Blob Blog http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/ (this is a personal blog) en Copyright 2007 Fri, 17 Aug 2007 11:59:59 +0100 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=3.2 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Skype offline due to software glitch http://heartbeat.skype.com/2007/08/









broken?
Skype, the popular VoIP telephony service was offline most of Thursday and Friday due to a software malfunction. The glitch left many skype users unable to connect and chat or call other users. It is yet unclear how many of the 220 million registered users were affected, but problems were reported in the United States, Europe, South Africa and Brazil.

"This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software. This controls the interaction between the user’s own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network. Rest assured that everyone at Skype is working around the clock — from Tallinn to Luxembourg to San Jose — to resume normal service as quickly as possible," reads a post on Skype Heartbeat, skype's status-update blog.

]]> http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2007/08/skype_offline_due_to_software.html http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2007/08/skype_offline_due_to_software.html IT news Fri, 17 Aug 2007 11:59:59 +0100 Facebook source code exposed

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg: sleepless nights?
A misconfigured server caused part of Facebook source code to be revealed, it was annouced on Saturday. Instead of processing the PHP code, on which Facebook is built, the misconfigured server sent it back as raw text to a user, revealing the code of this given page.

“A small fraction of the code that displays Facebook web pages was exposed to a small number of users due to a single misconfigured web server that was fixed immediately,” said Facebook in an official response to a Techcrunch story.

“It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way […] the code offers no useful insight into the inner workings of Facebook”.

The code was posted on a Blog called ‘Facebook Secrets’ and several Bloggers mentioned the gaffe. Facebook lawyers were quick to take down all portion of the leaked code off the sites and blogs which reproduced it.

]]> http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2007/08/facebook_source_code_exposed.html http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2007/08/facebook_source_code_exposed.html IT news Tue, 14 Aug 2007 14:24:11 +0100 Yahoo! terminates photo service to focus on Flickr Users of Yahoo Photo are now encouraged to turn to Flickr asYahoo has decided to close on 20 September 2007 the weakest of its two photo sharing services. The move follows months of decline for Yahoo Photo and a rise in Flickr market share.

“We've decided to focus all our efforts on Flickr - the award winning photo sharing community. Why not head over to Flickr for a look?,” reads a statement on Yahoo Photo.

Yahoo hopes with the closure of Yahoo Photo, it will catch up with Photobucket, its main competitor on the photo-sharing market. Yahoo bought Flickr in March 2005.

The move follows months of decline for Yahoo Photo which is now the fifth photography website in the US according to monitoring company Hitwise with 3.19 per cent of the visits to photo sharing sites.

]]> http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2007/08/yahoo_terminates_photo_service.html http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2007/08/yahoo_terminates_photo_service.html IT news Sun, 12 Aug 2007 15:20:38 +0100 When was this man born!!!! Yesterday (15 June) Lakshmi Mittal was invited by the Belgian Senate for a Diner, the occasion to promote the attempted merger between Mittal Steel-Arcelor. Apparently, the organisers believed it was his Birthday and brought a cake. Only to be told that it was in fact not Mittal’s birthday…. ‘Histoire Belge’, not so sure. A little research on the internet will only give 15 June 1950 as Mittal’s birthday. And wikipedia gives the same date with a mysterious ‘not certain’ between brackets. So what is Mittal’s Steel’s CEO birth date? Why so much secrecy? As in every ‘histoire Belge’ , there is a good ending. Paul Wille, Belgian senator for VLD received the cake instead…. Claiming it was his birthday…. Not so certain as his website mentions it was on 16 June. A free pass visit to Arcelor's plant to whom finds to actual birth date of the Indian multimilionnaire...

View RTBF story (TV News 15/06/06)
Paul Wille, Belgian senator
All about Mittal on Wikipedia

]]> http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2006/06/when_is_this_man_born.html http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2006/06/when_is_this_man_born.html News of the World Fri, 16 Jun 2006 12:06:41 +0100 More efforts needed to achieve Lisbon strategy targets says Commission The European Commission’s annual report on the progress of the Union towards the Lisbon goals warns of insufficient improvements in at least four of the five benchmarks used to measure the progress of the EU’s education systems. The Commission staff working paper published on 16 May 2006 analyses progress achieved since 2000.

]]> http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2006/06/more_efforts_needed_to_achieve.html http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2006/06/more_efforts_needed_to_achieve.html EU Fri, 16 Jun 2006 10:08:02 +0100 I was on a CIA flight cia.jpgRemember the quest for MEPs and other NGOs in Europe to find out whether CIA chartered flights across Europe? Well I was in one as this bording pass can testify.


Now who should I contact to report that, please help I want to help. I tried to alert the authororities at Ciampino (Rome) airport where I was for a week end. But no way.


Another fascinating development of my travel experience will surely be my trip to Japan late July. I will attempt to post experiences from that trip. So far what is planned is Tokyo (Disneyworld, sightseeing, electric city), Kyoto (shrines, old town), Osaka (where people speak loud, the Italy of Japan) and of course yamanashi famous for its Hot Springs (where men have to be naked with other men who speak klingon-could be a bit embarrasing) and its Mount Juji. Watch this space (I mean nobody's visiting that space, but I like to say that)

]]> http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2006/05/i_was_on_a_cia_flight.html http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2006/05/i_was_on_a_cia_flight.html visits/trips Tue, 16 May 2006 17:42:54 +0100 EU domain names, already 3,000 live The general public might have to wait until 7 April to be able to register web addresses with a .eu domain name, but already more than 3,000 domain names have been granted the go-ahead and are live says EURid, the company chosen to operate the .eu domain name.

So far more than 300,000 applications were submitted during the Sunrise I period which started on 7 December 2005 and the Sunrise II on 7 February 2006. The Sunrise period is reserved for applications from public bodies, holders of geographical indications and owners of a trademark.

]]> http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2006/03/eu_domain_names_already_3000_l.html http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2006/03/eu_domain_names_already_3000_l.html IT news Sun, 12 Mar 2006 21:47:50 +0100 Barcelona
I visited Barcelona and Spain for the first time of my life. The most amazing thing is the light and heat, very unusual for a northerner like me. Walking around the city is also a fascinating experience, provising you have time in your hands, with ony one day to see everything leaves you with a taste of unfinished business and the desire to come back to see more of the city Gaudi.

Among the highlights of the city is the cathedral of the Holy Family which harbours some of the best finds in architectual design of the this and the last century (the 20th).

I highly recommend the place. And if you go to hotels, be aware that the mini bar might be free... (I wished I had known it)

]]> http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2006/03/barcelona.html http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2006/03/barcelona.html visits/trips Tue, 07 Mar 2006 10:08:48 +0100 AJAX brings new functionalities to EUN portals Several EUN portals now use a state of the art web application called AJAX. It is a JavaScript-based application which has taken the web by storm since its invention a year ago. For European Schoolnet’s development team, AJAX means more flexibility as it allows, among other things, the display of dynamic content on static HTML pages.

Among the latest application using the technology is Insight’s Library which displays, according to keywords relevant to the articles, entries from a server-based library of resources.

Static HTML pages are very convenient as they are quick to load and pages do not require time-consuming requests to a database server. The downside is that a static HTML page cannot display the latest news or the latest document added to a repository on-the-fly. AJAX, which stands for “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML”, can do just that. A tiny JavaScript application nested into the static HTML page fetches outputs from a server.

Currently, among the sites using AJAX is FIRE (fire.eun.org), EUN Federation of Internet Resources for Education. It is used to access and search learning resources in the repository. “Ajax allows us to display incoming results without reloading the page. Thus making the application more user friendly,” said Sylvia Hartinger, a developer in the EUN office. “Instead of recalculating and resending the whole dynamic page, the refreshed part can be added on the fly using AJAX. ”

Other sites using the tool include the Quality Foundation portal (www.qualityfoundation.org) and the project section of the Calibrate portal (calibrate.eun.org) for which Ajax increases user friendliness upon registration and editing of user profile

Sites:
http://insight.eun.org
http://www.qualityfoundation.org
http://calibrate.eun.org


]]> http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2006/02/ajax_brings_new_functionalitie.html http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2006/02/ajax_brings_new_functionalitie.html IT news Sun, 26 Feb 2006 10:44:38 +0100 Microsoft gives you a look to the future and it looks (too much) fun Yesterday's evening I decided I wanted to know what the future of 'the digital decade' world will look like and I turned to Bill Gates' 1h30-long presentation at the CES on 4 January 2005 in Dallas.

Well, from the presentation I can tell the future looks like a lot of fun, but not a lot of work!

I might sound completely nerdy here but isn't the future of PC and software to improve productivity, facilitate work and finally get that cure for cancer?

To sum up, over hour and a half presentation, Bill and his friends watched two movies (Hitch, the Aviator), listened to 10,000 songs thanks to Media Center (I won't list them but they had Justin Timberlake on stage), recorded some TV programmes, played one video game - Flight Simulator, hammered the benefits of the new Xbox, chatted on the internet with his 'buddies' etc…

]]> http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2006/02/microsoft_gives_you_a_look_to_1.html http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2006/02/microsoft_gives_you_a_look_to_1.html IT news Fri, 03 Feb 2006 15:29:41 +0100 Engage Wardrive Scottie! Throughout the underground internet the last few months, everyone has been whispering the same magic word: ‘wardrive’. No, not warp-drive, like in the Star-Trek series, the ‘engine’ that allows to travel faster than the speed of light. Wardrive.

]]> http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2006/01/engage_wardrive_scottie.html http://blog.eun.org/drizzdo/2006/01/engage_wardrive_scottie.html wireless Tue, 03 Jan 2006 17:46:01 +0100