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8/2/2007 Moving away from Live Spaces..Hi All, After too much frustration with MSN Live Spaces I've decided to move all the contents to WP. My new URL is www.agilehands.com/blog You are more than welcomed to visit me at the new home. :) Fabio 7/28/2007 The New 100 most useful sites - by the Guardian.co.uk
Applications Why have an application to run in your browser? Because for tasks shared between people at different locations, it makes sense to access password-protected sets of work. 37signals offers Backpack (note the domain is backpackit) for simple tasks and the bigger Basecamp for grown-up projects. Tadalist is simpler, being just to-dos (but isn't that what it's about?), while Google's Documents & Spreadsheets requires a Google account (they're free) and doesn't try to compete with Microsoft Office. Wikicalc is a free online spreadsheet, and developing smartly. Blogs: reading There are millions of blogs out there; you need to pick the best. Step forward RSS (aka web feeds) and blog search engines to simplify things. Technorati is occasionally flaky, but generally a reliable indicator of what's being blogged about. Icerocket runs it close. And you'll need an online aggregator to keep abreast of the feeds you're most interested in: Newsgator and Google Reader are good choices. Bloglines is an excellent alternative feed reader. Blogs: writing To do it rather than read it, you need a good set of tools. The open-source and free software project Wordpress has risen to prominence, elbowing aside many rivals with its blog creation, management and (importantly) spam-beating tools. Wordpress.org is the free software; wordpress.com offers paid-for, managed versions of the free package. Blogger is the best of the rest; Vox is neat, easy and free, and plugs into lots of social applications. Statcounter counts, well, statistics for your site; the free Google Analytics (if you can get an account) is good too. Google's Gmail has become the web-based email system of choice for those who can get access. Its main drawback is that it's still an invitation-only system in the UK. However, Yahoo's free email service is a decent competitor, and Microsoft has Live Mail. Unlike Microsoft's old Hotmail service, none will delete all your old emails if you fail to log on every 30 days. Among the dozens of free alternatives, Bluebottle is a decent option for its focus on spam filtering. The free version offers 250MB of storage and supports the POP3 and SMTP standards, so you can use a proper email program as well as web access. There's also TempInbox, which provides free, temporary, throwaway email accounts with no registration. Gaming There are far too many videogame news sites on the internet today; you need an aggregator like Gametab to filter through to the best. Pocketgamer specialises in handheld games, while Gamasutra is absolutely unmissable. Gamesfaqs has FAQs and walkthroughs (plus cheats, reviews and previews) for loads of games. And the ESRB lets you search by age rating. Maps Maps matter, but once you're past Google's maps and satellite detail, everyone's thrown back on the Ordnance Survey's data, which means there's little to choose between them. Ordnance Survey has improved its site, and can at least now tell you which map to buy for an area; its placename search is nifty. Meanwhile, the New Popular Edition site shows how the country looked in the 1940s. Delightful. News: mainstream The BBC marches on, adding more media forms while also letting users add their comments. The New York Times site is vast (though it has shut off some of its content behind a "paywall"). Both sites' (short) RSS feeds can be read on a mobile at bbcriver.com and nytimesriver.com. Google News extends its reach, though the top headline is still whichever site last updated rather than the one which is most accurate. Nowpublic is a US rival to OhMyNews and claims 52,000 (and counting) "mojos" - amateur journalists with mobile phones whose location can be figured out from GPS or phone triangulation. News: recommendation One thing that Web 2.0 is really good at is letting lots of people vote on things. It can be (and is) abused, but generally the system works. That's seen the rise of sites which let people vote stories up, or which news stories (and how) bloggers are talking about (at memoerandum).The biggest is Digg, which overtook Slashdot earlier this year. Reddit was recently bought by Wired magazine. Findory is slightly different, learning what you like the more you use it. Offbeat Snopes checks out unbelievable tales, scams and urban legends and debunks (or confirms) them. Slightly less useful is the 100-strong webring of Unusual Museums of the Internet. These include the Virtual Toilet Paper Museum, the Old Calculators Web Museum and Signalfan's museum of traffic control signals. You can find links to lots of other offbeat sites via the Weird Site's Other Weird Links page. The Onion is the web's leading satire magazine, though with an American bias. Otherwise, for five minutes of fun, try browsing B3ta. This UK site sends out a weekly newsletter of cool links and runs a message board where people post amusingly manipulated pictures. But be warned: it's often offensive - that's part of the point - and most definitely rated NSFW (Not Safe For Work). Politics The MySociety team remains unbeatable for turning Hansard inside out with Theyworkforyou and Publicwhip, but bloggers have begun to expose the unwritten workings of politicians to greater public scrutiny too. Guido Fawkes' blog has the inside gossip from Westminster, while NO2ID agitates on arguably the most important political and technological issue around, while NHS 23 is a wiki outlining the problems with the political, technological and medical drama of the NHS computer- isation programme. Public action Now, it's time to bug someone in power. The idea that the web can make a difference is growing; politicians are on the web and there's an online petition site at No.10. Pledgebank and HearfromyourMP are both part of the excellent MySociety (mysociety.org) family of sites enabling citizens to connect to decision-makers - and, one would hope, vice versa. Netaction includes The Virtual Activist, a manual for anyone looking to build and promote a cause online. Those interested in helping out in their area might try Timebank, which finds organisations to which to donate spare time. Radio Radio now travels over wires, at least to our homes. The BBC dominates here, but there are thousands of stations to choose from. AOL's Shoutcast is interesting: find whatever's on right now (you can tune in via iTunes or any internet radio-enabled player.) Radio-locator and Live-radio list broadcasters worldwide, so you can find something new to listen to. Reciva does the same, but if you buy its internet radio you can add your own favourites online and they show on the gadget; or just listen online. Recommendation: music Another new category: being able to find stuff that's similar to music you like is increasingly important, both to listeners and to record companies trying to profit from niches. Last.fm requires an application that runs on your machine, and shows what other people with the same music like. Pandora says you need a US postcode; so give it one, then enjoy its expert-chosen stations. Liveplasma can search relationships in films as well as music. Tuneglue is a relatively new venture between last.fm and EMI, using data from Amazon and last.fm. Goombah requires a small download and only works on music in an iTunes library, but has been at it for some time. Reference Wikipedia now dominates the reference side of the web, partly because its pages are ranked so highly in Google. User-written, it's not always reliable, but is usually a good place to start. It competes with the Encyclopedia Britannica, which isn't free. However, another traditional alternative is the HighBeam Encyclopedia, which searches more than 57,000 articles from the Columbia Encyclopedia. Otherwise Jim Martindale's Reference Desk, started in 1994, provides an astonishing collection of links to reference sources. For words, try Onelook, which indexes more than 7.5m words in 931 dictionaries. It also has a reverse lookup to find words from their meanings. Finally, Teldir (on the infobel site) has links to the world's online phone books. Science Alphagalileo gives a view of public-facing science in Europe and is a counterpart to eurekalert, the American Association for the Advancement of Science's press announcements forum. Space.com remains fascinating for all things spacey. Nasa contains a wealth of information. The growing importance of climate change makes the RealClimate blog written by climate change scientists important. Search Google continues to tighten its grip on our hunt for information (it now gets half of all searches) but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best. Search can now encompass your hard drive, blogs (a separate category - see above), images, peer-to-peer and even what used to be out there. Blinkx remains unique with its focus on video, while Ask (now without Jeeves) has made great strides recently, though it only gets a tiny portion of searches. Social software The browser has grown up: now it's the path to meeting people of similar interests and creating your own personal space online in a shared area. Social networks have become a cliche, but that hasn't stopped MySpace becoming the biggest site online. Bebo is popular, Habbo is more tuned to the kids, while Friendster and LinkedIn will appeal to the older user. Video The crowds are all over at YouTube, the poster child of online video (a category too niche to merit mention two years ago; YouTube was founded in February 2005). But it's not the only place to find video. Revver offers a revenue-sharing system (people pay to watch your video, you get some cash). You can also start your own TV station at brightcove and currenttv. And Videojug has demonstrations of how to do lots of possibly useful tasks. Virtual worlds The key distinction from social sites like MySpace is that virtual worlds give you an avatar - your representation of yourself in the online world. The advent of broadband allied to faster machines has made them usable. When the BBC held a concert in Second Life, it seemed like an anomaly; then IBM's chief executive got an avatar, and suddenly everyone's there. Habbo Hotel is booming with teens. World of Warcraft has millions of users; Everquest, its own culture. Or you can play the Sims online. Whether an influx of new users will make these worlds more antisocial remains open. eqplayers.station.sony.com/index.vm Zeitgeist It's what everyone's talking about. Some of these sites appear above because they're the places to go to find out whatthe webworld is thinking. Watch them whizz by, but don't forget to breathe. YouTube is the moving picture of the web; Flickr the static one. Google Trends shows what the world's looking for; Digg, what it's found. And Technorati shows what it's writing about. youtube.com flickr.com google.com/trends digg.com technorati.com Readers' suggestions VideoJug (videojug.com). Videos on how to do everyday stuff such as tying a tie etc. (HiddenAway) Slideshare (slideshare.net) . For sharing presentations; Best Tech Videos (bestechvideos.com). Very techie tutorial videos; TechXtra (techxtra.ac.uk). Has a long enough 'tail' to answer real queries. (RoddyM) Online apps and desktops: Zoho (zoho.com); Cosmopod (cosmopod.com); eyeOS (eyeos.org). Online video editing: jumpcut.com. (hakluytbean) Reevoo (reevoo.com) is a very handy site for people looking for honest feedback on products, as it only publishes reviews known to come from customers. (TechMonkey) 7/24/2007 Iphone Security compromised...
7/23/2007 Ok.. so it's Monday... let's start with something funny...
6/23/2007 Harry Potter has been hacked?It seems like a hacker called "Gabriel" had published the final ending of the saga in the Internet. He infiltrated the London office computer system of Bloomsbury, publishers of the Harry books.
The individual claims to have hacked into
Bloomsbury and downloaded a digital copy of 'Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows', the seventh and final book in the series by JK
Rowling. 5/25/2007 What do women want?: an investigation of career anchors among women in the IT workforceI’ve found today an interesting article conducted by Penn State stating why women stay away from IT jobs… it is worth the reading: In an attempt to address the under representation of women in the information technology (IT) workforce it is important to understand the values and motivations of female professionals. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to examine career anchors of women in the IT workforce and how these factors are manifested in their careers. In doing so, we examine data from a field study of 92 female IT practitioners. Three important findings resulted from this exploration. First, technical competence and managerial competence are mutually exclusive. Second, a combination of career anchors for a given individual can be found. Third, career anchors vary in terms of temporal characteristics. You could download the full study here:
5/12/2007 Cracking hi-tech crimeThe BBC has created a special section in their website specially dedicated to combat cybercrime. It is worth a look if you would like to get an idea of what bad boys are doing during these days. Link here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2006/hi_tech_crime/default.stm The ghost in the browserA study from Google Researcher Niels Provos called "The Ghost in the Browser" has been publicly published online. This study shows some analysis of Web-based Malware and the raise of this type of attack. You could find it here: www.usenix.org/events/hotbots07/tech/full_papers/provos/provos.pdf Google searches web's dark sideOne in 10 web pages scrutinised by search giant Google contained malicious code that could infect a user's PC. Interesting article at the BBC website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6645895.stm 5/11/2007 Yahoo phishing on the raise..The Symantec Security Response team has recently received multiple reports of phishing attacks using Yahoo Instant Messenger, potentially causing users to unknowingly provide their Yahoo login credentials to a phishing web page. Phishing attacks are an ongoing risk that we should always be cautious of; however, specific examples of Yahoo phishing have been seen during the past couple of weeks. Please use caution when receiving Yahoo instant messages with links included in the text, especially any links that require you to login to another website. There are several phishing web pages involved in the recent attacks, one of which is listed below: Ÿ www.geocities.com/piic_v1/index.htm This phishing attack will attempt to use valid Yahoo accounts so that messages sent will appear to come from trusted contacts, so you'll need to keep a keen eye out for strange messages. 5/10/2007 Downing St in Youtube??Believe it or not even the UK Prime Minister has a channel in Youtube... the URL is: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=DowningSt Last video is Tony Blair himself congratulating his French counterpart Zarkosy in English and in French! 5/9/2007 Parrillada at the Phoenix ParkSome photos from last weekend parrillada (which i missed because i was away) but nevertheless they look very professional. And Federico could start looking for a job as "parrillero".
Microsoft to buy Yahoo?Rumors, rumors, rumors... apparently this time are more serious as suggested by Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117827827757492168 Apparently the only way to beat competitors is by doing mergers rather than innovative products. In any case it will become a big thing if this happens as Google now is the leader on this segment. 5/2/2007 Security fear over internet voting in the UKThe UK government yesterday admitted that it was aware of security concerns about internet votes being cast in local elections in England tomorrow.
mmmm.. someone should have done his homework.... full story here: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,2070412,00.html
Fabio
4/27/2007 UK Police struggling to combat online crime...A recent article from the Guardian Unlimited states that the UK police cannot cope with the amount of online if they had to look into every internet crime that was reported. "The scale is such that the police service would fall over if it tried to investigate every case," she said. "I would hate any member of the public to feel that they can't report a crime, but people need to understand that each individual e-crime can't be investigated."
Full article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,2065600,00.html
4/24/2007 Hotmail still riddled with spamMicrosoft has admitted that up to 98% of messages sent to Hotmail addresses are spam.
The company's own research found that between 40% and 98% of messages sent to users of Hotmail, now being rebranded as Windows Live Hotmail, are unsolicited or fraudulent in nature. So, apparently this problem arrived to stay and is growing each year as opposed to Bill Gates prediction back in 2004 when he was saying the spam problem will be solved in 2 years time. I think a radical approach should be applied here if you want to solve the problem of spam... some sort of pay-per-message sent or something like that (as similar to an SMS) if you want to get rid of this problem.. otherwise our mailboxes are going to be filled with rubbish for a long time. Full article here: http://www.rte.ie/business/2007/0423/hotmail.html 4/13/2007 Google opens Latin American Operations Centre in Buenos AiresToday I am very happy for two reasons:
1) Obviously is friday, so weekend is very near and promising with good weather. :)
2) Google had opened its Latin American Operations Centre in Buenos Aires (my home town).
This is very good for the economy of my country and the region. In an interview with Eric Schmidt, local newspaper La Nacion, pointed out the reason being is for the quality of university students in Argentina and the prosperous area which is becoming for the Internet industry Latin America.
So, good weather around Dublin and new jobs for Argentina... that;s a fantastic way of starting the weekend!
Fabio
Ah, you could find the interview in Spanish here: http://www.lanacion.com.ar/EdicionImpresa/economia/nota.asp?nota_id=899645&pid=2370435&toi=5256 3/9/2007 Britain's Tories love open sourceAn interesting article was published today at Register.co.uk where it shows the importance Open Source movement is grabbing... even some of the very top representatives from the UK government are encouraging schools, private and public sector to use Open Source to save money in licenses. George Osborne, Britain's shadow chancellor of the exchequer, suggested that the principles of transparency used in open source software development could also be applied to political discourse and the workings of the establishment.
Here you could find the whole article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/09/uk_conservatives_applaud_open_source/ 3/8/2007 Ford Mustang Commercials...One thing I never mentioned yet about me is the passion I have about Mustang cars... i really love them (except that 80's series which was a piece of crap).. anyway today I've found a site which contains all the Ford Mustang commercial series since its creation back in the 60s... So here is the link to them and one which i would recommend watching which is the Ford Mustang Shelby Police car chase... http://www.mustangevolution.com/ford-mustang-commercials/ http://www.mustangevolution.com/shelby-gt-police-chase-commercial/ 2/8/2007 Kasperskys discuss cybercrimeRussian security professionals Eugene and Natalya Kaspersky dropped by Network World this week en route from Moscow to the RSA Conference in California. In a wide-ranging interview with Features Editor Neal Weinberg, the Kaspersky Lab duo discussed the Russian mafia, the latest in hacker tricks and their view that the bad guys are winning. If you want to read the full interview follow this link: http://www.networks asia.net/ ena/article/ articleDetail. jsp?id=402460 |
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