Deligio: Deligi-~ Deligo ; Is the latin translation for to pick, to pluck. Search software in the Deligio tree and pick what you need…

Deligio claims to be a search engine devoted to software. The site encourages users to create accounts where they can add software that they use / like just as one adds website bookmarks on sites like del.icio.us or digg or reddit
. Software can be tagged to make it easier to find. They can also be rated – there’s a five star visual indicator although like all opinions on the Net and off, YMMV.

What I like about the site is its relatively clean interface and the fact that they include non-Windows software as well. As more and more people join the community and put in their reviews, we should see it gain popularity.

I would like to see the ability to edit each program entry’s description and tags added in the future. If someone has already added the software, there doesn’t seem to be a way for others to edit it – something that should be included to allow for new features and abilities as versions keep changing.
Ordinarily, I would perform a search at the usual suspects of sites like Google Groups’ alt.comp.freeware, tucows, sourceforge.net, CNet Download.com etc. and of course the run-of-the-mill search engines – Google / Yahoo / MSN. Let’s see how this site turns out.

Linux Distro Chooser
ZeGenie Studios, a Norwegian development firm have come up with a very novel and immensely useful idea to help new and struggling users of Linux. Their questionnaire based selection picker asks the user a series of questions regarding what s/he is looking for in a Linux distro and accordingly makes recommendations so the user can make an informed decision about which distro would suit their needs best.

The following Linux distributions are curently included :

Fedora Core
Mandriva
SuSE
Debian
MEPIS
Ubuntu
Kubuntu
Linspire
Xandros
PCLinuxOS
Yellowdog Linux
Gentoo
Slackware
Knoppix
OpenSuSE
ArchLinux
Foresight Linux

What I like about the test is that it asks simple questions based on your skill set level and proceeds accordingly. At the end, when its recommendations are displayed to the user, you get reasons why the candidate that is displayed has been selected for you. Another good thing is that the next closest alternatives are also displayed to give you a range of choices.

Informative links leading to Wikipedia pages act as a sort of glossary so users can see the meanings of terms that they don’t currently understand. All-in-all a very useful tool for newbies who want to shift to Linux but don’t know which distro to install.

This little button has put off my getting Carpal Tunnel Syndrome by a few months. I no longer have to hunt for the option in the drop-down list on the side.

My choices in IM clients were dictated more by the inceasing number of contacts who started using different services. Took the plunge with Mirabilis ICQ in 1997 – some months before the takeover by AOL. Also used Yahoo Messenger for a while until the start of the millenium when most of my contacts were MSN Messenger users. Naturally, I couldn’t just get rid of the other clients, because most of them were exhibiting the kind of brand loyalty that a marketing man gets wet dreams about, so I turned to multi-protocol clients.

Trillian was the first and it was good while it was free. It did all that was expected of it and connected to all 3 protocols at once without the overhead of the pretty and overly fancy individual clients. I was later introduced to GAIM and always being one to fly the OpenSource banner, I decided to try it out for a few weeks (of course – the fact that I was playing around with Knoppix and other *nix flavours at the time also pushed me to use the same client on my Windows partition too).

I am now a huge fan of the Open Source Miranda IM. Unbelievably large collection of plugins allows the user to customize it to a very large extent. There’s also support for so many different protocols, some of which I haven’t even heard of .

But then comes Google Talk with its simplistic interface and it’s innate ability to conduct voice chats all embedded in a client smaller than some images that I’ve seen. I was hooked.

Now it’s a combination – for most times I use Miranda for communicating with all 4 protocols (ICQ / Yahoo / MSN / Google Talk). For vox chats – I switch to Google Talk.

I’m now championing the cause of , a web based multi-protocol messenger service that functions within a browser window, has full support for Firefox and also keeps logs of the chats you’ve had so it’s easy to dig up references to any topic you might have discussed with your friends earlier. It’s being continuously developed and new features are being added regularly.