If you want to boost your system performance and speed things up, you definitely have to try this famous and award-winning software.

You can download System Mechanic 9 for free, with 6 months licence. This is part of a promotional offer by Iolo and Computer Active magazine.
(Below are the instructions for download)

System Mechanic 9 is currently one of the bestselling applications for system speed-up, and it has over 22 million users.

It has been awarded with Editor’s Choice Award by:

CNET, PC Utilities, LAPTOP Magazine, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and many more, but I can’t write them all down because the list would be pretty big.

The original price of System Mechanic 9 (standard edition) is $39.95 but with this promotional offer, it’s yours for free.

Popularity: 82% [?]

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Do you like how Windows 7 works? It’s way better than Vista right? I think we all agree at that point… Well today I have something that will prolong your joy of using Windows 7 for free from default 30 days, to amazing 120 days! I don’t talk about RC or Beta here, only final versions of Win7.

As you already know, Microsoft allows anyone to install and use any version of Windows 7 for 30 days without having to enter an activation key. There are no strings attached, and the operating system’s performance is not degraded or defaced during the trial.

But fortunately for us, the 30-day grace period can be extended up to three additional times – to a total of 120 days – using a Microsoft-supplied utility called the Software License Manager (slmgr). This tool conveniently ships with Windows 7 which means you already have it on your copy of Win7.

First let me explain how this whole process works:

If you install Windows 7 and don’t enter an installation key, the 30-day activation clock starts. To see how many days you have left, click ‘Start’, right-click ‘Computer’, and choose ‘Properties’. At the bottom of the dialog under ‘Windows Activation’, you’ll see the number of days left in your trial period.

When your remaining days come near to zero, you can apply the following steps to extend Windows 7 trial period and make it last additional 30 days.

So how is this 120 days? Well you can repeat the process three times at maximum. (When another 30 days end, you repeat, and then again after those additional days end, you repeat this last time) After that, you will need to enter the activation key which you, hopefuly will, after deciding which version fits you.

Popularity: 7% [?]

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Here’s a great freebie for you. I don’t know whether you heard it or not, but the new version of Zone Alarm has been released on November 24. And it is now available free for download.

It is kind of strange though, that the official announcement of the release hasn’t yet spread fully over the net. Even the link to download the latest version of ZoneAlarm on their official website leads to a page at Download.com where you can download only version 8 (I hope they will fix that soon).

It seems that the news about the new version of ZoneAlarm doesn’t seem to have got past the ZoneAlarm forum…Yet. But who cares. You can download it right now and enjoy the internet security that this famous firewall provides.

So what are the major changes and add-ons in the latest version of ZoneAlarm (9.1)?

1. One of the most important things is that this version of ZoneAlarm is now fully compatible with Windows 7. That means you can relax and don’t need to worry whether it will crash your system or cause any conflicts with other installed software on your computer (which could, yet again, lead to system failure).

2. There is a new browser security toolbar included with installation. This is helpful if you happen to go to some malicious website that tries to install some kind of malware on your pc. But I also think this browser toolbar will suck in additional RAM memory and if you have many add-ons installed (Firefox anybody?), then it could become pretty messy. (but only for those with less RAM capacity)

Popularity: 10% [?]

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Google is widely known as the Internet’s best search engine. Everybody with access to the internet uses Google at some point to find something (or many things) on the web for a particular web page, or a certain piece of information.

However, Google has several built in functions that will help you make your searches more successful, and to enable you to spend less time searching. I have written a post about some tricks that will help you with your image search and that will ‘give you the power’ to Find Images by Exact Dimensions, File Type or From Specific Website. That should make your search for new wallpapers that perfectly fit to your screen resolution as easy as walk in a park.

But today I’ve decided to expand that post and to tell you about a list of 5 functions that you did not know before (I think), all accessible from the main Google search box (frontpage), which will help you find every piece of information you are looking for.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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(Originally posted at Cloud Avenue)

This year’s Microsoft Profesional Developers Conference is full of announcements and surprises. The next big announcement besides Windows Azure (and Windows 7?) is the new “Office Web Applications” live service. The Office team will be delivering the five most popular Office applications as light weight browser based versions that include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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(Cross posted from CloudAve)

Microsoft announced its rollout plans for the 3rd wave of Windows Live services.

The goal of this latest release wave, according to company officials, is to simplify the use of the offered services and unify the user’s entire online experience into the Windows Live interface.
Microsoft is planning to rollout the new services, currently in beta, to the public within the 1-2 months timeframe.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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The basic model for MapReduce derives from the map and reduce concept in functional languages like Lisp.
In Lisp, a map takes as input a function and a sequence of values and applies the function to each value in the sequence.
A reduce takes as input a sequence of elements and combines all the elements using a binary operation (for example, it can use “+” to sum all the elements in the sequence).

MapReduce, inspired by these concepts, was developed as a method for writing processing algorithms for large amounts of raw data. The amount of data is so large that it can’t be stored on a single machine and must be distributed across many machines in order to be processed in a reasonable time.
In systems with such data distribution, the traditional central processing algorithms are useless as just getting the data to the centralized CPU running the algorithm implies huge network costs and months (!) spent on transferring data from the distributed machines.
Therefore, processing such massive scales of distributed data implies the need for parallel computing allowing us to run the required computation “close” to where the data is located.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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I’ve recently answered Predicting missing data values in a database on StackOverflow and thought it deserved a mention on DeveloperZen.

One of the important stages of data mining is preprocessing, where we prepare the data for mining. Real-world data tends to be incomplete, noisy, and inconsistent and an important task when preprocessing the data is to fill in missing values, smooth out noise and correct inconsistencies.

If we specifically look at dealing with missing data, there are several techniques that can be used. Choosing the right technique is a choice that depends on the problem domain – the data’s domain (sales data? CRM data? …) and our goal for the data mining process.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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On the past few weeks I’ve been working on a new venture centered around the iPhone. The process of building our app has been quite an adventure and we’ve experimented with several technologies that were new to us before reaching our current technology stack.
As we’ve finally got our stuff together and made an initial release to a group of testers I thought I’d share some of the technology choices we’ve made and the reasons behind them.

First some information about the team

…because technology choices are affected by the team’s technical skillset.

• We’re 3 developers (Yosi, Udi and myself) and one designer (the awesome Naor Suki).
• We’ve allocated two developers for the iPhone and one for the backend APIs & website.
• We’re all veteran developers with experience mostly on Microsoft’s Development stack. This project meant going out of our comfort zone to a whole new set of technologies. Experience does make a difference easing the learning curve…

Popularity: 2% [?]

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I encountered this post on my weekend reading. 91 Surefire Ways to Become an Event Greater Developer contain a comprehensive guide linking to all sort of blog posts providing insights on improving your skills as a developer.

While the list is very long and sometimes debatable it does have some interesting pointers. If you do nothing else, delve into item #8: Learn Programming by Not Programming referring to the following post by Jeff Atwood.

The topic in question is why some developers outperform their peers regardless of their accumulated experience:

But the dirty little secret of the software development industry is that this is also true even for people who can program: there’s a vast divide between good developers and mediocre developers.

A mediocre developer can program his or her heart out for four years, but that won’t magically transform them into a good developer. And the good developers always seem to have a natural knack for the stuff from the very beginning.

The answer lies in the quotes taken from Bill Gates remarks:

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Kaxaml!

Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a “split view” so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content (kind of like XamlPad but without the gigabyte of SDK). Kaxaml is a hobby and was created to be shared, so it’s free! Feel free to download and try it out. If you don’t like it, it cleans up nicely.

If you’re having problems with the installer or if you’re just a do-it-yourself kind of individual, you can download the files you need as a zip.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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If you want to make Windows 7 Ribbon and add it in your application, give Visual Ribbon Creator a shot. It is developed for VC++ programmers only. Ribbon is a great feature in Windows 7 and deserves an appreciation.

This tool generates Ribbon code, DLL, and Code Snippers for sample usage. It requires Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 and Windows 7 SDK. The app creates standard Windows 7 Ribbon using Win32 only and is very different than Visual Studio 2010 editor which creates MFC/Office Ribbon.

Please note that you should use this tool only and only if you are doing Win32/x64 directly.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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