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Showing posts from May, 2008

Is piracy killing Vista?

Its been a while since I blogged, I was out of town last week and have been a little busy lately. Its just one of those spur of moment topics that comes up in my head. I think one of the reason why Vista is failing is 'cause of piracy. Not 'cause its being pirated but due to the lack of piracy :) All of the older Microsoft products earlier were easy to pirate so not only legit users, but also users who did not pay could use them. But as Microsoft started adding more and more weird ways of copy protection the users who could easily pirate are unable to do so. Since there is low penetration in the legit world no one even bothers to pirate it. If nothing else Microsoft should remove the strict copy protection from Windows 7 and they will see a good enough reception, not only from the pirates but also legit users who in any case would pay for it. Just read somewhere that they might be soon demoing windows 7, here is hoping that they remove the copy protection and also reduce the mi

Commercial games released as freeware

Wikipedia has a huge list of commercial games that have been released as freeware. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_games_released_as_freeware Also listed are Open Source game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_games This entry is more like a bookmark so that I can come back and view it in case I am looking for a game.

Swinging with Java and Python

As always I am stuck with the option of developing the application in multiple languages. I still believe that application should be small with no bloat. Recently while testing I was amazed to see that a Java application can take as little as 1500Kb memory. So my next project is in Java and not Python as I had decided earlier. I was unable to find the libraries I needed in Python while I was able to find most of the things I needed in Java. Still not sure if this project will ever see the light of day but so far I've learned quite a lot about designing desktop applications in Java. And given the fact that JVM comes preinstalled on most computers be it a Windows based or a Mac it just makes sense to design the application using Java. Will add more once I get all the things in order. I've still not started the project so its still possible that it just might end up the the "Things to do".

Rendering HTML elements according to the system - I

I like things which look and feel like my OS. But I have rarely come across a site which looks and feels like an application running on my computer. Not like they are supposed to look like that but I have still been trying to figure out how they would look if the site could automatically change according to the user settings. In my quest to figure this one out, the first and the foremost thing to look at are the fonts. Most browsers have the magical property which allows you to get the font settings on the OS. This line should be in the menu font. This line should be in the caption font. On most browsers you should see the first line rendered with the font used in the menu 's and the second line rendered in the font used in the caption 's. Funny thing caption does not work in FireFox it works in Opera and IE. Getting down to the code its just a one line code. Just set the font property to menu or caption and thats all that you need to do. font: menu; font: caption; That is