Do you Hulu?

Well, do you? I guarantee you that you will be after visiting the site: www.hulu.com

Full-length movies, TV shows like the Simpsons, even the famous Superbowl commercials - all legit - can be viewed with the click of a button. The quality is much better than YouTube.

Hulu came out of beta about a week or so ago and is now open to any user - in the U.S. Oh well, google an app called Hotspot shield which is primarily used to secure your wireless connection on public hotspots, and you will also get an ip recognized as in the US. With your shield up, you can hulu on.

Web 2.0 Map

Here's how Web 2.0 would look like if it were a subway:

http://www.informationarchitects.jp/slash/ia_trendmap_start.html

What is Web 2.0? Wikipedia (a prime example) says it "refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which facilitate collaboration and sharing between users."

Your Files Anywhere

Go to Foldershare.com to grab this neat program that lets you access your files remotely. Great for those times when you need to check files on your home or work PC. However, it does choke on files larger than a couple of megabytes, in my experience. It is still officially on beta.

What do you want to do with your life?

Do the Taskbar Shuffle

Taskbar Shuffle is a nifty little program that allows you to rearrange your open program icons in your Taskbar simply by dragging and dropping them. I want my programs lined up in a particular order in my taskbar for easy location - my e-mail program is usually first, then my contacts, then Firefox, etc.

So, do the shuffle - no spyware, ads or banners. Keep life simple.

The Future is Virtual

These days choosing an OS (Operating System) is like choosing an ice cream flavour from Baskin Robbins - so much to choose from, so little time! Whether you're best pals with Bill (Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003, Longhorn, etc.) or a FOSS advocate (Linux, but which flavour?), there are a myriad of flavours from which to choose. Now, what if you can run all of them from one box? You can, with virtualization.

"Virtualization allows multiple virtual machines, with heterogeneous operating systems to run in isolation, side-by-side on the same physical machine. Each virtual machine has its own set of virtual hardware (e.g., RAM, CPU, NIC, etc.) upon which an operating system and applications are loaded. The operating system sees a consistent, normalized set of hardware regardless of the actual physical hardware components."

Right now, the best virtualization software out there is from a company called VMWare. They have a whole suite of products from which to choose. You can run, VMWare Server, for instance, from your PC (reasonably fast, pack it with lots of RAM), and switch back and forth from Windows to Linux to your heart's content. The best part of it is - it's free! Well, except for the Data Centre and Enterprise products, of course. But the free VMWare Server should give you a pretty good idea how virtualization works.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft is also getting into the fray. It is offering Virtual PC 2007 for free as well. Alas, their Virtual Server isn't free but you can download a trial copy.

Want to run XP on your intel Mac? Well, you can boot-camp or you can run Parallels. The latter will set you back $79 and the former is still officially in beta.

So, go ahead, virtualize your world. Choose any flavour, any computing experience that suits you. With virtualization, you don't need to choose sides. Welcome to the future!

A Smug Mug

There must be a gazillion photo upload sites, but Smugmug is unique. First, you can upload an unlimited number of photos. Second, you can organize your photos through tagging. The most clever feature though, I think, is their "Geotagging" where you can associate your photos to Google maps. The site is not free but the $39.95/year admittance price gets you more features than other photo sites.