Rui Carmo- Microsoft has another go at set-top boxes. How long until these start being modded like the Xbox?
- OpenOffice's XML file format may well become an ISO standard. But will it stop people pasting bitmaps into Word?
- The Digital Negative Format, another way to fill all those terabyte hard drives that are just around the corner.
- The Nokia/7710 is leaked. Again, I think. Or it might just be a re-vamp of the initial Series 90 prototypes. Anyway, Nokia must be praised for consistency: the UI looks as ugly as the outside of the phone.
- Ubuntu keeps showing up on the radar. Okay, so Debian finally got an installer (fulfilling my initial 2003 prediction), but what use is it if it uses a separate package tree?
- Lots of Olympus cameras, by the way. I've given up keeping track.
And our moment of Zen just had to be The Python OS. Finally, I can use Python to mock emacs users.
Minor Gnome Gripes
While setting up a couple of Fedora servers, I spent some time fiddling with Gnome launcher files and, to my amazement, I couldn't find a single decent way to launch a program as root easily - i.e., in one click, setuid fashion (the program was Ethereal, and I have to set up a monitor station for sniffing test traffic). Wierd that .desktop files seem to lack provision for that (I must assume I missed something).
What annoys me the most is that all of the pam stuff seems correctly in place, and yet I don't get the userhelper prompt for the rood password. I guess it's some kind of bug, but the geniuses on the mailing-list archives I've searched all seem to prefer launching Ethereal from a root terminal prompt.
Another Mail.app wish
An Outlook-like sidebar with favorite folders. Navigating my humungous IMAP tree to file stuff in Personal/2004/Q3 can get pretty damn irritating sometimes.
Random Website Concept Of The Day
Okay, so let's assume I would bother subscribing to an iCal feed of TV shows (the tricky bit here is spending enough time in front of a TV set, but I assume other people find it easy to arrange). Given that XSLT makes it pretty damn trivial to generate anything out of RSS or XML, the problem becomes finding updated RSS or XML feeds to transform into iCal feeds. Now, Portuguese TV stations have about as much Internet-savvy as a roasted hippopotamus with apple sauce, so I don't think there are any official feeds available (although I haven't yet done any real search for cable program guides and such). So this might need to be a group endeavour.
I've been out of the calendaring game for half a year now, but there weren't any simple web-based apps that allowed you to edit calendars (PHPiCalendar springs to mind) - just view them.
So the dumb idea I had when coming back from the office is figuring out if a Wiki (the collaborative editor par excellence) can be made to generate iCal feeds of TV shows, and get enough people to keep those up to date with easy, no-frills markup.
After all, someone out there must have enough time on their hands.