Monthly Archive for May, 2008

New Toshiba M700 – Not impressed

So we moved to the new m700 (crummy low light camera phone picture above) at work and I’ve got to say I’m not impressed. Sure it’s much faster than the m400 and yeah the vista drivers actually work and the battery seems to just keep on going, but beyond that in almost every way it’s a step down from the old machine:

  • The wide-screen display is actually smaller (shorter) and lower res (1280×800) than the old machine
  • I don’t like the soft-touch keyboard they’ve used on the new machine
  • The support clips for the display actually feel like they’re breaking when you twist the display into tablet mode
  • The physical volume dial is actually a software volume nob, so you never actually know if you’ve turned the volume all the way down (useful for when using the tablet with one-note in meetings)
  • The wide-screen display has finger-touch capability now, and in return for that the pen sensing capability of the screen seems to have gone too sensitive. I now get random strokes all over the place and can’t seem to turn down the sensitivity.
  • I’ve turned the finger touch capability off because it kept stuffing up documents I was showing to other people (while touching the screen)
  • I’ve tried to calibrate the pen 100 times and it still doesn’t draw directly beneath the pen tip when writing notes
  • The annoying camera software starts up automatically and doesn’t seem to have a context menu, control panel applet or any other method of disabling the autostart for the always-on camera toolbar overlay. And no, it’s not int he start up folder.

End rant.

I’m still here

Just a quick post to say I’m still here.

Have gone through a rather difficult family experience in the past few weeks coupled with some incredibly hectic work loads at the office.

I’m still here and will continue to post where I can until i can get back to a normal work load. I also have an awesome new design for my blog that the Creative Director (no-less) at ninepxels, Joe Smith, put together for me, which I hope to be building using K2. I’m just waiting to actually get some time to implement the design.

Javascript port of Processing

I ran into Processing at BarCamp earlier this year. It was quite an interesting concept. Slashdot has news of a javascript version of this system. This is mainly cool because it makes it that much easier to have a play around with Processing. Yay the good old days of demo writing.

Mysql backup extensions are open source again

As linked to all over the web, Kaj Arnö has posted a blog post explaining that the Enterprise-only backup extensions that I previously covered on this blog are now to also be available in MySQL Community. This essentailly means that the encryption and compression backup extensions be available to the open source  world.

Cross Platform Standalone Silverlight

Miguel posts an interesting blog on cross platform stand alone silverlight. As Miguel points out there was already a way to do this with Moonlight on linux, but not on windows.

Using a Windows.Forms.WebControl to embed a sliverlight control is trivial approach to doing this. But Tamir has gone to the effort of wiring it all up for you now which is great. His approach also runs a HttpListener in a separate thread to enable the silverlight control to dispatch requests back and forth.

Webkit GTK (and QT) get plugin support

Another gem from planet gnome. WebKit GTK and QT are finally getting pluggin support (follow the link for screenshot bling). WebKit is fast becoming the little browser engine that could. I’m looking forward to seeing the GTK and QT pushes bring on an age that gets us native Win32 WebKit. I can think of tonnes of projects where I needed a light weight, easy to embed browser engine and instead resort to IE shell hacks.

Open source use of flash spec is now ok

According to this blog from planet gnome, open source projects are now able to use the flash spec to create their own SWF and FLV decoders. This is good news both for the open source projects that try to bring flash to linux and its ilk and for Adobe since there is no better way to put a spec to test than to have multiple implementations against it.