Entries for tfraser

New Design for Microsoft.com [New Design for Microsoft.com]

tfraser — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 04:12:57 GMT

Well, sort of.

I was automatically directed to what seems to be the test page for the new design of Microsoft.com. At the moment it just looks like a slightly altered (and unfinished) rehash of the current one, though I expect that it's still a while off being done yet.

The main navigation definitely makes it easier to find things now, but I still think they need to cut down on the amount of information that's presented in the panels below the Silverlight feature.

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The Programming IQ Test [The Programming IQ Test]

tfraser — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 07:12:44 GMT

I found this semi-humorous, semi-serious IQ test for developers and thought it was quite neat and worthy of a mention here.

Some questions have obvious answers but there's also a few that could stump you (or at least stumped me). Oddly, the joke questions were harder than the technical ones.

I scored 65 (out of 100), though I should add that I intentionally sacrificed some points at Question 10 (you'll understand when you get there). If you take the test then post your results so all the Niners can see.

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A More Reliable Task Manager [A More Reliable Task Manager]

tfraser — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 12:32:43 GMT

The other day my system encountered a full freeze where I wasn't able to access Windows Task Manager, therefore making a reboot the only solution. With the crash-catching and application recovery improvements in Windows Vista this doesn't happen often, but when it does it's a real pain.

This got me wondering whether WTM could be made a more reliable way of rescuing the OS. I'm thinking of something where a small section of the CPU and RAM resources could be permanently reserved for use by WTM in the event of a freeze. This way WTM can still be started and used to trim some troublesome processes to restore Windows to a functioning state. I'm aware that the resource requirements of WTM vary based on other currently running processes, but surely calculating this would not be overly complex.

The concept seems so obvious to me that I'm certain Windows already has something similar, though if the feature does indeed exist it clearly isn't working the way it should. What are your thoughts on it? Do you think it would be useful or viable?

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ExitReality [ExitReality]

tfraser — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 09:22:03 GMT

Out of nowhere it seems has come this application called ExitReality from an Australian-based software company.

In short, it's a browser plugin that converts any web page you visit into a 3D environment. I have only just started to tinker with it so I don't know much about what it is capable of but at first glance it seems pretty nice.

It can be downloaded at ExitReality's web site.

Edit 1: I was just in The Coffeehouse and while all of the content is there it seems to be having serious trouble presenting it in a 3D context. For a better idea of what it can do take a look at some of the examples given on the web site. I'm wondering how difficult it would be to get The Coffeehouse looking nice in this thing.

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Our Leet Coffeehouse [Our Leet Coffeehouse]

tfraser — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:14:37 GMT

The Coffeehouse reached quite a significant milestone today when the number of pages of threads reached (and then exceeded) 1337, officially making it forever a leet forum and for a brief moment one of the leetest places on the whole Internet.

I captured the excitement with this screenshot:

Edit 1: I know this is inane but it had to be done.

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MythBusters Take On Parallel Computing [MythBusters Take On Parallel Computing]

tfraser — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 12:36:35 GMT

Boing Boing Gadgets has an article (with video) about the demonstration made by Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman on the last day of the NVISION 08 conference.

It seems to me that this is just the latest in NVIDIA's series of not-so-subtle attacks on Intel and the CPU industry in general. The basis of the CPU robot hardly reflects the multi-core architecture found in modern CPUs, while the GPU robot significantly overstates the extent to which parallel processing is used in similarly recent GPUs.

Details aside though, the sight of 1100 paint balls drawing the Mona Lisa in 275 milliseconds has something inherently awesome about it.

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Decisions, Decisions [Decisions, Decisions]

tfraser — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 06:34:36 GMT

Between late 2008 and early 2009 I will leave the sheltered and safe environment of secondary education and enter the big, bad world of tertiary studies.

One area I am interested in and considering is software development, though I'm faced with a small problem; the University of Queensland, which I will most probably be attending, offers two appropriate yet entirely separate courses related to this field and I am unsure as to which one I should be including in my list of preferences (that which will best prepare me for a career in software development).

The two courses are a Bachelor of Engineering (in which Software Engineering is a major) and a Bachelor of Science (in which Computer Science is a major). From what I can tell the two majors are fundamentally very similar which makes it difficult to choose between their parent degrees. I would have thought that software engineering would be the more focussed of the two, but I have noticed lately that in many cases software developers have graduated from a computer science course.

I know that many of you are or have been in a similar situation and would value your input on the subject.

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