If you want to try a new operating system, but don’t want to put your computer and data to the risk of being corrupted, virtual machines can come in handy. They are small programs simulating to be a completely independent system with CPU, GPU, memory, HDD, DVD drive and so on and can run another operating system parallel to the one you’re actually using.
There are three major virtual machines out there: VMware Player, Sun VirtualBox and Microsoft VirtualPC. I took a look at all of them and compared their strengths and weaknesses. If you want to read the full review, have a look at the posts below:
A newly released pre-alpha version of Opera promises to radically improve the browser’s performance and speed of displaying and loading websites. The official developer website even claims that “[Opera 10.50] is fast, more than 7x faster in SunSpider than Opera 10.10“. Since Google Chrome has been the fastest browser on the market so far, followed by Apple’s Safari browser, we may have a new player among the best-performing browser.
I downloaded and tested Opera 10.50 and found out that it actually is much faster than before, but also very unstable. I ran Peacekeeper three times, the first time it went well, the second time it was much slower and the third time it didn’t start the benchmark and showed just a blank page. I had to re-install Opera in order to fix this problem. But please keep in mind that this is a pre-alpha release and not meant for everyday use.
In comparison to Chrome 5.0.307.1, Opera 10.50 lost by 12.8%, which is actually a big improvement compared to Chrome 2.0.170 and Opera 9.64, where Opera lost by 60.2%. Safari, once the fastest browser, scored 28.6% less than Chrome, thus giving up its second place to Opera.
Considering the fact that Opera is still pre-alpha and that the development team will improve it before releasing the final version, one can expect Opera’s Peacekeeper score to increase again, bringing it dangerously close to Chrome.
On 26th November 2009, the ”World’s Largest Digital Festival” DreamHack Winter started in Jönköping in Sweden. I was lucky and won the journey to Sweden as well as the ticket, sponsored by Razer. Razer even chartered a bus and painted it with the Razer logo just for the DreamHack festival:
The official website describes DreamHack as “the word’s largest LAN-party and computer festival” with more than 12,000 participants. DreamHack is focused on everything one can do with computers: gaming, communication, programming, designing, music and so on. Moreover, there were many gaming tournaments with famous teams from all over the world in games such as Counter-Strike, Quake, Warcraft 3 and Street Fighter.
Participants had to bring their own computers and equipment, but got a quite nice Gigabit Ethernet and an extremely powerful internet infrastructure in return. Speed-Tests I did on DreamHack certified downstreams of almost 100MB/sec and upstreams of almost 50MB/sec. In actual downloads, I was able to reach 7.5MB/s downloading and 8.7MB/s uploading.
In addition to gaming events, there was also a Dream Expo of different hardware and software companies showing products and doing overclocking competitions or giving away products. Furthermore, live bands and singers, games and events on stage and movie screening during night added to the fun. There were also lots of really powerful computers (the best featuring Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition, 12GB DDR3 RAM, 4xGTX 295) with many games installed (Modern Warfare 2, Couter-Strike, Left 4 Dead 2) provided by different hardware and software vendors (Razer, Fujitsu, R.U.S.E). Thus even persons visiting DreamHack without a computer or any hardware had enough to see and enjoy.
Surprisingly, 10% of all participants were female and some were even competing in the tournaments. I will add some pictures and a video in hope of giving you an idea about DreamHack!
Since October 1st, 2009, this website is hosted on a new and hopefully faster and more reliable server. Hostmonster is providing the hardware, and since their computing centre is located in the USA, the website should be faster when being accessed from the United States. Moreover, I got a new domain multimolti.com and all traffic to multimolti.de is redirected to the new domain.
If you find any links still pointing to the old .de-domain, please notify me so I can change it. Thank you!
For some time, the developers at Google were working at a solution to make their search engine faster. Now you can test the new search architecture called “Caffeine” yourself.
Obviously, they reached their goal of increasing the search speed, but didn’t change the search behavior. When searching for normal terms, you can feel a speed increase of up to 75% in my tests, but when using more complex searches with quotes, there is almost no difference.
Adblock scripts for Firefox, Opera and even Internet Explorer have been around for a while, but until now, there was no easy-to-install extension for Google Chrome with a similar  functionality. The latest release of Google Chrome, version 3, has added easy support for extensions, and a nice guy called gg3po has developed an extension to disable advertisements on websites.
Step 2: Update Google Chrome
In Chrome, click on the settings button (on the right side) and select About Google Chrome. The appearing window will check for updates and download them, if available. After the download finished, close Chrome.
Step 3: Enable extensions
Now right-click on your Chrome shortcut, select Properties. Add “–enable-extensions” (without the quotes) as launch parameter to your Target path.
Step 4: Download AdSweep
Launch Chrome, now extensions should be enabled (although you won’t see any change yet). Go to http://www.adsweep.org/ and download the Extension for Chrome (not the User Script!) (alternative download). A window will pop up asking you whether to install the extension, click OK.
Step 5: Restart Chrome & start surfing ad-free!
Now most ads on websites shouldn’t show up any more!
This is how a website looked before and after enabling the AdSweep extension:
There are so many websites out there who can calculate Currency Exchange Rates for you, e.g. Google Search, Bing Search or Yahoo Currency Converter. But what if you just want to have the exchange rate to use in your Desktop or Web Application? It would be kinda troublesome to extract the rate from one of the websites above, especially when they decide to change the layout of their HTML code.
The API updates itself once an hour, so the values you’re getting may be up to 1h old. This should be good enough since these values are for information purposes only.
How can I use the API on my website?
This example shows how to use the API to display 100$ in € (please replace the & stuff in the URL with a normal &, can’t display it correctly here):
$amount = 100; // amount in your original currency, e.g USD
$oricurr = "USD"// iso code for your original currency
The calculator works almost the same way as the API itself. Call calculator.php with three parameters: original, target and value. original and target are ISO codes of the currency, and value is the amount of orignal currency to convert. The output is the corresponding amout of target currency.
How accurate are the values?
The acuracy of the exchange rates can’t be guaranteed. All values are for informational purposes only. See the footer of the index page for more information.
On May 15, 2009 Wolfram|Alpha (sometimes just called WolframAlpha) went online. Wolfram|Alpha (in the following just refered to as “WA”) is an answer engine, meaning it can handle complete sentences and questions as search queries.
The special thing about WA is that it doesn’t just display a filtered collection of links to other websites matching your search query, it rather “compiles” all available information on the internet into a overview page showing all interesting facts about the term you searched for.
Currently, the website is mainly focussed on natural sciences (mathematics, physics, engineering), geographical data, stocks and unit conversion, but I’m sure more topics will follow soon. Currently, searching for “The Beatles” returns nothing, but searching for a some mathematical equations gives you a hell lot of information: Plots, Limits, the Derivative, Series representations, Integrals, … It can even show you the way it computed the Derivative with explanations about the methods used.
When entering cities or countries, you will get a map and information about the population, weather, flag, languages, currency and so on. Wolfram|Alpha can also compare data, e.g. the GDP of China and the USA.
Whole sentences are fragmented into different parts, e.g. “Where was Bill Gates born” is structured into “Bill Gates” and “place of birth”, resulting in “Seattle, Washington” and the geographical information about Seattle. Wolfram|Alpha answers some questions in a humorous way, e.g. when asking for the meaning of life, it returns “42″ (quote from “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”).
All in all, Wolfram|Alpha seems to be a very good alternative to Google when searching for information in one of the topics mentioned above and wanting to have a quick overview over the most important data.
Now that the actual development of Windows 7 is finished, Microsoft seems to begin with Windows 8 according to different sources on the Internet. The new operating system will include innovative new features like cluster support, a “revolutionized file access in offices” and is called a “cutting-edge project”.
“Are you a talented SDE/T Lead looking for the next technical challenge on a key operating system component? Are you passionate about distributed systems, networking, file systems and want to be the leader of a cutting edge project? Are you looking for a team with abundant opportunities to grow? If so, we have the position for you!
DFSR is Microsoft’s premier file replication engine and is an integral part of our branch office strategy and File Server role. It can scale to thousands of servers and replicate hundreds of terabytes of data. We have shipped the technology that powers file sharing in Windows Live Messenger, Windows Meeting Spaces (Vista) and Branch Office replication in Windows Server 2008 which has strong customer deployment. DFSR technology saves MS-IT and our customers more than 80% WAN bandwidth by using advanced On-The-Wire differential compression.
For the upcoming version of Windows, new critical features are being worked on including cluster support and support for one way replication. The core engine is also being reworked to provide dramatic performance improvements. We will also soon be starting major improvements for Windows 8 where we will be including innovative features which will revolutionize file access in branch offices.”
Since Steve Ballmer announced shorter periods of developing their operating systems after the long time we had to wait for Vista, it makes sense that Microsoft starts that early with the development. On the other hand, it may turn out that it’s just a typing mistake in the job description. Until this moment, Microsoft didn’t confirm the speculation.
Just a few weeks ago Futuremark, a company known for creating benchmark programs for Windows computers (3DMark and PCMark), released a new benchmark called “Peacekeeper“. Peacekeeper tests various browser functions such as JavaScript arrays, DOM functionality, rendering and other things often used by today’s modern websites like YouTube, Facebook and GMail.
Why would you need a browser benchmark? The better a browser performs on your system, the faster websites are shown and can interactively been used. This is especially needed when browsing Web 2.0 websites, and on low-end PCs such as netbooks the difference can really be a barrier. I experienced this using my favourite browser Firefox 3.0 on my Asus Eee PC 900: When typing and address into the address bar, the “intelligent search” feature needs so much computing power that the whole browser is stuck. Also using GMail or Facebook doesn’t make fun when you have to wait for a second before you can click, scroll, type, etc… That’s why I switched to Google Chrome. Jukka Mäkinen, Head of PC Products and Services at Futuremark, said:
“People have more choice now in how they experience the internet than ever before. But they may not realize that performance between browsers can vary dramatically, especially on lower-end PCs. With Peacekeeper, it’s simple to compare different browsers and see which one offers the best performance on your PC.”
