Firefox has released the Firefox 3.6 beta 1 for developer preview. It Visually doesn’t feature any changes from version 3.5. But it features integration with Windows 7 Taskbar and also Windows 7 Style switching of tabs using Ctrl + Tab. Yes it’s able to display the tabs preview.

Download it here.

(Click on this, if you need a Direct link to Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 English for Windows)

Windows 7 Like Tab Preview

Firefox 3.6 ca now display tab previews like Windows 7(the very same way of Alt+Tab in Windows 7).

This feature is disabled by default in the beta version.

type about:config in your address bar and on the appearing page, search for browser.ctrlTabPreviews. Set this as true.

OK now you’re done. Start Exploring

You can select the required tabs using mouse as well by holiding down the Ctrl+Tab key.

What if you’ve too may tabs? Ctrl + Shift + Tab will show up all tabs in the firefox window. Alternatively you can do this by holding down Ctrl + Tab and Click on “Show All Tabs” displayed in the very same windows

This preview window display features a search box where you can quickly search for the required tab if too many tabs are open. As this Shift key assigned with Ctrl+Tab to show up whole tabs, I’m sadly missing shortcut I previously used to traverse back in order.

You can also close the tabs if necessary in this view.

Windows 7 Taskbar Integration

On hovering the taskbar icon of firefox, you can see the preview of tabs in the aero peek window. To enjoy this feature you will have to enable aero theme in you Windows 7.

On hovering the mouse over the windows displayed in the peek view, surely you can peek to see the window. It’s the real Windows 7 peek feature. You can also close the tabs if necessary in this view.

If you’ve too many tabs open, then it will be displayed as stacked list as your seeing above.

Cool eh! This is a quick post on my first look, if you find something really cool, please do share with me in twitter, facebook, or as a comment in this blog.

It will be very nice if we can temporarily removing the update from the friends. So that I can check each and every updates in ease, on removing seen entries, the next entry should come up. Tweetdeck has a feature like clear seen tweets. This something similar to that. Without deleting the facebook entry, temporarily removing the entries. Something like below, it’d be nice if we put a close button like this per entry to hide the facebook updates. I believe something like this would make the facebook less noisy! What do you think?

I am a hard fan of Scott Berkun especially because of great essays and his book “The Art of Project Management” (it has a new updated version called “Making things happen”) which is one of the best management books I’ve ever read. Trust me, it doesn’t contain any bullshits. It talking about the common stuffs in Project management with common sense.

This time I am really interest to quote about his new article in posted in his Blog “How to keep your mouth shut?” Why I am quoting this here because this is a common problem we face including myself  in our day to day life. At least I am experienced few things he mentioned in his blog post.

As a rule, if you insist on speaking your mind, you will inevitably find yourself in an environment where everyone hates you.  Most people can not handle the truth. And the more you shove it in their face, the easier it is for them to ignore you. You simply become the person who always complains, rendering any good ideas you have entirely impotent. Your ideas will be shot down simply because of the reputation of the mouth they come from.

When you’re working under good teams you will get applauded regardless of the senior audience. But he talks about the time where he worked in a team where no one spoke their mind in public.  Few people worked hard or asked tough questions. Quality of work, and morale, was low.

In this kind of situation people may consider your view points as wrong or arrogant.

If you don’t know the angle being played, anything you say might ruin the plan.

This is a great rule to follow before you raise objections or offer big ideas. No matter how right you are, if you care about effecting change, you should never open your mouth without some sense of who will agree with you and who won’t.  If you can anticipate the angles and responses, and judge, even by guessing, if there is a 80%, 20% or 0% percent chance anyone in good standing will follow your lead in support of what you say, you know whether it’s worth opening your mouth. It’s a world of difference of perception when someone respected says, after you speak, “he might be right” and when there’s only silence. And of course, in most cases your percentages go up if you raise your objections in private, rather than in a large meeting where egos are at stake.

We must have experienced situations where our words took in wrong sense. May be we’re talking or raising the hands when we are foreseeing some issues, dealing with BS management, poor tracking, planning, unrealistic estimations and schedule. But remember, someone more powerful than you should have to agree with what you’re saying, otherwise the situation comes like your words got misinterpreted. Trust me, it’s hard to convince your seniors and you will have to do your homework on how to convince them if you’re seeing some wrong or may we need to understand ourselves why such a decision has been made. For this Berkun has another interesting essay – How to survive bad managers?

If you’re saying something, just think twice whether it’s gonna be respected or agreed by your audience. If we’re feeling our ideas or opinions are great, we should have the convince the audience about your view point. Our actions and images are the core things behind these acceptance. If you’re having a bad track record it simply hard get proved unless you’re introducing something great to change the status quo.

On the other hand(receiving end), we’re not comfortable in changing the coziness we’ve, sometimes even if realize it’s a mistake. In the classic book code complete Steve McConnel says -

Any fool can defend his or her mistakes—and most fools do —Dale Carnegie

If a person refuses to admit a mistake, the only person she’ll fool is herself. Everyone else will learn that they’re working with a prideful programmer (person) who’s not completely honest. That’s a more damning fault than making a simple error. If you make a mistake, admit it quickly and emphatically.

The post is still incomplete because these kind of things may vary from people to situation. Some good related essays from Scott is here.

• Why smart people defend bad ideas
• How to pitch an idea
• How to survive a bad manager
• Why you must lead or follow
• How to give and receive criticism

[Updated 2009-10-13 12.00 Noon JST]

Fixed typos. reduced the usage of BS (Sometimes I forgetting I am not an American

Friendfeed is a cool aggregation service which took aggregates many social media websites. They’ve introduced the service with a cool new feature called “Like this”. You can press the like button to mark your emotions towards the shared content. Finally the number of people liked the story and comments give every author a good satisfaction and inspiration to share more! Of course believe me.

Facebook also introduced the “Like” option to the shared contents inspired from friendfeed. but recently I’ve noticed that, lot of good, bad news are happening around but without having any common sense or understanding people are “Liking Stories” (even myself accidently liked a sad story, which I never supposed to").

This came to my attention when Barack Obama’s page posted the Passing Away for Senator Kennedy. You can see 38,847 people like this story so far.

It surely doesn’t make any sense. It’s a great loss for a nation. People may clicking the like button for showing the interest to the stories or may be just because the news was shared by a “The President” who’s a celebrity on the same platform. It’s method to convey your feeling towards what’s he shared.

Another story is shared by the Indian Army. It’s again the feelings of a nation, a sad news shared by the protectors of great India. But still lot of people liked this story (I accidently clicked by misunderstanding the trooper with trespasser. Anyway I unlike it quickly) .

I think facebook (or any other service providing this feature) should provide an option to control this by the author itself. Because social networks are not simply automated robots. Ultimately it aims people and Sharing their thoughts and information. The services should be flexible and apt to make good sense and value to their users stories and emotions.

Here’s the another one in the tools series. Suppose if you’re preparing for a hands-on demo on your product, or want to prepare some cool tutorials like this guy because you just luv2help.  What’s the easiest and cost effective way to capture high resolution vide of your desktop? Camstudio is a free screen recording (capturing) Software. Don’t think about paying some bucks to get the license, it’s absolutely free and Open Source software.

CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)

CamStudio can also add high-quality, anti-aliased (no jagged edges) screen captions to your recordings in seconds and with the unique Video Annotation feature you can even personalise your videos by including a webcam movie of yourself "picture-in-picture" over your desktop.

And if all that wasn’t enough, CamStudio also comes with its own Lossless Codec that produces crystal clear results with a much smaller filesize compared with other more popular codecs, like Microsoft Video 1.

You have total control over the output of your video: you can choose to use custom cursors, to record the whole screen or just a section of it and can reduce or increase the quality of the recording depending on if you want smaller videos (for emailing to people, for instance) or you can have "best quality" ones for burning onto CD/DVD.

Enjoy the cool tools

Hello my dear readers,

I’ve been maintaining this blog for last couple of years and primarily it deals with windows programming tips and general thoughts on software engineering. In fact this is a mixed blog. I am not really constant with blogging topics. ( I know it’s bad while we are entering to serious blogging). That’s why I named this blog Sharing my thoughts.

Now to have my own identity, I own this blog in a new name www.codereflect.com. I am first time dealing with DNS configuration stuffs etc. Anyway it’s nice. It may take few day to get this stable. I am frequently facing lot of outages for this websites.

Why I named this site as codereflect.com? The answer is no specific reason it’s’ one the name quickly came to my mind when I thought about buying a domain name. Whatever be the things we write or talk about soft wares, the ultimate thing is code. We all implementing new policies, standards, best practices to improve the project development, improve quality of code. It’s the ultimate reflection.

So here I’ve a new home. CodeReflect.com. The blog is still hosted in wordpress.com. nothing else so far changed except the web address. Hope soon I will go to my own webspace.

Also today is Independence day for Indians. Wish you all a happy Independence day. Proud to be an Indian!

Set yourself free from anything that might hinder you in becoming the person you want to be. Free yourself from the uncertainties about your abilities or the worth of your dreams, from the fears that you may not be able to achieve them or that they won’t be what you wanted.

Set yourself free from the past. The good things from yesterday are still yours in memory; the things you want to forget you will, for tomorrow is only a sunrise away. Free yourself from regret or guilt, and promise to live this day as fully as you can.

Set yourself free from the expectations of others, and never feel guilty or embarrassed if you do not live up to their standards. You are most important to yourself; live by what you feel is best and right for you. Others will come to respect your integrity and honesty.

Set yourself free to simply be yourself, and you will soar higher than you’ve ever dreamed.

- Edmund O’Neill

Bing.combeta is publically available. Now let’s see how to add make bing as default search engine.

The Firefox way

It’s pretty easy as firefox addons page already listed bing.com in their search engine list

1. Click on the search dropdown button and opt for “Manage Search Engine”

2. Add to Firefox

3. Start using it.

The Chrome Way

1. Take “Settings” (whatever you call that tool Icon button) option menu

2. Under default search option Click “Manage”

3. As I had visited bing.com before making it as default search engine, I got it as an option in “Other Search Engines” list. (Thanks to Google for automatically identifying it)

4. You can directly make it as default one, if it’s already listed in the Search Engines list. Otherwise follow the steps below.

5. Opt to add a new search engine by clicking “Add” option and give a name, keyword and the URL as specified in the above text box.

Now You’re done. Start using Bing as your default search engine by choosing “Make Default” after adding it.

Inspired by: Scott Hanselman’s blog post.

4-5 months ago, I finished reading Seth Godin’s new book “Tribes: We need you to lead us”.  The book is very short and is very interesting.
Tribes, the book is talking about leadership in the new age. The book makes sense in this age of social networking. “Tribes” is concept of few to infinite number of connected people where the group will be having a leader and the interested common topic for the tribes he attracted. The book helps us to realize that, there’s leader inside everyone.
Social network like twitter, facebook, and friendfeed are booming around and millions of people are roaming around various social networks that are having their own “tribes”. The best way explain about Tribe is to talk about twitter. Twitter is a simple website share the answer for a simple question “what are you doing?” There are people whom are following you and also you can follow many. The messages are simply limited to 140 chars. whenever you share a message; it’s been distributed to tens, hundreds, thousands of people following you. The interesting thing is that you can receive and send new tweets using your mobile phone itself.
I never realized the power of twitter and social networking websites before reading this book. The simple example is the posts in this blog. All posts and updates in this blog are shared to friend feed and friends feed is shared with twitter. This means that, all updates in this blog will be distributed globally to those who are following me through various social networks.
The book is starting with story of Joel Spolsky, one of my favorite blogger, entrepreneur, programmer etc. Seth explains how he attracted people and created his own tribe. The topic chosen by Joel was “how to run small software companies?” the interesting articles spread among people and thus he made his tribe.
Seth shared some interesting short stories connected to twitter.com. He explained how a housewife Laura attracted millions people to her social network by gaining their trust and keeping interests by small tweets and how she became a consultant. How Scott Beale thrown a party within no time by a simple tweet? It’s all about power of social networking, leadership and keeping your tribe with you.
The book is also talking about various short topics like

• Leading from bottom – how a person attracted many people with his innovative security ideas after World Trade Center disaster? What all he did was a 3 hours presentation discussing about various security challenges and solution for them.
• Opportunity of leadership – leading and marketing
• The difference between crowd and tribe – Crowd is a tribe without a leader and communication
• Changing the status quo – Trying something new – Changes from conventional systems and procedures. Few stories related to it.
• Difference between how a employees and tribe?

The book is really good give us a light on new age marketing, building social networks, earning trust, leading tribe following us etc. but the book misses details on how? It’s only provide some collected stories who are successful with their tribes. The book is really missing on how to do the ground work? Just trying view things in an abstract point of view. However we can learn lot many new things, which is up to date with current affairs and business styles.

Here are few quotes from the book.

• You don’t need a keyboard to lead, you only need the desire to make something happen
• Without leader, there are no followers. You’re a leader, we need you to lead us.
• Leaders are having followers while managers have employees.

I’ve updated the theme of the blog to Spring Loaded. I had two sidebars before. Now I miss my blog header image, encounntering with the space concerns of single sidebar with the hefty amount of widgets I’ve in my blog. Anyway let me know your comments and opinions, suggestions whatsover through comments to this post.

Screenshot of blog