Software utilities

FruitfulTime Task manager is a nice tool that aims to simplify your daily life, using an intuitive (and cool) user interface to let you organize things to do, both for your work or personal life. With this software you can create a to-do list, and create subtask for each main task, in order to better manage your work in smaller steps. For each task you can add notes (in a rich text editor), contacts, references (both files on you PC or internet pages), and also remainders, that “”show a popup”" at specified intervals. For each subtask you can specify the priority, the start and due date, and the percentage of progress, in steps of 25 %. Finally, you can associate tags to each tasks, to better filter out unwanted data and optimize searching for a task. Last but not least, all data are secured using AES encryption system with 256 bit key.

Try it out, you’ll never get back! More information at FruitfulTime TaskManager website.

Some screenshots

I was wondering why if I add a background to a li elemente inside an unordered list (ul) with an inline display style, the image shows up shrunk, it is only visible behind the text present inside the element. I finally discovered that it’s due to the inline stuff. Both Firefox and IE7 behave the same (previous verisons of IE don’t have this problem, but they misinterpreter the HTML and CSS rules, as usual). Here is the original code:

ul.mymenuclass {

height: 20px;

width: 520px;

}

ul.mymenuclass li {

background-image: url(tab.gif);

display:inline;

width: 82px;

height: 20px;

}

And here’s the modified code:

ul.mymenuclass li {

float: left;  

background-image: url(tab.gif);

display:inline;

width: 82px;

height: 20px;

}

Hope it helps!

I checked out the Alky project blog today and found out that Falling Leaf Systems closed down! This small software house created this project with the objective to port DirectX 10 to Windows XP. Unfortunately, it seems that their project was too ambitious or they failed in reached their objectives in time, anyone now it’s closed down. The only positive news is that the Alky code is now available as Open Source “in the event that someone from the Open Source community decides to re-open the Alky Project” as they say in their website. We’ll see, I stick to XP for the moment, until the first SP for Vista!

On a recent Gmail official blog post, two interesting hidden features were exposed. The first one is that when you have a Gmail address, let’s say myaddress@gmail.com, you can add a plus sign at the end of the user name (technically, the local part) to get additional addresses (in this way, you get unlimited addresses!). This can be useful in many situations. The first one can be to filter particular messages, let’s say, you use myaddress+bank@… for your bank account, and star or filter it. Since this can be exploited by spammers, I suggest you to use more sophisticated names, not a simple +bank, to certify the authenticity of an e-mail. You could also use this feature to track your e-mail, for example, you give it to someone with a +id123 and when you receive an e-mail to that address you know that that person gave it away without your permission.

Another hidden Gmail feature is that it does not recognizes dots in the username, so my.address and myaddress are the same for Google. Dunno how one could use this, any ides?

I was looking around searching for a new desktop, and found this monster from Alienware website! Its main features are:

• 45 nm Intel™ Quad-Core™, Penryn™ core, overclocked from 3 GHz to 4 GHz and liquid cooled
• 2 Gb dual channel 1333 MHz DDR3 SDRAM
• 3 possibilities for the video side:
• • Dual ATI® Radeon™ HD 3870 with Crossfire™
  • ATI® Radeon™ HD 3870 X2
  • Dual ATI® Radeon™ HD 3870 X2 in CrossFireX™
• from 1 to 4 HD, up to 1 TB each
• up to 128 MB solid state disk
• optional Blu-Ray reader or writer
• optional multi card reader

The price is a bit high, but I think you can wait for quantum computers before replacing this!