wikked thoughts by Waqas Ahmed

wikked thoughts by Waqas Ahmed

yet another geek blog about Seattle, food, gadgets, games and the art of laziness

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Archive for April, 2004

Adobe Acrobat Reader Speedup

Acrobat Reader 6 certainly is slow while starting up. In fact I would go as far as to say it’s painful when launching a PDF link from the browser. There are good tips on disabling unnecessary plugs here and here. Launch times improve dramatically.

Einstein’s Wife

PBS has a very interesting documentary on Einstein’s wife, Mileva Maric Einstein. It seems she was deliberately erased from his life story. She may have also had a hand in collaborating on his work, yet being an object of his contempt and abuse.

“Albert has a new lover, his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal. On his 34th birthday, [...]

Thunderbird

I really like Jon Hick’s treatment of the logo for the Mozilla email client, Thunderbird. If anything, it’s even better than the Firefox logo.

Shout out

One of my friends has started his own blog - Nuskha-hai Wafa at bilalrafi.com. Good to see that he’s another Movable Type user.

Dreamweaver

My university has a listing of my final year computer science project. You’ll have to forgive the name - these were days when I wasn’t sensible enough to google project names to find existing trademarks.
For background… the incentive behind this project was to provide a practical solution to sharing videos on a hostel network. We [...]

Outlook 2003 with Lotus Notes

I’ve been waiting eagerly for this Outlook 2003 Notes Add-in. It connects to a Lotus Notes / Domino server backend. About time I got rid of one of these two memory hogging mail clients. I vote to kick Notes off the island.

Venture capital in developing nations

TMT Ventures is the first tech incubation fund / entrepreneurial finance company that I’ve seen in Pakistan. That’s an excellent start.

2004 Hugo Nominees

Hugo Award Nominees for Science Fiction / Fantasy Novels of the year:

Paladin of Souls — Lois McMaster Bujold (Eos)
Humans — Robert Sawyer (Tor Books)
Ilium — Dan Simmons (Eos)
Singularity Sky — Charles Stross (Ace Books)
Blind Lake — Robert Charles Wilson (Tor Books)
Full list of Hugo 2004 Nominees here.

Visual Studio 2005 preview

MSDN has an excellent preview of Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) with screenshots, differences with previous version and mention of the future successor (Orcas).

Skype

Skype is free VOIP using P2P. How is that different from the built in audio conference features of msn and yahoo messenger? Well, for one they claim it works through firewalls, and secondly it features end to end encrypted communication.

What I’m interested in is the performance. I use MSN voice with people on dialups half [...]