Archive for November, 2005

Open source software: Reuse or redo

Monday, November 14th, 2005

Last week was a frustrating one. I downloaded and installed a module that was supposed to provide some sort of integration with a Jabber server. It basically provides a user interface and a bunch of functions that I can call from within the toolkit I am using. It was a pain to install due to […]

Windows Live update

Thursday, November 10th, 2005

Windows Live now supports Firefox. I have been playing around with it in Firefox and it’s pretty slick, particularly the drag and drop stuff. So far I’m quite impressed. Thumbs up to Microsoft for playing ball this time around. Still doesn’t work in Safari though. Maybe that’s asking a bit too much

Touché

Monday, November 7th, 2005

“There are three kinds of people in this world: those who can count and those who can’t”

Google on your mobile

Monday, November 7th, 2005

Now you can get Google on your mobile phone. Google Local shows you how to get to where you want to go and will also show you what’s there e.g. cinemas, restaurants. The service is free but is currently only available in the US.

Another acronym of the day

Sunday, November 6th, 2005

This is a follow-on to the first acronym of the day that I posted a while back:
WAG — a wild-assed guess.
I found this one in an article about absinthe in Wired magazine.

“Artificial” artificial intelligence

Sunday, November 6th, 2005

Humans are much better at certain tasks than computers; identifying objects in a photograph for example. This is the fundamental premise behind Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. You get paid for helping out a computer! For each Human Intelligence Task (HIT) you complete successfully Amazon credits your account. Interesting idea.
I had a brief look through the list […]

Pre-built computer with Linux installed

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005

I gave up building my own computers a while back after a particular nasty incident involving a Windows 2000 installation. Anyway, what I am looking for is a pre-built machine with Linux already installed that I can use as a development server at home. Nothing fancy. I can install the operating system myself having done […]

Windows Live

Tuesday, November 1st, 2005

Today Microsoft announced a new collection of online applications. It’s live.com. You can view some photos of the event here.
Apparently Gates repeatedly used the term “live software”. If software isn’t live, what is it? “crashing all the time software”?
The site doesn’t work at all in Safari and there’s actually a notice at the […]

The origin of the name “Skype”

Tuesday, November 1st, 2005

Just a quickie. The best kind of course (I am referring to the short length of this post by the way).
Have you ever wondered where the word “Skype” came from? No, then you probably have a social life. Well I have wondered about the name, being a user of their software, and if you […]