First looks: Microsoft Live Labs Pivot

I just got an invite to Microsoft Live Labs Pivot and I am currently testing it out. Although, I haven't found a practical use of it, it looks visually interesting. Other than that, this desktop application seems resource intensive.

Microsoft describes Pivot as follows: "Pivot makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun." It is difficult to pinpoint what exactly that means, because its doesn't seems like a search engine. Also, it is unclear if this has anything to do with the semantic web.

Pivot uses Trident, Seadragon and .NET. (In fact, this is quite apparent once you experience the app for yourself). It feels like a desktop version of Photosynth with images of data (as collections) instead of images of places.

Here are some screenshots:

Fonts of the Web

Good typography is pretty important, even on the web.

The League of Moveable Type + Some cheap CSS hacking and a bit of work = Awesome looking site

Java 7

Java 7 JDK: September 2010

Here are 7 of the new features that have been completed:

* Language support for collections
* Automatic Resource Management
* Improved Type Inference for Generic Instance Creation (diamond)
* Underscores in numeric literals
* Strings in switch
* Binary literals
* Simplified Varargs Method Invocation

Read more about the new language features here...

Java 7 (Project Coin) is actually looking good! For a modern programming language to stay relevant, it is important to introduce new paradigms to make programming easier while maintaining a large degree of backward compatibility. It wasn't so long ago that Python made a gigantic leap from 2.6 to 3.0.

Unicode Fonts

3 Cool Unicode Fonts:
1. Arial Unicode (This rocks, of course! and its 22mb.)
2. Code 2000
3. GNU Unifont

More info: Comparison of fonts

Another interesting Unicode font: Bitstream Cyberbit

Download Unicode Fonts:
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html
http://www.j-a-b.net/web/char/char-unicode.phtml


What was I doing with Unicode fonts? Trying to change the font on my Nokia handphone so that it could display other languages besides English.

Office 2010: The Movie

Oh yeah, that's for Office 2010. Now get ready for Office on the Web.

GIMP.org Easter Egg

I was looking at the source code of gimp.org when I came across an Easter egg! To see the Easter egg, head over to gimp.org and type "eek".

Flickr Video of the Day: Night Run II, 1st Half

Night Run II, 1st Half (Houston Ship Channel), originally uploaded by OneEighteen

Jetpack: ready for takeoff

Mozilla Labs has released Jetpack, an API (add-on) for allowing the community to write Firefox add-ons using common web technologies.

Currently, Jetpack is still experimental and shares some similarities with Ubiquity, although both projects have different aims.

Mozilla Labs Jetpack - Intro & Tutorial from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Contig: Single-file Defragmenter

Instead of running a disk defragmenter on a single partition, it might be faster (and more optimal) to run a file defragmenter. Contig, from Sysinternals, is a a freeware that uses the native Windows NT defragmentation support to analyse and defrag specific files.

Uses
For instance, if you use a system-managed pagefile, your system performance may be slow if your pagefile is heavily fragmented. Hence, it would be wise to defrag the pagefile (normally hidden at C:\pagefile.sys). Defraging hiberfil.sys may also improve the time required to resume form hibernation. Hence, defraging heavily used files (which have high-tendencies to be the point weakest links), may generally improve system performance.

For those who prefer not to use the command line, PowerDefragmenter (combined with Contig), is the solution.

Pro-Choice vs Pro-Life

Surely, Facebook gives us a choice here:

Facebook: I support the right to choose one element from each set in a collection

Do you believe that an infinite product of nonempty sets should be nonempty? Do you feel that non-measurable subsets of the reals should exist? Or games of perfect information with no winning strategy for either player? Do you believe that every set should have a well-ordering, or that any poset in which every chain has an upper bound is entitled to a maximal element? Do nonzero rings have the right to a maximal ideal? Is every vector space entitled to a basis? Should fields have algebraic closures? Should products of compact topological spaces be compact, and countable unions of countable sets be countable? Do you want to be able to cut a sphere up into a finite number of pieces and reassemble them, with only rigid motions, into a sphere twice as large?

It's all possible if you're pro-axiom-of-choice!

versus

Facebook: The Axiom of Life (aka Negation of Axiom of Choice)

Do you have nightmares of being split apart, reassembled, and finding two of yourself? Do you wonder just how large is a non-measurable set, roughly speaking? Then this is the group for you, advocating the negation of AC (or at least replacement by the axiom of dependent choice if you actually need to prove a theorem for some reason).