Google Israel – Where Art Thou in the Development Community?

I know that Google‘s original Googleplex at Mountain View is very active for non googlers. There are frequent open lectures there and they host a bunch of other things like Summer of Code (well, not always host, but sponsor and make sure people know about it) and Google Developer Day (which is happening at 10 different locations worldwide, but NOT in Israel).

I know there are suppose to be two development centers in Israel, one in Haifa (which I know is located in MATAM cause you can see it from road #2 leading from Tel Aviv to Haifa near Intel and Microsoft Haifa) but I have no idea where the other development center in Israel is located, other than the fact that its suppose to be in the Tel Aviv area.

[Read More]

Nokia E61 Change Language Keys Combination

I own a Nokia E61 phone which I’m very happy with (leave aside the PC Suite backup problem my wife had when she upgraded to an E61 as well).

Even though I’m an Israeli I use its English interface because it’s less buggy and because most of the things I do with the phone (Emails and such) are usually in English, but from time to time I do need the occasional SMS in Hebrew.

[Read More]

Yedda Twitter .NET / C# Library

This is a bit of shameless promotion but I think it’s worthwhile never the less :-)

One of the things I did lately on my day job (Yedda) was to integrate it with Twitter (check the integration here and add Yedda as your friend!).

Yedda is all about sharing and us sharing things like code with the rest of the world is no exception.

So, without further due, I’m proud to present the Yedda Twitter .NET / C# Library (you will see that it’s more of wrapper than a library… really ;-) ). The post about it in our Dev Blog is here and the details, source and binary are here.

[Read More]

Corporate Identity and Identity Issues

There is a lot of buzz about Sun’s announcement of OpenID support and the fact that Sun will be giving OpenIDs for all of its employees.

While this is indeed good news for the identity community in general and for the OpenID community specifically, it got me thinking about the implications for such a move in which a big company OpenID enables all of its employee.

If a company OpenID enables all of its employees and its OpenID server is usable for outside parties to authenticate against it means that now every employee of that company, when authenticating with his/her OpenID can be verified as an employee of that company (providing that no one spoofs the domain and DNS settings, etc).

[Read More]

Bi-Wiring is Cool

I just moved to a new apartment and when I started to setup my home theater system again I’ve decided to use Bi-Wiring for my front speakers.

My front speakers support this and up until now had a bridge connecting the elements of my speaker. I removed the bridge and ran cables to each part.

While the Wikipedia article states that from an electrical point of view there is no difference when you bi-wire or not, I did notice a difference in the sound which might stem from the very small changes in resistance which theoretically exists since the system has changed a bit.

[Read More]

Feisty Fawn – Works as advertised

Whenever a new version of Ubuntu comes out I download the CD, run it in LiveCD mode and see if my Laptop (Thinkpad T43) works with everything included (video card – ATI, sound, Wireless card the Intel a/b/g wireless thingy) and succeeds in connecting to my home wireless network (using WPA2 encryption).

Previous versions usually missed either in the wireless card or the WPA (or it was really cumbersome to configure WPA).

[Read More]

The new and slick myOpenID.com

I’m probably the last person to talk about it, by myOpenID.com has a cool and slick new design [via Scott’s blog].

They also added a cool new feature, client side certificate, so when you install such a certificate on your machine you don’t need to do anything to sign in. It does all that for you!

Just remember to NOT use it on public computers or on computers that are being used by more than one person and do not have a different user names for each person.

[Read More]

Forgive me Outlook for I have sinned (not)

Forgive me Outlook for I have sinned.

I have been using you as one of the primary communication tools that I have form your very first days. I have stayed within the 2Gb PST file limits but when I was told that Outlook 2003 can hold up to 20Gb I have rejoiced, joyed and thanked you for your kindness.

I still dreaded the old 2Gb limitation but decide to look forward for a better future. I therefore installed Outlook 2007 blindfold as I have known that each version of Outlook brings it’s own bliss and helpfulness to the world.

[Read More]

Google Apps for Your Domain and Gmail Mail Applet for Nokia phones

I own a Nokia E61 cell phone. A nice phone all in all (aside from the backup problems my wife encountered).

Gmail has this cool little applet that lets me access my Gmail account in a nicer (and better cached) way from my cell phone. It’s a really nice program and I use it quite often.

It has one problem though. If you host your own domain through Google Apps for Your Domain to get the Gmail like interface for your Emails you cannot use this program.

[Read More]

Crawling to the people

Yaniv let the cat out of the bag about some of our ideas for making other parts of the search and its relevant data open, free and accessible to all of us.

I’d thought I’ll add some background and my thoughts on the subject.

First, the idea was iterated a couple of times when we were in that place where you have a solution(s) and you are seeking a problem(s) to solve.

[Read More]