Music of the Clouds

I don’t think many Indians are used to http://www.soundcloud.com or the http://www.cloudplayer.com . These web sites allow you to upload music and make it a medium to socialise. Cloud Computing is a concept which would be there for a a long time to stay.

Google Music beta [ Don’t get confused with http://google.co.in/music ] available for American IPs,  has a made a mark in the Open Source cloud Arena.[Available at http://music.google.com]. You can store up to 20000 songs in your account.It syncs with your android device – a mobile or a tablet PC.

To top it all – it runs in offline mode on your android driven mobile device. Get connected to listen from the cloud. When not connected, it can run the recently played music. I think it’s a great step forward.

 

But there are pitfalls – The site is available in the US by invitation. If in India - To get an invitation, can logon with your normal google account  via web proxies.like http://zendproxy.com .

Cannot install the music player for android even with web proxies.

So, what's the take?if you get an invitation, be the first to use it when launched in India. It syncs, it shuffles and makes you dance to the tune from the clouds !!!!

One browser enough for your machine? The TAB story……..

I was trying out on many browsers to access sites. IE, Chrome, Mozilla, Safari …were some of them. Surprisingly all browsers were faster than IE. Even Apple’s Safari spoke well than the conventional IE. Then why use IE at all? We can have a browser which suits the best. But, many of the Enterprise Business Portals do not open or work properly in browsers other than IE. Solution was to come up with a tab which would have IE Extensions. Now a days, virtually all browsers have an IE extension.

Mozilla has an IE tab and can be downloaded from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ie-tab/ . The source is available in Mozilla’s CVS[Concurrent Version System] and can be downloaded from http://ietab.mozdev.org/source.html.[ Only of interest for CPP Programmers]
Chrome has a similar plug-in and can be downloaded from http://www.chromeextensions.org/utilities/ie-tab. You can only use Google chrome to download the extension.

Opera has also started IE browsing . Safari does not have any such extension available till date.

	So why do we need IE Tabs ? If you are using a site prepared by Share Point Portal or driving mails from Microsoft Exchange which uses Microsoft’s proprietary mechanisms , IE is the only answer.

Let’s look at the other way round. Does IE support other browsers for tabbed browsing?

Google’s Chrome Frame for IE 6 , 7 , 8 & 9 is a plug-in which supports Open Web Technologies and HTML5’s offline capabilities. If you are an IE user , try using Chrome Frame by installing it from http://www.google.com/chromeframe.

So, Open Web Technologies, Microsoft or Apple’s proprietary technologies need to shake hands very often in spite of the stand offs posed out. Shall try to find how intense these shakes are.