Software – Page 2

.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.

Open letter to Bank of Ireland

29/10/2007

I’ve been discussing BOL – as covered in this post – with a customer service rep from BOI, but I don’t think that’s going to result in any changes, so I asked them to forward this to the Chief Executive, or tell me how to get it to them. This probably won’t result in any changes either, but it’s worth a shot. If you think BOL is a steaming pile of shite too, perhaps you should put pen to paper yourself.

Dear [Pinstripe-Suited Person],

Someone in BOI needs to talk to someone that understands the Internet, because it’s clear that the bank has no idea how things work outside the branch network. A lead time of more than a year – never mind several years – for the development of a web application is simply ridiculous, even with the extra security contraints the bank requires.

This is on top of the blatant ignorance the bank displays with regard to web standards and usability. The fact that I can’t log into the current BOL system with any browser I choose, never mind any operating system I choose, is an absolute disgrace in a time when market share for the recommended browser and OS are shrinking fast. The fact that the system appears to have been designed by a child doesn’t help matters either.

Tha bank needs to get it’s house in order on this matter. It may not like the Internet and there are obvious and valid reasons for this, but it’s not going to go away. Continuing to deny it with the pigheadedness of the record labels is going hurt in the long run.

Regards,
Adam Beecher

Verbo.se

Category: Software