A minimal way to notify users of success or error, based on Twitter's bar and jBar

It was at that moment I decided to make a go of it with Linux as my sole operating system. After nearly 2 years of tweaking, making mistakes, fixing those mistakes, and then making even more mistakes, I finally feel qualified to give you advice.

  Top 7 Reasons to Shift to Windows 7 Who hasn’t heard of Windows 7? If you are a Vista user you probably can’t wait for the final release of Windows 7 to replace your existing operating system. Vista introduced us to many changes in our existing computing experience, at the expense of our convenience. Windows 7 promises to change that with a much more simplified, secure and faster operating system. You have 4 versions to choose from, Starter which is targeted for netbooks, Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate. The higher your version, the more features you will have compared to the lower versions. Here are some of the reasons why you should shift to Windows 7 as soon as it comes out. Speed is Everything Ever since the first computer came out people have been constantly finding ways for it to perform faster. Hardware and software are working in unison to achieve a faster computing experience. Vista was the operating system that slowed things down. People would often complain of slow boot times and system slow down as time progressed. Windows 7 promises to be faster than Vista while having just the same hardware requirements as Vista. XP Gone in 2014 If you are still holding on to your Windows XP operating system and didn’t make the mistake of upgrading to vista then now is a good time to consider upgrading to Windows 7. XP will no longer be supported by Microsoft on 2014. This means that even today there will be less updates for this operating system as Microsoft concentrates its attention on Windows 7. Software makers would also shift their attention to Windows 7 leaving XP with lesser software choices. Convenient Organization of Files The days of constantly searching for that particular photo or video on your computer is over. With the Libraries feature in Windows 7, all files of the same properties are grouped into one folder. By default you would have a library for Music, Video and Photos. You can add additional Libraries quickly as needed. Multi-touch Support With touchscreen gaining widespread popularity due to the iPod Touch, computer makers are slowly adding touchscreen to their laptops. Sensing that touchscreen would soon become popular, Microsoft has added touchscreen support to Windows 7. If your laptop has a touchscreen then try to use Windows 7 on it. Aero Windows 7 has AeroSnap and AeroPeek. Both of these features make you more efficient in your work. AeroSnap enables you to easily compare 2 open windows by snapping them to the edge of your screen. AeroPeek enables you to view your desktop by just a simple gesture of your mouse even if lots of windows are currently open. Security Encryption A lot of us have probably experienced losing a portable flash drive. If you have data in your lost flash drive that is meant to be a secret then the consequences could be damaging if someone finds this. To protect your portable data Windows 7 has a feature called BitLocker To Go. Contents of your portable flash drive will be encrypted and you will be required to input a password to access the data. There is also a Biometric feature that comes with Windows 7. Now you can login to your computer using your fingerprint and you can even set program access control using your fingerprint. Simplified User Account Control People who used vista know all too well the problem of User Account Control. If a program wanted to do some changes you would be prompted with a window and given options. This is a security feature to protect your computer from malicious software but sometimes it tends to slow us down. Windows 7 has corrected this and you will no longer be constantly seeing these popups.

JMS is used to exchange asynchronously messages between programs in Java. Learn here how to get it to work using open source ActiveMQ and see sample cut-and-paste-ready codes of JMS producer and JMS consumer.

How to make your code dirty, how to avoid it?

The JFXtras team has announced a 0.6 Preview Release that includes support for a JavaFX Menu, Tree, Table, Shelf, and other controls that you need to build large JavaFX applications today. Check out my blog for a full list of features, and have a Happy Thanksgiving for us (because we will be way too busy)!

Webpages to Render Faster

Kirill Zhukov introduces us to his new Smart grid component for ZK!

I'm talking about some tools, which comes in very handy while you are in trouble or save you from future trouble or even help you to do things fast. Note that I'm not listing all the tools, neither I'm ranking those.. I have just picked few tools which I use regularly, and have good experience with them.

What is Swype & how does it work? Putting it simply Swype allow users to trace their way between different letter on a touch screen (by actually dragging their hands on the screen) instead of tapping each letter one by one. Essentially the aim of Swype is to increase the typing speed by making touch typing more intuitive. Now, here comes the real interesting stuff. Today TechCrunch leaked a video that (attached with the post) shows the comparison between the typing speed on an iPhone and Samsung Omnia II. Both the phones are placed side by side and by now you won’t be surprised to learn that Samsung (using Swype) beats the iPhone. In fact the typist using Samsung finishes way before his iPhone counterpart. I am not saying that this is gonna be another iPhone killer. Ofcourse not. I have not used Swype personally so I can’t comment on its speed. But from outside I find it very impressive and this could be the direction in which touch technology might evolve.

Sun's Java SE team recently released the Milestone 5 build of JDK 7. This was expected to be a feature complete release of Java 7 but is some way short of that. InfoQ takes a look at what has been added and some of the major features still missing.

Google quietly announced last week that its cloud will run nothing but open source software. This is a big deal, but let’s first admit why Google did it. As I have written many times, Google has a big cost advantage when it comes to delivering Internet resources.

Do you want to use an API but you are too lazy to write your own code to handle the requests? If you code in PHP as I do, then you will definitely need these classes. By using the classes listed here you will be able of using a great number of web services with an easy and documented way.

Project Lombok seeks to reduce the (significant) amount of boilerplate in Java code with the use of some clever compile-time annotations. Some debate the wisdom of using annotations like these as a substitute for language features. Here is my review of this interesting new project that is causing quite a stir.

New to UNIX? Learn UNIX and improve the skill you have with these UNIX resources.

We can use mysql_connect and mysql_select_db functions to create our connections. For closing the connections there is mysql_close function. These are basic functions of managing connections in PHP. There are also a lot of classes made by developers for free.

This is a brief tutorial on Mindscape LightSpeed, an O/R Mapper which is super easy to setup and use. I am using on a project now and wanted to share how simple it is to use, compared to something like Entity Framework from Microsoft.

I want to share very useful in my opinion code snippets for WPF developers. Most of they were created my friend - Dmitrij Zakharov. Moreover I want to add a short description to each snippets. Note: The Code Snippet Inserter inserts a code snippet at the cursor location, or inserts a surround-with code snippet around the currently selected code.

The Eclipse 4 development environment, codenamed "e4", just reached its second milestone. The new milestone includes significant changes to the platform and the XML Windowing Toolkit (XWT) for the GUI. XWT, a new feature in the fourth version of Eclipse, received a lot of attention in this milestone.

God bless Javascript, glorification of all sorts of butchers.

Let’s investigate some of the most essential tips you can use to improve you Wordpress performance.

This post shows how to use session handling in GWT, shows the client and server-side plumbing that is required to get this done nicely...esp. when you are using Spring, GWT-SL, Gilead

Starting today, developers worldwide can integrate LinkedIn into their business applications and Web sites. Developer.linkedin.com is now live and open for business.

Everyone has had an interview that didn't go as well as it should have. Luckily, there are things you can do before, during and after an interview to ensure that your mistakes can be avoided or negated.

In an ideal world, each big subject from the software development process would be handed to a specialized professional: UI designers, programmers, architects, database administrators etc. Unfortunately, this is not the case most of times. There a plenty of cases out there where projects suffer from lack of proper expertise and well trained people