.farshid sedghi’s personal blog.

I finally bit the bullet and re-imaged my laptop after some 5 months. Anyways, last round I tried Google and Microsoft’s desktop search engines and although Googles was good I never really trusted it as it didn’t seem to index everthing I asked it. Also it doesn’t give you much options in terms of where to store your index etc. Microsoft has a better integration with windows and was very good but I constantly had to snooze it as it would try and index things instantly and using FileMon from sysinternals I realized that it is constantly writing to the disk.

So this round I am trying Yahoo’s which is powered by the fast X1 and so far I must say I am impressed and prefer it over the two I mentioned.

Also, in case you haven’t seen this, here is a list of killer apps (by Scott Hanselman) that I would say most of them are must have, especially if you are a little on the geek side.

I came across Beaterator that you can potentially waste a lot of time on. Basically it lets you create your own beat. Very cool design. [via Geekdojo]

Also, I learned that Microsoft is offering a 2nd free shot if you take an exam with them and happen to fail and since I already was planning on taking one of the MCSD .NET exams this works out perfectly. Details on 2nd free shot.

When waking up this morning I thought to myself, I am tired of waking up either to the annoying ring of the alarm clock or the music on the radio that I can’t control. Why can’t there be a alarm clock with mp3 functionality. Well I guess Philips must have heard me. They have one now so you know what I want for my birthday.

Also, I came over these two sites that are handy to have bookmarked www.connectionstrings.com and free dev tools

Checked my Ad sense account today for stats of yesterday since it was my first day. 28 visits (# of times the Google script in the page was loaded), 7 clicks on the ads and $0.00 in income. Maybe I am too optimistic about getting a dollar in 6 months.

Came across PureText which as a developer seems very useful. When copying/cutting text from an application into another, where you want only the text and not the formatting…this tool can be configured to do the job.

And here is a cool addin to Outlook. A calendar addin that give you fish-eye view as well as other useful features when looking at your outlook calendar. It’s called DataLens and you can view a demo video so you understand what it does and it works with outlook 2003 as well. Both of them are free.

Here is a good link that I have been looking for. MSDN’s own search is not good enough (unfortunately) and I tried this with a few articles that I looked for using MSDN’s own search without finding it and I found it using this search engine. I came across this link reading this free book called .NET in Samples . This is still in draft version and final one will be release on the end of 2004 focusing on Whidbey features (pdf or doc) [via Iserializable].