This photo was taken during promotional campaign of energy-saving set of HP products - i.e. HP Pavilion S3260, a compact-size computer unit reconciling high-performance with a nice design and low power consumption. Here’s the official press release — just in case someone may be interested in reading about the hardware instead of staring at the picture!

I did a little research on Chinese internet and I didn’t find more pictures of that girl, which isn’t much surprising when it comes to booth babes - they all do their work anonymously. All of the pictures I happened to find are included in this post published at Chinese Engadget. Anyway, some fellow dropped few links in comments added below the DailyTech article, have a look at that stuff.

Thank you very much DailyTech readers, I have seen LOTS of pictures of trade shows before, and I must admit — HP Girl just seems to be the finest one. By the way I learned that northern Chinese have sharper noses and less rounded faces when compared to the southern Chinese — not sure if that makes them more good-looking, or not. If so — what would you say about Koreans?

Compiz Fusion is collection of plugins for Compiz, an OpenGL based window manager for the X Window System (read: available for all Linux distributions, natively build in Ubuntu) that uses 3D graphics hardware to create fast compositing desktop effects for window management.

Most of you have heard about that great piece of free software, and I really don’t want to rewrite what was already written. Instead, I’m gonna share with you a well-performed video demonstration of all Compiz Fusion plugins which was recently recorded by one of my compatriots. Definitely worth watching (RSS readers - below is a little preview).

Here are the links to the video showing all the plugins in action:

• AVI version (206 MB, the higher quality, scroll down the page to download)
• OGG version (56MB, quality comparable to the previous one)
• YouTube version (terrible quality, but it is also available )

For further information go read Wikipedia. And for those of you who would like to show off a little with their own Linux installations - here’s the Compiz Fusion installation guide for Ubuntu users. Cheers.

How much time may it take to find complete information about pricing on their own website? Five minutes, maybe ten? Well, I’m sorry but this time I simply have no idea - and I can only tell you that after 15 minutes of hard-digging through the all of their marketing brainwash I came up with nothing, so I tried Google Search. And check out what I found under “godaddy renewal prices” - a series of comprehensive articles clearly showing the way GoDaddy deals with people. Go on, find out how the world’s most popular domain registrar does it’s business. It is really interesting and worth reading, just go on and read.

The GoDaddy Girl - Candice Michelle

After visiting Wincent’s website I’m sooooo glad that GoDaddy has nothing to do with my domain names. Be anxious - in one of future postings I may publish a list of trustworthy companies where you don’t need to worry about all these hidden catches and never-tells (which I’m trying to complete right now). Also, I think I will try to bring it to you together with a shiny collection of promotional codes

PS Danica Patrick is ugly. Bring back Candice Michelle.

Instead, let’s focus on the real benefits volleyball brings the world…

Following a rigorous selection process and a great deal of deliberation (*cough*), I am finally able to present the 10 finest pictures of the 2007 FIVB Women’s World Cup, showing only the sports hottest cheesecakes in all of their athletic glory

Katarzyna Skowrońska (POL)

Jaqueline Carvalho (BRA)

Francesca Piccinini (ITA)

Stacy Sykora (USA)

Mirtha Uribe (PER)

Bethania De La Cruz de Pena (DOM)

Kimberly Glass (USA)

Yoshie Takeshita (JPN)

Yumilka Ruiz (CUB)

Eleonora Dziękiewicz (POL)

You can find these and MANY more hi-res photos in the official gallery of the Federation Internationale de Volleyball. Thanks to Eskey for bringing my attention to that site.

Finally, I have a question for Russian readers (if there are any) - do you think the use of a trans-gender hormone popping monster in an all female team is really in the best interests of the game? I mean, maybe she should try some other sports, or something?

I changed my mind about Twitter, and registered a profile. Be shamefaced Bart, not long ago you maintained that you will not ever have a Twitter account! Well, yes - but let’s say that my point of view changed a bit. I was digging through the web and - completely unintentionally - I found a list of Firefox plugins. Two of them (number 5. and 6.) can give you a great ability to make an untypical use of your Firefox search bar.

I have no clue how could you all use that sucky “search bar” thing - as far as I know when I need to do a search I just type “g search phrase” into standard address bar of my browser, then I hit enter. So let’s say that additional search bar filled full with affiliate links that Mozilla has included in it may be even totally useless, and in fact it would be great to completely remove it from the toolbar. And - I didn’t know about it - but there is a very simple way to get rid of that thing. Read that comment added by Asa Dotzler of Mozilla below my writings (it actually makes me feel sooooo damn cheap on my shameful lack of the basic FF know-how so I’m updating that post once again, you won’t notice )

So… These two plugins mentioned somewhere above allow you to post updates to Twitter directly via your Firefox search bar. Think: “hey, what a great occasion to use it as the most comfortable miniblog tool in the world!“.

Two awesome extensions that actually make totally useless thing useful, this just cannot be true. And you see, unfortunately it isn’t - both of them are currently not available for download. I wrote my own - kinda funny, it required only 10-lines long XML file. If you would like to download click here, all instructions are included within the readme file. I use it together with tweaked version of Wordpress plugin written by Alex King.

After four weeks of silence, author of that blog finally enters 2008. Better late than never - glad to see I’m not alone in publishing my first post THAT late this year.

Happy New Year?

If you haven’t yet heard about it - yesterday AOL announced that Netscape (an icon of internet, acquired by that company for $4.2 billion almost 10 years ago) will be officially dead on February 1, 2008.

Okay, honesty it’s been many years since Netscape is dead unofficially. But whatever browser you use (current share of Netscape Navigator is around 0,6%) - story of that program should be really important to you. Deplorable ending of that brand is a great example of the way that corporate business affects great things. You see, there was a time when Netscape and ICQ were great programs, in fact. I swear - before mental giants from AOL bought them, they were.

That’s why I’m actually glad to see that Facebook and Digg haven’t been sold. They will keep the good work, I mean.

Bart, that’s not ok, at least not all products of Microsoft are doomed to failure! Well, maybe not - Silverlight looks pretty nice. But you see, I have a good memory. And clearly I remember what these guys were saying 14 months ago, when they added IE 7.0 to Windows Vista. Hey, I can even have a quote!

In IE7, we will fix as many of the worst bugs that web developers hit as we can, and we will add the critical most-requested features from the standards as well

Liars, liars. For example - we successfully added support for the alpha channel in PNG images. Wait… Oh crap, looks like we found a problem! Do you need more examples? Okay, just tell me how many of them do you need to have a critical point of view?

Comment quoted below (taken from Slashdot) ideally shows the way people do their best in Redmond

if (url == acid2 test page)
display jpg of correct acid2 rendering
else …

PS Scrollbar does not disappear. This is a bug isn’t it? Have a look into The Guided Tour of Acid2.

PS Picture comes from that site, it is a poster available to purchase and hang on your wall

Things you should know about:

• I wanted to make it clean & juicy, thankfully it looks like both of my goals were accomplished
• It’s based on the frame of Wordpress theme made by Chinese buddy. Despite of the fact that this design doesn’t look that good, his code was pretty fine and adjusting it to all of my crotchets was trouble-free and quite comfortable
• Choosing a good logo was the most challenging part of my work. Although I don’t have many problems in web design, every time when I need to develop a logotype I’m starting to realize that all of my GIMP know-how is not enough to make a good one. So I did a little research, checked few variants, and finally decided to use one of icons available in Tux’n'Tosh.
• Color scheme comes from my favorite distribution of Linux, of course. In spite of all of my liking, I haven’t put Ubuntu logo into header section - it would be suggesting that author of that blog writes about Linux basically. As far as I know he doesn’t

Okay, time to response to all of your recent comments & cut through the sea of unread items in Google Reader…

Recently Opera’s market share increased from 0.87% to 0.99%, when I was discussing about it with a group of nerds (I really like Opera Browser and I’m always glad to see their progress ), the nameless mental giant came and stated: “with only 1 percent of share Opera has no importance at all!“.

Dude… I wish you would know the number of all internet users at first!

Below you can see a chart that shows current Browser Market Share (provided by Net Applications). This is nice, but you can say you have seen similar ones coming in news many times before, so that’s nothing special. Ok, but in general all these charts have a little disadvantage - they don’t feed your imagination. So people are starting to think that Opera has only few users, and of course no one uses other browsers like Konqueror, K-Meleon, or any other. Fortunately, we possess some info about global internet usage…

According to these numbers there are already around 1,244,449,601 people connected to the web (yes I know it looks amazingly, cannot see it in stats of my sites ) - let’s calculate how many of them use respective browsers:

• IE (around 969,052,904, one another chance to say “I hate Bill Gates!”)
• Firefox (around 184,800,766, thanks to Google & their affiliates?)
• Safari (around 62,844,705 - say hello to all users of Mac)
• Opera (around 12,320,051)
• Netscape (around 7,964,477)

Now you’ve got to know that Opera’s 1% is THAT much, and why social bookmarking version of Netscape.com was a success.