Daily quickies

Posted by bordalix Wed, 15 Feb 2006 15:06:00 GMT

From my RSS feed, things worth notice:

News dump

Posted by bordalix Wed, 04 Jan 2006 15:09:00 GMT

Having nothing more to say, here are some news worth notice:
  • In the video world, BBC is opening is archive to UK public, and now you are able to download nearly 80 news reports (from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Tiananmen Square) and create something unique. Another great idea from BBC, like backstage;

  • Still on the video world, it seems that Microsoft is helping Entertainment Group to deliver Vongo, a new movie download service that allows consumers to view full-length studio films, concerts and TV shows. The site is open only to Windows users and US customers, so you have to use a US open proxy to be able to access it (tip: I used this free proxy, 208.21.64.4 port 80);

  • From ArsTechnica, GNU liberates VoIP with a new open source telephony stack. In my humble opinion, this could be the push needed for total interconnection between different VoIP providers: this could be the lingua franca for VoIP.

  • A beautiful piece of technology, Retrievr, allows you to search for photos in Flickr by making a sketch of what you want. Really nice and well done;

  • As everyone else, I'm waiting for AllPeers, a new Firefox plugin. This could lead to a all new P2P ball game. For now, you can take a peek to some screenshots here;

  • And finally, transform your iPod*, iPod mini or iPod nano into a full-fledged video recorder/player with the new iSee 360i. You have to see it to believe it.

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Tuesday in the afternoon

Posted by bordalix Tue, 22 Nov 2005 14:57:00 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

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Microsoft SSE

Posted by bordalix Mon, 21 Nov 2005 14:56:00 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?

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Feed fishing

Posted by bordalix Tue, 08 Nov 2005 14:43:00 GMT

Due to the lack of time, today's menu is about grilled feeds:

  • Microsoft keeps surprising, and is offering Visual Studio and SQL Server. It's free, even for comercial usage, but it's only a Express Edition;

  • An excelent how-to implement your own helpdesk company, using UltraVNC and some webservices. Requires heavy geekary;

  • Joined the Morfik Pioneers program. A very interesting application that will allow building web applications (AJAX) with a graphical user interface;

  • Finnaly, follow-me phoning, or how to implement bluetooth proximity detection with Asterisk.

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The future is sooner than we expected

Posted by bordalix Fri, 04 Nov 2005 14:41:00 GMT

Three news worth notice:
  • The newest player to arrive at the webOS arena is Microsoft. The old giant unveiled is web strategy, launching is Live program: a personalizable website, with a lot of Ajax and a cool concept, Windows Gadgets; a new webmail application, which mimics Outlook in a browser (have to see this working); a new messenger, with VoIP integrated and ability to call for any fixed line in world; and Office Live, which is not an online version of Office, but a set of free, ad supported, productivity business tools;

  • Sun announces services to convert Microsoft Office docs to Open Office compatible format. There is nothing special with this announcement, Sun is following the OpenOffice path. The thing is, this is a service to be offer by Sun Grid Utility, which is Sun's vision of the future, "the network is the computer". Or in other words, applications will be web based, all you need on your side is a browser and a web server running in our PC for local access to information, as stated by Jason Kottke;

  • Google has filed a patent to serve search results based on user profiles. That means that Google will start to work on all the information they have about us, like what are we searching for, what are the websites we visit most, and what are our social networks. It's a good idea to have Google showing me the links I care most, but this arise a lot of privacy concerns. For a peek on where this could lead us, watch epic.

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