Cool Tool: Paint.Net

Not just .NET based, not just free it is open source too !
Paint.Net is an awesome light weight photo editor for everyday photo editing needs.

Cool Tool: Slick Run

Slick Run could literally really save you hours of dragging your mouse to program shortcuts!

Quoting the author:

SlickRun is a free floating command line utility for Windows. SlickRun gives you almost instant access to any program or website. SlickRun allows you to create command aliases (known as MagicWords), so C:\Program Files\Outlook Express\msimn.exe becomes MAIL.

Enter a web URL into SlickRun and it will launch your browser and navigate to the specified address. Run multiple programs in a few keystrokes, jot a note, look up a definition... SlickRun is the most natural way to interact with your computer.

Another 2D game

This game looks like it is going to make it to top games in 2009 !


Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.



For now you can go for a free alternative (NERD ALERT!) :

It sums it all up

Nokia E71

Whoever said iPhone will dominate was partially correct. With Nokia's years of experience, they sure wont give up that easy!
(Although a $99 iPhone will sure make a huge difference )

One example of a really good deal from Nokia is the Nokia E71. Which is essentially a good price/features deal.

Key Features include:
- Full Qwerty Keyboard
- 369 MHz processor/128 MB SDRAM Memory
- Wifi/Bluetooth/Infrared/v2.0 microUSB
- GPS
- 3.15 MP camera
- MP3/AAC/MPEG player
- Email/IM
- Slim!
- 10 hours talk time battery

Google releases Browser Security Handbook

They are taking this whole web browser thing seriously !
To the extent that they did release a security handbook.

Google Chrome is no beta any more, IE8(which is still Beta) will contain similar features to google chrome.

One of the key features in IE8 is that it supports Tab Groups. And most notably Advanced Printing (finally?). It took them 8 versions to figure out that something is wrong with printing!!

It is not clear yet which browser will score more in terms of JAVA SCRIPT SPEED(which is what matters anyway)!

World of Goo !

This game is just amazing. One of the best games in 2008 actually.
With a more than an excellent physics engine and low hardware requirements it sure ROCKS !

You can't resist finishing the demo !

It is really fun to play it after all those crazy evil FPS games I have been playing the past weeks.

It is all about the business value!

If I learned anything from the last year at work. It is all about the Business Value !

Whatever time or effort I spend on any task, if that doesn't directly translate to a business requirement then I am simply wasting my time.

It could be surprising how much good feedback we get from our clients on projects that we are "not proud of", just because it does a really important task (high business value?) !

I call it the development ROI (Return On Investment). If my development work doesn't directly translate to business values (something that I can explain to a non tech-savvy user) I simply stop.

So basically I stopped the awful habit of "optimizing my code" ! Why 'd I spend hours optimizing code that will run less than 10 times in an hour ! And it didn't fail me so far ! So I only optimize code that would result in bottle necks or really really poor performance!