Finally OpenOffice is going to get a major User Interface overhaul. Features improvements were impressive in last two big releases – version 2.x and few weeks ago 3.x, but UI mostly stayed horrible as it is since the beginning. Now there is “Project Renaissance” ongoing to adapt UI to 21st century.
So far more than ten proposals were submitted. Some just minor changes, some too difficult to understand in 20 seconds watching the page, some promising. Check out especially Flux UI and Iced Coffee.
The good news is according to Harward University Circumvention report there are various tools how to defeat the firewalls of the countries which filter the Internet traffic and these tools work well. Time to setup Tor server somewhere has probably come.
Attendance at any big conference meeting is a good opportunity to scan other people’s computers. Once you connect into a WiFi network at such event a list of other computers appears immediately via Bonjour / Zeroconf services. There is of course nothing interesting or valuable at those computers, but one is tempted to scan them anyway :) This time at ICANN meeting I found Evil computer!
Wonder what was on that computer? Honestly I don’t know as I didn’t browse it, becuase I was scared I could find something truly evil.
Check your favorite programming language and the related religion here. I’m glad my favorite “has abandoned whole concept of goto hell“.
If you are the user of OpenOffice.org office suite, there is a survey you might participate and help the development team to improve the software in the future. So don’t wait, take your part and answer following 38 questions.
A new water regeneration system is going to be delivered to ISS by Endeavour shuttle by the end of this week. The brand new technology by NASA is able to recycle human urine as well as the other garbage water. As the blind test have shown – the quality of recycled water is about the same as tap water.
Seems the end of urine therapy in space :) Have you ever tried?
Found another media coverage of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in recent Newsweek article. Well written, understandable, but insightful and funny. By the way … did you know: “When the force of gravity is tested carefully against the electrical force, it is found to be weaker by a factor of one followed by 40 zeros.
Nokia is trying to remove OGG format from HTML5 draft at W3C. Regarding their position paper OGG is proprietary. Ha ha ha … transparent and cheap, just check the document for DRM keyword. It’s quite clear where the wind blows from.
Nokia has included a SIP client in their business phones – namely E line. All phones have the option to call over the internet, but Nokia does not want to tell you that. They do not want to show the phones at one of the major VoIP/ENUM events in Czech Republic – ENUM Day hosted by CZ.NIC, because they’re scared of mobile carries?! Do you understand why someone with 40% market share is scared?
“A vast physics experiment built in a tunnel below the French-Swiss border is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe.” [BBC]
Check out more on LHC at CERN or Wikipedia. All the pictures seem to me really impressive. Bad news is 2008 Open day at CERN has been in April :( Hope they will have it next year again, but at that time LHC should be already in operation. So hope nothing will go terribly wrong either this or this way.
The exploit for coffee machine internet connection add-on has been found. It is really serious as it can be used as denial of service attack. And you know such important product as coffee, may hurt performance of the company (particularly in IT industry) pretty much if not available. See the details in bug track at SecurityFocus.