Whitenoise

Fennec’s gesture based UI : After a successful launch of Firefox 3, Mozilla has been working on a mobile version of Firefox. Codenamed Fennec the first alpha release was  made last month .  Last week I came across a video explaining the UI of Fennec . The ideas are quite impressive!

As soon as you launch the browse you see a blank area with a huge + icon. Clicking on it opens tabs. Selecting it opens the content in full screen and NO buttons.  How go back,close this page ? All actions are via gestures .. Panning slightly shows the ‘Back’ and associated buttons. Panning even more gives an option to  ‘Zoom out’  and return back to the home area.

The address bar is similar to the ‘awesome bar’ of Firefox 3 and it also has some buttons that help in navigating to popular pages. Here is a demo of Fennec alpha version. A demo version of the browser is available for download (Linux /Windows) here .

Fedora 10 (Cambridge) ..brimming with features :Fedora 10 was released this week. Just like many others ,I gave up on Fedora long back and switched to Ubunutu. But Fedora 10 has got rave reviews ,I am tempted to give Fedora 10 a try.  Fedora 10 brims with new features, including a new graphical boot manager   that uses some nifty features from the linux kernel to provide a ‘flicker less’ boot process.  Another significant addition is enhancements to PackageKit , its  software management tool ,that install libraries and codec’s on demand ,transparent to the user. The idea looks very promising. Need to see how this progresses.

Windows Azure, updates from PDC2008 : This update is a bit late but nonetheless posting it here. Microsoft’s PDC 2008 concluded recently and there was lot of talk about  many new things coming from them. Important among them was the announcement on Windows Azure, Microsoft’s entry into cloud computing.

One of their presentations helped me understand how Azure would work: Lets say you have a nice idea and made it working for a couple of users. But you face lot of issues when you want to open up to the whole world. There is no infrastructure that makes the application scale for 10’s of thousands of users. How to implement and host a trusted authentication service , how to integrate with other services(for e.g. a map service or search service for your application) ?

Using a system like Azure will help you out in all these. You just have to host your application on Windows Azure and the back end is taken care ! Sounds pretty nice.   You can find more about Windows Azure here . Bluehoo is an application that is hosted on the Azure platform. and about a use case here.

Donald Knuth stops paying through checks :   Its the time for changes to happen …and now,  Donald Knuth has brought in a change!  Most computer engineers would be familiar of the ‘Knuth reward check‘. Now, Knuth has decided to stop giving checks to those who find errors in his publications. The decision is based on the security concerns with checks.

He has also explained that not many would be affected as only 6 of his checks have been cashed since 2006 and the rest have been cached!   As a replacement, money is deposited in his own ‘Bank of Sans Serriffe’ in the fictional nation of ‘San Serriffe’ which keeps account of everyone who found an error since 2006. One can see the top deposits are here : http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html !

IT enters health:  After revolutionizing most fields and causing devastating effects in few areas, IT is now entering seriously into ‘health care’. Electronic Health Records or EHR’s is  entering the US in a big way  and big players like Intel, Google and Microsoft are into this. Google’s solution looks more simplistic and well intergrated with its other web based tools..Intel’s solution is centered around a device, the PHS600.

4G consolidates to just 2 Standards: The next generation of  wireless communication standards was having 3 major contenders,   UMB from Qualcomm, WiMax from Sprint,Samsung, Intel  and LTE ,backed mostly by the operators like AT&T ,T-Mobile,Vodafone and China Mobile. Over the past weeks, it became clear was UMB was losing out ,with Intel, WiQuest and finally Qualcomm halting development on it. So we are now left with just WiMax and LTE in the race. My bet would be on LTE that is coming from 3GPP rather than the WiMAX standard from IEEE.

Many of us have made a demo some time or other in our career. I have made reasonable number of demos in my career, and have got that embarrassing feeling when the demo fails right is front of the most important audience.

Today I stepped across what is fondly known as the ‘Mother of all demos‘  .Douglas Engelbert made 90 minute live public demonstration of the NLS on which he and 17 others were  working since 1962.
Many revolutionary features on HCI were demonstrated that day. The ‘computer mouse’ made its first public appearance, apart from video conferencing,teleconferencing ,email and hypertext.

This demo ,made in circa 1968 has all the ingredients of a keynote speech by Steve Jobs. The introductory note on how the demo is screened was inspirational.Have a look.