Archive for March, 2006

facebook.google.com?

According to Business Week the reason why Google is raising $2 Billion, may be to buy Facebook. I guess that would be the final nail in the coffin for Orkut. Could be interesting to see what Google would do with another social networking site. The first attempt didn’t seem to be very successful. Perhaps they have different plans for this one? Personally I think $2 Billion is a bit to much for the site.

WPF/E in Firefox

Mike Harsh discusses a bit about WPF/E as a cross platform solution, and includes a Firefox extension, leaving me to believe another Firefox extension from Microsoft is in the works (first being Microsoft Genuine Advantage). Mac support too.

For those wondering what WPF/E is, I’d recommend reading this and of course a wikipedia entry.

I do wonder if yet another framework to fragment the computing world is needed. Especially with things like SVG, Canvas and the Web Applications 1.0 Specification aka (X)HTML5, among existing technologies already in motion. But that’s another discussion.

Apple to Mark The Big 3-0

30 years of “Apple will be bankrupt and out of business in a year”.

Here’s to another 30 “Apple will never survive” years.

Google Finance

Google Finance launched, in perma-beta form as usual. A few things about the design are notworthy.

First of all, the use of javascript, or AJAX, or whatever you want to call it, is pretty good. The ability to see the headlines on the graph as it relates to the stock price is extremely well done. Interestingly, it seems Steve Jobs was camera shy.

One last note. How long will it take before a company sues Google for putting blog posts next to their stock information? Now anyone can say something negative about a company’s products or service, and an investor may hear that a consumer doesn’t like it! Yea it would be a garbage lawsuit, and hopefully Google would fight it (and win). But I’m pretty certain it’s just a matter of time before that happens. Even newsgroups seem to make it.

From an investor point of view, that gives good insight on what people think of this company. Not just financially, but actual customers/users.

Overall, a pretty good spin on yet-another-finance-stock-site.

Filtering out the Channel Noise

Ben wrote a must read post about public discussion that I think any Open Source developer needs to read. If you’re a Mozilla contributor, read it extra close. It really makes only 1 point (make more discussion open). But it doesn’t really address all the problems that prevent that goal from becoming a reality. I mentioned it briefly in a comment, but thought I’d make a post on the topic of channel noise.

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Words of Wisdom

I accidentally turned off my “words of wisdom” on the sidebar of the homepage a few weeks ago… it’s back in all it’s glory, plus a few new quotes.

mozPod 0.2 Status

I have slowly been working on a new mozPod release, it’s just not going very fast, as it’s still a lower priority project. So far, it seems to be pretty well accepted. Here are a few of the changes planned, or already completed:

  • Preliminary Lightning Support
  • Having an LDAP server setup in your Address Book won’t cause the sync to fail
  • Some code cleanup, optimization, and bug fixes

For the record, I will be dropping support for Thunderbird 1.0.x in mozPod 0.2. Most people seem to be upgrading, and it’s just not worth the hassle. Many (or most) seem to have had problems with MozPod and Thunderbird 1.0 anyway.

Yes, development is a little slow, but it’s free (unless you feel like saying thanks), so don’t complain ;-).

Update: It’s out.