Ladies and Gentlemen,

Microsoft has quietly launched a hotfix for Vista graphic’s memory overflows. What is that? I hear you ask? When sometimes you play a game, you get interrupted with this dreaded ‘Out of Memory’ errors, then it’s due to the way Vista manages memory allocation when a game is being played.

How did this bug happen? The hard limit for a physical address space on a 32 bit computer is approximately 4 billion. In Vista, 2 billion is reserved for applications and the remaining 2 billion is reserved for the OS. Now, It appears a bug in Vista that handles the virtualized graphics card memory fills up this storage space quickly. As a result, you get the ‘out of memory’ error. To read more, please visit ArsTechnica’s article here.

The second news of interest, is that earlier today, Microsoft will most likely ship Service Package 1 of Windows Vista sometime by the end of the year. This potential date was floated by ArsTechnica. According to them, SP1 will be released to MSDN and Technet subscriber over the coming weeks.

A White Paper on Vista SP1 has also been released at Microsoft’s Window’s Vista Team Blog page. You can view it here.

One thing did catch my attention on SP1, It’s a minor one after the installation has completed, but if you’re low on disk space(highly unlikely unless you’ve been filling up your computer to the brim since you bought it in January, then free roughly 8 gb so that the installation of SP1 can finish smoothly. Why? Just look at the snippet below.

Installing the service pack will require a large amount of free disk space (7 GB for x86 and 12 GB for x64). However, most of this space will be reclaimed after installation

Well, I’ve not tried it yet, but few bloggers have already experimented with it.

If you want to hear their views on it, do visit the following two pages.

 Small Potato

Boren’s WordPress Taxonomy

JSuresh.net interrupts the daily (almost) publishing of tech news to wish fellow Malaysians “Selamat Merdeka”.

May our country grow more prosperous and more tolerant and be a beacon in the region, promoting actual tolerance between the diverse races, and perhaps in future, truly celebrate the diversity that our nation is endowed with.

Selamat Menyambut Hari Kemerdekaan.

To my American visitors, The Malaysian flag is very similar to the American flag because the ideals of America was the inspiration for the flag. So in another words, the original founders of Malaysia was looking towards America as a role model when the country gained her independence from Britain.

P.s: To my visitors, Could you please leave a comment. I just want to know how many of you are real people instead of bots. Thank you very much for taking the time to visit my humble little blog. I’ve just started this blog, but I hope to be able to churn out some articles of interest to you. Please click on the advertisements too. That would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot again.

Eclipse…What do you think o f it. Do you think of the following picture?

Or do you think of the following IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

Eclipse has recently(sometime in June 2007) released 21 projects under the codename Europa. These projects are as follow:

• · AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT)
• · Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT)
• · C/C++ Development Tools (CDT)
• · Data Tools Platform (DTP)
• · Device Software Development Platform – Device Debugging (DSDP.DD)
• · Device Software Development Platform – Target Management (DSDP.TM)
• · Dynamic Languages Toolkit (DLTK)
• · Dash (Eclipse Monkey)
• · Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF)
• · Eclipse Platform, JDT, PDE and Equinox.
• · Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF)
• · Eclipse Modeling Framework – Query, Transaction, Validation (MQ, MT, VF)
• · Graphical Editing Framework (GEF)
• · Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF)
• · Model Development Tools (MDT)
• · Model to Text (M2T) – JET
• · Mylyn
• · SOA Tools Platform (STP)
• · Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP
• · Web Tools Platform (WTP)

src: Eclipse.org

I’ve been using the latest Eclipse, Eclipse 3.3. Previously you only had one ‘type’ of Eclipse to Download. Now you have 5 choices, depending on your project requirement{Java,Java EE, C/C++, RCP/Plugin,Classic}. As usual, the downloads are all extendable, thus you can easily download other development toolkits when you need them from the Europa Update Server.

The changes in Eclipse can be seen at this page. I would like to highlight some of the changes that I’ve noticed since using the new version of Eclipse.

I like the new Minimize and Maximize feature.

When you click at the minimize and maximize buttons, tabs such as ‘Hierarchy’, ‘Console’, and ‘Problems’ all get minimized to the rim of the window. You can see it highlighted in the picture above. If you’re pressed for screen space. The above touch in the new 3.3, is a nice addition.

I`ve also used the newly enhanced Refactoring Tool. It is now more convenient. Just see it below.

Previously in 3.2, to do that, you had to go through a dialog box. With this new approach, you have less steps to perform.

I`ve only used the above two techniques. I’m sure you’d appreciate the changes in the latest version of Eclipse. I did not know about the new changes. I just stumbled upon this earlier this week by accident. So if you knew about it, well good for you. If you only knew about it now, well, I’m glad to be of service!

All Eclipse IDE pictures were obtained from here.

Just a small snippet of news.

This particular news caught my attention.

Windows Genuine Advantage server was down between 12 pm August 24 and 11 am August 25 (Pacific Time). As a result of this unfathomable incident, countless of users with VALID Microsoft Windows Operating Systems were not able to download updates and patches for their computer.

And that wasn’t the worse, If the software detects that your copy of Windows is not genuine, then it will shut down certain features. In Windows Vista, it turns of the Aero Feature.

Microsoft has fixed the outage of their WGA server. But at the time of writing this, still no news on the cause of the outage (if indeed Microsoft plans to tell us that).

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If you’re using Microsoft Office and Windows Vista, you may find this Time Saving tipshelpful

With respect to the title of the post, I probably would want to do that some time in the future.This means that you’ve gone from just being a user of WordPress to a consummate member of the WordPress community.Heck, I suppose, you can call yourself a ‘WordPress Evangelist’. Perhaps some one should come up with a banner that says, ‘WordPress Evangelist’ if you have successfully designed a WordPress theme. And if your theme is well received and you turn out to make more than 1 theme, perhaps we can upgrade the title to something more illustrious, say to the distinguished title of WordPress Master Evangelist and if you are one heck of a prolific WordPress theme designer, you can gain the title of WordPress Supreme Evangelist…or you can call yourself WordPress Big Kahuna.

I just browsed some sites and came up with this list. Perhaps some of you can contribute to this list as well.

Good Starting Points:

1. WordPress CODEX. It has various helpful tip for beginners who want to design but don’t quite know how to begin.
2. Lorell on WordPress. (Has tons of links there as well).

Beginning to Design WordPress themes:

1. WordPress CODEX: (Different Link than above). Touches on Theme Development. You should start here if you want to get an authoritative view on designing a WordPress theme.

Other Useful Sources.

cre8dDesign WordPress Design Links & Sources. Has tons of links there for you to refer when attempting to build your own theme.

I made my first Popfly Mashup today.Microsoft popfly is easy to use! I have not used Yahoo’s pipe, but I bet that too is user friendly. I’ll try making a Pipe Mashup next. It’s not difficult to do a Popfly Mashup. Just drag and drop the boxes, put in your desired inputs and then output it!

See an example of my Mashup.It is called World Wide Location Finder. It’s a very simple Mashup. Enter the Location you want to find, and it will centre the map over that location.

If you were caught in some sort of error a few minutes before this post was posted, I would like to apologise for it. I updated my wordpress to 2.2.2 (using Fantastico Deluxe). I hope the experience was uneventful for you as it was for me. (Though I had a bit of a scare when I got the CPU Error coming up on me, after a browser refresh, I could access this site again! whew!)

Suprnova.org is back. It was resuscitated from the dead and is now coming back with a vengeance!

The Angel of ‘Live’ that brought it back is the (in)famous PirateBay. I tried checking the website, but I’m getting this page instead.

Perhaps, the server is down due to many people logging on their site.

But nevermind, from Arstechnica, this defiant quote was gleaned:

This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the internet and the future.”

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I’m still contacting my Group members to get The Ruby Documentation up. I’ll post it here so that it may be of use to the community.

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Building Web Services with Java: Making Sense of XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI (2nd Edition) (Developer’s Library) (Paperback)
(Author), by Steve Graham (Author), Doug Davis (Author), Simeon Simeonov (Author), Glen Daniels (Author), Peter BrittenhamYuichi Nakamura (Author), Paul Fremantle (Author), Dieter Koenig (Author), Claudia Zentner (Author)

If you’re working with web services (i.e. from a beginner’s stand point), you would like to have a selection of sites that you can turn too for guidance when you’re stuck. One such site is: http://www.wso2.org/. I found that their coverage on Axis2 good. They have lots of tutorials. This is indeed a boon for those of you who are working with Axis2. For those of you who are using Axis 1(I’m currently using Axis 1.4) due to work/project commitments, I found that the Axis Guide Site is very useful. Though you can also get books that discusses Axis, as the one pictured above.

The above mentioned book has a chapter dedicated to Building Web Services in Axis. Most books do not have such in depth coverage (if any). The book may be verbose, but it is good enough if you need to know how to utilize Axis 1.* for your web services needs. Let it be known, I’m no expert in this subject matter, If you have a lot of experience in Axis, please comment and share your knowledge with me. I just learnt about web services just 4 months ago. So as you can see, I’m a neophyte!

The book also has detailed (a bit lengthy) coverage on SOAP, UDDI, WSDL and XML technologies. These technologies are important in the web services stack. If you want a quick read on the operation of the SOAP and other web services technology stack, I recommend Web Services Platform Architecture.

Web Services Platform Architecture: SOAP, WSDL, WS-Policy, WS-Addressing, WS-BPEL, WS-Reliable Messaging, and More (Paperback)
by Sanjiva Weerawarana (Author), Francisco Curbera (Author), Frank Leymann (Author), Tony Storey (Author), Donald F. Ferguson (Author)

The above book is ideal if you want something light to read. It is a far thinner book than the “Building Web Services with Java”. I found it easier to understand this book if I want to learn something first. After I’ve read this book, then I went to the “Web Services Platform Architecture” book.

Hmm, looks like I gave a mini book review. I haven’t completely read both books. I just read selected chapters of both books that were pertinent to my project. Please share with me your knowledge if you’ve worked on Axis or on any part of the Web Services architecture. Thanking you in advance!

Okay,let me be honest. I wanted to test my video and audio plugins. That’s why I’m putting it here. But don’t let that detract you from enjoying this short movie.

Testing AudioPlugIn
Sample Song