Today, my permanent ACM membership card arrived. Cool, though.

I just surfed on this website where you can find a whole bunch of cool movie related TrueType fonts for download.

Source: http://www.typenow.net/themed.htm

I just spend some minutes this evening updating the LibraryThing Widget CSS styles.

The DIV classes used by LibraryThing are as follows:

.LTwrapper
.LTheader
.LTitem 
.LTprovided

LTwrapper is for the whole widget, LTheader only for the "Random books I have" line, Ltitem for each book and finally .LTprovided for the footer "powered by LibraryThing".

However, to get some more flexibility in the layout you should make usage of the cascading property in CSS and define the .LTitem img class to position the images. It could look like the following then:

.LTitem img
{
  float: right;
  margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px;
}

Again, I start writing a new paper and again I realize how hard it is to stair for hours on an empty sheet of paper respectively an empty screen. Therefore, I am glad about Simon Peyton Jones hints about "How to write a good research paper". Thanks to Simon you always have a good start...

Source: http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/giving-a-talk.htm

Yesterday, I discovered the images related to your Windows Mobile device shown in Windows Mobile Device Center. Today, I found another surprising feature: Whilst selecting my mobile device in Explorer the image of the corresponding  device appeared on the Explorer. Nice feature.

It looks like Microsoft heads to submit its Shared Source Licence to the OSI. If the Shared Source License satisfies the of the Open Source definition Microsoft will become a effective member of the Open Source community. After CodePlex, this seems to be the right step to satisfy the needs of the the community. Therefore, Microsoft release a new Open Source related webpage including a feed [rss].

Rich Williams, leading the Computational Ecology group out of our team at Microsoft Research Cambridge gave an interview for Channel9. So go for it and watch the video. Rich is a bright person and he brings up tons of cool projects we develop new tools for. 

Source: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=325909#325909

Sometimes, the small features make you really smile about something. I don't know if this has been there for the whole time, if it is related to the Windows Mobile 6 upgrade or if it came with the latest Windows Mobile Device Center update. However, the Windows Mobile Device Center shows my device (O2 Xda Trion) on its window. I haven't realized this before.

Oh dear, last month all my colleagues did an upgrade on their MDA aka Hermes 9600 for a newer ROM version. Unfortunately, I was not able to find any upgrade for the Xda Trion at the O2 XDA website. Also the German O2 website does not provide any information about ROM upgrades. Here I finally fond some information about O2 taking their Windows Mobile upgrade quite serious and the most importing information: All the upgrades are hosted by HTC directly. They even adapted the O2 style on the Windows Mobile 6 Update for Xda page. 

All you have to do is to enter the serial number of your Windows Mobile device (right behind the battery) and download the corresponding 52 MB bits. Before installing make sure your ActiveSync connection is set up properly and running. And that's currently the only drawback of the whole story: I tried to perform the ROM upgrade first with my Windows Vista machine. The upgrade process seems to run up to the point where the application tries to upload the ROM files. At this point the application does not work properly with either Windows Vista or the Mobile Device Center. Therefore, I did take my Windows XP backup machine. There you simply plug-in your device and make sure that the ActiveSync connection is established.

It looks like the SPL version (whatever this is) was not updated by my first attempt. Connecting via ActiveSync showed a different version (2.03 instead of 1.04). After confirming the setup procedure on your desktop machine, the screen changes then to a progress bar. After approximately 10 minutes the ROM upgrade is complete, the device restarts and shows up the new Windows Mobile 6 screen.

Source: http://member.htc.com/ruudownload/O2Wm6SnCheck.aspx

I mentioned it before today: I started to create my virtual book shelf for technical books in LibraryThing a few days ago. It allows you adding new books by simply selecting them from a list. By entering the title, author or ISBN number you just query one of many book directories such as the Library of Congress or simply amazon.com. If you don't find your book (e.g. in my case a couple of German books) you can add alternative Amazon websites. There are some interesting features in this kind of features I am interested in: (1) you can export your information to tab-delimited or CSV files. (2) You can easy access all the book information including cover images without typing all the information in first. (3) LibraryThing provides an API to access the information. I haven't found time to check the API yet, but it allows you  to receive simple information based on the submitted ISBN, title or language of the book.