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Twitter is one of those Web 2.0 applications that at first glance seems to beg the question: why? But first, a description of the service from its home page: Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? In short, it allows you to post a short description of what you are doing right now (or in fact, any short phrase at all - the trend seems to be for posting witty or funny comments). The next obvious thing is to track what others are doing - which can be a limited set of your friends, or for anyone who has chosen to make their status public. Another interesting use is to use it as a virtual SMS mechanism on the web - you can choose to only track your friends, and use the service to keep in virtual touch with each other. Twitter offers tracking and update via the web, IM as well as SMS via a cell-phone. The service has already gained a large following, and many web celebrities such as Marlin Mann of 43Folders fame or Cali Lewis from GeekBrief TV are on board. Yours truly is also testing the waters right now, and has the handle evolve75 on the service. There are also quite a few tools already available to make the usage easier. A Firefox extension called twitbin enables live tracking via a side-bar on your browser, and OS X dashboard widget called Twadget is available for updating Twitter from your Mac desktop (for Vista users, an alternate version for the sidebar is available here). Whether Twitter is just another Web 2.0 meme - or here to stay - remains to be seen. The service is useful, but carries the risk of the novelty fading away to becoming a chore :-( ~ Anupam

Found an interesting Emacs blog with lots of tips and tricks, and is run by Ryan McGeary. The entry for running Emacs on OS X is useful. Ryan recommends the Carbon Emacs package, which is a pre-packaged version of the GNU Emacs version 22, and contains a ton of extra packages not available in the CVS Version. I personally use the latest Gnu Emacs Version 22 from the CVS repository, and compile the application manually (well, via a cron job actually) every month or so, to keep up with the latest developer changes being made in the code-repository itself (which - BTW - can be tracked via the Emacs devel newsgroup), and prefer to manually setup the packages I need. Apart from the literally thousands of site on the net dealing with Emacs, one wiki Site I can whole-heartily recommend is the Emacs Wiki: http://emacswiki.org/, a fantastic resource on Emacs of all varieties, and catering users from newbies through über-geeks.

While setting up this site (which is based on Wordpress), I was evaluating a few offline blog editors, and came upon MarsEdit and Ecto - both of which seem to be well-accepted commercial blog editors in the Mac world. Both allow easy setup of the blog configurations, have a hassle-free configuration, and allow a mail-inbox like access to previous posts. My needs for the offline blogging tool are: Support Wordpress (obviously) Support formatting in Markdown (the default Wordpress formatting is atrocious). Note that you will need to enable Markdown syntax on your blog by using any of the plugins available for Wordpress. Provide easy access to prior posts Have a decent text editor built-in Provide at least a subset of my current editing muscle-memory However, I happen to be a Emacs fanatic, and perform majority of my day-to-day computing tasks in that tool (another post on this later). So I googled around a bit for the current state of blogging using Emacs, and voila! EmacsWiki pointed to the weblogger mode, which supports Wordpress, and also handles Markdown formatting easily with the markdown mode. And to top it off, the code is open-source, which means that I can tinker and change the functionality when needed. ...

Since Firefox 3.0 released, I have been on a extension binge"evaluation" spree - and currently have around 37 of these installed. The problem is that having the same set of extensions across different installs of Firefox on my machines has been rather tedious, given the fact that Firefox does not provide a easy way to list the installed ones. The only way out so far has been to manually scroll through the list of add-ons and hope that I recorded the name correctly :-) ...