A great read if you write or promote websites.
Google search.  Details how Google tune their search engine to remove trash sites and improve result quality.

It seems pretty certain that our future is going to involve mobile internet devices if it doesn’t already. By that I mean tablets and smart phones. We already have phones with resolutions higher than the 800×600 that I used to code for back a few years, (the new Google Galaxy Nexus has 1280×720 resolution). Between Apple and Google, about a million of these devices is sold a day now, so if you are not already testing your site/webapps at smart phone resolutions, you’d best be starting.

Anyway, all that aside, I’ve been reading about how Steve Jobs from Apple was determined to destroy Google Android Linux because he viewed it as stolen product. He was also prepared to blow all of Apple’s money and kill himself to do it.
So I started wondering. What in Android was stolen product from Apple?
* Was iPhone the first touch screen phone? (Nope, IBM Simon did that in 94.) There were others too, like the Motorola Accompli 008.
* Was multitasking what Google stole from Apple? (Nope, the first Iphones had no multi tasking and it was added in much later than Androids arrival which had it from the start.)
* Was iPhone the first B/G/N wireless connected phone? (Nope, this Accton page shows they were already selling Mobile wireless chips in 2006 and PDA’s with wireless were already about.)
* Was iPhone the first phone with a browser? (Nope, that happened in 1997.)
* Was iPhone the first phone with an icon based layout? (Nope, lots of phones were doing that before the iphone)
* Was iPhone the first camera phone? (Nope, Phillipe Kahn did that back in 97)
* Was iPhone the first music playing phone? (Nope, that one goes to Samsung back in 1999)
* Was iPhone the first GPS phone? (Nope, people were doing that back in 1999.)
So, what did Apple “invent” that was so ground breaking? Pinch to zoom maybe? because it seems to me that all they did was combine the functionality of a touch screen PDA with a GSM phone. And they were not the first to do that either.

So, the “invention” that Apple made that was so worth defending, was actually taking everyone else’s ACTUAL inventions, and putting them in one device and marketing it really really well.
Doesn’t seem revolutionary enough to blow 40billion dollars trying to defend though, because if you removed all the shoulders that Apple were standing on to make the iphone, you’d be standing on the ground holding a Nokia candy bar phone from the 90’s.

Steve Jobs said he’d fight to his dying breath to destroy Android, and in the end he did exactly that. He is dead and Android has never been bigger than it is today. The shame is that if he’d innovated instead of litigated he may actually have gone down in history as an real inventor rather than just a marketing/stylist/CEO guru. As it is, they are no more revolutionary as innovators than Microsoft are, and that is precious little in this persons mind. So guys, forget what everyone else is doing, and concentrate on thinking of new things you could be doing. Then you can call yourself innovative inventors of revolutionary products. (A little humility with regards to mentioning the people who’s innovations you are using wouldn’t go astray either.)

Regardless of which company you give your loyalty, the mobile future is here. If you are not targeting them in your development, you are going to lose customers because this a growth industry that will very likely soon outweigh desktop browsers.

While Franki and I seem to be having a contest to see who can post least frequent on here, my daughters are trying to go in the other direction. They want to win a trip to Greece given away by a tour agency — all they need are votes.

You can vote for them here: http://getonthecontikibus.com/the-short-bus-4. It could be their trip of their lifetime — so far — if enough of you can help them. So what do you say? Takes two seconds to vote.

I can’t tell you how much time I have wasted telling people how to overcome the auto-configure of IMAP in Thunderbird since 3.0. People often want POP3 but cannot get it to install — it locks you into IMAP, or so you thought until you read this article over at http://blogwranglers.com.

That, plus the fix for outgoing Thunderbird email line-wrap issue I recently wrote about, and finally re-finding the “Allow HTML Temp” add on make Thunderbird nearly as functional as it used to be once again. Granted I don’t like the new Allow HTML Temp as much as the old one because it doesn’t offer the three pronged choice of text, safe html or html like it used to. It still allows that functionality because it starts in safe and you need to allow external content to download — it just isn’t as convenient. What it does is turn on html only for the current message and back off again vs using the built in view > message body as > text/simple html/html that then stays on for all messages when you simply wanted it for one message.

In a post over at BlogWranglers (my site that advertises my expertise in moving blogs to wordpress from hubspot and other cms/blogging platforms) I note that Facebook took a step backwards — just like Thunderbird — in my opinion.

I’ve never really liked Facebook all that much anyway — great to find someone, but horrible to carry on any meaningful conversation.

As explained in my post over there, you no longer had “Send Message” available except apparently when your friends are off-line. I use it all the time even when someone is available for chat because it is threaded, has some “history” where you can look back at what was said and is less interruptive in many cases than having a chat might be — you just want to send a message and get a response, not engage in dialog.

I personally believe that Thunderbird has declined in usability with the past few renditions called updates. I like it less today than I did a year ago.

One of my big complaints, wrapped lines in outgoing mail — I don’t want them wrapped, often url links are chopped off, and it’s just not pleasant.

I found a plug-in that worked on a case by case basis — about every third email I send I have to “unwrap”. Not so happy — until tonight!

Here is my salvation:
Tools > Options > Advanced (tab) > Confi Edit (button) > Confirm on Break Warranty Screen 😉 > Filter for “wrap” and change the following two settings by right clicking on them, (a) mail.compose_wrap_to_window_width sett to true, and (b) mail.wrap_long_lines set to false.

At first I also had mailnews_wraplength set to 1022, but in the end I think that is unnecessary as that is for news — I think.

Here is a screenshot of how to disable word wrapping in Thunderbird 3.0.x and above.

It isn’t exactly new news for Linux folks now, but for those that don’t know. SCO’s slander of title claim against Novell has been found in favour of Novell (and Novell have been found to have kept their Unix copyrights). Linux is for now, once again out from under the shadow of legal action. Anyone that delayed deploying Linux for fear of SCO may now go ahead, and anyone who bought one of their licences can now feel very silly and lament the loss of vast sums of money that was wasted.

For the most part, that is show over for SCO. They are going to try to continue by begging the judge to give them the copyrights since the APA said something to the effect of “copyrights as required”.

What SCO are hoping nobody notices, is that “copyrights as required”, intent wise, was referring to the copyrights that might be required in the general daily activities of an actual working Unix business (like oldSCO were for many years before Caldera and Darl Mcbride got involved). NOT the copyrights required by a company who’s only remaining business is trying desperately to find someone to sue for some code somewhere. SCO argued that the “intent” of the APA was more important than the wording. They don’t get to change that now and claim it the other way around. The Intent was never to provide copyrights simply for the purpose of creating a litigation business.

SCO have also said that they will continue to litigate the IBM case where they claimed among other things that IBM put code from Unix that SCO owned the copyright to (though we now know they didn’t) into Linux and thereby made it an awesome competitor that stole Unix’s market share. In 7 years I don’t believe SCO revealed any code they claimed was in Linux that belonged to them that wasn’t almost immediately found to be from free unencumbered sources. Obviously SCO can’t fight this any more since they have been found to not have the copyrights to Unix anyway. Instead they are going to continue on some contract issues. IBM have counter claims as well so it may well be that SCO leaves this world owing IBM some money as well as Novell and dozens of others. Special thanks to Groklaw for making sure that the inconsistancies in both SCO’s public announcements and those of the traditional media were pointed out and corrected thoughout this long saga.