I am reading with interest accounts of Mount St. Helen’s eruption yesterday (photo of eruption). In 1980 when it erupted, I was nearby in the following week. I visited Moscow, Idaho, and the ground was covered in volcanic ash several inches thick. It looked like it had snowed.

It is good to see that they have increased the use of technology to monitor activity around the volcano so as to minimize risk of injury and death. An October 2004 C|Net article explains how remote cameras, sensors and GPS units constantly monitor to volcano to follow what is going on.

When I left the area in 1980, I packed up several large zip lock baggies of the ash to bring it back for friends and a college science teacher. Imagine the difficulties I had at the airport as a long haired college kid going through the security x-ray when four or five zip lock baggies of white powdery substance shows up. Of course after some explanation they offered to give me more of the stuff and I got on the plane.

Today Microsoft launched Microsoft® Office real-time collaboration solutions with a dog and pony show led by Bill Gate’s himself. In a connection featuring Mark Burnett, creator of “The Apprentice” reality show hosted by Donald Trump, Gates demonstrated his software. They expect to roll out three primary products in the coming months:

Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 (previously code-named “Istanbul”) that is claimed to “unif[y] real-time communications modes — such as IM, voice, video and access to voiceconferencing and Web conferencing — into a single application. It also enables PC-to-phone integration”,

Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 Service Pack, an update to the existing communications platform, and

Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2005, touted as a major update to the existing net meeting software.

This article is funny. The guy goes to great lengths to get a PDF document. It is easy, just download a copy of OpenOffice.org and export as PDF, (OpenOffice.org is a free Open Source office suite for Windows and Linux and performs and looks much like other office suites including a Word processor, spreadsheet, drawing program and presentation software that is compatible with Microsoft Office file formats).

Speaking of OpenOffice.org, they have just released the 2.0 Beta which we will be reviewing shortly.

After beta release and success, Google released today the 1.0 version of Desktop Search. According to the Google Press Release on Desktop 1.0 The new Desktop is greatly enhanced from the original version. It will search the entire text of a pdf document, meta information from images, video and music, support for Firefox, Netscrape Browser, Thunderbird etc. It has the ability to search your visited web pages and even many deleted documents (the text with cached snapshots).

Parents might like Desktops ability to search instant messages. However be forwarned, it takes up 500 megabytes of space. You can find out more and get a copy at http://desktop.google.com.

US Department of Justice crosses border to purchase 50,000 copies of WordPerfect 12 worth 13 million dollars from Canadian based Corel Software.

While I enjoy the irony in the DOJ going Canadian, in fact Corel was taken private by Vector Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. So perhaps I should not chuckle too long.

Corel also aquired Paint Shop Pro last year, one of my favorite programs, so I guess they must be okay.

Blogger Mark Jen, fired from Google for blogging (and no doubt smarter for the experience) has landed a new job. Read all about it over at 99 zeros. I don’t doubt he is grateful to Google for advancing his career.

The European Union has recently rejected proposed patent legislation. Unfortunately, it may now pass when read in Parliment today, according to Reuters.uk. That article reports that Polish representatives in the EU, who previously objected to the proposed bill and thus energized others to voice opposition, is expected to remain silent. Passage of the EU patent legislation would be considered a win for large companies that try to patent all sorts of trivial things, acording to some pundits. Contrary it would be somewhat of a blow to open source as some things otherwise available to them may be foreclosed from use due to patents.