GMail Drive -- A New Network Drive on Your Machine

GMail is not just email box for us from now. Can you imagine that GMail can be used as a network storage medium accessed through your local machine if only you have GMail account and network. That is just easy!

It is GMail Drive that achieve this great job! It adds a drive in your Windows Explorer or My Computer. You can use it just like using the C, D...local drive on your machine. 1000MB is a relative huge storage for normal user. Probably sometimes you think that how many letters I need to fill up this huge 'tank'. Now you've got an idea?

GMail Drive is a shell namespace extension which creates a virtual filesystem on the top of your GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail, even to create folders on this virtual drive, but folders will not appear in your GMail box. In your GMail box the files are still organized as emails. Folders are just a kind of virtual organization structure on your machine.

Detailed information can be gotten in the GMail Drive's website.

Google's technologies always shock people, which injects a shot of special and creative energy to the development of Internet technology. Also, it also attracts more and more developers who are willing to dive into the Google's technology. This is Google's Environment!

Computational Biology ----- Biology is flying with IT

Biology underlies all the life sciences, but historically it has been more of a descriptive than quantitative science. Today, however, computational approaches dramatically increase the potential to learn and understand the complex relationships within and between the subsets of biology (biological response, biodiversity, genetics, medicine, etc.).

Computational Biology represents the marriage of Information Technology (IT) and biology, and spans many disciplines, such as bioinformatics (both genomics and post-genomics), molecular modeling, bioengineering, biosimulation, clinical informatics, medical imaging, and many others. While genomics research brought a face to Computational Biology, it also brought with it a set of new and more difficult challenges such as:

• A collision of paradigms giving rise to data overload,


• Data interoperability problems, and


• The need for widely distributed data and computing resources to solve certain problems.

Continue to read 'Computational Biology: the Marriage of IT and Biology' , which bring a new face for the computational biology in relation to the Sun technologies. I think that it will give you a practical review about computational biology.

Sun also has Communities of Interest for Computational Biology, which provide a open platform for researchers, scientists, and partners. The most valuable part in this platform, I think, is Partnerships Program which is composed of three parts: Centres of Excellence, External Research Office and Asia Pacific Science and Technology Centre. It gives out large loads of information, developments, trends, and resources of computational biology with high-advanced Sun technologies.

Got GMail Account!

Recently Google announced the arrival of 1G GMail email system. Because it is still under the stage of beta testing, the registration of accounts are not available to everyone. The persons who want to get the account must get the invitation from the GMail user. Many people include me tried to look for the invitation sources and expected to get one account. My purpose is to attend the testing phrase of Google, providing useful and practical feedbacks to Google about their new email system as I was attracted deeply by the technologies of Google. Eventually I got two accounts thanks to friends Brennan Stehling and Taylor Simpson.

Next, there is a problem put on the table directly and clearly after getting the GMail account. That is, how to import the other email accounts, such as Thunderbird, Mozilla, Hotmail, Outlook and so on, into the GMail email box. Google's GMail did not provide such tools to implement this function. I 'google' GMail on the Web and found this solution for this problem, which solved most of my required problems! Based on the instructions published on that site, Microsoft Outlook PST file is still under development. I believe it will be available later time!

Currently I have 6 invitations for the GMail account. If interested, you can email me and of course I hope you can give me satisfactory reasons!

Duke Surfing Screensaver

I have never seen this kind of screensaver from Sun before. Although not fabulous, like 3D effects and real background sounds as many popular screensavers, it opened Java developers a new window in the development fields, I think. You can download it from Java.com, which just need you to answer three simple questions like normal registration in the common BBS.

Wish to enjoy it!

Using NewsGator to public the Blogs through email client--Microsoft Outlook

This is great news for me, a newbie to RSS technology. Through searching the web, though there are many RSS readers available nowadays, after testing I found that two readers fitting me well, one is free RSS Reader, the other is NewsGator, which is not free of charge, but you can find the cracker on the web to crack it to make it work normally. I prefer the first one because it is not only simple but also flexible. Many websites introducing the basic knowledge of RSS advise the users the most common and popular RSS reader, SharpReader. But I think the users should not limit their eyes only on this kind of introduction, but look for more and appropriate readers fit yourself well.

Every reader has its own advantages. RSS Reader can import and export the XML format for your feeds, and also provides you a directory storing the business, news, technology, science, health, and many other kinds of feeds. NewsGator is run embedded in the Microsoft Outlook. It provides many plug-ins which will extend the functions of this tool. You can obtain and download them directly from the website of NewsGator. I use one of them, Blogger plug-in, which will make the users of Blogger.com write, edit and publish their blogs in the Microsoft Outlook offline or online. It is very convenient! I selected NewsGator actually just because of this advantage of NewsGator. Though NewsGator also provide the function of import and export, the format is very particular, not common like that of RSS Reader. I think that this will be the obstacle of the NewsGator’s development in the future unless this format will become the standard of this field used by most of the RSS reader.

In summary, I think that the primary principle of selection of RSS readers is you-feel-comfortable-about-its-functions-and-interface. It is really difficult to say which RSS reader is the best. But we can find easily by the investigations which reader is the most popular! This site will provide you the popular RSS readers.

This blog is edited and published using NewsGator in the Microsoft Outlook.

Learn the Ontology from the View of the Ontology Tools

Ontology is used to organize and construct the concepts and information-pieces in a specific domain in a formally logical way designed for machine processing. It has been one more years since I first touched the Ontology when I was doing my Master project and dissertation. I still found that there are many aspects about the ontology and its applications underlying the popular and critical industries. This paper on the XML.COM enlightened me that there are still many unknown corners to me in the Ontology, which drives me to discove more through daily pracitce. In the mean time, I also felt pressure suddenly pushed on me for my oncoming PhD study in the Ontology Management, because lack of deep understanding of ontology made me upset.

Back to the paper, although it investigated the current ontology tools in the market, it also gave out a clear viewpoints of the ontology which made me remeet the concept of the ontology. I have mentioned the ontology to my peers who are doing the relevant works in the IT industries in China. It is a pity that they seldom know this concept currently. Compared to the situations of 5 years ago, ontology is not developed limitedly in the academical circles. It has entered into the many fields of IT industries, such as web search services, web portals, web services, e-commerce, and other industries, such as health care, intelligence agent. Nearly everyday we will use Google or Yahoo! Do you really know them? They are actually using the ontology-base framework to organize and manage the contents on the web. Directories in the Yahoo! is a good example of structure to show how the ontology to organize the contents on the web.

Surprisingly, In April of this year, Gartner, the market research firm, identified taxonomies/ontologies as one of the leading IT technologies, ranking it third in its list of the top 10 technologies forecast for 2005. That is a great news! There will be more and more applications based on the ontology coming up in the following years!

Shortcut to Routine Life on the Keyborad

I always notice that many people use their keyboard on the hand to nevigate the Windows fluently, smoothly, and even magically. That is cool, isn't it? There are many shortcuts hidden in our keyborad. I seldom dig them out, or remember them for the use, but still use some complicated actions to perform the tasks which can be done easily by one-action shortcut. Windows Keyboard Shortcuts, althought just a glance of the shortcuts on the keyboard, I think, but these one-action clicks will satisfy our routine daily life definitely!

No Topic

Imagination meets innovation, and first impression will leave a lasting.

Bioinformatics, New Field in The 21st Century

Introduction to Bioinformatics by Robert Jones -- Bioinformatics is the intersection of molecular biology and computer science. For software developers, it’s a fascinating area in which to work. Mac OS X is gaining popularity in this arena, and this article introduces you to the concepts and opportunities related to bioinformatics.

Biology and Computing technologies are the two crucial roles and hottest energies, whether in the routine daily life or in the industries, in the 21st Century. Bioinformatics, this combination of these two technologies, will us what and how the effects are. As a researcher, what we will bring to this new field and how to get the practical techniques from it apply them to other relevant researches so as to make difference to the development of technologies is not an easy and explicit topic to discuss.

The solution for File Uploading in ASP.NET

ASP.NET File Uploading by Budi Kurniawan -- File upload and download are much simpler tasks in ASP.NET than in classic ASP, thanks to the extensive .NET Framework class library. While file upload in ASP.NET is as easy as retrieving an HTML form value, file download is still a bit tricky.

Although I am not professional in the programing, I retain the strong interests in finding some solutions in the programing languages for the practical problems. This problem I met long before, but I did not find an appropriate solution for it, then I put it aside (actually this is not a good habit for a scholar!). Today I finally found the answer for it!