The folks at Microsoft Live Labs do a much better job of explaining how Smart Menus works than I do:

Microsoft Live Labs – Entity Extraction
The web is overflowing with descriptive information. The web is also rich with new applications that aspire to use this data. Right now most content is not linked with the applications. Entity extraction is the glue which will connect document authors with application functionality. Imagine a “smart menu”, which when you highlight a restaurant address on a web page, automatically provides a popup map. Or when you highlight a book title, it automatically offers a review or to deliver it to you for the lowest available price. Imagine “smart cut and paste” which allows you to push any address directly into your contact manager. Imagine a button which appears at the top of an email from UPS which allows you to track that package.

This week, the latest version of the Windows Live Toolbar will include a new entity extraction engine. The first uses will focus on addresses maps, and later uses will include shopping and finance.

I saw this today at a “Hawaiian” restaurant near me:

Hm. Am I to believe that this Withdrawls only ATM is emptied of all its cash every night, and then restocked every morning?

But then again, it is rather vague – “emptied” of what? It doesn’t have to be cash. Post your thoughts in the comments!

So recently I bought a new Dell. As is custom of any new PC, the first thing I did was reformat it and install Windows XP Pro SP2.

(The absurdness of why I have to reformat a brand new PC is something I’ll delve into another time. Let’s just say that the rule of “With great power, comes great responsibility” isn’t always followed in spirit.)

Cool, now my machine runs great. Except that I can’t watch DVD’s because there’s no decoder included with the OS, unlike on a Mac. Argh.

I look through the CDs included with my PC and, of course, there’s none. So I contacted Dell via online chat and they DHL’ed me a pile of CDs. Great! I install Sonic CinePlayer and now I can watch DVD’s again. Cool. (sort of. The UI is pretty limited. I actually miss the OS X DVD player UI.)
I then install Roxio Creator MyDVD Combo LE. Sweet – now I can burn CDs and DVDs (sort of. Confusing UI!)

But then I go and install Roxio MyDVD Plus – which I actually paid for. Apparently it’s the competitor to iDVD and allows you to really customize and create cool video DVDs.

I knew this would be trouble when I noticed that it started to uninstall Creator MyDVD Combo LE. But nonetheless, MyDVD Plus gets installed. I launched it, the splash screen appears, and disappears. And this is what I’m left with:

No windows, no nothing. Just that.

So I tried uninstalling all these MyDVD’s – and that’s when I noticed that the uninstall process leaves behind registry keys galore in both the Sonic and Roxio path.

Now I’m stuck in this same situation. Yuck.

Having worked on installers, I know first hand that it’s a complicated process. But that’s no excuse for this.

8/12/2006 Edit: After a whole bunch more of uninstall/reinstall, and system restore, it all works fine. Phew!

MercuryNews.com | 07/27/2006 | Intel unveils powerful new computer chip
Intel kicked its corporate turnaround plan into high gear Thursday with the launch of its long-awaited Core 2 Duo, a line of computer chips that boast up to 40 percent more processing power while using 40 percent less electricity than the company’s previous chips.

The Core 2 Duo, so named because it squeezes two computing brains onto a single microprocessor, allows the world’s largest chip maker to leapfrog past its archrival, Advanced Micro Devices, in the race to give customers better chips to run computer servers, desktop and laptop computers.

Ah, no wonder Dell was having all those crazy sales on their current desktops. In retrospect, buying one last week probably wasn’t the best idea! Oops! Guess I should’ve kept a closer eye to Intel’s product roadmap instead of looking at discount codes.

Today I stopped by a local Starbucks to try out Google Wifi in Mountain View.

Pretty good!

Too bad where I live in Sunnyvale doesn’t seem to get a signal! Otherwise, it might be interesting to think up ways of using this great uplink bandwidth for server purposes. Overcoming NAT would be one challenge…

CNET reviewed Windows Live Toolbar today. Here’s what they had to say about Smart Menus:

Windows Live Toolbar 3’s tiny contextual Smart Menus pop up when you highlight text on a Web page and bring you more details without leaving the page. Highlight a company name, and the Smart Menus can display stock quotes. Highlight an address, and Smart Menus will open a tiny map or a weather forecast for that location. These menus can be quite useful, and they’re small enough to ignore, but we understand how they might drive some people batty. A similar feature from the Yahoo Toolbar irked us before we knew what it did.

Woot! They found it useful! Just like me! What a happy coincidence!
(By the way, if this drives you batty… you can turn off the feature entirely in options. You can also turn of individual buttons if you want! Hurray for choice!)

Another positive review from Farshid:

.farshid sedghi. » Windows Live Toolbar – Highlighting Makes Life Easier

Today I came across Windows Live Toolbar and so far I have discovered a couple of really useful features with it. To demo something I have been wishing for a long time is highlighting an address and getting a map rather than cut and pasting it into one of the map sites.

Ahh… this is one of the reasons I love working on consumer products: I just know that this is going to make a difference in people’s lives. Hopefully a positive difference!
But while basking in the glow of a positive review, one must also take the lumps. Here’s a nit that CNET found:

The download of Windows Live Toolbar 3 was nearly instantaneous in our tests, but during the otherwise quick installation, we weren’t sure whether to install the Standard, Custom, or Advanced modes. We chose Standard, which accepts Microsoft’s suggested content, but when we changed our minds, we couldn’t go back to pick Custom, nor could we cancel installation without causing it to install the Toolbar with its default settings.

This was actually redesigned from the Beta version from earlier this year – based on feedback from the Beta. I’ll have to blog about this one day. Thanks for the feedback – I guess I’ll have to think about this some more in a future release.

I can’t wait to see what other people have to say about Toolbar 3.0!

Hey Jeremy,

Thanks for the review today. But here are two small corrections:

Windows Live Toolbar for IE released
The latest utility to escape from Redmond Labs is the Windows Live Toolbar, which has just come out of beta.

Technically this escaped from the Silicon Valley Labs. The Toolbar team is based here in Mountain View. But hey, I get that everyone associates Microsoft with Redmond and vice versa. (Just look at Redmond magazine – it’s not about living in Redmond, that’s for sure.)

The Windows Live Toolbar features a plethora of tools by default, including the aforementioned search bar, a phishing filter based on the Windows OneCare Advisor, a picture and web page archiving tool called Onfolio, an RSS feed button, tabbed browsing, context-sensitive right-click menus for highlighted text, and quick access to maps and directions.

The part I put in italics is probably about Smart Menus. To be clear, you don’t need to right-click anything for them to appear. In fact – one of the ideas behind this feature was to eliminate the need to right click – all you have to do is select the text you’re interested in.
Check out the videos on this page to learn more about Smart Menus. Maybe I should’ve called them “No more right clicks”

This blog entry caught my attention today:

Windows Live Toolbar ships sans marketing — Microsoft News Tracker

Now Windows Live Toolbar doesn’t even get a post in a Microsoft blog that I can find.

That’s not really true… after all, we did get a mention in the Virual Earth blog (with whom I work with a lot):

Live Toolbar released. Includes great mapping capabilities
 
The Live Toolbar plugin for Internet Explorer is now available here. It has some nice features, including a number of mapping related tools:
 
1. Recognize addresses on a web page and map all of them at once. This is great when you are at a webpage like this with a bunch of addresses and you want to see them all on a map at once to compare them. with one click in Live Toolbar the addresses are passed to Live Local as a new scratchpad. You can view them, save them as a Collection, or share them with a friend. See the OSF screenshot below. One thing i really like about this feature is that the recognizer apparently is parsing the DOM in realtime, so it is compatible with AJAX sites, web forms and web editors! It not only parses the initially loaded page, but if an Asynchronous call is made to the server that delivers address information to the web page, they appear in the dropdown list as well.
 
2. get interactive inline maps on any web page. with Toolbar installed, whenever you highlight some text on a webpage a smart menu appears with a list of ways to operate on the selected text. if the text you selected is a street address, one of the choices will be to see a map right there on the webpage without having to surf off to a mapping site. very convenient! See the Showbox screenshot below

And now, we even have our own entry on the Live Search Blog:

Introducing the new Windows Live Toolbar 3.0
 
We’re excited to announce that Windows Live Toolbar is not only out of beta but also packed with new features to help you find precisely what you’re looking for, surf with powerful protection and personalize your experience on the Web. Since the toolbar is an add-in to the browser, these features are ubiquitously accessible from any web page. Our hope is that Windows Live Toolbar gives you a better overall Web search experience, so try us out and let us know what you think.

Phew! I do consider this issue fixed.