iPhone found ready for enterprise, better than BlackBerry

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/04/13/iphone_found_ready_for_enterprise_better_than_blackberry.html

In a report issued last week, Ted Schadler of Forrester Research has presented an about-face for the research group’s attitude towards iPhones that recommends businesses consider the devices for their network and that many users are genuinely more interested in accessing work content on an iPhone than on corporate mainstays using Microsoft or Research in Motion software. Using the web is a “chore” on a BlackBerry but intuitive on an iPhone, Schadler writes, and many workers are ultimately happier when they can pick their phones instead of having that choice dictated by IT.

MIT to make all faculty publications open access

ars technica

If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access.

Google, Mozilla Back 3-D Acceleration Web Standard

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/webdev/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=216300312

In an effort to address one of the last major deficiencies of the Web browser as a platform for application delivery, a consortium of tech companies that includes Adobe, AMD, Apple, Google, IBM, and Intel on Tuesday announced an effort to develop an open, royalty-free standard for presenting accelerated 3-D graphics online.

Finally, a SPAM solution cometh…

Nielsen: Social networking tops email

The dramatic rise of social networking means that in a few short years social networks and blogs have become the fourth-most-popular online activity, passing personal email, according to a new study from Nielsen. What’s more, the amount of time that surfers are spending on these sites is still growing at a rapid pace. Last year, the category grew three times faster than the rate of growth for the internet overall. Now 67 percent of the global online population visits what Nielsen calls the member communities category, which includes social networks and blogs. It is growing twice as fast as the other major categories, passing email and now only ranking behind search, portals and PC software. Facebook, says Nielsen, is now the world’s most popular social network and is visited by 30 percent of people online each month across the nine markets that Nielsen tracks.

Safari 4 Tips, Tricks and Special Effects

http://www.macrumors.com/2009/02/25/safari-4-tips-tricks-and-special-effects/

This is a good article about Safari 4’s amazing peformance and then shows off some of the cool HTML5/CSS3 animation stuff.  Very, very cool!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/21/open_source_projects_08/

C overwhelmingly proved the most popular programming language for thousands of new open-source projects in 2008, according to license tracker Black Duck Software.

The company, which monitors 180,000 projects on nearly 4,000 sites, said almost half – 47 per cent – of new projects last year used C. Black Duck said 17,000 new open-source projects were created in total. Next in popularity after C came Java, with 28 per cent.

In scripting, JavaScript came top with 20 per cent, followed by Perl on 18 per cent.

PHP attracted just 11 per cent and Ruby six per cent. The numbers are a surprise as open-source PHP has proved popular as a web-site development language, while Ruby’s been a hot topic for many.

Gartner Analyst: Open source will quietly take over

From ZDNet UK: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39379900,00.htm

Here are some quotes from the article:

“By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms,” predicts a Gartner report, The State of Open Source 2008, which sees a “stealth” impact for the technology in embedded form: “Users who reject open source for technical, legal or business reasons might find themselves unintentionally using open source despite their opposition.”

“Gartner has woefully underestimated the penetration of open source,” said Mark Taylor, president of promotion group the Open Source Consortium. “Everyone uses [open source] on a daily basis in services like Google.”

“Open source has been promoted since 1998. If it fades from view now, because it is embedded in the mainstream, that is exactly what we wanted.”

“Licensing is only a slice of the total cost, but historically, companies have only bought as many licences as they can afford. If you remove the licence cost, you may only remove three percent of the of total cost of the existing project, but you also remove the brakes — you massively expand the numbers that project can be rolled out to at no extra cost.”

Eclipse 101 – Basics, Tips & Tricks Screencast

http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/igDq

I am pleased to share with the community almost two hours of developer training that was taped before a live audience – the Oncourse developers.  :)  The team has started a biweekly training regimen and oddly enough I was elected to deliver the first session.  After a few code review sessions, it became clear that not everyone was familiar with some of the basic capabilities of Eclipse.

This screencast attempts to fill in some of those knowledge gaps.  I think you will find that this screencast builds on some of the work that Zach Thomas has done in this space.  Zach did an excellent job of covering the setup and configuration of the environment.  While this is no opus magnum, I hope it finds you well and I would appreciate your honest feedback.  Best, L

TSS: Easily manage license headers of your source files with Maven

From TSS: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=48526Licensing source code can be rough, especially if you’re changing licenses, or adding license references to code that’s already been written or generated.Modifying licenses is quite time expensive and a developer doesn’t necessarily want to spend his or her time managing headers on source files.Searching on the Internet, I found only these tools relative to license headers:

• Release Audit Tool
• The Maven 2 plugin for RAT
• Checkstyle
• Another one (which I do not remember the name) that is just a command-line tool[Editor's note: I tried to find acommand-line tool for this, to no avail. Anyone who would like to offer pointers is welcomed to do so.]

These tools lack features. Since I use Maven as a project managementtool, I wanted to have a Maven 2 plugin capable of checking if the license headers are present, in the verify phase, and of course I wanted the ability to add or update these headers. Therefore I wrote a Maven 2 license plugin available at http://code.google.com/p/maven-license-plugin/ that anyone can use in a POM like this…

First experiences with ScreenFlow – very positive!

I have to admit, I am smitten with good screen-casts and when I saw the release of a new screen-casting application, ScreenFlow, I had to try it.  In the past, I have used SnapzProX and that tool has served me well.  However, there were a couple of serious limitations that have always left me wanting more:

1.  WYSIWYG – You must select your capture options, start the recording, and then do not make any mistakes!  Because you will export to a resolution lower than that of your desktop (e.g. 1440×900), you will likely choose options that limit the capture area to something more reasonable (e.g. 640×480).  Because you have to make these decisions before recording your chances of getting it wrong increase substantially.  This is a very unkind WYSIWYG – no undo – you must start your recording over if you make any mistakes.  
2. Export/Transcoding – You can only make your export selections once and hope you got them right!  You want to get the smallest file size with the highest quality encoding.  Almost certainly you will not get it right the first time.  So now what?  Record again and export again!  Not acceptable.  

I was intrigued when I read TUAW’s blog posting about ScreenFlow.  The approach ScreenFlow takes fundamentally changes the workflow I have come to know.  ScreenFlow captures the entire screen – no more trying to remember if I am in-frame or out-of-frame — just capture the desktop in its entirety and worry about zooming and panning later!  According to their web site: “ScreenFlow can handle everything from capturing DVD video & audio to fast moving Keynote presentations”.  This fundamentally changes the screen capture game and the way I think about it.

 

Okay, so the capture is great (with low CPU overhead), but the real magic happens when you start adding what are known as “actions” to your project.  Actions allow you to manipulate video and audio in post.  Callout actions allow you to draw attention to the mouse or foreground windows.  I cannot do the editing process justice; go watch the company’s screencasts to be wowed.  :)  IMHO, this application is really top notch and represents what differentiates great Mac software from good: it is fun, easy to use, and it gives me great results.  

 

So how does ScreenFlow directly address my issues with SnapzProX?

1. WYSIWYG – friendly – because it captures the entire screen during recording, I can worry about panning and zooming in post.  If I do not like the results, undo, and try again; very forgiving.
2. Export – Since the entire capture and post processing is saved as a project, I can run multiple exports/transcodes until I get it right.  Again, very forgiving.

While I do not claim to be a pro, I submit my first screencast made with ScreenFlow for your review.  I spent about an hour on this total with three takes.  The learning curve for post processing was very low.  ScreenFlow includes screencasts that document the workflow and are very helpful.

 

XMeeting Configuration Screencast