Let’s face it. The only reason people use MSN is because, everyone else uses MSN. Everyone also uses Facebook – in fact arguably, more people use Facebook than MSN.
This week, Facebook started offering Facebook Chat over Jabber. What does this mean? This means that you can use Adium (OSX), Pidgin (Windows) or even iChat (OSX again) to talk to your Facebook buddies. There is no longer any need to log into Facebook and chat in your web browser or use the bloated MSN client from hell. As a point, I haven’t used the official client in years, Adium offers it perfectly well.
Either way, I’ve been using it for a few days now. It’s much more stable than they hacky approach that had been taken before and means that communication tends to be a lot smoother. It’s refreshingly cool.
So a call to everyone, stop using MSN. It’s bloated, horrid, ad/spam ridden (especially on Windows). Uninstall it, leave it alone – the friends you have on MSN are highly likely your friends on Facebook already. Let’s get this non-standard, horrid closed system outta here!
If you want details on how to do this, Facebook has a page on their site detailing how to set up the various IM clients out there.
I also just realised… this is my first truly opinionated blog post! Scary.
The Palm Pré is a nifty little phone. However, the fact that you can view PDFs on it, albeit useful, is under scrutiny as it appears Palm failed to check the licenses of the software they were using.
When working on closed/embedded projects that you distribute, the GPL requires you to make you application open source as well – the LGPL requires you use the library in a DLL/.so form – it’s all fairly simple. License checking is time consuming but worthwhile as it means you end up with a product that you have at least tried to protect from potential lawsuits.
That also said, open source developers should consider dual licensing (a bit like Nokia with Qt). This way, if a large company wants to use your code, you make a reasonable amount of money out of it to fund the GPL/LGPL versions.
Doing it that way may well mean breaking Stallman’s view of the world – but there is his view… and the way the world actually works.
Lawsuit alleges Palm Pre violates copyright – Artifex, copyright, gpl, GPL violation – Techworld.
Stories like this enrage me. Why? Let’s take a look at the story’s strapline on the front page as of right now:
A patient with swine flu and other health problems has died, a Scottish government spokesman has confirmed.
Right, so a patient, who has flu… you with me so far? Died. Ok, that’s fine. The important detail is also included near the top of the story:
The patient, who had underlying health problems, is understood to have died while being treated at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley.
Of course, the general public will ignore the bits I have bolded here. It’s written as a scare story with the facts only mentioned in passing. The media, already known for blowing things out of proportion, are just at it again. It’s a well known fact, even with normal Flu variants, that if you have underlying health problems, the risk of complications is high. Nice one BBC News, I notice you failed to mention that little detail.
BBC NEWS | UK | First UK swine flu patient death.
This is quite amazing. No more using World Pay then.
Visa on Friday alerted the world that RBS WorldPay and Heartland Payment Systems are not on its list of payment card processors who are in good standing with industry-mandated standards for data security.
via Visa yanks creds for payment card processing pair • The Register.
Important non-technical post! On the 14th June, 2008 – I got married to Christy whom I have been engaged to for about 18 months.
A small excerpt of the speech I gave:
“Christy, you can’t help being lovely… you can help becoming my bride. Today I married my best friend – the woman I laugh with, live for and dream with”.
Here’s to many more years of happiness!
