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This is a comprehensive review of the T-Mobile Sidekick II. I wanted to push this review out a lot quicker but I figured that a thorough testing and experience with the Sidekick II was necessary. After spending a year with the original color Sidekick I think I’ll be able to write up a very good review. On Tuesday, my Sidekick II came and like a gleeful school boy I dropped my SIM card in it and plugged in it to charge. I analyzed, prodded, poked, and so on then took it to SeaWorld the next day. ...

Microsoft announced on Sunday that it would share Microsoft Office 2003 source code as part of the Microsoft Government Security Program. The program is designed to make governments feel more comfortable about Microsoft’s security practices. The source code for Office 2003 is going to be shared with the governments of more than 30 countries. I’m sure the United States will have numerous teams from different agencies analyzing this source code. It will be interesting to see what the NSA has to say about it. Something I’m curious about is if a government finds a blatant security flaw of some sort are they to fix the flaw themselves or is Microsoft the only person allowed to manipulate the code? I’m Microsoft isn’t going to want to have over 30 different versions of Office 2003 out there but it sure would be nice to strip out the Excel game and all of the other non-sense incorporated into Office in an effort to speed things up and make it more secure. ...

I finally did it. I bought a laptop before I headed out to California. Not so much for the trip to California but for another PC in the house and some more horsepower (a lot more horsepower). I’m not a gamer but I can always use a powerful processor. I picked up the HP Pavilion zv5260us. Here are the specs of the system: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Processor 512 MB of DDR SDRAM 80 Gigabyte 4200 RPM Hard Disk Drive 15.4" WXGA Widescreen Monitor 64MB NVIDIA GeForce 4 440 Go Video Card DVD+RW/R & CD-RW Combo Drive 54g Integrated Broadcom 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Adapter & Bluetooth 10/100 Mbps Network Adapter and 56K Modem Decent Sound Card with Good harman/kardon speakers 5-in-1 Card Reader Firewire (IEEE 1394) 3 USB 2.0 Ports I dumped all the pre-installed software (of course) and installed the software I actually needed, removing all the crap that comes pre-installed on a laptop these days. ...

orkut.com is a social networking service developed in association with Google. Why the name Orkut? Orkut Büyükkökten, a Google employee that has a significant interest in social networking, developed the service. How did Mr. Orkut have time to develop such a project? Google has a creativity policy of sorts that encourages its employees to use 20% of their time for personal interests. Google has officially stated that orkut.com is not part of their service offerings (yet) but the fact that the phrase, “in affiliation with Google” appears on every page leads one to believe that this social networking service isn’t going to spin-off into a non-Google entity any time soon. ...

This article is designed to help individuals build web pages that are search engine optimized as well as human friendly. It will focus intently on the process used to develop web pages for this web site and how pages are optimized before being published on this web site. Any good web developer or webmaster will tell you that your site should be themed. This means your site should have the same look and feel across all of its pages. Colors, layout, navigation, positioning, and numerous other elements fall into creating a good theme for a web site. However, developing a site theme mainly deals with the content of the web site itself. A site’s theme is essentially the topic of the site and that site’s content should relate to the topic or theme. However, this article isn’t about creating themes for a web site it’s about building an optimized, user friendly web page to include in a site that’s already themed. ...