Today an article on cnet news caught my eye: Get a 40-inch HDTV for $399.

I thought wow! After reading the specs it's a 1080p w/ 2,000:1 contrast ratio w/ an average 4.5/5 review rating. I bought my 37" Toshiba 720p LCD TV about two years ago for $750. So I can basically get a TV that is twice as good for a little more than half the cost. Not a bad deal. Even Amazon can't touch this price that Walmart has. They list it for another $150.

However I do have to give Toshiba props for excellent customer service regarding a warranty issue I had. They replaced pretty much the whole guts of my TV at no cost, on site, and with awesome communication. This TV in the article is a Proscan brand. I wonder how they would handle a warranty claim? Would there be the trade-off?

It's just always amazing how fast electronics drop in price. Just recently I remember speaking with my grandfather on how he bought two 5MB hard drives back in the day for a cool $3,500 - thinking he would never need more space than that. Good luck finding 5MB anything these days.

I use SVN on a regular basis to commit and update code either myself or my team is currently working on. However one issue I've had, that I've never really looked into, was notification of commits so that each programmer can be notified automatically of changes.

I've heard of some scripts that can be created to email the proper programmers, but today I found a nice tool that makes this painless. By default this program, that hides away in your system tray for Windows, checks for a new commit every 90 minutes. When a new commit is found, it displays a small window showing an update, similiar to goodsystray for Google Wave.

This small program can monitor multiple projects and there a few options you can customize such as running a script after a new commit is found or changing how often it checks for commits.

The program is called CommitMonitor and can be found at http://tools.tortoisesvn.net/CommitMonitor.

On HP Laptops, sometimes F11 will get you into the recovery partition. However if this fails and you can still get into a runnable Windows you have an option.

Run compmgmt.msc (Computer Management) in Windows and select Disk Management. Then mark the recovery partition (usually D) active by right clicking on the drive's icon. Then restart.

Don't press any keys and if the partition is still good it should boot up the recovery partition so you can get your computer back to factory condition.

This was verified on a HP Pavilion dv6000 series laptop.

Apple released the Apple iPad last week. Other than a horrible name, I thought it was a great design and am very tempted to buy one. Three things I think will make this device:

1. It's thin, it's lightweight, and looks good (hopefully they don't break too easily)
2. Battery life is up to 10 hours (we'll have to see real-world numbers though)
3. A simple, easy-to-use OS

But I wondered, what about Adobe Flash support? Jobs said that "you will be able to see the web as it actually is". I figured I'd read about it in a few days. The answer was no. Jobs gave two reasons:

1. Flash will eventually die and give way to HTML5
2. Flash is one of the largest reasons why a Mac crashes. (Really? I thought a Mac doesn't crash :() )

According to Adobe, 99% of all Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets as well as a wide range of devices have some version of Flash installed. While taking into account a little marketing tweeking, it is still used by the majority of everyday web users.

HTML5 is still being developed and accoring to Ian Hickson, editor of HTML5 specification, the expected W3C Candidate Recommendation stage will be in 2012 which means Microsoft will likely not pick it up until after then. So what are we going to do until then? Two choices. One being make the end-users see a broken flash placeholder or second being make and maintain two versions of your website. Neither are a good solution.

HTML5 is aimed at reducing the need for proprietary plug-in-based RIA technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX according to Wikipedia. HTML5 will introduce native 2D drawing, media playback, drag-and-drop, messaging and more. So does Jobs expect that everyone just drop the millions if not billions of Flash apps out on the Internet now and try to convert everything to HTML 5? Besides, flash is still rapidly evolving with new features and frameworks like Flex. It's just not going to die, anytime remotely soon.

Right now Apple seems to have it out for Google. But Google did one thing right with their Chrome browser. They managed plugins that break. So if Flash crashed, only the specific block of the webpage would show a broken-flash placeholder and you could either reload and try again or go on to the rest of the webpage uninterrupted. So wouldn't that be a little more reasonable solution for Apple? In Apple's mobile browser, mimic this great Chrome feature and Jobs second reason would be void and the end-user would benefit greatly.

Jobs needs to step up and not hide behind whatever agenda he has against Adobe. So, I will probally wait to buy another competitor's Tablet until Jobs can get in gear. Not to mention it's limited to AT&T for 3G wireless service again. Ug.

Other resources:

• Adobe Responds: Enabling innovation isn't magic
• Facebook: I Want IPAD to Support FLASH
• TheFlashBlog: The iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience?
• False Apple Advertising: iPad Promotional Video and Images Show Properly-Displayed Flash Content

As a programmer I've had to deal with Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 since, well... since it first came out. Non-standards driven, needing multiple hacks to make things show up right. It costs me frustration and time and the client time and money.

But today is a good day. The big-wig of the Internet, Google, is stepping up and saying it's had enough. According to cnet's News site "As of March 1, Google will no longer support IE6 on its Google Docs and Google Sites services...". Recently a flaw in IE6 was exploited and allowed access to Google's network.

Perhaps this will force a few more IE users to upgrade their browsers and make my and countles other developer's life a little easier.

I've used Avast as my primary anti-virus solution for close to half-a-decade now. There are a number of reasons for this but the two foremost are it's free and non-bloated.

Anytime I get a new computer or setup a friend's computer, the first thing to go is Norton's solution. At first it was just anti-virus. It would always hog memory and slow down resources. Then came along their Security Suite which hogged even more resources.

After uninstalling Norton, Avast would always go on. I've never had any issues with it hogging up my resources. It's always been fast, clean, efficient, and reliable for me. All you had to do was register each year and turn off the annoying voice announcment every day when the definitions update.

It has caught most viruses through file-copy and file-download for me and have rarely seen one slip by unless someone hit ignore and let it continue. People! Read the warnings!

Today I read on cnet News that Avast 5 was released. It features a new GUI which makes things much more pleasant to look at and even easier to use. But what caught my attention the most is what I've never taken the time to research.

From cnet:

"In November 2009, Avast 4.8 and Microsoft Security Essentials were the only freeware to score Advanced+ in the Retrospective/Proactive Test done by AV Comparatives. It's also the only program that tested faster than Norton AntiVirus 2010, and was tied with Microsoft for second place in fewest false positives detected. The detection score was also high, at 98 percent. That's worse than Avira, but Avast noted far fewer false positives. ...Avast Free 5 [is] probably the strongest, free antivirus currently available."

"Sold"

For years I've done my best to explain to new designers, customers, or just people in general that it's fairly hard to make a webpage look really good on your screen because everyone sees it differently depending upon your screen resolution. Then they ask what is screen resolution and just get lost. Give them 800x600, 1024x768, etc. and they just walk away muttering "geek" under their breath.

Well Google has come to save the day once again. Thanks to my co-worker Jason for letting me know about this, check out http://browsersize.googlelabs.com. This will show you what the average percentage of viewers will see on your or someone else's website with an overlay. You want to make visible what is important to the most amount of people right away without scrolling. This puts it into perspective.

Enter your website address on top and check it out. A great design tool.

Hint: If the website is centered, resize your browser window horizontally until only the main content section is left, otherwise you'll see incorrect overlay.

My favorite software company has to be Adobe. I've made an enjoyable career out of now Adobe's ColdFusion Server for about 11+ years now. I also use other Adobe software on a daily basis such as Flash Player and Dreamweaver and sometimes Photoshop, AIR, and Flex.

I've been looking forward to the new movie Avatar for some time now. I learned from a friend it's based upon a comic, but I've never read it - and probally never will. The movie seems to have a great plot and awesome graphics and action.

I learned today that much of the movie was made using Adobe software. For one they used Adobe Photoshop, the same program I own. They also used AfterEffects, Acrobat Connect, LightRoom, InDesign, and Premier Pro. Watch a video on how it was made at Adobe.com.

I recently bought a new laptop with Windows 7 64-bit. I noticed that there where 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Internet Explorer installed but that the 32-bit was pinned. Wondering why this was I did a little investigation.

64-bit IE will work faster and run with your system better. However apparently the Active-X plugin world needs to catch up first.

For example, you can not play Flash inside of the 64-bit browser. At least not until Flash 10.1 is released.

So for now I will continue to use the lesser of the two for maximum compatibility.