"Passions", "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence - FYI" & "Flavor of Life" By Utada "Hikki" Hikaru

What should be an easy task of just picking out three songs from Utada Hikaru, a very talented J-pop/R&B/Experiential artist, became such a hard task. So I came to a conclusion that no matter what songs I choose from her it's going to be good.

The first song, which might be one of her greatest songs ever, "Passions". This version of the song honestly gives me the chills! I swear she is one of the best singer alive.


Next is "Flavor of Life", which was number 2 in worldwide digital download yearly single chart with over 7.2 million downloads in 2007.



Finally "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence - FYI", which I feel like was one of her stronger songs off of her 2009 Album "This is The One".

Finally

Get your Portable ID!

(Explained in my previous post)

Google Wave

I'm extremely anxious to get my hands on this product and to get the ability to add my own extensions to it and so forth, but there are quite a few questions lingering in my head regarding Wave.

As usual with every site on the internet, I'm going to make a list.

1) Is Wave interoperable with regular XMPP accounts? Will it be?

2) When logged into Wave do you appear online to regular XMPP users?

3) Will Wave have any integration with e-mail?

4) What does Wave mean for video and voice chatting? Will Wave have this functionality?

5) In the end what will become of Google Talk and Gmail?

6) How will Wave replace e-mail alerts? Will it?

7) How will Wave notify you of messages when you don't have the client open?

8) Will Wave support storing messages offline?

9) Will Wave have themes?

10) Will Wave play nice with OpenID and OAuth?

All in all I have a few opinions but not many ideas (as this honestly milks a lot of them), so I'll just leave it at that.

Marissa Mayer X Digg

(Source: Blogoscoped)

On Google Chrome OS

So, I've decided to talk about it after all, being that the web hype has died down and that every site I seem to look at seems to blow what this is completely out of proportions and glorify it as the next best "Windows killer".

Chrome OS is nothing but Google Chrome atop of a Linux kernel, it'll do nothing that you couldn't do with Google Chrome on Windows, Linux or Mac. The applications that Chrome OS supports are the same one's Google Chrome supports, end of story.

Googles only goal in creating Chrome OS is to gain market share for Google Chrome, lower the market share for IE6, get people to use the web and web apps more (this doesn't necessarily mean the cloud though, I'll explain later) and get a larger userbase for web developers to be able to use HTML5 and standards compliant code in their sites.

Now the other thing about Chrome OS that alot of sites have seemed to skip is [again] the fact that all apps that run in Chrome will run on Chrome OS. So every time I saw a blog or a comment that said Chrome OS will fail since it can't run native code, I'd always point them to Native Client and the fact that Google plans to integrate Native Client into Google Chrome (thus meaning that Native Client will also come to Chrome OS).

And as for those who say Chrome OS will fail because it requires the internet, I point them to Google Gears(which it already built into Chrome so that's self explanitory).

And then the biggest assumption I keep hearing is that Google plans to use Chrome OS to push the cloud computing industry, now that's a large possibility but I don't think that means that they plan to abandon offline computing. I think one of the longterm goals here is to standardize the desktop the same way the web has been standardized whilst using that to push use of the web further, think of it as Adobe Air on every PC with a few much needed additions like Native Code support.

All in all, I'm waiting to see what this means and if my predictions are right. Plus I'm waiting for Mozilla, the company that never sleeps, to start on their own Firefox OS or something along that line.

Echo

Ok, so when I had first switched comments to JS-Kit, I felt the interface was ugly and that I couldn't wait for Disqus to add Blogger syncing and Friend Connect support to bring it back to this blog.

Now I find it bearable and I like the fact that the JS-Kit team was ahead of me and added the ability to change the theme of the comment box with CSS, plus over time they started to add features that other services don't have like Google Friend Connect support and so on, so I stuck with them.

Now my reason for sticking to JS-Kit is even larger as they've displayed a large upgrade to their existing commenting system called Echo.

Now I don't mean to advertise for them but Echo is this great expansion to commenting that in real-time draws comments from sites all over the web about your post to your blog, allowing you to increase engagement ten fold via sites like FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, even Delicious.

I think just for posting a blog post about Echo I've also posted on their example pages comment box.

All in all to end this post quick so that I don't go off on a rant, I plan to increase engagement on this blog through FriendFeed, I was originally going to code this crafty comment box that'd take comments from FriendFeed and Google Friend Connect but instead I'll just go with JS-Kits Echo.

EDIT: We just got the ECHO comment box on our site, still don't have the cool social gestures feature yet though (I plan to pay for it in the future).

No IE6

We don't support IE6 on this blog (because it's too much of a hassle to design for) and I hate it alot so to help the hundreds of anti-IE6 sites out there, I'll make a list of stop IE6 campaigns that I know of on the web.

IE6Update
Bring Down IE6
Hey IT
StopIE6
Stop Using Internet Explorer
End6

I'll update this as I go...