Sen No Sen

OSNews.com features a former Windows PC snob and his tale of being seduced over to the Mac side:

It’s like seeing a girl you made fun of in school and now she is hot 10 years later.

Ha! ‘ had to laugh at that one!

Well, here in Germany, where Apple’s marketshare and general recognition is particularly low, I’ve had my fair share of enounters with die-hard Wintel freaks, and whenever they’ve been willing (which is only rarely the case) to just look at the way things can/could be done different, they’ve inevitably been taken by complete surprise at what the Mac has to offer.

It never ceases to amaze me, though, how effective the blinkers that Windows seems to impose on its users are at filtering out these perceptions. As a qualifaction, I might add that I have sufficiant experience with Windows to make the comparison.

In any event, this guy does offer a fairly balanced view and ends with an admirable reconciliatory note:

You might find, like me, that you want the best of both worlds. PC’s and Mac’s should be friends.

OK, I’ll second that.

RSS enclosures and podcasting made easy.

This lets you receive a podcast from any page that has MP3s on it (or .movs, .torrents, etc). For example, you can “subscribe” to a band’s MP3 page or to a radio station’s archive. When they post new stuff you’ll get it automatically.

they also have a cool bookmarklet: Feedme

When you get to a page that posts cool media files (MP3s, torrents, etc) just click the bookmark to make a podcast-ready RSS feed.

Alright! let’s test it!

(via unmediated)

Heads-up:

an interesting paper by TechnicalInfo.net on

HTML Code Injection and Cross-site scripting.

(via Heise Security)

In my first look at ohmynews.com I found a thought-provoking article entitled:
“Say Goodbye to Your Squeaky Old Cyber Dungeon” about how the

…line between the online and offline space increasingly blurs beyond distinction in hypersurfaces.

The idea of “hypersurface” is taken from new-generation architect Stephen Perrella’s book “Hyper Surface Architecture.”

in order to create true hypersurface, we must premise it on an “ubiquitous” environment in which people could access a network anywhere at anytime. In other words, just as the Internet gave birth to cyberspace, the ubiquitous environment shall inevitably give rise to hypersurface.

A scenario is provided which illustrates the idea:

Mr. B, with his next generation mobile handset, finds an eatery near his office. As he passes one restaurant, basic information about the place, along with comments left by customers who had eaten there, pop up on the screen of his handset, which is registered for a LBS or location based service. In just a glance, B could decide whether or not he wishes to eat at that particular restaurant.

After eating, B could leave a comment of his own concerning the restaurant, or do nothing. It’s a cyber bulletin board that exists exclusively when space, time and conditions are correct, but it is as if it were a real bulletin board with customer postings hanging right next to the restaurant door. This is hypersurface.

Recommended Reading.

Upon subscribing to the Ohmynews Technology feed I found the following description:

Abolish the threshold to being a reporter. -Break down the set formula for news articles. -Demolish all walls that separate media. OhmyNews currently has over 35 dedicated staff reporters. On any given day, more than 30,000 citizen reporters post their stories on regular basis.

Wow! now that’s my kinda service!

The Guardian Unlimited lists the 100 most useful websites of 2004 in various categories:

Blogs

• typepad.com
• www.statcounter.com
• technorati.com
• http://blogdex.net
• ipodder.org

Here statcounter.com comes out of left field for me, so first thing I’ve done is to register and will check it out: report pending…

Great to see ipodder.org right up there. Both technorati and blogdex have certainly deserved it too. Typepad being the most popular comes as no surprise, but next year the competition is going to be tougher….Go Blogsome!

Community
Yea for de.licio.us! and flickr.

News
bbc.co.uk gets my top vote too.
ohmynews.com is another out of left field for me (from Korea!) - will check it out. (at first glance their Technology section does seem to offer a different angle - and provides an RSS feed as well!)

Reference
Surprise, no wikipedia!… although it does head the Readers’ favourites list

Search
Here blinkx.com is the one to keep an eye on…
Good show too for searchenginewatch.com

(thanks to Scoble’s Linkblog for the pointer)

Quite a stir in the c’t security forum this morning around the Crypto-Challenge of Rolf Jentzsch from the Technical Universtiy of Darmstadt.

€ 10.000 to be won by anyone who manages to crack a new, supposedly fullproof encryption scheme developed in the GDR during the cold war. The challenge will run for a full year.

While the information is in German only at present, I imagine that it won’t be long before translations are made available. Until then there’s always Google. On the other hand, to anyone capable of taking on such a task, that ought to be no obstacle at all.

From a mere mortal’s perspective, it’ll be interesting to observe whether such a bold claim can withstand the onslaught.

Update: 26.12.04
Look’s like it was all a hoax of some sort - the page is no longer online…

Update 10.01.05
Now it appears that it just ran into some unforseen problems at first and is actually taking place elsewhere!