Archive for category Software
The Incredible Tide
This is the original title of the book by Alexander Key which inspired the japanese anime of my childhood, Future Boy Conan (Mirai Shounen Konan) by Hayao Miyazaki.
Finding that book and purchasing the DVDs of the anime was on my to do list since a very long time. Then suddenly on december 26th a real incredible tide stroke South East Asia, a world tragedy I think will remain impressed in our memory like a few others. The reference to the anime came immediately to my mind, since the tide which changed the world of Conan impressed me a lot when I was a child.
Well, now watching those terrible videos as well as the astonishing satellite images of the areas involved by the real tsunami made me feel breathless and almost as without the earth under my feet, although I watched it from a warm home.
It will take time to fully understand the real proportions of this tragedy, but by finally being able to read the book by Alexander Key I’d like to close with a quote by Hayao Miyazaki, which sums up the meaning of the book and gives a hint of hope to the people involved in the tragedy, both those who faced the tide in first person and those who watched it from a safe distance and are now willing to help:
“What fascinated me about the book was its main meaning: at the fall of any ‘great civilization’ some ‘primitives’ always take the lead, not to be intended in negative terms, but as people with a great vital strength, full of vitality and willing to rebuild a new world. It’s their vital pulse which captured me.”
I think you’ll agree these are wise and current words. I’ll write again about this event in one of the next updates.
Update: speaking about satellites, on December 23rd the local daily newspaper La Provincia published my full page article about GPS and TomTom Go.
BatteryLife Activator Test
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on December 21, 2004
When I first read about the BatteryLife Activator I got immediately curious, although I admit I was pretty skeptic about its real capabilities until I read positive comments on some german websites. This mysterious black foil appeared to keep its promises of increasing the charge of a common lithium ion battery by up to 30%, which was pretty amazing actually.
But it wasn’t enough for me and I asked for a sample to make some tests. The guys at BatteryLife sent me the samples and then I’ve been able to use them on the batteries of my Axim X3 and of my Motorola MPx200. On the Axim I run the Spb Benchmark with the option “Max backlight, standard using” several times and if I got 3:05 hours without the Activator, once I applied it on the battery I got results up to about 3:35, which is exactly the increment the Activator promised to provide.
On the MPx200 I did a different test by playing the default video sample at full volume with the Media Player and I got the same percentage increase from about 4:00 to 4:35 hours until the device went off automatically. I’m very satisfied of this product and I hope it will be commercialized and promoted even in Italy. I also wrote an article about it for the local daily newspaper La Provincia, which you can find it here in PDF format.
The advantages of the Activator extend beyond increasing the standby and the talk times by even shortening the battery charging time up to 40%, something I’m glad to confirm, and providing a longer lifetime for the battery itself. Very interesting improvements especially considering a street price of only 9.90 Euro per foil.
Now that I’m fully back to my development schedule with the new workstation, I really hope to make old and new Ecpc users a nice Christmas present with the release of version 1.4.
The next update will be the one they’re waiting for! 😉
Hardware Upgrade and EmEditor
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on December 8, 2004
If used heavily, sooner or later a PC turns into a snail, and I don’t mean the nice gastropod featured in the game Snails by PDA Mill, which I installed on my Pocket PC and Smartphone thanks the special offer reserved to Pocket PC Thoughts subscribers.
That’s to say I’m in the middle of a complete hardware upgrade. In the building of the new workstation I took particular care of two aspects: a fast mass storage subsystem, the real bottleneck of modern PCs, by installing two Barracudas in RAID-0 mode, and a quality Chieftec case providing a good internal ventilation and most importantly silence through the use of quiet fans. 8)
The next step has been the installation of the Windows XP Pro operative system and the software I daily use, each one with its customizations, a procedure that’s time consuming if done properly.
This time however it has been easier thanks to Raxco’s FirstDefense ISR and PerfectDisk, the first one useful for testing drivers and applications without messing with the main snapshot and the second one to keep the Barracudas defragmented. 🙂
And speaking about useful tools to improve productivity, I’m happy since I’ve finally found a text editor with great general features and full Unicode support, EmEditor, useful to edit the language files of Ecpc. Even better is the fact that it’s free for academic and technical use, which includes shareware authors. Thanks to Yutaka Emura of Emurasoft for his policy and as you can read in the Ecpc Wishlist page now I recommend his software to translators. 😉
Update: since at Raxco they’re happy that PerfectDisk v7.0 just won the 2005 Redmond Magazine’s Readers Choice Award for the “Best Disk Defragmentation Tool” they’re offering a 25% discount off their products with the promo code REDMOND25 that they invited me to share. 😉
Coming Full Circle at the Mobile Fun Forum 2004
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on November 26, 2004
On Wednesday 24 November I attended to the Wireless Forum Fall event and in particular I followed the Mobile Fun Forum 2004 conference.
The last year Ecpc won the Cellulari.it Special Award at the first edition of the Mobile Fun Awards and my friends from Impressionware did a big applause when I went on the stage to get the prize. This time they won the Best Gameplay Award for their Java game Metal Racers: Quad Bikes and I had the pleasure to congratulate with them, so I can say that the circle closed perfectly! 🙂
This year the event took place at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Milan. The expo area was much bigger and the event was divided into four main forums: the WLAN Business, the Mobile Office, the Mobile Fun and the Spam Forum.
I followed some interesting presentations during the morning in the Mobile Fun Forum area and I had the chance to meet some old friends such as Pietro of Bryo, Tiziano of Cellulari.it, Fabio of Wireless Gaming and the always kind Marco of Wireless. It’s good to know that wireless technologies are getting even more attention in our country, although mobile gaming and PDA sectors are not certainly at the pace of other countries.
If you’re curious to know if I passed the selections of the Premio Palinsesto Italia contest, well, the answer is no, as they communicated me a few days ago.
Since in any contest part of the fun is in participating, I asked them if the participants will have the chance to show their projects during the two days of the event, set to take place on December 10th and 11th in Bologna, but they told me this was not in program for the first edition of the contest and that they won’t even manage to publish all the submitted projects on the website too soon.
Although I’m curious to know more about the selected finalist projects I doubt I’ll attend to the prize-giving as I was going to, I’ve too much things to do to for the release of Ecpc version 1.4. 😉
Bill Gates at the Microsoft Technical Conference 2004
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on November 22, 2004
On Thursday 18 November I’ve been in Milan to attend to the Microsoft Technical Conference, held at the Assago Forum.
3008 people were present at the event, mostly developers and Technet or Msdn subscribers. The day quickly passed away among the presentations by Microsoft staff divided in four main areas.
Of particular interest have been the application installation and deployment issues discussed by the always brilliant and friendly Fabio Santini, although a bit unlucky with his demos ;), and a preview of the features of Visual Studio 2005 by Gabriele Castellani-Donald Duck voice, as a friend funnily pointed out.
Then Bill Gates performed the final speech in the crowded auditorium. It was the first time I saw him in person and I must say that it has been fascinating hearing about his visions of the incoming future and his intentions on focusing on well-made software to provide a challenging experience to the common non technical user.
After the speech he answered to three questions from as many MVPs and then he disappeared just as he came in. Here are some pictures of the event, sorry for the low quality of the digital camera I used.
Now some news about the incoming version of Ecpc: there’s still some testing to do, but judging from the increase of traffic towards the website it seems this release is getting some attention and that’s a positive sign considering the important switch to the Shareware distribution model I already announced.
This additional time will be well spent since I’ll probably also include the full spanish translation! 🙂
Ecpc version 1.4 Announced!
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on November 10, 2004
I’m ready with the announcement of the long awaited version 1.4 of Ecpc.
It’s currently in betatesting and I won’t release it until the transfer to the new hosting provider TotalChoice Hosting will be completed, but you can get a preview of the new features and changes in the Updates page.
To celebrate the announcement I’ve added a bonus section in the Download page where you can find a little present: a free Euro coins related Pocket PC theme made by McDeb.
Download it, it’s available even for WM2003 SE with QVGA and VGA support.
Another funny addition to the site are the seven deadly sins of e-mail I added to the contacts page, something everyone should keep in mind when dealing with e-mail, me included of course. 😉
It may take up to a week for the hosting transfer to complete, so enjoy the Euro coins theme and prepare for the re-launch of Ecpc! 8)
A Motorola MPx200 in my hands and Premio Palinsesto Italia Contest
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on November 6, 2004
Much work is going on behind the scenes around here and the next week is going to be even busiest.
Since I’m an expert at making things at the last minute ;), yesterday I’ve been able to send a participation dossier for the italian contest Premio Palinsesto Italia containing the latest 1.4 beta version of Ecpc and a preview of the desktop PC version with the same interface of the Pocket PC one, although I use it only for development purposes since the final desktop PC version will have a better and extended user interface.
Finally a contest with some money for the winners, something that might be vital lymph for the next projects if the submission will pass the selections and will go up to the final round. Let’s hope for the best, finger crossed!
I even got my first Smartphone this week, a Motorola MPx200. I don’t like the clamshell design, but I must say that the integration of e-mail, SMS, MMS, Outlook contacts and so on surprised me positively. It only needs a stylus! 😉
And considering that it’s very similar to a Pocket PC from a development point of view, you might expect a Smartphone version of Ecpc well before the desktop PC one.
If you like to read the blog and you check it out for updates every now and then, I suggest you to use the Mozilla Firefox browser and setup up a weekly check in the bookmark manager.
Tabbed browsing and an efficient bookmark management are the killer features which made me to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox as the default browser. Give it a try!
Another quick news: I’ll make a test of the revolutionary BatteryLife Activator. 8)
Update: since version 1.0 of Firefox the development team discarded the notification option in the bookmark manager since it was buggy. I hope to see it again, or maybe provided by some extension plug-in.
New Devices and Old Friends at SMAU 2004
On Friday 22 October I’ve been in Milan to attend SMAU 2004, the 41st International Exhibition of ICT and Consumer Electronics, the biggest event of this kind in Italy.
Although it’s getting smaller at every edition and this year even the big telecommunication operators such as TIM, Vodafone and Tiscali weren’t present, I’ve been able to spot something interesting in both the Windows Mobile and Palm worlds, to meet some old friends and to make a few new contacts.
In particular it has been a pleasure to meet again with Giorgio Cifani and Pino Paparone, the two Italian Microsoft MVPs for mobile devices, Enrico of Pocket PC Italia and Diego, editor of the Italian magazine Il Mio Palmare. There was even the troupe of Netcafé walking around the stands. 🙂
Here are some pictures I shot at the show. The first one is pretty curious. The new Asus A730 in VGA landscape mode with its 1.3Mpixel integrated camera pointed towards the HP stand, where visitors could find notebooks and printers, but alas none of their new iPAQs…
In the Windows Mobile corner of the big Microsoft stand Enrico showed me the new Qtek 9090, the Qtek 8010, the iPAQ 1710 and the Sagem My S7. For the Palm side of things at the Palmosoft stand I’ve been able to make a confrontation between the Tungsten T3 and the brand new Tungsten T5, both in 480×320 landscape mode.
At the end of the day I even got a good deal by purchasing the 2 DVDs box of the Schindler’s List movie, which I was searching for some time but I was not willing to pay it at full retail price. 😉
Essential Development Software
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on October 18, 2004
As I came back spending much more time in front of the compiler than I did in the previous months, I’ve also started searching for development tools which could increase my productivity or simply make the coding activity easier.
So, when I went back to the Wholetomato website I’ve really been pleased to see that Visual Assist X now supports even the Microsoft eMbedded Visual Tools which I use to build my software for the Pocket PC platform.
In short Visual Assist X is an enhancement to the so called Intellisense, but this definition is too much reductive. If you’re a developer using Microsoft IDEs just try it and you’ll immediately miss it after the trial version will be expired.
So I did and then I’ve purchased a license. On the Wholetomato website there’s also my quote rotating among their many testimonial comments. 🙂
Since Ecpc will soon go multiplatform I’m in the need of a more professional installation tool than EzSetup which I’m using now.
I’m evaluating e-PocketSetup and Installshield X, both finalists in the Pocket PC Magazine 2004 Awards. Unfortunately they doesn’t seem to offer a license model for hobbyists or independent developers.
The choice is an important one because when distributing your software the installation is the last thing you work on, while it’s the first thing the user has to face.
Yes, this means Ecpc version 1.4 is almost ready, although I might delay its release if the two new translators who’re working on the french version will complete the translation this week.
Strike or Die PayPal Donation Campaign
I recently moved the website dedicated to Strike or Die, my turn based wargame project now suspended due to lack of resources, here on the main website.
Every now and then someone contacts me asking something about its status, since to them it looks good and promising even if I’ve never released a public version of the latest alpha version.
This interest in the project just gave me the idea to start a donation campaign by adding a PayPal link as you can see in the product page, so that people who would like to contribute and support me in completing the wargame now have the opportunity to do it.
I really hope to get back to it as soon as possible, maybe already during 2005, and I plan to work even on a mobile version of SoD.
Any contribution to the project from my visitors will be very important, since I’ve found out long ago that no publisher is going to pay in advance for a wargame unless it has already reached beta status, which means almost finished, but going from alpha to beta is a lot of work…
I hope you’ll show your support if you’re interested in a good conclusion of the project.
The choice is only yours! 😉