Jul
04

Tablet PC for housewives in Japan

Uncategorized

Intel, Microsoft and Japanese online payments company Bit Wallet have teamed up to develop a mobile PC platform designed to bring computing to those traditionally considered to be unfamiliar with shopping online, browsing the web or sitting at a desktop PC. Like housewives, apparently.

There’s no mouse or keyboard, to make it more friendly for folk unused to such input devices, and Intel, Microsoft and Edy said they want to see apps with simple, button-based interfaces to come to the platform the better to appeal to people with little or no PC experience.

Slate DT FeliCa

(Slate DT FeliCa.)

It looks likely the first device will be manufactured by local hardware company PBJ, which has already used Intel CPUs in its existing mobile devices.

More at Reg Hardware

Anyway, I think this is a good effort. This is a rather small news but I like the idea that they’re targeting housewives. Housewives is perhaps of the least tapped groups of people in the society to use computers. Exposing them to new technologies may be a good idea. And in return, I too hope that computers are easier to use since computers have to be housewives-friendly in future.

Our computers are just too hard to use. My aunt is still stuck thinking that the monitor contains the CPU. I encouraged her to get a Mac already.

0

Jun
30

Internet to get .asia addresses

Uncategorized

If the price is right, I’ll snap up a .asia domain, hahaa… It just sounds kinda cool and I’m proud to be in Asia.

Internet to get .asia addresses

Starting in October, the first net addresses ending in .asia will be assigned, DotAsia Organization Ltd. said Thursday.

The non-profit group, representing countries including China, Japan and India, will start giving names to governments and registered trademark holders in October, and follow up with companies in mid-November.

Potential registrants must be based in Asia, including Australia and New Zealand.

Source: CBC.ca

0

Jun
19

Which host can survive the Digg effect?

Uncategorized

Great little experiment with 9 different hosting companies to figure out which ones can withstand the traffic surges caused by Web 2.0.

When too many people visit a website at the same time, it tends to slow down the server so badly it starts to time out. Below is a list of web host that is being tested to see how well they can withstand the Digg effect. The list is not fantastic but still worth taking a look if you’re looking for a host. I’m hunting for a new host already. My host has been great but it isn’t going to support my bandwidth much longer unfortunately.

I intend to host multiple websites too so I’m looking for web host. Probably going with MediaTemple. They seem to be pretty good at what they do.

read more | digg story

0

Jun
16

HTML5 differences from HTML4

Uncategorized

The HTML5 draft reflects an effort, started in 2004, to study contemporary HTML implementations and deployed content. The draft:

  • Defines a single language called HTML 5 which can be written in HTML (HTML5) and XML (XHTML5).
  • Defines detailed processing models to foster interoperable implementations.
  • Improves markup for documents.
  • Introduces markup and APIs for emerging idioms, such as web applications.

I kinda blog about this HTML5 thing for my own benefit. I just thought it would be useful to take a look at it again another time. They are introducing new elements such as <dialog>, <figure>, <nav>, <header>, <footer>, <datagrid>, <progress> and more. Good news is that getElementsByClassName() is going to be added.

And it would seem like HTML5 is stepping in to help developers expand the capabilities of their web application. It appears that the internet is very serious about moving to the direction of web applications. It may be a good idea to prepare to enter this industry. I’m entering it and I’m pretty optimistic about it.

Elements such as <header>, <article> and <footer> isn’t really necessary, but if developers were to all deploy these tags, they probably isn’t a need for those feeds at all. Every website can easily become feed-enabled.

They’re dropping some elements though, such as the <u>, <frame>, <frameset> and <center>.

Unfortunately, with all these additions, HTML5 is getting more complicated. The learning curve would get steeper. There use to be a time HTML is about layout and positioning and everyone’s using <table>. But things are changing, it’s about layout and XML items. They just sort of changed direction or something. Teachers are probably going to find it hard to explain a macro picture of why those new elements are present in HTML. My web publishing teacher in school isn’t even teaching me CSS that time! In fact, she’s still teaching about font tags when it is already deprecated. CSS was a ‘read-up’ thing. Good to know, don’t need to know for examinations.

Just want to share my thoughts about HTML5, hahaa… Sorry that this post is a little disorganized, I typed in a hurry.

This document describes the differences between HTML4 and HTML5 and provides some of the rationale for the changes that have been made to the language.

read more | digg story

0

Jun
11

Test how fast your website loads!

Uncategorized

You can have a good representation of how each of the components in your website loads. It’s pretty cool and quite user-friendly too! //beconfused loads kinda slow I think.

The Full Page Test loads a given HTML page, including images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes. In this way, the Pingdom tool mimics the way a page is loaded in your browser.

read more | digg story

2

Jun
04

Using HTML to draw anime character

Uncategorized

A voluptuous anime bunny woman, created in time-lapse using thousands of lines of HTML code to individually create and color table cells as pixels.

That really test sanity, doesn’t it?

read more | digg story

5

May
31

Windows Live Messenger 8.5 Beta

Uncategorized

Currently in beta, Windows Live Messenger 8.5 would sport a new interface. It looks much beta and cooler and has a more consistent Windows Live branding. Check out some of the screenshots that I included.

Windows Live Messenger sign in window comparison.

The Windows Live Messenger sign in window, version 8.0 on the left, 8.5 on the right. Windows Live Messenger 8.5 seems to have a lot more text that people don’t find useful to see. It’s probably the lawyers’ idea.

Windows Live Messenger main window comparison.

And of course, the main window. Similarly, 8.0 is on th left, 8.5 on the right. It’s all looking much cleaner and I love it when the interface designers removed the left and right border, it makes the application feel lighter.

Windows Live Messenger chat window comparison.

Windows Live Messenger 8.0 is at the top and Windows Live Messenger 8.5 is at the bottom. The chat window has little changes, take a look at the Send and Search button. It’s looking better on 8.5. Previously on 8.0, it’s quite space wasting to put it on the right of the chat box.

Windows Live has some sort of strange error to advise me closing Windows Explorer.

During my installation, I was told to shut of Windows Explorer, I don’t have any Explorer windows open and in order to continue with the installation, I ended the Explorer.exe.

There really isn’t much changes. Everything works similarly, the interface change is much welcomed though.

You can read more at Inside Windows Live Messenger or get the Windows Live Messenger 8.5 beta here.

6