News on SWiK

Are You Ready For Firefox 3.1?

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 12:53:35 -0700

It may seem as if the Firefox 3 release cycle went on forever, especially if you hopped on board with the earliest betas. Many of us are still catching our breath after the version 3 release, waiting for add-ons to be updated and tweaking our preferences. But don't rest too long: Firefox 3.1 is right around the corner.

Greg Norman Leads British Open by 2 - About to Become the Oldest Player to win a Major!

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:48:08 -0700

Wow, what a tournament. I just finished watching the 3rd round of British Open as Greg Norman finishes up with a 2 shot lead and a 72 today.

What impressed me wasn’t the fact that he is 53 years old, it’s the fact that he’s able to turn back time to his 1986 Turnberry British Open championship.

I know if this was the Masters, Greg Norman wouldn’t have a good chance going into the final round but in this case, with Norman 2 shots ahead, it’s as good as in the bag.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Greg Norman eventually wins by 5-7 shots tomorrow. He might be old but he’s still more in shape than most 30 year olds. Plus, he knows how to win a British Open.

Well, I hope I am not wrong tomorrow and let’s see one of our favorite golfers win one of his last majors tomorrow.

Christian Welde - Take Off

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 09:47:34 -0700

Kristian Skeie (aka Elk) has just premiered a music video made using Blender for its 3D visuals. The song is Take Off by Christian Welde, from his album 'Fairytales'. The music video is...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

The Microsoft VMware Smack Down: Perspectives behind the Headlines

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:53:24 -0700

A collection of blog posts from Archimedius about the smack down between VMware and Microsoft as analysts prepare for VMware's upcoming earnings announcement Tuesday July 22.

By developers, for developers - Builder AU

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:45:56 -0700

[Phoronix] Linux & Solaris Hardware Reviews

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:45:55 -0700

Ars Technica

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:45:55 -0700

20 Web Startup Lessons I learnt at Proto.in(Day 1)

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 05:53:20 -0700

Some very successful Indian entrepreneurs are sharing their wisdom with the community :

Open Source Software - Find, Evaluate, Collaborate - OStatic

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 04:46:11 -0700

slinkset.com: share -> vote -> comment

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 04:46:07 -0700

social news site

Red Database 2.1 released - merge ideas

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 02:51:33 -0700

Hello, Dear Firebird Team Members! After almost two years in development, four betas and four release candidates, Red Database 2.1 is finally released. Information about the release is present here: http://www.red-soft.biz/en/index.html We are not interested at all in forking basic engine functionality, so here are my thoughts on what major features Red Database engine has, and how they can me merged into [...]

Radiohead Open Sources a Music Video | OStatic

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:52:27 -0700

Groklaw - Digging for Truth

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:51:10 -0700

JS-Kit Brings Comments and Polls to Evite

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:56:20 -0700

Evite, the social planning service which has been around since 1998, announced a partnership with JS-Kit today. Evite will use JS-Kit's commenting and polling features to allow organizers and guests to communicate with each other. Evite is also expanding the social networking features of its site, including the ability to share photos and stories after the event has taken place.

While a number of more Web 2.0 oriented invitation companies like Socializr, Renkoo, or Goovite have challenged Evite over the years, Evite has remained the de-facto mainstream standard for online party invitations. Evite currently has about 15 million unique visitors a month, a number that dwarfs that of any of its competitors.

Evite's biggest challengers are probably not even other invitation services, but social networks like Facebook and MySpace. However, given that Evite is geared towards a very mainstream market where email is still king and not everybody is on Facebook, that challenge only applies to a certain sub-set of users, especially college students. By refreshing its look and by adding more social networking features as well as photo sharing, however, Evite is doing quite a good job at staying fresh, even though the company has been around for ten years now. The question for Evite is going to be if its users are going to accept these changes, which are pretty far reaching and include not just the new features, but also an updated user interface and the ability to import photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube.

JS-Kit is clearly on a roll right now. After acquiring the commenting system provider HaloScan just a few weeks ago, this partnership with Evite gives JS-Kit access to a very large number of users. JS-Kit is currently deployed on more than half a million sites.

JS-Kit company profile provided by TradeVibes

Better Live Blogging: CoverItLive Adds Support for Qik, Mogulus and Ustream

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:59:51 -0700

The Canada-based live-blogging tool CoverItLive added support for live video streaming to its application this week. Users covering live events can now add streaming video from Qik, Mogulus, and Ustream.tv to their live blogs. Bloggers can simply copy and paste the embed code from one of these services into CoverItLive. Adding video to live blogging takes it to a completely different level and will allow those who are covering these events to focus more on commentary and interacting with viewers than just reporting the events.

Conspicuously absent from the lineup of supported services are Stickam and Yahoo Live, both of which have a considerable amount of users.

Once you have added video to your live blog, users will see it at the top right of the application, but they can also pop it out and resize it. This is quite similar to how CoverItLive already handles YouTube videos, though the option to see videos in their own windows is new. One major advantage for bloggers here is that they can handle text and video all in one application.

CoverItLive provides writers with what they call a 'Writer Console,' which is quite different from what end-users see (see screenshot). The console is the main hub of the application and allows you to add polls, images, audio files, and now, live video. It also displays reader comments on the right side of the application.

One major advantage of CoverItLive is that it allows various writers and editors to work collaboratively, so that one person can handle the writing, another the video, and yet another blogger can focus on interacting with the audience.

Adding live video turns live blogging into a more interesting and immediate experience. Thanks to the proliferation of Qik on mobile phones, we will surely see more events being covered this way. We already liked CoverItLive a lot when we first reviewed it, though it did experience some outages when a lot of people used it during the January Macworld keynote. Since then, though, the platform has become a lot more stable.

The Haskell Sequence | News about Haskell

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:50:34 -0700

Flock 2 Beta 2 available now

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:55:21 -0700

Flock has released the second beta of its forthcoming Flock 2, the Firefox-based web browser that features tight integration with most of the most popular social web services including Flickr, Facebook, digg, YouTube and many others.

Flock 2 beta 2 is based on Firefox 3 (3.0.1 actually) code base bringing along all the performance improvements and new features including Places, tagging, malware protection, the new location bar, web content and protocol handlers among others.

Other features include an option to manually update a web feed or group of web feeds and notifications when one is updated.

Revver has also been added as a supported media feed provider you can search, search, and subscribe to.

Flock 2 is expected to have a long development cycle according to Flock’s Marketing VP, Dan Burkhart.

You can download Flock 2 Beta 2 from Flock Beta site. Available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Pinch Media " Your view into the App Store

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:04:08 -0700

App Store Metrics | Medialets

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:04:07 -0700

Identi.ca Implements Twitter API

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:00:47 -0700

When we first reported about the new microblogging service Identi.ca earlier this month, it looked like an interesting experiment. Since then, its community has grown rapidly and today, it implemented an API that is compatible with the Twitter API. Thanks to this, any application that connects to Twitter can now also work with Identi.ca by simply pointing to identi.ca/api instead of twitter.com.

Dave Winer tested the new API yesterday and reports that everything worked perfectly after he substituted the Twitter URLs with Identi.ca URLs. If this holds true for other developers as well (and we have no reason to believe otherwise), then this is a major step for Identi.ca.

Many new services struggle to build a developer community around their platform. By being compatible with Twitter, though, Identi.ca's developer pool is now virtually identical with Twitter's developer community, which means that it is only a matter of time before Twitter clients like Twhirl, Snitter, or TweetBox will make posting to Identi.ca an option.

As Twitter is making it more and more difficult for some third-party developers to hook into its API by severely restricting the number of calls any given application can make within a certain time period, Identi.ca will probably see a lot more interest from developers in the near future.

Semantic Web takes big step forward " Travelling Through The Wire

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:56:57 -0700

Enhancing AIML Bots using semantic web technologies " There Is Nothing New Under The Sun

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:02:10 -0700

The Making of Pigeon: Impossible

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:56:43 -0700

Lucas Martell has been working for a long time now on a 6 minute short called Pigeon: Impossible. Hes recently been posting a video blog which gives and interesting and humorous insight into the...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

AT&T WiFi Hot Spots for iPhones

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:00:41 -0700

Acer Aspire 6920G-6A2G25Mn

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:53:11 -0700

Acer Aspire 6920G-6A2G25Mn

John Resig - Firebuggin'

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:04:10 -0700

I've got a mini-announcement. Starting this week about half of my time at Mozilla is going to be spent driving the direction of the brand-new Mozilla Firebug team. I'm, understandably, quite excited about this proposition. Like all web developers I've found Firebug to be an invaluable tool for web development.

Spring Framework Training Summary (July)

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 03:43:08 -0700

SpringSource is pleased to offer the new Developing Rich Web Applications with Spring course. The first presentation of this course, offered in Washington D.C. August 5 through August 8, will be presented by the Spring Web Team Lead, Keith Donald.

All courses are delivered by the people who build and sustain the Spring Framework. For full details, please visit the main training information page. Here is a summary of some of the upcoming courses and venues:

USA and Canada
- Core Spring: July 22nd - 25th, Ottawa, Canada
- Core Spring: July 22nd - 25th, New York, NY
- Core Spring: July 29th - August 1st, Seattle, WA
- Core Spring: August 5th - 8th, Salt Lake City, UT
- Developing Rich Web Apps with Spring: August 5th - 7th, Washington, DC
- Core Spring: August 12th - 15th, San Francisco, CA
- Core Spring: August 19th - 22nd, Raleigh, NC
- Core Spring: September 2nd - 5th, Toronto, Canada
- Developing Rich Web Apps with Spring: September 3rd - 5th, New York, NY

Europe & Middle East
- Core Web Services: July 24th - 25th, London, UK
- Core Spring .NET: July 30th - August 1st, London, UK
- Core Spring: August 12th - 15th, London, UK
- Core Spring: August 26th - 29th, Athens, Greece
- Core Spring: September 16th -19th - Hamburg, Germany (presented in German)

Australia/Asia/Other
- Core Spring: August 5th - 8th, Melbourne, Australia
- Core Spring: September 9th - 12th, Sydney, Australia

... plus others

CUPS 1.4svn Weekly Snapshot, r7754

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 01:48:43 -0700

A new weekly snapshot of CUPS 1.4svn (r7754) is now available.

British Open - Can Greg Norman Win It?

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:58:49 -0700

The news around the block is that Greg Norman might be able to win this year’s British Open if he only believed in himself again.

The former British Champion, Greg Norman, is 1 off the lead by shooting an even par today.

I believe Greg Norman has couple majors that the golfing world owes him. At numerous majors, Greg Norman either got struck by lightening (metaphor here that is) or he simply gave it to the guy standing next to him.

I thought Greg Norman would have won many more majors if he only believed in himself again.

I mean for like 10 years or so, he was the shark. Perhaps, Tigers do scare away sharks but come on.

It’d be like my dream come true if Greg Norman could win the Open this weekend at age 53.

Maybe that’s just my speculation but what the heck, Greg deserve one for sure.

Twitter Testing a New Design - Getting Ready to Integrate Summize?

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:52:47 -0700

There have been various sightings of a new design for Twitter this afternoon, though by now, Twitter has reverted back to its old design. Possibly, Twitter is testing this new design as it prepares to integrate Summize's search into its current look. The new design moves the navigation bar away from the top and to the right side of the screen, making the overall look of the site more coherent and modern.

From what we were able to see in the short time the design was up, Twitter is mostly trying to streamline its interface with this new design - we did not spot any new features. The latest tweet a user made has been moved from the profile on the top right to directly underneath the text entry box. The 'reply' and 'favorite' shortcuts have been moved out of the interface and now only show when you hover over a message. The search box has also been moved and the empty space between the updates and the profile information on the right has been removed.

While the new design keeps the general feel of the old Twitter page, the new design is decisively more minimalist and clean. As Twitter is preparing to integrate Summize into its site, chances are that if they want to integrate Summize's real-time updates, they would also have to redesign their front-end to be able to display those updates.

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Twitter_Testing_a_New_Design_2';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';Interestingly, the redesign looks exactly like the sketch Twitter used in its post about the Summize acquisition. Judging from this, the integration with Summize might already be quite far along.