Software – Page 2

Palm Pre

09/01/2009

[This has been in my drafts since January 9, only noticed it now. It does have a motion sensor and landscape mode btw.]

The wife’ll kill me, I want one of these and I only have my Treo Pro a couple months.

It seems to settle a major deficiency in the Treo Pro, namely Windows Mobile. It’s not a bad mobile OS per se, but the hardware is a tad underpowered for it, and it has niggles that can’t be addressed because of it’s closed nature. That said, I don’t know if the Pre’s webOS will be open either, but hopefully Palm will have generated Clue from their Windows adventure. And drop it forevermore…

One other apparent deficiency would appear to be a motion sensor and/or landscape mode. You’d think that if it had it, the presenter in these PC Pro videos – well worth watching by the way – would have demoed it; although it has to be said that despite best effort, he’s no Steve Jobs and might have been better off deferring to someone with more charisma.

(Via Slashdot.)

.TEL Coming Soon

11/11/2008

New TLD sunrising on December 3, landrushing Feb 3, GA March 24.

Very cool service with no hosting required, everything is done via the DNS. Put your contact details in a few NAPTR records, add your location in a LOC RR and perhaps a few keywords in TXT RRs, and your details will appear neatly formatted on your automatically generated .TEL website. (Tucows is the registrar I use in Beecher Networks.) But of course since that’s just generated from your raw data, it can be used in a multitude of other ways, by your mobile, your GPS unit, etc.

Not cheap though, at least not for sunrise. I haven’t set pricing yet, but I reckon sunrise registrations’ll run at least €300.

Tweetrush Is Here

25/08/2008

A project I would love to have been more involved with, hopefully I’ll be forgiven for opting out to get married…

Well done to AJ, Grzegorz, James, Slawomir and Walter for gettingÂ theirÂ Tweetrush proof of concept Techcrunched today. I was lucky enough to spend a couple of hours with the lads in their lair last week, and there’s been very little doubt in my mind since that this demo of their upcoming Rush Hour engine was going to get slashdotted today. (Although I notice that it is still up!) I only hope I’ll be allowed in the door again to work on future projects with them!

(Special mention to Damien and Pat for helping hands too, I reckon.)

Nokia to buy and open source Symbian

25/06/2008

I wouldn’t be mad about the Symbian platform, but this is still huge news, it has a huge install base.

Symbian co-founder Nokia announced Monday night that it is buying the 52 percent of the software maker that it doesn’t already own and releasing its mobile operating system under an open source license.

Someone should buy nineties-thinker Tavis McCourt some clue though:

“With the success of Apple’s and RIM’s models, we would have thought traditional handset vendors would develop and maintain similar proprietary OS models,” said Tavis McCourt, a Morgan Keegan analyst. “We view this move as a long-term positive for the smartphone vendors that own their own OS (RIM, Apple and, soon, Palm).”

I’m so old…

15/03/2008

I met my other youngfella the other day for the first time – he’s sixteen, so that must mean I’m a hundred and eighty three – and he forced me to install WoW on my rig, completely against my will and despite rigorous protestations. (I said “I’m not really a gamer”, and later sighed dramatically.)

So I watched while he showed me the ropes, taking nothing in, and today I logged in for the first time on my own and proceeded to suck monkey nuts at it. I don’t really know how to fight, for example, and I’m guessing that’s kind of important. So I’ve logged out, and now I’m reading the Getting Started part of the manual. I’m so old…

James, you’re a gamer, where’s the Autopilot key?

Sun acquires MySQL AB

16/01/2008

Ooooookaaay. Has the fork already happened or is that later today?

MySQL: After all the industry speculation about MySQL being a â€œhot 2008 IPOâ€, this probably takes most of us by surprise â€” users, community members, customers, partners, and employees. And for all of these stakeholders, it may take some time to digest what this means. Depending on one’s relationship to MySQL, the immediate reaction upon hearing the news may be a mixture of various feelings, including excitement, pride, disbelief and satisfaction, but also anxiety.

Being part of the group planning this announcement for the last few weeks, I have had the fortune to contemplate the consequences during several partially sleepless nights (I usually sleep like a log). And over the coming days and weeks, I’ll provide a series of blogs with various viewpoints of the deal.

(A series of posts Kaj. The whole thing is a blog — weblog, geddit? You’ve been blogging since September ’05, you really should know this stuff.

Oh, and shouldn’t you have included the ‘AB’ in the post title? We both know that Sun can’t actually acquire MySQL per se, but do you not think that the suggestion might just spark a little panic with the lesser informed out there? Like the Diggers that are already going spastic over it?)

WordPress Geoblog Extraordinaire

19/11/2007

There’s hacks and there’s hacks like.

Digg: A modified WordPress installation is forced inside a Google Maps info window. A small GPS Java app running on his phone places a marker at his current position, while transmitting the time, direction, and speed at which he was moving when he last updated. You can literally see everywhere he is throughout the day (assuming his cell phone is on).

Dell dumps Ubuntu

06/11/2007

How you could discontinue a friendly OS like Ubuntu and at the same time start standardising on a complete piece of shit like Vista is just beyond me. However the first comment is probably right, the whole affair just a stick to beat MS with.

The INQ: Dell no longer supplies Ubuntu pre-installed. “It has been discontinued in the UK,” a closed source said.

Flash Player RPM

02/11/2007

I’m probably way behind the field on this, but I’m delighted to see that Adobe have made the Flash player available as an RPM now. In fact they automatically detect your OS when you visit the download page and present you with three options, the traditional tar.gz package, an RPM, and even an RPM that’ll set up a YUM repo for the player. Now that’s progress, well done Adobe! Can I get DW in Linux flavour next please?

“All the code that’s fit to printf()”

29/10/2007

The New York Times doesn’t just have a blog about open source, it’s open-sourced some of it’s own tools. On Trac. How cool is that?

Open: A blog about open source technology at The New York Times, written by and primarily for developers. This includes our own projects, our work with open-source technologies at nytimes.com, and other interesting topics in the open source and Web 2.0 worlds.

DBSlayer looks shit-hot btw. I’ll be keeping that in mind for an upcoming project.

Verbo.se

Category: Software