Few days scare me more than those when I return from a vacation (as in yesterday). I take certain measures to ease the pressure, e.g.:

• Mail auto-responder/s are set up to suppress incoming messages
• Wikis for correspondence (IM equivalent which updates a few times a day) are locked or put on hold
• Disappearance from Web logs and forums
• No involvement in newsgroups and mailing lists

Despite all, E-mail, newsgroups, and feeds require catching up upon return. Even worse, additional reasons to worry lurk around the corner:

• One can forgot what has recently happens in the field of IT
• Orientation within API‘s gets eroded
• Breakage of Web sites or pages
• Shortage in updates, resulting in reduced crawling
• Electronic moderation, approval, and authorisation are delayed
• Site spam in its various forms
• An extensive list of tasks which cannot not be handled remotely
• Backups which are long-overdue

So, moments after a vacation are perhaps good moments to stay isolated… and catch up.

My sister had no worries about comment spam

any different forms exist for conversation over the Internet: site forums, wikis, newsgroups, IRC, blogs, mailing lists, IM and so forth. Each of these requires an application to be accessed — a Web browser being the most common among these applications.

The different communication methods have pros and cons, but they all can be bridged. All should be intrinsically entwined. Commercial interests have often pushed conversation protocols apart and disintegrated them to form the chaotic state we are in today. The result: poor compatibility, inter-operability and an endless number of installed applications, all of which are needed in order to keep up with the changing times (and people).

Will somebody, once and for all, take initiative and work towards a single comprehensive package?

Feeds have come a long way towards efficient,
standardised form of one-way communication.

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

Shortly after Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia, Microsoft infiltrate Adobe territories by introducing their own portable document format called “Metro”, which is based on XML.

Services that manage lists of tasks on-line spread rather quickly. Matt Mullenweg recently announced:

Someone cloned all of Ta-da List into Bla-Blah List which uses Flash for the interface instead of HTML/JS.

A diary that is well-integrated with mail accounts and accessible via the Internet
click image to view in full size

I have come across similar features in recent versions of Horde (shown above). I truly believe that these tools can compete with PDA‘s, especially when content is edited in collaboration with a team. All software mentioned, by the way, is completely free.

Cited by: PalmAddict

The following screenshot gallery demonstrates the features of one future desktop environment (X11). Windows exploit OpenGL for window ‘swinging’ (see the previous entry on luminocity or even bogus transparency). The effects are quite distracting, but provide that ‘wow factor’. Another long-anticipated eye candy is the spherical desktop.

Let us consider 3 types (‘families’ or ‘classes’ if you like) of headphones:

Standard arc headphones are not very popular these days. They are relatively gigantic, at least when compared with today’s gadgets. Pros: Often come with a thick single wire that connects to one side only (this minimises wear). Cons: Large and unfashionable, susceptibility to outside noise.

In-ear: Often cheaply made. My last set lasted only 4 days, but it had a nice mechanism for isolating noise. Many headphones these days penetrate the ears, yet research has shown that this is damaging to the ear. When I searched for a headphones replacement 5 days ago I saw an odd in-ear set which would penetrate nearly 1 inch inside the ears. My knees could bend seeing the scary otoscope-like design.

Large headphones: my favourite type, but only suitable indoors for obvious reasons.

The bottom line: unless you foresee yourself an old person who is unable to listen to people at the table, care less about noise reduction. We are yet to discover the damaging effects on a generation of Walkmans, Discmans, Minidisks, MP3 players, etc.

ews that are just in speak of a takeover of Macromedia (best known for Flash) by Adobe (makers of Acrobat Reader, Photoshop, Illustrator and so forth).

The two companies had settlements in court in the past. So, what are the implications of this acquisition? Domination of rich media delivery? This 3.4 billion dollar deal is definitely going to shape our future.