Internet Prices vs Speed
Just looking at the following numbers makes me want to go to Japan. 61mbps! wow. We all have a long way to get there.
Cygwin 1.7
Cygwin 1.7 has just been released. There are many cool features added to the new version. The following are just some of the changes in the new release. To see the full list of these changes click here.
- Add support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
- PATH_MAX is now 4096. Internally, path names can be as long as the underlying OS can handle (32K).
- Creating filenames with special DOS characters ‘”‘, ‘*’, ‘:’, ‘<', '>‘, ‘|’ is supported.
- unlink and rmdir try very hard to remove files/directories even if they are currently accessed or locked.
- rename rewritten to be more POSIX conformant
Evolution of storage devices
Looking at this picture makes me realize how much technology has improved at the same time how cheap storage devices has become. It was not a long time ago where we had to pay so much to get a 20GB hard disk, or pay the same amount to get few MB of space on a server on the web. It feels too good to be living at the present!
Googles new Interface
Apparently people at Google have been really busy lately. They are working on a new interface that hasn’t been release to he public yet, but you can see the new interface by running a small script.
Useful tools: Launchy
If you have ever used any operating systems i.e macos and Linux you would already know how easy it is to launch your applications without the need of adding shortcuts to your Desktop etc. For instance in Maco you can use spotlight to launch your applications:
Similarly in Linux you can use Alt+F2 to launch the application you are looking for.
Unfortunately you don’t have this extremely useful feature in Microsoft Windows. Microsoft has added similar functionality to windows7 but if you are using older versions of windows such as XP you are still suffering from this problem.
I have just found an application called Launchy which adds this feature to windows XP. Once you install this tool typing alt+space opens a window which you can use to search for the application you are trying to run.
Google Wave
Few days ago I finally got the invitation for the Google wave. I had previously sent more than three request to google for an invitation but I had no luck until I managed to get an invitation from a colleague at work. I was really excited to finally get it, because I really wanted to use it. I had seen some clips made by Google on the web showing how it could change the way email system works, but I had never actually used it. I have been using it for a few days now I have to say that it still has a long way to go if its goal is to really revolutionize the current email system. The funniest bug I have detected by far is that I cant create new wave messages in Chrome browser. They should probably ask their QA to test under their own browser first! It has been designed to allow users send gadgets to each other so that could be a nice feature once users start implementing their own gadgets.