This is pretty cool – MSN Search now supports RSS! Basically you can run a search and get the results in an RSS 2.0 document, which can be very handy depending on what you are trying to accomplish. Neither Google nor Yahoo have this feature, though IceRocket does.

Check out a sample search for tsunami relief.

[Via MSN Search Blog]

I haven’t really said anything about the Tsunami, as I am planning to do a podcast on it, but I wanted to post this story that I found on News.com tonite:

A Canadian student dubbed the “wave rat” for offering the domain name “tsunamirelief.com” for $50,000 on the online auction site eBay has sold it and donated the money to relief efforts, the gaming company that bought it said Monday.

The 20 year old, Josh Kaplan, made a wise decision there. Good on ya mate!

I listened to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code this morning on my way to school. I am still catching up on podcasts since the holidays, so I was listening to the show from Friday, where Adam walked through Miami, Florida and shared the sounds. It was kind of painful to be in minus 20 degree (celcius) weather here listening to Adam strolling the streets of Miami! It sounded so nice and warm there.

I guess Adam accomplished what he wanted though. Throughout the show he was talking about how radio/audio forces you to use your imagination, it forces you to think, unlike TV where you are completely passive. And he talked about “the sound”, something that is real, not just a commercial production. It came through loud and clear on Friday’s podcast Adam, thanks for doing that!

I really gotta get back into the whole podcasting thing…

Oh CAB, how I have missed you and your pizza.

Last night I was reading News.com and found that Microsoft released a beta of their new anti-spyware software yesterday. I have been a happy Ad-Aware user, and I have recommended it to many people, so I wanted to see how the Microsoft app stacked up.

First thing to note – I read an interview with Gates or Ballmer a while ago, I forget which, and whoever it was said that Microsoft went and bought the best anti-spyware software there was. The new program is the result of 21 days of work since Microsoft bough Giant Software. I don’t know what the previous Giant offerings looked like, but the new program definitely looks like Microsoft.

Put simply, Microsoft AntiSpyware is amazing. I would easily recommend it over Ad-Aware. Not only did it find 22 more threats than Ad-Aware did, it also found three that were not adware but actual programs that I use, and it marked them as Ignored. I appreciate that it still wanted to tell me about the possible threat however. Messenger Plus was one of the applications, which might seem weird, but to its credit, Microsoft also shows Windows Messenger as a threat if you have that installed still. The UI is really nice, and the feature set is extensive! I changed my IE start page, and AntiSpyware showed a popup asking if I wanted to allow the start page to be changed. Other things include real-time protection, and the SpyNet community. Pretty cool stuff!

The only thing I didn’t like was that it seemed to take a lot longer to remove threats than Ad-Aware does. Aside from that however, its an excellent beta! Keep in mind that the software is beta – so you might have problems, and it might not always be free. If you want a good adware killer now though, go check it out. One thing I’d like to see them add is integration into the new Windows Security center in XP, that would be cool.

NOTE: The software only works on Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003.

Felicia does! I guess she started her blog quite a while ago, located at http://starfishi.blogspot.com. Apparently I was telling her some statistics back in October about how so many blogs die soon after they are started, and so Felicia is proud to post once a month to keep it going. For that reason, I told her that her blog is like PMS! She didn’t like that comment 😛

Wow, long time no post! Ah well, the holidays are over now, time to get back to business.

Just a quick post for all you Skype users out there – version 1.1.0.61 was released yesterday and includes a number of fixes/changes, including a slicker looking UI. Apparently it also includes a new version of the API, but none of the documentation has been released for that yet. Get it here!

Just came across this article at Wired that talks about wildlife and the Tsunami that rocked Sri Lanka. The waves apparently washed floodwaters two miles inland at Sri Lanka’s biggest wildlife reserve, yet no animals died:

“No elephants are dead, not even a dead hare or rabbit,” said H.D. Ratnayake, deputy director of Sri Lanka’s Wildlife Department. “I think animals can sense disaster. They have a sixth sense. They know when things are happening.”

Is that so? Maybe it’s not that animals have a sixth sense, but that humans are stupid. You’d never find a rabbit or an elephant standing around watching the water engulf them as they record it all on tape. Nor would you find a leopard heading into the water to retrieve his favorite material possession.

Okay so maybe I am being a little harsh, but seriously!

Happy New Year and all the best to you in the coming dozen months!

A follow-up to the Suprnova story I wrote about earlier, BitTorrent file sharing site LokiTorrent has promised to fight the attack launched by the MPAA:

LokiTorrent, a Web site and index of files available through a peer-to-peer technology known as BitTorrent, posted a letter from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) on its site on Tuesday. The letter states that the MPAA has filed suit in district court in Texas against the site and demands that Loki Torrent cease linking to video files that could infringe on studios’ copyrights.

“If you’ve ever benefited from this site or file-sharing in general, now is the time to show your support,” a message on LokiTorrent stated. “We are looking at a cost of $30K per month in fees.” So far, the site has garnered nearly $18,000, or about 60 percent of the total needed for a month, according to a bar graph on the site.

Read: CNET News.com