EcoblogIT

I've been using Gmail for domains for seven months and it's been a bit like the beginnings of a romance. First of all, every day you find something great about it that you didn't know before. Then every week.

And then this....

You can create pseudo addresses. What's that you ask?

Well it means that you can sign up to services with unique e-mail addresses so that any mail from them still comes into your mailbox. BUT, you now know where any sold-on addresses came from (using Gmail's filters).

So, in the case of my projectrestripe.com account:

mike+spamfromecoblogitpost@projectredstripe.com

will also get to me, but if the address gets harvested I will know where it came from. Now, I'm sure that pretty soon services will start to defeat this, but for now it's fantastic.

See Aaron Lynch's blog entry for the lowdown.

Go anywhere on the web, flickr and amazon work really well then paste this into the URL bar

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

Just watch

this video

Labels: fun

My on time and on target manager book is erm delayed.....

Dear Customer,

We wanted to give you an update on the status of your order.

We are sorry to report that the following items have been delayed.

Kenneth H. Blanchard (Author), Steve Gottry (Author) "The On-time,
On-target Manager (One Minute Manager)" [Hardcover]

We are sorry for any inconvenience this causes.

Just don't go there.

As the name of the site I saw this on says (not quite NSFW).....

Labels: fun

Catch it while you can.

I deleted my post last week about the iphone not being amazing as I thought I looked a bit stupid, the post had terrible English and I generally thought I'd spoken too soon.


Mike Elgin from computerworld writes :

Steve Jobs' blockbuster keynote address at last week's Macworld was brilliantly and powerfully delivered -- one of his best ever. It was also a colossal mistake.

Labels: apple, iphone

I still get annoyed when managers think they can simply throw people at problems. Some problems don't get fixed with numbers. There is no silver bullet

I might just make one of these!

Labels: home

Nuff said...

Labels: iphone, microsoft, zune

4Gb model $499 expected to ship in June in the US in partnership with Cingular (exclusively). Q4 for Europe.

The reasoning given for the exclusivity is that the visual voicemail needs work from the service provider. It remains to be seen how this will impact on sales and how soon it will be before unlocked iPhones become available on the grey market

It wasn't made clear what length contract will be demanded by Cingular during the "multi-year" exclusivity period.

From today Apple is dropping the "Computer" from Apple Computer Inc.

Labels: apple, iphone

A widescreen iPod, a phone and a revolutionary internet connectivity device. All in one - the iPhone (using Steve Jobs words there).

"It is smarter and easier to use that anything out there right now."

The keyboard will be a "soft" one one a big screen that you use your finger to drive. It will run OS X. Now, Microsoft have gone down this route, but not on their own hardware.

It will sync via iTunes.

From a design point of view, it has a 3.5" screen (diagonal) and is 11.6mm thin. It has only one button on the front - a home button. It also has an accelerometer built in so that it knows whether to display in landscape or portrait, for example. Plus a proximity sensor (so that it can respond appropriately when you have it close to your ear, for example), and a light sensor.

The iPod works through gestures and taps on the screen and Jobs obviously had had some practice as he used it without problem, but intuitively it looks like it might be fiddly. As an iPod it looks better than any before.

The phone "will make using the contacts really easy", is quad band with wi-fi and Bluetooth plus a 2 megapixel camera.

Jobs showed how easy it was to conference callers in. The voicemail feature shown allowed access to all waiting messages via a list rather than in sequential order but he hinted that this needed some additional service from the service provider.

It looked really impressive as a phone.

For internet connectivity it has an HTML e-mail client, Safari, Google Maps, widgets and will switch seamlessly to wi-fi when a service is detected (some caveats here, surely). For the e-mail service Yahoo! will push e-mail to the iPhone (as a Blackberry does) for free.

Safari load a complete picture of a page on the screen and you can easily zoom in as you need to (my Nokia N73 kinda does this now).

I suppose a question might be how open the device will be for third party apps.

Labels: apple, iphone

iTunes has sold over 2 billion songs; 1.2 bn in 2006.

Paramount will join Disney in selling movies through iTunes.

Appletv was shown - it was previewed in September and is a wi-fi connected device that can store and stream content to you wide screen tv from iTunes including music. Of course, the default encoding on iTunes is not hi-fi....

The way that Jobs presented the features of Appletv seemed to be laying the gauntlet down to MicrosoftTV/MediaCenter - the interface looked like the one I saw for MediaCenter a while ago.

Appletv will be available in March and will retail for $299.

Labels: apple

After scrambling up the escalators in what can only be described as a scrum we're here (I, of course, was dignified and walked).

Labels: apple

From that pillar of objective reporting, the International Herald Tribune, news that Apple will introduce a mobile phone and compete directly with manufacturers such as Nokia and Motorola.

They also speculate that Google and other Internet companies may jump into the mobile telecoms market as a way to strengthen ties to their users. Enter the Googlephone?

What that means is that of you're a regular poster (hi Audra, Dave, Rob and Stew) you'll need to create a Google account when you next sign in.

Most usefully, you'll also be able to categorise posts...

Which leads me to what to do with this one.

Labels: blogging

From eWeek: Microsoft has issued a zero-day attack alert for its ubiquitous Word application. The unpatched flaw can be exploited when a user simply opens a maliciously rigged Word document, and there are no pre-patch workarounds available, Microsoft warns. Microsoft says don't open or save Word docs, even from trusted sources
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2068800,00.asp?kc=EWNAVEMNL120606EOAD

No, not the bugmenot thing, but Spambox. You create a temporary account to sign up to whatever and the account gets deleted after a period you specify so you don't get spammed.