{mosimage}Despite the heat, I hope all my fellow Australians managed to have a great day today.
Just crackin' a coldie after a day of sweating and coding (no blood or tears, sorry).
It's certainly refreshing to hear that millions have been celebrating from backyard barbecues to thong-throwing competitions.
"This 3,000-square-foot New Jersey house is Michael Strizki's life's work. It is run completely independently of the local power grid, using solar panels and a hydrogen storage system.
The solar panels cover the 1,000-square-foot roof of a nearby building. In the summer, the panels generate 60 percent more electricity than the super-insulated house needs.
The project, called the Hopewell Project, cost about $500,000 US ($633,299 AU) to plan and build."
{mosimage}We're now on the map -- Google Maps, that is.
Yes, that's right, we've finally got our own domain name maps.google.com.au, ending the need of having to put "Australia" in every search.
Also, according to Slashdot, Google has added more satellite imagery for a lot of other countries such as Egypt, Iraq, mainland Europe and the UK.
Nice one Google.
{mosimage}Check out this strangely addictive new app for Windows, OS X and *nix called Packet Garden. Watch your packets be visualized like never before, as plants and terrain on a spinning virtual world.
"None of this information is made public or shared in any way, instead it's used to grow a personal landscape, a kind of 'walk-in graph' uniquely shaped by the way you use the internet.
With each day of network activity a new world can be generated, each of which are stored as tiny files for you to browse, compare and visit as time goes by."
{mosimage}The Tom's Hardware article states that "Vista in many regards is XP with a facelift with enhancements and series of new tools."
"Various ills plague my testing as I was attempting to review a work in progress in many regards. The operating system might be ready to ship to software and hardware vendors but that does not mean all of the bugs have been worked out."
"It is clear from the comparative charts that AMD (formerly ATI) has a Vista driver that maintains the same performance level as that of its Windows XP counterpart. Microsoft stated that it would not be uncommon that graphics performance under Vista would come in 5%-10% behind that running on Windows XP."
And in conclusion "In its current state Vista is too unstable at least from a graphics perspective and cumbersome in a number of ways to be attractive to gamers and even professional consumers."
