Author Archives: NeoSmart Technologies

Making Gmail a More Welcoming Experience

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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It used to be that when you opened your Gmail account you would see a bland, blank page with the text “Loading…” in the upper-right corner of the screen, as you waited for your browser to download the Gmail scripts and to make contact with the mail server to download the list of messages and other content that appears on the Gmail “dashboard.”

We’ve long felt that Gmail’s approach was not befitting of the Web 2.0 service with all its sky-blue shades and flashy appearance – and now it seems that Google’s felt that way too.

Here’s the new loading interface… Subtle, simple, and effective:

(Click image to see more changes)
 Gmail Progress Bar 

After all, first impressions are everything!

Mapping Computer Techniques to the Real World

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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As a recent Times article describes, shopping plazas are now using cell-phone tracking technology to map shoppers’ activities and movement patterns. The "Path Intelligence" hardware used to track the movements works like this:

  • A cell-phone-wielding shopper enters the shopping plaza.
  • Path Intelligence monitors mounted throughout the plaza detect that a new mobile phone is in the vicinity and log its IMEI code.
  • As the shopper moves around the mall, his or her movements are continuously triangulated by the multiple Path Intelligence units, allowing movements to be mapped and saved for later analysis.

The good news: it’s totally private, there isn’t any (automated) way to map a particular record in the Path Intelligence logs to an actual person. The resulting logs can be analyzed for shopping patterns (where people go after visiting a certain store, peak hours of traffic, most popular regions, etc.) later on, providing valuable intelligence and allowing for improvements.

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Asus: Linux, Whether You Need it Or Not

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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It looks like Asus is going to be shipping all its motherboards from here on out with Linux built right in, as part of their “Express Gate” initiative. Express Gate is a custom Linux distribution (Splashtop Linux) installed to a Flash ROM that’s a part of the motherboard. With Express Gate, Asus users have an option of booting from that built-in ROM chip to a Linux-based desktop, with an average boot time of around 5 seconds or so.

The problem with Express Gate isn’t that it’s Linux nor that it’s there – it’s the rather more-mysterious question of why it’s there in the first place. If ASUS had thought to make use of this Linux distribution to provide data recovery & diagnostics services, offer advanced BIOS configuration and updating options, or one of the infinite other creative ideas that one can manage with a light and fully-configurable OS that ships embedded with the motherboard, perhaps then we could see a use for it.

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Want UAC-Free iReboot? You got it: iReboot 1.1 released!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Back in August of 2007, NeoSmart Technologies released iReboot 1.0 – a tiny application that sits quietly and unobtrusively in the taskbar and is used to select which OS you’d like to reboot into.

iReboot isn’t by any means a major application, but it’s gathered a pretty strong following over the months, mostly by people interested in boosting productivity (or increasing laziness) to the max. But there was one flaw in iReboot that made all the hard work we put into making it as unobtrusive and minimalistic as possible almost meaningless: if you had UAC enabled, iReboot will not run automatically at startup, no matter what you do.

This behavior comes as a result of the architecture that Microsoft used to secure Windows Vista, which doesn’t allow for applications requiring admin approval to run at startup. It doesn’t matter what your application does or if you absolutely trust it beyond the shadow of the doubt, Windows Vista simply won’t let an application that runs in elevated privileges mode to launch at startup – end of story.

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Windows Vista SP1, Adobe Audition, and DEP

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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For anyone attempting to install or use Adobe Audition on Windows Vista SP1, you can forget about it. Something about Adobe Audition or one of its dependencies causes it to crash immediately on startup, with Vista informing you that it has "rescued" your system from an attempted DEP violation.

The "good news" is, if you’re on Windows Vista SP1 x86, DEP doesn’t get in the way as often. And for when it does, Windows Vista x86 lets you disable DEP and continue along on your merry way. But Windows Vista x64 isn’t as forgiving – even after you use a program like EasyBCD to disable DEP entirely, you can’t stop hardware-based DEP or exempt software from the protection list on 64-bit operating systems.

Adobe has yet to provide an official (or even an unofficial) response on the matter; but seeing as Adobe hasn’t properly touched the Audition code-base since buying out Cool Edit Pro, it’s probably safe to assume we won’t be seeing an update anytime too soon. (for instance, Adobe Audition 3.0, released in Sep. of 2007, still doesn’t have that omnipresent 3.0.1 patch out yet).

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EasyBCD 1.7.2 Released

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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EasyBCD 1.7.2 has just been released, and is available from download from the official EasyBCD download page.

EasyBCD 1.7.2 has only two minor changes, both of which involve the installer. The more important of the two involves the installer UI: Windows Vista SP1 broke the EasyBCD installer (buttons’ text was no longer legible), making it rather difficult to get on with using EasyBCD if you didn’t already have it installed.

Development of EasyBCD 2.0 is going well, betas should be available in the next month or so.

If you already have EasyBCD installed, you don’t really have to update.

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Download: Windows Vista x64 Recovery Disc

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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This disk can be used to access system recovery tools, giving you options of using an antivirus, System Restore, document and picture backup and recovery, automated system repair, and a command-line prompt for manual advanced recovery.

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Recovery Disk for Windows Vista x64

Windows Vista Logo Ever since we first made available the Windows Vista Recovery Disc for download back in January, we’ve been inundated with requests for an x64-compatible version. Flash-forward to three months later, and it’s finally here!

If you don’t already know what the Windows Vista Recovery Disc is and what’s used for, take a quick look at the original article – good luck catching up on the half-a-thousand comments there!

Note that this download is no longer free, due to licensing restrictions imposed upon us.

What it does: The Windows Vista Recovery Disc can be used to access a system recovery menu, giving you options of using an antivirus program, System Restore, Complete PC Backup, automated system repair, and a command-line prompt for manual advanced recovery.

What it doesn’t do: You cannot use the Windows Vista Recovery Disc to re-install Windows – it only fixes (not replaces!) Windows.

Why you need it: If you bought your PC from a major retailer, you didn’t get this CD with your hefty purchase.

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The NeoSmart DevNet Initiative

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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NeoSmart Technologies is pleased to announce the logical next-step in our contributions to the tech community by the establishment of the NeoSmart DevNet project.

NeoSmart DevNet is a new effort on behalf of NST to reach out and lend a helping hand to other software developers by providing a number of tools, libraries, and frameworks that we’ve developed over the last several years to address certain commonly-encountered issues in a generic-yet-customizable manner.

Basically, DevNet is an attempt at getting software developers to spend more time on developing their applications verses worrying about the stuff that they need to get there. Unlike other developer resources on the internet, the goal of DevNet is to provide complete working subsystems and frameworks to developers, almost entirely doing away with the need for supplemental coding and code-monkey work.

For instance, the first of our DevNet projects to be released is a scriptable graphical HTTP/FTP downloader. The NeoSmart Downloader (NST Downloader) is intended to be drop-in solution for anyone looking to add the ability to download and run components from the internet to their software projects. All interfacing with the NST Downloader is done via command-line arguments, making it language-agnostic and dead-simple to use.

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File-Based Extension to the WordPress Object Cache

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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WordPress 2.5 has just been released, and has users are quickly finding out, file-based object caching has been removed from this release.

We’ve just released another extension to the WordPress object cache mechanism, supplementing our existing plugins for adding eAccelerator and XCache support to WordPress’s object caching features.

NeoSmart Technologies’ File-Based object caching extension for WordPress re-implements the cache-to-disk object caching feature of WordPress 2.0 through to 2.2. NeoSmart Technologies is also committed to the maintenance and support of the file-based caching mechanism.

Please be careful with the use of this plugin. It’s been disabled in the default WordPress codebase since WordPress 2.1 as a result of certain shared webhosts complaining of increased disk I/O access and thrashing when WordPress is subjected to extreme load times (as in the event of a Digg or Slashdot attack); so make sure your disk is fast enough to make it worth using this extension.

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WordPress 2.5 and the Object Cache…

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Caching and Why We Need It

Ever since the creation of interpreted languages and the birth of dynamic web content, developers have been on the lookout for tools, workarounds, and extensions in search of a solution for a solution to bring maximum performance to the world of dynamically-generated web pages.

Perhaps the simplest, most straight-forward, and most effective of these solutions is the caching technique. In most caching implementations, the dynamic content generated by user requests to a particular URI on a server trigger the caching mechanism which then stores the generated content in a "storage facility" somewhere. Future requests to the same URI retrieve the stored content rather than spend time and effort re-creating the response.

The most-popular method of caching involves the archiving of the complete HTML response generated by the webserver and then stored as a static content on the hard drive for retrieval at a later date (usually with some mechanism responsible for expiring the content upon certain actions or after a set amount of time).

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