Naquada

I had an interesting coversation with the guys from Skype today, they were running a mini marketing campaign on Paddington Station.

It seems they have teamed up with Broadreach Networks to provide free Voice over IP (VoIP) access for Skype users from any of their 350 ReadytoSurf fixed and WiFi wireless Internet locations in train stations, caf

I found this blog today, its a report by Rick Von Feldt describing first hand what happend when a tsunami hit Phuket on December 26th 2004..

Rick Von Feldt is an American from Topeka, Kansas. He has lived for the last five years in Singapore, working in the IT Industry. He headed to Phuket, Thailand for a 5-day holiday on the beach. Four minutes after his arrival to his beach hotel, the Indian Sea Tsunami hit

The blog, along with photos makes very chilling reading.. over 124,000 people (thats almost one seventh of the population of London) are confirmed dead..

You can donate to the Red Cross South Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Disaster Relief fund through Amazon

The 1394 Trade Association, the organization behind the FireWire connection standard (e1394), has given their agreement to the WiMedia Alliance to move forward with a wireless version of Firewire that uses ultra wideband to create high-speed connections between gadgets.

Although it may only support the lower 400 speeds of firewire the idea of wirelessly syncing my ipod when I’m at home sounds pretty cool to me!

Scientists in the UK have demonstrated the world’s largest grid computer system.

The grid which is based over 78 countries is made up of over 6,000 machines, with over 1,000 in the UK alone. The grid’s been set up as part of the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LCG) – the world’s largest and only permanent grid, carrying out research into particle physics.

The grid is expected to process at least 15 petabytes of data annually (15 million, billion bytes). Not content with the current setup, the aim is to push the grid bigger still.

By 2007, the scientists will have the grid up to 10,000 computers running 5,000 jobs, with the possibility of expanding further still. The grid solution was chosen because, compared to using supercomputers, it’s cheaper and easier to enlarge.

Analyst house IDC predicts that by 2007, the grid market will be worth $12bn, as this year see’s the start of grids going mainstream.

The LCG was demonstrated at the All Hands e-Science meeting in Nottingham.

posted from the 7.45 Reading to Paddington

Its interesting to see how blogs are becoming more accepted by larger companies.

Sun Microsystems has just hired the principal author of the open-source software Roller Weblogger, Sun is using this to build closer ties with developers and customers. Sun hopes this will gather support inside and outside Sun for the online journals (or blogs).

Most people seem to have blogs now, even Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s chief operating officer!

In an interview on Tuesday, Jonathan Schwartz said Sun is encouraging use of blogs to communicate directly and efficiently with people as different as bankers and Linux users. “What better ambassadors than our own employees? And what more efficient vehicle than a network connection?” he said. Obviously Sun also hopes to sell computing infrastructure that companies could use to build their own blog sites.

Blogs have become a corporate tool for companies that want to build relationships with developers and customers. IBM, Microsoft, Google and Dell all use blogs. Even Ascential’s dipping it’s little toe, although they aren’t public yet.

Now we need to get the corporates interested in wikis, which are collaboratively developed information repositories such as Wikipedia..

It seems that the airtunes encryption has already been cracked. This keeps non Apple applications from using the Airtunes hardware.

Jim a friend of mine was particularly annoyed since he was just beated to the post by Jon Lech Johansen who decrypted and published the key that Apple’s wireless hi-fi bridge, Airport Express, uses to protect music streams. Jonansen also released the source code to a small Windows command-line tool in essence opening the door for other applications to broadcast music to the airport express.

Unfortuantly Jim had already cracked the keys as was tidying up his code to release, but was beaten at the 11th hour… hes not in a great mood tonight!!!

Windows XP service Pack 2 appeared on the MSN developer site yesterday. The service pack features a number of security enhancements, including a stronger firewall than the one currently in Windows XP. It will also be on by default. Service Pack 2 will also have improved Wi-Fi and Bluetooth stacks, and a number of new features for Tablet PC and Media Center users.

Microsoft originally planned to deliver XP Tablet PC Edition 2004, the next major update to the the TabletPC OS separately from XP SP2, as it had done with Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) 2004 (code-named Harmony), the update it shipped for Media Center PCs late last year. But with the XP SP2 security push, Microsoft realized that it would better serve customers by tying these releases together. So the company asked PC makers to pull their Harmony upgrade offers and integrated both XP MCE 2004 and XP Tablet PC Edition 2004 into XP SP2. XP SP2 will apply to all XP users, but Media Center PC and Tablet PC owners will experience other significant enhancements that are unique to their systems. Basically if your on a TabletPC this update is a major OS change..

Microsoft will deliver the update through the Auto Update mechanism of Windows XP, or as a single 475meg download from the microsoft site..

Fingers crossed… see you on the other side of auto update!!!

Source: Smartphonethoughts.com

Research In Motion says that they

Virus attacks are not yet frequent on instant-messaging applications, but the latest threat is likely to send a shiver down the spine of all IM users. A businessman whose computer had been infected by a virus found that his entire buddy list had been sent a record of all his IM conversations, said Derek O’Carroll, managing director of IM software vendor IMLogic on Tuesday.

O’Carroll was speaking at a panel discussion on the war against spam at a security event aligned with the Microsoft TechEd conference in Amsterdam. He said the businessman, a vice president at a US-based company, discovered that IM conversations stored by the application had been sent to colleagues on his buddy list, which included partners at the company.

He was fired because of negative comments he’d made about his colleagues in what he thought were private IM conversations. His computer had been infected with the virus after clicking on a URL received in an IM application, according to O’Carroll.

O’Carroll pointed out that various IM applications can keep a record of conversations although they can be set up so that they do not do this. He advised that companies implement content checking with instant messaging to prevent employees from making defamatory comments and to stop critical information from leaving the company.

source: zdnet mobile
posted from outside the mariott hotel heathrow

Pocket PC Passion have an article on the 7230 Blackberry and how it really compares to other solutions such as Windows Mobile Product.

The blackberry is a great idea, email and appointments always there, java based so you can add additional applications like IM etc, but is it really that great? or is it a poor substitute for ‘real’ email.

Our company uses Blackberrys, but they havent filtered down the food chain to the likes of the Sales Engineers (like me). In the US the blackberry devices have started to be known as ‘Crackberrys’ due to their additive nature!!

Since I dont have a crackberry (or a blackberry for that matter!) I use a 2210 Ipaq with GPRS through to the leederbyshire’s PDA version of exchanges OWA client

Which works just great, and the only downside is thats its a connect to, as opposed to the blackberry’s push type architecture.. The new version of leederby also supports attachments which is dead handy as well..