Things from, of and about the head on the shoulders.
More patent insanity. This time it’s for landing pages that appear when users initially start their browser at public hotspots to enable them to log on, select items such as bandwidth and billing options, etc. Recently Jim Rapoza also wrote about two stupid patents on eWeek as well. This is getting pretty ridiculous.
The beta of the recently oft-spoken blogging tool by Microsoft is out and contains all the necessary features of a blog. The blogs look nice too so I guess MS scores on the looks department. But then, it appears it is noticeably slow for many users. Check it out. I’m stick with WP here of […]
Arstechnica gives a nice summary of an article in USA Today about an experiment involving ‘monitoring six “honeypot” computers for two weeks — set up to see what kind of malicious traffic they would attract.’ Less than four minutes from start of the test, an intruder breaks into Windows XP SP1. Wow. Kids, start using […]
According to Brad Garlinghouse (VP, Communications Products) on Yahoo! Search Blog yesterday, Yahoo! Mail now has three new features: Better Search DomainKeys Implementation DHTML Nothing too surprising or exciting in search features since it was expected after Gmail‘s search within their mail interface. Yahoo! merely seems to equal their feature list for now; only Gmail’s […]
I sent out a small one liner in the office about starting a Mexican Wave. I received many responses and ended up on this particular page: Mexican Waves (Laola) – A quantitative analysis of the propagating human wave. Good stuff.
I checked out the My Yahoo! Search beta today. From the 5-10 minutes I spent looking around, I liked what I saw and will return later to explore it further.
I finally caught up with and am now officially current on all my news feeds. RSS rules.
FlashBlog is a Weblog made in Flash/Php/MySQL. It is an Open Source application and even the Flash source (FLA files) are available. Though in beta, it already does: Front End in Flash Back End Php/MySQL Categories Search WYSIWYG Publisher Multi-users Multi-author “Limitless” vertical stage Function buttons: back/ahead Not a big fan of Flash applications but […]
That’s Jacob Nielsen speaking in his latest Alertbox. It is an excellent article where he talks about how the user experience is so governed by ‘accepted norms’ that a non-standard design implementation will only alienate your users and make them go elsewhere.
I just caught it on /. that ASF has refused to implement Sender ID. They’ve written an open-letter to MARID IETF Working Group about it. The current Microsoft Royalty-Free Sender ID Patent License Agreement terms are a barrier to any ASF project which wants to implement Sender ID. We believe the current license is generally […]
Mozilla.org got a facelift today. Quite refreshing design though I was taken aback just a little when I saw Firefox being promoted over Mozilla 1.7.2 but I suppose there must be a logical reason to do so. Don’t think Firefox has become the flagship product for Mozilla Foundation yet though it appears that it is […]
Ever wonder how to deliver custom typefaces to people who don’t have them installed without using graphics? It’s quite a catch-22 isn’t it? You use graphics and your search engine ranking goes down and in some cases, the page simply doesn’t show up since all the good stuff is in the images. If you don’t […]
… and causes an uproar. The official thread on the topic on xchat.org forums is nothing compared to the fiery stuff at IRC Junkie. Almost everybody is saying that GPL is being broken and those who contributed code are wondering about the licensing of their code. This open letter to Zed, the core developer of […]
When I shifted to Linux, I was using FeedDemon on Windows which unfortunately did not run on wine’s default installation. I looked around and came across Straw which sounded and looked almost like a Linux-avatar of FeedDemon. Unfortunately, no rpm of Straw existed and I managed to track down the SRC on Dag’s Apt/Yum RPM […]
InfoWorld is reporting that Microsoft has decided to enforce Sender ID on all email sent to its Hotmail, MSN & Microsoft.com email addresses from October 1. Microsoft will begin matching the source of inbound e-mail to the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of e-mail servers listed in that sending domain’s SPF record by Oct. 1. Messages […]
According to an article on PC Magazine: Microsoft launched its MSN Hotmail Plus subscription service in 30 markets worldwide today. The upgraded service, as announced in June, offers subscribers, for $19.95 a year in the US, 2GB of storage, the ability to send 20MB attachments, no account expiration, and no graphical advertising. That is 4 […]
I just ran into two reports on BetaNews about Hotmail. The first reports that in the first moves towards competing in the email business, they have enabled Anti-Virus scanning. Now existing users might remember that they already had a tie-up with McAfee but they have apparently expanded from scanning attachments being downloaded to scanning entire […]
I just gave aDesigner a test run. Simply put, I am damn impressed. Let me organise my thoughts: What is aDesigner? IBM has an emerging technologies initiative called alphaWorks. Here they develop, showcase & distribute new ‘alpha-code’ technologies till they are licensed or integrated into IBM products. (Read more) aDesigner is a disability simulator. It […]
The Google Blog talks about Google entering The Computer History Museum. We’re five years old and already they’re sticking us in a museum. The museum’s display is of Google’s first corkboard server rack from 1999. A few specs: each tray contained eight 22GB hard drives and one power supply, and the rack itself required no […]
I just came across a funny story on The Inquirer which provides info on how Hackers got hacked by a hacker! I’ve usually heard of stories about this, especially the tiff between pro-India and pro-Pakistan hackers/crackers/script-kiddies a few years back when they went on a site-defacement spree. But this is a pretty detailed account of […]