One Shot Design

OSOR.eu has details about a decision by the French Directorate General of Public Finance to migrate the mail client towards Mozilla on 130,000 computers. The Directorate General of Taxes had been using IBM Lotus Notes; while the Directorate General of Public Accountancy used Microsoft Outlook. The decision to merge the two departments led to an assessment of different solutions to make both entities software compatible. The economical weight of licenses eventually led to adopt the Mozilla suit.

I’ve started using my Microsoft Hotmail Windows Live account again, and it didn’t take a hard look to find 2 reasons why it is vastly inferior to Google Mail:

1. Informations are passed on a transparent HTTP connection. Gmail uses encrypted HTTPS all session long.
2. Windows Live allow me to search keywords in ONE message at a time. Gmail allows me to search keywords in the frickin’ thousands of email I have been getting since opening my account.

Way to go Microsoft, Bing! must be a big threat to Google if you’ve put the same attention to detail in developing it.

Update: last week, Microsoft reported that thousands of Hotmail accounts were exposed over a phishing attack. I know better than to click on an email link to log into my account, so it seems that many of those exposed accounts were used to corrupt the Hotmail network, including my own account. I got about 20 spam mail allegedly sent by contacts, and 10 mail sending failure notices to contacts from my Hotmail list. I proceeded to change my password, and it now seems that the Hotmail spam filter is temporarily disabled, letting all the junk mail reach my inbox. I’m sure this is prompting a lot of long time Hotmail users to move to a more serious provider like gMail or Yahoo.

Update: Turns out my vacation reply has somehow been activated, featured the same text I’ve seen on and on, and was set to reply to every incoming mail (which according to Microsoft makes me more vulnerable):

Dear friend,
how were you going? I would like to introduce you an really good space,there are mainly run various kinds of famous electornic products, it’s true charm pioneer.Now the company is under promotion, all of the products are sold nearly as the same as their cost.
Charmpioneer renders the best service to customers, and provides you with original products which are very cheap, but good-quality.
It is really a good opportunity for taking action, let’s go,just do it, and you will fall in love with it.

The web address: (www.)brcian.com

Update: Now I noticed that my contact list has completely dissapeared whenever I connect with an IM client.

After several months of waiting and pondering I have decided to jump in and get an HTC Magic running Google’s Android platform.

The choice of a carrier was tricky. I eventually chose Orange, which would be the weakest network in Switzwerland, but they have extremely good costs for calls and roaming in Europe.

The first days, I’ve had a hard time figuring out how to type correctly. The best solution seems to be anticipating the fingertip roundess by typing a few millimeters closer to the dial center.

Update: Android is seamslessly integrated with online Google services. I can access my calendar, create and modify events; and gMail runs like push e-mail on Android. The first time I logged, the address book synced with my gMail contacts but the application seems to fail to refresh. I performed a soft reboot to achieve the result. I have also installed on my laptop a Thunderbird plugin called Zindus that consolidates and syncs the address books. Zindus syncs most address book fields between Thunderbird and gMail contacts, but street addresses have to be written manually.

Palm has stopped teasing us and finally announced a date for the launch of the Pre. The handset will go on sale on Saturday June 6th for $300, just two days before Apple’s WWDC, where many are expecting the announcement of a new iPhone.

Read the whole article at Wired.com

It is highly arguable that at the time of this famous statement, Andy Warhol could have foreseen that a US government agency created in 1958 to secure technological edge over the Soviets would combine with post-1975 personal computers after to enable common mortals to experience fame from the anonymity of their basement.

Since 1989, the World Wide Web has enabled skilled users to publish content on the Internet, and the ever-decreasing technicality of the process now allows laymen to publish 140 characters-long messages. The Web 1.0 era was characterized at best by free static web hosting, while the Web 2.0 saw the successive rise of free content management software, free blogging, MySpace, Facebook and eventually Twitter. On april 16^th 2009, actor Ashton Kutcher won his bet against CNN, reaching 1,000,000 followers on his Twitter account before the news channel.

Twitter is based on proprietary software, just like the social networking portal Facebook. Both networks boast a multi-million broad user base, but have yet failed ^{1 2} to capitalize on their popularity. Apple’s iconic iPhone received dedicated Facebook and Twitter applications and Facebook features a micro-blogging feature that can be synced with Twitter.

Users somehow consider the free service they get as something democratic, but truth be told, both networks are funded by capital venture; so at some point the investors will want to get their money’s worth.

On several occasions, Facebook did stir strong protest from regarding policy. The network is prone to phishing and is criticised namely for holding onto information even after an account has been closed and for reselling data to third parties. Similar concerns about Twitter brought some developers to create Identi.ca, an open-source Twitter clone that handles all the user information according to the Creative Commons license.