DB Designer 4

It has been a long time for me to look for a free (better if open source), user friendly and powerful ERD editor. Most of the foundings are trial version, limited version, non-open source, or not so user friendly.

But this week, it seems God wants to give me a gift - DB Designer 4, which is an open source, user friend and powerful DB designing tool. It support connections to various data sources, e.g. MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle and ODBC, execution of queries, reverse engineering on db design, forward engineering by applying the change in db design or generating SQL script. You're also allowed to export the diagram in to PNG or BMP, which would be useful for documentation while some other tool doesn't export any graphics...


DB Designer 4

StarUML

Half year ago, I found this tool very useful for system design and documentation. Six months later, I still think so. StarUML is a free CASE tool for OO Methodology, supporting UML, MDA, and both forward and backward engineering. The tool is planned to support round-trip engineering, which I'm interested in very much. I hope the tool can be continued with its development and we can see the power of round-trip engineering at the days.

StarUML

My recent thought

Recently, I thought of a system framework to allow us to develop software in the same way as how chemical factory works. It will be nice if I can implement the framework, and then show you the interesting idea. Hope it won't be too late for you.

Germany 2006 - The Goals

Germany 2006 - The Goals

Nothing in IT. It's just another one of my favourite - World Cup.

ASP .Net Web Page Optimization Checklist - The Code Project - ASP.NET

ASP .Net Web Page Optimization Checklist - The Code Project - ASP.NET

Do keep your application clean and efficient. Try this out. It works!

Ajax Patterns

Ajax Patterns

Have you started AJAX development? If so, how many of the patterns have you applied? You can find out a list of patterns of AJAX development, covering aspects like Performance and Usability. This page is useful to not only AJAX developers, but also for developers with no AJAX developemnt experience (for preparation).

Ten Essential Tools: Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now -- MSDN Magazine, December 2005

Ten Essential Tools: Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now -- MSDN Magazine, December 2005

I have just figure out a new article in MSDN magazine on add-ins for Visual Studio. Those add-ins cover areas like testing, documentation, Visual Studio usability, Web Services development and cache monitoring. I am not sure if these are useful, since I haven't read through it in detail yet. But the 10 Must-Have tools introduced by the author last year are quite helpful. Enjoy.

A web service as a framework for simplifying development and deployment of business functions - The Code Project - SOAP and XML

A web service as a framework for simplifying development and deployment of business functions - The Code Project - SOAP and XML

This is one of the best preparation material for starting Web Service development for systems in medium to large scale.

Ting-hao Yang's ASP.NET blog : Cross page navigation techniques in ASP.NET 1.x and 2.0

Ting-hao Yang's ASP.NET blog : Cross page navigation techniques in ASP.NET 1.x and 2.0

If you found the loading speed of your pages is slow, you would probably need to do some performance tuning on those pages. You may most likely think that the database query is slow, the page computation is too complicated, or the page size is too large. However, it may also be the case for long client-server round trip time (propagation delay). Here is a blog post from Yang on the details of page navigation scenerio. It may give you ideas on how to fine tune the loading time of your pages.

Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Project Tutorials in C#

Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Project Tutorials in C#

I don't know when will I need to work on some migration project from dotNet 1.1 to dotNet 2.0. But I do think this will happen some days later, and this tutorial will be helpful.

To lead, or to be led?

It's just a very simple question. To lead, or to be led? I think most of the people thought of times that they're in the leading position. However, how many people reach there? How to get there? I don't have a concret idea. But standing behind someone and tracking their path obviously doesn't work.

Be more active, or even proactive.

Ken's Goodies Blog

I'm not sure how many of you recognise that I've established a new blog, named Ken's Goodies Blog, for new product alert (or may be there's nobody reading this blog). It seems that the new blog is not very popular, perphaps it's because I've not put much effort in promoting it. I think I need to promote the blog in more public channels. Let's see what will the situation be in the early January.

The Dilbert Principle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I found out his Wiki article today, when I was finding information on Bottleneck Bill. All I can say is that this principle is really something.

Cell phones outnumber PCs in China | Tech News on ZDNet

Cell phones outnumber PCs in China | Tech News on ZDNet: "Cell phones outnumber PCs in China"

This remind me of my Final Year Project in CityU, entitled "Online Game in Mobile Phone". When will this idea really come true?

Vodafone is leaving, but who's next?

As reported, the loge of some high-tech companies may be on Mancehster United shirts next year. What will that be? Google? IBM? Or Yahoo? I think I'll then buy a new MU shirt the coming summer.

George Best 1946 - 2005

Keane, Vodafone... And then MU lengend George Best has also left MU, and the world.

Google Video of the Day

What a collection of the Google Video entries. This blog is like the "Google Map Tour" blog few months ago, but much more interesting for the rich of media.

Geek to Live: Find free music on the web - Lifehacker

Live like a geek, and find the media you need like a geek.

After Keano, Vodafone is leaving MU

Manchester United Official Web Site - Club & News - News - 1:08:24 AM

The remarkable Vodafone logo will not be on the shirts starting from next season. I'm lucky that I've bought a training shirt for this season.

Create a simple file transfer Web service with .NET - Techguides - ZDNet Asia

This situation is really interesting. "Creating a file transfer Web Service" is the topic of a girl's final year project last year. She also won in the Imagine Cup by Microsoft with that project. My friends lost in that competition and argue that the topic is too simple and not useful. Well, yes, it's simple to implement. But perhaps they're on the wrong track. In that competition, as shown in the name, creativity seems to mean everything.

Opera goes mobile with AJAX - ZDNet UK News

It's nice to see AJAX everywhere, especially for mobile platform. I really hope to see my mobile phone running responsive web application for ordering some products from my company.

Roy Keane Leaves Old Trafford

Manchester United Official Web Site - Club & News - News - Football News - 6:15:07 PM

It's sad to heard that MU skipper Roy Keane is leaving the club immediately. We'll miss you in Red, Keane.

Implementing Ajax.NET-based Lookup Server Control - The Code Project - ASP.NET

Recently, I'm working on some AJAX stuff, since I've found AJAX.NET.

AJAX.NET is great except that it can only apply on pages but user controls. Fortunately, there're guys trying to make things done. This Code Project article shows you how to make the user control more integrated with AJAX.

Implementing Ajax.NET-based Lookup Server Control

Business Opportunities Weblog | How Much Is My Blog Worth

This applet is really interesting. It evaluate the relative value of your blog comparing to AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.

Vincent Cheung: Alarm clocks are bad. How to wake up and feel better.

Well, this is something I've been doing for several years. Since I like the radio programs in the morning, I normally schedule the radio to turn on every morning, before I actually wake up. I don't know whether this method work, but I think this method really remind me of what the time is, since there will be time and weather report every 30 minutes.

My blog got spammed

Kind of funny. My posts will get spammed with bot reply whenever they're published. Really funny.

Dictionary.com/idempotent

All of a sudden, I thought of the term "idempotent". This was a term I heard in university life, but I have forgotten the meaning of this term. Then I look it up in dictionary.com and got its meaning. Well, quite mathematical and computer scientific.

Keano is going to leave MU?

It's a bit sad to hear that Roy Keane may leave Manchester United after this season. But just as what Roy said, "Players come and go - that's football." I'm looking forward to see Alan Smith playing as a midfielder in MU and Roy sitting on the bench as a coach in the coming seasons.

PSP Crack - The Place To Get All Your PSP Hacking Needs

Go Hacking!!!

Nokia pushing mobile development at Eclipse - Builder UK

Nokia pushing mobile development at Eclipse - Builder UK

I can still remember the time when I was working on my FYP. I had to search for tools for J2ME development. Finally, I got some tools from Sun, Borland and Eclipse. But since the Sun J2ME WTK isn't developer friendly, and Eclipse didn't support J2ME 2.0 at that moment, I picked Borland JBuilder.

Now, Nokia said to support mobile development at Eclipse. How would the situation be? It links me to the tales of HTML. HTML doesn't require any expensive development tool at all, and it finally became a basic unit in the web. For mobile development, even though it's as easy as writing HTML, a good and free development tool will definitely helps in the spread of technology.

Will there be some mobile applications that we use daily in the coming two or three year? Will there be publications on the problem of mobile game addict? Well, may be.

Why CEOs should blog?

Global PR Blog Week 2.0 � Blog Archive � Adding Your Voice to the Conversation. Why CEOs Should Blog

Well, this is not the first time I heard concept like this. But just to remind us the importance of the Blogging, I'm blogging it.

43 Folders | Writing sensible email messages

Make things systematic, please do write meaningful, sensible emails.

Google Blog Search reach my blogs deeply

The search result is impressing. My blog entries get dominated in the result list even though I didn't quote my search pattern. The link above is on a quoted search pattern, which I assume to contain really mostly my blog entries. And I'm gonna try some other search patterns in a couple of hours.

TechCrunch � Top Ten Things You Can Do To Get Blogged

This may be a list to help u make you get blogged.

The Code Project - Implementing Ajax.NET-based Lookup Server Control - ASP.NET

Well, AJAX again. There is a library on AJAX for .NET developers, named Ajax.NET. And this article in code project describe how to work with that library.

Cross Domain Cookie Provider

I've been working on some sort of authentication and authorization module recently. I use .Net encrypted cookie, copied from a MSDN article, but I found the authentication cookie can't go across different applications. Then I try to create the cookie on my own. This time, it works, but it still doesn't work across doamin. Therefore, I googled "cross domain cookie" and reached this article. I've been hearing stuff about single sign-on, things like server and token. This design pattern seems to be similar to what I heard before.

MarkItUp - BlogML

MarkItUp - BlogML

Yeah! Mark your blog in BlogML.

Google Bendi

This would be cool if you're going to stay in the Mainland China for some time.

YesAsia.com: Customer Support

This is my second product in the current company. It looks good, but it can be great.

Main Page - Soccerpedia The Free Soccer Encyclopedia

A Wiki on global soccer information. This is another great stuff I've found after the FootballDatabase.

TheServerSide.NET - The Fallacy of the Data Layer

TheServerSide.NET - The Fallacy of the Data Layer

This is not a very new article, but worth reading. This would be particularly useful if you're working on data access classes everyday.

The Code Project - ORM, Code Generation and a bit about MDA - .NET

The Code Project - ORM, Code Generation and a bit about MDA - .NET

The article is not a very informative one on either ORM, code generation or MDA, but it contains a list of tools and reference links on articles about the above 3 topics. I'll comment this page as a good summary of these 3 technologies.

Computation consumption for exceptions handling in.NET - .NET

The Code Project - Performance implications of exceptions in.NET - .NET

Exception handling is a common task in practical programming. To employ the exception handling feature of a language, you have better have a clear view on their effect on the system performance, which is also an important issue in the real world.

Yahoo! Search - Audio Search

Yahoo! Search - Audio Search

I love this product from Yahoo!. It can even reach TVB.com.

To evaluate a blog

Napsterization

An open source algorithm to measure the value of a blog.

Design Patterns: Dependency Injection -- MSDN Magazine, September 2005

Design Patterns: Dependency Injection -- MSDN Magazine, September 2005

Sounds good.

: 101 Samples for Visual Studio 2005

: 101 Samples for Visual Studio 2005

To make a better preparation on VS2005 and .NET Framework 2.0.

The Improved Sorting Algorithm Demo

The Improved Sorting Algorithm Demo

This is really a good resource for those people studying Sorting Algorithms.

YesAsia.com-logogle

YesAsia.com-logogle

When YesAsia.com looks like Google.

MSDN Solution Architecture Center: Metadata-Driven User Interfaces

MSDN Solution Architecture Center: Metadata-Driven User Interfaces

This will be a good way to separate program code and UI design.