Kev's Development Toolbox

After one of the craziest mergers of the dot com era, Time Warner are cutting their losses with AOL and are going to spin it off as a separate standalone company. This can only mean the end for AOL at this point, unless it manages to reinvent itself overnight.

A-ha! So it’s not psychological – wiggling your mouse on Windows does help Windows ‘do its thing’, as confirmed by this Microsoft support article for when retrieving data from Oracle with Excel: KB168702.

Here’s the all important quote:

If you move your mouse pointer continuously while the data is being returned to
Microsoft Excel, the query may not fail. Do not stop moving the mouse until all the data
has been returned to Microsoft Excel.

Awesome. If you jiggle it around harder does the query execute faster?

Ballmer is currently presenting at the All Things D conference this morning and has just started talking about the re-branding of Live Search as ‘Bing’. news.com have a live blog as it happens, here.

I’ve never really understood rebranding. You take the same product that no-one is interested in, give it a new name, and now you have… the same product that no-one is interested in with a different name? Surely Ballmer with the billions of Microsoft cash he has at hand can come up with something better than that?

Microsoft Live Search has been out there for a while, but Microsoft is still looking to cash in on the largest slice of the search pie that Google is still enjoying. Microsoft are rumored to be re-launching Live Search re-named as ‘Bing’ as it’s been noticed they have been registering the ‘Bing’ domain name with various top level domains (.co.uk, .com.au etc)