i shuai dot org

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 Only Available for Windows.
http://www.dvhardware.net/article4322.html

Microsoft has answered a few questions regarding the launch of Internet Explorer 7:

Platforms. We currently plan to make IE7 available for Windows XP SP2 and later. This will therefore include availability not only for the 32bit version of Windows XP SP2 but also for Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and Windows Server 2003 SP1 both of which are due to be released soon. As Dean commented in his original IE7 post on this blog we have heard the requests for support of Windows 2000 but have nothing to announce at this time.

Outlook Express. It’s great to see the questions on Outlook Express which is a separate product team to Internet Explorer and is not part of the IE7 plan. The Outlook Express team is hard at work on great functionality for the new version of Outlook Express, which is shipping with the next release of Windows. There are no plans to ship the new version of Outlook Express before the next release of Windows. The Outlook Express newsgroup is a great place for discussion about that product and to leave feedback for that team.

[Extracted from: http://www.dvhardware.net/article4322.html]
The real article:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/02/28/382054.aspx

Oh well. Like IE is not a POS for Mac, anyway…

1000 Used Apple iBooks to be sold for $50
If you just happen to live near Richmond, VA or around the area, you’re in luck. If you live farther, this may be a deal you would want to drive to. Or take a plane to, which I don’t recommend.
These iBooks (used) are being sold for $50. Personally, I would get one if I just happened to be in the area, but I’m in Cambridge now. Shoot…
Anyway, this could be a deal someone’s interested in.
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/messageview.php?start=0&catid=18&threadid=499705
School Site:
http://www.henrico.k12.va.us/

Family Guy Movie Leaked!
Yes! Just what we needed: some leaked screenshots from the Family Guy Movie!
Alright, it’s only four pictures.
But the question is, where the he11 did this guy get these?

Somehow the uncensored, straight-to-DVD movie has been released to the world of P2P sharing, more than 2 months before the official release date! Mad <3 to whoever did it, and just hope you don’t get caught.

Ah. The P2P community is the one that always gets them…
Well, in case you didn’t click the link above, here it is:
http://www.sandstorming.com/index.php/2005/07/family-guy-movie-leaked-2-months-early-with-screenshots/
Oh yeah, and in case you’re wondering, I’m not supplying the torrent link

Is Flash Over? I don’t think so.
A company called Backbase B.V. has created an application/application platform called AJAX. AJAX is supposed to be a rich internet application maker that would be like Flash. At least, that’s what I thought.
On further inspection, I found that it wasn’t built on a kind of application platform. It looked like HTML and some CSS, with a lot of JavaScript.
On even further inspection of the source code, I found out it was built on XML. Lots of XML. In fact, it looked like it was totally built on XML.
Though the website looked good, I found the “interface” to be slow and the response was a bit delayed.
When looking at the samples, I found that it looked like lots of websites I’ve seen, nothing new.
Is there something I’m overlooking?
http://www.backbase.com/

Skype vs. Gizmo
RandomThink.net posted an article about Skype vs. Gizmo. Sans all the details, it basically compares Skype and Gizmo, including the size of the program, multiple features, price, and other things.
In the end, the author decided that Skype had the slight edge. Read it here:
http://www.randomthink.net/archives/2005/07/08/skype-vs-gizmo-project/

Can Your Printer Identify You?
From this story from the Electronic Frontier Foundation there is a story about if the printer encodes your serial number into paper you print.
Here is an excerpt:

On Nov. 22, 2004, PC World published an online article stating that “several printer companies quietly encode the serial number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers and color copiers on every document those machines produce. Governments, including the United States, already use the hidden markings to track counterfeiters.” (http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,118664,00.asp). According to the article, the high fidelity of outputs from color machines to their original documents suggests that counterfeiters can potentially succeed in creating high-quality counterfeited currency and government documents using these machines. At the request of the United States Secret Service, manufacturers developed mechanisms that print in an encoded form the serial number and the manufacturer’s name as indiscernible markings on color documents. The Secret Service and manufacturers would be able to decode these values from the markings and in the event a color machine was used to print a suspected counterfeited document, these values would be used with customer information to discover the identity of the machine’s owner.

[Extracted From: http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/wp.php]

The color would be a bright, hard-to-see yellow. See the whole article for more details, plus test sheets and how you can help.
Some people think this would be good to stop counterfeiters, but I think that these companies have just crossed the thin line between valid tracking and privacy-intruding tracking.

The link to it is: http://metaatem.net/words/

I tried my name “Shuai” and got this:

Very cool. On the page, there is open-source source code for the main source code and the js wrapper (spell) source code.

Plus, it has links to the Flickr images.

I have one bone to pick with this though; some of the images are kind of hard to read:

…but it’s a cool tool.