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Tag Archives: Tech News

Passing of a Legend: Sir Arthur C. Clarke

Yesterday marked the passing of a legendary figure in the literary world.  Sir Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and dozens of other works, passed away in his adopted homeland of Sri Lanka on Wednesday.

Clarke was a pioneer of science-fiction, along with others like Isaac Asimov, helping to build the genre into the strong source of insight, foresight and entertainment that we enjoy today.

“The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.” - Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke’s brilliance not only as an author but as a futurist brought him to write not only about fantastic other-worldly adventures, but also about the future of the the earth, space travel and humanity’s role in it.  Another prominent member of the science-fiction community who was inspired by Clarke was Gene Roddenberry.  Clarke’s vision and writings helped to fuel his passion to pursue Star Trek which has grown into one of the most popular and prolific science fiction series of all time.

You can see Dave’s short video comment on the GGP blog, and a video dedication by Rod Roddenberry.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, dead at 90.

Jott Launches Local Canadian Numbers

JottMessaging and “GTD-ish” service Jott has just launched new local numbers in many major cities in Canada. The service has gone from one local number in Toronto, to twenty nation-wide.

Here is an excerpt from the email sent to Canadian Jott users today:

In an effort to protect your privacy, most Canadian mobile providers have blocked caller ID information from being passed to toll free numbers. This leaves the alternative of using local access numbers across the country, so that everyone can send Jott messages without having to pay long distance fees.

Here are the new Canadian local numbers

CITY NUMBER
AURORA +12898020110
CALGARY +14037751288
EDMONTON +17806287799
HALIFAX +19024828120
HAMILTON +19054819060
KITCHENER +15199572711
LONDON +15194898968
MARKHAM +12898000110
MONTREAL +15146670329
OTTAWA +16136861502
QUEBEC CITY +14189072209
SAINT JOHNS +17097570047
SHERBROOKE +18193401636
TORONTO +16477245365
TORONTO +14168001067
VANCOUVER +17787868229
VANCOUVER +16044841347
VICTORIA +12509847093
WINDSOR +15198000031
WINNIPEG +12042728154

I’ve been using Jott off and on for the past couple of months, and with the addition of local Canadian numbers, I can definitely see this becoming a regular part of my GTD arsenal.

Flickr Fight Doesn’t Attribute Photos

Pouring through my ever overflowing RSS reader tonight I came across a post on AppScout by Alan Henry about Flickr Fight.  This is a site that allows you to search for two terms, and then determines how popular the term is based on the number of hits returned in a Flickr search (Google Fight knockoff??).  Along with the search result is a grid of photos for each of the terms.  Compare Coke vs. Pepsi, Angelina & Jennifer or whatever else you like… or better yet, don’t.

The one major thing missing from Flickr Fight is it’s lack of attribution for any of the photos it displays.  It simply links to the images stored on the Flickr server and doesn’t bother to provide a link to the photo’s page in flickr, or credit the photographer/owner of the image in any way, shape or form.

This is the kind of IP violations that make posting legitimate content online a risky venture.  If people don’t consider copyright violations of online material legitimate, then how will these forms of content distribution ever be considered good, legitimate viable sources??

Shame on Flickr Fight, and shame on AppScout for not picking up on this glaring omission.

Picasa for OS X in 2008

It’s been a busy week this week, and there’s some news items that I just didn’t get to yet.  This one comes to us courtesey of TechCrunch.

One of the most popular photo editing programs for Windows has to be Google’s Picasa.  Though it’s not the most full-featured image editing on the market it’s free and great for managing photos and albums, something that isn’t a strength of more full-featured applications like Photoshop and Paint.NET.

On the Mac, the most obvious photo organizer is Apple’s own iPhoto.  iPhoto does a decent job of organizing photos, though it does have its drawbacks and it’s not free.

A free Picasa would not only challenge iPhoto, but would also channel users into using Google’s online service Picasa Web Albums.  One question raised is how this will affect competing photo management services like Photobucket and industry leader Flickr.  Reality is it will probably do little to the market since OS X users make up a relatively small percentage of the software market, but what it will do is make Picasa a true cross-platform tool.

Sun Acquires MySQL

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced yesterday that they have acquired the Open-Source database platform MySQL. This is a huge purchase and one of the largest acquisitions of an Open Source entity that we’ve ever seen.

The goal, says Schwartz, is to put a Fortune 500 vendor behind the innovative technology powering many next generation web-based services. To accomplish that goal Sun is “putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP” (and MAMP, WAMP, and of course Sun’s own SAMP…).

Support of open source projects is nothing new for Sun. They have been a positive force behind several other projects in the past including Java, ZFS, NetBeans and OpenOffice.org. This bodes very well for the future of MySQL and companies offering other higher-priced options for production databases will be watching very closely to see what edge this provides in the Enterprise space.

With the acquisition Sun picks up “clients” who may not be using Solaris, or even Java in their implementation but are major players in the Web 2.0 market. These include Google, Facebook, Nokia and WordPress. Kudos to Sun for putting some more muscle behind the Open Source movement, and here’s hoping some more major corporations will now be willing to take a “leap of faith” and make more use of a proven and effective open-source technology.

MacBook Air: An Obsession with Thin

Announced at MacWorld yesterday, the MacBook Air is an ultra-thin laptop that is… well… ultra-thin. It skimps out in almost every other facet from storage to expansion ports and still has the same footprint as larger thicker models.

Kevin Naits put together a great little video montage poking fun at the obsessive nature of the thin MacBook. Don’t get me wrong I appreciate that you can put this bad boy in a manila envelope and be none the wiser that there’s a whole computer in there (well, most of a computer)… The video is quite funny though.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQkdVymW8C8]

SimCity Source Code Released Under GPL

Bil Simser has posted an article on his blog about the release of the source code for the original SimCity under the GPL. The GPL’d version has been renamed under the original working title Micropolis to protect the trademarks of Electronic Arts who currently own the intellectual property for the Sim* franchise. If the original title had stuck I wonder what they’d call The Sims these days….

The source code for Micropolis has been published on author Don Hopkins’ website. He has also included a bit of history about this branch of the SimCity project including some technical detail behind this iteration of the code.  The GPL version has also been ported to the version of Fedora Linux being run on the OLPC.  A great way to spread this brilliant game to those who are just getting a computer for the first time.

I love the fact that older software continues to be released to the public domain. I’d love to find a copy of Wing Commander… If there’s anyone out there from Origin (or EA) can we see a GPL’d version of WC1 so that we can play it on our Macs!!

Warner Brothers Backs Blu-Ray

On Friday executives at Warner Brothers announced that they would be committing to support the Blu-Ray format for HD movies and would be ceasing production of movies in the HD-DVD format at the end of May, 2008.

Though the battle is far from over with technology giants like Intel and Microsoft backing the Toshiba-led HD-DVD format.  Disney and Fox have both committed to the Blu-Ray format.  WB has been producing movies in both formats until now.  With the decision to move to the Blu-Ray format, this tilts the scales in the direction of the Sony-backed format quite significantly, particularly for movies.

One possibility we may see is Blu-Ray being adopted for movies, and HD-DVD being adopted for the video game industry, particularly given Microsoft’s support of the format in it’s XBox 360 console.

Microsoft Releases VS 2008 “Orcas”

VS 2008This news is a couple of weeks old now, the latest version of it’s development software, Visual Studio 2008 (formerly codenamed “Orcas”) has gone RTM.  The newest version of (imho) the best IDE on the market follows the “Whidbey” release and has also shipped in “Express” editions.

For those of you who haven’t read my previous posts on the subject, the Express editions are standalone IDE’s for VB, C# and Web Development, as well as an express edition of SQL server which can all be used and distributed royalty-free.

I’m looking forward to poking around in VS 2008 a bit more in the coming months.  So expect to see some more of this, and a bit less focus on the Mac platform for the next little while.