Jun 23 2009
This great tip describes how to remove the really annoying Adobe Acrobat toolbar from Microsoft Office: Removing and Reinstalling Acrobat PDFMaker (6.0 for Office 2000 or XP).
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Jun 04 2009
I am hearing and reading a lot about Bing this week! Microsoft seems to be putting a lot of resources behind it! I have not tried using it yet. This is mostly because I am happy with Google, so there is no real incentive for me to change my search engine. I previously had very bad experiences with Cuil. (I must write about them here :o )
Today somebody showed me the Maps feature of Bing. I thought that the interface seemed nice, and the satellite photos were good. It certainly is as good as Google Maps.
However, then I was shown the Bird’s Eye view! This really impressed me!
Bird's Eye view of Camp Nou in Bing Maps
Above you can see the Bird’s Eye view of Camp Nou (home of the 2009 Champions League winners).
Mar 18 2009
Today I am going to focus on the Irish involvement in another international standards body called the OMA (Open Mobile Alliance). Information about the history and goals of the OMA can be found in About OMA. There are 4 different levels of membership of the OMA, and these are described in OMA Membership. However, I am not going to distinguish between these membership types. I am basing my lists on the memberships lists in Current OMA Members.
The Irish companies that are currently members are:
The non-Irish companies that have technical operations in Ireland that are currently members are:
As always, it is difficult to determine if some of these multi-nations have a technical presence in Ireland.
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Feb 09 2009
I am going to continue my series on Irish companies (and organisations) that are involved in standards organisations, and today I am going to focus on the GSM Association. This is appropriate timing for doing this, because the GSMA Mobile World Congress is happening soon in Barcelona. I have never attended this, but I would like to ;)
The GSM Association has several types of membership, and these are described in Types of Membership. I am going to focus on the Associate Membership type, and the members with this type of membership are listed in Associate Members.
The Irish companies that are currently members are:
The non-Irish companies that have technical operations in Ireland that are currently members are:
As always, it is sometimes difficult to tell what sort of a presence some of these companies have in Ireland.
There are also a number of Irish companies that are working in the same area as the GSM Association, but these companies are not listed as members. Enterprise Ireland supports these companies, and it rents a large stand at the GSMA Mobile World Congress which these companies can use. More details about this can be read on the 3GSM Ireland web site. The Irish companies that Enterprise Ireland is, or was, supporting that are not listed as members are:
I am really surprised, and impressed, with the number of companies in these lists!
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Feb 03 2009
Like many people, I have a very large collection of MP3s on my computer. I diligently ripped most of them from the original CDs, and I ensured that the ID3 tags were set correctly. My ripping software automatically gets this information from a database on the Internet, and I am really only interested in the artist name, album name, song title, track number, genre, and cover art.
I share my MP3s with my family, so the MP3s get played on several different computers using different MP3 players, and they also get played on several different types of mobile devices. Everything works really sweetly because all of these MP3 players can read the ID3 tags.
When I bought my HTC P3600 PDA, which runs Windows Mobile 5.0, I also bought a large miniSD card to hold a selection of my MP3s. I was really annoyed the first time that I played an MP3 on it, because the default MP3 player does not use the cover art contained in the ID3 tags! This is another sad instance of Microsoft ignoring a well established standard!
After doing some searching on the Internet I found a simple hack that works if all of the MP3s that share a cover art are in the same directory.
Folder.jpg in the directory containing the MP3s that share this cover art. The image will usually be approximately 300px by 300px.Unfortunately, this does require some effort every time that I want to add new MP3s to my PDA :(
I have since discovered that the MP3 player in Windows Mobile 6.0 does not use the cover art in the ID3 tags, but the same workaround described here enables it to display the cover art!
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Jan 20 2009
I previously wrote about the Irish Companies involved in W3C, so today I am going to list the Irish companies (and organisations) that are involved in the TM Forum. Again, I am basing these lists on the online membership list.
The Irish companies that are currently members are:
The non-Irish companies that have technical operations in Ireland that are currently members are:
At least I think that all of those companies have technical operations in Ireland. It can be very difficult to tell from their web pages.
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Jan 08 2009
I am a big supporter of standards for technology, and I was reading some specifications from one of the many standards organisations today. I suspect, perhaps incorrectly, that there are many Irish companies involved in international standards organisations. I know that standards participation by Irish companies is something that Enterprise Ireland encourages.
Therefore, I decided to write a series of articles listing the Irish companies that are involved in international standards organisations that relate to information communication technologies. I will also include non-Irish companies that have technical operations in Ireland. (It would be nice if I could replicate this for the entire EU, but I do not have the time for that at the moment.)
I am going to start this series by looking at the W3C, because it is probably the prominent standards organisation in relation to the Internet. I am basing these lists on the online membership list.
The Irish companies that are currently members are:
The non-Irish companies that have technical operations in Ireland that are currently members are:
The Irish companies that appear to be members based on their own web pages even though they are not listed by the W3C:
That took me longer than I expected!
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Dec 29 2008
A friend recently sent me an article describing the first application that Microsoft has developed for the iPhone. This application, Seadragon Mobile, is an imagine viewing application that allows users to view large image collections using touch-screens. It was released initially for the iPhone due to its advanced graphics hardware. The full article is Microsoft releases its first iPhone app.
The main Seadragon application is described and demonstrated in Microsoft Live Labs Seadragon. I think that it would be cool to see this in use on large touch-screens! For example, it would be a great way to explore the Sistine Chapel ceiling!
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Dec 16 2008
News about the latest security issue in Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer has made it into mainstream media, such as Security alert over Internet Explorer and Serious security flaw found in IE. More details about the security issue can be read in MS issues brown alert over unpatched IE 7 flaw and Microsoft issues emergency patch warning for IE.
I think it is great that users are being encouraged to switch to other browsers! Internet Explorer has been far too dominant for too long. I think that this caused browser innovation to be stifled.
It is times like this that make me feel happy to use Firefox :) Of course, I am not naive enough to believe that it never suffers from security issues!
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Nov 25 2008
Microsoft are hosting an event focusing on embedded development and robotics in Dublin next Friday. The general theme of the event is described as:
You’ll see the Microsoft Windows Embedded family of products at work in the real world and discover how they are being used to power systems in factories, cars, your personal navigation or music player device or even your set-top box at home. You’ll get under the hood of the Microsoft® .NET Micro Framework and also discover just how easy it is to build robotics applications for a wide variety of hardware using Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio, the Windows-based environment.
There will be presentations and demonstrations by Microsoft researchers from the UK, France, and the US.
The event is free, but you must register beforehand. I have also heard that there will be Microsoft prizes for some lucky attendees!
Full details of this event can be found in Windows Embedded and Robotics European Tour.
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