brightonbeachbid.org

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CNET Networks)

Make a WordPress theme quickly and with zero coding experience necessary with this free tool.

Here’s an oldie but a goodie. Confounded by trying to track down fancy-looking WordPress themes? Check out this Web-based theme editor that lets you tweak every nook and cranny of a theme then spit it back to your server to go live. You can add columns,A Lange and Sohne Watches, change fonts and backgrounds,Gucci Watches, even throw in a customizable tag cloud–all with no coding experience required. All you need is a little creativity and some working knowledge of drop-down menus.

While some WordPress themes have excellent built-in support for doing this right from the WordPress dashboard,LONGINES Watches, many more don’t, and trying to figure out all the little things like text color is made far easier with a WYSIWYG editor than with WordPress’ built-in editing tools.

Advanced users can throw in graphics or design elements they’ve hosted elsewhere on their server (as long as it’s got a URL to link up to), and when all is said and done each bit of the theme can be grabbed as an individual file to whatever theme you’re currently using. This is an easy way to try out new fonts and colors without making a mess out of your existing style.css file.

One guy admits, “I was a normal human being until I was thirty five years old.” and then he found hi-fi, and he’s been obsessed ever since. It’s all about a love affair with exotic gear, sound, and yes, music.

Full video after the jump.

Some guys are into
cars, some gamble, or blow the budget on high-end kitchens. Me, I’m an audiophile. I’ve met a lot of really intense tech geeks over the years, but this masterful YouTube video by Ken Barnes takes it to the extreme. The members of The Audiophile Club of Athens show off their stuff. It’s a truly gorgeous video, lavishly produced and the short interviews are well done.

But the sad thing is [Sun's] failure to build a community around it, getting other people involved. And that’s tied to Sun owning OpenOffice.org. It’s a Sun project. They own all of the code, they demand ownership rights, and that just really retards developer interest. I mean: [Who] would want to work cleaning someone else’s gun?

Discovered through LinuxToday.

It’s time to open it up.

commentary

This isn’t just a Sun problem. Michael’s comment speaks to a much broader problem as more and more open source goes corporate: How do you encourage development as a corporation?

I think one of the sad things we see at the moment is the decreasing amount of interest in investing in OpenOffice.org. So we see Sun cutting back their developer count on OpenOffice.org, while we still see them demand ownership for all of the code, which kinda retards other people investing in it….

OpenOffice.org (download for Windows | Mac) has a range of problems: Monolithic architecture, declining interest in fat-client software, etc. But it’s primary problem may be its corporate ownership, as Michael Meeks, long-time OpenOffice developer and Novell employee, notes:

This is much easier for non-profits like the Linux Foundation, Mozilla, Eclipse, etc., even when the contributors are overwhelmingly corporate in nature. It’s more palatable to contribute to a community than a company.

Yes, companies do receive contributions, but they tend to come from partners and customers, and not as much from the organic, unaffiliated community. Is this a bad thing?

I’m not sure it matters. That’s just the way it is. But I understand Michael’s point, and think that OpenOffice.org is not strategic enough to Sun to justify keeping it under its corporate guidance any longer. It needs to be given a foundation’s guidance, and a foundation’s ability to attract outside development. OpenOffice.org has largely been an effort between Sun and Novell for too long.

Using other fabrication facilities could mean Aptina wouldn’t have to compete with other Micron manufacturing priorities, and other companies have expertise. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, for example, builds sensors for Kodak and made a cutting-edge sensor prototype developed by Stanford researcher Keith Fife.

The approach is reminiscent of buying processed food rather than raw ingredients in grocery stories, a practice that can be convenient for buyers but that also boosts profit margins for suppliers. Thomas preferred to express the idea as “adding more value to the complete value chain.”

“We’re going to provide 1.4-micron pixels that are equal to if not greater (in quality) to 1.75 micron pixels. And 1.75 is better than 2.2,” Thomas said. “Clearly, if you just shrink the pixel and you don’t make enhancements to the other stuff around it, you’re not going to get what you want. We’re absolutely focusing on more than just shrinking the pixel.”

The sensor itself has VGA resolution–640×480 pixels–and its dimensions are the teensy 1/11 format, Thomas said. The camera modules will be shipping in samples in the second quarter and will be in production “shortly thereafter,” Thomas said.

For example, Aptina will have a dedicated sales force and get new options for finding manufacturing capacity to build its products, Thomas said. “We’re able to respond more quickly to our customers’ needs.”

And Aptina has a new chip using the process, a 9-megapixel model of the “1/2.3″ format that’s very common in compact cameras.

Aptina Imaging now can assemble image sensors, lenses, and other components into a camera phone package. The integration happens earlier in the manufacturing process, when the sensors are still part of their silicon wafer, than is typical today.

Teensy cell phone cameras–now prepackaged
On the mobile-phone side of the business, Aptina announced a significant development, a much greater degree of integration that means the manufacturing fab will produce not just image sensors but full-fledged camera modules. Lenses and other components are attached directly to the silicon wafer, and mobile-phone manufacturers can buy the whole module instead of just the sensor from one company and other components from another.

The company also said its first chips using 1.4-micron pixels will be in production this summer. And it’s begun making engineering samples of chips with 1.2-micron pixels that will be on sale in 2009.

(Credit:
Micron)

Most significant in the near term is a refinement of the company’s existing process for sensors whose pixels measure 1.75 microns (millionths of a meter) across. The new version improves quantum efficiency (the ability to detect small amounts of light), fill factor (the amount of the pixel that’s devoted to capturing light rather than electronics), and dark current (electronic noise that occurs even when there’s no actual light to generate a signal in the sensor).

(Credit:
Micron)

New products, but are smaller pixels better?
Aptina also has several new product developments for its image sensors.

The new subsidiary is based in San Jose, Calif., a Silicon Valley location that’s a long way from Micron’s Boise, Idaho, headquarters. It will employ several hundred of Micron’s 19,000 employees, Micron said.

Memory chipmaker Micron Technology has launched its image-sensor business as a more independent division called Aptina Imaging, a move the company believes will improve its flexibility and business potential.

“We’re always open to exploring other options for our business, but we’re not commenting beyond that,” spokeswoman Kirstin Bordner said about the possibility of a spin-off.

Aptina Imaging's new logo

Making pixels smaller means more can be put on a single chip of a fixed size, or more smaller, cheaper chips can be used to reach a certain megapixel count. But there’s a possible penalty: smaller pixels can produce more image noise. Bucking the trend, Nikon’s new D3 SLR has comparatively gargantuan 8.45-micron pixels and works well in low-light conditions even at a sensitivity setting of ISO 6,400.

Thomas said Micron is making sure image quality is level or better as it goes to smaller pixels, though.

The camera package measures just 4×4x2.5mm–a significant notch smaller than conventional phone packages. Aptina hopes this means it will be adopted in the hundreds of millions of low-end phones sold today that still don’t have cameras.

Thomas wouldn’t comment on two interesting business possibilities, however: whether Micron might be packaging Aptina for sale or spin-off and whether Aptina might use other fabrication facilities besides Micron’s.

Aptina Imaging's camera module, shown in front, back, and side views to the upper left, measures 4×4x.2.5mm. A conventional phone camera module is at the lower right.

“We need the additional flexibility and identity to be able to grow the way the markets we see are growing,” said Shane Thomas, director of product marketing for the imaging business.

(Credit:
Micron)

In addition, photographs of the house appear on the county’s Web site, as well as the assessed value of Aaron and Christine Boring’s home and the lot size.

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Looking at the turnoff to Pittsburgh’s Oakridge Lane on Google Street View, though, shows a street sign but no obvious private road warning–meaning that, perhaps, any sign didn’t exist when the Google van drove by.

The lawsuit, filed in Allegheny County court on April 2, claims there was a private road sign on their street that Google should have honored. It claims that Google’s “reckless conduct” has “exposed plaintiff’s private information to the public.”

In general, of course, photographs taken of homes from the public street (or the air) are perfectly legal and protected by the First Amendment’s freedom of the press. Barbra Streisand learned this when she sued a California aerial-mapping site–but was forced instead to write a check to the defendants for $177,107.54 in legal fees and court costs. I wouldn’t be too surprised if this lawsuit turns out much the same way.

A Pittsburgh couple is suing Google because photographs of their home are appearing on the company’s street view service.

In other appointments, Tim Shaughnessy, vice president and controller, will become senior vice president of Services Delivery, and Jim Kavanaugh will become IBM’s Controller. Jon Iwata, senior vice president of Communications, will add marketing to his responsibilities on July 1, and Bruce Harreld, currently senior vice of IBM Marketing & Strategy, will become senior vice president of Strategy. Both will report to Palmisano. Iwata has been at IBM since 1984 and Harreld since 1995.

Nick Donofrio, executive vice president of Innovation and Technology and a 44-year veteran of Big Blue, is retiring on October 1, 2008. He will not be replaced directly, Palmisano said, but John Kelly, senior vice president of IBM Research, and Linda Sanford, senior vice president of IBM enterprise on demand transformation, will now report to the CEO.

(Credit:
IBM)

Bill Zeitler, senior vice president and group executive of the Systems and Technology Group, will retire August 1. He spent 39 years as an IBM employee and launched the AS/400. He will be replaced by Bob Moffat, currently senior vice president of Integrated Operations and a 30-year IBMer.

Nicholas M. Donofrio

IBM CEO Sam Palmisano announced a series of retirements and appointments among his executive staff. It continues IBM’s tradition of promoting from within.

This changed in 2005 when Oracle acquired its way into identity management with the purchase of Oblix and Thor Technologies. Even with these acquisitions, many industry watchers never thought that Oracle could buy its way into the market and weave disparate products into an integrated suite.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Oracle dabbled in the identity space with database access controls and a network directory. But it really wasn’t considered a player in this space.

• Identity management is a business–not an IT–initiative. Back in the 1990s, identity management was all about technology tools to manage user provisioning and security. Now it’s about mapping employees and outsiders to business processes, managing user roles, and meeting regulatory compliance mandates. When identity management evolved from a set of IT tools to a business application, deal sizes skyrocketed.

• Identity management projects can be huge. Identity management is like ERP in that it means years of process definition, role creation, custom development, and systems integration. This is right up Oracle’s alley.

Once again, common wisdom was completely wrong. While others struggle or abandon this space, Oracle has vaulted to a leadership position. In fact, my sources tell me they see Oracle in every large deal these days. The fact is that Oracle saw the identity management space as strategic and invested accordingly to become a market leader because:

Oracle isn’t alone in this space. IBM still kills it on product and services. Identity is one of CA’s healthiest businesses. Novell has great technology, and Microsoft is a sleeping giant. These guys won’t lie down, but Oracle went from nowhere to become a market leader in three years. That won’t change in the future.

• Identity management is middleware. Oracle wants to own identity middleware just like it wants to own application integration middleware. Identity is the glue between users, applications, and distributed systems.

That’s actually well short of what Kryder’s Law predicts–if hard drive capacity continues to double every year, then the hard drives of 2015 should be 128 times larger than today’s. So the IBM researchers’ claims of up to 100x capacity, while impressive, are not particularly surprising given the trends of the past decade. According to my calculations, 100x would mean the biggest iPod would have a 16,000 GB hard drive, which would be enough to hold more than four million songs at the current advertised compression rates. Or if you assume that Apple’s lossless codec compresses the typical song to about 25MB, it could hold about 650,000 songs–with no loss in audio quality.

IBM researchers have reportedly demonstrated technology that will increase hard drive capacity 100-fold, as well as offer major improvements in energy consumption (leading to much longer battery life) and better reliability. Production is estimated in seven to ten years.

(Credit:
Apple)

Today’s
iPod lineup contains no product advertised to hold 5,000 songs, so I’m not sure where the 500,000 figure came from. In fact, the current highest-capacity iPod is 160GB, and is advertised as being able to hold 40,000 songs. So this shorthand would imply a hard drive size of just under 2TB–only 12.5 times bigger than today’s largest iPod.

Of course, few people would use a portable hard drive of that size solely to store music–movies, games, and applications will probably take up most of that space. Still the idea that we’ll be carrying terabytes of data in our pocket in a few short years explains why Apple, Microsoft, Google, and the rest of the industry are focusing so much attention on mobile computing.

The reports summarizing the researchers’ findings, which were published in Science (subscription required), use the shorthand “500,000 songs on a portable MP3 player” to describe the advance.

In seven years, we'll be measuring hard drive capacity for portable devices in terabytes.

At that point, service will determine who wins the most customers and operational efficiency will determine who profits most from them. The former will be increasingly influenced by those vendors who make “software” easy to use. The latter will be influenced by those who quickly learn to manage scale through tools like Reductive Labs’ Puppet, Amazon’s EC2, etc.

Although SaaS development platforms like SalesForce and Coghead have gotten a lot of attention, this market has so far been remarkably closed and proprietary. The Platform as a Service leader, SalesForce, has both a draconian hosting policy (host your apps and data anywhere, as long as it’s with us!) but also a proprietary language (who needs Java when you’ve got Apex!?).

Disclosure: I am an advisor to Bungee Labs.

In all the hype around Software as a Service (SaaS) as a way to bring down prices and drive value to the customer, one thing is conveniently overlooked: SaaS is the ultimate lock-in platform.

commentary

Google already has open-source Gears, and is also increasingly opening up its App Engine. Over time, Google will determine this market, and its stance is increasingly open. Open source, open APIs, and open data.

Who will drive this move to open? Well, Chris clearly feels that his company, Wavemaker, will be among them (though I have money on Bungee Labs to help fuel this move, as well: Bungee is not nearly as closed as Chris’ post would suggest). But the real driver of this will be Google.

As Chris Keene, CEO of Wavemaker, suggests, however, SaaS may well succumb to the same forces that are driving software to open up:

Moving forward, the same trends driving open source adoption everywhere else in the industry will ultimately drive SaaS adoption of open source, particularly by ISVs whose business plan does not include a low multiple sale to their proprietary hosting provider. Future SaaS platforms will converge with traditional tools, offering on-demand development based on traditional programming languages with built-in tools for mash-up based development for basic users.

(Credit:
Gamespot)

After the job the original Crysis did on even high-end gaming PCs, it didn’t surprise us when we heard from PC vendors requesting that we adopt the supposedly optimized, more forgiving Crysis: Warhead as a high-end gaming test. We’ve also heard from EA that it recognizes the problem for testers and that a solution could be forthcoming. In the meantime, we’ll be scouting for other new games that aren’t quite as high maintenance. Far Cry 2, we’re looking at you.

Our hopes and dreams, as represented by Crysis: Warhead.

We’ve negotiated frustrating Windows DRM in the past, but our PC testing efforts have never been thwarted by an individual gaming title. Our problem is that in order to use an application as a system test, we need to install it on every PC that comes through CNET Labs. As much as we’d like to stay current and adopt a Crysis: Warhead benchmark, we can’t take the chance that on the sixth, twelfth, or eighteenth system some random EA customer service rep will deny our reactivation request.

Spore isn’t the only new PC game from Electronic Arts to come with a frustrating DRM scheme. Crysis: Warhead, the follow-up to last year’s Crysis, has a similar five-install limit. We know PC gamers hate DRM, and you’ve certainly not been shy about making your complaints known. As gamers ourselves, we share your outrage. We’re also feeling the pain as reviewers.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

(Credit:
Microsoft)

After the change of settings, the missing menu options appeared on the Office button menu. I was able to transfer a Word 2003 template from my XP machine to Word 2007 on the Vista machine in just a few seconds. And it was just as quick and simple to place an Excel 2007 worksheet into the workspace I created, and download it from there to Excel 2003 on the XP system.

Uncheck options in the Windows Live installer to avoid downloading programs you don’t want or need.

Unfortunately, getting the options in place on my Vista PC required a separate download, a tweak to my Office 2007 settings, and a couple of restarts. The separate download wasn’t so bad, but my Office 2007 security settings prevented the add-in from running. First, I had to change my Add-ins settings in Word 2007 (click the Office button > Word Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Add-Ins > Require Application Add-ins to be signed by Trusted Publisher > OK > OK). Then I had to select “Enable all code published by this publisher” in the pop-up window that appeared after I clicked the warning at the top of the document window when I next opened a file in Word. That’s a lot of running around just to get two Microsoft products to work together as they’re designed to.

Tomorrow: keep the junk out of your Outlook inbox.

Once I got used to what the service isn’t–it isn’t a way to actually work on the files in a browser–I came to appreciate how easy the service makes it to save Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on the Web, and open them in their original app on any PC with an Internet link.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

I decided to start from scratch by creating a new Windows Live account rather than using my existing Hotmail account. Signing up for the account was a breeze, though I opted out of most of the options the installer presented. For example, I had no interest in downloading Messenger, the Windows Live Toolbar (my browser’s cluttered enough already), or anything having to do with OneCare, which single-handedly destroyed my home network when I tried out the beta last summer. Be sure to uncheck the option to make MSN your home page, and you may want to avoid sending Microsoft any more data than the company already helps itself to.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

The biggest downside is how difficult it is to get the service working on a Vista machine running Office 2007. I was uploading and downloading Office 2003 documents on my XP machine in just a few minutes, but I had to jump through a series of hoops to do the same in their Office 2007 equivalents on my newer Vista PC.

In Office 2007 you open files from your workspace or add them to a workspace by clicking the Office button, choosing either Open from Office Live or Save to Office Live, and selecting the workspace in the window on the right.

Open files from or save them to your Office Live Workspace from within Office 2007 apps via these menu options.

The utility adds a toolbar to Office XP and 2003, and new items on the Office button menu in Office 2007. To open a file from your workspace in Word 2003, Excel 2003, or PowerPoint 2003, click the down arrow to the right of the toolbar’s Open button, and choose the workspace from the list that appears. Likewise, you can save the file you’re working on in one of those three programs to your workspace by clicking the down arrow to the right of the Save button and selecting the workspace you want to add it to.

Choose the down arrow to the right of the Save button on the Office Live Add-in toolbar to place a copy of the file on your workspace.

Choose Enable all code published by this publisher to allow the Office Live Add-in to work with Office 2007 apps.

I spent Wednesday afternoon getting to know Microsoft’s new Office Live Workspace, a free service that lets you store Office files online for easy access and sharing.

Among the workspace templates Microsoft provides are ones geared to students (”Class”, “Essay”, “School,” and “Study”), business (”Job Search”, “Meeting,” and “Project”), and special subjects (”Event” “Household”, “Sports,” and “Travel”). Even with all these workspace options, there’s not much you can do with the files in your browser besides read them or copy material from them for pasting elsewhere. You can add comments to the file, and you can view its history in the Activity pane on the right side of the screen. That’s about it.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Adjust your workspace by mousing over its name in the left pane and choosing an option from the popup menu.

To share the file, click the Share button, choose Share Workspace, and enter the e-mail addresses of people who you want to let edit or view the file. The Share Screen option requires the Microsoft SharedView beta, which I didn’t test. The program is designed to let you share your desktop or application with the people you invite. I may try it when the need arises to collaborate with someone on a file in real time.

Most people share files by attaching them to e-mail. Office Live Workspace is a small step up from this technique by providing rudimentary versioning, though you still do all your work in a desktop app. For now I’ll be satisfied with what the service is–a file-sharing freebie–rather than fret about what it isn’t–a Google Docs-type online word processor/spreadsheet/presentation program.

Once the Windows Live installation completed, it took just a few more clicks to get started with Office Live Workspace. You’re prompted to give the generic workspace a name and description, which you can change later simply by mousing over the name in the left pane and choosing one of the options that appears.

Of course, there’s not much you can do with the service until you get some files uploaded. You can add files from inside the workspace one at a time or in batches, though the batch approach uses an ActiveX control, and thus requires Internet Explorer 6 or higher. Since I normally use
Firefox (and had used that browser to create the workspace), switching to IE just to upload a bunch of files at once would have been a major inconvenience. Still, I never intended to use this method to add files to the workspace. Instead, I downloaded the Office Live Add-in, which lets you upload files to and download them from the workspace directly inside Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.