Archive for Technology

History of the Internet

// May 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

History of the internet is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.

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Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo

// June 18th, 2008 // No Comments » // Technology

About this talk

Blaise Aguera y Arcas leads a dazzling demo of Photosynth, software that could transform the way we look at digital images. Using still photos culled from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes and lets us navigate them.




About Blaise Aguera y Arcas

Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon, and the co-creator of Photosynth, a monumental piece of software capable of assembling static photos into a… Full bio and more links

Does Firefox + Windows XP = Trouble

// June 18th, 2008 // 3 Comments » // Technology

Anyone else having problems after a Firefox 3 install?

I am not sure if anyone else is also having some new found reservations about firing up their new Mozilla Firefox 3 browser after experiencing some really worrying post install blues?

I downloaded and installed the new FF3 at work on my 64-bit Vista (INTEL) machine and it’s running like an absolute dream, the first thing i noticed was that pages seemed to ‘pop’ as the loading times for almost all sites seemed to improve. All the extensions that are not updated yet were axed and the rest updated, Google was even ready with a shiny new toolbar too.

However, at home, the picture is not quite as rosy and the honeymoon is turning nasty even though technically, we’re not hitched up yet!

At home I am running the vanilla Win XP box (AMD) and noticed that right after the installer had finished, there were now 3 FF icons on the desktop, none of which could be deleted. A reboot fixed that problem, but now I see a whole bunch of stuff misbehaving.

My old faithful BF2 installation is now rickety as all hell and croaks 100% of the time, but never at the same point (the one game that did manage to load was over in 15 seconds after realizing the the controls were all busted as well.). One in content text link ad that loaded a small div popup also locked up the browser and OS to the point of having to resort to a hard reset. Other apps are now either taking forever to load up if at all, even after several reboots, registry check, defrag, virus scan and spyware check!

I have restored to a previous time, only to realize that FF2 in now poked as well, but I was able to recover all my application data with another FF3 install (I don’t have an old installer lying around) – this is all in a days work and it happens from time to time, but what I cannot help feeling for the first time in my life is reluctance to use Firefox as a default web browser until I stem the tide of issues that I am now experiencing.

If someone else has also had this problem, or knows what it could be, leave me a note, I would be eternally grateful!