Miscellaneous and Useless Information
James Lin’s infrequently updated blog
It’s been more than a month since I came back from Taiwan, and I’m still organizing our photos from our trip to Asia. In Taiwan, Matt and I had CDs burned with my photos and some of his. And then a couple of weeks ago, Michael gave me a DVD with photos from him and …
Continue reading “Software for dealing with vacation photos”
While Yahoo 360 has an easy-to-use blogging service, it’s a little too basic for me. There are three things that are missing: Putting my entries into categories Importing entries from my old blog Changing the template of the blog (let’s face it, I’m a control freak) So now I’m giving WordPress.com a shot. It’s got …
(This was originally posted to my Yahoo! 360° blog) Unfortunately, the site that was hosting my blog, TrailBlazing.org, has unexpectedly gone down, and its maintainer, my friend Francis, doesn’t have time to track down the problem. Plus, I don’t want him to spend time fixing something that, essentially, only I was using. So I’m now …
I just got back from a BayCHI talk by Jensen Harris, the lead designer of the new Microsoft Office 12 user interface. He’s actually already blogged a lot of what he talked about, so I won’t repeat it here — take a look at his “Best Of” list on his blog for an overview. Instead, …
Not much, besides really good brand recognition. But it does show that Microsoft is starting to take another strategic shift toward emphasizing software as a service. Actually, it’s been trying to do that since .NET and the ill-fated “HailStorm” in 2001, only now there’s actually a business model to go along with it — advertising. …
Continue reading “Windows Live and Office Live — what does it have to do with Windows and Office?”
I was surprised to learn that Google Maps was referring to Taiwan as a “province of China.” After all, how can there be room on a map for such a long label? It turned out the map itself only ever labeled Taiwan as Taiwan, but up until Monday, there was a space to the left …
I mentioned last month that Microsoft is overhauling the user interface of the next version of Office. Now member of the Office user experience team, Jensen Harris, has a blog all about Office’s UI, both its past and its future. It contains some good insight into how Office’s UI has evolved, how they are designing …
Last week, Microsoft had its semi-regular Professional Developers Conference. I was impressed by the amount of new material it put out, much of it unexpected, including: LINQ — language enhancements to C# and Visual Basic to ease the "impedance mismatch" between data access and object-oriented programming The overhauled user interface of Office "12" — they've …
Windows 95 was launched ten years ago yesterday. It was a huge deal at the time. People lined up at midnight to buy it, and some of them didn’t even own a PC! I was interning at Microsoft that summer, and I remember how massive the launch was. Calling it a carnival is not an …
Continue reading “Windows 95 — Has it really been ten years?”
“Windows Vista“, eh? It’s an okay name — more meaningful than “XP”. Dan hopes Windows Vista’s fate will be like AltaVista‘s: technically it still exists, but no one uses it. I’m more inclined to believe it’ll be more like my old high school, Monta Vista: still going strong.