TechLife

Google caught using undocumented iPhone API features

2008-11-26T16:52:01Z

Google and Apple seem to have taken on left- and right-hand roles, with neither quite sure what the other is up to. After Google’s long-hyped iPhone Voice Search application’s rocky launch, they have again hit a pothole:

Does Google Mobile use private APIs?

Surprisingly enough, Google appears to use both dynamic linking and calling unpublished APIs … it looks like Google decided that it was better to get the job done and provide a richer user experience to the end user than to live according to Apple’s exact dictates.

Google admits flouting Apple App Store rules

Google has acknowledged breaking the official rules of Apple’s iPhone software-development kit when it created the latest version of the Google Mobile application for the iPhone, but denied a more serious charge.

Kernel exploit in Vista

2008-11-23T15:40:58Z

Reports like the following piss me off:

A flaw has been found in Windows Vista that could allow rootkits to be hidden or denial-of-service attacks to be executed on computers using the operating system.

Asked about the severity of the flaw, Unterleitner pointed out that administrative rights were needed to execute a program calling the function that would cause the buffer overflow.

Source: Kernel vulnerability found in Vista.

So an “evil person” would need a root account, to run an exploit that could potentially give him access to a root account… Isn’t this kinda like saying an exploit has been discovered that allows hackers to permanently delete your documents and settings folder… if logged in as an administrator, a hacker could shift-delete your personal folders!

The report itself actually isn’t the annoying part, the little flame-war in the comments between Linux and MS zealots is typical of the single-cell mentality shared by the two factions, and makes me wish someone would provide some venture capital for this to be developed.

An application has expectedly quit

2008-11-23T13:45:46Z

A couple of weeks old, but still news to me: Windows 3.x retired.

Who remembers the hotdog stand theme?

The future of political campaigns

2008-10-16T10:45:08Z

Resource Nation has an interesting article on how Obama Raised 87% of his Funds through Social Networking.

In January, Obama set a record for donations in one month by raising a total of $32 million dollars, $28 million of which was raised online. From these $28 million in online contributions, 90% were under $100, with over 250,000 contributors.

This really shows the power of micro-donations, in a way similar to crowd-sourcing.

G1 on its way

2008-10-13T12:53:02Z

It appears that Vodacom, HTC and Google are hashing out a deal that will see the G1 hitting local shores sometime next year. I would love to get my paws on one of these just to play around with, though I don’t see myself purchasing one unless it’s cheap enough that it doesn’t need to be subsidised on top of a the existing cost of a contract *cough*iPhone*cough*.

Read the rest of the rather sketchy details at MyBroadband.

Open Office v3.0 released today

2008-10-13T11:49:15Z

In long-awaited anticipation the free competitor to Microsoft’s Office Suite, OpenOffice.org v3.0.0 Final will be officially released sometime today. OOo v3.0.0 was already available for download on some of the mirrors since late last night. I assume given the time-zone differences the official release details will be shortly forthcoming. Their site is currently down so it’s probably a safe bet that they’re currently updating as I write this article seeing as when I checked 2 hours ago it was working fine and contained no details regarding the official release.

I’ve long maintained that OOo, while not exactly a poor comparison to the very mature and comprehensive suite that is MS Office, it is not the brilliant masterpiece that supercedes MS Office that so many people claim it to be. However for a free office suite it is definitely not lacking in features or functionality, so it should be interesting to see what v3 Final brings to the table and see how much closer it comes to truly rivaling MS Office.

Added: Local Mirror #1 (http) Local Mirror #2 (ftp)

Top 3 Final Countdown covers on the internet

2008-10-10T12:15:58Z

I present to you, dear reader, the three greatest covers of “The Final Countdown” to ever appear on the internet.

Coming in at number 3, mostly because of the sheer audacity:

Number 2, I hope you guys are touring near me!

The pinnacle of human achievement (seriously), #1:

Telkom to sell stake in Vodacom

2008-10-10T11:31:08Z

While doing my 5 seconds of research for my previous entry I came across this article. While the article isn’t exactly news considering that the deal has been making headlines for quite a while now, it contains parts that I found decidedly amusing.

At the moment Telkom shareholders own the fixed-line business and 50% of Vodacom. After the deal they will still own the fixed-line business, will hold 35% of Vodacom, and will pocket a substantial amount of cash. The analyst expected Vodafone to pay about R21,75bn once 15% of the debt was deducted.

“We don’t know yet how much cash will be paid out. Telkom is not going to keep that R22bn so it will pay it as a special dividend to shareholders.”

Vodafone did not want to buy Vodacom in its entirety, partly as it would have had to relinquish some of the shares for a black empowerment deal that is now under way.

Doesn’t this just speak volumes? Don’t forget the government’s 39% stake in Telkom. I guess a few politicians will be getting new cars.

Effort to fine Telkom revived

2008-10-10T10:56:22Z

Efforts by the Competition Commission to fine Telkom R3,7bn for anti competitive behaviour have been revived, with the commission winning the right to appeal against a court ruling that temporarily halted its campaign.

Telkom owns one of the largest ISPs in South Africa, and all evidence appears to indicate that they’ve been giving their own ISP preferential treatment, in terms of rates, packages, etc.. This has led to the opinion that they abusing the market with their anti-competitive behaviour, and I tend to agree. They will undoubtedly fight this tooth and nail so it will likely be a long time before we see any kind of resolution. My question is, what happens to that money should the Competition Commission be successful?

Full details at Business Day.

Wikipedia moves to Ubuntu

2008-10-10T10:39:13Z

“The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the user-driven Wikipedia project, is in the process of migrating its servers to the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Wikimedia’s move to Ubuntu is part of an effort to simplify administration of the organization’s 400 servers, which previously ran a mix of various versions of Red Hat and Fedora.”

“Wikimedia’s entire collection of web sites—which includes Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews, and several others—serves up roughly 10 billion page views per month. At its peak, traffic can sometimes reach 50,000 HTTP requests per second. The organization’s hardware budget to date is roughly $1.5 million, and it spends $35,000 per month on bandwidth and physical hosting. All of its technical infrastructure is managed by a small IT staff consisting of only four paid employees and three volunteers.”

Via ars technica.

A few extra details at Linux Watch.

Site maintenance

2008-10-09T09:45:12Z

A couple areas of the site are undergoing maintenance; notably, the comment system is being enhanced with some AJAX functionality and also a subscribe to comment thread option is being added. As such, the commenting system will probably not function very well today, so watch out!

Back to normal operation tomorrow hopefully!

Stop embarrassing "Drink 'n email"s

2008-10-08T10:33:39Z

Google Labs has released a plug-in for Gmail that tries to prevent you from sending and then later regretting “late-night” emails (cough cough).

You can enable this by clicking “Settings” in Gmail and then selecting the “Labs” tab.

Scroll down for a while and you will find the module.

Details.

Telkom's latest digital service

2008-10-07T11:22:48Z

In a rather uncharacteristic move of innovation, Telkom has launched GETMO, a platform offering digital content downloads such as movies and music. Targeted at the local South African market in direct competition with international services, I find it incredibly ironic — in true Telkom style — that it’s hosted internationally largely defeating the point of actually launching a “local” service.

A quick perusal of the FAQ is filled with hilarious tidbits such as:

I own an iPod, but cannot transfer music from GETMO to this device. What is the cause of this problem?
Since the iPod does not support WMA, it cannot be used with GETMO. Find a list of supported devices that have been tested for their compatibility with GETMO in section “Supported media devices”.

and…

Can I use my MAC?
With Mac OS xxx cannot be used because here neither the full functional circumference of Windows Media players nor that of the Internet Explorer are available. However, it will be possible on Apple machines with Intel’s processors to install Windows XP. Likewise VirtualPC Windows and therefore Macintosh can be used with the help of additional programs.

Clearly Telkom believes that eliminating a large chunk of your potential consumer base is a good way to do business — incidentally Cyberdyne believes the same thing; open the site an any non MSIE browser and prepare yourself for a slap in the face. I’m not a market analyst, but it doesn’t really take an expert to know that Apple has managed to secure themselves a very large chunk of the market with their range of iPods in the portable media sector. Also, designing a site that only supports MSIE doesn’t seem like the best of ideas given the soaring popularity of competing browsers such as Firefox and OS’ that don’t support MSIE.

In the same motion that Telkom give you a real world-class service they also turn around and kick you in the balls (what’s new?). The FAQ indicates that the content will be riddled with DRM. There’s just too much there for me to list specifics so it’s better to check the complete FAQ.

Via MyBroadband

Collecting user data with Google forms

2008-10-07T09:39:10Z

Google Forms is a recent addition to the Google Docs suite, allowing you to quickly and easily collect and report on user data.

In similar vein to Wufoo and SurveyMonkey you can create hosted forms and surveys and then either link to them, or embed them as I have in this post. This allows you to manage forms and results in a central location, and to also be able to use forms on straight HTML web hosts (are there any of these left?).

More information on creating forms:

Once you have created and saved your form, click the “More Actions” menu button to get the iframe embed code.

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G1 / Android test drive

2008-10-07T09:09:57Z

T-Mobile put up an emulator for the upcoming G1 where you can attempt to give Android a test run. I say attempt since my experience with this rather novel idea turned out to be rather short-lived. The actual emulator is largely dysfunctional and lacking many functions. Also on the site is a 3D view of the phone; it looks rather ugly to me. Its direct competitor, the iPhone, is certainly a lot prettier, but aside from that and the fact that it has an Apple logo on it the iPhone doesn’t have too much else going for it.