Web review

The Internet’s got a new talent: that damn hole in the Gulf of Mexico that is spilling roughly 200.000 gallons of oil a day into the ocean. For the moment, every attempt from BP to stop it has failed; in compensation, they had no problems with the installation of a camera that broadcast from deep underwater a live video feed of the oil spill.

http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/homepage/STAGING/local_assets/bp_homepage/html/rov_stream.html

(Sorry, the original video feed is only in Windows Media format, if you have problems I suggest to search on a live video site like Ustream, to find an alternative source)

Digiarty Software informed me that they began an interesting giveaway for their new DVD Authoring software: you can download WinX DVD Author and get a free unlimited license, until the end of the month. Next, the cost will be USD 29.95.

WinX DVD Author is able to create DVD-Video directly from a variety of formats (AVI, ASF, MPEG, MKV, MP4, MOV, RM, RMVB, XIVD, DVIX, H264, OGG, Quicktime, FLV, etc).
You can also add a custom menu and choose between several type of supports (DVD, DVD-DL, DVD+RW, etc.). The software is multilanguage (English, French, Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish are only a part of supported languages).

The special giveaway offer is here:
http://www.winxdvd.com/specialoffer/oct09.htm

Don’t be evil is the famous Google slogan. Since some time, it seems that something is changing: last week they contacted Cyanogen, the author of the most famous “unofficial” firmware for Android phones, telling him to stop the distribution of these releases; the problem comes from the fact that Android code is open source, but Google applications that are shipped with it (Google Talk, YouTube, Android Market…) are not.

This contradiction bring the impossibility to build a fully working ROM (if the developer can’t release a firmware with Android Market, final users can’t even download the other Google Apps!). Cyanogen has confirmed his intention to respect Google copyright, so he will continue to develop new firmware without any proprietary component, but the final solution is still incomplete. Let’s wait to see if this story will have a happy ending.

see also:

CyanogenMod home page: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

“A Note on Google Apps for Android“, from the Google official Android developers blog.

Every blog based on Wordpress – the most famous CMS for blog management – is at risk since yesterday, because a new security hole that was discovered in this platform, until version 2.8.3. This bug allow the “injection” of a new administrator account in the blog; from this account it’s possibile to do anything. The suggestion for bloggers is, of course, to update their Wordpress installation to the last release (at this moment it’s the 2.8.4), that is immune from this vulnerability). Users with a blog that is hosted directly on Wordpress.com haven’t any concern, because the automatic update service that is offered by the network is already in action, protecting the blogs that are in hosting.

I just released the very first version of gCalTasks, a free gadget (Windows 7, Windows Vista) that is able to record and directly log your activities/tasks to your Google Calendar. It works also with private calendars. Extended info and download link on the gCalTasks dedicated page on this blog.

Post updated at 13:50 (GMT+1) on June, 17th 2009 – Now Windows 7 RC1 is public and available to everyone.
As anticipated by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at CES (Las Vegas), Windows 7 first public beta is now available for free download.
Windows Vista users are free to get and install it on their computers as update.

The download is Beta licenses are limited “only” to the first 2,5 million of users.
This version will expire on August, 1st 2009.

At this moment, official pages don’t seem to offer the link to start the download. (Windows 7 official site – Post on Windows 7 official blog), but… leggi tutto »

Short answer:
Because of spam.

Long answer:
Do you know that e-mail comes from the early ’70s?

One upon a time… only militar people – and then univerities – had access to the Internet (aka ARPANET), and nobody thought that one day anyone will connect to each other with one, unique, world-wide network, without fines. So e-mail protocol was understandably invented without any protection to prevent sending unwanted informations. leggi tutto »

I just encountered a little bug in Google Reader, that I use everyday to read some feeds. One of them (Downloadblog, a nice italian professional blog about technology) is marked in bold, having one unread item, but if I click on it, Reader tells me that it doesn’t contain any unread item.

The fun part of this bug is the message I get if I click on the “All items (1)” link: “Your reading list has no unread items.” that, in the italian version of Google Reader is: “L’elenco Ancora da leggere non contiene elementi da leggere.“. Translated in english it sounds like:

“The Unreaded list doesn’t contain unreaded items”
компютри втора употреба

I recently received an e-mail from the team of Google Adsense, that invited me to partecipate to a simple survey about their advertising service. I cannot speak about contents of this survey, as required by their terms… anyway I have to highlight an interesting point I noticed:

The scripting language used for the survey is MS ASP.Net! You can check this in the screenshot attached to this post: the extension of the Survey’s start page (and, as I checked later, in the survey process)  is .aspx.

It impressed me because, as all we know, Google is usually very far from Microsoft technologies an, in general, from commercial software solutions. Which is the reason to use .Net for a simple survey script?

Today, as promised, Microsoft launched its new project: some days ago it took an obscure domain, opensourcehero.com, that pointed to http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/heroes/default.mspx with a black background and a cryptic senstence: “{Forge} New Powers” and a reference to the launch date: “February 27, 2008“. Now the site is open and the mistery is unleashed.

“{Open Source} Heroes Happen Here” (a bit long as title?) presents some featured developers that became “heroes” because of their prolific programmer profession. It’s strange and a bit ironic that they all uses proprietary technologies from Microsoft (Visual Studio, Windows Server platform…).

The site allows users to ask the “Hero Hack Pack”, a bundle of “free evaluation” software to introduce new people to MS developing.

Microsoft’s idea of the Open Source scene is very bizzarre: why an open source “hero” should develop his free software with proprietary platforms?