IT Blogs

I had a quick look of Google Plus. I found that is a mixture of Facebook and Google Wave. You can put your contacts into different circles.You can get the friends' update from the circle. That is very similar in Facebook, you can put friends into the group. Another main feature of Google Plus is chatting. You can form a circle (group) to chat. That sounds like Google Weave. Just now, they don't call it weave, calls it circle!

Those features are interesting, I may try it out in the future.

I am very happy about the performance of Kubuntu 11.04! My old laptop only has Duo T7500 and 4GB Ram. T7500 has only 2 cores(2Ghz) and 4MB Cache. In such configurations, I found my old laptop is not much worse than my new laptop(Win7) which has i7 2630 QM and 8GB RAM. 2630GQM has 4 cores (2Ghz) and 6MB Cache. I think at least 2 times powerful than my old laptop, that has double number of CPU cores and RAM. Kubuntu is done a great job!

I got 12" old laptop, Asus F9 Series. It has Duo T7500 and 2GB RAM with Windows Vista Home. That is a bit old. Today, I did an upgrade. I change the RAM to 4GB. Originally, I wish to upgrade to 8GB. But the laptop only has DDR2 slots. The computer I went today has 2GB DDR2 RAM. Therefore, 4GB is the max I can have. I hope that will have good enough.
I did an OS upgrade too. I changed to use Kubuntu. That is lighter than Winodws, I think! Moreover it got more modern interface than Windows Visa.
Now, I successfully did the upgrade. The laptop is with Chrome, Mono and Java EE too! The most important is its performance is still OK!
(P.S. Kubuntu is installed successfully, all hardware drivers are working)

I wish to a rich user interface for my website. Well, HTML 5 is the best choice. But HTML 5 is still not easy to do some tasks, such as animations and charting. Then, Flash is the second best choice. A lot of platforms support this. But I need to learn it from scratch. In this case, Silverlight is a much better option. It is similar with WPF which I have learnt before.Moreover, the Silverlight is a component-based components. I can use some third-party controls to build the interface. Those third-party controls can be download from internet freely or just needs to pay a small amount of money. This can reduce the amount of coding. So, I choose to learn Silverlight

I have installed Silverlight 4 Toolkit - April 2010. I tried to drop a component in a xaml. But I got an error,
"Unknown namespace http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation/toolkit". I searched a solution for a while, but no luck at all! Finally, I got the cause I forgot to install Silverlight SDK4! I am so silly!
After I installed it, that works! Please remember set your visual studio project to use Silverlight 4 too!

I love Iconia A500. It got very good hardware specifications. It has NVIDIA Tegra 250 dual-core CPU 1Ghz with by 1GB RAM. All applications are running smoothly. Even I can play some hardcore 3D games, such as Need For Speed! That is so great!

Another good feature in Acer Iconia A500 I love! That is the External USB Port. It can connect to an USB Flash Drive. That is very convenient. For example, last Saturday, a friend needed to play a song in our fellowship. Before I bought my tablet, I needed to a netbook or laptop for playing songs. But now, I only need a tablet. I can plug it into my tablet and browser though a file explorer app. I picked the song and click it, then it will plays from the tablet. By the way, the sound quality of A500 is very good too!

Moreover, you can plug in an external keyboard to USB port. Now, you can turn A500 is a cut-down version netbook! That is so great!

I don't like wireless network. I don't feel that is safe at all. But how do I connect my Tablet, Acer Iconia A500, to internet?! Maybe, it got a USB port, then I can try to plug in an USB Network Card. Android is a kind of linux. It should support that and an USB Network Card only costs me $2. That is worth to try. But the result is failed. I guess Android did some in its linux kernel. They may blocks some drivers. I guess I have to root it. That is too much hassle. Finally, I bought a wireless access point.