New toy at work! Dell E1905FP UltraSharpTM 19 inch LCD monitor right in front of my desk, and this thing is massive. Oh well, some developers got two for dual display, and that is spelt MASSIVE. I am hooking it up to my Dell Latitude D600, and its 14″ screen is small, dim, lack of contrast, and a little bit too sharp for my eyes. After working with our new E1905FP for a few hours in the afternoon (mostly coding inside Vim under SSH sessions), here is my initial impression:
- Oh, so big :)
- Very bright. Factory default for brightness is 100, and I have to drop it to 75 to avoid being blinded by its glare (no, only kidding).
- Very dark. Actually, the correct word is very high contrast. You’ll never find pitch darkness in LCD monitors, but this one is very close.
- Not as sharp as I like. It might be because I am running it on D-Sub instead of DVI. The resolution (1280×1024) is also no comparison to my notebook’s (1400×1050). But the text is clear enough for coding all day.
I am still getting used to looking at two monitors with very different characteristics at the same time…
Slashdot reports Adobe buys Macromedia for USB$3.4 billion. Do I smell the monopoly for the graphics productive software? And we will see further domination of Flash for the interactive websites. I wonder what will Microsoft and the Open Source world will react to it.
Vade-Mecum is the plucker file viewer for the Windows Mobile devices. I’ve used Plucker in my Palm III days, and absolutely loved it. Great that it is also available on Pocket PC’s.
Burnham reckons that Friendster is in trouble as its model of social network application is not innovative. It still uses the possibility of “dating” as its main attraction, which in reality has very limited audiences and short participation life time. There are many others that are more innovative, and some has just got too much resource to make it a fair competition.
Ross Gittins of SMH argued that a cut on the top-marginal tax might do worse to the society, because of our rivalry nature and the zero-sum game in status seeking. Very interesting read. Maybe governments of Hong Kong and Singapore should continue raising their income tax.
Drupal is releasing their latest and greatest, which is 4.6.0 at the moment. This is great, especially after I’ve spent my afternoon setting up a site using the old 4.5.2 version. D’oh. This always happens.
7 ways on how to shuffle a deck of cards, with lots of images and demo video. I better learn this one. One reason why I dislike card games is that I usually just make a mess when shuffling.
I think I now understand why goods and services are so damn expensive here in Australia – because the real wealthy people usually only pay a little bit more than half price for those items, that results the poor people (or not so informed people) getting ripped off.
I don’t mind having John Paul II’s funeral today, but I am very glad that Charles and Camilla have rescheduled their wedding to tomorrow, the 9th of April. At least I know that I do not have to celebrate my anniversary with them… :)
Had sore throat this morning and felt sick. Email work that I’m going to take a sickie, and then realise how many of them have I taken so far this year.
Must have been this age thing. Or maybe lack of exercise. Or maybe over stressed. Or maybe all of the above…
Yeah. One more ride on this blue planet around the sun will bring the number to the utterly evil big three-oh. Hopefully it will be a slow ride…
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One thing I really liked about Yahoo! 360 (ask me for an invite if you have not got one) is its implementation of access control. You can choose from multiple level of privacy for different sections of your Yahoo! 360. For example, you might want everyone on 360 to see your real name, restrict your residential address to only your 2nd degree friends, and then further restrict your primary email address to your first degree friends. Access control applies to not only your basic info, but also your full profile, your “Blast”, your lists and groups, and your blog.
Access control on blog is fantastic, especially when your blog is used mainly as a personal journal/diary whose writing might not be suitable for public consumption. Want only your close friends to know what you have been doing last weekend? Want to blog about your thoughts on certain complicated issues, but do not wish to share with everyone? Easy. And Yahoo! 360 does all the authentication and user management for you.
Moreover, when the privacy level is set to only your first degree friends, you can further restrict the visibility of your blog by your friend “Categories”. You can allocate your friends to one or more categories, or default to “Uncategorised”. Now let’s see. Shall I start a personal blog there that actually blocks everyone who knows me personally from reading it?
Hmmm…
In the April 2005 issue of In The Black magazine, there is an interesting article “Where is your manner?” designed for business travellers so they’ll know how to behave appropriately in different cultures. Out of the 10 trivial questions, I could only answer 4 correctly – and that was only because the background culture for these questions were Australia, Taiwan and China! For example, take this one:
- When meeting a potential business partner in France, if you use the gesture that in North America, Britain and Australia means ‘OK’ (thumb and index finger joined together), according to his culture you’re saying:
- You can’t hear him
- You think he’s worthless
- You find him attractive
Yeah. Just don’t do that when you travel to France next time! (Check the article for the answer). And here’s one about Taiwan:
- When dining with a host in Taiwan, it is most polite for you to:
- Eat everything on your plate, regardless of odour, texture or taste
- Leave something on your plate at the end of the meal or your host might think that you are still hungry
- Offer your host something from your plate as a sign of generosity
No wonder many Taiwanese have jokingly replaced greetings like ‘Hello’ and ‘Good morning’ with ‘Have you had enough food?‘