whistler’s blog

A very good software is out for the J2ME mobile phones, Opera Mini. Although I in no way like the desktop Opera browser which I used a few years back, I found this to be the best web browser freely available for Java phones. Opera Mini outperforms others because it uses a gateway which processes the pages before serving them, it scales images to a suitable size for mobiles, compresses the text and removes ads. The result is fast web browsing over a slow GPRS connection.

The browser takes reasonable time to load, not instantly, but better than what most J2ME programs take. It has a user friendly interface. I particularly like the bookmarks feature where the favicon is also saved along with the URL, and links to several of the popular sites comes preset in the bookmarks, you can simply select the link instead of typing in the URL even when you use the browser for the first time.

Yesterday I came across a wonderful site 43things.com, it was not the first time I had been there but this time I got registered there and started creating my list of things which I want to do in life in doing so I also got help from the other peoples’ lists. The good thing is that you can see entries by other people who are doing the same thing, you can also ask questions about a particular topic, but most importantly your list reminds you of all the things to do in the world and take time out of your routine to do them, of course completing everything in the list would be rare unless you work really hard on all you want to do, still creating the list clarifies your aims in life.

After reinstalling windows i wanted an office package on my computer, but as now I was tired of all the problems caused by MS Office on my machine I decided to use something other than that. I found a very good open source alternative, in which i am currently writing this text. The 75MB Package that I downloaded proved to be worthwhile. Not only is OpenOffice fully compatible with MS Office documents, its user interface is also very similar to MS Office, which makes the transition very easy. One of the best features I liked is the ability to save the document as PDF. But sadly this package did not include Bluefish, the web designing tool like Frontpage in MS Office.

Today it had been more than six days since my computer was running, it somehow was closed when I came back from school, sadly I could not complete a week, only a few hours were left for it. For the first time in my life I have found windows to be so stabilized, during the weekend I worked on a software project, which mean there were tens of software I had opened, and a lot of them would be running at the same time, I was connected to the internet most of the time too with Shareaza downloading some files in the background. And it was being used more than normal too because Shuaib is here from LUMS and he hates his laptop now, so he spent the whole day on my PC.

Some time ago I saw a link to a game called Commando4, the site claimed to be the first 3D Pakistani game, although I am not sure there have been other 3D Pakistani games released before as well. As a software developer myself I was interested in the game, so I ordered a CD using the online order form. This seemed pretty impressive for a Pakistani site, I got an email instantly confirming the order, but it also said I