Eclipse shirt

Sweatshirt + kitchen strainer = eclipse shirt. :-)

SanDisk mail-in rebates through June 29th

SanDisk has a mail-in rebate offer through June 29th on several popular models of SD, CF and Memory Stick Duo cards. The rebates are on a sliding scale; the more you buy the more you save. The amounts range from $5 off a single 1GB SD card to $300 off three 16GB CF cards.

For example, I just ordered two 8GB SanDisk Extreme III SDHC cards for $74.95 each. Adorama's website lists the price as $34.95 after rebate, but that's for one. You get another $5 off each card when you buy two, lowering the per-card price to $30.95.

Embeddable RDBMS options, and some other cool tools

I'm in the middle of rearchitecting a massive Access 2003 application into something that can be used offline, replicate data back to a central database, and is modular. Notes and Domino aren't an option since the target platform is a Windows Mobile device I work in a Microsoft shop, but in the process of tracking down what we need I found some pretty cool tools. The best thing about all these is they're all F R E E !!

Microsoft SQL Server Compact 3.5

Stand-alone Microsoft SQL Server running in 2MB RAM. Really! It supports native replication with SQL Server 2005.

SQLite

Another small embeddable database that features snapshot replication with any ODBC data source.

Firebird RDBMS

The third embeddable database I tested. It does not support replication out of the box, which is why I couldn't use it.

AnySQL Maestro

It's an admin tool somewhat like TOAD or SQL Server Management Studio, but a little scaled back. One thing it's missing is viewing/editing stored procedures, but I'm using it mostly for the visual query builder.

XXCOPY

Have you ever started copying a directory of files and something craps out so you have to restart it? You don't want to have to hit "No" to the overwrite prompt eleventy billion times so you end up just overwriting everything. XXCOPY will handle copying only files that don't already exist, as well a huge amount of other things that overwhelmed me.

TeraCopy

It's like an Internet download manager for Windows. You can pause a long-running file transfer and resume it later, it has error recovery in case it can't write a file, and it does asynchronous copies so it's faster than normal Windows copy routines. It has Windows shell integration so it can be configured to replace the default Windows copy routines.

Jing Project

Desktop capture software for Windows and OS X from TechSmith, the makers of CamtasiaStudio and Snagit. Look for some video demos soon. :-)

marumushi newsmap for Netvibes

I have been a huge fan of the marumushi newsmap since I first came across it while reading about treemapping. Yes, I find data visualization algorithms and processes interesting. But you already knew I was weird. Anyway, the marumushi newsmap is one of the ways I get news that is somewhat independent of the mainstream outlets and I was pleased and surprised to discover you can get your daily serving of marumushi via a Netvibes widget! The biggest limitation is that it only lets you select a single category at a time, but it's still highly functional.

Crazy cool technology - IBM Live Partition Mobility (updated 8/22/2007)

From the IBM Press room:

In June, IBM shipped its first System p 570 servers with the POWER6 processor -- the world's fastest chip -- containing a unique design that creates dozens to hundreds of "virtual" servers on a single box. Live Partition Mobility, currently in beta testing with general availability planned later this year, is a continuous availability feature that will enable POWER6-based servers, such as the System p 570, to move live logical partitions -- including the entire operating system and all its running applications -- from one server to another while the systems are running.

Update 8/22/2007: How's that for disruptive innovation? I was reminded that VMWare has offered VMotion for a long time. Live Partition Mobility is cool, but not quite as bleeding edge as I first thought.

Imagining the Tenth dimension

The people in the #visualbasic channel on IRC scare me sometimes. They shared an animation concerning string theory and the 10th dimension. The general gist: every possible timeline for every possible reality can be expressed as a single dimensionless point. It's way more complicated than it sounds, check it out yourself.

Video: Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Crazy cool technology: IBM pokes holes in chips...

The CPU advancements from IBM keep on coming. Now they've come up with self-assembling nanotech plastics to provide better insulators inside CPU's. Read all about it.

Moving toward the 3D Internet

Computerworld had an article today about IBM updating its research image. Included in that was a link to some work IBM has done with Second Life and Computer City in creating a 3D online store. When executives talked about Second Life during the Lotusphere 2007 OGS I was admittedly skeptical. I'm still not convinced there's much meat on that bone for business end users, but it could be interesting for B2C interactions.

While this is going on Microsoft hasn't been standing still. They recently recently launched WinFX as .Net 3.0 and Avalon as Windows Presentation Framework (WPF). Together these allow developers to code web sites that do both 2D and 3D rendering on the Internet, and they also have people working on 3D stores. They also have another set of technologies to provide 3D visualization on the Internet using spatial mapping. If you haven't seen it yet, check out Photosynth.

I don't know where any of this might lead but it is very, very interesting.