Yes its advertising for Microsoft -but its for a good cause.

"Microsoft Australia are running an interesting campaign to demo MS Office 2007 and raise money for charity at the same time. The premise is fairly simple. Users head over to the campaign page (built with Silverlight) and watch a 30-second clip of 9-yr olds explaining MS Office 2007, and Microsoft donates one Aussie dollar to The Smith Family."

http://www.microsoft.com.au/donatenow is the link

Looks like Twitter is going into the garage tonight.

Its coughing a bit of blood at the moment so that may be a good thing for all of us twitticts.

http://www.istwitterdown.com

http://www.twitter.com

I love DigsBy but there are three annoying behaviors that could be solved with.... just a few more options :)

1) In popup mode and an IM from person I didn't have a conversation going with comes in, it pops up and takes focus and whatever I was typing starts streaming into the popped up IM window..

I've not found a way to stop it from taking focus - even when turning off "Popup"

The number of times I have almost posted code or a part of an email I am typing to Twitter is quite astounding. I'm removing the Google Talk and MSN accounts and going back to native. I'm still using Digsby to monitor Twitter, Facebook and half a dozen email accounts.  I've been using Twitter via Google Talk and its amazing how much faster the messages come through via Google Talk I'm hoping that's just down to polling speed and not Twitter API issues :)

2) The flashing of the application toolbar icon.

I want to be able to tell it to not flash on every message source. I don't want to know that I have gotten 10 messages from Twitter or ThumbWhere. I want to know if a coworker messages me.

3) I run it at home and at work - and I don't want the same behavior in both environments. These ones should be machine specific as they are specific to the hardware.

It may not work for a pot or a kettle, but thanks to some operating systems giving the topmost focused window process a higher priority, it does work for computers.

This will only really work If the process is graphically intensive and is doing an awful lot of computation eg.

It can be worthwhile just clicking on that window to make it focused and watching time pass by. Hint. Open a web page and do some practical research, just keep bringing that process window back to the top and clicking on it if it goes away because you have clicked on something in the web page.

So next time someone says "A watched kettle never boils", you have the counter argument.

Possibly the best comic form summary of the CDOMBS scandal. (Sub-prime loans crisis.)

http://www.suburbanhousehunters.com/about/mortgage-crisis/

Of note.

1. SPV's is the general term for the more specific term of SIVs (Structured Investment Vehicles).  Expect to hear more about these in the future.
2. They don't mention that some of the ratings agencies and the financial institutions had shared ownership which could be counted as a conflict of interest.  IMHO If nothing is done legislatively to regulate ratings agencies then this can always happen again. They obviously have a large duty of care.

LOL-* (Pronounced "LOL STAR")  is a simple and compact markup language for creating image macros on your mobile phone via MMS.

An implementation of this language has been included as part of the http://rss.thumbwhere.com MMS to RSS gateway.

When you submit an MMS message from a mobile phone you typically send one media element with a subject. A server capable of rendering LOL-* is able to extract the LOL-* markup and render one or more captions or annotations onto the encapsulated media.

Caption Your MMS Submissions

Any text you put at the start of the subject in square brackets.

[Like This]

will be turned into a caption.

The remainder of the subject will be left as is, so if you send

[Fear Me Human]Why is my kitty growling?

It will caption the image with "Fear Me Human" and the subject will be "Why is my kitty growling?"

Why is my kitty growling?

A Caption can be positioned in three rows on your photo, [Top/Middle/Bottom]. The / character is used to switch to the next row.

A more complicated example is

[I/love/these things]Tribbles taste like chicken.

which will caption the image on three lines "I" will be at the top, "Love" will be in the middle and "These Things" will be at the bottom. The Subject of the message will be "Tribbles taste like chicken!"

Tribbles taste like chicken.

You can of course leave the first two rows blank if you want your caption at the bottom as in this next example,

[//I Is Raptor U Fool!!]Why does my Kitty Have Glowing Eyes?

...which will caption the image at the bottom with "I Is Raptor You Fool!". The Subject of the message will be "Why does my Kitty Have Glowing Eyes?"

Why does my Kitty Have Glowing Eyes?

Putting a < or > in your caption will align the text to the left or the right so...

[<Oh hai, can I Ha..//>WTF!!]

...will put a caption at the top, left justified and at the bottom right justified.

All captions are automatically capitalised, they just seem to look better that way.

If characters are already capitalised, they will remain capitalised. Note the WTF!! in the previous example was not converted to Wtf!!

Here is another example.

[//O RLY?]

You don't have to end your caption instruction with a ] if you are not going put some text after it, such that ...

[nom nom nom

...will still work as a top caption even though the caption command is missing its final ]

As part of an MMS message standard you are also allowed to send one or more large blocks of text, which ThumbWhere treats as the message body.

If you send a video, the caption will be rendered over the top of the thumbnail and the video will remain unaltered.

If you run out of room in the Subject, keep the Subject blank and use the message body. If the Subject is blank, the Body will be treated as the subject and image commands such as caption and rotation will come from the body.

Image Rotation. Not all phones have sensors to detect if you are taking an image on its side, so you may need to rotate the image from your phone for it to make sense.

Luckily you can do this as part of LOL-*

Rotate Your MMS Submissions

You can add special commands to the start of the subject to rotate your photos. This is useful if your phone's camera functions don't automatically rotate an image before sending it via MMS

< Will rotate the photo left (anti-clockwise)

> Will rotate the photo right (clockwise)

So if you sent in the following subject

>I Love My Kitty!

Your picture will be rotated to the right and given the subject of "I Love My Kitty."

You can rotate your image before applying a caption such that if you sent in the following subject

>[Distinctly Told//Not To Mow During The Day]Australia - Its Hot

Your picture will be rotated to the right and given the subject of "Australia - Its Hot", a top caption of "Distinctly Told" and a bottom caption of "Not To Mow During The Day"

Australia - Its Hot

LOL-* is being constantly extended. I will post updates.

If you think these instruction can be made better - please send me an email.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7358792.stm

This is really just another buffer overflow attack. If he is taking advantage of bugs in the VM then it's just an old fashioned exploit.

Because the 'code' you execute in a Virtual Machine or Intereter does not directly access the low level runtime libraries, we assume that the programs we develop can not cause a buffer exploit. If there is an exploit then it lies in the VM itself. Its very easy in a low level language like C or C++ to allow a buffer exploit simply due to the semantics of some of the calls. You have to actively check for these issues and have some knowledge on how these exploits arise. When developing code that is executed via a VM, the onus for this checking for and blocking of this class of exploit is shifted to the application, which in this case is the VM itself.

We trust that a VM is checked and tested thoroughly and is free of these kind of bugs so that as developers we can not worry (so much) that our code has some kind of exploit.

If anything this paper simply reminds us that these VMs are just another application and if they have holes, these can be exploited.

Yet again, we are the bridesmaid and not the bride.

And the winner in our category of Best Interactive Channel was http://www.wedigtv.com/

So its congratulations to everyone involved - its an honor just to be nominated!

Next Year Gadget! Next Year!