Patrick’s Bytes

I know this is not the place to blog about family relationships (where are the codes?!) but when you have Raymond Chen (author of the book Old New Thing and developer in Windows Shell team) talked about this topic and finding out that he can write in Chinese then this is awesome.

Normally we Asians think that in English there are no word/ vocabulary to tell you want relationship you have with i.e. your father’s sister in law’s daughter. Chinese have word for every relationship but in English an uncle is just uncle, outsiders of your family won’t know when you call your uncle it’s your dad’s side or mum’s side. But here in Raymond’s blog post, I actually find out there is.

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2009/04/27/9570320.aspx

October had been a crazy month for me and November is no exception either. Been busy preparing a lot of demos for customers.

Just a placeholder for myself in view of the hectic schedule, I just found out that VSTS 2010 and .NET 4.0 CTP is out for public consumption.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=922B4655-93D0-4476-BDA4-94CF5F8D4814&displaylang=en#filelist

Will be back with more details after this week. Also will be posting about my experience on Windows 7 M3

For the first time, Microsoft have won 9 awards in the Computerworld Readers Choice awards . Since these awards were voted by customers, it’s a clear indication of the strength of Microsoft product offerings as well user acceptance and acknowledgement! Given below are the details of the award and the categories that Microsoft have won under:

• System Management Software (Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager)
• Application Server (Windows Server)
• IT Asset Management System (Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager)
• Identity Management (Active Directory)
• Patch Management (Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager)
• Content Filtering (ISA Server)
• Collaboration Platform (Exchange Server)
• Enterprise Content Management (SharePoint Server)
• Service Oriented Architecture (.NET Platform)

http://www.computerworld.com.my/rca/winners-list

Got the privilege of previewing Exabyte’s new website design. First I look at the page is the Express drop down box, it reminds me of the DiGi website where a customer is given a chance to have a guided and simplified navigation path. Very good for first time customer to lead them to important info within the website

In marketing, nothing cant be more important than showcasing your awards and how proud you are with them

First on the menu bar right side, there is a picture link to the page showing visitors the numerous industry awards won by Exabytes. This menu bar also has a good design where they allocated some real estate to showcase other stuffs in future such as promotion or event.

underneath the Express drop down you also can have internal advertisement showing latest promotions, events and again awards you won.

Hot news is still there at the top and they added a Google search box

So I tried typing in ‘windows 2008′ as my search term to test whether this is a site search or a global search

As expected the results are from within Exabyte’s website, and it is formatted nicely (some website redirects you to Google but this search stayed within Exabyte’s website)

The Google search box is definitely useful if the Express drop down fails to help the visitor. 

Exabytes also took into consideration that today more and more people buy LCS screen and normally with a decent graphics card, one can have 1200 X 800 resolution and above on their monitor. Their homepage can be fit nicely within my Thinkpad 1400 X 1200 screen resolution (show below)

Overall, the new website is every well designed with fast loading time (anything loaded more than 10seconds will turn me off), I spent about 5 minutes the first time I checked out this website and since this is a preview site, certain info are not there yet. However the main purpose now is to get people to provide feedback and here is it.

What are missing here are stuff like

1. RSS feed for people to subscribe to news and events. This is a Web 2.0 thing and a lot people subscribe to RSS feed via Windows Live.
2. Local content where instead of showing the ‘ang moh’ why not show pictures taken in corporate functions. This also shows Exabytes is very engaging with their customers.
3. A bit of inconsistency here, I saw the link to addthis.com where I can put Exabytes in social bookmark site i.e. Digg and Windows Live. This is something helpful but I would like to see it across the site.

As a faithful customer of Exabytes, I wish them all the best in launching of the website. No matter how nice is the design, one thing that delighted me all these while are their efficiency in providing support to me, which I believe is world class.

You probably remember Blizzard for its successful Warcraft, Starcarft and Diablo titles and when a video game company got onto pages of Businessweek magazine, they are on to something big. Blizzard recently merges with Activision (Mechwarrior came from this company) and becomes known as Activision Blizzard (announced at the end of 2007).

Inside the world of Blizzard

Each search engines uses different style to represent Beijing Olympics. So far I think Live Search got the best one with the Bird Nest stadium.

Below are Google’s and Yahoo’s one.

Started migrating my blog from Wordpress’ server to Exabytes on Friday, and today the process is completed with all the testing done.

3 more days to go and I will point the DNS to a new web host at Cyberjaya. Do expect the site to be down for the whole weekend starting 1st August Friday night.

Good news for pre-paid users like me, DiGi and Maxis launched their respective 365 days number validity plan. For DiGi customer, you have to reload RM100 at one shot before 31st August to enjoy the offer while Maxis just need RM33 balance before you send in a #100 activation code.

  vs

Regardless how, it will be consumer who benefit the most from competitions. I hope Celcom will do the same because I occasionally uses their pre-paid 3G services. So this will encourage people to take up extra phone line for various purposes.

This happened sometime ago but I was not aware until today. Codegear is the company that owns the famous Delphi programming IDE as well as the once popular Turbo suite of development tools under Borland. When open source IDEs such as Eclipse and Netbeans started eating into Borland’s JBuilder’s market share, they realize IDEs are becoming commodities and started focus on value added businesses such as Application Lifecycle Management. Then they spin off all developer tools (incl Delphi, CBuilder and JBuilder) to a subsidary named CodeGear with the intention of selling it. As of 1st July 2008, database tools vendor Embarcadero bought over CodeGear, and this closed another chapter of Borland which the father of C#, Anders Hejlbergs once worked there to create the tools we known as IDE today and fathered Turbo Pascal and Delphi.