Java 5 has reached it's "end-of-service-life" yesterday. Java 5 entered Suns "hospice" for software on April 8th, 2008, and passed into the oblivion on All Saints Day (somewhat fitting really).

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Friday is my last day with my current employer, who happens to also be my first employer in Germany.

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In a wired interview hacker Jonathan Zdziarski says that "iPhone 3GS Encryption Is 'Useless' for Businesses".

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In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing part of the navigation systems source code has been released to the public via Google code.

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Google Chief Erich Schmidt in an interview claimed that the upcoming Chrome OS will be on millions of computers, though doesn't have any hard figures.

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If you are using wordpress on your site you may want to check out the vulnerability report on CoreLabs.

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What would you do if you lost or someone stole your fancy smartphone? It's gone forever right? Wrong! Kaspersky Lab has come up with a great way to secure and even find your phone.

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Before my laptop died I used the converter software from VMWare to convert it to a virtual machine thereby not losing all of my installed programs (most of which I actually paid for). Once I booted up the virtual machine I had to enter in the Windows serial number that's generally on the tag they slap on the bottom of the laptop. Not a big deal I thought.

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Yesterday Google released the new version of Google Earth. This new version of Google Earth just doesn't let you explore the earth's surface now you can dive beneath the surface of the ocean. Through animation Google Earth lets you dive blow the surface and explore the ocean floor, see exclusive content provided by Google Partners like the BBC, and the National Geographic.

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The instant messaging expert Carl Tyler has published, what he deems to be, a security hole in IBM's Lotus Sametime instant messaging software on his blog. Apparently IBM doesn't think that what Mr. Tyler claims to be a bug is actually a bug.

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After my post yesterday regarding the "new" promotional site for Lightroom I decided to try it out. I took a few images from my flickr photostream that could do with some touching up.

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I recently decided to use Google docs to do a little writing. I find it's ok for simple documents without too much fancy stuff, simple for simple needs.

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A little while ago I installed the Piclens firefox plugin to take for a test-drive. I first thought "not another flash gimick".

But I actually really like it for browsing my pictures on Flickr.

Its a heck of a lot better than the built in slide show viewer. The scrolling is smooth the image loading is fast and it's really quite fun to zoom through the images.

The only thing is that I find it has a very limited use. SearchMe on the other hand had made some pretty nice improvements to its flash visual search engine since it first released it's Beta back in March of this year. Its use as a visual search engine also probably has niche market, but I guess only time will tell whether it can carve out a little bit of the search engine traffic to stay make the business worthwhile.

Happy coding...

It seems to me that this year is the Year of open source CF CMS's. Ben Forta recently made us aware of ColdBricks open source CF CMS, and now I have stumbled upon Sava CMS. I think it's a great sign to see all of these open source CFM projects coming out, especially in the crowded CMS market.

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I just heard about this little start up out of Boston called Virtual Ubiquity on a post on basement.org, they have created a feature rich online word processor using Flash. I signed up for a preview account and I have to say I am really impressed with the functionality and ease of use.

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For those of you who like the new Ajax tags of Colfusion 8 the framework, ExtJS, has released the Alpha version of their next major release.

This release is a rather large upgrade to the code base that Coldfusion uses and fully separates its reliance or dependence on other frameworks (yahoo ui toolkit for example).

The host of new features are too many to go into here so you can read about the major and exciting new features here. You can also read more about the general release news on their blog.

All I can say is that Jack Slocum and his crew do a fantastic job and I am continually impressed with the quality and level of their work. Add on top of that the three licensing options (open source, oem/reseller, and commercial) and you end up with a product that everyone can use.

An important thing to note is that this release while extensive has not significantly increased the size of the library. The whole library measures in at 522kb (thats everything you need) and it is possible to reduce that size rather significantly by importing only the library files that you need for a specific task. Though that being said the general practice is to include the ext-all.js file and be done with it.

Happy Coding...

A lot of folks in my office here in Munich use Winamp over iTunes. It just seems to be more accepted than iTunes. It might be that iTunes won't let you connect and sync with two different computers, or it might be that they just want a player not all the other things that come with iTunes. Or it may be that Winamp "really whips the Llamas ass"?

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