Category: General

I happened to come across this:

Chocolate Russian Roulette [cybercandy uk]

You get a tray with 12 pieces of chocolate. 11 of them are praline filled milk chocolate bullets, the 12 contains a real chilli pepper.

Work started on the new acid test almost as soon as the IE developer team posted notification that IE8 passes Acid2

🙂

Well, if you read the article and comments, it’s not perfectly correct. But it’s kind of funny as a quote.

CSSInfo

Since it wasn’t obvious to me where this document was, here is a link to a Microsoft page describing Windows XP services with descriptions.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/guidance/serversecurity/tcg/tcgch07n.mspx

There is also a similar document for Windows 2000

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb742605.aspx

Interesting blog post talking about how Adobe plans to improve Photoshop, which is obviously an application with a large number of very committed users.

John Nack is talking about task orientated user interfaces, which in theory is what Microsoft was trying to get to with clippy. Unfortunately since everyone seems to dispise clippy; Brushy the talking airbrush (signature quote: “Hey, pardner, looks you’re tryin’ to retouch a photo!”) is definitely NOT going to happen. (It’s just a joke in one of the comments).

John Nack on Adobe Photoshop: Photoshop, as seen through Johnny Cash

This looks really cool: IT World: Nissan adds a robot helper to its concept car

It’s a concept electric car which has a small robot on the dashboard that offers directions and tries to keep the driver cheerful.

Got a package this morning delivered by DHL and an interesting thing happened.

I recognised the delivery person and the delivery person recognised me. Which was nice. 🙂

I think they must work a particular route, because the same woman tends to deliver most of my (DHL) packages.

I get tired of filling in captcha fields on forms.

Wouldn’t it be handy if there was a facility in web browsers to fill them in automatically.

🙂

This says it all really.

(Though saying that there are still some smart shows on tv. I just wanted to link to that page)

I’ve been watching educational stuff on the internet recently.

One of the things that I really like is Google Tech Talks on Google Video.

These are talks given at Google on different subjects and many are now available online.

Amongst the really good ones I’ve seen:

• Inbox Zero – Merlin Mann – How to handle lots of email
  
• Everything is Miscellaneous – David Weinberger – tagging vs organization

(And there are lots of others, these are just ones I could find the links to easily!)

I’ve been reading stuff recently about creating native (non-java) mobile phone apps.

The key thing is application signing.

In an attempt to prevent viruses and malicious code from being run on mobile devices, the major platforms require that applications are signed using a cryptographic key before being distributed. The two platforms have different requirements, but this signing process is expensive and difficult in both cases.

Things range from really hard (if you have time and money) to almost impossible (if you lack either time or money).
Windows Mobile:

“I can’t emphasise enough, just how bad the current code-signing mechanisms are in WM5 / Smartphone”

[At WindowsMobile Team Blog]

Symbian

“Having your application, which you’ve slaved over and spent countless hours perfecting, stuck in the signing process for over a month is unacceptable.”
[At SymbianGuru]

Apple iPhone

Apple of course don’t publicly allow any 3rd apps to run on the iPhone. However by comparison it seems simplicity itself to run whatever you like using unofficial methods.

Java

Java application aren’t native. But to fully access all of the features without warnings requires a code signing certificate too.

Code Signing Certificates

Code signing certificates are very expensive. Often costing several hundred dollars. Which is ok if you charge several hundred dollars per copy, or you sell thousands of units. But it’s really bad if you charge nothing and give away the source code. It’s also bad if you are a very small company trying to sell relatively cheap software.

I think that if I own a device I should be able to do what I want with it (within the limit of the law).
Buying something and then being told that I can’t run my choice of applications on it seems really bad.
Charging people who want to give away stuff is bad too.

It looks like I won’t be buying Symbian for my next mobile phone. 🙁