4.5 minute visual presentation of what this so called web 2.0 is for those who are still unclear about it (hope you are a fast reader).

Time and again I tell people to always be aware of what you post on the internet about yourself. Here is an example of why. Imagine I am an identity thief and I have decided to target you for whatever reason…it could be that I saw your myspace page and got a glimpse of personal data on you there and decided to pursue and complete the rest of the picture and take advantage of that info. You might think this should be challenging.

I am afraid with all the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and these engines archiving things away, it would be fairly easy to do this. In fact I came across a tool that just does this and demos exactly my point.

Go to http://www.paterva.com/wizard/. Choose what info you have (person’s name, email or phone number) and it will give you probably more accurate info you thought about the person you search for. Now, this is just a prototype and as these types of tools get more powerful, imagine how easy it will be to find out a lot about you?

So next time you decide to publish any personal information about yourself, I would think twice before doing it.

As a FYI to all my fans (thanks mom), I have started a work blog on http://blogs.msdn.com/farshid. That blog will mostly talk about work related stuff. However the first post is about what it is like to work at Microsoft which you might find interesting as I have been very open about things.

Cropper is a screen capture utility. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. The files are saved straight to a folder of your choice in the format you specify or to the clipboard or printer. No more ‘Print Screen’… open image editor… paste from clipboard… crop… export. Just double-click the form or press enter, and whatever is visible below the form is captured. Download it on Brian Scott’s Blog]

Illinois state wanted to find its own 7 wonders and so people voted and after the results are in, among these wonders you will find the Baha’i House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois. More on this story on CBS Website.