How Well Do You Understand Design?

Even though the blog post is more relevant to website design, I still learned a couple of fundamental design concepts there.

10 years of Yahoo Mail

A blog post here saying the author has been using Hotmail for 7 years. I rarely use Hotmail, but I used to have a Hotmail account before the Hotmail is acquired by Microsoft which I already forgot the account password long time ago. I am using Yahoo Mail most of the time. I remember I started to use Yahoo Mail since December 1996, so I have been using Yahoo Mail for a decade. Yahoo Mail is established around September - November 1996, I believe not many people can beat my 10 years of loyalty.

The end of advertising as we know it

IBM Institute for Business Value has released an interesting finding on the shifting trend of advertising - from traditional one-to-many advertising model to one-to-one targeted model. I believe the traditional model is getting less effective especially on the global internet - firstly, I seldom pay attention to the irrelevant banner ads on a web page, let alone click on the ad to find out more information. Pop-up ads are even more obtrusive, that is why we need pop-up blocker. If I am not mistaken, the new advertising model was started by GoTo.com which is more like an advertisement search engine. Sadly, GoTo.com pursued a wrong business decision by dropped out GoTo.com website and renamed the company called Overture which later acquired by Yahoo. Google refined what was done by GoTo.com and called it AdWord. Later, Google also introduced AdSense, which is more sophisticated. Currently, Google is working on the advertising strategy on YouTube. Hmmm…what sort of innovation Google will bring to us this time?

Windows XP is an upgrade to Windows Vista?

An interesting blog post which explain why the author 'upgrades' to Windows XP from Windows Vista. I personally found that Windows Vista is an acceptable OS even though it is bulky, sometimes working relatively slower than XP, having troubles when installing older software which I can find the fixes for most of the time....but overall, Vista is still acceptable.....at least I have no problem running Visual Studio and Expression Blend.

101 Dumbest Moments in Business

An interesting list from Fortune magazine. Some are quite funny. Never thought big corporations can be good joke makers too.

The skills you need to succeed

Bill Gates recently wrote to BBC News. He briefly mentioned that digital technology has transformed most of us into an information worker. In addition, he touched the foundation we need in order to success in virtually any career.

The .net Suffix

A recent blog post from Keyvan Nayyeri kindly reminds us the .Net suffix is dropped out from most of the product names, so we shouldn’t refer Visual Studio 2008 as Visual Studio .Net 2008. I did notice that the suffix was removed when I installed VS 2005 on my PC and when I read articles where VB.Net is simply referred as VB 2005. I found this product renaming and versioning thing often very confusing: WinFX suddenly became .Net 3.0, Silverlight 1.1 becomes Silverlight 2.0, SQL Server Everywhere renamed as SQL Server Compact, we use C# 3.0 with .Net 3.5 LINQ..etc…..The most recent confusion is the ADO.net Entity Framework. The Entity Framework itself has different versioning from the Entity Designer. So, which Entity Designer should I use? Users have to figure out all these version names before working productively.

LINQ Cheat Sheet

A great way to learn a programming language is to look at the code snippets. Keith Rull has published a LINQ Cheat Sheet which is quite nice. Most of the LINQ coding are one-line and lengthy statement which make it very hard to code in VB. I think it is hard to read with so many underscores in a code file. In other word, if I want to use LINQ extensively in my projects, it is better to convert my existing data validation coding, etc to C# first, and that would be lots of work. Also,I rather stick to my current ORM vendor as LINQ is not much more superior as an ORM tool. However, LINQ will be an excellent query language if it is well integrated into my favourite ORM tool.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1

Windows Vista SP1 RC is available for download now. Microsoft also published document to outline changes made in Service Pack 1. To date, I read mixed results about the Service Pack. Some users claimed their Windows Vista does not behave properly after Service Pack installation, e.g. Internet Explorer is slow, etc. So, I think it is better to wait until RTM version.

The 25 Coolest (and Most Unconventional) Keyboards

Check out the keyboards here. I wonder how to use some of the keyboards.

Working Offline on Google Documents

For Open Office fans, a new extension named OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs is published recently. This extension allows you to take Google Documents (GDocs)offline and work on them locally and then synchronize your offline copies with the online copies. This sort of desktop-web integration opens new possibilities like backup documents to web, sharing documents, work with the documents everywhere regardless of whether you are online or offline. For MS Office users (like me), there is a similar service (DocSyncer) available as well.

As Internet becomes ubiquitous, it is obvious that Desktop-Web integration and synchronization technology become more and more important. I am planning to include synchronization functionality in the future version of my software to facilitate data flowing between user computers and between offices (HQ and branches) too.

Auto Desktop Wallpaper Changer

There is a Windows Sidebar gadget called Desktop Wallpaper which has high download rate and high rating from users. According to the author's description, it is "similar to the MS Slide Show Gadget, but also changes your desktop wallpaper at set intervals". Even better, it provides some additional image scaling options like 'Crop to Fit Screen" for your wallpapers.

Personally, I am not a sidebar fan. So, I prefer John’s Background Switcher (JBS). It is a small piece of software sitting at your system tray. Unlike the Desktop Wallpaper gadget, JBS works on Windows XP too. JBS is also more interesting. Instead of simply pulling images from a local folder, JBS can retrieve images from web services like Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, etc. In other word, you never know what you will get for your next wallpaper.

Google Chart

Google Code recently released a very useful product called Google Chart API. As described by Google, it allows you to dynamically embed charts in your web page. Chart API is pretty straightforward, simply add

IMG SRC = "http://chart.apis.google.com/chart? + parameters"

tag to a web page then the chart will be generated. You can use Javascript to encode dynamic data from back-end databases too. very very nice product - simple, easy and free. I will certainly revisit this API in the near future.