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[Breaking News: TypingAid 2.15 is released!]

 

Back to Pycon.

There is a humanitarian effort in Africa called 'One Laptop Per Child'. Two Indians from social service sector created a simple logic game that they think could help the children. It is to be bundled with the laptops. (I mistook their topic as about an AI application, but actually the game is about logical thinking.) A meaningful application with simple GUI programming in Python. Another valuable talk was given by a veteran. He actually took the time to summarize his 10-year experience with library creation. Creating and maintaining a successful library isn't easy. Success of a library is measured by the number of the users. No user = failure. It is then, the speaker suggests, advisable to start with a use case. Pragmatic, failure is prevented. The programmer extracts the necessary components to form a library and then generalize it to accommodate all other use cases.

 

Today 10/Jun/2010 is the opening of the 1st Python Conference in Singapore. I didn't attend yesterday's tutorial because I needed the time to prepare my talk. It was 8am when I arrived at SMU's Auditorium. The chairman Dr. Liew gave a welcoming speech. Before the speech, he amazed us with a 3D visual presentation of Pycon, showing the features of each participating Asian pacific countries. Then, Steve, the chairman of Python Software Foundation gave a speech. It was a pity I didn't see Guido van Rossum, the crowned dictator for life of Python. Steve gave a good talk with a steady and encouraging English which are characteristics of a stalwart. I didn't quite fancy his speech until he told us a story. On one occasion, he asked the creator of Ubuntu Linux what he felt about Python Conference (in US), who replied frankly with you people are good but complacent, meaning self-satisfied. It is always dangerous to be self-satisfied, and the best way to gauge an achievement is not by what has been achieved but by how far we still have to go. The story provoked some thoughts.

 

Sometimes we have to write a lot of articles about the same topic or even multiple rewrites of the same article. When doing so we may even run out of ideas to do them because we use the same words once and again, compromising the originality of the content and probably making it useless.

 

Article spinning is a good solution when we need to do lots of rewrites of the same text. It is quite difficult to use and making a spin ready document may take a long while, but if we need like 20 rewrites of the same article it is worth of the time because once we have done the spin ready article we can make unlimited rewrites with just a few clicks and this will make us to save time.

 

A friend of mine asked me to drop by and trouble-shoot his computer saying that it is very slow and he can hardly get his things done on it.

the startup process becomes very slow. opening a program or surfing the internet takes ages. "My Computer" takes a long time to load.

My first guess was that some programs were hogging up the CPU in the background. Fixing such a problem is usually very fast. This guide works in XP/Vista/7.

As Windows 7 hits the retail shelves, we read more and more reviews that encourage us to spend our money and upgrade to the latest and greatest Windows from Microsoft. Surely, Windows 7 offers the finest functionality improvement, from user interface to management and control, over all previous Windows versions especially the misconceived Vista. We tested the RC and saw that the praises are true, among them, Windows 7 indeed boots faster, performs better and has a more convenient UAC.

 

Some comments in the reviews even go so far as to suggest that Windows 7 scales better than XP, and that multitasking in XP is slow and painful, whereas Windows 7 seems to multitask so much better with the new taskbar. So there is no point supporting a 10 years old OS and it's time to let go, is there? Although we may say Windows 7 is good partly because Vista is bad, we wouldn't think XP is bad just because Windows 7 is good.

We work in an online publishing and software engineering business and often find ourselves facing heavy workload, tight budget and deadlines. We learnt from experience that to survive any understaffed situations, multi-tasking is the only way to go. Now we are like others, considering upgrade or not to upgrade. We decided to publish our guide about how to multi-task with Window XP (The guide also applies to Windows Vista as well) and look for feedback that shows us we could be more productive and efficient on Windows 7.

 

You can get a full list of keyboard shortcuts in

Microsoft Help and Support site AutoHotkey Community's Comprehensive list of Windows hotkeys KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS @ AXCEL216 / MDGx Tricks of Past Weeks WINKEY SHORTCUTS @ AXCEL216 / MDGx Tricks of Past Weeks KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS @ AXCEL216 / MDGx Tricks of Past Weeks WINKEY SHORTCUTS @ AXCEL216 / MDGx Tricks of Past Weeks

You may ask, "which hotkeys should I memorize and learn first?" "which are more commonly used?"

 

We have divided the shortcut keys into three categories:

Basic - Must know. Failure to use them would result in loss of plenty of precious time. You probably have learnt all in this category. Intermediate - Learn to make yourself more productive, to get things done fast. Advanced - Optional. Awkward key combinations or rarely used keys.

Practise them at work, see how they can help you.