Category Archives: Software

Don’t unplug your boot drive before installing a new OS! Please!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Please, please, we beg you, don’t do it! Even if it seems logical, like it’s the right thing to do, we urge you not to change the boot/primary drive, or otherwise disconnect other drives when installing another OS!

Seriously, we had no idea so many people engaged in this activity until EasyBCD started spreading like wild fire. Here’s a fact for you: 95% of all support requests for EasyBCD in our forums come as a direct result of users disconnecting their Windows Vista/XP drive before installing Linux, Vista, BSD, OS X, Windows 2000, XP, etc. It’s one thing to reinstall the bootloader when you’re done, and quite another to have to recreate the required boot files to make them point the right drive/partition combo.

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MessengerLite for Windows

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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[poll=2]

A lot of people have been complaining (within earshot of course) about Windows Live Messenger: it’s too slow, too resource intensive, and has just too many useless features they’ll never use and don’t like to have.

At NeoSmart Technologies, we hear you. So in order to hear you even louder, vote above and let us know if you’d be interested in a lite version of Windows Live Messenger. Something that’s fully compatible with the latest WLM protocol, and can share text, streaming webcam content, audio, and avatars with all MSN Messenger clients – and nothing more. This means no search, no silly themes, no advertisements, no games, no sharing folders, no winks, and definitely no nudges.

We like to do things right, so if our programmers were to create a lite version of WLM that just works and does just what you need and nothing more, doesn’t take much memory, and is 100% compatible with the MSN Messenger protocol, would you use and support such a thing?

Whether you would or you wouldn’t, vote above. If you would, vote so our programmers can get cracking, and if you wouldn’t, vote and let us know to focus our resources elsewhere — after all, NeoSmart Technologies is here for you.

Just How Serious Creative is(n’t) About Open Source….

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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To show you just how serious Creative is about open source and the Linux community, just take a (good) look at two of their sites: the main site, and the open source division. No, your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you, nor is the open source site run by 3rd graders from 1993 – it’s just that Creative doesn’t think it’s open source division deserves at least a moderately useable interface for their users.

Forget the quality of the drivers – after all, the Windows drivers are utter garbage as well compared to some of the other companies out there. So if you put aside the fact that their Linux drivers hardly work, the X-Fi isn’t even supported (they ask you to upgrade to Windows if you want to listen to hi-def audio…), and that the site looks like it hasn’t been touched since the X-Fi originally came out, you’re still left with a little problem: Linux users like music too! 

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WordPress 2.2 Adds Tagging Support!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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It seems like the latest SVN commits to WordPress have added tagging support to the popular open-source blogging platform… and it’s about time, too! It’s no longer stuff you have to add by plugin, so WordPress is finally getting with the times and adding this much-requested functionality to the upcoming WordPress 2.2 (due to be released April 22, 2007). See for yourself:

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Why is it You’re Studying CS, Again?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Some people tend to be rather stupid about the choices they make in life. For the most part, that’s OK – it’s human nature after all, and it can (most of the time) be rectified with a bit of hard work and a lot of concentration. But at other times, these mistakes run so deep that it’s almost impossible/unfeasible to set them straight afterwards, making you wonder just why they happened in the first place.

Take, for instance, the average class of computer science students. Go to the nearest university on a day where 2nd or 3rd year computer science students have a hands-on lab session for programming in the language of your choice. Watch as half of them struggle with the basic logic that’s already up on the board/overhead-projector. Notice how half of them (or more) have trouble writing a simple if statement or a for loop (no matter what language) that properly tests-for/does something.

It’s not their fault. In a world that has been turned upside-down in less than a decade and revolutionized in its entirety by the digital PC, you can’t blame students for turning to the number most popular field of work/study when it comes to deciding what they’ll be doing for the rest of their lives. The facts certainly support their decision: you no longer have to be a CEO of a Fortune 500 Company, a Lawyer, or a Doctor to be making 120k+ a year (and if you’re a lawyer or doctor you have to handle licensing fees, insurance, and many other money-sapping necessities) – you just have to be a programmer with 5+ years of experience.

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What on Earth is Wrong with Akismet!?!?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Akismet sucks. No really – if it can’t tell that 400 duplicate comments made to the same blog but different pages by the same IP address linking to the same domain in a matter of 4 minutes are to be considered spam, no thanks – we’ll find something better.

Seriously though! This has happened 3 times in 24 hours. 100 or so comments each time. Each “wave” comes from the same IP, links to the same site, contains the same exact (non) words, and is just as ridiculously obvious as being spam…. They don’t even get flagged as “moderated,” they go straight to the inbox (so to speak..)!

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Image Lists or Resources?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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One of the nicest things about Visual Studio and the .NET language is choice. You have plenty of choices, plenty of options, and plenty of different ways to confuse and confound yourself. Take, for instance, icons/images as “labels” for buttons: what’s the best way to do that?

At face value, there are two options, either of which should theoretically work just fine, and get what you need: Image Lists and Resources (resx files). Technically, there’s even a third option: compiling local resources directly into your application. Anyway if this all sounds like Greek to you, no worries, here’s the low-down on these two (three) different ways of adding an image to your file.

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CompleteRSS 1.0 Released

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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CompleteRSS 1.0 was released yesterday, it’s been upped to a full-release, no longer alpha. Nothing major has changed as far as functionality or purpose is concerned, but it’s a highly recommended upgrade because it addresses a couple of high-profile (really annoying) bugs that can occur if you have a post with the word “feed” in the permalink.

Moreover, there have been several fixes to enhance compatibility with non-standard permalink structures, older versions of PHP, and feeds via proxies. It’s a fully-stable release, and now it’s more important than ever, since WordPress 2.1 has gone public.

WordPress 2.1 never displays content past the <!–more–> marker in an RSS/Atom feed, unlike WordPress 2.0.x & co. If you’re a dedicated blogger and you love your readers, do them a favor and serve full-content RSS feeds: they’ll appreciate it, and you’ll get more feed subscribers :)

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Bloggers: Boycott Pay-Per-Action!!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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If you’re a blogger or a small-site webmaster, get ready to boycott Google’s new Pay-Per-Action program. Why? Because you’ll never get as much money as you do right now with AdSense & Co.

Google calls Pay-Per-Action the “complement to AdWords,” but in reality, Pay-Per-Action is an AdWords/AdSense replacement. Look at it from Google’s point of view: Google claims it loses over a billion dollar’s in revenue from click-fraud with AdSense. If Google thinks it’s losing that much money due to click-fraud, and Google sincerely believes that with Pay-Per-Action that loss will no longer exist, they’d be stupid not to switch over.. Unless of course, bloggers refuse to use their new PPA service.

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The Real Reason Twitter Will Fail

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Twitter is all the hype right now, you don’t need us to tell you that. For some odd reason, something as simple and basic as a one-liner blog site has captured the minds of the online world. For two minutes, put aside whatever feelings you may have on the matter. Good or bad, just set them aside for a couple of minutes and look at it from a different point of view.

Let’s take the best-case scenario here. Twitter continues to increase in popularity, and can handle any and all problems that come up with their system. Let’s assume Twitter keeps on booming. What happens next?

As with all other social networks, the goal of Twitter is connections. NeoSmart Technologies connects ideas, Twitter connects people. Now there are a billion people on Twitter: they check out each other’s profiles, and get to one-another. What then? They head off to each person’s blog, Facebook, or even MySpace to get in touch: leave one another messages, check out their friends, share ideas, photos, and videos.

At the end of the day, people are going to be leaving Twitter to go to their friends’ blogs and sites, and hooking up with them there. The point is, Twitter isn’t filling the void. It fills up a small portion of it, but not enough to satisfy. If at the end of the day, people are going to leave it for other sites, they’ll stop going back.

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