Happy One Year!
Dear Visitor,
Today this blog makes one year since it is hosted on LunarPages’ servers.
My target was to post this message as the post with number one hundred but I preferred to be 96 instead of writing four more dummy and maybe stupid posts. I hope that at least a part of the posts wrote here were useful and I would like to get more feedback in order to improve what I write.
It was an year full of surprises and discoveries. I found out what Twitter, SEO, Wordpress, PHP, Google Analytics, (etc) are, I met a lot of people through this blog, I won something and I had fun writing all this.
As a present, the blog got the picture of the cake (yeah, just the picture) on the right and a new header. Do you like them?
The most read content of this blog in one year (Top 5 Posts and Pages):
- SkypeGadget
- Install custom firmware on Asus WL500G Premium
- Using UAC with C# – Part 1
- How to install SQL Server 2008 in almost 4 hours
- Chuck Norris Java facts
Ok… So this been said, let the party start! [Where are the presents?] Have a drink from the right side (sidebar)
Microsoft Bing (Bang?)
Because Live Search didn’t had the expected impact, Microsoft decided to create a new (revolutionary?) search engine. It is called Microsoft Bing and is said that “is more than a search engine, it is a decision engine”.
One thing is clear, though: a search engine that is only ‘good enough’ will not be enough to gain back any market share from Google, which now virtually controls the search engine market. Remains to be seen how can be used in practice. Until a demo will be available we can only watch a movie with Bing – seems pretty cool.
Watch the movie in high quality: click the “HQ” button in the right-bottom corner.
Bing is available through bing.com but for the moment it sends you to a site where you can discover what Bing is (you can watch the movie above and read some stories about the decision engine).
Software That You Should Install
Here is a list of what I recently installed or I plan to install. It is a list of software (updates) that you might consider useful:
Windows Vista/2008 Service Pack 2
It was released a few hours ago for general audience and it brings some important fixes. I think is a must-have. It is a must have and now can be downloaded through Windows Update.
I have just installed it through Windows Update. It took about 30 minutes to complete (download + install).
Visual Studio 2010 Beta
The lastest version of the well known IDE brings a lot of new features: editor completely written in WPF, a more eye candy user interface, .NET Framework 4 (dynamic types for C#, named parameters, implicit values, etc.). It is available for free and you can download either Professional or the Team Suite edition (I recommend the last one).
Office Mobile 6.1 Upgrade
Software + Services. A Modern Approach. Part 2
Part 2 – The idea
Contents:
- A little more Live Mesh (CTP)
- The Actors
- The Modern Approach
1. A little more Live Mesh (CTP)
Today, online and offline tend to be two different approaches for building software. Most software companies offer either online or offline versions of their software.
If they somehow offer both then mostly sure one is a limited (reduced functionality) version of the other. Moreover companies tend to create a gap between the time when the offline and the online version gets updated. You always hear thing like “the online version does not yet support feature X that is available in the desktop version. Will be available soon”. The bad thing is the soon might mean a couple of months.
Creating software that works the same way both online and offline is not a new idea but until not it would require a lot of overhead. There was the need to simulate either the offline environment online or the reverse.
Now, with Live Mesh, the online environment is simulated on the local machine with no overhead for the developer. The guys from Microsoft resolved this problem and they’ve simplified our lives.
There are some aspects that need to be clarified as pointed in Part 1 about online services and applications:
- The user experience: this problems was somehow resolved by enabling applications to be based on Silverlight. This technology enables web applications to deliver an improved experience compared to the classical web apps. It is client-side technology.
- The need of permanent connectivity: just like smart clients, Mesh Enabled Applications can run with no network connectivity, persist offline what needs to be processed online and continue the process when connectivity is available. In other words what can be done offline is done anytime and if Internet access is required the task is queued.
2. The Actors
Lets consider a company named InvoiceGuys which offers a service called InvoiceService that exposes functionality for processing invoices. Anyone can subscribe the this service – for the sake of simplicity we’ll just ignore authorization and authentication; just don’t do this in real life!
Subject: Problems with my new computer
Dear Mr. Bill Gates,
We have bought a computer for our home and we have found some problems, which I want to bring to your notice.
1. There is a button ’start’ but there is no ’stop’ button. We request you to check this.
2. One doubt is whether any ‘re-scooter’ is available in system? I find only ‘re-cycle’, but I own a scooter at my home.
3. There is ‘Find’ button but it is not working properly. My wife lost the door key and we tried a lot trace the key with this ‘find’ button, but was unable to trace. Please rectify this problem.
4. My child learnt ‘Microsoft word’ now he wants to learn ‘Mi crosoft sentence’, so when you will provide that?
5. I bought computer, CPU, mouse and keyboard, but there is only one icon which shows ‘My Computer’: when you will povide the remaining items? Read the rest of this entry »
Panda Cloud Antivirus Beta Review
As we emerge more and more is a Software + Services world, Panda took advantage of this new wave and released the World’s first cloud antivirus solution.
The protection model based on a thin-client agent and server architecture which services malware protection as opposed to locally installed products. By combining local detection technologies with cloud-scanning capabilities and applying non-intrusive interception techniques on the client architecture, Panda Cloud Antivirus provides some of the best protection with a lightweight antivirus thin-client agent that barely consumes any PC resources.
Of course this S+S approach has advantages and drawbacks.
Advantages:
- Always using the latest version of software and protection
- Minimum impact on local resources
- Detection of threats in less than 6 minutes (this is what Panda announced on the official blog)
Drawbacks:
- Need of permanent Internet connection
- Without Internet connection the protection is reduced
Panda Cloud Antivirus takes advantage of the cloud world and combines the information from all users in order to detect and stop malware. Using the so called Panda Collective Intelligence, a cloud-based test lab for malicious software, samples are collected, analyzed, categorized and, if needed, disinfection routines are created. Therefore the community becomes the lab. In this way there is no need for software updates, there is no virus definition database on the client computer and everyone has access to the latest protection.
Compared to other antivirus solutions, Panda categorizes local files from “real security risk” to “minimum security risk” and by this criteria the scanning engine prioritizes it’s tasks. There are three types of automatic scanning (as mentioned on the official blog):
- On-Access Scan. This is the maximum priority resident scan that is applied only to objects which are truly a security risk in a specific point in time: files which are being executed or used. The file is intercepted, prevented from running and disinfected if found to be malicious.
- Prefetch Scan. There are other elements such as files downloaded from the Internet which, while not being executed at a specific point in time, have a much higher risk and probability of being executed at any time. These files should be watched more closely than files which have barely any activity, as we can expect them to be executed, unpacked, copied or moved shortly. A Prefetch Scan basically launches an asynchronous local & cloud query on the file to scan it “as soon as possible” without impacting performance. Of course if any of these files is called to be executed, the file will be intercepted and an on-access scan will be applied to it.
- Background Scan. Lastly a normal PC has hundreds of thousands of files in its hard drive. Most of these files are not executing normally and simply just “sit there” until either the use double-clicks on them or they are called upon by another process. These are considered the least dangerous files from a security perspective. Panda Cloud Antivirus will continuously run Background Scans on these in an asynchronous manner while the PC is idle, without impacting performance at all. Of course if any of these files is called to be executed, the file will be intercepted and an on-access scan will be applied to it.
In my opinion Read the rest of this entry »
GeekMeet Brasov #3
We are happy to announce the third GeekMeet meeting in Brasov, Romania.
We learned a lot from the previous two events and we made some significant changes:
- Sending e-mails in order to join was not a good idea because e-mails are hard to synchronize amongst the organizing team. Now there is a form that must be filled in order to join the event.
- We are collecting some data in order to improve future events. We want to know what attendees want to see on GeekMeet.
- We are trying to bring important speakers from major companies like Adobe or Apple.
Up to now we have three confirmed speakers: Laura Bularca who will talk about “Game Dev”, Mihai Dragan who will talk about “Research si creativitate” (Research and creativity) and Cornel Creanga from Adobe who will talk about “Rich Internet Applications”.
The event will take place on Saturday, May 30 in Okian library, Brasov.
For more details check the official announcement.
To register to the event fill this form.
You can also follow us on Twitter.
More blog news – May 2009
Last week was exhausting. I spent four days at home working on the Communication Session (and Bachelor) project. The bright side is that I’m almost done with it and I have 2 months to write the paper thesis which should be more than enough. The bad part is that I only got the 3rd place in the contest :(
One of the bullets on my TODO list says “write part 2 and part 3 of the Software + Services. A Modern Approach article”. I promise I will try to write part 2 this weekend. Sorry for the delay!
I forgot to write about this: CommunityCredit is a website that “gives stupid prizes to smart people”. I’ve got in their contest and won the 9th place in the April competition :-D I think this is great for the first try. My stupid prize is a set of geeky ties:
They’re cool, huh? When I receive them (hopefully they’ll arrive soon enough) I will start a contest and someone will win one of them. Stay tuned for more details about the competition.
Blog news – May 2009
Dear visitor,
Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit has some cool new features:
- Post rating: so you can rate/review what you are reading. Doing so will allow others to see if that post deserves to be read. In order to vote click the post’s title to go to the single post page and use the stars at the bottom to vote. While browsing posts or viewing the archive you can only see the ratings.
- Share this: now you can share much easy the content you like on today’s most popular social network like Twitter, Digg, Technorati, Facebook, etc. The share functionality can be accessed through the “Share this” button at the bottom of each post.
Enjoy your stay!