Minimalist Geek

Changing StumbleUpon Password

So you, just like me, want to change your StumbleUpon account password and are experiencing frustration. You logged into your StumbleUpon account and spent a few minutes going through the available options without finding the simple option to change your password.

The simple answer is you cannot find an option if it is not there. StumbleUpon decided that it will provide all the options and settings in your online account profile except changing your password. This is ridiculous.

To change your password you need to download and install the StumbleUpon toolbar in your browser and then from the Tools drop-down menu choose change password. I might be wrong, but to me this seems like a marketing ploy to force users to download and install your toolbar. I for one won’t bother to download and install any toolbar.

I like the whole idea of StumbleUpon and this password changing decision goes against the grain of online communities. First of all, I do not like to load my browser with myriad toolbars, hence the Minimalist Geek, and secondly if I want to change my password while not on my personal computer and haven’t the option to install toolbars, how will I manage to change my password.

Please StumbleUpon listen to your community and let them be free to choose whether to download and install your toolbar. Add the change password option to our online profile.

Good password policy… not!

Following good security practice I recently went through the process of changing my passwords. I started off this exercise by changing my ISP account password. So I went through the process, entered my strong password, and logged out to try out the new password.

Next, I tried to log on with my new password but I got an invalid account or password message. As happens to common mortals I thought, oh I must have entered the new password wrongly. So I tried again carefully typing in every symbol. Same result same frustration.

Read more…

SQL Server 2008 Management Studio Express

I am writing this post to save your precious time if you happen to be looking for the Management Studio of SQL Server 2008 Express Edition.

Recently I upgraded my 2005 express edition of C# to 2008. As part of the installation they include the 2008 version of SQL Server Express. I thought since the installation is upgrading my current 2005 version to the 2008 versions it will include everything I already have installed. Unfortunately, it turned out I was assuming too much from an installation.

C# 2005 and SQL Server 2005 Express editions were both upgraded to the 2008 version but the Management Studio was not. Surprisingly, or not, the 2005 management studio could not connect to the new 2008 installation. So I uninstalled it and went looking for the management studio version 2008.

Read more…

FruitfulTime TaskManager 2 Launched

As I wrote in my last blog post, I was busy working on FruitfulTime TaskManager 2.

Today I am happy to announce that after months of hard work, today we launched FruitfulTime TaskManager 2.

Time to celebrate

Go check it out and download your own free 10 day trial from here.

Installation is only 300KB, so you can download and install in less than a minute

Alive and kicking

It has been a while since my last blog post here since I was busy with some other stuff. Last month I had my degree exams and as you can imagine that was a busy month. After the exams were over I continued to work on the next version of FruitfulTime TaskManager.

FruitfulTime is a startup company developing productivity software, and I am co-founder along with my friend Gaetano. Our first product, FruitfulTime TaskManager is a simple, lightweight, yet powerful to do list management software.

Following the success we had with the first version, we continued to research ways to improve the product further and include feature requests received from our customers.

The next version of FruitfulTime TaskManager is a major release and includes many enhancements and new features which further simplify the product whilst making it more functional.

You can read more about FruitfulTime TaskManager 2 here.

Google’s simplicity vs Yahoo’s complexity

I continued to think about what I wrote in last Wednesday’s post, The Minimalist March to Success, and did some more research on the internet. While doing so, I came across two interesting posts one by Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame, and the other one by Prof. John Maeda, associate director of MIT’s Media Lab, on his blog simplicity.

Read more…

Real or Artificial Intelligence

Jeff Hawkins, the guy behind Palm Computing and mobiles such as PalmPilot and Treo, argues in his book, On Intelligence, that the current way of thinking about intelligence and how the brain works is flawed and therefore we cannot create intelligent machines based on this knowledge. He is so convinced of this that he founded his own research institute, the Redwood Neuroscience Institute (RNI), now permanently relocated to the UC Berkeley campus as Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience.

In his book, Jeff Hawkins states that we currently have a lot of data about the brain but not much as regards theories of how it really works. In fact, the Redwood institute task is to ”to use mathematical and physical principles to understand the nature of coding, dynamics, circuitry and plasticity in nervous systems.”

Read more…

The Minimalist March to Success

In this post I want to focus on what I feel is a recurring pattern adopted by all of today’s successful technology companies, minimalism.

Let me take the following companies as an example to support this argument: Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. You’ve all heard about them and most probably you either hate them or love them. With all probability you either witnessed or have been part of a flame war involving a combination of these companies. If not, just head to slashdot and go through some of the posts. I am confident you will find evidence of endless conversations in the line of my platform is better than yours, Bill Gates is evil, Google rocks, Yahoo sucks and so on and so forth.

Read more…