Category Software

The Face of Hypocrisy.

Late last year, in an article about the need for interconnectedness of social networks and the ownership of user profile data, I wrote: If Facebook can connect to another service with your account (and your permission), what’s stopping the creation of a MetaSocial Network. A network to which you provide the login details for all […]

VMWare Workstation 6.5β

VMWare has a beta testing programme for its venerable virtualisation software VMWare Workstation. Version 6.5 is going to add a number of very impressive and long-awaited features such as the Unity feature (pioneered in VMWare Fusion on the Mac), proper 3D acceleration support for Windows machines (yes, this means Direct X 9.0c and most probably, yes this means games and a whole slew of applications previously impossible to run under VMWare). I'll be giving Beta 1 a try in the next few weeks and I'll report here if anything worth mentioning comes up. I'd be very much interested to find what the pricing of this upgrade will be for owners of Workstation 6.0.

WidSets. What a disappointment.

A reader of this blog sent me an email a couple of weeks ago, asking me to consider porting my Hellenic Reverse Directory Lookup widget (HRDL) for Apple’s Dashboard in Mac OS X to the Widsets service provided by Nokia. Over the past year or so I’ve been emailed another two or three times by […]

Phun

If anything is certain is that this is fun. Lots of fun. An excellent piece of software and a great educational companion.

Resampling Needed

Those using Firefox 3.0 may have noticed that by default when someone scales the content of a page, the images are resized too, a behaviour long-pioneered by Opera. Those using Firefox 3.0 on linux will be sorry to find out that upscaled images are not resampled using anything but what seems to be nearest neighbour (I haven't checked the code): they are ugly, pixelated and definitely not pleasant to the eye. This is well documented on the Mozilla Bugzilla repository and sadly it may be the case that it's not fixed until Firefox 3.0 final is out. Which is a shame, as many people with higher resolution displays, especially high-resolution laptop displays that sometimes reach approximately 150dpi actually depend on the scaling functionality to be able to read stuff properly. Ironically GTK+ offers pretty decent image scaling functionality and hopefully it's not that hard to make use of it in Firefox in the near future. Here's an illustration of the problem. The picture on the left shows the original (unscaled) content of the ΜΠΛΟΟΓΚΛ hellenic blog search engine. The one in the middle shows the scaled version, as shown in Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 that shipped with Ubuntu 8.04. The one on the right shows a resampled version of the image using the (pretty computationally expensive) lanczos algorithm, which although not probable as a solution it's quite close to the (realistically possible) bilinear resampling for upscaled images of this size. Image Upscaling in Firefox 3.0B5 (Linux) You can follow the progress on this issue on the Mozilla Bug tracking page here.

Dynamic IP friendly SPAs.

At last, Linksys just upgraded their SPA (formely Sipura) 942/962 series phone firmware. Among many other bugfixes, the new firmware fixes a number of longstanding and extremely annoying SIP registration bugs (CSCsm28353, CSCsk69012) that afflicted dynamic IP ADSL users whose external (routable) IP address gets changed frequently and necessitated a relatively long process to make the phone behave properly. Kudos to Linksys for fixing this, albeit quite late.

10 Days to Hardy and GNOME's ugliness.

Following on from my earlier post on the upcoming Ubuntu 8.04 ‘LTS’ release, I fear that my prediction, albeit harsh, was pretty accurate: Ubuntu 8.04 LTS should have never been branded as a Long Term Support (LTS) release. Despite the obvious shortcomings of having β-quality software (Firefox 3.0, GVFS) and new frameworks that — statistically […]

Oh, the irony!

Gruber may be more articulate than the average Mac zealot, but I usually find his opinions irritatingly illogical and biased, especially when he tries --- and subsequently fails miserably --- to rebut perfectly valid criticism about Apple. This is not one of those times. Following on from earlier criticism about Google's 'demo' Huddlechat, Gruber sums it up perfectly in a very concise manner:
Even if you think it’s OK to copy someone else’s application feature-for-feature, the big fear for developers with something like Google App Engine is that you’re trusting Google with all of your source code. Why should small indie web developers trust Google when the first example app is a Google rip-off of a small indie web app?
HuddleChat was a Google product and it certainly was a clone of Campfire. Still, it remains to be seen whether there is an ethical issue with cloning existing, commercial applications/services and releasing them to the world for free. Isn't this more or less what Microsoft and later Google became well-known -- and in some cases loved --- for? Would Gruber, and everyone else --- and I'm not excluding myself --- have a problem if it was a text-book, Startup.com-like company that had cloned Campfire and released it as a demo of an app-hosting service + framework (ala Wordpress.com), or is the criticism firmly rooted in the fact that Google is rapidly becoming a threat to [everything] in the minds and hearts of so many?