Thought the many iPod users that wander past here would find this interesting and useful.
Rather than using a single license of Microsoft Office on one computer, why not put OpenOffice on your iPod so you can use it on any computer without even waiting for the installation to comoplete.
With Portable OpenOffice.org 2.0 & 1.1.5 you can take your office (and your documents) with you. If/when I finally get my iPod this will certainly be one of the first things I do.
Don't forget to snag a copy of the Mozilla products for your iPod too.
Firefox logo painted on the sidewalk of Oregan State University to celebrate the 50 millionth download of the Firefox browser. And they did it for around $30. 8o)
They're doing a hot air ballon for the 100 millionth download.
US, UN, or ____? This will be the deciding question of the future world.
I've been playing with PHP frameworks for a while. They all have different pro's and con's. Yesterday, Zend (the maker's of the PHP language engine) announced they will be creating a Zend PHP Framework of their own.
There's already an extreemly large number of PHP frameworks available (the Ismo project I actually run). Most of these frameworks, including Ismo, lack a developer buy-in and only a few of them have large open source or commercial applications built on them. Zend is seeking to rectify that situation by throwing their considerable weight behind a community built framework.
All in all I think it will be for the best. My hope is that Zend releases it under a reasonable open source license like their own PHP License, but I do fear a money-making GPL/commercial license. I guess time will tell.
In the mean time I plan on getting in deeper with Ismo and implementing some framework concepts I haven't seen yet (see the Ideas section on the Ismo Wiki.
One more thing: Zend also announced that they've joined the Eclipse Foundation and will be creating PHP related plugins for Eclipse. For the curious, there's already a PHP plugin for eclipse that's quite good.
For a while now I've thought that someone should create portable computers that could use a larger machines features (screen, mouse, keyboard, etc) when plugged into a larger box. Turns out (as usual) I wasn't the only one thinking about this.
Meet BlackDog. This little machine, while it doesn't come with an interface it can handle the "symbiotic" relationship I mentioned earlier. Plug the BlackDog into any host machine, authenticate using your finger or thumb, and you can start using your Linux-based portable server.
Now as you may have realized, this is only helpful if you have access to pre-existing laptops or desktops that can host your BlackDog. However, BlackDog's symbiotic relationship isn't terribly intrusive, so the host machine is really none the wiser. The host doesn't even need to reboot.
Two things I think BlackDog lacks that it would be good to acquire in the next 6 months are input and output devices of it's own (making it a full fledged PDA) and a much larger hard drive (256-512 mb) pail in comparison to the iPod nano's 2 to 4GB range.
It's an excellent start and decently priced at $199. It's certainly something that will take off among "geeks" and "techies." The rest of us are likely to wait until it reaches a higher level of ubiquity.
Now if they could make their BlackDog Linux version installable on an iPod nano.... :)
In a similar vein to some thoughts I shared back in January, Apple is gradually easing their way into the video market. Today they released a new iPod that can handle video: Apple unveils video iPod, strikes deal with ABC.
It won't be long now until we're purchasing movies via iTunes. By the way, did anyone else notice the "Videos" tab in the latest iTunes release. Just curious.
Just one month after Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 was released, the Mozilla Foundation pumps out another Beta. As with the last Beta, Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 will disable a good number of your extensions, but that's to be expected. One of the major things getting an overhaul in this next release is the extension API.
Happily it looks like Chris Pedrick's Web Developer extension remains compatible.
If you're upgrading from 1.5 Beta 1, I suggest using the "Help | Check for Updates..." menu option rather than downloading the full release. Either way should work fine, but if you use the "Check for Updates" option, you can see the new and improved update system. It's quite nice. :)
Now to restart Firefox and see how the upgrade goes. :)
Just wandered across this article: Google, Sun to bring StarOffice to Web.
StarOffice is the commercial equivalent of OpenOffice. Both are a good alternative to the cost-of-your-first-born Microsoft Office product.
According to this article Google and Sun will be announcing a partnership later today that will unveil a web-based version of the StarOffice product. If this does happen it will likely be the most powerful AJAX application written yet. It will also make Tim Berners-Lee's (the true founder of the web) dream of the read-write web a closer reality.
I expect to see Google offering more business partnership opportunities to integrators for products like this office idea, gmail, and their yet-to-be-released Wi-Fi system. They currently have a good number of free API documentation and SDK's. These, I believe, will likely be the stepping stone to larger product integration opportunties for partners. Google can't live off advertising income forever... ...or can they?