CristiPotlog

I just stumbled upon this gem: Top 25 Free Icon Resources for Web Designers.

If you are in despair for some free graphics those may come in handy.

Labels: Free, Internet, Programming, Software

Joe Wilcox, posted two news commentaries on his Microsoft Watch Blog, here and here.

Basicaly, he states that Ballmers' letter is one of the nastiest pieces of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) communications of the high-tech era.

"Microsoft seeks to set Yahoo shareholders against the 10-member board of directors. The letter, while written for the board, is really for shareholders. Microsoft's publication of the letter is evidence enough of the audience."

Joe Wilcox further analyzes the letter, paragraph by paragraph, revealing the real meaning of Ballmer's words: fear that Yahoo shares will further decline and during a period of huge economic uncertainty, the "large premium" is overstated.

"Microsoft will take the company or take it out. This isn't even an implicit threat. It's direct and deliberate."

Labels: Internet

A friend on mine pointed me at a recent article about blogging from New York Times , which raises a difficult question after enumerating some tragic deaths of some bloggers, hearth disease related.

"Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December."

Blogging is a lucrative business, many bloggers being well-compensated for their efforts to keep the rest of us up to date with breaking news and the latest gossip. It is unclear how many people blog as a job, but surely there are several thousand out there.

There is a growing number of online writers, reporting and even reflecting about sports, politics, business, technology, celebrities and every other conceivable niche. Some write for fun, but thousands write for publishers, or have started their own online media outlets with profit in mind. One of the most competitive categories is blogs about technology developments and news.

Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, said “I haven’t died yet”, but “this is not sustainable”, as he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “There’s no time ever — including when you’re sleeping — when you’re not worried about missing a story,” Mr. Arrington said.

Labels: Blogging, Internet

Microsoft press officials released the text of Ballmer’s letter to the media one day after unnamed sources close to Microsoft told some reporters that Microsoft was losing patience with Yahoo’s reticence to take up Microsoft on its January 31 offer to buy Yahoo.

Microsoft says Yahoo has three weeks to negotiate a decent deal, after which time Microsoft is going to take his case directly to Yahoo! shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy bidding to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo! board.

I don’t believe that Microsoft has any real intention of walking away from this deal. I feel there’s so much overlap between Microsoft and Yahoo that this merger seems feasible, but a hostile proxy battle is the surest path to mutually assured destruction. Microsoft shares have already fallen more than 10 percent since the company first sprang its unsolicited bid on Yahoo, and market research has shown that it can take years before companies recover from a hostile takeover.

However, even thou Microsoft implies that Yahoo! has not answered their offer, Yahoo! has released to the press a statement on February 11, concluding that the proposal is not in the best interests of Yahoo! and our stockholders.

Labels: Internet, Software

Lenovo has launched a new ultra-mobile laptop, the X300, weighting just 1.4 kg.

The X300 offers SSD storage, wireless connectivity options including integrated Wireless WAN and W-LAN, as well as Ethernet. Just about what MacBook Air is missing, as you can see in this fact sheet:

I can only hope for a faster processor.

Check out this aggressive web ad from Lenovo. Big words: “The art of thin”, “No-compromise” and “Everything else is just hot air?”. Is this the sound of war?

Maybe it isn’t as sexy or inexpensive as the MacBook Air, but it has a lot of features the Apple lacks, especially a wide array of ports and connectivity options, a built-in DVD-RW drive and a removable battery.

Apple and Lenovo have reset the bar for the next generation of incredibly thin notebooks. The next “Big Thing” is probably going to have two drives (one small capacity flash drive where you put your OS and applications, and a larger capacity magnetic drive data, so you can get fast load times), a longer battery life , in order to keep the cost of the product down to something the market can afford.

See a full review at geek.com

Sad news today: Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the famed science fiction writer and visionary died early Wednesday morning at a hospital near his home in Sri Lanka, at the age of 90, as The Times reports.

Most famous for expanding his short story "The Sentinel" into a novel and screenplay that served as the basis for Stanley's Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the British-born Clarke authored more than 100 books involving space, science, and science fiction, and he's often credited with inventing the concept of satellite communications. Clarke was the last surviving member of what was sometimes known as the "Big Three" of science fiction, alongside Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.

In recent years, he has been largely confined to a wheelchair due to post-polio syndrome, but his output as a writer continued undiminished.

Marking his “90th orbit of the Sun” in December, the author said that he did not feel "a day over 89" and made three birthday wishes: for ET to call, for man to kick his oil habit and for peace in Sri Lanka.

Labels: Life

After years of living in denial, Microsoft has finally decided to stop trying to fight open-source software, by releasing 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows (both desktop and server products) that were previously available to partners only through trade secret licenses. Redmond is making also available new licenses to a large number of its software patents “on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, at low royalty rates.”

In a series of recent moves including the launch of http://www.opensourcehero.com/ site, that will launch February 28, the same day as Windows Server 2008, Microsoft has released to the press “New interoperability principles.”

The four principles it is declaring are:

(1) ensuring open connections
(2) promoting data portability
(3) enhancing support for industry standards
(4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.

In order to improve visibility for following acts, the company has setup a new site, that will allow access to latest developments in Microsoft's products.

Labels: Microsoft, Open Source, Programming, Software

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML Working Group has published a draft of the HTML 5 specification, the first major update to HTML in 10 years, factoring in changing tastes around rich-media applications and online collaboration.

Much has changed since the early dot-com days of December 1997 when HTML 4 was published. Now developers, designers and users have unlocked the Web's potential. Sites have moved from being a collection of static pages to media-rich communities leveraging participation.

HTML 5 is defined in a way that it is backwards compatible with the way web browsers handle deployed content. Some of the new elements in HTML 5 relate to structure and presentation. The new section and article tags, for instance, should be familiar to those of you who have worked with docbook. There are also new elements for navigation, headers, footers, figures, and dialog. Media support gets a boost, with the canvas drawing system as well as new audio and video tags. Improvements to HTML forms include support for date and time input elements and a new datagrid that will support interactive tables and trees. HTML 5 also gets basic templating functionality and support for repeating elements.

A full list of changes from the previous version can be found here.

UPDATE: Here's some more in-depth The HTML 5 Draft Hints at a Brave New Web

Labels: Internet, Programming, Software

James Lau has A basic guide on upgrading Visual Studio 2005 SDK packages to build in the Visual Studio 2008 SDK.

There are several things you need to be aware of when you are porting a VS 2005 package to VS 2008. This blog post will guide you through the process, step-by-step.

Labels: .NET, Programming, Software

Sun Microsystems announced an agreement to acquire MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL database, one of the world's fastest growing open source databases. MySQL database is regarded as one of the core components of open source server infrastructure, the so-called Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) stack.

In a blog post where MySQL published its official announcement of the acquisition, the company expressed strong affinity for the Solaris operating system. MySQL community vice president Kaj Arno wrote:

"Solaris has a special position in the heart of MySQL, as it was the first platform under which MySQL was developed. Linux came second. Internally, code coverage tests were long performed just on Sun. And with the DTrace probes planned as part of 6.0, some types of optimization of MySQL applications are the easiest on Solaris."

"The combination of MySQL and Sun represents an enormous opportunity for users and organizations of all sizes seeking innovation, growth and choice," said Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL. "Sun's culture and business model complements MySQL's own by sharing the same ideals that we have had since our foundation -- software freedom, online innovation and community and partner participation. We are tremendously excited to work with Sun and the millions of members of the MySQL open source ecosystem to continue to deliver the best database for powering the modern Web economy." (from Sun Press Releasses)

This has not come as a complete surprise. MySQL has previously turned down Oracle’s offer.

Sun's acquisition of MySQL broadly validates open-source database solutions as viable alternatives to proprietary commercial database products like those from Oracle and IBM.

Labels: Java, Open Source, Programming, Software

I just changed my blog design. It's a new custom theme. It uses a lot from the old one, but it has a new twist.

What do you think about it? Seriously.

Labels: Blogging, Design, Internet

On a post on Netscape blog, Tom Drapeau, AOL's director of the Netscape brand, announced that AOL will end support and development for the Netscape Browser. Support will continue for the current version of the browser, Netscape 9, by releasing patches or security fixes until February 1, 2008. After that date, all development will stop and there will be no more active product support for the browser.

Originally released in 1994 during the nascent days of the web, Netscape Navigator was the underdog contender in the "browser wars" of the late 1990s, when it faced stiff competition from Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. Netscape released its browser's source code and created the Mozilla project in 1998. AOL then acquired Netscape in 1999.

AOL's Drapeau recommends for the nostalgic users to download Mozilla Firefox, and add on the Netscape's theme and extensions pack for Firefox.

As of February 1st, 2008, Netscape will continue to serve as a general usage Internet portal.

Labels: Internet, Software

I have started planning a project a few months ago. A Romanian clone of Digg. Not the first one, I assure you. I'm still gathering features for this site, hoping that it will be a blast. If not a ground breaker, at least a decent Digg clone :-)

And now, not at a totally surprise to me, comes this article from Scripting News, "The next step in Digg clones".

It talks about all other Digg wannabes out there, taking some points out, and insisting that there is a place, even if some might call it "niche" for sites that emulate Digg.

Even more, at the and of the article the author summarizes the whole idea:

"So that's the idea. I want starting a Digg-like community to be as easy as creating a weblog on blogger.com. Just fill in a form, click Submit and off we go. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Sure most will be ghost towns, there will be press articles talking about the abandoned communities, but I bet we look back in a couple of years and see the landscape in the blogosphere has changed yet again."

You might think that this will discourage me, but it feels nice to know that more people are working on the same field. It gives you a sense of competition.

Labels: Internet, Programming, Software

This week I've revisited my old home town, the town where I grew up.

I'm doing a roadshow for this project I'm working on, so it was a business trip, with no time for hanging around. I was able though to get to my favorite place at the edge of the town.

It was a rainy day, the air was misty and filled with a sick and heavy smell coming from the slaughterhouse. All those memories going through my head, ranging from hot summer days with same fetid smell and nights with hungry mosquitoes driving me crazy, and coming to those cold and windy winter days with little snow if any.

All this seems so far away now...

NOTE: A few days have passed since then. I was a little hesitating of publishing this post, being so personal, but here it is.

Labels: Life

Daniel Cazzulino has a post on his blog about an addition to .NET 3.5, the System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace.

Here's an excerpt:

"This namespace, which lives in the System.ServiceModel.Web.dll assembly which provides the WCF Syndication functionality, contains useful classes for working with feeds and items. I won't go over the Architecture of Syndication, How the WCF Syndication Object Model Maps to Atom and RSS, How to: Create a Basic RSS Feed, How to: Create a Basic RSS Feed, How to: Expose a Feed as both Atom and RSS or the basics of Syndication Extensibility. All those links provide enough to get you started."

Labels: .NET, Open Source, Programming, Visual Studio

Visual Studio Extensibility team has released the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0, and, for the first time, the new free Visual Studio 2008 Shell redistributable runtimes for both Isolated mode and Integrated mode.

The Visual Studio Shell (isolated mode) provides a foundation on which you can build your own custom-branded tools environment that runs side by side with Visual Studio. By using the Visual Studio Shell (isolated mode), you can accelerate development by reusing the Visual Studio IDE in your application and focus on your core tooling problems.

The Visual Studio Shell (integrated mode) provides the foundation on which you can seamlessly integrate tools and programming languages within Visual Studio. The Visual Studio Shell (integrated mode) does not contain any programming language, so it provides the perfect foundation to deploy a development environment for your own language.

The Visual Studio 2008 SDK is required for development and testing tools and programming languages that target the Visual Studio 2008 Shell. For more information about the Visual Studio 2008 Shell, visit Visual Studio 2008 Shell overview.

Visual Studio Extensibility site has the links to the SDK, and Shell downloads, and other resources.

Somasegar has announced that his team has released to manufacturing Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5.

"We hope that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 enables you as an individual or as a team to build great applications. Whether you are a professional developer or a software enthusiast, are building applications for the client, server, web, or devices we hope you have fun with these products as your software is our passion."

The entire family of Visual Studio products (from the Express Editions to the Professional version to Visual Studio Team Suite) and .NET Framework 3.5 are available for immediate download here.

Update:
For those of you intereseted in VSX, Aaron Marten published an update on his blog: "As a reminder, the August 2007 CTP of the Visual Studio 2008 SDK is not compatibile with the release version of Visual Studio 2008.". But he thinks they have the final build, and have a plan on posting it to the web later this week after some final testing.

Labels: .NET, Programming, Software, Visual Studio

Microsoft recently released a CTP (Community Technology Preview) of Sync Framework SDK – “a comprehensive synchronization platform enabling collaboration and offline for applications, services and devices with support for any data type, any data store, any transfer protocol, and network topology.”

According to the documentation (see Introduction to the Microsoft Sync Framework Runtime), the Sync Framework will allow developers to take online services and databases offline. Microsoft says the framework can synchronize “any type of file including contacts, music, videos, images and settings.” The Sync Framework also includes “built-in support for synchronizing relational databases, NTFS/FAT file systems, Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS/ATOM, devices and web services.”

The framework consists of:

• Core sync runtime that provides universal synchronization functionality agnostic of data types and protocols
• Ability to create and consume Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) feeds
• Components to enable the rapid development of sync solutions on platforms including SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, NTFS file systems and removable drives
• An extensible provider model that integrates data sources into the sync ecosystem
• Rich conflict handling for automatic and custom resolution
• Built in support for filters to sync subsets of collections such as mailboxes or media libraries

You can use the Microsoft Sync Framework to build collaboration and offline scenarios such as the following:

• Seamless online/offline data access for rich internet applications (RIA) and line-of-business applications
• Peer-to-peer collaboration on content such as files/folders, email, contacts, appointments, audio, video and settings across any number of PCs, services, and devices

At the moment the Sync Framework only supports Windows Vista, XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 Service pack 3. It’s unclear whether Microsoft will expand that support in the future.

For more information on the Microsoft Sync Framework SDK - CTP 1, you can visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/sync, and you can get a copy from Microsoft Downloads.

Labels: Database, Programming, Software

Acording to a recent press release, Microsoft is plotting a huge vision for a modern SOA platform.

Microsoft unveils an ambitious roadmap for its SOA vision, to bridge “software+services”, and to take composite applications mainstream. The company announces multi-year investment in “Oslo” and launches new SOA resources for IT professionals.

It is the first time Microsoft has outlined how it plans to integrate its emerging SOA platform and its software-plus-services initiatives.

Building on the technology available today, the “Oslo” advancements will be delivered through Microsoft server and tools products in five key areas:

• Server - Microsoft BizTalk Server “6” will continue to provide a core foundation for distributed and highly scalable SOA and BPM solutions, and deliver the capability to develop, manage and deploy composite applications.
• Services. - BizTalk Services “1” will offer a commercially supported release of Web-based services enabling hosted composite applications that cross organizational boundaries. This release will include advanced messaging, identity and workflow capabilities.
• Framework - The Microsoft .NET Framework “4” release will further enable model-driven development with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).
• Tools - New technology planned for Visual Studio “10” will make significant strides in end-to-end application life-cycle management through new tools for model-driven design of distributed applications.
• Repository - There will also be investments in aligning the metadata repositories across the Server and Tools product sets. Microsoft System Center “5,” Visual Studio “10” and BizTalk Server “6” will utilize a repository technology for managing, versioning and deploying models.

But one important missing thing from the “Oslo” pitch is a release date for the planned products, which are clearly being scheduled for delivery once the current clutch of planned new server and tools software are out the door next February.

One report (PDF) has Oslo at sometime in 2009. That means Microsoft's server and tools will slip even further behind important rivals IBM, Oracle, SAP and even tiny BEA Systems in middleware.

Mashable has published a list of tools and resources for building web sites and web applications aggregated from previous posts on their site.

"We’re all living on the web, and we all seem to be starting our own websites, so it’s time we all learned the languages that make it run. We’ve gathered over 250 resources to help you get going."

Check it out, it's pretty amaizing what they've done.

Labels: Internet, Programming, Software