wikked thoughts by Waqas Ahmed

Secure (relatively) communication using instant messengers such as MSN Messenger and AOL instant messenger. This should have been built into the products in the first place.

March 5th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

Engadget has been giving me my daily geek fix of cool gadgets since gizmodo dropped the ball. Today’s “don’t need it, but really want it” entry is this Ferrari branded laptop by Acer. Stop that drooling already.

March 5th, 2004 | | | Comments (1)

A list apart has a good (visual) explanation of the usability benefits of striped tables. I wonder how well this will scale when I have more than three table areas in a product UI? Too much clutter with all the zebra stripes?

March 5th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

A summary of salaries and benefits for web designers, copywriters, art directors, managers and owners by the American Institute of Graphic Arts and Communication Arts. White paper here.

Nice presentation. At least I know what to expect if I were to switch careers

via MeFi.

March 5th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

Normally I couldn’t care less about cricket, even after having grown up in a culture obsessed by the game. But this article still left me laughing.

Pakistan is a country that has never lacked great drama – in the past few months alone its president was nearly blown up, twice, its nuclear scientists were exposed as having sold more atomic secrets than Gerry Harvey has sold televisions and then, Osama was supposedly spotted in the hills on the border. But all these events come to nothing compared with the drama of a series against the Indians – the first between these two great cricketing nations, on either’s home turf, since 1989.

Somehow it rings just too true.

March 5th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

Now this is how you hype your product features. Exposé for Mac OS X does much better at navigating between multiple open windows than Windows XP. Yes, even with multi-line task bars or the power toys for virtual desktop and the Alt-Tab replacement.

March 4th, 2004 | | | Comments Off

I last checked out BitTorrent a year ago. It looked like an interesting concept, and the speeds were quite reasonable. However, the client was no more than a new download window for each file within Internet Explorer. Resuming long downloads after a system restart was not convenient and the available files seemed to be limited to current TV episodes only. Managing individual downloads was such a pain that I moved on to Kazaa Lite.

Now, it seems this kid is all grown up. I’m using TorrentStorm (a windows based client). Finally I can get a list of all active and inactive torrents in a single download window, with combined speed statistics. Adding new torrents is as simple as clicking on a hyperlink in Internet Explorer.

As for torrents themselves, I get them off SuprNova and TorrentReactor. Appz, games, movies, albums and comics. If it’s something new and popular, you’ll find it here, and download speeds will be excellent.

The TorrentStorm client does need improvement. It should allow adding multiple tracker URLs to the same torrent and switch between them if a tracker goes down. It should allow better file management for downloads in progress and downloads that have been completed… something as simple as renamed files will do. Shared file locking seems to be a problem in Windows XP too.

If someone can integrate a search function within the client, and extract a categorized list of torrents from multiple servers… that would be a killer feature.

March 3rd, 2004 | | | Comments Off

I’d been out of touch with decent peer to peer file sharing apps until recently. Someone pointed me to KCeasy. Screenshots here. It’s an open source windows client that uses giFT as a back-end.

It connects to the OpenFT, Gnutella and FastTrack networks. The UI resembles Kazaa, but without any embedded spyware.

Initial impressions… Clean, responsive UI that supports multiple simultaneous searches. However, it did not seem to return as many results as Kazaa Lite K++ used to. Maybe it’s because it lacks the “auto search for more results feature? I also miss the “auto search for more sources” feature in the transfers tab. The ability to connect to three networks as opposed to just one did not seem to buy me too much. Will try more searches to qualify that.

Verdict: good start. Should keep a look out for future versions.

March 3rd, 2004 | | | Comments Off