Gadgetopia

Palm gives up. Latest WebOS update for the Palm Pre lacks iTunes support : Palm has given up trying to sync with iTunes.  Too bad.

For the time being, it appears that Palm has finally given up on its efforts to maintain compatibility between the Pre and iTunes.  And truth be told, it’s about time.  The real losers in this little tiff between Apple and Palm were the Palm Pre users who found themselves stuck in the middle of the dispute.  One day a Palm Pre would sync up with iTunes and the next week it wouldn’t.  Talk about an extremely inconsistent and frustrating user experience for Pre owners.

I don’t lay the blame on Palm’s doorstep.  If anything, this is a dick move by Apple.

Google: Firms can ‘get rid’ of Office in a year : I hope that this is true, but I’m skeptical.

In a year, most enterprises will have the choice to “get rid of [Microsoft] Office if they chose to”, suggests Dave Girouard, president of Google’s enterprise division.

Girouard, one of the company’s four presidents including founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, said in an interview with ZDNet Asia that he expects Google’s online document application, Google Docs, to reach a “point of capability” next year that will serve the “vast majority’s needs”.

Printing support is currently very poor.  I can write all I want, but I have to format my document with headers and footers and all sorts of stuff for print (or even PDF) delivery.  I hope Google can pull this off, I really do.

I think I’m the last person in the world to realize what this abbreviation means:

Too long, didn’t read

Now the name of this software project makes so much more sense.

How I tracked down a foregin couple on only the flimsiest of photographic evidence, and made their day. it was fun. : I loved this short story about how a guy’s wife took this picture of a man proposing to his girlfriend at the end of the New York marathon, and the guy used evidence in the picture and on the Net to track the couple down and give them the picture.

They are absolutely flaberghasted that I was able to find them and they were very happy to have the photo - it is the ONLY one they have of the actual proposal. And I now have an open invitation, any time I’m in London, for a pint at the local pub. .

Orchard Project : This is a new, open-source ASP.Net CMS, run by Microsoft employees (but not an official Microsoft project, as we mentioned previously)

Orchard is a free, open source, community-focused project aimed at delivering applications and reusable components on the ASP.NET platform. It will create shared components for building ASP.NET applications and extensions, and specific applications that leverage these components to meet the needs of end-users, scripters, and developers. Additionally, we seek to create partnerships with existing application authors to help them achieve their goals.

SPDY: Google wants to speed up the web by ditching HTTP : Wow, this takes guts – Google is researching a replacement for HTTP called SPDY, or “Speedy.”

SPDY uses a single SSL-encrypted session between a browser and a client, and then compresses all the request/response overhead. The requests, responses, and data are all put into frames that are multiplexed over the one connection.

Joe made the point this morning that they really have to get the Apache group on-board.  If Apache buys into it, that might be enough to kick the snowball off the hill.

WordPress Wins the 2009 Overall Best Open Source CMS Award : I was a judge in this category.

While WordPress occupied the top spot in the Overall Award, the other two extremely popular finalists MODx and SilverStripe tied for the first runner up position. After Pixie and Pligg sharing a similar result for the Most Promising CMS category, this is the second time the combined opinion of judges and the public was evenly divided for two CMSes, awarding each of them a first runner up spot.

I voted:

1. SilverStripe
2. MODx
3. WordPress

I still think WordPress as a full-blown CMS is a stretch, and I say this as the practice director of a firm which has pushed WordPress about as far as it can go with all the stuff we’ve done for Federated Media.  Just the other day, we started the conversation of what comes after we’ve maxed out WordPress’s capabilities, which we feel we’ve done.

My vote for WordPress was really a vote against the other two systems, which I didn’t care for, and a vote in favor of the community which has built up around WordPress.  To be honest, if I could have just turned in two winners, I’d have done SilverStripe and MODx, and left it at that.

In saying this, I’m not trashing WordPress.  I just define “CMS” differently, I guess.

Trends: Is the SharePoint bubble going to burst? : I had a fling with SharePoint a few months ago.  I was thinking that there was no point in putting any other CMS in an intranet scenario, because SharePoint was going to be King of the Hill (something I’ve said here before, in fact).

However, I was decidedly underwhelmed by it.  It’s complicated, and it can be rigid and frustrating in a lot of places.

Apparently, I’m not alone:

I may well be wrong, but I am starting to get the distinct impression that the SharePoint bubble is about to burst. Or at the very least, that enthusiasm for SharePoint is waning and demand for the platform set will begin to plateau.

Discussions with a number of ECM practice leads at major SIs (System Integrators) have told me that SharePoint is no longer perceived as a silver bullet by larger enterprise customers. SIs report that many purchased licenses have not gotten deployed, and that some hard lessons were learned when SharePoint was allowed to grow at viral rates. Once bitten twice shy.

Recently, I’ve seen EPiServer’s own intranet built using their Community product.  It’s simply fantastic, and fits their organization like a glove.

Leaked video game footage shows terrorist attack : This is causing some controversy:

Footage leaked from “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” reveals that players of the upcoming video game can shoot innocent civilians in an airport in a realistic rendering of a terrorist attack.

In the storyline, the player is undercover with a terrorist group, and gets caught up in an attack at an airport.

Destructoid has a full run-through of the level in HD.  I’m not squeamish by any means, but it’s brutal.  Fast-forward to 2:00.  Video game or not, it’s tough to watch in parts.  I travel a lot, and watching those people get machine-gunned while waiting in the security line hit a little close to home.

PEP 3003 — Python Language Moratorium : Python has announced a moratorium on language changes to let alternative implementations catch up to the core C implementation.

This suspension of features is designed to allow non-CPython implementations to “catch up” to the core implementation of the language, help ease adoption of Python 3.x, and provide a more stable base for the community.

[The idea is to] slow the alteration of the Python core syntax, builtins and semantics to allow non-CPython implementations to catch up to the current state of Python, both 2.x and 3.x.

Python, as a language is more than the core implementation — CPython — with a rich, mature and vibrant community of implementations, such as Jython, IronPython and PyPy that are a benefit not only to the community, but to the language itself.

Morale: Fighter Pilots Face A Dismal Future : Apparently the Air Force is looking to a day when no fighter plane have pilots in them.  The UAV is the future.

Many people, including some generals in the air force, believe that its next generation fighter will not have a pilot on board. Many air force generals admit that the F-35 is probably the last manned fighter. But some believe that the F-35 will be facing stiff competition from pilotless fighters before F-35 production is scheduled to end in 2034.

XF-84H Thunderscreech :  I love this plane.  I totally want one.  It appears to be the most ridiculous experiment in aviation history.

The engine was […] an Allison XT-40-A-1, capable of 5,850 hp (4,362 kW). An afterburner was installed though never used, which could increase power to 7,230 hp (5,391 kW). The propeller consisted of three square-tipped blades turning at a constant 3,000 rpm, with the tips travelling at approximately Mach 1.18.

[…] It flew a total of 12 test flights. One test pilot flew in it once and refused to ever fly in it again. Test pilot Hank Baird took the craft up 11 times, with 10 of these flights ending in forced landings.

The XF-84H was quite possibly the loudest aircraft ever built, earning the nickname “Thunderscreech” as well as the “Mighty Ear Banger” On the ground, they were reportedly audible 25 mi (40 km) away. Unlike standard propellers which turn at subsonic speeds, the outer 24–30 inches of the blades on the XF-84H’s propeller traveled faster than the speed of sound even at idle thrust, producing a continuous visible sonic boom that radiated laterally from the propellers for hundreds of yards and was reportedly strong enough to knock a man down

Microsoft’s Not So Secret New Open Source CMS : Very interesting.

Microsoft has a secret, although it’s not completely secret. They are getting ready to offer a new open source content management application code named Orchard.

The project, which will be discussed at next week’s TechEd Europe, is a “new effort to produce free, open source, reusable components and a full-featured CMS application built on these components to produce a variety of different types of web sites.”

Chroma-Hash: A Belated Introduction : An interesting experiment.  As you enter your password, it gets hashed and convert to three colored bars in real-time.  So, you come to know the “colors” of your password, and can tell if you entered it right before you hit enter.

If your password normally is represented as “red, purple, orange”, and after you’ve finished typing you see “pink, green, grey”, you’ll know you mistyped it somewhere along the way. This avoids a potentially long wait for the server to respond with a “failed login” notice.

It’s neat, but I can’t say it’s fixing a huge problem for anyone, I guess.

Developers stealing from developers: an App Store tale : Interesting story that details a situation every knows happens all the time.

A guy writes an iPhone app.  Then he gets a call from someone wanting to ask about his experience with the subcontractor who supposedly wrote the app for him…wait, a minute.  Someone had apparently claimed that they wrote the app and were using that claim to drum up work.

Curious as to just what was going on, Haddad decided to e-mail Trucid pretending to be interested in their services. In the e-mail, he requested information about the company and a list of examples of its work. It wasn’t long before Haddad received an e-mail back from Trucid’s Chief Marketing Officer explaining who the company was, what it did, and its experience on the iPhone platform. Sure enough, ConvertBot was on the list of the 14 apps the company had supposedly developed.

[…] Sadly, this kind of résumé boosting is becoming more common.

I have some experience with this.  In 2000, Joe and I were working at a company that built a Web site for the Minnesota Vikings, which was probably as high-profile a site as any Sioux Falls company had done back in 2000.  I was the lead developer, and there were 3-4 people on the team for it.

Some years later I sat down for a beer with my friendly arch-rival Aaron Mentele from Electric Pulp.  He informed me that lots and lots of people he had interviewed over the last few years had claimed to have written the Vikings Web site.  I thought that was pretty funny, I guess.  Maybe they wrote it and I was stealing their credibility?  I’m such a hack.