Posted by bordalix
Mon, 28 Nov 2005 16:02:00 GMT
I'm a Mac user at home, and a Windows user at work. I have my mail on a IMAP server, so I can read it in either systems without any frills. In the iMac I use Mail.app, and in the Windows box I use Thunderbird, and everything works fine. But I have a problem with my calendar. I love the
iCal design, and I would like to have it in my Windows box. Not only for scheduling meetings, but also for ToDo management, sharing and publishing other calendars. I went to the web and to all the sites with "web application lists" on it, but didn't find any real good web calendar application: I tryied
Planzo.com, but has a polluted user interface, and
Kiko.com, which don't work in Safari, so I had to improvise.
After some googling, I found
Yagoon, and if you take a minute to jump to their site, you will notice the resemblance with Apple iCal. For 30 bucks, this could be my best buy of the year, but wait, I can try it for 60 days, so it seems is going to be my best buy for next year. Ok, I have my iCal look-a-like in my Windows box. Now, how can I sincronize the two applications?
So, I went to .Mac pages for prices and conditions, but 99 dollars per year seems to much for a WebDAV server. Back to Google, I found
iCalExchange, which is a free service for sharing iCal files. Ok, so now I have my "synchronizer". I tryied to publish and subscribe the same calendar from iCal and Yagoon, but I got a lot of permission errors, so I had to go for a two calendar solution.
I created two calendars on iCalExchange, named bonnie and clyde. iCal publishes (writes) in the bonnie calendar, and subscribes (reads) the clyde calendar. In the iCal, bonnie is coloured
green and clyde is coloured
red. This way, I know that I can change, erase or create green events, but I should not do nothing to the red ones. On the Yagoon side, it publishes to the clyde calendar (
green) and subscribes the bonnie calendar (
red), implementing the same colour code.
At the end, I can use two different applications in two different operating systems, having the same user interface and full syncronization (it even syncronizes ToDos). All for less than 30 dollars, and thanks to iCalExchange. Ahhh, and I can see my calendar live going directly to iCalExchange homepage.
Rui, feel free to use this to write a new HOWTO for your blog ;)
Tags calendar | no comments
Posted by bordalix
Fri, 25 Nov 2005 16:01:00 GMT
From
Ajaxian I found that
OpenLaszlo added XMLHttpRequest in is version 3.1. I didn't know what OpenLaszlo was, so I decided to take a peek:
The OpenLaszlo platform allows developers to create applications with the rich user interface capabilities of desktop client software and the instantaneous no-download Web deployment of HTML. These applications run on all leading Web browsers on all leading desktop operating systems from a single XML code base.
Since a video is better than a thousand images, watch this 3m
video (2MB) and take your own conclusions.
Tags development | no comments
Posted by bordalix
Wed, 23 Nov 2005 15:59:00 GMT
What if Google will do most everything wrong, and is competitors don't? A tale from Jack Shafer (Slater's editor) called
The Great Google Wipeout give us an interesting view of what could be a possible future.
Tags google | no comments
Posted by bordalix
Wed, 23 Nov 2005 15:59:00 GMT
A very interesting
presentation from
Lawrence Lessig at OSCON 2002. A true call for arms in the fight against control and copyright, a must read. 32 minutes plus download time (8MB).
Tags culture | no comments
Posted by bordalix
Tue, 22 Nov 2005 15:57:00 GMT
Yesterday I spent all night catching up my feeds. Due to personal reasons, I spent the last three days offline, and when I finally get to my
bloglines account I had thousands of new posts to read. So I decided to do something about it (besides reading them), clean up my blogroll and add some new feeds I'm interested in. As a result, I have now more 6 blogs to read daily (ouch!).
Another good decision was to delete Google's AdSense from the blog. This blog exists for more then a year now, and I've earned less than 5 USD from it, so, bye bye AdSense. Essentially, I'm giving free publicity to Google, and they don't need it, right?
So, into the juice of those thousands feeds:
- Talking about Google, if you want to include Google maps on your website, you should take a look at Phoogle, which allows you to do that with 5 (yes, five!) lines of php.
- If you're a heavy user of Wikipedia, maybe you can find LuMriX useful. It's a Ajax powered Google Suggest look-a-like service for Wikipedia. Can make your Wikipedia searches faster.
- Microsoft is trying to standardize Office 12 documents, in what they called the Microsoft Open Office XML. It's a good move, but it would be much better if they would follow the Open Document standard. Yes, I'm being naive now...
- Amazon is preparing to launch two new great services, branded Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade. In the first one, you will be able to buy pages from a book, instead of buying the entire book, which can be useful in some cases (I don't see much utility in this, but maybe someone will). But the second service is a major breakthrough: when you buy a book from Amazon (70% of my books) you will be able to buy a search service for that specific book!! So, it's the best of the two worlds, I can read my book while getting a tan in the beach, and if I want to find something in it really quickly, I have Amazon Upgrade.
- And the funny link is about the launching of the new iPod Invisa
Tags adsense, amazon, googlemaps, microsoft | no comments
Posted by bordalix
Mon, 21 Nov 2005 15:56:00 GMT
Microsoft announced SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions), which can be seen as a two way item sharing (think bidirectional RSS). The extensions described in the Simple Sharing Extensions enable feed readers and publishers to generate and process incoming item changes in a manner that enables consistency to be achieved. For example, two or more will be able to co-edit a post, which can be a huge revolution in the blogsphere. If you are a technical person, you should take a look at the
specification page, after all, Microsoft launched it under a
Creative Commons Share Alike license. Are the winds of change blowing from Richmond?
Tags microsoft, rss, sse | no comments
Posted by bordalix
Mon, 21 Nov 2005 15:55:00 GMT
The end of the year is coming, so are lists of anything. In a couple of weeks, TV channels, magazines and newspapers will start to deliver lists of people, inventions, events, etc. So, let me try to do it now, be the first one to annoy you with this:
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Posted by bordalix
Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:54:00 GMT
Thank you Nicolas and your team for this achievement, the $100 laptop. Watch the
video where UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Nicholas Negroponte Unveil the $100 Laptop Prototype at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia, and some
photos on the MIT website.
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Posted by bordalix
Wed, 16 Nov 2005 15:52:00 GMT
This can be Sony's worst nightmare: first, Sony decided to distribute a rootkit in there music CDs, to be installed in your PC (without your knowledge), in order to hide is DRM software; second, Mark Russinovich
discovered the existence of this rootkit, and make it public, which make people start to
scream at Sony; third, someone took advantage of the rootkit and wrote a trojan codenamed
Stinx-E, able to hide from Windows, so impossible to be detected and cleaned; fourth, Sony decided to provide an uninstaller to allow people to erase the rootkit, but this uninstaller
raised new security holes; and finally, it seems
Sony used some LGPL code, without delivering the source, so breaking copyright:
It turns out that the rootkit contains pieces of code that are identical to LAME, an open source mp3-encoder, and thereby breach the license.
This software is licensed under the so called Lesser Gnu Public License (LGPL). According to this license Sony must comply with a couple of demands. Amongst others, they have to indicate in a copyright notice that they make use of the software. The company must also deliver the source code to the open-source libraries or otherwise make these available. And finally, they must deliver or otherwise make available the in between form between source code and executable code, the so called object files, with which others can make comparable software.
Sony complied with non of these demands, but delivered just an executable program. A computer expert, whose name is known by the redaction, discovered that the CD "Get Right With The Man" by "Van Zant" contains strings from the library version.c of Lame. This can be concluded from the string: "http://www.mp3dev.org/", "0.90", "LAME3.95", "3.95", "3.95 ".
Tags drm, sony | no comments
Posted by bordalix
Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:51:00 GMT
So, after all the
fuss around this issue, Sony decided to allow people to download an uninstaler for is DRM software. All you have to do is fill a
form, download the software and run it. Know that you know that, don't do it. People from Freedom to Tinker
found out that if you install Sony uninstaller in your PC, you are opening a huge security hole. Malicious users can execute code in your PC, all you have to do is visit one of there websites. Where (and when) is this going to end?
Tags drm, sony | no comments
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