Info. Tech.

Thinking of buying a new laptop or desktop PC? Now is probably the best time to do it. Windows 8, the latest version of Microsoft Windows which is due to be released to the general public on October, is being at a discounted price.  If you buy a new PC pre-installed with authentic Windows 7 between Jun 2, 2012 until January next year, you can get Windows 8 for only $14.99 (1,200 yen in Japan) when it becomes available.

A few inches more and I would have to use both hands.  A smaller size would hardly be a delight to my not so perfect eyesight.  7-inch then, for many people, is just the right size for a portable e-book device, even if Apple's CEO Steve Jobs thinks that " ". For people like me who likes to read books inside Japanese trains, 7-inch is the maximum size for an ebook reader that can be held and operated comfortably with just one hand.  The 9.7-inch iPad and other similarly sized e-book readers are just too big. In Japan where trains get too crowded especially during rush hours, it is highly likely that you have to stand inside trains and use one of your hands to hold on to straps or handrails, leaving you with only one hand available to carry other things.  Even if you can balance yourself and not depend on straps, it is very likely that you won't able to lift a reading material using both arms without elbowing people around you.

It's been a year now since the , the cloud platform offered by Microsoft, became commercially available.  If you develop software and you still don't know how to build an application for Windows Azure, perhaps it's the right time to learn how to do it.  In this article, I will show you how to create a simple ASP.NET application that will run on Azure. To develop Azure applications, your computer must be running either , , , or higher editions.  You also need to have and installed on your system.  The Windows Azure Tools and SDK provides project templates for creating Azure applications.  It also provides tools that let you simulate the cloud environment on your local machine.

Recently, some of my friends have been unknowingly sending strange emails from their Yahoo accounts.  The emails, which contain a link to a suspicious website, are being sent to all email addresses registered in their contact lists. If you've been victimized like some of my friends, you might think that someone has hacked into your account.  However, because of the viral way and the extent to which the problem has spread, it is more likely that a virus or automated spam bots are the culprit.

Two of our client companies have reported a problem regarding the financial software that we are providing them.  We had not been able to reproduce the problem in any of the computers in our company so we had a hard time fixing it.  It was not until after 3 weeks and lots of coffee and tea, that we were able to finally solve it.  The culprit? 's design of the new in . The problem was that a piece of code, which was supposed to run when the Ribbon is loaded, had not been executing as otherwise expected.  Apparently, our clients have been using our software on a small screen resolution and this has resulted in opening in a small window.  When opens in a small window, the Ribbon remains "out of sight", that is, it doesn't get loaded at program startup (figure 1). It is only when is resized to a certain threshold size that the ribbon appears and enters " 's mind" (figure 2).

You don't have to completely convert your English system into Japanese if you only need to occasionally .  Just like Windows OS, Ubuntu has input method components that allow you to enter , , and characters into your applications. To install these components, just follow these steps.