King  Gary 

While going through my instant messenger contact list, I began thinking of new ways that I could use to sort my list. There hasn’t been any innovation in terms of how contacts are shown in a contact list. A list always consists of a list of groups, and then there are contacts under each group. Each contact can only belong to one group.

It would be interesting to see tags applied to contacts. I’d love to see a web-based instant messaging client take an initiative on this, such as meebo, or desktop clients such as Adium or Trillian, because they are more flexible and can apply these types of features without requiring that the actual network support it.

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As some people know, I purchased a Nintendo Wii about a week ago (from Pittsburgh, PA because they are extremely hard to find here in Toronto!) I’m having a great time with it so far, and have a few events planned and had a few that have passed where we’ve used it to play some games, such as WarioWare, Zelda, and of course, some Wii Sports. I’ve had it for a week now, and so I began to ponder: what else could I do with it?

There’s that Mac Mini that I have…

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During these past few days while exams have been running on campus at UW, I’ve been going in and out of the campus so that I can go home to Toronto and have a change of scenery to see if I can focus more on my studying. Whenever I leave any location, the first thing that I always check for is if I have my laptop with me. Well, during one of my quick trips in and out of the campus, I did manage to bring my laptop, and yet, I somehow managed to forget my power adapter for it! This essentially meant that I was SOL and had no laptop to use until I returned to campus! That’s, let’s see… 4 days without a laptop. This marked the first time since I even GOT my laptop that I ran more than a day without using it.

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JPMorgan has announced the launch of ‘AlgoAlert’, which is ‘an instant messaging service that provides unique charts as well as real-time updates of algorithmic trading performance and trading conditions’. It’s interesting because it uses different IM platforms such as BLOOMBERG PROFESSIONAL® service’s messaging system, AOL’s AIM service, and the Google Talk ™ instant messaging service, which, as Google notes, was not a use that they had imagined for their Google Talk software, but that it’s nice to see it being used for things outside of their scope of imagination.

What’s most interesting to me is that, the head of product development in ECS, the team behind the AlgoAlert, is Carl Carrie, the person who I met while I was in Europe this past summer. Cool stuff!

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The release of Crossover Mac couldn’t have been at a more perfect time. I bought my Mac laptop about a week and a half ago, and of course, I’ve wanted to test Windows on it.

I’ve tried both the Parallels method, which runs Windows in an application in Mac OS X, but it uses up RAM which it takes from Mac OS X, because both Windows and Mac OS X run at the same time. Also, Parallels does not have access to my computer’s video card, so I can’t play games in it. But, Parallels is useful for those moments when I quickly need to boot up a Windows-only program.

Then, I tried Boot Camp, which is directly from Apple. It allows me to run Windows on my Mac as well, but in order to do so, I have to restart my computer and then choose to run Windows instead of Mac OS X when my computer starts up. The disadvantage of this is, of course, that I have to restart my computer to run Windows, and that I can’t run both Windows and Mac OS X simultaneously. The advantage is that all of the processor, the RAM, etc. AND the video card is dedicated and is able to be used by Windows. This is most useful when I need to run programs that require higher specs to run, and it is especially good for Windows-only games.

And finally, I’m trying out Crossover Mac, which allows me to run Windows programs on my Mac - without running Windows! One of the biggest advantage of this is that it uses much less RAM because it doesn’t have to run Windows itself, and so I can run, say, Internet Explorer, which is useful for me to test websites to make sure they look good in IE, as a web developer. Now, as it is still beta, and it was released yesterday to the public, I’m sure there are bugs. But so far, I’ve got several Windows programs to work without any problems, such as Internet Explorer 6.0, which I’m sure I’ll be using quite a lot now. The Firefox for Mac OS X is currently using about 80 MB (granted, I have a lot of tabs opened), but Crossover AND Internet Explorer running in it uses less than 20 MB in total. That’s a HUGE plus for me. Now, I can hold off my extra RAM purchase a bit longer! (I’ve only got 512 MB RAM - hey, I’m on a college budget now!)

Unfortunately, us Mac users can’t jump in on the fun and run Windows viruses, just yet!

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As I announced last Sunday, I bought my MacBook Pro laptop. And today, I announce that BenQ has replaced my broken monitor with a new monitor; it’s also a step up in terms of model number from the last one (not really a big deal, though, as probably the only major difference is the aesthetics.)

This is perfect timing, because now I’ll be doubly as efficient now that I have both my fast laptop AND an extra monitor. Words don’t do it any justice. Photos do!

UPDATE: I’m debating as to whether I should also add in my 15″ LCD monitor as well. It’d be a nice, long desktop. And when you add in the virtual desktops , that’s 4x as much length!

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My laptop, a MacBook Pro, is here!

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I’ve been playing a lot of Civilization IV: Warlords these past few days, and I’ve settled on a general strategy on how to take over the world, which takes advantage of the new features introduced in this new version of the computer game expansion pack. Please note that this strategy is best used for games with many civilizations; if you have 3 or less, then it’s not as effective because you could win much more quickly using other methods. (Make sure Permanent Alliances is enabled in your game’s settings!)

1. Improve your relations with at least one of the civilizations, enough so that your relation with that civilization turns to ‘Friendly’. (Trade resources and technology, and give some free gold to speed this up.) In my game, I was China and my ally was the United States. (I had set my civilizations to Random. Honestly!)
2. Once you’ve reached the relation level of Friendly, form a Defensive Pact with that civilization. This was pretty easy, because the Americans had no State Religion, and so they didn’t have any opinion about what State Religion my civilization was.
3. Provoke a war with another civilization (preferably the one that already wants to go to war with you.) You can do this by demanding technology, resources, gold, or anything else from that civilization. People don’t like getting pushed around, and neither do world leaders! At this point, I had provoked the Romans. (The Roman Empire isn’t supposed to exist in the year 1800 AD, anyways!)
4. Once a civilization has declared war on you, your Defensive Pact with the other civilization will come into effect, and both you and your ally will be at war with your opposing civilization.
5. After a few turns at war, you should be able to form a Permanent Alliance with your ally.
6. Your civilization might get a huge boost from the technology that your Permanent Alliance has given you from your ally; it did so to me, which was absolutely fantastic.
7. At this point, if you can, continue with your war that’s going on. Every time you take one of the opponent’s cities, check the trade window with the opponent to see if they are willing to Capitulate to you. If so, great, and if not, then continue taking cities until it IS available. Once it is, click on it to trade it (it’ll also automatically cause you to have Peace with your enemy AI.) What this does is it makes that civilization a vassalage of yours, meaning that it follows your rule (if you go to war with another civilization, then it’ll follow suit, or if you vote one way in the United Nations, then it’ll vote the same way, etc. - but it does NOT share any of your technologies, resources, etc.) The civilization is basically a protected nation under your command, somewhat like Puerto Rico and the United States, I suppose. They can be a self-governing nation once again if they grow large enough (such as reaching 50% the size of your total nation, including theirs.)
8. Continue the above steps of going to war and forming vassalage nations until you’ve created the United Nations.
9. Now you have a lot of votes and you should be able to win a Diplomatic Victory! (Or even a Conquest or Domination victory, because forming vassalage nations is just like conquering them - and it’s more quicker, too!)

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My BenQ T701 17″ LCD monitor just died this morning. I turned on my computer and my monitor, and the display showed the desktop for one second, and then it went black. I tried it on another computer, and it didn’t work there, either. So now my monitor is being sent to BenQ, courtesy of CompuSmart (which was where I bought the monitor.) It should take about 3 weeks, and hopefully not any longer. I’m forced to work with my Samsung SyncMaster 151s 15″ LCD now, which I took from my Windows XP computer.

I suppose that my monitor dying now is a better time than never, since I’ll be away in Europe for a week and a bit in a few days. Once I return, WWDC will have taken place, and I’ll then be able to make my final decision on which MacBook to buy for university in September.

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Browsing my iTunes library to play a specific song used to be a chore on Windows. I had to open up iTunes (which takes a short moment to load on Windows), go to the playlist that I wanted (so that the songs that are looped were the ones that I wanted), type the name of the song in the search box, play the song, then clear the search box so that the other songs in the playlist were also included in the song loop.

Well, I’m no Quicksilver aficionado, but I do know that I can use it to do exactly what the above paragraph describes - all without even leaving the window that I’m working on at the time. Hitting ctrl+space just opens the little window that you see below; I then type in the first few letters of my playlist (my favorite playlist is aptly named ‘good songs’, and so I just type ‘go’ to find it), hit the right arrow key, then start typing the first few letters of the song I want.

When I compare the iTunes method with the Quicksilver method, the iTunes method took 15 seconds while the Quicksilver method took no more than 6 seconds. Just imagine multiplying that over several dozen times a day (yes, I have picky song choices sometimes!). How’s that for great productivity?

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