Archive for March, 2007

DeepFish, "Enhanced Browsing for Your Mobile Device"

DeepFish is a new Microsoft mobile technology which aims to provide a better mobile browsing experience. Enhanced is what it claims to be! Because I just call it a bug fix edition of the rendering engine of Internet Explorer for mobile with new zooming features. But how enhanced is rendering normal web pages correctly on mobile devices ?! The demo shown in video is realized with msn.com website, the only new things I saw in this demo is that Microsoft is showing its own bugs in a demo video (That’s how IE mobile currently render webpages). Otherwise opening a website of 300kb even if you render it correctly and open it fast, that is 300kb !! And that’s too much for mobile browsing, I don’t know how the current solution can handle such size in memory, I’m waiting my copy to test it, but my old Imate become very slow before opening any page. I finished by give it to mom, because I’m sure she will never surf the web with it. Anyway this is just a preview with very basic feature and tons of limitation : As a technology preview, Deepfish is early in its development cycle (still a few releases from beta quality). As a result some features are not implemented or are only partially implemented. Currently, the technology preview does not support ActiveX controls, AJAX, cookies, Javascript, and HTTP POST. Seriously DeepFish : Go fish !

Pear News Roundup

There are some news this week around PEAR, David Coallier pointed over his blog to new features on PEAR website powered by jQuery JavaSCript library : http://pear.php.net is now using jQuery for some sections of the administration area in order to view user notes/comments and that I will be starting implementing more sections over the site within the next few weeks (Of course this will all be done once we have split the code completely into templates, views, controllers, MDB2 move, etc) Joshua Eichorn , author of HTML_AJAX, announced a new mirror of the PEAR channel mainly for installer data at the moment, but there will be more in the future. You can switch to the new mirror and test it by running : pear config-set preferred_mirror us.pear.php.net

FSF releases third draft of GPLv3 for discussion

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA—Wednesday, March 28, 2007—The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today released the third discussion draft for version 3 of the most widely used free software license, the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). Today’s draft incorporates the feedback received from the general public, official discussion committees, and two international conferences held in India and Japan. Many significant changes have been made since the previous draft, released in July 2006. In recognition of this fact, the FSF now plans to publish one additional draft before the final text of GPL version 3.

YouTube to Launch Mobile Site, ToGo !

YouTube is getting ready to launch a new mobile edition of their video service, this is going to be big in my opinion with the whole database that they have optimized for mobile phones. Currently the service located at http://m.youtube.com is showing nothing but a “This page is not available.” message with a very small logo of Youtube 51×19 pixel, dark background and a css file . Following the css file I can guess that there will be listing of videos (obvious) with description, links, rating and each video will have its own page with more details, creation date, maybe also the file size, and duration. GigaOm reported that : The mobile site when it goes live will have around 800 “editorial picks” of videos to choose from. It’s kind of an experiment to see how well things go and how good of a response the company gets, the spokesperson explained to us. Though, the end goal is to create a truly mobile YouTube experience with eventual access to the entire video catalog.

Paypal To Offer Mobile Payment Solution

Paypal is getting close to announce their new mobile payment platform, called Mobile Checkout. Very similar to the Paypal solution but designed for mobile phones ! This is interesting if Paypal roll out very soon their services, especially that their…

Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software

The MIT press released a new book titled Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software , an excellent reading for the weekend ! The book; edited by Joseph Feller, Brian Fitzgerald, Scott A. Hissam and Karim R. Lakhani; analyzes a number of key topics: the motivation behind F/OSS — why highly skilled software developers devote large amounts of time to the creation of “free” products and services; the objective, empirically grounded evaluation of software — necessary to counter what one chapter author calls the “steamroller” of F/OSS hype; the software engineering processes and tools used in specific projects, including Apache, GNOME, and Mozilla; the economic and business models that reflect the changing relationships between users and firms, technical communities and firms, and between competitors; and legal, cultural, and social issues, including one contribution that suggests parallels between “open code” and “open society” and another that points to the need for understanding the movement’s social causes and consequences. What is the status of the Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) revolution? Has the creation of software that can be freely used, modified, and redistributed transformed industry and society, as some predicted, or is this transformation still a work in progress? Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software brings together leading analysts and researchers to address this question, examining specific aspects of F/OSS in a way that is both scientifically rigorous and highly relevant to real-life managerial and technical concerns.

Ready for Summer of Code ?

Google started accepting applications for the third Summer of Code , the Google’s program for introducing college students to open source software development and certainly to discover new talents. Not everyone knows it, but open source plays an enormous role at Google. Each time you use the Google search engine, you’re using open source software.

Is Moguling the next "big thing" on the Internet?

In less than thirty days, a new Internet Blog (http://oprahsschool.com) was started by Robin Smith and has rocketed to the upper reaches of Google. It leverages the interest in Oprah’s Leadership Academy for Girls with a new process called: “Moguling”. Moguling is a term trademarked by Phoenix, Arizona technology company- DotVentures that revolves around using blogging and proprietary Internet marketing techniques to spike the value of an Internet domain name. While Mr. Smith is an Oprah fan, by utilizing Moguling, he is also quickly developing valuable Internet real estate that could one day be worth a fortune. “I started Moguling about a year ago and this is my second site that has taken off like this. I love helping Oprah’s Leadership Academy for Girls and to actually have something that might be worth money one day very exciting to me,” he says. Blogging is often referred to as the “next wave” of the Internet and could very well produce the latest batch of Web Millionaires. According to DotVentures’ SEO Director- Bill Scott; “Blogs tend to get ranked very quickly by Google and to then rise in the Results dramatically.

Europe, Brazil and China unite to foster open source software to boost growth

Brussels, 15 March 2007 – Leading European, Brazilian and Chinese information and communications technology (ICT) players announced today that they have joined forces to launch QualiPSo, a quality platform to foster the development and use of open source software to help their industries in the global race for growth. The aim of QualiPSo is to help industries and governments fuel innovation and competitiveness in today’s and tomorrow’s global environment by providing the way to use trusted low-cost, flexible open source software to develop innovative and reliable information systems. To meet that goal, QualiPSo will define and implement the technologies, processes and policies to facilitate the development and use of open source software components, with the same level of trust traditionally offered by proprietary software. The initiative will support the development of local ICT industries – from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) to large ICT providers and systems integrators in Europe, Brazil and China – and help establish European leadership in domains such as distributed middleware.

AdWords Keyword Tool Showing Previous Month’s Searches

AdWords Keyword Tool is currently showing results from last month’s searches, more narrowed period might show more relevant information for advertisers looking for interesting keywords for their campaigns. This might have a negative effect also, if for a reason or another a keyword become popular for a month then next month the results drop down, in this case showing results for one month are not enough to decide. This information you can find if you choose “Search Volume Trends” in the display data options. Tips : You can use the Site-Related Keywords to help you generate list of keywords relevant to your website, if you find keywords not relevant copy a relevant article from your website and paste it in the optional textarea. This should work much better.