Archive for May, 2007
I’m a regular user of Google Reader because it helps me keep my feeds in order, and I think you agree with me on this one. However, a little colored link that said NEW caught my view today. It linked to a page that presented me a new BETA service developed by Google, called “Google Gears”. The software is available for Windows, Mac, and even Linux right now, and it seems like a wonderful project.
It’s basically an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JS API’s that will store any application resources locally and serve them from your HDD. The same goes for the databases and their relations with other components. And it’s all STILL based on AJAX to improve the user feeling.
Want to try it out? Download it from here (requires browser restart). How is this useful? This will enable you to browse content while offline, the same content that would have required you to be connected otherwise. For example, you can browse offline the latest 2000 posts in your Google Reader account, or you can check your GMail inbox (will soon be developed). Isn’t that great?
Running the above downloaded setup file will be possible only after you close all of your browser windows (yes, including this one 
. It will then initiate a download sequence (this might take a few moments), and afterwards Google Gears will install on your system.
The requirements are not high though you should already be running Windows XP or Vista and use Firefox 1.5+ or IE 6+ for it to work. You can safely start your browser after the installation finishes and load Google Reader again. You will be prompted by a security warning (shown in picture #1) which you’ll have to accept in order to continue. Should you need to go over these again, the settings can be found in your Tools menu (Firefox shown in picture #2).
The only disadvantage I would find for now is the amount of time that will take for it to download that much data and when the GMail extension will be released, the time it will take for people to download 1,5GB of mails. Of course, most people don’t use that much of their space so it’s barely a general disadvantage, but time will come.
I’ve always wanted to be able to stay connected to the Google services while offline and now this is making it possible. If anyone has tried this in detail already, I would be more than happy to hear your comments and first opinions on the service.
Google on,
It seems that FileHippo presented us with Firefox v. 2.0.0.4 before there was any official announcement on Mozilla’s FrontPage, but taking a short trip in the past, I noticed that FileHippo has done this before. If you’re dying to try the new version of Firefox, you can download it from here, or you can wait for the official announcement of the release.
As a noticeable feature for this version, they say it delivers easier navigation for everyone, including those who are visually or motor-impaired.
Enjoy,
UPDATE: It seems this version is now available on Mozilla’s official page – http://www.mozilla.com/firefox
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 | Posted in Internet | 1 Comment »
The new Street View feature for Google Maps looks great. Although it’s only available in a couple US cities ( five of them to be more precise) the Street View amazes us by the level of detail you get. Entire streets are mapped completely, and not just main boulevards but small streets too, from busy highways to silent streets Google covers it all. You can even navigate the mapped roads using the provided arrows and the N-S guiding line.
Click to enlarge
This combined with the Traffic tool in Google Maps makes a great city orientation guide, also the Find Businesses and Get directions features come in handy when you feel disoriented in the big city. We can only wait for Google to cover larger areas (outside the US) and to bring new and more astounding features (which it will most certainly do).
You’ve all been aware of the fact that RegisterFly was lately involved in a series of lawsuits due domain theft. If not, let me remind you a few hot lines.
The split between the founders of Registerfly.com, the leading domain name registrar, took a tawdry turn last week, as court documents filed by John Naruszewicz and Unifiednames, the corporation that owns Registerfly.com, made some shocking allegations against ousted CEO Kevin Medina.
The complaint seeks compensatory and punitive damages, and alleges that 75,000 domain names were lost in January 2007 alone due to failure to remit registry fees. The complaint goes on to accuse Medina of using corporate accounts as private slush funds, thereby failing to maintain sufficient float to cover registry fees.
Click here to find out more!
The embezzlement alleged includes tens of thousands of dollars for luxuries such as escort services, personal credit card bills and even liposuction. It also alleges that Medina used $10,000 in corporate funds per month to cover rent on a Miami Beach penthouse apartment.
Registerfly is an ICANN-approved provider of internet hosting and domain name registration services based in New Jersey that controls approximately two million domain names for 900,000 different owners. In recent weeks, the service appears to have effectively collapsed, with owners scrambling to recover domains that were not automatically renewed as agreed, or were paid for and for no apparent reason allowed to lapse well before the agreed upon expiration date.
Source
However, I’m bringing this up because a few hours ago, GoDaddy, one of the acredited ICANN registrars agreed to take over and manage ex-RegisterFly customers. The number is just a bit higher than 850,000, those being added to the already existent 20,000,000.
RegisterFly clients were in limbo after the internal troubles the company had. Official persons declared that many of their customers were unable to renew their domains before expiration, or even to transfer them to another registrar.
I have found no financial information over this deal at this point, but it’s certain that GoDaddy will start running the RegisterFly names within a week.
At the time I’m writing this, RegisterFly is no longer an ICANN certified registrar since The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers revoked its certification and sued it for the databases.
I’ll keep you posted with future coverage if anything happens, but I’d also like to know your opinions on this.
They made it, yes. Well, they don’t actually achieve Apple’s performance in selling 100 million iPods but noting the fact they’re newer on the market, they’re pretty satisfied of their results. The following is an extract from an interview with Robbie Bach, Microsoft’s president of the Entertainment and Devices Division.
Question: Can you talk a little bit about the Zune overall? Will we see next-generation Zunes coming out, particularly flash-based players?
Bach: We’re still about nine months into having Zune in the marketplace. We’re very pleased with the progress. We’ve sold a little over a million Zunes. In the category we’re in, the hard-disk-based category, we’ve got about 10 percent market share. It’s a good start. It’s not an overwhelming start. I’m not going to pretend it’s some gigantic move. As we look to the future, you’re certainly going to see us continue to invest in that category. We don’t enter things like that lightly. There will be new things down the path (in the fall). We just came out with a special edition pink Zune and a watermelon-colored Zune, which are the personal favorites with my kids.
Question: Are people sharing music by beaming songs from Zune to Zune? Do you have any way to gauge that?
Bach: People are sharing. When your installed base is a million, the benefits of sharing, frankly, aren’t as wide as we hope to see in the future. One of the challenges for us is continuing to build on the install base. Sharing is a tip of the iceberg of what you can do in the social nature of music, and what you can do when you have a device that you can connect when you’re at a Starbucks, when you’re at work, when you’re at home. That really, over time, will change things, for Zune and for consumers.
Reddit isn’t one of the most popular social news websites out there, but its presence is commonly known. However, reddit’s developers don’t seem to put pretty much thinking in their job, as this story demonstrates. They seem to forgot adding ANY type of validation to the submit form (the most used feature on the website itself). From the security point of view, this is a major flaw that needs to get fixed.
Basically, you can enter anything you want there and nothing can stop you. If you’re smart enough, you can use XSS to retrieve usernames and passwords or to execute malicious code in your favor.
At the time I’m writing this, the bug is still not fixed, the submit form still allowing me to play around. What’s more intriguing is that reddit’s owner found out about a similar exploit on Yahoo Combinator a while ago. Although that one was checked and quickly fixed, reddit.com is still vulnerable at this very moment.
After Samsung and Philips each announced last week the launch of new Active-matrix OLED displays, now it’s Sony’s time to buzz the market. While Samsung offers a resolution of 320 x 240 with a contrast of 10.000:1 and 262k colors that should last you for at least 50.000 hours, Philips has the same resolution but only 16k colors, thus making it less desirable.
But that doesn’t matter now because Sony has outdone them all by revealing its 160 x 120 pixel flexible display that has exactly 16.7 million colors. Yes you heard that right, compare this to 256k or even 16k and you’ll see Sony is miles away from the competition. There are downsides like the smaller resolution and the contrast of only 1.000:1 compared to 10.000:1 but it’s nothing if you think that it’s a flexible display and it’s the world’s first 24-bit OLED.
It seems Sony has the ball for now but as you see every week brings something new in the game, so stay tuned!
This week’s Google acquisition is Feedburner. The rumors launched last week turned out to be more than accurate and it seems that FeedBurner is in the final stage of negotiation with Google. The price was set somewhere around $100,000,000, mostly cash a one-time payment.
It seems like the deal will finish up in the next 2-3 weeks and it’s a sure thing since there’s nothing that could happen now.
FeedBurner is a news feed management provider launched that launched three years ago. It provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters, and other web-based content publishers. Services provided to publishers include traffic analysis and an optional advertising system. Though it initially was not clear whether advertising would be well-suited to the RSS format, authors now choose to include advertising in two-thirds of FeedBurner’s feeds. Published feeds are modified in several ways, including automatic links to Digg and del.icio.us, and “splicing” information from multiple feeds. FeedBurner is a typical Web 2.0 service, providing web service application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow other software to interact with it. As of the beginning of May 2007, FeedBurner hosted feeds for 410,769 publishers.
Congratulatons,
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 | Posted in Internet | 3 Comments »
Yes, Google takes a step forward into improving the GMail experience. They have modified the maximum attachment size limit, from 10MB to 20MB. However, I would have been more satisfied if they’d increase the storage space for a bit, since I’m fast approaching the 2500 MB mark.
Anyway, the feature is kind of limited for now since only few other e-mail providers accept attachment sizes of 20MB. You can easily send your files to other GMail users or even Yahoo Premium users.
With doubling the maximum attachment size, this theoretically doubles the waiting time until the files could be uploaded. Still Google doesn’t provide any progress bar for the uploaded files, hence I do have that feeling my browser stopped working, which I simply hate. Are you watching this, Google? A progress bar, quick!
They’re finally here, although it’s not even mid-2007. PC World announced the best products of 2007 in a short
list.
Top ranked, Google Apps Premier Edition. A $50/year add-on to Google Apps that will get you 10 GB of e-mail space, 24/7 tech support (including phone help) and a 99.9% uptime guarantee for it, as well as other features for the remaining applications. It totally worths it, especially for you e-mail addicts whose inboxes fill up faster than they can handle.
Coming up third on the list, is the Nintendo Wii with its wonderful Wii experience and I have a small story to share here. I was present at one of the IT&C expos in my city the other week, and I had the chance of trying out live the Wii, as well as the other consoles, PS3, XBOX 360, but although the PS3/XBOX 360 had great graphics, the gameplay had a lower influence on me than Wii. I ended up playing tennis as a mad man right in the middle of the expo. In short, Wii convinced me to buy it, PS3 didn’t. Nintendo Wii clearly deserves its high place in the list, and in my opinion, it could have been even higher.
A bit lower, on the 27th place is Yahoo Mail Beta, followed close by Google’s Gmail 4 places down. Why? No idea, and they don’t reveal the reason. Perhaps Yahoo worked hard in order to achieve a web 2.0 AJAX-based e-mail interface, that being pushed up by the unlimited space they’re offering, would rank a bit over GMail that didn’t make any major improvements to the service lately, I believe. But the fight between Yahoo Mail and GMail is a long story that I will discuss widely on some other occasion.
The 58th place is assigned to Kevin Rose’s digg.com, a social news website. Digg is a community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. This differs from the hierarchical editorial system that many other news sites employ. However, getting your story on the frontpage is a dream of every webmaster. Some think this is better than every mean of paid publicity. Most websites die while being under the “digg effect” so you can figure out the amount of traffic being redirected from there. This might look perfect, but it isn’t. It’s flaws and related, on some other article.
82 is the lucky number for MacBook Pro. This comes in less than a week after Apple announced the release of new MacBooks. They’re brilliant in my opinion and I’m going to do my best to get one in the near future. Here’s a great review on these equipments.
I just presented a few of the insights from the list made public yesterday. I strongly suggest you read it all, along with the reviews as it’s quite interesting.
Until next week, have a good one
