SweetCron is probably the best thing I heard about in September. What it does is pulling off your updates from virtually all your web services supporting RSS and allow you to easily mix them together.

The Problem

It’s not hard to understand why this is useful. You now have accounts on so many great services, each of which is often extremely specialized in only one area and therefore reflects only one part of your life. Overtime you will want a centralized point where your friends can go and keep up with your updates in a single shot. Yet it’s probably out of anyone’s power to create a whole new website which allow you to do everything well: upload images and browse other people’s photo; save bookmarks and see what’s hot; upload videos and watch funniest vid today; and write a quick note and save it on server etc. During the first 2 years of Web 2.0 these services survived in tough competitions and established huge barriers for others to conquer. So you still need to keep those services separated not only for their exceptional usability, but also for their mature social network features. But the goal of having a one-stop shop for all of your footprint on the web is still unsatisfied.

SweetCron is a Solution

SweetCron deals with this. It allows you to add RSS of your pages on those services and it will retrieve them automatically and put those updates into your own database. It only tackles retrieval of your contents as oppose to supporting content creation, except the built-in blogging feature. This covers the most general use case in my mind, pretty much anyone who host their own website or blog. We see people displaying their flickr images on the sidebars everywhere, and it is often done by using some programming language specific library. If you need to display contents from another web service, you would need to find another library for it. Not only do those third-party libraries lack of support, their qualities often vary greatly too. They also often breaks when remote services are down, for example, and you will see many weird messages on your website.

SweetCron depends almost exclusively on RSS of your contents, which should be available on any web services today. If succeeds it stores them in your own database, which is usually as reliable as your website. This makes it very robust and compatible with most web services out of box.

More Info about SweetCron

I wasn’t sure about exact release date of the beta version but seemed it was at least a month or two back. After a little research I figured it was August 28th as blogged on ReadWriteWeb (Woah, exactly a month ago). The interface is as primitive as Twitter’s but it got the features right.

The work of SweetCron is led by Yongfook, a Japan-based “Web Producer” as he quotes himself. I came across with his website early in the year and found his “boxy” design, now a standard theme of SweetCron, quite inspiring. It’s great that someone would package his work and make it available to the public and let everyone get their hands all around it. It is very generous.

The official web page of SweetCron is http://sweetcron.com/, but it doesn’t provide a direct download link to it. You may choose to sign-up by email, or go to Google Code directly. http://code.google.com/p/sweetcron/

Here am I, back from a long silence on updating blogs and busy-like-ants working term. Without more words, here are the tools I used most often for Web Development at work.

Tools

• Eclipse IDE: The Eclipse open-source IDE
• Eclipse Web Tools Platform: An extension of Eclipse for web development
• JSEclipse: An effective extension of Eclipse for Javascript editing and syntax highlighting, from Adobe
• Firebug: The best of breed Web development debugger in Firefox
• Internet Explorer Dev Bar: A Dom inspector for IE
• JSDoc: A JavaScript documentation generating tool
• JSLint: A JavaScript syntax verifier against ECMAScript standard
• Visual Studio 2005 Express: A free but limited version of Visual Studio
• Notepad++: A powerful light weight editor for geeks

Browsers

• Firefox 2
• IE 7
• Multiple IE (IE5.5 - IE6)
• Safari 3 Beta

As one of the benefit of participating ImagineCup Web Development Competition, I was entitled to download the free Windows Vista off the web, coming with an appropriate license. With an adequately good Video Card and a 1.5G of DDR memory, it barely meets the minimum requirement running Vista. Here are a little feelings I’ve got during the first few days of use.

Compatibility

I recall the Vista was built from ground-up over the last four years by the team. But it does provide sufficient backward compatibility that many programs running on XP can successfully run on Vista without an upgrade. In fact, when Vista gets an installation request from a program that has known incompatibility issues, it will give you a warning. My bloody experience told me that, don’t take it as a joke. It’s really going to mess it up.

I was installing Nero Essential 7 on the Vista before I get a message saying that I better upgrade before continue. But I wanted to risk it. So I pressed continue, after which the installation halted and it took me about 2 hours to figure out how to back out the halted installation. Fortunately the Nero.com has a cleaner that was designed to remove such zombie installation from the OS, but seems like the tool only works when I sign in as “Administrator”. (i.e. I must be using the Administrator account, not another account that is also an administrator).

But the whole process is overwhelmingly complex for any non-professionals I believe. Vista system recovery staff might be an emerging career. (hehehe…just joking).

Performance

Like 4 years ago, when I first installed Windows XP on my Pentium 2, although better than that, the vista gives me the feeling that it’s occupying all of my machine’s resources. Occupying 500-600 M of physically memory by itself, I really feel sorry for the 1G memory I bought during last Christmas, for it being “abused” by Windows and couldn’t devote itself to other “projects”.

When the CPU gauge stays stable, (on startup, it freezes at 100% for quite a while and eventually becomes normal), I tried to open some large programs and count the seconds they take to open. The speed, in fact, is acceptable. But I didn’t test operating them. I bet those memory intense ones would suffer since there is less “pizza” left for them.

…Vista is ready to be an ultimate platform for the Internet centric world…

Hardware Support

The hardware support looks to perform better than Windows XP. It recognizes my graphics card and installed it properly. But after I manually re-installed the driver so the nVidia control center can be accessed from display dialog, Vista detected my hardware change and automatically shut my Aero theme on next start up, until I found the cause and upgraded the driver again.

General User Experience

I would keep saying “where is my stuff” for the first 10 hours using it. Every common task in XP is now separated into one or more drill-down levels. There is always a list of common tasks comes first as oppose to advanced settings which can usually be found on the left side bar of the window. I found the advanced options are more clear to me as they retain a similar organization as they were in XP.

Another concern I found was the file moving and deletion. It was extremely slow. I guess it has things to do with updating the windows file indexing feature. Although not really clear if there is such a thing, I am guessing that Vista is keeping track of all the folders and files in it to optimize searching of files. So each file moving and deletion operation will affect the structure of the index file, if it works similarly like the ones in a database system. The consequence of this can be severe and even catastrophic. “If user can’t even get the very basic tasks done efficiently”, what’s the point of having everything else?

Final Notes

Like I always believed, the value of Vista is not Vista itself, but the .NET framework 3.0 bundled in the back scene. With that strategy, Vista is ready to be an ultimate platform for the Internet centric world, and could potentially beat Linux and Unix like it did decades ago with its Text Editor.

This is something everyone should check out - the incredible global WIFI coverage, powered by you!

Recently it’s in celebration of its 1st anniversary and so it’s giving out free 54M routers. So you’ve got absolutely no risk to try it. And how it works is simple, plug it in to allow other foneros (acronym for FON users) use your wireless when they are visiting your neighborhood, and most most important and fun is you will be warmly welcomed wherever you go by other foneros.

Let me just summarized things up and you make the decision. No tricks or exaggeration.

Stop! What is this thing good for?

It’s a get-and-share spirit. Once you joined the community, wherever you are at, Europe lets say, and there are Foneros living around, go ahead and connect to it! So you are not stuck even when you are touring small towns abroad, as long as the town has one Fonero!

What you do to join Fon Community.

Request a free La Fonero Router now / Buy one later.

What do you need to get the free router?

Nothing but a valid address. No tax, No shipping fees. It doesn’t ask for your credit card at any point of the check out process.

If you are not quick enough to get a free router, you are not joining?

Yes, I would say 90% people will leave and check back later if the free deal expires. But, check back soon. The usual price is around $5 - $10 with applicable tax and shipping. It doesn’t quite look like a for-profit community. If $20 dollars for a stylish 54M wireless router doesn’t scare you away, read on!

I know they charge me for hell a lot random things once I got it! I got it and I can’t back out!

Not right. The worst thing can happen to you is you are requested to pass the router to a friend who would like to share his bandwidth. No operation fee, service fee, or any other names companies created to charge you for.

There is no free lunch? It’s so great that I can hardly believe ya!

No, no free lunch. You do need to spare some wireless for your visitors when they need Internet access. But, you have controls over how much bandwidth you’d like to give visitors. And remember how kindly they are to you.

http://www.fon.com

First saw the news from 晨钟暮鼓, and traced back to the source Google Earth in 4D.

The Timeline Based Infomation Visualization

Shortly after the first person coming up with the timeline visualization skills, no matter if it was Danlife, SIMILE of MIT, or Google Stock, google has taken it steps further — adding a billions years long dimension in its once-stunning-now-being-ripped-off Google Earth 3D.

The feature

In the latest “beta” version, the software added the world’s landscape as far back as 1710. The old maps are not Satellite Photos obviously, but are more likely to be transformed from those parchment maps you see on screen of theaters. Adventurers, sitting around a table covered by an old, yellow, faded treasure map, lit by dim candle light, yelling/killing each other. Ya. Well, there is probably no dried blood though.

Might be useful to?

Ok, back to topic, I am interested in seeing flat old maps to be integrated to Google Map (the web based one) though. Even though there is hardly anyway (until scientists figured out how to overpass the speed of light) to get significantly more maps of the earth, the existing ones could already extend the mashup-ability to a much greater scale, and improve the logic of mashups.

Just an example, the no-too-long-ago launched Flickr Geotag, which allows user to associate photos and the places they are taken at, now could easily allow visitors to filter the pictures on a particular location based on the time. There are usually millions of pictures available for attractions, and from time to time, it grows into a virtual world history.

A bit more “fiction”

Sounds so much like a fiction, your grandson goes to The Great Wall fifty years later from now, and when he gets home and uploads the image he has taken, he happens to see your pictures in the 2010 pile. More interestingly, the kid mistakenly got into the background of the photo is then the president / prime minister(depending on your country). What a magic. (Hmm…I still cannot help controlling my wild imaginations, sigh…)

Buzz

O well, I am not the only one who will be thought as unrealistic though. Check out Yahoo Capsule too. As a personal comment, the thing is really hard to use and badly designed.