Basically I just switched it to use Add-EventHandler, which in ShowUI does at lot of awesome magic to make sure all the variables you would want (i.e.: variables for named controls) are defined in your event handler. It makes writing these gadgets much easier. Here are a few:

Let’s start with the simplest Widget I can dream up:

Yeah, just a simple text clock. To be honest, that’s a bit plain for me … but I do like digital.

Another few Clocks

My preference is for something very large, with the date and stuff on it:

If you prefer analog clocks, this one has “hands” and old school stopped movement (no click sound, but maybe you could add that)...

And finally, while I’m on the subject, the clock from yesterday could be a lot simpler if it didn’t need animation, here’s the target part of it. Feel free to explore.

And now for something completely different

My other favorite widget to implement in new UI frameworks is a weather widget. Why? Well, mostly because it requires parsing an RSS feed and a few extra pieces of work that let you actually determine how hard it’s going to be to write more advanced UI. In any case, here’s my ShowUI weather widget (note that you have to change the $woEID to get your forecast):

OK, that’s enough for one night, but I’ll take requests for tomorrow! As a side note, you know the cool thing about these gadgets? When I took the screenshots, those were all running from the same PowerShell window -AsJobs, and using less than 1% CPU.

We got this “Word Whammer” from LeapFrog this week. They make these fridge toys that come with a bunch of letter magnets, and three slots that you can put the letters into. When you put a letter in, it reads it and pronounces it phonetically, like: “Eff! Eff says fuh, eff says fuh, every letter makes a sound, eff says fuh!”

Except the Word Whammer is special. It can pronounce whole words! Well, only three letter words, but still. If you put P-I-N in, it says: “Letter Pee, Letter Eye, Letter En. Press the three letters to hear your word” ... and when you do, it says: “Pee, Eye, En; Pin! Pih, iih, nuh; Pin!” and then encourages you to play some more … if you put C-A-T in and press all three letters, it says “Cee, Aeh, Tee; Cat! That’s one of my favorite words! Kuh, Ah, Tuh; Cat!”

What’s amusing is that LeapFrog is so careful not to offend people …

If you put G-O-D in, it doesn’t know the word, so it just says: “Gee, Oh, Dee; Guh, Oh, Duh” and then suggests that you do another word — now to be fair, that’s just the default behavior for words that it doesn’t know, but really, I mean, if you’re teaching it words, why would you leave out god?

It gets funnier if you put D-I-M in, it will say “Letter Dee, Letter Eye, Letter Em. Press the three letters to hear your word” and then you press them, and it says “Duh, Eye, Em, Dim! Great word, try another one” so you just switch out the I for an A, and it says: “Letter Dee, Letter Aeh, Letter Em; Let’s build a word! Put three new letters into the Word Whammer!” Yep, it won’t even phonetically pronounce it! Nothing you can do will get it to do so … all it will do is repeat the letters and then tell you to start over with three different letters.

All of the major Flash retailers are now offering 32GB SSD drives, and with the arrival of Windows Vista, we have the first operating system which is natively aware of the needs of SSD cache management and able to take advantage of SSD capabilities to improve it’s performance. Since several of my friends have asked about flash discs after having read that they have short life spans, I figured it was worth writing down what I know about them.

The most important thing I can say about flash right now is that you should pay attention to the brand names. The most common flash chips have life-spans of only around 300,000 write cycles — you can read from them as much as you want, but if you write to the same block (that is, the same exact physical spot on the disc) it can fail after only 300,000 writes. However, my point is that not all flash is created equal, and the best flash chips can be rated as high as 1,000,000 write cycles per block.

On top of that, most flash drives nowadays use wear-leveling algorithms: since the wear is only on the write cycle, they swap data which is being written frequently with data that has exhibited a “read only” behavior … doing this can reportedly extend the life of the drive as much as 100 times the base life of the flash media.

This means that even if you read and write gigabytes of data every day, a flash-based SSD should last several years (experts claim the life expectancy of a conventional HDD can be as low as three to five years). On top of all of this, remember that with these bigger drives it is physically and financially feasible to add a DRAM cache into the drive which will not only make it faster, but can significantly improve it’s lifespan.

To give you an idea what we’re talking about here, the “Mean Time Between Failures” (MTBF) for hard disc drives had been going up fairly steadily from around 200,000 hours in the 1990’s to nearly 1,200,000 hours today (of course, we’re talking about top-of-the-line drives here). Just to be clear, when manufacturers measure the MTBF of a model, they do so only within what they call the “service life” of the drive. That is: if the MTBF of a drive is listed as 500,000 hours and the service life is five years, this means that a drive of that type is supposed to last for five years, and that of a large group of drives operating within this timeframe, on average they will accumulate 500,000 of total run time (amongst all the drives) before the first failure of any drive. So this doesn’t guarantee that your 500,000 hour drive is going to last 50 years. What it means is that if you replace the drive every five years, you would go (on average) almost 60 years before you had a drive failure.

Now, back to these these new SDDs that are coming out. All the major manufacturers seem to have 32GB models that are completely compatible with regular HDDs, so you can just take your your hard drive ans slide a flash drive in instead). They have input/output speeds as high as 62MB per second sustained, with random IOPS (input/output per second) at 7000 for a 512MB transfer (the fastest HDDs rate around 300-400 IOPS) and access times that are as much as 156 times faster (yeah, that’s not 156%, that’s 15,600%) ... all while using about 60% less power, and making no noise (both of which are really significant for laptops and media devices).

The bottom line is that a solid-state drive is going to be orders of magnitude faster than any hard disc drive, and the coup de grâce is that SanDisk is claiming a MTBF of 2,000,000 hours (the best I can find in hard disc drives is around 1,200,000). Of course, on the downside, their drive is going to cost you an extra $600 right now, but the point is everyone is getting into the market and competing, the prices are already coming down very quickly, and very soon you’re going to have an extra option when you start looking at drives for your next computer, laptop, or media center.

Some links for more details

• What is Mean Time Between Failures?
• Samsung’s HDD Reliability
• Increasing Flash Solid State Drive Reliability
• HDD Reliability is improving
• A Sample High-End Flash Drive
• Hard Disk Drives vs. Flash Solid State Drives
• SanDisk’s 32GB SDD

• Hard Drive Performance Charts

Honestly, I think the icons need some work in this, they’re ridiculously generic in the version he’s showing off in the video (as in: no way to tell one PDF from another PDF), which for me would completely break the program. I would want a faster easier way to “open” the piles without waiting for the pile plugin menu to show up (and I’ve never been a big fan of fisheye menus). That said … the way the drag-select works, and animations for draggins groups of files, and the stacking and pile plugins … are very cool, and just the sort of stuff I’d like to add to the desktop.

Edit: The funny thing is, Apple is not going to put the Intel Inside badges on them, apparently it messes up the aesthetics. Of course, that means they won’t get the money from Intel that everyeone else gets. Maybe that explains the prices.

Core Specs: 2Ghz Intel Core Duo processor. 2MB L2 Cache (shared betwen the two cores). 667Mhz Bus (is it just me, or did someone carefully boost that 1 extra Mhz?). Up to 2GB of DDR2 RAM. PCI Express ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card with up to 256MB RAM (very much mid-range … maybe they’re saving room at the top for something else?).

Extra Stuff: 17 or 20 inch screen on the iMac (built into the computer, remember). 15.4 inch screen on the MacBook. Built in 802.11g, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 2, web cam. 2 Firewire 400 ports and 3 USB2 Ports (1 and 2, respectively, on the MacBook). And of course, you get Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) and iLife ’06 …

I was going to do some comparisons ... but it’s kind-of pointless, there’s no such thing as a Windows or Linux Intel Core Duo desktop, because Intel Core Duo is the “Yonah” processor which was created for laptops. Yes, that’s right, that’s an awesome mobile processor in your iMac.

I thought about comparing it to AMD’s dual-core processors, but Intel Core Duo is only 32 bit. Oddly enough, they don’t seem to mention that anywhere on the Apple or Intel site. Besides, the fastest processor Apple is selling (2.0GHz) isn’t the fastest “Core Duo” that Intel is selling. Which is irrelevant, because you can’t even get a dual core Athlon that slow anymore (it was the 3800+). AMD’s 64bit X2 is up to 4800 now, which runs at 2.4Ghz with the same 2GB L2 Cache, but a larger L1 cache (128KB per core vs. 64KB per core for Intel’s Core Duo) and of course the X2 has an on-die memory controller.

Ok, maybe one comparison ... we can compare the MacBook to a Windows laptop featuring the same Intel Core Duo chip. The MacBook has a 15.4” screen and starts at $2500 for the (fastest) 1.83Ghz processor. The equivalent “Dell Inspiron E1705” has the same 1.83Ghz Intel Core Duo processor, the same 1GB of DDR2 667Mhz RAM, matching drives, matching wireless capability… But it also has a 17” screen and a next-generation NVidia Go 7800GTX which will kick that ATI Radeon X1600 right off the playing field (seriously). Despite that, the 1.83Ghz Intel Core Duo processor is only $2173. Of course, that’s the fastest that Apple offers, but with Dell you can upgrade the processor to 2Ghz for $200. Maybe OSX is just worth $326 more than Windows XP. Or maybe it’s the fancy magnetic power cord.

The Dell weighs more … but it’s got a much bigger screen, four extra USB2 ports, a 5-in-1 card reader, and a standard PC Card instead of the stupid ExpressCard … so the weight is earned. Maybe a better comparison would have been with the Gateway NX560 which starts at $1100 and costs $1500 with a similar config to the MacBook, with a 15.4” screen and an even sadder graphics card. Fujitsu, Asus, HP and others also announced Intel Core Duo laptops, but they aren’t available yet, and besides … I wasn’t going to do any of these comparisons.

P.S. I can’t wait to see actual number of how the new Macs do on some benchmarks we can all hold in common, like DOOM 3 … the iMac graphics page says it’s 2.3 times faster than a 2.1GHz PowerPC G5 (which would get it’s tail handed to it by that Dell Laptop, nevermind a real PC), but there’s no solid numbers.

Palm. We never knew thee.

When the Tokyo company ACCESS bought Palm Source (the makers of the Palm OS) there wasn’t a whole lot of fanfare, since it was just the latest bizarre twist in the saga of the company famous for its little handheld that never crashed …

But now, PALM is turning it’s back on the Palm OS in a move noone ever thought they would see: Palm SmartPhone meets Windows Mobile, Microsoft is practically cackleing with joy as their number one competitor in the handheld space suddenly becomes their best-selling partner and customer!

Basically, the Mirra is a small network-attached storage device which provides continuous, hands-free backup to multiple PC’s simultaneously. You run a client app on each PC, and every time you modify and save a file, it gets backed up over the network. In fact, you don’t just get backups of your files, you get version management, where older versions of your files are kept around too.

The thing that sets mirra apart is that on top of automatic backups of your files, (photos, documents, music, whatever) you get a secure web-server interface for both private access (enabling you to get to your files from anywhere you have web access) and sharing those files with family and friends. And hey, no monthly fees for file storage might just make the $400 for 80 (or $500 for 120, or $750 for 250) GB worth the cost if you’re paying for file-hosting.

Of course, I get a couple percent back from my credit card, and Office Depot has a loyalty card that gives me around 10% back [ ] ... so it’s an even better deal!

So now, I have dual monitors again (I had to give up one monitor when I put together a second PC for my wife [ ]).

There are touch panel video screens throughout the house (some can even be painted over so they blend into the walls, and the image shines through the paint when you touch it, how sweet is that?) , for viewing everything from food delivery menus, to voice-mail messages left by visitors at the front door (the voicemail/email/front doorbell are all tied together). There are microphones embeded in all the walls for verbally controlling the various functions: “Hal, set scene: Welcom home;” “Hal: Play voicemails.” There are multi-media functions in every room, predictably tied to downloading/storing/finding and playing music protected by Microsoft’s latest anti-piracy measures.

Another big bet by Microsoft: everything has RFID tags, and everything else reads them, so the kitchen knows what ingredients are on hand for cookies, or when you’‘re running low on milk; the mirrors in the children’s rooms tattle on them if they try to wear things that aren’t up to dress code on a school day; the screen on the refrigerator switches from the weather forecast to the “specials of the day” from the pizza shop when you move their magnet from the side of the fridge to the front; and the washing machine refuses to run when your daughter recklessly mixes her delicates blouse with her jeans and tries to wash them in hot water…

Oh yeah, and in the future, everything is a dirty cream color like old linen.

P.S. The NY Times has an article about this too, from which I pulled the topic of this post, but it wasn’t a very good article. The author seemed more interested in the fact that their tour guide called Bill Gates “Bill G.” than in details about the house. Despite that, it was copied verbatim on CNet

Of course, there’s a downside: Ambient’s website has this to say: “The ability to carry video signals suggests that there are opportunities in surveillance and security. Monitoring of remote, unmanned facilities and continuous transmission of security-related data … are obvious applications.” So, yeah, we could slap a video camera on every lamp-post and have an instant surveillance network.

In other news: the FCC also announced the deregulation of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), so telephone companies will no longer be the only ones allowed to lay fiber. While this may bring some competition into the market, it also means that companies can build high-speed fiber-optic lines to within 500 feet of customers’ homes without having to share the new lines with rival companies … so, if you’re lucky, you’ll soon have fiber-optic speed broadband potential, and if you’re really lucky, your street will be dug up four or five times by different companies laying seperate fiber optic lines …