Mind.random()

You’ll be able to ignore most viruses
Each time the Windows community gets up in arms about the next big virus that is circulating around the globe, you can go about your business on your Mac without really worrying. However, you do have to be careful to not forward on infected files from one Windows user to another.

People will help you for no reason
Other Mac owners are usually fairly willing to help you get up and running on the Mac. This may be self-serving on their behalf, because it helps sell more Mac stuff which in turn justifies their investment in a company with less than 10% market share, but it’s still a perk.

You’ll have some “ah-ha” moments
From time to time you’ll be pleasantly surprised because the Mac will do something that you completely didn’t expect, because you’re used to how Windows would do things. For instance, you put a picture into the Address Book, and it appears automatically in iChat and then on your phone.

Keyboard shortcuts will drive you nuts
I spent years honing the craft of keyboard shortcuts on Windows, to the point where it was mostly muscle memory pressing the keys for me. On the Mac, it seems like there are two or three different ways that the various shortcuts are implemented, and it drives me nuts to this day.

You’ll regret your purchase, but you’ll get over it
You’ll have a few moments where you really, really wish you had purchased that Dell laptop for $399, and you’ll seriously consider taking the Mac back to the store, but eventually you’ll get over it and wonder what the hell you were thinking.

You’ll spend more money than with Windows
From the initial hardware purchase, to software, to more frequent OS upgrades, you’ll likely end up spending more money than someone with a Windows box - but you’ll find you often get good value for your extra money. And Apple will keep coming out with new shiny objects that you really, really want to have.

You’ll generally sell your used Mac for a decent price
Apple computers tend to retain their value better in the used marketplace. Even a two-generations-back non-Intel laptop will sell for $250-300 on craigslist.

>>read all points

Tags: Apple, mac

Web 2.0 is about four different interacting things

1. Community. This is the most obvious one. Community is basically interaction between members, between websites, and between the website admins and its members. In the old days, we had the BBS and then IRC and then forums. Now it’s more of the same, but also extended in one crucial way: we are happy to share without claiming ownership. The best example is Wikipedia: no one claims copyright control over it, and so we are breaking the traditional authorship rights. When we contribute to Wikipedia, anyone can read our contribution, anyone can copy it, anyone can edit, and dang it, anyone can delete it. This is very new.

The other new thing is voting. Now we have popularity contests of our contributions. Our forums have reps, delicious has the popular lists, and of course digg is the ultimate voting system. If you think hard, you can also convince yourself, Google’s PageRank is essentially an algorithm that measures social popularity (link = vote).

2. Technology. Here we talk about XML, APIs, new content management systems like blogs and wikis, and if you’re that inclined, sure, AJAX. The new technologies support the formation of communities and the interactions I explained above. XML gives us RSS and AJAX. APIs are a more general term that gives us mashups, and arguably, everything else. Basically, it’s the use of standard technologies everyone agrees on. This, IMHO, is the biggest “technological” breakthrough: actually agreeing on a technical standard!!!

3. Architecture. This is best described by the Cluetrain Manifesto as:

Quote:

Essentially, we’re talking about a more modular way to build applications. The (re)rise of Ruby on Rails and MVC model, along with other frameworks like CakePHP, is testament to this aspect of Web 2.0

4. Look. Every movement has a look: the 60s, the 80s, and now Web 2.0. Long gone are square boxes with plain boring color. No man, bring on the colors. Give me some jive. Don’t be square. Lively and fresh is what we are. Why be something else? And yes, white space is great.

So this is Web 2.0 in a nutshell. Web 2.5 is in beta now and will be released shortly.

from the author of ekstreme.com

This is one awesome site I recently bumped into. Has so much of handly DHTML scripts that is ready to use. Most of them are AJAX based. Just download and plugin to your project.

Tags: ajax, javascript

A bug in Windows Vista’s built-in antipiracy technology is telling some users that they need to reactivate the operating system after they install new device drivers or run newly installed software.Microsoft Corp. quietly issued a patch designed to fix the flaw in its Software Protection Platform (SPP) technology late last month. Criticized by some when it was announced last fall, SPP is an updated and more aggressive version of the Windows Genuine Advantage antipiracy tools that Microsoft included with Windows XP. But because of the bug, SPP may suddenly demand that a copy of Vista be “activated” even though the user and/or the computer maker did so earlier.

“You may be prompted to activate Windows Vista on a computer on which Windows Vista activation was not previously required,” Microsoft says “Although this problem rarely occurs, it may occur during typical use of a Windows Vista-based computer. For example, this problem may occur under one or more of the following conditions: You install a device driver, you install a program, you run a new program, you remove a program.”

One Vista user, commenting, on Microsoft’s Windows Vista Validation Issues support forum reported that he ran into the bug after he had updated his PC’s BIOS. Oops!!!.

>>read more

Tags: reactivation

Back home after a two day trip to a nearby State.

I am really not going to talk about the Mono + C# initiative or about the XAML + Javascript initiative of Microsoft. There are opposing performance comparisons between C# on Mono and Java Swing.

Google came up with a wonderful idea called the Google Web Toolkit. Just code Java and you have a powerful Gmail-like AJAX applications coming handy. But as I said in my previous post, it is still Javascript.

After a long time, there are a few things happening in the Swing circles. Like the Aerith. Believe it or not, the following screenshot is a Swing based application.

But Aerith is just a mash up of a few popular webservices and definitely not near to the term “alternative”. While talking about Aerith, we also need to talk about the “very” late adoption of newer versions of Java. I dont know about you. But still, I code in Java 1.4. Its been around two years since Java 5.0 has been release. And Mustang is already released. Though, unlike .NET, Java provides complete backward compatibility, there is very little or no upgradation of JDKs. One pestering example for “Why not upgrade?” is the “enum” keyword.

Comparing upgradation of Flash with Java — Flash runtime comes with every browser. Lightweight. And 50% of the browsers upgrade to the latest version of the engine within the first month and within a year there is 100% migration of the plugin. Best of all, Cross-platform. As someone rightly quoted, “Java is everywhere but not everything”. So, its time we have a new perspective that is away from “All Java”. A kind of mix-up of technologies similar to the mashups that currently rock the web.

Flash is good. But not everybody does Flash. It requires skilled professionals to play with it. And, personally, designing a webpage using HTML and CSS is complicated. Adobe realised this and came up with what is called as the Flex. Now, ActionScript and the MXML components are the only thing that you would want to learn to design very attractive front ends. ActionScripting looks easier to Java and object-oriented programmers. MXML tags just look like our normal component tags that we write in Struts and JSF. MXML is also written in ActionScript. So, just in case you need customization, you can write your own tag components !!! Best of all, all your backend Java code is safe. So, you would essentially design your pages using Flex and invoke your Java code.

This video, you should never miss. Drives you crazy on what Flex could do.

Flex 2.0 is the current version and is downloadable for free at http://www.flex.org/.  There is an  online Flex compiler for instant experimentation.  Here is a wonderful screencast that is available on how to use Flex as a front-end for Java server applications.  And if you want to play with Flex, here is the link.  Flex has an IDE built on Eclipse ;-)  which currently has only the commercial flavor. I am sure, they would soon come out with an opensource alternative. However, there is also an IDE called Flexible you can play with.

Apart from Flex, Adobe also came up with Apollo to develop desktop applications using Flex/HTML/Javascript on the front end and Java/Python/Ruby/C# in the backend. However, Apollo is in its 1.0 version and is currently supported only in Windows and Mac platforms. They are currently working on Linux and other platforms too.

Here is an example of what Apollo could do.

Tags: aerith, apollo, flash, flex, java, swing