Swordie Bloggie

This is Treo750 and it is powered with Microsoft Window Mobile 5… my favorite PDA Phone OS.  Currently I’m using the iPAQ HW6965… i will talk about it next time.

I like PDA phone with QWERTY keys… I can do text messaging or writing faster with it. I have to choose HQ6965 although I don’t really like its design because Treo750 is lacking one feature… only one… WiFi!!! Weird… most of American phones, minus iPAQ, do not have WiFi. I really like the Treo750 design, but because of WiFi, I have to sacrifice design over WiFi…

I just hope… really hoping… the next Palm Windows Mobile 6 phone will comes with WiFi… pleaaaseeeee… WiFi pleaaaseeeee…. I will definitely retire my iPAQ HW6965 immediately once Palm support WiFi.

While looking for information about International Space Station (ISS), I accidentally stumble with this site… http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/tracking/

It’s NASA web site showing the location of the ISS in real-time. It really excites me… but what excites me more is, it also showing the real-time location of the SUN!!!

On the map, it shows 3 flight-paths of the ISS… I’m waiting for it to pass my house… some said, you can actually see the ISS with naked eyes… hopefully I can see it with my naked eyes when it fly-pass my house. You can check it out and wait for it to fly-pass your house… 😉

While writing this blog, the ISS has move from South America to Africa in less than 10 minutes… it should be above Sabah in less than 15 minutes… isn’t that cool 😉

I’m always fascinated with new gadgets especially its appearance and features… which I always refer as RADICAL. The experimental aircraft from Boeing, X-48B, is one example. The image on the left shows its first flight at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, California on July 20, 2007.

The X in front of the model number represents experimental… so, whenever you see an X in-front of any aircraft model (build by US), it means it still being ‘experimented’… not for production yet… I learned this from National Geographic 🙂

The X-48B resembles like a flying wing… no cylindrical fuselage like the normal aircraft. It is more like the Stealth Bomber B1 from USAF… aka BAT-WING. The other bat-wing is the Stealth Fighter F117A… which I see not really bats-like fighter jet but aircraft with lots of sharp edges. The sharp edges and the bats-wing design which make it stealth actually going against the aviation principles… so it is very RADICAL… it’s not supposed to be able to balance itself once airborne… but require thousands of computer instructions to stabilize it… and makes it the deadliest jet fighter.

. . . Continue Reading »

Did you ever see a very simple front-page of a website which consists of one logo and 17 banners?

And all the banners are made of:
Size: 800 x 108 pixels
Horizontal Resulution: 72 dpi
Vertical Resolution: 72 dpi
Bit Depth: 24

If the main html file of the website is default.htm, how big will the default.htm file? 10K? 30K? 50K?…

You will not be wrong if you pick any of the numbers… Even if you said 100K… you are still on the right path…

If you display the webpage on your browser, how much of data  will be downloaded to your PC? It should be less than 700K right?… the index.htm + 1 logo + 17 banners… yea, less than 700K or 0.7MB should be sufficient.

But will you believe if is said the size is 5.16MB or to be exact 5,419,008 bytes? Yes… i type it correctly… 5.16 Mega Bytes… Yes it is five point one six mega bytes!!!

You don’t believe me yea?… well its ok… if you were the one telling me this stuff, I won’t believe you too.

Ok, let me tell you about it, I was troubleshooting a slow network again today…
After some emailing with the ISP, I check the content of the website… the front-page of the website… to my horror… this is what I found… an index file with the size of 5.16MB!!! UNBILIEVEABLE!!!

So, I reported that to the system people… When they came back to me, they told me there are 4,680,471 lines in that file!!!… yes… 4 MILLIONS!!!… The page supposed to display one logo and 17 banners only and hyper-linking each of them to their respective sites. UNBILIEVEABLE!!!

🙂 . . . Continue Reading »

o my gawwddd… I can’t believe it… buying a game console is as good as buying a car… 3 years warranty!!!

Microsoft or Redmond got fade up with unacceptable hardware failures in its new generation game console Xbox 360 has decided to extend the warranty to EVERYONE… old and new box… cool… Redmond says:

“As of today, all Xbox 360 consoles are covered by an enhanced warranty program to address specifically the general hardware failures indicated by the three flashing red lights on the console. This applies to new and previously-sold consoles. While we will still have a general one year console warranty (two years in some countries), we are announcing today a three-year warranty that covers any console that displays a three flashing red lights error message. If a customer has an issue indicated by the three flashing red lights, Microsoft will repair the console free of charge-including shipping-for three years from the console’s purchase date.”

3 flashing red lights?… is there a “backdoor” for that… say, if I have 2 flashing red lights, can I make it 3 flashing red lights instead…LOL…

Redmond will take a pretax charge of more than $1 billion to repair defects in its next- generation game machine…. wow… estimate of USD$1 billion for repairing alone? pretax?… damm… how much are they making for the consoles anyway huh…???

And, sure there gonna be another Xbox 360 & PC Halo competitions in this coming TechEd SEA 2007!!!… wanna collect some Microsoft T-Shirts 😉

My previous posting was about Solid State Disk or SSD. But what exactly is SSD? What components do SSD has? What it made of? After doing some research on the net, these are the info I gathered:

A solid state drive is primarily a data storage device, for use in computing applications that traditionally use a hard disk drive with a spinning disk or platter. A solid state drive is based on either non-volatile memory or volatile memory instead of the spinning platter and mechanical-magnetic head found in a conventional hard disk drive.

With no moving parts, a solid state drive eliminates seek time, latency and other electro-mechanical delays and failures associated with a conventional hard disk drive. SSD is a high-performance plug-and-play storage device that contains no moving parts. SSD components include either DRAM or EEPROM memory boards, a memory bus board, a CPU, and a battery card.

Because they contain their own CPUs to manage data storage, they are a lot faster (18MBps for SCSI-II and 35 MBps for UltraWide SCSI interfaces) than conventional rotating hard disks; therefore, they produce highest possible I/O rates.

SSDs are most effective for server applications and server systems, where I/O response time is crucial. Data stored on SSDs should include anything that creates bottlenecks, such as databases, swap files, library and index files, and authorization and login information.

SSD is still very expensive for regular home use at the moment. You can read about the new Samsung 64GB SSD released in June 2007 at Samsung Debuts 1.8-Inch, 64-GB SSDs.

The process of data recovery program is the best computer backup device solution and it is the way of ensuring that backup computer files are kept protected from corruption with free software and that access to it is properly controlled on a back up server. It also facilitates the process of online file sharing. The globalization of disk recovery hardware networking is a facility with the help of which your stock can be sourced from anywhere in the world with the help of backup software.

Trancend has released 32GB 2.5” Solid State Disk (SSD). It is exactly the same as 2.5” IDE hard disk. Even the thickness of 74mm is the same. With the IDE interface, it can be plug into any notebook or mobile disk enclosure. SSD is like RAM, it has no moving parts. Without moving parts, you will get better reliability and lower power consumption which is very critical to notebook battery.

Do you have photographs taken with megapixels digital camera? I’m sure you do, because digital cameras are compact and reasonably priced nowadays. The pixels are getting higher and higher where even the most compact and cheapest digicam can have resolutions of 5 megapixel or more.

Each photograph will require as much as 1.5MB or more storage space. Of course with the higher pixels and resolutions, the photographs details and colors will be more brilliant. And the large size is not a problem today since storage card are cheap and large in capacity. You can have 1GB storage card and 4GB are getting common. And if you need more space, there are 8GB or 16GB. In fact 32GB are already in the market right now.

The only problem with large size photographs is when we need to transfer it to another medium. The most frustrating will be when we need to email or publish it on the web.

If you don’t have photo editing software, the only option you have is using the PaintBrush which comes with the Windows. You can reduce the size of the photographs to about 20% for instant and save it to another file. You can reduce your 1.5MB photographs to roughly about 50KB, but all subject to your original photographs. This method is not bad, I have been using this trick for sometimes and when I’m on a machine which doesn’t have any photographs tools.

But that trick requires you to do some typing and clicks. Microsoft actually has a tool called Image Resizer. It is available since June 20, 2005 and you can download it for FREE at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx and the manual at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/learnmore/tips/eschelman2.mspx.

The tool is very small, only 521KB and once installed, it will integrate with your file explorer. Using Image Resizer is as easy as right clicking on your photographs file from file explorer and chooses the size you like to have from the popup window. Your photographs will be resized and save on another file. For example, if you resize your image001.jpg file, it will be copied to image001 (small).jpg automatically after it being resized. Just make sure you don’t tick on “Resize the original pictures (don’t create copies)”.

So, go a head… give it a try if you don’t have any photograph editor to resize your super huge photos 🙂

Do you think you can escape from being caught when you beat the RED traffic lights? Think twice before you do that next time. Some of the intersections are installed with CCTV… and I’m sure it is connected to the Police Traffic Unit and one of the implementing agencies. I’ve seen the video… played with the camera remote control… the camera can zoom and see the driver clearly… so, not only refrain yourself from beating the red lights but BEHAVE while you are at the intersection waiting for the GREEN lights… because someone is watching you!!! And it’s recorded live!!!

My car was used for product promotion this afternoon. My cousin was launching Crystalite for the first time in Sabah. Crystalite is a type of coloring for glass using nano technology. Crystalite provides or creates a layer of color on the surface of your car lamp or any glass surface. But today, most of the car lamps are made of acrylic… some kind of plastic glass (?).

But you can’t put Crystalite color layer on it directly. We have to put a very thin layer of artificial glass… or just simply call it primer layer. And you can’t put Crystalite color on any plastic type lamp, for example your brake light or any lights at the rear of your car because most of the reverse, signal or brake lights covers are made of plastic. The ‘nano’ will eat-up the plastic!!!

I wanted the ‘purple’ color… just like the SPORTY sample picture on the banner but it’s not available yet. I choose the ‘light blue’ for my Avanza… just like the COOL sample picture on the banner. But unfortunately, light blue is too light… it’s not very visible unless you really look at it. I should have chosen the dark blue! You can see that in the pictures I’ve taken. The cost for each car is $98.00 (in RM)… but I got it free since my car is a demo car 🙂

. . . Continue Reading »