Isolated Storage in Silverlight 2.0

Firstly, the default limit is 100 KB, but you can increase the quota. The quota increases to predefined levels: 100 KB, 1 MB, 5 MB, 10 MB or unlimited. E.g. when request to increase the isolated storage to 9 MB, it actually increases to 10 MB. The increase quota action must be user-initiated, e.g. a button click event, then a Yes/No dialog box will pop up to ask the user whether to allow the quota increase.

Dim store As IsolatedStorageFile
store = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication
dim result as Boolean = store.TryIncreaseQuotaTo(10 * 1024 * 1024) '2MB
If result = False Then DoSomeThing()
store.Dispose()

For the same Silverlight application, the same isolated storage is accessible from different web browsers, which is good. Regarding on how to save and retrieve data from isolated storage, it is exactly the same as Winforms.

Save data:
Dim store As IsolatedStorageFile
store = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication
Dim fs As New IsolatedStorageFileStream(fileName, IO.FileMode.Create, store)
Dim sw As New IO.StreamWriter(fs)
sw.Write(stringContent)
sw.Close()
fs.Dispose()
store.Dispose()

Read data:
Dim store As IsolatedStorageFile
store = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication
Dim fs As New IsolatedStorageFileStream(fileName, IO.FileMode.OpenOrCreate, store)
Dim sr As New IO.StreamReader(fs)
Dim s As String = sr.ReadToEnd
sr.Close()
fs.Dispose()
store.Dispose()


Open file dialog in Silverlight 2.0

To open a file from client side, we need to use a Systems.Windows.Controls.OpenFileDialog object. I found the OpenFileDialog class in SL 2.0 quite interesting. Compare to WinForms counterpart, it has fewer properties and some property names are renamed too but still quite straightforward.

The surprising part is the return type of SelectedFile property. Instead of return the file path of string type, it returns System.Windows.Controls.FileDialogFileInfo object.

FileDialogFileInfo has a Name property, but it returns the file name only, not the full path of the file. I guess there is no way to retrieve the full path.

To read the content of the selected file, I need to use either:
FileDialogFileInfo.OpenText() which returns a System.IO.StreamReader object to read text,
or,
FileDialogFileInfo.OpenRead() which returns System.IO.Stream to read non-text content.

Example (select an image file and display the image on the button):

Dim dlg As New OpenFileDialog
If dlg.ShowDialog() <> DialogResult.OK Then Return
Dim img As New Image
Dim bitmap As New BitmapImage
bitmap.SetSource(dlg.SelectedFile.OpenRead)
img.Source = bitmap
aButton.Content = img


Open file dialog in Silverlight 2.0

Stumpedia: The human powered search engine

Stumpedia.com is a social search engine that relies on human participation to index, organize, and review the world wide web. The guided search model is dependent on crowdsourcing and the benefits of social media participation.

I don't believe Stumpedia can give more relevant search results than Google or Yahoo!, but it is interesting to see how far this model can go. Stumpedia just released its new feature - Instant Answers, where we can get real people to help us in real time provided there are somebody online.

Earth Day 2008: Eco-friendly logos

Major search engines changed their logo in support of Earth Day.

Google


Yahoo


AOL


And most surprisingly, green Flock browser...


You can download Flock Eco-Edition from here.

Oosah: A hub to manage your online media

Oosah offers free 2 GB online storage space. But it is more than a storage service, it is well integrated with YouTube, Facebook, Picasa and Flickr where you can drag-and-drop a media file from Oosah to the other social network accounts. Basically, it serve as a hub where you can manage all your online media files from one place. The third party integrations reduce the problem of login into multiple accounts and perform various tasks by some degrees.

Another important feature is that, Oosah allows you to share your Oosah-hosted files as a widget which can be embedded into blogs or social network profiles.

Google wants to do Genetic indexing

Google never feel its database is huge enough, so according to Business Week, Google wants to index your DNA too.

Excerpts from the article:

Google wants to plant an early stake in a potentially large new market around genetic data. 'We are interested in supporting companies and making investments in companies that [bolster] our mission statement, which is organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful,' Google spokesman Andrew Pederson says. 'We felt it was important to get involved now, at the early stage, to better understand the information generated by this fast-moving field.'

3D Video Panoramas

Making photo stitches into 360 degrees panorama are fairly common. Immersive Media is taking one step further by creating 360° video panorama, which is a very different experience of watching normal video. In the video, you can drag and move your mouse cursor along to view the content from different directions, which is amazing!! Check out the gallery here.

Startup Delayer: Make Windows startup faster

A slow Windows startup is caused by too many applications are launching when Windows has started. One way to solve this problem is to disable some applications from launching during Windows startup. However, some applications have no way to allow you to disable this feature, but you can use msconfig to change the behaviour.

Completely disabling an application may not be desirable. This is where Startup Delayer becomes useful. Besides allowing you to enable or disable applications from running, Startup Delayer permits you to specify how many seconds after Windows has started up before running each program.



Startup Delayer is a free software. So far, I haven't encounter any problem running Startup Delayer on Windows Vista.

Baywords: Uncensored blogging service

Excerpts from Baywords.com:

Many blogs are being shut down for uncomfortable thoughts and ideas. We will not do that. Our goal is to protect freedom of speech and your thoughts. As long as you don’t break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it.

I wonder where the service will bring us. Luckily the service does not allow contents that break Swedish laws, so there probably won't be any drug-use, or any illegal activity blogs. But I wonder how people will use this kind of service, so I checked through the list of BayWords blogs, many of blogs are in foreign languages which I don't understand, otherwise, I haven't see anything too weird so far.

The service is powered by WordPress. Since it is just launched last week, it does not have the bells-and-whistles of other blogging platform yet. Nevertheless, Baywords have 10,000 blogs registered within 3 days, eliminating those blogs with only single testing post, I guess number of active blogs are around 5,000.

WidgetBox:Thousands of widgets for Facebook, Blogger and more

WidgetBox directories listing thousands of widgets which can be embed into your blog, social network profile and web page. The widgets are mostly user-generated, many of them are pretty cool.

Embedding a widget is very simple, you simply tell WidgetBox the desired target platform (Blogger, Wordpress, MySpace etc), and WidgetBox will provide you the embeddable code. Another alternative is to use the installer tool from WidgetBox to install the widget to your web page.

The best part of the service is that it is so easy to create my own new widget. Simply feed any content (whether it is Flash, RSS feed, Google gadget or a web page) then WidgetBox will turn it into a widget which can be easily share with others. No prgramming knowledge is required. The only limitation is the styling: The output widget is functional but does not look very attractive.

Hilariously misleading domain names

What is misleading domain name? For example, how do you read this:

www.TherapistFinder.com

or

www.TheRapistFinder.com ?

Now you get the idea.

Although I occasionally see some misleading domain names, I don't take notes of them like this guy. He compiled a list of misleading domain names.

In the future, do spend some times thinking about your domain name before registering it.

Cluttered desktop folders become art

I like to keep my desktop as clean as possible, so I normally don't have cluttered desktop problem. But it seems having tons of folders on your desktop is not totally bad, it can invoke sense of artistry too..



More pics at Macenstein.

The World's Hardest Game

First, the screenshot of level 1...


You still cannot see what is so hard about it? Go and try out yourself, then let me know how much time you have taken to complete the first level. It is a crazy game, you need speed and accuracy.

Yahoo to Take on Google Analytics

Having seen Google set up their Google Analytics product for free and then seen Microsoft release their version of a free web analytics tool (Microsoft adCenter Analytics beta), Yahoo! wants to do the same thing.

Instead of building the tool from scratch, Yahoo! recently purchased IndexTools, an enterprise-level web analytics service provider. Dennis Mortensen, COO of Index Tools announced on his blog that Yahoo! would set the service free, but no news regarding the release date of the free service.

Personally, I am excited about it, since I don't like the Google Analytics.

Google Earth 4.3: Still ahead of Microsoft Virtual Earth

A couple of days ago, I watched a video demo on the new Windows Live Maps, which introduces the 3D rendering of Birds Eye view. And now, it appears Google Earth 4.3 is doing the same thing too.

Google Earth is doing more, it even allows us to adjust the time in order to watch the sunrise and sunset in Google Earth. Also, Google Earth has the Street View feature, which I don't think Microsoft Virtual Earth has it. On the other hand, Windows Live Maps has some nice enhancements on traffic info. Specifically, Windows Live Maps will suggest a rerouting to you based on heavy traffic.

Below is the video demo of Google Earth 4.3.

Start your own video wiki at WikiVideo

Wikipedia is undoubtedly a very successful wiki project. Since then, many web companies join the wiki market to allow you to start your own wiki. Among the most popular ones are:

PbWiki - recently, PbWiki introduced the version 2.0. It has some nice features, but the data storage limit for free version is too limiting.

Google Site - it is part of Google Apps. Hence you need a Google Apps account in order to use it. To sign up for Google Apps account, you need to own a domain name, e.g. www.myCompany.com. Besides this restriction, it is a good choice too.

Wikia - everything is good except I cannot remove the footer that Wikia puts in.

Wetpaint - In my mind, this is the best wiki host. It has the best structure, thus it is easier for users to navigate within the wiki. It offers some very nice looking skins too. Again, same as Wikia, I can't remove the footer Wetpaint puts in.

But recently, there is a new startup joins the market called WikiVideo, which allows you to create a video/audio wiki. It comes with two languages, English version, and Italian version. Unlike other wiki sites, which you can only embed a video into a page, WikiVideo hosts your videos, i.e. you can uploads you videos directly to WikiVideo.

WikiVideo accepts all the popular video formats (AVI, MPG, WMV, MOV, MP4...). But the most interesting feature is, it doesn't convert your videos into FLV like YouTube. It simply displays the video on the web page as it is, which may be or may not be a good thing. The recommended file size is 20-100 MB, but I am not sure whether this is a strict rule or not.

Microsoft designs UAC to annoy you

UAC is among the most hated feature of Windows Vista. At recent RSA security conference 2008 in San Francisco, Microsoft's David Cross said: "The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I'm serious".

In fact, the logic is that the annoyance should encourage application vendors to eliminate as many unnecessary privilege escalations as possible by causing users to complain about all the UAC 'Cancel or Allow' prompts.

Microsoft's strategy is actually quite successful. Personally, I never care about security privilege when developing software before this UAC stuff. Since the release of UAC, I noticed my applications will crash and throwing ugly error messages becuse of this UAC thing. As a result, I have to change my software development behaviour to avoid the UAC prompts.

However, Microsoft's strategy comes at the expense of user experience, and Microsoft get most of the complaints for the meaningless security warnings. As stated by Ars Technica, one of the most popular post-Vista install activities is disabling UAC. Yeah, it is true, I disabled UAC after using Vista for 3 days.

Source: Ars Technica

Firefox logo spotted in deep space by the Hubble Telescope!!

The photo is captured by the Hubble Space Telescope way back in March 2005. It is an image of V838 Monocerotis star which lies near the edge of our Milky Way Galaxy. The same photo is overlaid with a familiar logo, an the fits in nicely!!! Actually, I think Internet Explorer logo can fit in too. It does look like a big 'e' as well.

Source: Firefox Logo Spied In Deep Space

Google Maps camera records a police arrest

A police patrol car arrests a man and that scene is captured live by Google Maps camera!!! Explore the Google Maps street view at here...



(via Google Sightseeing)

In case you haven't be entertained enough, please read this: The Strangest Sights in Google Earth from PC World.

Funny video about Windows Vista

For non-Vista users, the video only captured the weaknesses in more exaggerated way, Vista isn't that bad...

Indonesia blocked access to YouTube and MySpace

On February, I blogged about 'Pakistan causes worldwide YouTube outage'. And now, it is Indonesia's turn.

Indonesia blocked access to YouTube and MySpace in effort to stop Indonesians from viewing the anti-Islam film. Oh gosh...what are they doing?? I hope Malaysia will NOT do this kind of funny thing...this really make Islamic countries sound like no freedom of speech, etc to foreigners....There is no use of blocking..if the users intend to view the film, they can still access through proxy servers, bit torrents etc....why make the country's reputation sound bad? I don't understand.

Top Singaporean blogger is featured in top American blog

I am surprised to find Xiaxue, one of the top bloggers in Singapore, is 'featured' in fake Steve Job's blog (Fake Steve Job is among the top 20 bloggers in USA). I seldom see Asian bloggers receive such 'honour'...

Check out Fake Steve Job posting about Xiaxue...

Magic Pen: Crayon Physics clone

3 weeks ago, I blogged about Crayon Physics Deluxe, a cool physics puzzle game which is not yet released. But over the weekend I found a Crayon Physics clone!!! It is called Magic Pen, the game play is exactly the same as Crayon Physics. Maybe both games are from the same developer. If not, who is the copycat?



I figure that this game shouldn't be too hard to clone using Silverlight 2.0 + Farseer Physics Engine, but I am lazy to try....

Innovation on CAPTCHAs

When posting comments on a blog or registering for web services, you probably asked to read a CAPTCHA to ensure that you are a human and not a bot.

To prevent the CAPTCHA being cracked by bot, some websites present very hard to read CAPTCHAs, but none of them is as hard as this one...


Source: Wellington Grey

Some people are even thinking of commercialize the CAPTCHA...like this one..

Source: JY's Weblog

More Silverlight 2.0 games

For Silverlight enthusiasts,

Tunnel Trouble




Zero Gravity

NeuroSky: A game device that can read your mind

I think the most exciting technology exhibited at Game Developers Conference this year is NeuroSky. NeuroSky is a headset device that can track signals inside the brain to roughly extrapolate how a gamer reacts to a game objects. If you think I am writing sci-fi, just watch the video clip below...



You can move objects...and even set fire on the an object!!!!!

I listened to another interview with the companuy's CEO, he said the headset will be available at USD $50, that is much cheaper than I have expected...

Zemanta: A content suggestion engine for blogging

Zemanta is a content suggestion engine that suggest contextually relevant links, pictures, related content and tags. You can add the suggested contents to your blog post which you can then edit. It also builds links to related stories. Generally, Zemanta try to search only inside Open content database (e.g. Wikipedia etc), CC licensed Flickr images, etc. You can download Zemanta from here, it works with Firefox and TypePad, Wordpress and Blogger.

It is hard to describe the power of Zemanta in words, just watch the demo video below to get the idea...


I believe the service will increase relevance and add better contents to your blog posts which ultimately satisfy your readers even more...I will start Zematize my postings in near future...

PicApp: Get the best images for your blog

PicApp is an image search engine that search for images that you can use in your website / blog legally for free. You don't get the image, but PicApp provides the JavaScript snippet to embed into your web page. In addition, you can share the image by emailing the images or add them to your favourite social bookmarking service.

I tried several keywords, the search results are generally okay, depending on what you want to search for. It return irrelevant results sometimes. If you key in more specific terms like Asian celebrities names, it is likely you get no result.

One thing that annoyed me is the website disables the right-click menu of the web browser, so I can't do things like 'Open Link in New Tab'.

YouConvertIt: Online file conversion tool

YouConvertIt is a web application that can convert convert your document, video or audio files into another file format, e.g. from DOC to PDF, WMV to MP3 etc. You can use the service without signup an account. Simply upload a file, YouConvertIt will give you a list of possible conversions. Select a desire file format, then YouConvertIt will convert the file and send you a download link to the converted file via email.

YouConvertIt allows you to download YouTube, MetaCafe and Google Video without installing any browser plugins or desktop application too. Simply specify the URL and click download it, You can download the video as FLV file. The only inconvenient part is, the downloaded file has no file extension, You have to put back the ".FLV" myself.

Another option is to convert the online video to a specified file format before download. For example, you can specify to convert the YouTube video to WMV. YouConvertIt will convert the Flash Video to WMV then send you an email containing a link to download the end result.

I tried YouConvertIt a couple of times. It is pretty good except I have to wait for a long time to receive the emails containing the download links. So, don't use it when you are in urgent.

Quintara: A cloud search widget

It is fun to play around with Quintara search widget. I key in a search keyword. Quintara returns relevant keywords and arrange them as cloud. I move my mouse over a keyword, and it drills down to more keywords, i.e. I search by discovering relevant terms and refining my keywords. I can save the refined cloud to my local PC, and best of all, I can share it by embedding the cloud to my blog!!!

Below is a Quitara widget, with 'Silverlight' as my search keyword.

Viscosity: The Modern Art Generator

Viscosity is the winner of Best Art Award at this year's SXSW festival. Viscosity is an online abstract art application, and it took years of efforts to develop it. I just checked it out, it is easy to use, it is fun, it is beautiful and it is free!! Here are few samples I took from Viscosity's gallery...

CubeDesktop: 3D virtual desktops

Sometimes it is desirable to work in multiple desktops environment. CubeDesktop allows me to have up to 6 virtual desktops. The navigation between desktops is presented in 3D, somewhat similar to Flip3D in Windows Vista. Like Flip 3D and DreamScene in Vista, the effects look cool at first sight, but very soon you will find them having not much practical values....

In CubeDesktop, you can switch desktop in 3D cube. The practical problem is, no matter how I rotate the cube, it is no easy to find the 5th and 6th desktops from the cube.


So, how about the 3D carousel views? Carousel views are better than the cube. I can see all my 6 desktops on the screen which is what I want.




Another navigation option is Desktop Explorer, putting all 6 desktops on a flat panel. I can zoom in and out the panel. However, it is hard to pan around on this view. If I am not careful with my mouse click, CubeDesktop will switch to that desktop although I only want to move the panel....


Another feature is Windows Exposer, which is similar to Alt+Tab in Windows. It display all the open applications on that desktop on a 3D panel. It does not look better than Flip 3D in Vista. And I am sticking to Alt+Tab to switch applications...


Here are the screenshots of CubeDestop's Options screen and its memory usage on my laptop. I would say the memory usage is still reasonable for a 3D application.




One annoyance 'feature' of CubeDesktop: When my mouse cursor moves too close to right bottom corner of the screen, my desktop will zoom out into 3D cube automatically....while I only want to interact with my system tray icons.

In conclusion, CubeDesktop is good, but I don't need, and will probably will not use, most of the fancy features. I hope CubeDesktop has a free lite version with those not so useful features removed.

Google's April Fool's joke 2008

2-stars joke from GMail Team:

Custom Time, a new feature of GMail, allows you to set custom time stamp of your email before sending, and specify whether the mail should be marked as read on recipient's inbox.




3-stars joke from Google China:

Google China is recruiting 25 million full time / part time volunteers now. Join Google China to build Google Human Search database. The idea is simple, current Google Search is too robotic, lacking human warmth, Google Human Search tries to remedy this by building is human-driven search 'engine'. When a user enters a keyword, volunteers from all over the world will response by generating contents for the users.........


3-stars joke from Google Japan:
Google Japan is introducing Google Search DAJARE beta. DAJARE is a search engine built on top of PigeonRank (PigeonRank is a web-page ranking system based on user clicks on search results). DAJARE releases web crawler called OyajiBot to serach for humorous materials and rate the materials using KudaRank. DAJARE is fully integrated with normal Google Search.




5-stars joke from Google Australia:

Google gDay allows to search tomorrow’s web. The core technology that powers gDay is MATE (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation). This technique can "predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!".

I think the creator will get a job in Wall Street immediately.




5-starts joke from Google Blog
Virgle Inc, a joint venture between the Virgin Group and Google to establish permanent human settlement on Mars.