about beta software...

Thanks to userfriendly.org

Firefox shortcuts

I just learned of a Firefox (and other Mozilla based browsers, like Flock (if it will ever move on)) keyboard short cut I did not yet know in Mozilla Firefox And Flock Shortcut Keys:

"Ctrl (1-9): Switch to tab corresponding to number."

Dell to join alliance that isn't

Dell signs on with Microsoft, Novell:

Dell Inc. has agreed to work with Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. under an alliance the rival software makers formed last year to make it easier for the Windows operating system and the increasingly popular Linux system to work together, the companies said Sunday.

As if there was something like a real MS//Novell alliance worth joining.

In other words: Customers are forcing Dell towards Linux, and this is the corporate way to do it.

Supermarket 2.0

Great commentary on the Web 2.0 hype...



I especially like the tags everywhere...
(via japhy.at)

Flock not moving at all

Flock, the social webbrowser, seems to be at a complete standstill for months now.

Flock 0.7.13 Release Notes

The 0.7.13 Flock Maintenance Patch fixes a Photobucket/MacAfee interaction issue that intermittantly causes a "lost internet connection" error.

technorati tags:flock

Google calc

I noticed the other day that quite lot of people (IT people, mind you) don't know that you can use google as a calculator and converter:

try this for math: 2*4**5-7

or if you want to convert units e.g. btu in kWh try this term 2000 btu in kWh.

Cool, eh ?

Small attachment icons in Thunderbird 2

Just found this on myIT6.Knowledge:

"Small attachment icons in Thunderbird 2
1. Tools > Options > Advanced -> General and click on “Config Editor”
2. Search for the preference “mailnews.attachments.display.largeView“
3. Change value to false"

Great. Saves space on the message pane.

The i is getting lame

So Google re-launched their personalized home as iGoogle... the internal code name it always had.
I sort of liked the lower case "i" years ago around 2000ish in iPlanet, when everything else was e-Something...
(iPlanet was the name of the Netscape/Sun/AOL alliance, when Sun Microsystems bought the server software part of Netscape from AOL...)

But now with iPods, iMacs, iPhones, iGoogles, iXxxxx its really getting lame.

iMe is getting bored.

The buzz about (cell) roaming

I really don't get the excitement about prices for roaming with you cell phone (within the EU).

The European commission argues that placing and receiving a mobile call in a “foreign” country within the EU has to be the same price as within your home country - and I don't see why...
I'm making the following points for voice roaming only (I'm not talking data/gprs/umts roaming here).

There are several sides to this discussion, and I tend to take the operators (or most of them) side. Here are my points against regulated/mandated roaming tariffs.

1. European telecoms market, especially the wireless / mobile / cell part is truly deregulated. Service and innovation have gone up during the last 10 years like nowhere else, prices have dropped to nearly zero.
2. There is a real market with real competition.
3. Roaming costs don't seem to matter: Drei /Three / Tre / 3 (Hutchison 3G) is the only operator in Austria to offer roaming from all international Hutchison 3G networks at the same prices as at home. Still (according to RTR - the Austrian telecoms regulation authority) in Q4/2006 they had only 4.2% market share. To me this means that roaming costs have no impact on the choice of operators and are therefore quite irrelevant.
   
   If roaming costs were such important an issue as to justify a regulation of the market, Drei would have a significantly higher market share (say 20% or so). Customers should migrate in cosmic proportions from A1 and T-mobile to Drei if roaming costs were really an issue.
   
   They don't - look at the figures.
   
   
4. The commission tends to argue (in the public) with the telephony cost during vacations; so the image there is Joe Average looking for his friends on a beach on a Greek island and calling them – with his Austrian phone on their Austrian phones. Or my favorite example: the dutch guys during their skiing vacation in Austria, chatting on the ski-lift over the phone, just because they are bored.
   
   I don't see the point for intervening in, and interfering with, a perfectly functioning market, just for that.
   
   Which also leads me to the next point. the business travellers:
5. Just the mere possibility to be able to call someone on their phone no matter where he/she is; or from the callee's perspective: the possibility to be called wherever I am, without having to communicate me coordinates, without having to tell people at which hotel/venue I'm staying for the next 3 days, just so they can call me there – this very possibility is an increase in productivity and availability that outweighs any (any!) roaming-costs.
   (I'm not saying that this constant availability is a blessing, but that's not the point here, anyway.)
6. Just consider the value of being able to call someone from my phone, even when I'm at a hotel in Rome or Athens or London (or ...) and not having to look for a pay-phone or paying the hotel quite a huge premium for the phone.
   I remember that about 10-15 years ago when you wanted to place a call from a French public pay-phone, you had to purchase a pay-phone card/voucher with a certain amount of money. First of all, you had to know that; then you had to find a place to buy that card (and therefore had to make yourself understood); and in addition this card meant that the money was tied-up. You could not use the credit on the card for anything else. This is not about huge amounts of money, but if you had to place just one call (e.g. home) and had to purchase a card for this single purpose, the call was more expansive than any roaming call today is.
   
   
7. I'd like cheaper roaming as much as the next guy, but... Telcos and mobile operators have to make money. That's the whole point of a deregulated market: To bring in, or enable, private companies to offer a range of different services (quite frequently at different service levels as well) and let the customers and the population decide where to put their money. If the operators don't make money, they'll go out of business and there goes the competition and the market.
   
   Granted, in Austria many of the operators make a huge part of their living (=EBITDA) from visiting roamers, i.e. visitors to Austria, who use their cell here, and therefore the Austrian operators charge money to the home-operators of those visitors.
   According to 2006 annual report for Telekom Austria (whose wireless daughter is mobilkom austria, A1) roaming revenues for the whole group (i.e. inkl Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria) were 258 MEUR out of 2902 MEUR total revnue. Meaning 9% come from roaming. Those 9% would have to come from somewhere else, and this somewhere else can only mean a) higher national tariffs or b) less subsidizing on the handsets.
   I wouldn't like either.
8. In many cases (not in all, I agree) roaming needs additional infrastructure and therefore additional investments: Vodafone et al in Greece wouldn't plan for the coverage they have on the islands just for the local population; the population and local revenue in Austrian and Swiss valleys and the neighboring mountains would never justify the infrastructure built there... it's the visiting roamers, and – of course – their revenue.
   

So my point is: there is a market, let it take care for that.
Just because the market - as of today – did not bring down roaming prices, does not mean, that the market does not work. It just means that the market participants, i.e. the consumers, don't really care for the roaming cost. (Except maybe for that invoice they get in August when the come home from Spain...)

For the sake for full disclosure: I used to work for mobilkom austria. but no longer do; and I don't own any stocks or interest in any telco.

StarOffice 8 Update 6

is here.
Get it at the SunSolve server.

Caterina Fake - The History of Flickr

Great interview with Caterina Fake, one of the founders of flickr on IT conversations.

Thunderbird2: it's here

Finally, Thunderbird 2 has really been released.
Just downloaded and installed it (top replace my 2.0 rc2).

Got and get it - Reclaim your inbox.

Software AG Announces Acquisition webMethods

Somehow I seem to have missed this a 2 weeks ago...
SOA - Integration Industry Pulse - ebizQ: "Software AG Announces Acquisition webMethods"

read more about it - with an interesting analyis - at Beth Gold-Bernstein's blog.

Thunderbird 2 Final sighted on Mozilla FTP | Techbloggers

Thunderbird 2 Final sighted on Mozilla FTP | Techbloggers

If you are an early adopter and don’t want to wait a few more days to download and install the email client Thunderbird you could head out to the Mozilla ftp and download it for your operating system and language right away. The Mozilla team is usually upping the latest version of either Thunderbird or Firefox on their ftp mirrors to ensure that they can serve the server load when they publish the links on the official program pages. This is indeed a good way to download Thunderbird 2 fast because the servers will not be that populated at this time.

Paul Graham on Microsoft

Read the following great essay by Paul Graham called Microsoft is Dead:

"Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite believe anyone would be frightened of them."

Of course Microsoft is not dead, but there are clear signs, that they are becoming less relevant. For instance, with Dell (of all) announcing Linux preloads...

Sun now diggs, etc

I just noticed that on the Sun Microsystems homepage they include buttons/links to technorati, delicious , digg, and slashdot.

Cool move; not often seen with corporate websites.

Small (UI) change, big impact

Xing, my favorite professional network site, introduced a nice little change in their userinterface recently.

When working with lists (of contacts, etc) the pagination looked like this (my rendering):


Notice the ellipsis between 5 and 20 and that the continue link/button is the rightmost. This meant that when you went from page to page, the page numbers and their width would not stay the same and the exact location of the continue link would change its position. Which was exactly the link you are using to navigate to the next page...
Which essentially meant that you had to look closely at this pagination links every time you wanted to go the next page, instead of just (blindly) clicking forward.

They changed it to that:

So now (finally) the continue link will always stay on the same spot and you can (blindly) stroll through the whole list.

Small change, big impact (to me).

Thanks a lot.

Thunderbird 2: My own extension

Today I discovered that my own extension to Thunderbird did not really run under TB2. I did a little debugging this evening and found the problem:

document.popupNode.getTextAttribute('emailAddress')
no longer works; did fine, though, in Mozilla and TB1.x

I had to replace it with
document.popupNode.getAttribute('emailAddress')
and it now runs perfectly again.

I know this is not really of great interest to most of you, but since I found no reference at all to this behavior through Google, I thought, I'd document it here.

Thunderbird 2: Display Images

Yet another cool feature in TB2:
When an incoming mail contains images on the web (i.e. images not embedded into the message but rather on any arbitrary web site) Thunderbird in previous version as well as in v2.0 blocks the images per default.
This is to protect the end user from inadvertently and unknowingly sending information to malign websites.
Only if you deliberately click on "Load Images" those images will be loaded.

Now TB2 comes with an additional feature which looks like this:

The upper part has always been there, whats new is the
"Click here to always load remote iamges from some-mail-address".
If you click it, you will never see this message again for this very sender... instead images will always be loaded for mails from this sender, because you trust him, and declare your trust within Thunderbird.

This info is actually saved in the address book entry of the user.
You'll notice a new field there:
"Allow remote images in HTML mail."
This will be set by clicking on the above link. Obviously you can also do so manually...

I wonder if I want this option on a domain level... I guess not.

Thunderbird 2: Intelligent reply

Usually (in TB until 1.5+) when you replied to a message that you sent yourself, the TO: field in the reply would contain your account, and the original recipient would be in the CC.
In TB 2 when you reply to a message you sent yourself, the TO: will be filled with the original recipients.

E.g. you find a folder in you SENT folder (most usually) with
TO: foouser@someorg.tld
FROM: myself@someorg.tld

In TB until 1.5+ hitting reply would yield:
TO: myself@someorg.tld
CC: foouser@someorg.tld

In TB2 you get:
TO: foouser@someorg.tld

This is most definitely more likely what you intended.

Great work...