Apple sued over iTunes interface | CNET News.com

Apple sued over iTunes interface CNET News.com

Sun does Jabber/XMPP

Jabber/XMPP ? Well I'm sure you already read something about instant messaging (IM for short), the next big thing after e-mail some people say. IM gives you the ability to see which one of your friends/buddies are online (present), if they are, you can send them a message which they can read instantly.

XMPP is a Message and Presence Protocol which is based on XML. So all the messages you send to your friends are encoded into XML, but as a user you won't notice this. It's even so flexible that developers can create their own XML messages, which their IM clients have to recognize of course. At this very moment I work on a research project for communicating through a TV set (STB) which uses this XMPP protocol to see which buddies are currently watching TV, what they are watching, you could even send emoticons to each other which will be displayed on the TV screen of your buddy.

So now also Sun is using it in their instant messaging software.

Muskrats are delicious

Have you ever eaten a rat ? Well neither have I, but be carefull when you have friends of family working in a Copenhagen zoo, they might serve you rat when you stay over for dinner.

Zookeepers find muskrats delectable - Yahoo! News

Roadcasting

A couple of months ago I was having a car-2-car brainstorm with a couple of my colleagues. At some moment in time we came up with an idea that you could tune in to cars around you and that you could listen to their music or even have a chat with the car's driver. It stopped for us as a nice idea, but today I came across this Roadcasting web site.

Roadcasting is exactly about what we were thinking about then, except that they just implemented the music part. Maybe I'll take a look at their source code and add the chit-chat part myself.

I'll keep you all posted !

Google Code: Summer of Code

Google has come up with a great initiative called Summer of Code. The aim of this initiative is to introduce students to the world of Open Software development.

And that writing open software isn't always for free (isn't it Erich Gamma), Google awards each student with $4500 who successfully completes an open source project.

So if you're interested go to the Summer of Code web site.