Female fan: “Oh, Bill, your floppy is so long”

hen there is nothing particularly interesting to post, the typical blogger will publish a photo. Shown above is Bill Gates posing for a teen magazine in 1985. The photo below is from WikiMedia.

“When nobody else is in the room, I sometimes get jiggy with it”

Picture from InfoWorld

rofessionals have cowardly made discouraging statements recently. They will have you believe that Palm is lagging behind. They will attempt to persuade you that the future of Palm is uncertain.

Nevertheless, based on recent statistics, it appears obvious what grabs the attention of the prospective customer. Note that the figure do not refer to ownership of handhelds, but the acquisition of new ones. One must remember that operating systems other than Palm OS and Windows CE exist.

Cited by: PalmAddict

An intriguing and exclusive article from PESN speaks of a 4-foot-diameter solar dish, which projects light onto 1000 square feet in buildings without harmful UV rays.

The system’s 48-inch primary mirror concentrates light into a secondary mirror, which strips away the infrared and ultraviolet components, and directs the visible light into the receiver.

…

The tracking system itself requires very little power to operate. It could be supported by a small solar cell – equivalent to a 9-volt battery (which would last about a week).

The product is expected to reach the market in 2007. The product will be of great interest to those who have read about the dangers of deprived exposure to sunlight.

ail archives organisation is a topic which I addressed quite recently. However, good inbox (recent incoming mail) management is the key to efficient and uninterrupted work. Merlin of 43Folders agrees, even though his preferences differ from mine.

Each e-mail message in your inbox demands your time and attention. Filters and rules are great for reducing some of that demand, shunting easily defined mail such as e-newsletters and personal notes to their appropriate folders…

I think the advice given in the article is valid, but mail managements depends greatly on the nature of your work and interests. For example, not all people subscribe to mailing lists or get involved in forums and newsgroups. Moreover, people get hugely varying amounts of spam. Some get none, some get a few per day and some people get many hundreds if not thousands a day. What works for the author of the article will work for many others, but not necessarily for everybody. It is still worth a read though.

Horde Web-based E-mail management (click image to view in full size)

My related write-ups on mail management:

• Local or Web-based E-mail
• Public Mail Accounts and Filtering
• Urgent Mail Account
• E-mail Address Disclosure
• Managing Large E-mail Quantities
• Solution to Junk Mail
• Managing E-mail on a Personal Domain

Inkscape is yet another Open Source image manipulation program (admire the screenshot gallery). Its GUI resembles that of GIMPShop (a popular branch of the GIMP) or the commercial leader, Adobe Photoshop. It has the words “Photoshop killer” written all over it, as unlike the GIMP, it greatly assimilates to Photoshop, which makes a migration easier. It should also run neatly under Linux, Mac OS and Windows.

Some months ago I heard rumours that Microsoft intend to provide an image manipulation add-on (in the form of a download) for Windows, thereby addressing one of its deficiencies. Too often do I see people use paint.exe for image editing. This requires much more time than necessary and usually achieves appalling results. While on the issue, how about Windows’ urgent need for a decent text editor?

Getting data more quickly using a CLI

ome time ago I came across YubNub – YubNub.org which is a command-line interface for the Web. It allows you to operate in and on the Web much more efficiently than by using the traditional GUI‘s. You can, for example, query Google for ‘saturn’ by typing in

g saturn

YubNub provides a very quick way of navigation the Web as chaining of commands is possible too and nearly 100 commands exist. The site was a great find, but I do not believe it can replace a keyboard-navigable portal (see example). Maybe I can embed the YubNub command-line in portals at some stage, which would make it ever more flexible. While on the issue of portals, Google have extended features offered by their Portal (personalised homepage) service. Among the new features:

• Adding your own bookmarks
• Selecting from more news feeds
• Adding your own RSS news feeds

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

From a thought-provoking article in USA TODAY:

Speaking to hundreds of university professors, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says he’s baffled more students don’t go into computer science.

Also see:

• Gates: Lack of Computer Science Spending Is ‘Kind of a Crime’
• Criticism on exploitation of power