Tides are turning...

For the past month or so all has gone down hill. Problems here and there...

So far everything I have done has been in the range of pure p0rn or just plain failures...

Most of my plans have gone down the drain - planning is not for me :-|

Today Google gave me good news, telling me "Your luck will change!" :)

So far it has worked...

Lets see if everything starts to work well again - its getting tiered to be on the down side of the life.

PS! Everyone have herd the idioms about "spinning in the grave" - here's an idea of how to power the whole world.
The Murphy is the author of the the Murphy's laws so he gets all the blame when things go wrong - how about strapping he's corpse to a 100000000000TW generator and if something goes wrong it will spin the generator. Considering that there is around 7 billion people living on this small planet so the chance of someone having bad luck is almost 99.(9)% witch would power the whole world. Simple isn't it?

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The first days of vacation...

Every new thing is weird at the beginning and this works with going to vacation also. As my vacation started in the middle of the week it makes it somewhat harder. When you get into the rhythm of 9-5 5 days a week it is hard to get out of the cycle.

Yesterday morning was interesting: when I opened my eyes it was around 12 or so and the first thing that came to my mind was "frell I have slept in soo much that....". The first thing that came to my mind was "The frelling electric company - they had an power outage AGAIN". After starting to get dressed to go to work I finally realized - Frell I'm on a vacation. It took around 5 minutes before realizing it and well going back to sleep was out of the question...

Todays morning was a bit better - waking up at around 8 - realizing that I'm on vacation and going back to sleep wasn't that hard to do. Tho the biological clock should have an off switch for the vacation time :)

technorati tags:Life, Fun

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Something Cute...

I'm going back to bed

[stretching paws up]

No amount of coffee is working this morning. Serious. I'm hittin' the hay.

Katherine M., nice find. Tho, they should have ended the movie at exactly the current middle point.

As I'm too tiered to live out my frustration to gnome configuration I though something cute would be a nice change...

Update: - hacked Lightning Multiweek to work with Thunderbird 2.0.0.1.

technorati tags:Cute, kittens, youtube, fun

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The 20 Most annoing tech products by PCWorld...

The every year worst top 20 is out. The number 1. is AOL - not my preferred choice as I don't live in USA, so my vote went to the number 8 (Microsoft Windows Vista). Well at least I tried :)

I have lived through most of the products, so heres some of my comments: the number 2 was not so bad - SE was worse.

How could they put together iTunes WMP, Zune and Napster - I don't get the logic. Sure all they use DRM, BUT there is a difference - Apple is dropping it, Zune is just a virus with its infective DRM and WMP is just not worth to mentioning. Sure DRM is the common bad factor in all of them, but still - they are not comparable. Besides Apple is correcting its mistake!

Never used the nr. 4. security products... Penguin rules! :D No comment on nr. 5.

And the next contestant is - Bonzy Buddy :) Anyone remember the green/yellow/purple helper screaming and wanting attention? Thats right its the ultra functional, resource hungry, nothing doing monkey. At the beginning it had at least 1 cool feature - H&H language synthesis engine and a api to make it scriptable - it was fun for a while. But as usual nothing good will last forever. Soon after MS integrated its functionality the the Clippy (well it became famous with Bonzy at least) and some time after that they started to bundle adware with the installer and as usual it was followed with spyware. Bye bye monkey (wave)!

Next stop MySpace - It matured too fast and so started the scamming, viruses and spyware - never got into it really.

Ok, we covered the Vista part - it just isn't worth the money, time and resources.

The next one is is kinda out of place (or should I say out of time). I would say it is the only good thing MS has ever done properly (if someone could kill the BITS). Windows Update isn't so bad thing (well it right now, but it started with Windows XP - 2004 or 2005). Well it started with WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) - Microsoft just got greedy and lost around 10% of its share with it in the enterprise world (Good luck with Vista - hi hi hi...).

I never had a quarrel with Apple QuickTime under windows - tho Now I have under linux, so in conclusion it never worked as needed!

Office 97 was usable (even tho it crashed in the places where you hadn't done a save and when restarting it erase the changes from an ancient backup).

Hmm, the next on is a pickle - Adobe (Formerly known as Macromedia) Flash. It got its bad name form flash advertising, but around 4..5 years ago some people created fantastic flash based sites. So I have no quarrel with the technology but I have with how its been used. Well thats up to today when Adobe joined the DRM market. I hope they wake up soon like Apple did - otherwise they will start to fade and waiting MS Silverlight to drop DRM and to be ported to linux will take ages, so life will get pretty interesting...

Next on the platter is AIM - as usually its a big corporation and should be spliced up to smaller peaces (in my opinion) too much power is never healthy... Also forcing Gaim to change its name to (what the **** was the new name?) Oh... Yeah... Pidgin... I feel sorry for the person who thought up that name. I understand the need for a not yet trademarked name but come one... I hope that name is not final as (If i remember right) that means pretty nasty thing in one language!

Windows (Live!!!) Messenger is almost totally unusable (PS! I didn't mention linux here!). None of my friends who use Messenger use the Live version. After Bill left the MS the design department has gotten free hands to redesign everything and as usually they tried to do the best, BUT as usually they managed to develop the worst. Go figure... I Have never used YIM nor PS3 so I leave them alone.

E-Bay - I cant say I have anything against them. They run a sleek operation, BUT as usually the greed of the government gets the worst out of them. Online taxing is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard of - basically its outrageous, people have bought the products once and now if they want to sell them again the government wants more money out of them. Why don't they go catch some Al-Qaeda or Bin-Laden or terrorist or something useful, not harass the simple people!

Now we get to a nice looking product :) Apple Pro Mouse - looks cool, but is totally useless (buttons anyone?). Never used plaxo, Outlook, Power Mac, Harmonium, Quicken, Harmony (well, I have played around a little with it but still - looks nice but programming is pain!).

This should be mandatory to every manufacturer on how NOT to do things!

That about it for todays technology bashing - see You all soon :)

technorati tags:Top, Annoing, technology, Hardware, Software, products,Silverlight

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CeBIT v 1.5 - the good stuff

The second day was a lot of running around. As I was not looking for something specific nor shopping for new technology I was looking at everything available. If normally I would say that window shopping is not hard, well this time I was really mistaken. 27 halls full of technology makes a techhy feel like a kid in a candy shop :)

Ok, the short version of the long story is - there were no big surprises in new technology. Don't get me wrong, its one thing to know the background info and pictures from the Internet and another thing is to see and touch a physical object.

The first thing that comes to my mind is 3D TV. Well it really isn't 3D as you really cant see it from all around the TV. Its a normal LCD TV with a extra layer of film that generates 3D like picture when looked at a correct angle. All the TV's and monitors I saw were quite crude, but promising. I'm guessing that the viewing angle is around 10+/-5 degrees vertical and horizontal, so it has a long way to go. Most of the sets were around 40'', so when the object moved from one end of the screen to the other the picture went foggy and you would have to look for a new spot where the picture became 3D. I would say that this technology has potential, but it could take up to 5 years until its production ready - I for one could not imagine watching a 3D movie while running around the room like crazy. So until the viewing angle is at least 90 degrees or more its not worth for a release. In one box I found a "medical" monitor that was around 15..17''. This could be usable much sooner as the display area is smaller and finding the focal point more easy as the user would be sitting in more or less constant position. Tho the chair would have to be really comfortable as sitting in a constant position gets really hard - maybe a new design would be needed to accommodate it.

Second big thing were flash HDD's. I know its not a big thing for most ppl, but for me it is. I have 7 comps running several apps for me and 4 of them run 24/7 so the HDD noise get irritating some times. Flash based drives have one more advantage compared to the normal drives - they consume around 75% less energy and therefore generate less heat witch also means lower rpm fans or maybe even peso/pelter based cooling for the whole case. This is if the CPU makers lower this TDP to around 30W (the current mobile/laptop CPU's fall to this range). One more good thing is maximum sustained transfer rate of around 30MB/s read/write and seek time of 2ms, so they are fast compared to the current best HDD's 5.4ms seek. And now for the bad things - the firs generation will use normal NAND flash cells, so the write cycle count is limited to 10..20k guaranteed write cycles per memory slot. This is extremely low compared to the standard DIE HDD's 100...300M write cycles, so the first users will probably be big enterprises that use LARGE databases for read only access. The first generation has been around for a year now with sizes of up to 32GB and I know that at least 1 company is using it for that purpose - NY Stock Exchange. I talked with 3 manufacturers who promised 128GB 1. generation flash drives by the end of the year with a price tag estimate of 1k USD/peace. Tho the price seems kinda high I suspect that this is just a manufacturing price not retail price. The bright side is that 2 of the sale persons revealed that their developers are working on a new technology to make the write count grow to the level of normal HDD's (100M write cycles). Hers a link to all the new flash memory technologies for extended reading.

Third big thing for me was WiMAX. The dreaded IEEE 802.16 has so much potential, but is dieing so fast as the final draft is still not ready after 5 years of research and standardization. As far the manufacturers we ready to comment was that the beta generation is working and running pretty well. So far the manufacturers are shipping out only as much hardware as is are telecoms ready to experiment. Since the v2.0 daft was sent to the IEEE council for reading the first generation wont be 100% compatible with the v2 draft as the transceivers are not capable to use all the frequency ranges that are allowed to use in v2. This is not all bad, as if the draft gets standardized, some have built their chips on a wide band transceivers so they can make small changes with only firmware upgrades, but the old generation is hardware based and therefore not compatible. The suspected v3 draft of the protocol should be ready at the end of next year, and that should be the final version. The changes planned on v3 are minimal protocol optimizations, so they should not pose any incompatibility problems. So at the end of the year there should be publicly available both AP's and cards that support the normal wifi and also wimax - next summer I can sit at my yard and watch HD videos without any problems, from my laptop while sitting outside next to a pool :D

Hmm - this reminds me that I did not see any BluRay not HDDVD products at CeBIT. I guess I missed them by accident, but still...

technorati tags:CeBIT, Impressions, of, 3D, TV, flash, HDD, WiMAX

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Vista...

Insert Windows Vista joke here

Oy Vey.

Not another Windows release.

[Falls asleep]

Kee H.—nice woik.

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