Vista speed-up

Nick pointed me to Ed Bott's posts on ZDNet.com about some reasons why Vista appears so slow "out of the box". Ed took a brand-new Sony Viao and then spent an age removing the crapware that Sony put on the machine, and updating all the drivers (essentially by doing a fresh install of Vista). The result? A zippy machine. In Ed's words "...Vista doesn’t suck".

Looking at the ZDNet website, it seems that Ed has also included a number of other posts to help people "improve" their Vista experience.

ECOOP 2008: Early registration

If you're thinking of attending this year's ECOOP - and surely you are! - then you're running out of time. The deadline for early registration is June 1. You can register online here. It looks like a great program, and there's a whole bunch of interesting workshops.

The fact that the conference is in a beachside 5* hotel in Cyprus in July might just persuade you if you're still in doubt...

iPhone modification

Got an iPhone? Like to "improve" the UI? Here's the answer:-)

DBPL - Information Systems

A special edition of the journal Information Systems has just been released. It contains a selection of papers from DBPL'05. This edition was edited by myself and Christoph Koch.

It's been a long time in coming - but enjoy! There are some great papers.

Visited Countries

Visited Countries is a cute little web app where you select the countries you've visited and it generates a map - just like my one above.

New look live

http://www.live.com/ has changed its front page style. I think it's an improvement - what do you think? (I posted a while ago someone's thoughts on redesigning another well-known search engine's front page.)

Is it art?

I found these photographs by Li Wei amusing.

HTC Touch Diamond

Readers of this blog will recall that I'm a happy user of an HTC Touch Windows Mobile Phone.

Nick pointed me to this page with a teaser video for the new HTC Touch Diamond. Wow! In the absence of an iPhone with Active Sync, this looks like a really nice phone. These guys know how to tweak the Windows UI!

OOPSLA 08

Great news: Two papers by friends have just been accepted for publication at OOPSLA'08, which this year will be in Nashville, Tennessee.

1. Matthew and Dino's paper on JStar, which is their separation logic based tool for verifying Java programs.
2. Claudio's paper on his implementation of joins in the production Visual Basic Compiler.

Well done guys!