The importance of an operating system will always be tied to fundamentals such as hardware detection (driver support) and the ability to run a Web browser with simple services. Watch this video.

Be aware that Microsoft strives to end this nirvana of platform-independent use of a PC. It recently introduced Silverlight, which is a Web technology that is tied to Microsoft’s desktop technology. Essentially, Microsoft wants to make the Web (including services and mashups) more Microsoft-dependent. Under the guise of choice and functionality, Microsoft strives to regain lockin. It schemes to do so by making the Web work better (or work only) with Windows.

Microsoft has recently announced that it would introduce a rival to Flash. It calls it “Silverlight”. I mentioned this a couple of years ago when it was called “Sparkle”. Bear in mind, however, that a lot of truths are being hidden and the intent here is to make the Web incompatible with Free operating systems. The points to remember:

• Silverlight does not support GNU/Linux.
• Silverlight is built to make the Web accessible only to proprietary platforms, even if one can view the source.
• Silverlight can be ‘extended’ at any given time. There is no industry consortium.
• Microsoft corrupts terminology by using the terms ‘Open Source’ and ‘cross platform’ inadequately. It is not the first time this do this. They used ‘cross platform’ to describe programs that work in Windows Mobile, Windows, and XBox.

Don’t be misled. Use Adobe Flash if you must. Better yet, use Open Web standards and make use of cascading style sheets, maybe even JavaScript.

Got something to say? Then say it in satellite pictures.

It’s a nice idea with an implementation that delivers the output as you type.

Similar tools:

• Text to Church Sign Convertor
• ASCII Banner Generator
• Cyborg Name Generator
• Polaroid Images

have just come across quite an amusing forum thread. Interestingly, I found a link to it on Digg. Flamebait, surely. It does nothing but bash Digg, which is sad, particularly given the idiocy in that forum, which gives it no credibility.

week ago I was trying to find an alternative Web-based feed-reading software. I was looking for merely anything, apart from desktop-bound solutions or ‘offshorn‘ Web-based services such as Feedlounge and Google Reader. While I am very happy with my current feeds reader, RSSOwl, it is bound to remain a native desktop application (albeit it’s fully cross-platform). I rarely bother to tunnel in and check the feeds while on vacation, so I quickly go ‘out of sync’. A Web-based aggregator could address this deficiency.

I had a quick browse through sourceforge.net, but could not find anything that was complete. Then, I took a glance at freshmeat.net where more complete projects reside. Here is a short report on what I could and could not locate.

• A CGI-based feed reader: CGIFeed;
• PHP-based: zFeeder

None was too impressive (more akin to a complete miss). I was then reminded of an RSS feed reader (aggregator) which already integrates news on my Website although it is extremely rudimentary. In general, none of the applications that I shallowly reviewed (judging by lists and screenshots, without installing) was mature or complete in terms of the required features. The pursuit for a free, Free (as in “Freedom to change, redistribute and so forth”), Web-based, multi-functional software was probably too much. This came to prove that, in terms of functionality (let alone responsiveness that is another important matter), Web-based applications have a lot of catching up to do w.r.t. good ol’ desktop programs.

For completeness, I also found:

• nntp2rss – A tool that provides a bridge to access newsgroups using an RSS reader. Quite interesting, I thought.
• Flock – still in alpha stage and has not been updated for almost 4 years. It is not to be confused with the Web browser Flock (a Mozilla Firefox derivative with social networks slant).

Veen concludes: “They’re not stupid. They’re not lazy. Don’t treat them that way.” Users are efficient. They want to get the job done with the least effort. It just doesn’t bode well as far as the intent of the developer is concerned.

New Yanoff for Palm – an example of
poor UI design

NE of the more ingenious technologies around involves user interfaces that are embedded in Web pages. Taking full advantage of powerful, modern Web browsers, it is possible to build fully-blown applications that are operable from merely any platform. One of the latest packages as such achieves all of this without any JavaScript. Have a look at the project summary.

ZK is an open-source Ajax Web framework that enables rich UI for Web applications with no JavaScript and little programming. With event-driven feature-rich components, developing becomes as simple as programming desktops. With a markup language, designing becomes as simple as authoring HTML.

previously mentioned del.icio.us, back in the days when it was a fairly new and hot phenomenon. The context and points of focus were ways of escaping it (exporting), along with all the acquired data, which had of course been put on a third party. I mentioned the dangers of ‘offshoring’ data once in the past; quite explicitly and bluntly so as a matter of fact.

Matters can be simplified however, assuming you have systems administration skills. There is a polished new tool called Scuttle, which enables any Webmaster to set up his/her little, super-flexible and highly-functional del.icio.us clone (social boomarks with bookmarklets to be precise) on a personal site. The software requires PHP support from the Web server and it can use MySQL, among many other database types. Here is an installation of mine. It is less than a day old, so it is naturally immature and somewhat depleted. Feel free to join in and add your bookmarks to this pool. The installation is here to stay and my site is registerted until 2014.

It is all about extensions, it seems — merely JRE applications embedded as panes in Firefox, which makes them well-integrated like the centre of all. Thunderbird does likewise and so can OpenOffice. The main implication is gaps being bridges. No more platform dependencies and filesharing protocols. Firefox makes everything transparent, or so one might assume (albeit you never know for sure with today’s Windows-only Firefox/Thunderbird themes and plug-ins).

For those who haven not heard/read yet, Firefox will soon have P2P file sharing incorporated as a plug-in. Rumours about this add-on have been circulating around the Internet for several weeks, if not even longer. There is even a screenshot. All of this commotion could attract a huge number of users from an already troubled Internet Explorer and, as browsers are used by all, this would push copyrights infringement to very worrisome levels.

Update (05/01/2006): Google renounce low-margin PC speculations