Dating Design Patterns

I have been spending a lot of time looking into various software design patterns, so when I saw this on Thinkgeek.com I couldn’t help but laugh.

Christmas is almost here. What a great gift for your single geek friends.

Web Messenger

I did not know there was a web version of MSN Messenger. It doesn’t have everything that the desktop version has (it only focuses on chat) but if your company has blocked the MSN Messenger ports this is a great work around.

Actually the company that I work for blocked this site but didn't block the MSN Messenger ports.

Chat on!

IM the Encarta Server

I saw this on Chris Sells' blog. What you do is add encarta@conversagent.com to your MSN IM contract list and then you can chat with the Encarta server by asking it questions. The questions are somewhat limiting, however the idea of chatting with a computer is very interesting. Being that you are using an application that is primarily used to communicate with humans, this has an AI feel to it. It is very cool.

Example Questions:

• What is the population of the earth?
• Solve x+2=5

On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets

I thought this was good.

The funnies thing is that the first picture (of Ali Rahimi) looks just like one of the guys that I work with.

Application Response Time

I was listening to a podcast interview with Joel Spolsky and the interviewer mentioned a quote that I thought was quite good. He quoted Jacob Nelson (I hope I got that correct).

“If the application responds in a 10th of a second, then you feel like you are in control. If the application responds in a second, then you feel like you are being controlled. And if the application responds in 10 seconds, then it is broken.”

BTW: Joel had some interesting ideas on Ajax and Web 2.0.

Silicon Art

This is really cool. Over at Silicon Zone you can find some images found on processors.

I find it amazing how small these things are, you have to use a high powered-microscope just to see it. Even more amazing is the fact that chip builders would put these images on processors in the first place.

Daffy Duck

Where’s Waldo?

Tasmanian Devil

The Space Shuttle

Dilbert

External Hard Drive

After a couple of hard-drive failures I decided to get an external hard drive. I bought an external Coolmax CD-310-U2 series. It does not come with a hard drive but instead allows you to put your own hard drive in it. It connects to your computer via a USB connection. Being a hard drive junky, I like to have a couple of hard drives kicking around that hold my data. You can use any 3.5” IDE HDD (ATA66/100/133). (It does NOT support SATA hard drives.) It is quite easy to setup, all you do is plug in a formatted hard drive (set to master or default) into the case then close up the case and you are up and running. I then downloaded SyncToy for Windows XP and am using that to synchronize directories from my computer to the external hard drive. SyncToy was originally created to synchronize pictures across different machines. The only thing that I found that I wish it supported was the ability to synchronize just the files in a directory without scanning the subdirectories. So if you have files in you’re My Documents directory that you want synchronized, you have to synchronize the entire My Documents directory and subdirectories or copy the files to another folder. I ended up copying the files to a My Docs folder under My Documents. This is a little annoying but doable.