When I started reading blogs, I only read one blog, then two. I made a folder in my bookmarks menu, and whenever I wanted to read something, I would go to the blog and see if there was anything new. This works just fine when you only have two blogs to read. When you have 35 blogs, though, it doesn’t work at all. That’s why RSS is so important. (If you don’t know what RSS is, get a life. No, check that. If you don’t know what RSS is, read the Wikipedia definition. And then come back here and keep reading.) Read the rest of this entry »
Every geek needs a calculator, and not just any calculator will do. A geek’s calculator must be able to handle very large numbers, fractions, trigonometry, and very large trigonometric fractions, among other things. The Staples BD-6703, which my mom picked up for me at Staples Business Depot for $9.99, fits all of the qualifications. Plus, it’s cooler than my brother’s calculator, so I can bug him about it.
But still, it was kind of scary. I mean, we’ve all seen this image before, but never in the context of google.com. The last time Google went down was in 2005.
Recently, while studying for my upcoming Grade 2 music theory examination, I started looking for free, open-source flashcards software programs to use for studying musical terms. (Contrary to popular belief, there’s plenty of good free software out there.) I looked at command-line applications, Linux GUI applications, Windows GUI applications–nothing. So I decided to write my own. I started writing a backend, first in C#, then in Python, then in C# again. I started working on Windows UI mockups. Then, in the midst of it all, I discovered Anki.
Strange name, I know, but it’s great software. Anki epitomizes everything good free software is – it’s fast, reliable, easy to use, cross-platform; it even has a really good-looking UI. Although designed for language vocabulary practice (with a focus on Japanese, a language I will probably never learn), it works just fine for anything.
Anki doesn’t limit you to having cards with just fronts and backs. You can have complicated cards with one front and numerous backs; for instance, a verb and its conjugations. Neither does it limit you to plain text: you can input formatted text, pictures, audio; even mathematical equations, with practice. One thing I would like would be the ability to input musical notation, preferably using Lilypond notation. It’s easy to input flashcards quickly into Anki; I was able to type 120 cards, front and back, in about half an hour, on a laptop keyboard.
The software’s practice interface is equally good. You can customize the formatting used to display the cards on the screen, but the default looks good enough that such action is unnecessary. You can grade how difficult the card was on a scale of one to five; the software will schedule the next appearance of the card based on your selection. This method, the Leitner Flash Card System, ensures that you get the most practice on the cards you find most difficult.
I remember hearing once that the computer platform with the most software written for it was the Commodore 64; but these days, that’s somewhat hard to believe, considering how much software has been written for Windows. Yes, there is much in the way of useless free software out there these days, but there are gems to be found, and Anki is one of them. I highly recommend this software.
Okay, so UI design isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Still, though, some parts of it are pretty consistent across applications, even across operating systems. Take, for example, the image below – a bunch of forward-back (or next-previous) buttons from different real applications.
Pretty simple, isn’t it? The forward button goes on the left. The back button goes on the right. They have nice icons pointing in the right direction. Now, look at the buttons in Excel 2003’s Print Preview window.
What? The Next button is on the left. The Previous button is on the right. Seriously, what were they thinking?
Half a decade ago, the big name in web maps was MapQuest. You wanted directions, you went to MapQuest. You wanted maps, maybe with satellite imagery? MapQuest was the only place to go. These days, though, every other mapping website lives in the shadow of one runaway success: Google Maps. And for good reasons, too: Google maps has better coverage, better browser support, a better interface, and much better satellite imagery.
And really, the satellite imagery is what a lot of people come for. Everyone knows it’s fun to look up your house, or for that matter, somebody else’s, and see what it looks like from space. (Usually, it looks like a roof. Not much, really. But bear with me.) Google’s satellite imagery is not only on average a lot newer than the competition’s (1-3 years old, compared to 2-3 years old on Live Maps and 4-5 years old on Yahoo Maps), it’s a lot clearer. And see that picture above? That was taken with a new high-image-quality satellite that Google has exclusive rights to the images from.
Google also leads, though, in map and directory coverage. Google has full maps of Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, the UK, and the United States, while Live Maps only has the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, and India. And Live Maps doesn’t even cover the northern Canadian territories. Not that anybody cares, but still.
Google’s browser support is better (6 supported browsers vs. 3 or 4), and their mobile device support is outstanding. Google Maps is built into every one of the twelve million iPhones out there. They’re faster, easier, and a whole lot better looking than the competition. Plus, they have Street View. (Imagine how cool it would be to have street view, and turn-by-turn directions, on the iPhone.)
Sure, Live Maps has 3D features that Google Maps doesn’t. But they require a special browser plugin that’s slow to install and slow to use. You might as well download the free Google Earth, which provides a far better 3D experience. While Google might not have been the first to come up with webmail, GMail now outshines the competition by far; I think Google Maps will be doing the same thing before long.
In Internet on Monday, October 20, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Maybe you couldn’t care less who becomes the next president of the USA. Maybe you have a hard time deciding who to vote for. Maybe you’re a shallow moron who bases his voting decision on how good the candidate’s web site looks.
If you are, you’ve arrived at the right place. I carefully (read: carelessly) analyzed both ticket’s web sites to help you decide who you should vote for.
Design
Obama – The Obama-Biden web site is well designed, although slow. It received a makeover from its already-good design at the end of last year, and it looks even better now. It has well-thought-out menu navigation, pleasing fonts, and a great color scheme. The site promotes campaign action on your part and makes you want to help Obama win.
McCain – The McCain-Palin site looks good, but not nearly as good as the Obama site. In fact, at first glance, it appears to be a poor imitation of the former. It does have some advantages, though: nice animations on the home page, a photo gallery, etc. Its navigation menus, however, look awful when juxtaposed against Obama’s Also, the site doesn’t have that same energetic, glowing feel to it.
In short, Obama’s site is a lot like Obama, and McCain’s site is a lot like McCain.
Speed
When it comes to page load speeds, however, McCain has a real advantage. Although both sites employ a tacky sign-up landing page that needs to be circumnavigated to get to the real thing, McCain’s site loads considerably faster on the landing and home pages, although it lags a bit in the content pages, probably because YouTube videos take a long time to load.
Anyway, here are the numbers (which I timed with my wristwatch): Obama’s site took 50 seconds to load the landing page and 49 seconds to load the home page. His “About” page took 9 seconds to load. McCain’s site took 27 seconds to load the landing page and 11 seconds to load the home page; it, however, took 21 seconds to load the “About” page, although the page was semi-usable before it was fully loaded.
Conclusion
The presidential candidates’ web sites epitomize their characters: Obama’s is good-looking, but a bit slow, whereas McCain’s is a bit wrinkly, but more usable.
In the past, I provided here, Saturdays, a list of my favorite blog posts and other online content from the week. It worked, I guess, but it was a pain to compile. So I finally decided I needed something new.
Ma.gnolia is a “social bookmarking” site, a lot like Delicious.com, but better looking. It allows you to bookmark sites, with rating, tags, and descriptions, and other people can subscribe to it. Hopefully this combination will be the perfect blend between full blog articles and little John Gruber-esque snippets that I’m looking for.
Been wanting to see my terrible photos? Now’s your chance: I’ve uploaded a bunch of my best (yes, that’s the best I can do) to flickr. Just head right on over to flickr.com/photos/iansinke to view my handiwork.
(You can also just click the link under the list of photos in the sidebar)
Well, after more than a week’s absence, I am finally (as of Friday) back online. It all started the Thursday before last week Thursday, when there was a big thunderstorm near our house. Check that, at our house. Around nine PM, there was a humongous clap of thunder, and three things happened:
The smoke detector screamed.
My little brother’s “Animal Explorer” (don’t ask) said “Press an animal or an explorer button.”
Windows kindly notified me that Primus DSL had become disconnected.
So the next morning I got on the phone with the Primus Tech Support guys, who did a few troubleshooting things (resetting the modem) and came to the conclusion that it would take “twenty-four to forty-eight hours” (listen carefully there) to get the problem fixed. All this in a heavy indian accent, of course.
It took more than 24 hours. More than 48 hours. I called them again Monday morning and they told me the same thing. 48 more hours passed; I called them Wednesday morning and was told, “But, my good man, this kind of problem, usually take twenty-four to forty-eight hours to fix, sir.”
Finally, on Friday afternoon, the guy from Bell Canada called. He had been fishing around at the local office and found the problem. What was the problem? Well, a wire had become unplugged.
In Software on Thursday, August 14, 2008 at 7:55 pm
I don’t really play a lot of computer games. I like computers, but most games leave me a bit cold. People often ask me, “So, what do you enjoy doing?” “Computers,” I say. “You mean, like, games?” they ask. “Well, uh, no, not really.”
One of my favourite games, though, was RollerCoaster Tycoon 2. The combination of the funky 16-bit, isometric graphics and the unique plot was perfect. For the same reason, I was very excited to discover Transport Tycoon Deluxe (TTD). Created by Chris Sawyer, the same guy who created RollerCoaster Tycoon, it involves not a theme park, but a transport company. You build railways, roads, seaways, and airlines that transport all sorts of goods to and from factories, mines, farms, forests, and towns. As you build your business, the surrounding towns grow.
Transport Tycoon Deluxe is no longer manufactured; however, the good people over at the OpenTTD project disassembled its code and ported it to first C and then C++, allowing it to run on many different platforms, including the iPhone. OpenTTD has many new features that improve the gameplay, including the autorail tool, 32-bit graphic support, a console, and an online multiplayer mode. It’s not too hard to play, and it’s a lot of fun, at least in the “easy” difficulty level. (I myself have not yet been able to conquer the “hard” level.)
What I like:
It’s fun to watch the artificial intelligence work. (Intelligence? What intelligence?)
The graphics are really cool. Not at all modern – they look like something from the nineties – but cool.
The sound effects are cool, too. I haven’t been able to get the music working on Linux, but I’m sure it’s cool. Shoot, the song titles are cool. (“Aliens Destroyed my Runway” is one of them.)
The vehicles are all actually real vechiles, but with different names. For example, the Concorde is now called a “Yate Haugan”. The Boeing 747 is a “Darwin 300″.
The towns all have odd names. (Gintfingburg. Tunningway-on-sea. Nafingbourne.)
What I don’t like:
The timing of the game is way off. For instance, a typical flight takes around three months. Six months round-trip.
Rails are a real pain to put in. You have to first find the best route, then level the hills, then put in the rails. It would be nice if the autorail tool really did do it all automatically.
The AI, as mentioned, is really dumb. The way their railways loop back around each other is hilarious. I’ve seen an AI build a road that needlessly crossed a railway, drove on the other side for a few squares, and then crossed back over.
All in all, OpenTTD is a great game that is very addictive and fun to play. I took a bunch of screenshots of the game, which you can see below. If you’re looking for an intelligent game to play, OpenTTD may be the answer, although I will not guarantee that it is less mind-rotting than other games.
Since the long-gone dawn of Windows 3.1, Microsoft bundled Minesweeper – a game that everybody knows about and sort of knows how to play, but nobody is really good at – with Windows. The Windows version of the game remained basically unchanged right through Windows XP, except that with the release of Windows 2000, the beginner level was enlarged from 8×8 to 9×9.
Among the notable features of this version of Minesweeper were the charming “smiley face” button at the top of the screen (he would scowl if you lost, and clicking him would start a new game.) Also, you could cheat: if you typed “xyzzy” and then pressed Shift+Enter, hovering over a mine would cause the upper left-hand pixel of your monitor to turn black. Hovering over a non-mine square would turn the pixel white.
Sadly, however, this version of everybody’s favorite game is now gone forever. For Windows Vista, Microsoft got an independent game developer, Oberon Games, to create a new version. Gone is the smiley face; gone is the cheat mode. Gone forever are the cool 16-bit graphics that haunted the game from Windows 95 onward. Worst of all, you can now cheat in a perfectly legal way: because you can save your game and start over, people just click on a mine, take a screenshot, and then start from the saved point, using the screenshot as a reference as to which squares are mines. Farewell, Minesweeper. You will be missed.
The GMail web app is supported by “featured content” – a sneaky way of saying text link ads – at the top of every page. Among the more interesting ads are those in the spam folder: they are all links to recipes that have spam (the food, not the emails) as an ingredient. There don’t seem to be very many spam recipes on the internet, however. The only four I am seeing:
I went to the mall this morning with the intention of buying some clothing. (Yes, nerds shop for clothing.) So after we stopped at Tim Hortons, which is the Canadian equivalent of Dunkin’ Donuts, we walked over towards Sears. On our way, we walked past a Rogers Wireless store.
And there it was, the iPhone, in all its glory, sitting on the counter, practically begging to be handled. (It was protected from theivery, though, by a cable attached to it and by the guy behind the counter who watched my every move.) I only had a few minutes to play around with it, but from what I could tell, the thing is great. A few small observations:
The device feels great in your hands. Really great.
Furthermore, it is incredibly thin.
The screen is amazingly bright, with no glare or reflection whatsoever, and absolutely amazing resolution.
Multi-touch is cool.
The GPS works perfectly.
The camera stinks. The resolution is terrible, and the camera itself is right where you want to put your finger.
The accelerometer, for some reason, was disabled on the display devices. And no, it was not just broken, because I stopped at a Wireless Wave store later in the same mall and had the same experience.
The keyboard is really not as bad as you might think. I, however, had a very hard time hitting the “s” key. Because the accelerometer wasn’t working, I couldn’t try the landscape mode.
The store device came preloaded with a bunch of stock images. (And while I’m on the topic, pinching to zoom is very, very cool. If you haven’t used a multi-touch display before, you should really go down to your nearest iPhone retailer and try the thing out.)
The lack of physical buttons is not a problem.
The UI has lots of cool animations and such. For example, the glow on the “Slide to Unlock” text slides from left to right. Also, when you press the home button, the icons zoom into place from the sides.
The way the icons jiggle when you want to move them is positively nauseating.
I got back in the car with my brother, Arie (who plays Scrabble at a professional level) and had this irritating discussion with him:
ME: The 3G iPhone is so cool.
ARIE: What’s so much better about the new iPhone?
ME: It has, um, welll… it has, uh, three G’s.
ARIE: So? The word gagger has three G’s too. Gagging has four.
ME: Uh…. well…
After a furlough of around two months, I’m back at blogging. I was a bit lazy about it for a while there, but now that I’ve finished school for the year, I’ll have plenty of time to write. I’ll get some Recommended Reading up as soon as possible, as well as some Recommended Listening.
In unrelated news, Steve Jobs announced the 3G (second generation, but three G’s of wireless connectivity) iPhone today at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. The other big news item was a new service, or rather a rebranding of .Mac: Mobile Me. Before the keynote, this name was rumored and hated by all; now that it’s over, somehow it seems just great. Steve Jobs has this way of making anything seem a lot better, I guess.
Citing your references and influences is a great and necessary thing, but obsessively listing every single blog you read– the so-called “blogroll”– is just noise.
If you’re really reading this many blogs, you should be linking to them organically in your blog posts, in a sort of natural quid pro quo. Wearing a giant blogroll on your sleeve is an empty gesture. I’m reminded of the distasteful way that blogs in giant ad networks (such as Weblogs, Inc) spam every page with a huge list of internal links to their other blogs. It feels artificial and insincere.
All the same, although I’m not going to put my blogroll in the sidebar, I feel somewhat obliged to publish it here, in case you’re wondering what I read. To that end, here it is.
I recently introduced a new feature: Recommended Reading. My goal for this feature was to be able to take a list of my favorite blog posts from Google Reader and automatically post them to my blog with a python script. The way I eventually implemented this was by ripping the Atom feed from my Google Reader Shared Items Page, take each item in it and format it as a <ul>, and then post it to my blog using XMLRPC/metaWebLog. Here’s the script, commented for your reading pleasure.
# Import a bunch of things we'll need.
# feedparser is from http://www.feedparser.org/
import feedparser
import time
import xmlrpclib
from xml.dom import minidom
from pprint import pprint
# Defines how to post to the blog.
def blogPost( server, username, password, date, title, content ):
datastruct = {'pubDate': date, 'description':content, 'title':title}
returncode = server.metaWeblog.newPost('1',username,password,datastruct,1)
print returncode
# Initialize some details.
# You would need to put your real blog url, username, and password here, though.
servname = xmlrpclib.Server("http://iansinke.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php")
username = 'xxxxx'
password = 'xxxxx'
# Check to make sure it's working.
pprint(servname.system.listMethods())
# Set up the post data.
Title = "Recommended Reading"
Date = ""
Content = ""
# Parse the feed.
# You would need to replace the URL with your google reader account's \
# shared page URL, or some other RSS or Atom feed.
f = feedparser.parse("http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/15838963114361614548/state/com.google/broadcast")
ontent = Content + '<p>(Every Friday, I post my favorite blog posts of the week under the title "Recommended Reading".)</p>'
Content = Content + '<ul>'
for item in f.entries:
Content = Content + '<li><a href="' + item.link + '">' + item.title + '</a></li>'
Content = Content + '</ul>'
Content = Content + '<p> </p>'
# Post to the blog.
blogPost(servname, username, password, Date, Title, Content)
This took me about two hours to figure out and implement. Feel free to use it however you want.
Some twenty-two years ago, you introduced Windows 1.0. Since then, you’ve released five major updates to the Windows kernel, including Windows NT, which changed everything. However, I’ve noticed lately that you’ve been doing a lot more with Windows.
Let’s get one thing straight: Windows is a business desktop operating system. It performs excellently in offices, stores, point-of-sale applications, etc. However, it is not a real consumer operating system. The Windows NT complexity built into Windows XP and Vista has complicated things beyond redemption for end users. Most people don’t even have a network in their home, never mind a server. Most people would be much happier with Mac OS X, if only it were a smidgen cheaper. (You hear me, Apple!?)
Furthermore, Windows is not a server operating system. Nor is it a developer’s operating system. For years upon years Linux has served the best servers and developers. Linux simply is better at this kind of stuff. It’s faster, simpler, more modular. And it’s open source and free – a developer’s dream. Most servers and developers don’t need the kind of functionality Windows provides. Most servers and developers would be happier with Linux. (Are you beginning to see a pattern, Microsoft?)
There’s one more thing, Microsoft, as Steve Jobs would say. There’s one more thing. Windows is not – has never been, will never be – a mobile operating system. Period. There’s not so much to say here – as of yet, there aren’t really any superb mobile operating systems out there. Perhaps Android is the next big thing; perhaps it’s the iPhone’s operating system. Who knows; maybe it’s even Symbian. It’s not Windows Mobile, that’s for sure.
Please, Microsoft, leave Windows on the business desktop, where it belongs, and start developing cross-platform software for those smarter people out there who’ve already abandoned Windows. I’d love to see .Net go truly cross-platform. Don’t port Internet Explorer, though. It just wouldn’t be worth the effort.
Last December, some people started to get annoyed by the pingback-bots, and others were confused by them. What’s the deal with those pingback-bots?
It’s all about fooling the search engines in order to make money, taking advantage of friendly policies at domain registrars to make it less costly an undertaking.
Step one: Register a bunch of domains with a domain registrar that includes a money-back guarantee.
Step two: Set up fake blogs on each of those sites, with different keywords.
Step three: Use a script to search the blogosphere for articles that contain keywords that match your site. (There appears to be a single script that 90% of the spam blogs use, since they all look exactly the same, and have the same bugs!)
Step four: Create a bogus blog entry for each one that say something like “Hey, here’s something interesting I found on the Internet” and then reprints the article in question. (You may notice that many of these sites mis-attribute the authorship; some of them even claim to have written the article themselves!)
Step five: Host ads on the site.
Step six: Just before the money-back guarantee period expires, look at each of your fake blogs to see which ones have made money from the ads and which ones haven’t. Cancel the domain registrations of the ones that didn’t make money.
Well, yesterday morning I logged into my wordpress admin dashboard and saw that I, too, had been attacked by a spam ping-bot. The website: a fake hair cair blog. Wait: a hair care blog!? Yes, they linked to my Recommended Listeningpost of last week. What does hair care have to do with classical music? Well, the title of the song I was reccommending in the post was The Girl with the Flaxen Hair. That might explain that bit.
This is where the story takes a turn for the worse. I should have blogged about it yesterday, but no, I put it off until today – and what do you know, the blog has gone out of style, as Raymond predicts:
Most of these sites are in existence for only a few days, so trying to stop each individual site is a waste of effort; the site is going away soon anyway.
In Software on Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Linux is easier to just do things on than most operating systems. It especially shines, however, when it comes to shell scripting. With bash and a text editor, there’s not much you can’t automate. Today I wrote a shell script to back up my documents (which can be found in /home/yourname on just about any Linux system) to a USB flash drive mounted as disk The script, incidentally, is three lines long.
1. #!/bin/bash
2. cd /home
3. tar czvf "/media/disk-1/backup/backup-`date +%s`.tar.gz" /home/ian
That’s it. This backs up /home/ian with tar to a compressed file with the name equal to “backup-” + the number of seconds since midnight on January 1, 1970 + “.tar.gz”.
If you want to exclude files or folders from the backup, just add “–exclude=filename” to line 3.
In Hardware on Monday, February 18, 2008 at 9:25 am
The real answer is 120 millimeters in diameter, large enough to hold 80 minutes of audio. The fun answer, the answer you really want to know can be found on Wikipedia.
The partners aimed at a playing time of 60 minutes with a disc diameter of 100 mm (Sony) or 115 mm (Philips). Sony vice-president Norio Ohga suggested extending the capacity to 74 minutes to accommodate Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1951 performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.
The extra 14 minute playing time subsequently required changing to a 120 mm disc. Kees Immink, Philips’ chief engineer, however, denies this. According to a Sunday Tribune interview, the story is slightly more involved. At that time (1979) Philips owned Polygram, one of the world’s largest distributors of music. Polygram had set up a large experimental CD plant in Hanover, Germany, which could produce huge amounts of CDs having, of course, a diameter of 115 mm. Sony did not yet have such a facility. If Sony had agreed on the 115 mm disc, Philips would have had a significant competitive edge in the market. Sony decided that something had to be done. The long playing time of Beethoven’s Ninth imposed by Ohga was used to push Philips to accept 120 mm, so that Philips’ Polygram lost its edge on disc fabrication.
This is a record on the part of Apple; 8 new products in only 7 Tuesdays. If they keep this up, they’ll have introduced more than 60 new products by the end of the year. How long do you think they’ll be able to hold out?
In Hardware on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 at 7:59 am
I still can’t get over this. I mean, this is a new thing for Apple. Twenty Dollars! (Well, Nineteen Dollars and Ninety Nine Cents.) Apple is going to charge $20 for existing iPod touch users to upgrade to the new firmware, of all things. Please.
In Hardware on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 at 7:56 am
Wow! Steve Jobs released a NAS, Wi-Fi, 500GB (or 1TB) backup hard disk called Time Machine at Macworld Expo ‘08. I still don’t believe it. I mean, Wi-Fi? Who needs Wi-Fi in a backup disk, of all places? Oh well, maybe the Apple Logo makes it worth the money.
Apple released the highly rumored MacBook Air yesterday at the Stevenote at Macworld Conference and Expo 2008! The MacBook Air is a new, ultra-thin, void-of-optical-drive sub-notebook that will ship in two weeks. Whether it’s worth the $1799.99, of course, is still up in the air.
In Internet on Saturday, January 12, 2008 at 6:23 pm
URL shortening services link a long URL you give them to a shorter one they provide. Apparently, the big name in URL shortening is TinyURL. I was wondering the other day which URL shortening service made the shortest URLs. So I compared a bunch of them, shortening a long Engadget URL. (I read Engadget daily.)
Hmm. We have a tie for last place: Shorl and Tinylink both have 31 characters in their new links. I’ve got to admit, that’s an improvement over the original 78 characters, but it’s pitiful compared to Metamark’s 19 characters. Metamark is the clear winner, two whole characters longer than Qurl’s 21 characters. The moral: the most popular is not always the best.
In Software on Thursday, January 3, 2008 at 11:36 am
Maybe this will become an annual event. Maybe it won’t. Whatever. The point is, many software companies have too many products. This year’s contenders are Microsoft, Apple, and Google. Which will win?
In Software on Tuesday, November 13, 2007 at 8:47 am
Well, Google has released an SDK and lots, lots, lots of details about its new “Android” Mobile Operating System. (That image is “Hello World” running on the Android emulator.) Check it out! If you’re a developer, like I am, consider entering their contest – there’s going to be lots of cash prizes.
In Software on Friday, November 9, 2007 at 8:38 pm
I’ve been programming in Python for a couple of days now, and I love it. The tab-delineated code blocks are extremely easy to use, and everything’s very simple to understand. It’s extremely object-oriented (check this out: you can do things like "string literal".join(x)) It works great on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. The error handling is superb – it shows exactly where the error is, right in the console output. Get it today, will you?
The Code Project Visual Studio 2008 Beta Competition
Criterion: Write a great Visual Studio 2008 Beta article. Post it on CodeProject.com. Wait. Prize(s): $1,000 cash, a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional, and more. Find out more.
The Code Project Monthly Competitions
Criterion: Write a great .Net/ASP.Net/MFC article. Post it on CodeProject.com. Wait. Prize(s): Everything from control libraries to software to books. Find out more.
The DotNetSlackers Forum Posting Challenge
Criterion: Post lots, lots, lots of posts on the DotNetSlackers.com forums. Prize(s): Telerik RADControls, Xbox 360 Elite, software, books Find out more.
In Software on Thursday, November 8, 2007 at 12:43 pm
You knew it was coming up sometime soon. Ubuntu Linux is this week’s DOTW. I recently installed Ubuntu (Parts 1, 2, and 3) and love it. The Unix enviroment is so much more powerful and much easier to code on than Windows ever was or will be. Get it now, please.
In Software on Thursday, November 8, 2007 at 8:19 am
Programming language, that is. The TIOBE index updates its list of the 50 most popular programming monthly. Check out their website for lots of cool graphs and historical info. Here’s this month’s list.
In Software on Thursday, November 8, 2007 at 4:57 am
I recently read Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg. It follows Mitch Kapor and his team of programmers through their first three years of work on the Chandler project. The project is now 6 years old and has had a total of more than 11,000 bugs, numbers considerably larger than those referenced on the front cover of the book. Throughout the book, the project suffers from some unidentified phenomenon that somehow slows down progress. Near the end of the book, Scott quotes Hofstader’s Law, which states “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” This is a strangely recursive law which strangely seems to epitomize the project’s schedule. (If you’re interested in more such laws, see 19 Eponymous Laws of Software Development on Haacked.com) Just read the book, OK?
In Software on Wednesday, November 7, 2007 at 9:16 pm
Ironically, the five mistakes I make the most when coding (this is C#, of course – still my favorite language) are simple, stupid things. Here they are.
5. Forget to close a curly brace.
4. Forget to type the second of the parentheses.
3. Forget to close a set of quotes.
2. Forget to type a semicolon at the end of a line.
1. Use “=” instead of “==”.
I’ve been using Gmail as my primary email account for a while now, but I’ve never bothered syncing it with Outlook, partly because Gmail’s web interface is great and partly because Gmail didn’t support IMAP. However, as of yesterday, the Gmail team has added the IMAP support they promised to Gmail.
Sorry this post is so late – I’ve been having too much fun playing around with all the features in Ubuntu Linux 7.10. Installation was uneventful. The installer (live cd application) hung once because I entered a user name with a space in it, but I fixed that and it worked. Ubuntu is great – very fast, lots of cool games, and the graphics are even better than what I’ve seen on Windows Vista. The only drawback is boot time – 1:25, or One Minute and Twenty Five Seconds. Oh well, I always hibernate anyway.
Today I got a notification by email of the beta launch of Microsoft Office Live Workspaces. I, of course, clicked the link and read more about it, before signing up for the beta. (I’m on the waiting list right now, of course.) You know, it seems to be a blatant ripoff of Google Docs – to save me time, I just cut and pasted this from the beta website:
Anywhere Access
Store 1000+ Microsoft Office documents in one place
Access them from almost any computer with a Web browser
No more flash drives or sending yourself documents via e-mail
Share With Others
Invite people to your workspace
You control who can view, comment, and edit your documents
Stop manually merging versions from multiple people
Works With Microsoft Office
Open and save files directly from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
Synchronize contact, task, and event lists with Outlook
No need to learn a new program
Hmm. “Anywhere Access.” “Share with others.” “Invite people to your workspace.” Where, oh where have I seen that before?
As I mentioned in Part 1, I needed to shrink my Windows partition before I could install Ubuntu. Before partitioning, I had one 40GB NTFS partition with Windows XP Pro and all my data on it. I wanted to shrink this partition by about 10GB so I could install Ubuntu in the remaining space.
I booted up my Ubuntu Live CD (takes forever and a day to boot from CD) and launched GParted, the GNOME Partition Editor. I chose to shrink the partition by 10GB, leaving slightly more than 10GB free space remaining.
Having already backed up my data, I clicked “Apply.” Gparted worked for a couple of minutes and then gave the ominous message “Could not complete the specified tasks” or something like that, with a big red error logo. But when I checked the disk in Ubuntu’s explorer, whatever it’s called, it said that the partition had worked.
I rebooted into Windows, expecting ChkDsk to launch. But it didn’t. All I saw was ~1/2 second of the Windows boot screen, and then blackness.
But it wasn’t silent blackness. My hard drive was making its noise. (I should really make a recording of it; it would be no harder to do so than to launch Audacity and make a recording with my laptop’s mic.) I waited for about five minutes. The hard drive was still laboring along.
So I went and had supper. When I came back, I saw the Windows welcome screen. I guess the black screen was the typical “Windows User Experience”. Logging on to Windows, I saw that the drive had correctly been resized to 27.25GB.
In Hardware on Friday, October 19, 2007 at 11:59 am
Have an old PC that you don’t know what to do with? You could…
Turn it into a robot.
With a couple of Phidgets and Visual Studio Express installed, you can build a wonderful crawler. (Works best with laptops and small form factor PCs.)
Install Linux. It’s always great to know more than one OS. I chose Ubuntu Linux.
Use it as a test machine. Install, say, Windows 2000 and see if your apps build and run. If they don’t, make them. Plenty of people still use old versions of Windows.
Vandalize it for parts. Only works if the computer is less than 2-3 years old. (Anybody for a 166 MHz Pentium? 1GB HDD? 64MB of SIMM RAM?)
Recently I made the decision to dual-boot Ubuntu Linux 7.10 with Windows XP Pro on my laptop. To do so, I needed to shrink my Windows partition so that I would have enough free space to install Ubuntu. There was plenty of space on my hard drive – it was a 40GB drive less than half full. However, it was extremely fragmented.
Oh well, I thought, I’ll just do a defrag. I launched Windows Disk Defragmenter and defragged the disk. When it was finished, the disk was entirely defragmented; however, there were still lots of files near the end of the disk.
Hm. I tried defragmenting a second, third, fourth, and fifth time, but nothing changed. I searched the help file, but it wasn’t very helpful. What was I to do?
I googled “disk defragmenter” and, to my surprise, there were numerous free defrag utilities available online. I chose JkDefrag. It labored along for a couple of hours and then told me it was finished. I still saw a red dot right near the end of the disk – oops, that’s my dead pixel.
(JkDefrag in action. Screenshot shamelessly robbed from the JkDefrag site.)
I launched Disk Defragmenter again, which, to my surprise, told me that the disk had a few files with fragments on it. Obviously, although JkDefrag does a better job of moving files to the front of the disk, Disk Defragmenter defragments them better.
That’s right. As unbelievable as it might sound, Apple is finally giving in and creating an iPhone Software Development Kit. This was announced on Apple’s “Hot News” feed yesterday – hot news it is, for sure! Seems that from the beginning they really wanted to put third-party apps on the iPhone. Of course, third-party apps may be limited by security features that Steve Jobs wants to implement
In Software on Wednesday, October 17, 2007 at 8:25 am
You knew it was coming. I love Paint.Net and I love to recommend it. It’s simply the best free, open source image editor out there. Rick Brewster, its author, also maintains a great blog with lots of information about Paint.Net and even monthly usage stats. Check it out.
In Hardware on Saturday, September 29, 2007 at 4:10 pm
What could the gadget obscured by the ribbon in the above picture possibly be? It’s showed up on Sony’s web site with no information except “Sony Drive” in the title bar. Engadget thinks it’s an all-in-one PC, but I think it’s ugly, whatever it is.
In Hardware on Saturday, September 29, 2007 at 3:59 pm
…Apple stores.
That’s right. The stylish new Samsung ML-163, and it’s multifunction twin, the SCX-4500, will be offered exclusively through Apple stores, until January 2008.
Both printers are black-and-white laser only; 17ppm print and copy; 600×600dpi prints; USB connection only. They might be good looking, but their specs aren’t all that great.
In Hardware, Software on Saturday, September 29, 2007 at 10:47 am
Windows Vista includes a new technology called Microphone Array. Basically, it uses more than one microphone to provide a highly directional sound input. This reduces background noise and, apparently, electrical noise. Find out more.
In Hardware on Saturday, September 29, 2007 at 9:34 am
A couple of months ago on this very blog I mentioned that wireless power would be a good idea. Now it’s becoming a reality. First, startup WiPower announced their plan to develop a wireless charging system, and now Seiko Epson and Murata have teamed up to develop their own version. (apparently one company is doing the charger, and the other one’s doing the battery.) The picture above shows WiPower’s prototype, apparently; Epson/Murata will charge devices “in about 10 to 15 minutes in a non-contact manner.”
In Software on Friday, September 28, 2007 at 3:19 pm
(Download of the week, or DOTW, is a new series on this blog. Approximately weekly I will recommend some freeware program that I have used and liked.)
This week’s download is Inkscape, a free vector drawing program. Inkscape’s tagline is “Draw Freely” and it certainly lives up to its slogan. Inkscape is 100% free and open source, and offers many features that make it nearly as good as Adobe Illustrator. Inkscape is primarily developed for Linux, but it runs on Windows, Unix, and OS X, too. It saves files in the .svg (Scalable Vector Graphic) format, which is a standard format for vector drawings. If you are looking for a good, free vector drawing program, Inkscape is for you.
Lately there’s been a bit of hype around Virtual GPS for cell phones. Traditional GPS requires a GPS receiver that communicates with at least two GPS satellites, triangulating to determine where on the surface of the earth you are.
However, software-based GPS solutions, such as those from Navizon, use the signals from cell phone towers, (which are basically everywhere in North America and all over the rest of the world too these days), known WiFi hotspots, and real GPS users to simulate the location-finding capabilities of a real GPS.
If this really works as well as a real GPS, I’ll be surprised; personally, I think it’s more likely that the accuracy of the Virtual GPS will be less than optimal. Oh well, it’s probably a lot more economical.
In Internet on Friday, September 28, 2007 at 10:15 am
As mentioned in my previous post, Firewheel Design, the people behind IconBuffet and Blinksale, are working on something new. What it is, nobody knows, but today Josh revealed on the IconBuffet news blog that…
We’re working on a new game. I can’t tell you what the game is about, what it does, or how it’s played. But I can tell you that if you like IconBuffet, you’re probably going to love this. I hope… if you don’t then we’ve made a tragic mistake. Doh!
I can tell you more in a couple weeks.
Over the next week or two, I’m going to slowly reveal a few details about the game so we can you up to speed before we launch it. We’re going to really need our IconBuffet peeps to help us out — be early adopters as it would be — to aid us in getting the kinks worked out. So stay tuned here for the latest. I can’t wait to tell you more.
In Hardware on Monday, September 17, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Sorry for not blogging in a while. I just came back from vacation and was amazed to see all the hype about the new iPod Nano with video, the iPod Classic with 160 gig!, and the iPod Touch (that deserves italic: iPod Touch!). What they’re doing over at Apple with the iPhone, iPod, and the mac is simply amazing.
(Apple links are really easy to insert, I just noticed. Instead of, say, apple.com/ipod/classic/, it’s just apple.com/ipodclassic.)
In Internet on Tuesday, August 14, 2007 at 3:23 pm
As of today, we finally have high speed internet. The old connection was a whopping 128kbps, whereas the new one is 5mbps (or so). Here’s the full report from speedtest.net:
Large files that used to take a whole night to download now download in 10 minutes!
In Software on Wednesday, August 1, 2007 at 8:10 am
After listening to Scott Hanselman’sHanselminutes podcast about being a better developer, I decided to learn a new programming language. I already knew VB and C#, and was working on Ruby and C++, so after looking at the TIOBE index (which shows what the most popular programming languages are), I decided to learn Java, it being the most popular.
First, I went to the Sun web site and downloaded the Java Developer Kit. Needing an IDE, I downloaded NetBeans 5.5 (and immediately regretted not downloading 6.0 Beta, because 6.0 Beta supports Ruby and Ruby on Rails). After the downloads completed, I installed them and got right to work.
First step when testing any programming language: Hello World! I found the Java language similar to C# (but after all, C# is supposed to be similar to Java) and very easy to use. NetBeans’ code completion (Intellisense) was very nice in that it gave you HTML help right in the editor (a blessing – no other help file came with the Java SDK), but it didn’t deserve the name “code completion”, because it didn’t complete your code for you. When you pressed the spacebar, it just entered a space instead of completing the word. I did notice, however, that some really common words had shortcuts, say, if you wanted “string”, you could type “str”.
NetBeans’ debugging features were great. Errors showed up as little red X’s in the breakpoint column, with a handy “lightbulb” icon that offered a bunch of potential fixes (something like the “lightning bolt” in Word and Visual Studio).
When I successfully ran my “Hello World” application, I was surprised to see that it had adopted the Java “cross-platform” UI theme. A quick Google search and a few lines of code fixed that.
In conclusion, I’m very pleased with Java as a language and NetBeans as an SDK. Of course, Java apps are a bit slow, but the fact that they run in a Java Virtual Machine on just about any OS is great.
In Internet on Saturday, July 28, 2007 at 12:00 pm
So far, Akismet (WordPress’s spam filter) has caught 888 spam messages. Compare that to 8 legitimate comments so far on this blog (3 of which were pingbacks, and two of which I wrote.)
The weirdest thing happened the other day. I was testing the UI of a program I was writing, so I was switching back and forth between the Luna scheme and the Windows Classic scheme. But when I switched back to Luna, the taskbar didn’t switch! It just stayed gray!
(Well, not exactly. It was more of a SystemColors.Control color. And it had the Luna fonts.) Everything else was Luna – window chrome, controls, you name it – in fact, even the start menu was Luna!
A quick reboot fixed the problem. The worst of it was, I forgot to take a screenshot.
As I promised, here’s a quick review of Techsmith’s new Jing project. Jing is a free screen capture and screencasting program from the makers of SnagIt and Camtasia.
Download and install was quick and easy. Jing requires the .Net Framework 3.0; but you probably have that installed already. Jing has a very cool UI, probably done with WPF. It rests in the system tray, but also permanently docked at the top of the screen (or bottom, or left, or right.) Everything in Jing is round – the windows, the buttons, etc., are all circular. The UI in general is very satisfying, if a bit slow to load.
Screenshots are very simple. You can select any window or part of a window, including the taskbar, clock, start button, and Quick Launch bar. You can do the same when selecting what you want to take a screencast of.
But there’s where the problems start. First, Jing limits your screencasts to five minutes. That’s right, five minutes. Obviously, if you want to make longer screencasts, you’ll need to either break them up into five-minute recordings, or shell out $800 for Camtasia.
Also, while you’re screencasting, the Jing window stays visible. I don’t know if this is a bug or a feature limitation, but it needs to change if Jing is going to be a professional tool.
Other than that, I have no gripes. In the past, I was using Cropper for screenshots, and found it less than satisfying, although better than the ol’ Print Screen key. I think I will be using Jing for screenshots, and possibly screencasts.
A week or two ago I expressed here on my blog my excitement over 110mb.com “free” web hosting. Yes, the basic hosting package was free. But MySQL only comes for a price. Oh well, I didn’t really need MySQL anyway.
In Software on Wednesday, July 18, 2007 at 6:06 pm
I just found out about Techsmith’s new Jing project. Jing is a free screen capture program presumably based on Camtasia Studio. It does screenshots and screencasts, and appears to be written in .Net 3.0 – possibly WPF? (it requires .Net 3.0). I’m downloading it right now, so I’ll review it soon. And, oh yes, there’s a Mac OS X version, too. My guess is the Mac version is compiled with Mono.
Lately I’ve been really having fun creating web site designs, so I’ve decided to share them on OSWD.org. OSWD stands for Open Source Website Design; they have thousands of free designs available. You only need to link back to the designer’s web site.
(If you haven’t read Part 1 of my review yet, you might want to.)
The second, much more exciting half of Popfly is the Mashup creator. Mashups pull data from one or more web services and mash it together, using one web service to parse the data, or another to output the data, to create a unique web service.
Since I have very little experience with mashups, I simply followed the Popfly tutorial to create a Windows Live Local map with the last 10 twitter posts on it. I found the tutorial to be simple and easy to follow. I think I will be using Popfly to create mashups in the future, if I ever need to.
To create a mashup, you have to select “Create a mashup” on the Popfly home page, which brings you straight to the mashup designer.
To the left of the Mashup designer is the toolbox. You can drag and drop items from the toolbox onto the designer surface, and then connect them with lines using the pencil tool. After you drag and drop items onto the designer surface, you can change their settings or connect them to other blocks with lines. Here I have dropped a Twitter block onto the surface and am changing its settings.
Finally, when you’re finished, you can save your mashup to your account. Once again, whatever space your mashup takes up comes off your 25 MB of disk space.
Microsoft Popfly is a new free online service (still in beta alpha) that lets you create mashups and web pages. It also includes the “Popfly Spaces” feature that allows you to store your mashups and web pages online, and access your mashups from within the Visual Studio Express Editions. People can download your mashups and use them in their Windows Vista sidebar or their Live.com personalized home page. In this the first part of my review, I will be covering the Microsoft Popfly web page designer.
Popfly is 100% powered by Microsoft Silverlight, which is also in beta right now, so I needed to download Silverlight first before I started using Popfly. On the Popfly home page, you are given options for creating a mashup or a web page.
After clicking on “Create web page”, you are brought (almost) immediately to the Popfly web page designer. The web page designer has a user interface a la Microsoft Office 2007. Excuse me, make that “the 2007 Microsoft Office System” (snicker).
The web page designer is very easy to use, although I found it to be a tiny bit slow to add text formatting. Of course, I have a very slow internet connection.
The ribbon interface currently only has two tabs, Page Editor and Page Style. On the Page Style tab, you can choose a color scheme and a theme for your web site. There is a wide selection of themes, grouped into categories, and matching color schemes that make your web page look great.
I selected a “Computers and Electronics” theme for my test web page, and chose the “Breeze” color scheme.
The editor makes it easy to add pictures, links, etc. to your web page. If you upload a picture, it is stored in your Popfly Space. Each user gets 25 megabytes of space to store pictures, mashups, and web pages.
I uploaded a sample picture (nothing spectacular, just an icon from IconBuffet) so I could see what the image uploading process was like. I found the upload/insert process to be easy and straightforward.
Formatting is also easy.
When you’ve finished creating your web page, you can preview it in your browser.
In conclusion, I think the Popfly web page editor shows potential to become a great web publishing tool. However, it needs a bit of work to become a professional-level editor. Of course, since it’s in alpha, that can be expected.
Check back here tomorrow for a review of the Popfly mashup creator.
That pretty much says it all. SharpDevelop is a free, open source .Net IDE written in C#.Net 2.0. The only feature I really use a lot is its built in WiX designer, but it seems to be a viable alternative to Visual Studio, and it’s better than the Express Editions on some points.
37Signals is a great company that creates web-based applications using Ruby on Rails. Their four flagship products are Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire, and Highrise. All of their products are available for free, but if you pay, you get more freedom and features. I will be reviewing them on this blog sometime in the near future. Check it out, if you’re interested.
As I mentioned in my previous post, my Mom was complaining about her internet connection being terribly slow. I had heard of OpenDNS, which claims to speed up your internet connection speed, but had never actually tried it. So I thought I would try it out and then blog about my experience.
First step: Finding out what my old speed was. Our internet connection is called “High Speed Lite”, but that’s an insult to high speed internet; its maximum speed is 128 kbps. I ran a simple test at Bandwidth Place, which told me my connection speed was 123 kpbs.
Then, I went to OpenDNS.com and looked for the downloads page. Except you don’t need to download anything. Their easy-to-follow instructions stated that all you need to do is open control panel and change two settings!
Well, I was dubious, but I changed the settings. The instructions said that I needed to reboot my computer, but their online test page said that everything was OK, so I avoided that minor frustration.
I went back to the Bandwidth Place for another connection speed test and – voila! – my new speed was 133 kbps – a 12% increase!
If your internet connection speed is lousy, I can reccomend OpenDNS.
My mom was complaining that her computer ran too slow (well, I use it too, and it was slow). The first thing I did was switch her to Firefox. An easy caper: Open Firefox, click Tools>Options, in the System Defaults section, click Check Now, and Firefox will ask you if you want it to become your default browser. Tell it yes.
The other thing I had to do was import all of her old IE favorites. (She has about a hundred of them, half of which she never uses.) Hmm… I searched for the Import feature in the Options dialog box, but I couldn’t find it. That’s when I realized: There was a Bookmarks menu; maybe the command was there instead.
Most computer users (me included) would have looked for this feature on the tools menu. Most computer users (me included) would be looking in an absolutely crazy place. The tools menu is misused all the time – hey, if there’s a bookmarks menu, maybe it makes sense to put bookmark-related commands on it. Sure enough, there on the bookmarks menu was the Bookmarks Manager. And there, on the file menu of the bookmarks manager, was the Import Bookmarks command.
P.S. If you want to speed up your mom’s computer and she lives far away, check out Fog Creek Copilot. It’s free on Mother’s day (and Father’s Day!)
After a long wait, the first “The History of Windows” post is here.
Introduction
Picture this: It’s 1984, a dark, dismal year (sound familiar) for PC users everywhere. Why? Well, they only have MS-DOS, while Mac users are getting a GUI (graphical user interface)! Suddenly, in 1985, Microsoft, the maker of MS-DOS, comes out with an entirely new product: Windows.
Features
Windows 1.0 was not just an operating system – it was an MS-DOS “front-end” – in other words, it was launched from MS-DOS and it ran MS-DOS applications in windows. (At this point, Windows could only tile windows, not overlap them, because this feature was patented by Apple.) However, Windows also supported a new kind of .exe file – the New Executable (NE), which only Windows could handle, and fully used the operating system. Over the years, Windows would slowly change, from Windows being part of MS-DOS to MS-DOS being part of Windows.
Four versions of Windows 1.0 were released, starting with Windows 1.01. (Windows 1.0 was never actually released; it is rumored that it was pulled because of a serious keyboard bug.) Windows 1.02 and Windows 1.03 were very close together, in May and August of 1986, respectively. They added new support for languages other than English. Windows 1.04, released in April of 1987, added VGA Graphics Adapter support. Windows 1.0 included a Shell called MS-DOS Executive, and it also included a horde of other programs: Calculator, Calendar, Cardfile (a Personal Information Management program), Clipboard viewer, Clock, Control Panel, Notepad, Paint, Reversi (a game), and Write.
Programmers working on Microsoft Office 2003 were told not to put any easter eggs in it. They didn’t like that rule – so they “sneaked” in some Easter Eggs in a place nobody would ever think of looking: the Office Assistant.
Most users of Microsoft Office 97-2003 know that the Office Assistant exists. What few know is that he is useful and that he gives you a tip every time you start a program. And, hidden among these tips, are a bunch of irrelevant “tips”. I can’t remember them all, but among them are “Never run with scissors.”, “Never dive into murky waters.”, and “Striped shirts with plaid pants make a fashion statement.”
In Software on Saturday, April 14, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Do you know what an “easter egg” is? Until yesterday, I thought it was a colored egg that children traditionally search for on Easter. Actually, another definition of easter egg (according to Wikipedia) is “a hidden message or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, computer program, or video game.” There are easter eggs hidden everywhere – but my favorites are in Office 97. Word 97 has a hidden Pinball game, and Excel 97 has a hidden Flight Simulator game. Also, there is another easter egg hidden in Word 97: If you type “I’d like to see” followed by almost anything and ran it through Word’s built-in thesaurus, Word will return “I’ll drink to that!”
Yesterday I promised I’d post more about a software company entrepenuer who wrote an autobiography. Well… I kind of had a different person in mind. Linus Torvalds, the man who invented Linux. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Windows. It’s way better than Linux. But this book is just plain great. It tells all about how he got his first computer, and how he installed minix on it, and how he hated minix, and so he created Linux. (Which, incedentally, is pronounced “Lih-nux”. If you’re interested, read the book.
A while ago I read this book, by Bill Gates: The Road Ahead. It was a fun read, considering that it was written in 1995. In the book (which is somewhat an autobiography) Bill Gates tells all about computers, and how he and Paul Allen founded Microsoft, and (this is the best part) he makes predictions about what computers and the internet are going to be like in 2005, ten years from when he wrote the book.
Well, most of his predictions turned out wrong, except for that he predicted that Moore’s Law would continue as it had been. Which turned out right
More about software entrepreneur’s autobiography tomorrow.
Soon I will be starting a new series: The History of Windows. (I was considering calling it “The Complete, Unabridged History of Microsoft Windows” but that was way to long. However, I will still be considering it to be complete and unabridged.)
The series will be in 14 parts:
Windows 1.0
Windows 2.0
Windows 3.0
Windows NT 3.0
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 95
Windows NT 5.0
Windows 98
Windows ME
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Server 2003
Windows Vista
… The Future of Windows
Every time a new version of Windows is released, I will update the series.
For all you .Net developers out there, this is exciting news: Component Factoryhas released Krypton 2.5.0! Krypton is a set of components for winforms that let you make your application look a lot better. The Krypton Toolkit automatically gives your form and menus and toolbars an Office 2007 look and feel, plus, there are lots of other great controls that also support the Office 2007 style. The Krypton Navigator is the best tab control on the market (in my opinion). Finally, 2.5.0 includes the newest control, Krypton Ribbon! The Navigator and Ribbon are available as free trials; the toolkit is freeware. Expect a review soon.
What? A terabyte? That’s 1000 gig, right? Right. Who needs a 1000 GB hard drive? I mean, my laptop has a 40 GB hard drive, and I only use 10 GB of space. My desktop has a 200 GB hard drive, and, downloads, pictures, and backups included, I only use 50 GB of space. Plus, the thing will probably cost about 500 bucks. What’s next, 1 PB (petabyte) hard drives? What comes after PB? TMB (too many bytes)?
A year and a half ago, my dad brought home a new computer. It had a 17″ screen (Yes, that was BIG), 200 GB hard drive, 512 MB of ram, and an Intel Pentium 4 processor, plus, it had the all-new Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. He got the folks at the store to install Microsoft Office Student & Teacher 2003 and Norton Internet Security 2005. He also got a laser printer that printed at 15 ppm. The whole thing cost him more than $1,200.
Today, for the same amount of money, you could get a new computer with Windows Vista Home Premium, 1 or 2 GB of ram, 300 GB of hard disk space, an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, Office 2007, Norton 360, and a color printer/scanner/copier.
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