Microsoft is still hiring interns for this coming Christmas

In such times of the global financial crisis, Microsoft shuffles its internals and is reorganising itself (at the same time saying goodbye to some of its employees). But, business as usual, Microsoft Redmond is still hiring new talent from Australia.

It’s true. Their international recruiting team sent me a flyer about the 3 month SDE/SDET internship at the end of the year. But remember, application closes 22 Jul 09 – that’s less than 3 weeks away!

It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to work for a company of such scale. And note, this is not an internship with Microsoft Australia, it’s with Microsoft in the US! It means you get to go over there, all relocation expenses paid for, etc. It’s worth trying for.

There’ll be a series of interviews involved of course, but even flights to interview site will be paid for. Remember to send your resume to ausrec@microsoft.com.

Outlook Live Answers Sydney Mail Questions

In response to the mounting questions about the new hosted Exchange services, a new website has been launched at http://outlookliveanswers.com/ to support your everyday email.

Already, it answers a range of questions from “What is Outlook Live?” all the way to synchronising contacts with other Live services. I think this site will be welcomed by many students, especially those who are a little more technically inclined. It even tells you how not to use the Outlook Live web interface, and fall back to POP and IMAP mail access.

It looks like that this website is intended to be a specialised community revolving around solving issues and problems with Outlook Live. A feature many would find welcome is the service availability status, which we hope would remain green most of the time.

Bing – the new Live Search is now live; create your own IE8 search provider add-on.

Bing, the new rebranded Live Search, has just been made available to public. The first thing I’d want to do is to make this the default search provider in Internet Explorer 8.

Searching www.ieaddons.com, I couldn’t find the Bing search provider! But not to worry, they’ve made it just too easy to make your own search provider. Head along to http://www.ieaddons.com/en/createsearch.aspx and follow the instructions!

Essentially, it involves:

1. Search for “TEST” (capital letters) using Bing
2. Copy the URL of the first page after you made the search
3. Paste that into the search provider creator, give it a name and click install!

Update: As pointed out, this method doesn’t give you search suggestions. As a quick hack to give the impression of Bing suggestions, we can add Live Search suggestions to this accelerator.

I really wish I could add javascript to this blog so that you can just click a button to add the search provider to IE8, but unfortunately hosted WordPress won’t let me. It won’t even let me upload an .xml file! So I’ve included after the break the Open Search Description file that would give you that.

Just create a new XML file Bing.xml, and host that up on your favourite web server. Then create a shell HTML file that calls a javascript function to add this as shown.

Update: Head along to Mozilla Addons, where Long‘s made the Bing search provider available for download. Even though it’s meant for Firefox, it’s based on the same open standard (open search description) so it’s the same. The “Download Now” link works in IE8 too!

Update: Get the addon now at ieaddons.com! It now uses the search suggestions from Bing rather than from Live Search.

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Windows 7 RC is out – Let’s all download at once

Windows 7 RC is finally available for download! It’s still free at this stage so this is the perfect opportunity to play with the latest version of Windows.

Unfortunately, Microsoft’s FAQ answers “Will I get a free copy of Windows 7 once it’s released for volunteering to test the Windows 7 RC?” – “Sorry, no.”

Anyway, we should see if we can knock down Microsoft’s servers again by having everyone download at once, just like with the beta.

Solved: Can’t Drag Maximised Office Windows

This is a new feature that I discovered this by accident. After switching to Windows 7, I drag windows to the edge of screen to maximise or dock it, and then drag it off to go back to the previous window size.

But, I had this problem where that after maximising some windows like Office Word 2007 or Office Excel 2007, you can’t drag it out to restore it to the previous size! I think it must have something to do with Office doing funny business with window decorations…

Anyway, I just realised that this now works – after installing Office 2007 Service Pack 2. At least I think that’s what solved the problem. Anyone care to confirm?