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.