A little of everything

t’s time to see everything in action. Here is a speech from Microsoft’s PDC 2009 about IE9, upcoming features and few demos. Enjoy.

How many uses can one tool have? If you think the answer is “never enough,” the Piranha by Pocket Tool X might just be for you. A multipurpose job (which kinda reminds us of a dinosaur’s head), the Piranha boasts a double-ended bit holder, both open and box wrenches, a bottle opener, a nail puller, a scraper, and pry ends — and it’s made of heat-treated S30V Stainless Steel — which means it should be sturdy enough to make it through a few family camping trips. The tool is available for pre-order now, with shipments heading out sometime in December, and for $49 it could be all yours.

e trata del nuevo smartphone de LG, llamado eXpo, con Windows Mobile 6.5 que incluye procesador Qualcomm de 1GHz (se especula con que sea un Snapdragon), sensor de huellas digitales y un pico-proyector opcional, uno de los teléfonos más completos del mercado.

So last week the New York Times Magazine published a piece called “Against Camel Case” which argues that intercapped product names like iPhone and TiVo are “medieval,” because they harken back to a time in which people mostly read aloud, slowly sounding out each word as they tried to understand them. Proper word spacing, says the Times, “eventually made possible phenomena like irony, pornography and freedom of conscience.”

That’s sort of a crazy coincidence — while we’re not so sure word spacing and porn have anything to do with each other, we did just re-do our style guide when we launched our jazzy new redesign, and we actually thought long and hard about how to handle intercapped, all-capped, and otherwise non-standard product names. This is something we deal with a hundred times a day, and we simply weren’t going to let Motorola tell us to write MILESTONE over and over again, completely contradicting our own sense of style and taste — as theTimes says, “Writers of the world, fight back!” Well, we can’t say no to that, so we thought we’d share our four newly-minted rules for writing out non-standard product names:

1. Product and company names that are regular English words shall be treated like proper English nouns, complete with proper capitalization. Example: DROID becomes Droid and nook becomes Nook.
2. Product and company names that are not regular English words shall be capitalized first as proper nouns, and then as the company treats them. Example: RAZR stays RAZR, but chumby would become Chumby.
3. Intercapped product and company names should generally be treated as the company treats them, unless it’s egregious and / or looks weird. Example: iPhone stays iPhone, BlackBerry stays BlackBerry and TiVo stays TiVo, but ASUSTeK becomes Asustek. This rule is subject to many exceptions based on usage and history, and also functions as the “this is stupid” loophole.
4. Acronyms should obviously be in all-caps.

We think these rules are flexible to handle most situations, although there are some edge cases and blatant Rule 3 violations out there. Still, it’s a start — unlike the Times, we’re pretty sure “iPhone” and “MasterCard” are here to stay, but we feel like our rules are a small step towards making our site clearer and more readable. Either that, or we’re just crazy in the head.

Java Portable 6 Update 17 has been released by PortableApps.com. Java Portable allows you to easily install the Java runtime engine to your PortableApps.com-enabled device for use with portable apps like OpenOffice.org Portable, all without any Java runtime on the local PC. This release updates Java to the latest version. It’s packaged in PortableApps.com Format for easy use from any portable device and integration with the PortableApps.com Suite. And it’s completely free.

Last week we launched the ASP.NET Ajax Library Beta during PDC, oh and we donated it to the CodePlex Foundation under new BSD license (FTW). As the email volume has been fading away running up to Thanksgiving in the US and everyone at work is recovering

If you have a Google Analytics account, you can use the Data Export API provided by Google to access your visitor stats, and retrieve them for use elsewhere. Here’s how to display some stats in ASP.NET.