As you might have read on the public mailing list, the DDWG has published a Working Draft of the Device Descriptions Requirements.

This is a great result, we have worked hard in the last months and the great thing is that the group has worked very smoothly. Everything flowed very easily and members discussed about little things, while the general concept was very uniform.

There are still a few things to clean up in the requirements list and some requirements might turn from MUST to SHOULD or viceversa, but most of the work is there.

Take a peek and make your comments.

A few days ago I was having lunch with a few colleagues, about 8 people.
While chatting, a couple of them started saying that they were impressed because another colleague (also sitting at the table) every time anyone asked for anything, seemed to have a link ready.
“I need to buy shoes”. “Here’s a link”.
“I need to go to this street”. “Here’s a link on a maps site”.
“I need that document you wrote for that client”. “Here’s the file on the server”.

She said that she’s very used to search for documents on the server (and how they are organized in folders) and that she can find things on the web very quickly as she’s used to run searches on it.

The funny thing is that a couple of weeks ago I was talking to a friend of mine and he told me:”I was talking to this girl that of course has a computer and internet at work. I asked her what she does when she needs to find a phone number or an address at home and she said that she looks on the White Papers or the City Maps”.
My friend was really surprised that she doesn’t use her computer and connect to some maps site to search for an address.
Actually I thought about myself searching for a number and immediately thought of going on internet or maybe priting a map to go from home to some other place (as I don’t have a GPS).

Again, two days ago I was on the train travelling back to Milan, I was reading my e-mails and needed to visit a website to check something. Of course I could not, because I was not ON-LINE. It felt strange.. I actually clicked on the link, saw the browser open and then realized that I could not visit the site.
I am SO used to be connected that I don’t even think about it anymore.
Many people, on the other side, is just NOT used to this.

Feels strange the fact that I always consider to be connected while other people don’t even think they could be… Or don’t feel the need to have internet connection at home (not even a computer, actually!).

PS: In case you wanted to make a donation, please, get me a nüvi™ 360 with the European maps, of course

Today I was reading email on GMail and a adword appeared on my upper bar.

For those who don’t speak Italian, the text says: “Every day 5 SMS for free fromthe Web and the hits for free!”.

You know what? This is the site I work on every day!
Are we doing AdWords on ourselves? 😀

Sounds like if an Apple reseller called Steve Jobs and suggested him to buy a new iPod! 😀

It sounds very strange to me, I must have lost it, but it seems like nobody has written about Gtalk in Gmail, yet.

A few weeks ago I was in a VERY restricted LAN and could only use services on ports 80 and 443.
I went on my gmail account to check for emails using Firefox 1.5 and noticed the “Quick Contacts” frame. I expanded it and noticed that some of my contacts where actually online.

I tried to chat with 2 or 3 friends. Here’s how it looks:

Things to note.
In the “Quick contacts” you can see users’ status, away messages and so on.
When you start a new chat, windows are stacked horizontally, from right to left. I actually haven’t tried to open enough chats to see what happens when the row is filled.
Windows can be opened, minimized or open as a pop-up with the Pop-out feature.
Window titles are highlighted when you have a new message.
The chat is really fast, feels a lot like IRC and not like a slow, clunky web chat with reloads and so on.
Smiles have a nice animation, you see the tag such as “:)” and then it animated and mutated into the smile (as you can see it in the screenshot).

Considering that it’s a web interface, the usability is very high and chatting is pleasant. Refreshes are smooth and you don’t really notice it.

The only thing is that you need to keep the gmail window open. Even if you “pop it out”, if you close the main window, even the other windows will be closed. Luckily you get notified and if you try to close the gmail window you will at least know it.
When you close the gmail window you become offline automatically.

Metadata seems to be the next big thing for filesystems. Apple released OS X v10.4 with the “cool” Spotlight that lets you search your hard drive for files and contents. Windows Vista will feature something similar.
The cool thing of SpotLight is certainly the possibility of search for words within the documents (or emails) and it is damn fast if you consider that it is searching your entire hard drive.
Google Desktop is another.

Recently I installed a plug-in for Mail.app called MailTags that many think is awesome.
I installed it because I wanted to check how cool it is (I have read more than once and on different sites how cool it is).
I have to say that it has some really neat features that let you add comments to emails, keywords and associate email to specific projects. A new feature that I have to say is really cool is the ability to integrate with iCal (the native OS X calendar). When you receive an email you can assign a due date and it will add it to iCal automatically. This is just great, I have to say.
I tried to tag a few emails, I tried to add metadata to a few files here and there… What I don’t understand is the final use of all this metadata. If I have to spend let’s say 5 minutes for each email or file that I receive to tag it with the project, a task or a few comments, then why not simply archive it in the appropriate directory or folder?
I don’t see this GREAT advantage from tagging files and e-mails. Looks a lot like archiving.

I am wondering what is people doing with their tags and how they use them.

This is my first post on the Blog from this neat new Widget for Dashboard!

Using the web interface of blogger.com is nice and has a lot of features (when using Firefox and NOT Safari) but for some reasons after a while takes a lot of RAM and CPU.
Hopefully this new widget will make it faster and easier to post.

Google is also offering other Widgets. Check them out.

UPDATE: Don’t use copy and paste or you’ll also get the HTML syntax for font and size of the copied text. Just a trouble in this case as I used it to paste the URL of the widgets and so it messed the HTML tag.

I think one bank of the RAM of my PowerBook is gone. I had SEVERAL kernel panics in a few days. I ran full memory tests and miserably failed.
I removed a yucky Hynix RAM and left my beautiful-high-performance Corsair RAM and now is working nicely (3 days now).

The sad part of the story is that I am temporarily stuck with only 512MB and my Mac is DAMN SLOW! Could it be Firefox and Thunderbird that together suck up at least 70MB? Then add Mail.app, Safari, X11 terminals, iTunes, NeoOffice, AdiumX, Skype… Anything else?

I was not used to this LOW RAM! 🙂

According to this UAProf from Siemens, the phone has 64bit display, which means 18.446.744.073.709.551.616 colors!

Take it while it’s fresh!

Today I had to fill in some documentation in our internal servers.
We use mediaWiki.

I had a real hard time filling less than 2 pages of doc.
mediaWiki is really good if you have to do really basic articles, but seems a little bit too complicated and sometimes missing basic features (at least IMHO). Also, the editing UI is SO UN-userfriendly!

Why can’t they integrate with FCDEditor?

Do we really still need to use ” for italic, ”’ for bold and so on?
Why can’t I decide to have a carriage return that is not a new paragraph?

Am I ignorant about Wiki’s? That’s possible. 😀
Sometimes it looks like things are uselessly HARD to do. Why can’t I have buttons to edit in Wiki? Am I the only one who would like to have them?