It is no secret that I am not an admirer of the Adobe product line. "Bloated" is the first word that comes to mind...

I know that Adobe does a couple products that are quite complex (photoshop) and those we expect to be large in size, but, there is no reason for a simple rendering tool like the Adobe Reader to be so large, gobble up so much memory and take an eternity to fully launch.

As an alternative, I use Foxit PDF reader and have used it for several years. I would recommend this one blindly as it is lightning fast, very light and does its job very well...it lets me read PDF's....for free, with no ads or anything... [you can get it here]

There are plenty of alternatives, some with more capabilities than others, but here is a post with about 30 other options for PDF readers.

Read more: http://www.cartridgesave.co.uk/news...

Here is another example of my forgetfulness... I saw a small, addictive Flash game somewhere and I can't find it anymore. It involved an object that you could drag and then several other objects moving around the screen.

The goal is to avoid touching any objects or the walls.

Here is my attempt at recreating this small game in Silverlight 1.0 (click on the image). As usual, nothing refined, just a functional model.

You may wonder why I am not diving into Silverlight 2.0...? Well, that version is still in beta and although I have experimented with it, I don't want to post any example yet, as most folks still have the 1.0 version installed and may not want to install a beta version of the player.

Enjoy! 

Silverlight Chase Game 

Distracted from what I was doing, I stumbled upon this excellent and inspiring clip. Truly one clip we should all watch every single day, first thing in the morning... I mean that. We go about our daily lives not realizing how we are wasting our youth; that precious substance of which we have less of, every day that goes by.... that and other magnificent advice.

From the Wikipedia article: "Wear Sunscreen or Sunscreen Speech are the common names of an essay actually called "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young" written by Mary Schmich and published in the Chicago Tribune as a column in 1997.

The most popular and well-known form of the essay is the successful music single released in 1999, credited to Baz Luhrmann." This version with subititles in Spanish.

Listen carefully and enjoy!

You just have to wonder that with today's technology and vast knowledge that we'd have robots in place everywhere, exactly as we were promised 30 years ago. Most attempts at designing and developing robots that emulate human or animal like movements have been, well, let's say, not so human or animal like...

Until I saw BigDog: incredibly beautiful and creepy at the same time. The project is funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency), you know the same folks that brought you the Internet... 

Make sure to check out 0:37...the immediate response is simply incredible and behaves so realisticly that I think I even felt a bit sorry for the steel beast.  

Their website is not much to look at and painfully slow, but check out their other robots...

Finally Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 has been released. This is a big release with lots of new features, as Scott Guthrie mentions: "Silverlight 2 includes a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Framework, and enables a rich .NET development platform that runs in the browser. 

Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby)."

Of course I w illbe posting some new experiments very soon.

Get the download, documentation, SDK and tools via silverlightexamples.net 

Silverlight 2.0 is about to be released in the next few days and I had yet to spend any time with version 1.0. I barely know how it works and thus decided to take a few hours here and there and put together a meaningless, but fun project, just to understand how it works.

Also, I know that the newer version 1.1 is in alpha and readily available, but I wanted to however still learn with the first version and understand the core basics of it.

This technology has tremendous potential and will be key in many, many future applications, especially with its close integration to .NET as it is basically a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation. Unlike (formerly Macromedia) Flash which uses Actionscript and a propietary editor, Silverlight uses standard languages such as XML, Javascript and any of the .NET languages in the next version. 

My first humble attempt at this technology produced a slide puzzle, like we all used to have as kids, but instead of a static image, its pieces contain a fraction of live video. Check it out!

Silverlight 1.0 Video Slide Puzzle. 

I was thinking about ways of cutting unnecesary spending last night and thought that I tend to waste a few dollars on so many things that doesn't seem so much at the time, but when it is all added up....well, it adds up.

A cup of coffee in the morning, a snack bar in between, sometimes a pastry at midmorning, then lunch and maybe another coffee in the afternoon.  A couple of dollars at the time X a few times a day X twenty workdays = a lot of $$$. Think about it, even if it is just lunch at $8 per day for a to go salad or sandwhich is ($8 x 20days) $160 per month!

A clever dude has some really good information on how to spend only $6.99 for an entire month on lunch; even if not followed exactly the same, his approach is very good and can be altered to fit your needs and definitively to keep your spending lower than it currently is.

Read more: An illustrated frugal lunch by A Clever Dude. 

Visual Studio 2008 had several issues in its first release of slowing down or even freezing temporarily when developing web applications, especially large ones.

This hotfix addresses some fo these issues.

A readme file included in the download details every issue covered in this hotfix.

For more details check out Scott Guthrie's post on this release.

You can find the direct download here.

I noticed this section recently in MSDN on how to accomplish certain tasks shown in brief 2 - 15 minute videos. There are many categories that range from ASP.NET to SilverLight to Visual Studio, etc. and each category contains a many topics.

This is a link I will definitively store in my favorourites.

Especially useful for those of us sometimes too lazy to read...

Check it out: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/...

Visual Studio 2005 is probably one of the most complex pieces of software ever developed. It has so many features, so many tools to (try to) satisfy every developer that is trying to accomplish such a wide variety of tasks, that it is easy to see how a product lile that could become very bloated and sluggish.

So, how do I speed it up? Here are some tips I have collected over time:

• Disable the Splash Screen
  Add the following parameter to your VS2005 shortcut: "C:\Program Files\...\devenv.exe" -nosplash
  Note: the same trick applies to Business Intellgience Managment Studio and SQL Management Studio....
  
• Install Visual Studio Service Pack 1
  get it here.
  
• Turn off any IDE animated windows
  Go to Tools | Options | Environment and uncheck Animate environment tools.
  
• Get a faster hard drive - seriously
  Scott Gu writes: "What you are much more likely to block on is the Seek and I/O speed capacity with which your computer accesses your hard drive.  If you are using an application that needs to read/write a lot of files, it is not atypical for your CPU processor utilization to be really low - since the application might be spending most of its time just waiting for the disk operations to complete."
  
• Disable Startup Page
  Visual Studio tries to download the MSDN rss feed from the Internet at startup. Turn this feature off. Go to Tools | Options | General | Startup | Download content every and uncheck the box. 
  
• Set the Environment to empty at startup
  Go to Tools | Options | General | Startup | select Show Empty Environment
  
• Disable Navigation Bar
  If you are using ReSharper, you don't need VS2005 to update the list of methods and fields at the top of the file (CTRL-F12 does this nicely). Go to Tools | Options | Text Editor | C# and uncheck Navigation bar.
  
• Turn off Track Changes
  Go to Tools | Options | Text Editor and uncheck Track changes. This will reduce overhead and speeds up IDE response.
• Turn off Track Active item
  This will turn off jumping in the explorer whenever you select different files in different projects. Go to Tools | Options | Projects and Solutions and uncheck Track Active Item in Solution Explore. This will ensure that if you are moving across files in different projects, left pane will still be steady instead of jumping around.
  
• Turn off AutoToolboxPopulate
  There is an option in VS 2005 that will cause VS to automatically populate the toolbox with any controls you compile as part of your solution. This is a useful feature when developing controls since it updates them when you build, but it can cause VS to end up taking a long time in some circumstances. To disable this option, select the Tools | Options | Windows Forms Designer and then set AutoToolboxPopulate to False.
  
• Install the Public Hotfix Patch
  for VS 2005 F5 Debugging Performance Issue with ASP.NET. You can get it here.
  
• Keep MRU Lists Under Control.
  One sure way to slow down the startup of Visual Studio is to have a lot of files and projects in the recent file and recent project lists. This is especially apparent if you have any projects in the MRU list that are located on a networkshare. consider this handy MRU cleaner add-in.

"So we all know how planes fly, right? The top of the wing is rounded and the bottom of the wing is straighter. Air takes longer to travel over the top of the wing, which means there’s less air pressure there relative to the bottom of the wing.

That means there’s more air pressure on the bottom — hence the lift. Right?

Nope."

Read more: http://dmiessler.com/...

One of the most important features I look for in an enterprise application is the ability for a developer to take the products and customize it to fit and fill the business need. In simple words, it needs to be extensible and it needs to be able to integrate with other existing applications.

SharePoint 2007 has greatly enhanced its capabilies in these two fields with something called SharePoint Features. In essence, "SharePoint Features" is a plug-in framework, that allows a developer to extend SharePoint in any way that he wants to.

In this tutorial we will be walking through the entire process from the very beginning in easily explained terms.

Read more: http://www.miguelmoreno.net/sandbox/...

I just posted about this yesterday but found a new site that has a concept I think is worth mentioning.

I have just registered and have yet to play with it some more but it seems it has quite a bit of content. There are hours of free courseware for several languages as well, but mainly it focuses on allowing you to social network with people who speak the native language that you are trying to learn and vice versa.

read more: http://www.livemocha.com

I think I have posted about learning a new language before and it not easy to find an application or software that is easy to use and free. Well, I came across this web based language application that, so far, is free and easy to use....really.

They have several languages and it starts out really easy, assuming you have absolutely no experience whatsoever.

read more:  http://www.trymango.com/

"Do you like the annoying message that keeps asking you to restart your computer after installing windows updates every 10 minutes?

If you choose 'Restart Later', this question will appear again every 10 minutes."

Here is a way to eliminate this behaviour...

Read more: http://www.techdo.com/?p=86

I had to do some simple form validation the other day and thought to myself that, in our current Web 2.0 world, I should do it with AJAX since it is really everywhere and it didn't even cross my mind todo it the old fashioned way with plain Javascript, which might do the job just a good. 

So, I stumbled upon Live Validation which offers a lightweight, open source javascript library to do just that: realtime form validation with some very useful features. They have some excellent examples here and the code is decently commented. Definitively a must have in my toolbox!

Read more: http://www.livevalidation.com/

I know a few people very close and very dear to me who suffer from depression and it is so difficult to communicate and understand what exactly it is that they are going through.

From time to time, I can feel a little down myself, without a specific reason to explain my careless mood. However, for people who are depressed more than ocassionaly and often require medication, it has simply become part of their lifes...so much that it seems that mood simply takes control. I don't undertand how someone can not be in control of themself...and I have learned not to try to understand either...I don't think I would be able to understand anyways, even it were to happen to me.

Here is a very brief article that attempts to explain in a few paragraphs how people feel when they are depressed, why it happens and how you should react.

Read more:  http://psychcentral.com/

Update: site seems to be down...here is Google's cache version. 

"Survival of the fittest is a phrase which is a shorthand for a concept relating to competition for survival or predominance. Originally applied by Herbert Spencer in his Principles of Biology of 1864, Spencer drew parallels to his ideas of economics with Charles Darwin's theories of evolution by what Darwin termed natural selection. [wikipedia]"

Now, we know this well established concept is applied to everyday living organisms. But what about the not so obvious ones...? What about M & M's?

Read more: http://www.laughbreak.com/stories/

Resizing an image is nothing new, and if you maintain the aspect ratio, it will look exactly the same but smaller or larger: smaller, you'll see less of it and larger, you'll distort the image.

But what if you could in some way, intelligently resize an image without distorting the content of it...? What if that intelligent technology could identify the less important background pixels in an image and delete those to shrink the image without touching the main object in the middle?

That sounds crazy, but that is exactly what this technology will offer. (Imagine this technology built into your browser...)