In case you were wondering why the blog went silent - I am touring Europe (Switzerland and Italy). Will post some stories after return ... and pictures on Smugmug - promise !
Greetings from Rome (just made it here tonight)
With the latest software update (I am now on 1.0.3), one of the issues to be fixed was the "charging indicator behaviour". Looks like it was indeed the software bug. After upgrade, the indicator jumped to full 4 bars and stayed there. Beforehand, I had usually only 3 bars regardless how long it was charged.
Time will tell - I am taking the reader with me to Italy to get some mileage out of it, during transatlantic flight ...
For all my fantasy-loving friends who consider reading in Czech or Polish too inconvenient: the first book of the grand master Andrzej Sapkowski in English is out. It is book of short stories about Geralt, the Hexer (or Witcher if you want), who is the main character of the 5-book saga with the same name.
You can get it on Amazon.
Yes, such nice tool really exists and it's name is Remember the Milk.
At first sight, RTM is not extremely visually appealing, but very nice and very usable Ajax application. After some time using it, you may better appreciate the "less is more" design. The offline access is thanks to Google Gears magic. Just flip the small green arrow (which will download your data to local cache) and voila - you can go offline, keep editing or adding tasks - your changes will be remembered. Later on, after going online the changes will be synced back.
I have been pretty quiet during last month. Few reasons why, none of them business related. The summer is not the season where people in our industry are incredibly busy - that's what winter is for ... and end of March, government fiscal year end ;-). We had family visit - my two nephews were staying with us for few weeks. So instead of blogging, I was spending evenings with them and weekends as a tour guide around Ottawa's attractions. I have even - finally, after 9 years in this country - overcome my dislike for really long car trips and visited Niagara Falls.
Once upon a time, there was an application named Democracy Player. A really neat one, capable of downloading videos from internet and playing them in multiple formats. It even can download YouTube videos.
For some reason, the Democracy Player name was replaced with a new name. My name. The Democracy Player will be know as Miro. I have not discovered why this name was chosen, or if it means something. Maybe the guys responsible for it had similar thoughts as my parents over 40 years ago :-).
It's been over 10 months since we have started to seriously use virtualization and run Windows inside virtual machine to ease installation and configuration pain. It starting first as convenient measure of isolation two different development environments (.NET 1.1 based and .NET 2.0 based) and avoid "crosspolination" in the data analytics project. At that time, my expectations what would be the limits of what you can or cannot do in virtual environment were mostly around performance, responsiveness and device support (USB especially). As it turned out, all of that actually worked much better than I have ever expected. With new versions of Parallels, the performance is very good and user experience (user means fellow developer) is barely noticeable difference against developing on host system. Assumed that you have decent dual-core system with 2 GB of RAM, of course. Using Parallels gives you the added benefit of moving the virtual environment between Windows, Mac and Linux hosts, which is very convenient.
In the previous article I have mentioned the potential issue with some uploaded images hanging in state "Processing image" for surprisingly long time after upload and expressed hope that there is some background "catch it all" process that would take care of all these. As it turned out, there is. All uploaded images that were haging in the processing stage turned up to be fixed by next day or so (it was about 10-20 images out of about 3-4 thousand).
Week ago, my SmugMug 14 day trial period expired and (as expected) I signed up for the 1 year service. Here are my first impressions after over week of use, with over 3000 uploaded photos and 6.8 GB disc space consumed :-).
Good news is - it really works as advertised and I still like it a lot. I have not really tried many of the features, but what I did try, worked as expected. The uploader (I am using the default, Java applet based drag-and-drop universal uploader) is very friendly - the small status windows shows not only status of the upload, but also the thumbnail of the uploaded image.
go and get it - at http://www.ghisler.com/
It got nice visual upgrades - look and feel and icons are gently nicer and more XP-ish. Plus many other new features. Upgrade is still free for registered users.
If I should pick one single most useful program I ever used on any computer system, Total Commander would be clear winner. I do not remember when exactly I purchased the license - I guess sometimes around 1994-95, when it was named Windows Commander. Since that time, I was using it pretty much every day (except few short periods I was working exclusively on Unix). I still use it every working day (as I often spend weekends on Mac platforms).