Last week the New York Times Technology section had a brief “Q&A” about mobile websites and pointed to my mobile website list as a good starting point. My neighbor who gets the Times delivered noticed it and was the first to let me know. I got a decent bump in traffic for the blog last week, so hopefully I’ll pick up a few new readers as a result!
In addition to the DC-10 air tanker that’s been getting a lot of press, we also have a new NASA drone aircraft called Ikhana helping out with California wildfires by using advanced thermal-infrared imagery to give firefighters a more accurate picture of fire activity on the ground. Today’s Mercury News reports: Ikhana, NASA’s pilotless aircraft, flew over the 47,000-acre Lick fire for the first time, transmitting images and information to firefighters below as they battled the blaze into Saturday evening. “They used that to facilitate their planning for the day’s firefighting,” said Vince Ambrosio, NASA Ames’s principal investigator on the…
This morning, the front page of the San Jose Mercury News included this disturbing story: Unopened rebate requests found in San Jose dumpster. Tech writer Dean Takahashi writes: … I am staring at more than 1,300 rebate requests sent to Vastech on Bonaventura Drive in San Jose. The envelopes were tossed – unopened – into a garbage dumpster near Vastech. I have two boxes of envelopes that were thrown out without being processed. In all of my years of reporting, I have never encountered such outrageous behavior against consumers. The proliferation of rebates clearly favors retailers and manufacturers, with consumers…
Big news at Yahoo HQ today! (No, it’s not the global rollout of the new Yahoo! Mail.) After 3 1/2 years on the Messenger team, I’ve moved to the Platform Engineering team, managing the integration/solutions engineering team. It’s a small team now, but will be growing. Coincident with joining this team, we all moved into a new bullpen cube arrangement. No network connections yet, but at least all my stuff made it over safely.
If you are a Windows developer or serious user at any level, you must check out Scott Hanselman’s Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List. I counted almost 600 links coming out of that post! Some are only useful for .NET developers, but there are a ton of goodies in there worth checking out. Most are free or really low cost.