Category: Software

  • FrontPage is dead, long live FrontPage!

    finally, it’s happened! Microsoft announced officially the end of FrontPage (Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 and Microsoft Expression Web Designer will come in Spring to replace it). As a matter of fact, FrontPage did not really succeed in penetrating the pro market for web designers. Its utterly simplistic approach to web design was obviously far…

  • Network traffic: BitMeter to replace DU-meter

    I have been testing DU-meter as a way to display the network traffic around my computer. It shows a nice little graph to present the network traffic in a very usable/understandable way like here: This graph is updated in real-time which means that color bar allow you to recognize incoming or outgoing traffic, but this…

  • Firefox 3 already

    Firefox 2 is hardly out that developers are already working hard on the new version 3 as shown by the apparition of an alpha version on the FTP server. Some visible improvements: Bookmarks will be replaced with “places” that will end in a left-side menu (an innovation to be tested). Tabs will be easier to…

  • BitTorrent purchases uTorrent

    BitTorrent, the leader and creator of the P2P technology that is driving most of the video and large-file peer-to-peer exchanges just announced that they bought µTorrent (micro-Torrent or uTorrent), the company providing the smallest, lightest (and maybe, fastest) BitTorrent client. Apparently, they intend to re-inforce their presence, possibly in preparation of an extension of the…

  • Very slow network on Win2K

    Very slow network on Win2K

    On a PC computer equiped with Windows 2000, I had a major problem of network slowness (when accessing the network, all operations seemed to atke ages to complete). I admit I was somewhat lost without a solution. So, I decided to use the ever-powerful solution: Google. It allowed me to find a web site with…

  • Apple wants total supplier security

    This is the obvious conclusion of this minor news that may attract the attention of the engineers among us: Apple now has no less than seven suppliers for the Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) of its iPod (they expect a strong growth in 2007): Tripod Technology, Nan Ya Printed Circuit Board (NPC), Unimicron Technology, Compeq Manufacturing,…

  • Vista: Time for 64 bits

    While Vista will soon be available in a 64-bit version (and that GNU/Linux went down this path several months ago), it is time to ponder the following question: “Do we need to go 64 bits?” And the answer is surprisingly simple if you look at it. Currently, PC are more and more often equiped with…

  • AntiGravity: Toilets flush and Microsoft

    AntiGravity: Toilets flush and Microsoft

    There is no end to jokes about what Microsoft did wrong (they’re the number one target for many jokes and many grievances, just from their being #1 software company). Today, I want to point you to an excellent little paper by Steve Mirsky published in his excellent column in Scientific American magazine. In the October…

  • How do your web site look?

    This is the tough question that BrowserShots.org web site anwsers for you. They provide a simple way to test your web site in a large variety of configurations and browsers. This is a very nice idea founded on the voluntary help of computers installed all over the world (widely distributed architecture). This way, you will…