Monthly Archive:: November 2010

Symbian has had a bit of a string of bad news lately, but starting today, things might just start looking up again. Major changes have been announced with regards to the Symbian Foundation and Nokia's involvement with the platform, which all basically come down to this: Nokia is taking over development of the platform, while the Foundation focusses on licensing.

Firesheep is a Firefox extension that makes it easier to steal logins and take over social media and email accounts after users log in from a WiFi hotspot or even their own unprotected network. Zscaler researchers have created, and are now offering to every consumer, a free Firefox plugin called BlackSheep, which serves as a counter-measure. BlackSheep combats Firesheep by monitoring traffic and then alerting users if Firesheep is being used on the network. BlackSheep does this by dropping ‘fake’ session ID information on the wire and then monitors traffic to see if it has been hijacked.

"I had reduced the size of my ongoing Z80 project down to something more wieldy by using CPLD chips, but it was still a bit too bulky to fit into an acceptably sized case. The next step was to look into FPGAs and see where they could take it. One thing led to another and I ended up building a self contained post modern home computer laptop.. thing." Kroc: Can I haz port of BBC BASIC plz?

Well, this was to be expected: an anti-virus company complaining that Microsoft's Security Essentials - by far the best anti-virus tool for Windows - is anti-competitive. Microsoft recently began offering MSE as an optional download via the optional Microsoft Update service (which is not Windows Update), and Trend Micro (a patent troll) is going into boo-hoo mode over it.

Finally. Finally the leader of a major distribution who has the guts to stand up and say what a lot of people have known for a long time, but didn't dare to say because it usually leads to a storm of criticism. Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu will be moving away from X.org, opting to go with Wayland instead.

It's the end of the line for Apple's line of servers, the Xserve. The Cupertino giant has just announced that the Xserve line (no more future models, either) will no longer be sold after January 31, 2011, and advises people interested in Mac OS X Server to buy either a Mac Mini or a Mac Pro with Snow Leopard Server installed.

"For a fairly scruffy looking guy, I have a surprisingly healthy approach to organising my files. However, I'm constantly pushing up against the limitations of a system that is based around directories. I'm convinced that Linux needs to make greater use of tagging, but I'm also beginning to wonder if desktop Linux could abandon the hierarchical directory structure entirely."

"What if you could essentially fake your death online - completely delete any trace of yourself from Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, Usenet, and anywhere else there might be some record of your existence. Such a concept is largely impossible today, especially given complications from services like Facebook combined with caches and mirrors of practically everything ever e-created. The European Commission wants to change that."

Fedora 14 has been released. "The Fedora Project today announced the availability of Fedora 14, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. The Fedora Projects leads the advancement of free and open source software with a new distribution released approximately every six months."

"For reasons that are not immediately clear to me, it seems that a lot of developers who attended Microsoft's recent PDC event were surprised to hear that the company now sees HTML5 as the way forward for developing rich Internet applications - and not, as they had been expecting, Silverlight. Their surprise surprises me, because past statements by the company had already made this repositioning obvious, though perhaps not explicit."

"The Jack PC from Chip PC Technologies offers a neat and novel thin-client desktop computing solution where the computer doesn't just plug into the wall, it is the plug in the wall. Running on power provided by the ethernet cable that also connects it to the data center server, the computer-in-a-wall-socket supports wireless connectivity, has dual display capabilities and runs on the RISC processor architecture – which gives the solution the equivalent of 1.2GHz of x86 processing power."

I bought 8Pen for my Nexus One last night, an alternative, and pretty revolutionary, input method for Android. But how does it stack against normal soft keyboards?

"Under an initiative sponsored by the European Commission, the Symbian platform was this week endorsed by the Artemis Joint Technology Initiative and specifically identified as a unique technology that is a vital focus for European-centric mobile software development. As a result, a total investment of over EUR 22 million has been committed to the development of next generation technologies for the Symbian platform. This development project is being led by the Symbian Foundation as part of a consortium of major European technology organisations. The consortium is made up of 24 organisations from 8 European countries, comprising major mobile device manufacturers, hardware and service integration professional services, major consumer electronics companies, mobile network operators, application developers, universities and research institutions."

InfoWorld offers a look back at the first decade of agile programming. Forged in February 2001 when a group of developers convened in Utah to find an alternative to documentation-driven, 'heavyweight' software development practices, The Manifesto for Agile Software Development sought to promote processes that accommodate changing requirements, collaboration with customers, and delivery of software in short iterations. Fast-forward a decade, and agile software development is becoming increasingly commonplace, with software firms adopting agile offshoots such as Scrum, Extreme Programming, and Kanban - a trend some see benefiting software development overall