OK, another decade has passed and I've been reflecting. I could mostly do without the last 10 years in retrospect, actually it's been rather annoying. The thing that bothers me to this day is how the software company Corel ended up spirialing down the drain as they are apparently doing now. They developed CorelDraw (which rivaled Adobe PhotoShop at the time) and later acquired WordPerfect. How could you go wrong with that combo?
Somehow they did, the rest is history. Sorry to see you ride the Fail Whale Corel...
I just put a list of links here for the biggest time waster Web sites because I'm running into more and more of them these days. Take the site pictured right for example. It's an 18 gigapixel panorama of Prague. From the site:
I just spent an hour panning and zooming around a city I most likely will never go to. The detail is incredible. Then I see there is a Treasure Hunt to find 30 clues a day for three days and you win a cool $1,000. I found two so far...
I've recently had a chance to mess around with a coworkers super sweet Motorola Droid. This is the Droid I've been looking for (Motorola had to licence "Droid" from Lucasfilm, I kid you not). I couldn't find anything not to like about this little diddy except the touchscreen displays fingerprint smears with glee.
I sure hope Sprint picks up on this fine piece of hardware and soon, lest I... -turn to the dark side... Muawhaahaahaa!
I've been helping my brother with his Android application to play streaming media. Aside from helping with the application's UI layout I was asked to make the launcher Icon. After seven or so revisions I came up with this.
It's not easy designing for something so small (48px x 48px). Luckily Android has some good documentation on it.
After my ancient monitor finally kicked the bit bucket I broke down and got an LCD panel, after some trepidation and research. I was wary of the color shifting and narrow viewing angles I've seen on a lot of LCD monitors.
I was unprepared for the visual feast that is the HP 2159. It has rich colors, excellent contrast and brightness (a little too much brightness, had to turn the default down). I'm sold.
The only point loss is the stand is not adjustable but luckily it's the right height for my desk. I discovered if you are running Ubuntu the panel goes into standby after a minute if no keyboard or mouse movement is detected. You can save yourself some head scratching, power management fiddling, and tech support calls by rebooting (power off) your PC with the monitor on.
I know from a second hand source that the barrier to entry to working at Google is real high but their News Timeline makes me want to apply for a janitor postion. It's crying out for a slider bar and more sensitive use of vertical space though. This'll surely be another desktop widget for me.
I've been thinking about Pseudo-screens for a long time and am glad someone is implementing it. I want it for my Desktop tho. I'm sure most people would think it's a waste but I think it would make a desktop aquarium rock. Something like iBeer on my notebook would be pretty funny. I can imagine a whole new class of wallpapers to spruce up the eye-bling factor on the PC.
I was reviewing some of the "Best Of" tech reviews of '08 and happened upon BigDog. It's creepy, weird, and cool all at once. From the Boston Dynamics Web site:
BigDog is being developed by Boston Dynamics with the goal of creating robots that have rough-terrain mobility that can take them anywhere on Earth that people and animals can go. The program is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).
I for one welcome our our creepy, weird, and cool robotic overloards.
This is the desktop I want. Actually, I want this plus Apple's dock, MS's Active Desktop (yeah, I thought that was a good idea, tho badly implemented), and Compiz with cube.
Lol, some serious bonus points for being able to launch a ball and play pinball on this thing! That'd be a fun little Easter egg because you'd have a different table depending on how you stacked your icons that day. Neat.
My lack of recent posts doesn't mean nothing's been going on. In the interim, I bought an ASUS Eeepc -best thing I ever bought. The "UMPC" bug promptly bit, now I had to have access everywhere, after all, a computer without internet access is half a computer. I bought a Motorola Q for tethering. There's something wrong with vacationing out in the sticks of the Adirondacks with a PC and an internet connection but I digress, this is 2008. The Eeepc saved my sanity when my workstation went dark one fine reboot and through my tortured post mortem forsenic analysis thereof (I luved that box *sniff*). It's a capable little machine and I have so far resisted the temptation to install Ubuntu on it even though the stock Xandros is stale by comparison. The Eeepc is not a great development environment you want to have to be stuck in for a serious length of time. Dell to the rescue with their sweet Inspiron 530 with Ubuntu preloaded. Talk about the right deal at the right time especially since I've been bleeding money left and right out on tech toys, did I mention I bought an Apple iPod Touch? As much as Apple pisses me off with their application lock outs but damn, they make a slick user experience.