Author Archives: NeoSmart Technologies

Comment Subscription Fixed

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A while back we had to disable subscribing to comments & receiving notification to subscribed posts, but we’re glad to let you know that it’s working again. It’s one of the sacrifices one makes in running the latest SVN software right out of the oven compiler errr opcode or wherever it is that PHP comes from.

But the bad news (yes, there’s always bad news, you should know that by now!) is, RSS feeds for individual posts aren’t working the way they’re supposed to. But we’re working on that… We’ll have that fixed soon enough!

WordPress, WP-Hackers, RSS Feeds, and More

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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At NeoSmart, we’re all about WordPress. Hands-down, it’s the most powerful, most flexible, and certainly most popular blogging platform available, and it’s free. We do what we can to help (which isn’t much, really), but we’re planning on getting a bit more “involved,” so to speak. Besides the couple of (hopefully useful) WordPress plugins that’re in the making, we also have several WordPress-centric articles coming up, and we hope you’ll enjoy them.

For now, here’s a quick one: Did you ever hear of “WP-Hackers?”
Well, those guys are the 1337 WordPress users, and they know all about WP, and what makes it tick. They have a mailing list you can subscribe to if you want to participate in all the fun, but what if you don’t want to (or can’t) join in the discussion? And since you don’t require a bi-directional form of communication, why use clunky email anyway?

We took the WP-Hackers mailing list archives, added a RSS feed to ‘em, and churned it through FeedBurner, the result is the WP-Hackers Live Archives – where you can find out what WP is all about and pick up all the tricks of the trade without divulging your email, filling up your inbox quota, or worrying about privacy. Just click and subscribe!

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Why not Embedded? ATM’s Running XP Professional…

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Today while on my way back I stopped at the (Cairo Amman) bank to withdraw some money. As luck would have it, the ATM wasn’t working – again. This time, I happened to be there when it suddenly BSOD’d and began a reboot cycle. Obviously, to BSOD it needs to run Windows, and moments later, that was confirmed. But that’s not the story here – believe it or not, most ATMs run Windows nowadays, and there’s absoloutely nothing wrong with that.

The problem is, they’re all running Windows XP Professional. Of course if the only alternative was Windows XP Home Edition, we’d understand; but there’s a reason why Microsoft developed Windows XP Embedded. It’s not just about performance, size, & reliability, but it’s also about speed, adaptability, cost, and ease-of-use. Windows XP Embedded is several times cheaper to license and deploy across a wide range of computers (err, ATM machines) than Windows XP, especially Professional Edition. What’s more, it doesn’t require as much power, and doesn’t have as much bloat.

I had the (mis)fortune of seeing the PC/ATM boot. They’re using an IBM with Phoenix Bios (from the 60s) and 512 MB SDRAM. Forget about speed, just think about it in terms of cash. It must be more expensive to buy thousands of these machines new than it is to purchase a minimal-device capable of supporting the stripped-down XP EE – which is all you really need to run an ATM. You most certainly don’t need Internet Explorer!

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The New & Improved Google Translate

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Everyone’s favorite search-engine/social-networking multi-billion dollar corporation is at it again. Following the addition of several new features to the Gmail platform earlier this week, Google has also revamped certain portions of its language tools – in beta of course. It’s not available for all languages, nor is it in a place where most casual users would find it, but Google’s newest feature makes online translation of websites and documents a bit more enjoyable.

The trick is – use the Arabic. About a month ago, Google launched its brand-new (beta) English-to-Arabic and Arabic-to-English translation service, making it the first free online translation tool that actually gives decent results… of sorts. At any rate, that’s another story for another day; right now, it’s the (“Web 2.0”) technology we care about: Dynamic switching between source and destination languages on a translated webpage.

For instance, here’s our “WordPress-in-the-Name Issues” story from a couple of weeks ago in Arabic; it’s ideal because of it’s more “natural” language and glaring lack of code boxes, technospeak, and general all-around esoteric content. If you understand Arabic – ignore the grammar, it’s really bad. If you don’t, that’s ok, it doesn’t matter.

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The NeoSmart Image Gallery…

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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The best thing about having our own server is that we don’t have to worry about the load. That means we can use resource & bandwidth hungry scripts like our image gallery without a fear in the world. To celebrate, we’ve taken this opportunity to completely redo our image gallery, and have filled in all the blanks. You’ll find images of all sorts and kinds there now, but we’d like to direct your attention to one gallery (and it’s brethren!) in particular: Windows Vista.

Besides the huge build gallery, there’s also, for the first time, every single RTM Vista wallpaper, all in hi-res quality, available in both widescreen and standard format. The “ambience,” “paintings,” “Vistas,” and “textures” categories are all there, in pristine digital goodiness, awaiting your downloads! Drive our hamsters mad, work them like they’ve never worked before; what else did we get them for!?

[digg]

Server Move Complete!

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We’re on our new server! Thank you Lunarpages!

Well, for starters, if you can see this that means we’ve done everything right. Our server says we did anyway, but we just like to double-check and be sure. If you’re interested, our new IP address is 209.200.246.14x (depending on which server responds), and you can test it by issuing a ping command or via nslookup. If you’re trying to get your friend’s PC to access this site, here’s how we did it:

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NeoSmart Technologies Goes Dedicated!

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The time has finally come! It may seem a bit late to many of you, but for us the time is just right. Thanks to a very generous offer by Lunarpages Web Hosting, NeoSmart Technologies is going dedicated! We’ll have our very own home-configured server running everything you see – no more lag, no more “database connection failure” errors and no more “bandwidth exceeded” notices. Slashdot and Digg are no longer the terror of our days – bring it on!

Lunarpages has constantly made the “top ten webhosts” almost every time no matter who conducted the survey, we are extremely happy for this opportunity to improve the NeoSmart Experience by hosting with LP. Besides faster loading and less trouble, this means we can finally launch a whole new lineup of services that we’ve had planned for a while! Running a non-profit organization out of our pockets isn’t easy, but we’ve finally come into some luck with Lunarpages. Let’s just put it this way for now: you’ll never need to leave NeoSmart Technologies to find what you’re looking for if it’s related to technology in any way!

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RTM Confusion, Build Mixups, and Ethics

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Windows Vista has RTM’d. No it hasn’t, Microsoft told me it goes out on Wednesday. Vista’s not coming out ‘till 2007. Vista RTM’d a month ago and Microsoft is planning to release it in time to subvert the minds of the American public to vote Democrat!

It doesn’t matter which of these you believe, it seems all and none of them are true at once. It also seems that something mighty fishy is going on in the higher-echelons of Vista blogging. Since last night, there have been rumors abound that Vista had “gone gold” at build number 6000.16386 – RTM was here. This “news” wasn’t confirmed by any independent sources at the time. Clear as mud, but at least no conspiracy theories – yet.

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Vista Gets It: Symlinks at Last!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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OK, we take our last post back, Vista does have several exciting features to blog home about (and guys, for the last time, that comment’s what they call sarcasm!) one of which is the much requested “Symlinks” feature. It’s been in practically every other operating system for the past decade+ and is one of the most essential time-saving devices ever to be implemented. For those of you (Windows-dwelling creatures) that don’t know what a symlink is yet, here’s the Wikipedia definition.

Symlinks save tons of space by making files “pretend” to exist where they don’t, but even more importantly is the time they save by allowing you to create/reference a static filepath in all your programs – then have that “file” redirect to the real deal, no matter how often it changes. If you’re a web-dev kinda guy, think of it as mod_rewrite for your hard drive, without the PCRE libraries though… (come to think of it, the first OS to implement regex into symlinks has my vote!)

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Microsoft Murders Max

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Well, it’s official at any rate. Contrary to what you’ve heard, Windows Vista will not be shipping with any of the original technologies, features, capabilities, or subsystems originally promised (and for those of you that really couldn’t tell: it’s called sarcasm!). First it was the real Aero – complete visual control over one’s system. Amazing graphics, sidebars that were a part of the Windows Core, Aero Diamond. Then it was NGSCB and its amazing security features – not DRM, but total privacy control; your privacy. Monad. Last we heard, it was WinFS, the king-pin feature that was promised to change the way you think of data… And now the last one is gone: Microsoft Max is dead.

Microsoft Max was a “virtual photo albums and distributing them online in a peer-to-peer fashion.” But it was more than just a sharing tool, it, in-keeping with the original Longhorn “tradition” provided a different way of looking at the data stored on your drive. Microsoft Max + WinFS would have been a formidable duo, but alas, it was not to be. For example, “3D Mantle View” (pictured above), treated albums as individual items. It provide a way to visually “stack” these and photos on top and around each other in ways that pertained to the way you actually used them – visualization of information movement.

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