IT Blogs

I think the hottest IT@topic today is Apple iPad. Last night, Steve Jobs announced the first Apple's tablet PC, iPad, in his keynote. The rumors were talking about that for long long time.
It doesn't bring a lot of surpises to myself. It looks like an over-sized iPhone. Moreover, it has another key feature, iBook. iPad sounds a good eBook reader. But I am more prefer an eInk screen. iPad is using LED-backlight screen. I can't stand for reading a textbook on this kind of screen for long time! But the price is very very attractice. For 16GB version, that is only USD$499!

Related link:
Apple iPad

I found Twitter has an new option on Trending. You can change the Trending to an individual country. But currently, they only provide the trending on these countries,included:
* Brazil
* Canada
* Ireland
* Mexico
* United Kingdom
* United States

Not Australia yet, so that is not very useful for me.

That is a bit hard to write a mp3 player in C#. I think you may need to find third party mp3 decoder dll. But if you only want to play to a wav file, that is very easy. .Net libraries already have a control class for you.

Code:

All you need to put the file name into the constructor

Code:

Then you can play and stop the file by these methods:

Code:

This afternoon, I wrote an example project for this. Moreover, this project is implemented in WPF rather than normal Windows Forms, because I wish to practice my WPF skills.

Download the example project, please click here.

You can jump to a new window by changing the content view.

Code:

But the type of Activity between two views must be same. In my case, I need to switch to a List view(Activity) from a normal window. I can't do by switching content views. The only way to do that is start a sub-activity, just like the following:

Code:

Yes, then it will jump to a new window, after the action completes, my code will call "finish();" from the sub-activity. Then it will jump back to the main window.

I went to Lamington National Park. I took some video. That sounds my camorder works much better in day time. The image is very sharp!

There is a big IT Gadgets event held in Las Vegas not long ago. That is the International Consumer Electronics Show(CES). I think that is a good time for the companies releasing their new phones. HTC released their new phone,HTC Smart, in there. This times is not Windows Mobile, and not Android. This is a Qualcomm BREW platform phone. That is quiet surprise. Now, HTC has phones on three platforms. What is their plan now? After Google released their own phone manufactured by HTC. I thought HTC will be close with Google and concentrate on Android platform. But now, new phone released on an OS.

Related Links:
HTC Smart Homepage

During last year Christmas Holidays, I brought myself a new toy, Panasonic HDC-SD20. This is a Full-HD SD camorder. That is around AUD$700. Not Expensive. But it is quite powerful. It got 16x optical zoom and optical image stabilizer. Moreover, it got 5.1 channel MIC. Let's see the quality of my new toy, this is 2010 New Year Firework in Brisbane:

There is a weakness. The software comes with the package is HD Writer. It has the basic video editing functions, such as adding title and transition. I can't find it to some more advance stuff, such as lightings. Well, that comes with the packages, I did not ask for much functions. I looked around some "professional" video software. The first software I tried is Corel Video Studio. That got very nice inteface, and a lot of friends recommended it. But it seems to be not support AVCHD, which is the format my cam using. Then I found Pinnacle HD Studio Ultimate. It supports this format and the interface is nice. There are a lot of built-in special effects!

I got a newsletter from Amazon. On 19 January, 2010, Kindle DX will be available internationally. This times, it got a bigger eInk screen 9.7".

Related Link:
Amazon

I am trying to reimage one of my old laptop which has Celeron 1.1Ghz and 128 RAM with a linux distro. I remeber I bought it on 2002 or 2003. 7 years old laptop! I have tried Xubuntu, it should be ok form 128 MB. But I can't get it running to GUI installer. It stopped at a black screen with a mouse cursor.

I found another lightweighted linux distro, Puppy Linux. It can get it running from a Live CD. But it can't detect my network card. Tomorrow, I will try Damn Small Linux. I hope it will work.

Google released their own branded phone, Nexus One. That is with 3.7" OLED screen and a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon. So, it should be super fast, may be faster than iPhone 3GS too. The most impressive function is voice enabled keyboard. Rather than typing, you can speak what you want to type in a textbox.
But that is an interesting point Nexus is manufactured by HTC. I am thinking wheather it is a Google Version HTC phone, same as Google I/O = HTC Magic.

Read more:
Google Offical Blog

Not long ago, WordPress 2.9 was released, I am very impressed by its improvements, such as the image resizing function. Today, WordPress released 2.9.1 version. That is a minor upgarde, only for fixing some small problems and making compable to the most of hosts.
Please download at http://wordpress.org/development/2010/01/wordpress-2-9-1/

Google Chrome OS is simple and quick. Please don't forget XUbuntu as well. Although XUbuntu is not customized for Atom, but that is light-weighted and fast. I got a VM with 512MB, that took less than 30 seconds to boot up. Moreover, that is a completed OS, not just a browser only!