I always like the design by Frog Design. The physical appearance of the laptop looks nice. Same to the user interface design of the applications. This rubberized laptop is not not only rugged and lightweight, the skin can change colour according to the surrounding too (A micro-camera scans then projects the matching pattern on its surface).
For more information, click here.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Gelfrog: Futuristic laptop
Turning Windows XP into Mac OS X
Want to make your Windows XP looks like Mac OSX? Flyakite OSX allows you to do so. The web site announced the upcoming version will work in Windows Vista, too. I saw Flyakite OSX on my friends PC before, it works quite nicely.
Free Icon Editor
My favourite icon editor is actually Axialis Icon Workshop (which is not free). The reason I use Axialis software is because I am not the designer myself and the imange object packs offered by Axialis become very handy when I need new icons.
IcoFX is a free icon editor and I like to use it to process existing PNG files or icons files. Not only that IcoFX can support Vista icons, it also allows batch processing on files, has many built in effects and it can extracts icons from EXEs and DLLs. Click here to check it out.
Controversial ads of Ubuntu
Last time, I blogged about the gaining market share of Mac. Linux world is desperate to do something, so Ubuntu comes up with these unbelievable ads:
Sadly enough, I think the result will probably make Ubuntu famous but not more users.
Hard disk analyser
Xinorbis can analyzes your hard drive content structures and sorts them different categories: e.g. music files, video files, Office files etc. You can save reports then compare how your hard drive contents change over time. I think the most amazing factor of this little application is the scan speed - the speed is really really fast.
SQL Server 2005 Backup / Restore Troubleshooting
Some information on troubleshooting SQL Server 2005: Click here.
Another Game
Some players (not me) can get over 25000 points in the game!!!! I hardly get over 10000 mark.
Mac is gaining market share
Apple is just doing better and better with the return of Steve Jobs. While Mac is gaining momentum, Windows XP still remains as the king with 76% market share. Windows Vista is breaking the 10% mark for a very understandable reason - people is forced to use Windows Vista when buying new PCs.
Related readings are this and this.
Resources on Data Modeling
Even though the resources aren't quite useful to me by now, it is a great reference for students who are learning data modeling or database schema design. Check it out: http://databaseanswers.org/
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
.Net overtakes Java
To me, with the release of WCF and WF, it is just a matter of time for .Net overtaking Java - .Net is getting easier to use and more features, while Java is getting more and more complicated. The result of the survey over here shows .Net is gaining market share. I think even if Sun changes its ID on NASDAQ from SUNW to JAVA won't help much because it cannot change the fact that the .Net is more productive by now - that is why .Net is winning.
Flying Penguin Game
After flying man, lets try flying penguin. It is very hard after 130 where there is no ice-walls to support the penguin. My best record is 293.95m.
Flying Man Game
I have tried for 5 minutes, the best I can get is this:
The best record I know is 1541.6m. See how far you can get: http://www.tredz.co.uk/Game.asp
Saturday, January 5, 2008
From Mozilla Firefox to Netscape Firefox?
Right after AOL has officially declared the death of Netscape browsers, some people already began to speculate about Firefox - what is the next move? With the growing popularity of Firefox, is Firefox going from open source project into a business? Some are looking forward to the IPO and believe Mozilla should take advantage of the Netscape brand values, and rebranding into Netscape Firefox. However, the respond from Mozilla to the speculation is no, we are not going to IPO.
Annoying software usage statistics collection
There are more and more applications that are collecting personal usage statistics collection in the background. Some applications allow you to disable this ‘feature’. However, some, e.g. Windows Live Messenger, are still collecting data even though I have disabled the option (Look for those *.sqm files at your C:\ path) - though I am not too sure whether those SQM files are ever sent back to Microsoft.
The worst of the story is, many software vendor are collecting data without user consents or knowledge. Adobe is one example. Adobe is trying to hide the process of sending back data. You can find out here how this cheap trick is discovered. Another thing I hate about Adobe software is the Adobe Updater. It seems like there is no proper way to disable the auto-update ‘feature’.
Google Chart API for ASP.net
It is nice to see how fast the community responds to new stuffs. Someone has build on top of Google Chart API to make it easier to use for ASP.net developers. The ASP.net control can be found at here.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Where does those names came from
Can't remember the source of information, but an iteresting reading nonetheless.
Adobe - came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.
Apache - It got its name because its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA's httpd daemon. The result was 'A PAtCHy' server -- thus, the name Apache
Apple Computers - favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 o'clock.
CISCO - its not an acronym but the short for San Francisco.
Google - the name started as a jokey boast about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders, Stanford grad students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google'
Hotmail - Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters "html" - the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.
HP - Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
Intel - Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.
Lotus (Notes) - Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from 'The Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation (by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi).
Microsoft - coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed later on.
Motorola - Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.
ORACLE - Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (acronym for: One Real *** Called Larry Ellison)
Red Hat - Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. He lost it and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone !
SAP - "Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formed by 4 ex-IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Applications/Projects"
SUN - founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network.
Xerox - The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to say 'dry' (as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying). The Greek root 'xer' means dry.
Yahoo! - the word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book 'Gulliver's Travels'. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos
Launchy: Keystroke launcher
I think Windows Vista users should be very familiar with the search in the start button.
Every time I want to open a file or open an application, I simply type in some characters in the search box, then I select the item I want from the search results - no need to browse through the menus and Windows Explorer. Part of the reason I come up with this habit to launch an application is because the redesigned 'All Programs' menu is very hard to use and slow. Many users complained about it and switched back to classic flyout-menu style.
However, Windows Search is still slow. Sometimes it is even faster to cancel the search and browse through the 'All Programs'. Here is an application called Launchy that can provides solution. It offers the function as I described and it works faster than Windows Search. It works on Windows XP too.
Google in 2007
A summary of Google's performance in 2007 can be found at here. iGoogle grows at an incredible 268% rate - not too sure what leads to the success. Overall, Google is still very popular with the web search and image search. Dropping popular in video search is understandable because of YouTube acquisition. As for other products, I never use most of them although I knew their existence. Frankly, out of so many products Google has released, there are still many of them I never know, not to mention never use. Look at this post, how many of you know and use all of them?
The Greatest Minds Inventing Things No One Wanted
Check this out.
Business world is tough, either those big corporations push forward or they fail. We, as consumers, often become the victims of purchasing something not as useful as we originally thought.
As for the Windows Vista entry, I think the most annoying factor of the OS is UAC. I turned it off the second day after I used Windows Vista after seeing enough of 'Are you sure...' questions. Microsoft should make UAC turned off by default.
Mozilla Weave
Check this out, Firefox will soon have online services too. Basically, you can store your Firefox bookmarks and history on the web then you can easily synchronize your data with other devices, e.g. laptops, cell phones, or share data with friends - which is useful to me as I ocassionally work on different computers. Certainly, Mozilla has a greater plan than just what I mentioned.
The desktop-web integration trend is more and more obvious by now. I can't imagined how the future life will be when we try to disconnect from the web and cell phone.
The best web browser in 2007
I think the best web browser in 2007 goes to Flock.
When I used the browser for the first time, it does not look so special - despite the skin changes, everything works as expected like Firefox. But when I drill down more on the side bars, I started to notice differences.
The media bar is very nice and convenient ways to search pictures or videos. The searc box is very innovative too - it searches from local history cache first (something Firefox 3 will implement) then displays search results from my primary search engine - Google as well as secondary search engine - Yahoo.
The web clipboard is a convenient tool as well - though I never use it. The built in RSS reader is much better than Firefox Live Bookmarks. It has a built in blog editor too (This reminds me of the HTML editor in Netscape broswers). People sidebae seems to be very innovative tool to share things with friends but I haven't try to use it. There are still a lots of nice fetures that I haven't mention - just go and discover by yourself: http://www.flock.com/
Windows Thumbnails
One of the enhancements I like in Windows Vista is the live thumbnails of the Windows in the taskbar, Alt+Tab panel and the Win+Tab 3D cascading panels. It is so convenient when I am working on multiple windows - simply point the mouse cursor on the taskbar to check the current state of the application without switching windows.
I didn't realized I can do fairly similar thing in Windows XP until recently. MiniMIZE shows a thumnail of each Windows on the desktop. it supports Windows XP only, though it can works in Windows Vista too with some configurations. I am not sure whether the MiniMIZE thumnails are live preview or just snapshots of the windows (I never use it). Nevertheless, it is a nice piece of free application for Windows XP.
The end of Netscape web browsers
The announcement here with an eye catching title - End of Support for Netscape web browsers - quickly attracts more than 200 comments. I think this announcement reminds many of us about this long forgotten web browser.
The first web browser I ever use was Netscape Navigator 2. I like Netscape navigator 3 the most. I upgraded to Netscape Communicator 4 too when it was released. I think Netscape lost from the browser because Netscape screwed up by itself. Netscape 4 web-page rendering was poor. Many websites just cannot show properly on screen. I switched to IE 6 after it was released. I used IE 6 for quite some times. Although I did try Netscape 7 for a couple of weeks (Netscape was skipping several version number to stay ahead on IE) but abandoned it fairly quickly (Can’t remember the reasons, maybe the browser was too slow, too many AOL stuffs, and I didn’t like the skin too). I finally settled with Firefox even before the version 1 was released. I am still using Firefox most of the time nowadays.
Web concurrent users tracking
amung.us has attracted my attention since long time ago. Instead of just providing traditional user-count widget, it offers widgets to track real time how many users hit on a web page at once. The widgets are available in counter, graph and map styles. Moreover, it is so easy to embed the widgets to a web page. Nice technology indeed - although sometimes I noticed there are some disagreements in the figures across different widgets on the same web page, not sure what is causing that. According to the amung.us, it is serving more than 7 billion widgets worldwide now.
360 Desktop
Some other Operating Systems have multiple desktops, but the desktop of Windows just doesn't evolve much since Windows 95.
Later last year, gOS caught my attention for a while because of the innovative web-OS style. Although interesting in concept, I didn't download and give gOS a try in the end. (Sometimes I wonder why they called it gOS but not the the full name greenOS, maybe Google wants to be flexible - you can call gOS green OS or Google OS - gOS can be used interchangeably).
However, I will definitely give 360 Desktop a try. It is innovative, and moreover you can put web gadgets on the desktop, it is more like Windows Desktop + gOS Desktop + Enhancements. Currently, it is still in invite-only beta program. Can't wait for the release version.
GC.Collect()
One thing I don't like about .Net application is that it takes up very large chunk, and the memory usage grows very quickly in a data intensive application. I regularly need to call GC.Collect() to force the application to free up memory otherwise it is just getting slower and slower. This observation here is very interesting. It seems GC is smarter in .Net SP1 and even more in .Net 3.5 runtime.
Hardest game ever?
Software Development in the Future
Brad Abrams made his software development predictions for 2008. However, the content isn't sound too realistic according to my experience. Maybe, I should call it predictions for the future, some times beyond 2008. Here is a response to the Brad's predictions which I believe is more practical in many ways.
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