Airports in general are boring places and getting a service such as WiFi without the need to supply a credit card is a welcome relief to anyone who distrusts using credit cards for temporary public services.  I would also like to add that that unlike other airports such as the Dubai International airport, WiFi here was actually fast and usable and good enough for any kind of internet telephony.

New Delhi Domestic Flights Terminal

Enter Bing. I decided to try Bing for atleast a day and see what the search engine could do.With about 20 searches, my initial reaction is that, the search engine is actually quite effective.

It produces decent results and also classifies information in ways that Google does not yet do.

For example all searches produce an additional reference link. A search for “Antique Cars” brings up results and on the left side a navigation bar with links to Manufacturers, Values, Trading, Parts, Reviews. The old Live.com feature of Cashback is still there with Bing.com. Eligible purchases get you money back.

A cool feature within Bing is the neverending image view function. Searching for images is continuous and you can keep scrolling till there are no more images to display. Images can be sorted by size and various other presentation options.

Now, what’s impressive about searching for images with people in them is that Bing can filter photos with “just faces”, “head and shoulders” and “other”. And this function works quite well.

Another cool feature is the webpage content preview function. A mouse over any of the search results gives you a filtered and condensed view of what the page contains without actually visit the page. This is helpful if you’re into research and need to find documents to read.

From a webmaster point of view, a website I submitted to Bing got indexed in less than 24 hours.

Searches are fast! Search results are clean. Cached version of pages are available. And search key term suggestions works nicely.

From the looks of it – Microsoft’s got a great product with a decent name – finally.

The challenge for Microsoft is to break into people’s Google habit. I am going to try both Google and Bing interchangeably over the next month and get into the habit of trying either engine randomly. Who knows, maybe using two search engines instead of one may actually make my life more interesting.

Copyscape.com is an online free plagiarism checking service that does exactly this and offers various free and paid options to see who has used or adapted your content.

It works pretty well too. Just type in your URL and the service takes care of the rest.

Visit: http://www.copyscape.com/

From their website, I found a drop off location at a local RadioShack and was able to get a bunch of dead batteries off my chest – literally.

So collect all your batteries and find a drop off location at: http://www.rbrc.org/

Recycling is the right thing to do.

The usual search criteria such as prices, bedrooms etc. are available also. I have a feeling that map based searches are going to become a standard for multiple listing services (MLS) and pretty much any online database that has entries associated with a zip code and address.

While most property listing show up pretty accurately on HotPads.com there are some quirks (here and there) where some properties from far away show up incorrectly. This is minor and I am sure will get resolved. Overall, I like the service.

If you live in an area with several wireless networks in the vicinity, chances are that your wireless connection is going to suffer from interference. Interference affects your throughput (quality of internet connectivity). What you should do is to check the throughput of your internet connection after changing the wireless channel on your router. Go from Channel 1-11 and check the throughput after each channel change (check your router manual one how to do this – usually all your need to do is to visit an IP address like “192.168.1.1″ enter the admin username and password and change wireless settings using only your browser).

There is a good online internet speed test here:
http://www.speedtest.net/

Test the upload and download speed using the same test location (the application will recommend the best location to test from) with all the wireless channels available on your router and then set your router to use the one that provides the best throughput. The speed test will tell you the channel that gives you the best upload and download speeds.

There are other techniques also to improve your internet connectivity and that involves messing with your TCP settings. Search for a product call Dr. TCP to explore that avenue.

Consider this: if you are in the business of providing web development services or in the web design business, you’re likely to have built several applications and data intensive websites over the years. Almost all of these websites/web applications can benefit from qualitative upgrades using Ajax techniques.

For a reasonable charge, boring data entry and retreival applications can be souped up using any number of easily integrated visual interface elements. You are not messing with the internals of an application, just improving the user experience so you’re unlikely to hit  major roadblocks. The resulting ’Ajaxed’ application looks and works much better, the client looks great to their management and its a win situation for everyone.

The easiest way to sell this is to invest the time in re-engineering say one web page/report (with some nice visualization effects) and letting the client see the benefit for themselves.