20 Magazines for free

Apple's iPhone user's have access to more content due to a partnership of Apple and Zinio. The trick is that those digital magazines are only made available to iPhone users by checking the User Agent of the browser. All you need to do is to change the User Agent in your browser to the Phone that is used by the iPhone and then access the magazine, which include Technology Review, Macworld, Lonely Planet and ... Playboy and Penthouse.
Firefox users can install the User Agent Switcher add-on and configure it with the following User Agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States)

If you have done this, just visit the Zinio iPhone page: http://imgs.zinio.com/iphone/

Reference

• http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/27/read-20-digital-magazines-for-free/

Microsoft Research Report on IM usage

Microsoft Research just released a very interesting research report "Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network" on the usage of Instant Messenger Usage. The anonymized study analyzed 30 billion conversations among 240 million people, from which a communication graph with 130 million nodes and 1.3 billion undirected edges has been constructed. The data for the analyzed dataset was gathered within 30 days in June 2006 and includes three main data sets:

1. user demographic information
2. time and user stamped events describing the presence of a particular user
3. communication session logs

which have been used to conduct the analysis.

Reference

• Microsoft Research Publications

How about voiceless communication?

This is mind freaking cool! At the moment only 150 different words and phrases are recognized. But what I found more interesting is the vision from Michael Callahan presented at the end of the talk. He wants together the voiceless speech recogization with a internet search, where someone on the road just "thinks" something he/she would need and got the answer from a search engine.

What to choose for developing a Rich Internet Application?

Lately I became very interested in the different choices for developing Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Although I followed the different announces of the various technologies I didn't put much effort in having a big picture of the different approaches. As I am now looking for some stable development libraries and frameworks for rich user interfaces I put together a short overview of the various options.

Adobe Acrobat Organizer & Firefox SessionSaver

I'm not sure how you use Adobe Acrobat in your daily work, but usually I have several pdf documents opened at the same time. I really got annoyed lately, because I couldn't find a way to save all opened files when closing Acrobat. The reason is that when I'm working on a document I have several pdf documents opened to read and quote them. But when I need to start another task other than writing, I close every window and application that is not necessary for that specific task. But later, when coming back to the writing task, I really would like to have everything open again to continue where I stopped. So I ask some colleagues for a solution, but no one had one.
Finally I found the organizer, which I hadn't notice in Acrobat. And there you go. There is a history of files that you opened and you are able to create your own collections. So the easiest way to save all opened files is to go in the history panel, select today and drag and drop the open files in a custom collection of your choice. I named my "last opened". If you later open Acrobat again you just need to open all files in the "last opened" collection and delete the links in the collection.

The same thing applies to Firefox. I have tons of tabs opened while working, but would like to save all these tabs, when closing firefox. I even used to restore feature from firefox quite often to save my tabs. I killed the firefox process with the task manager. When firefox is started again it asks to start with a fresh session are restore the old session with all tabs. Thats a bit awkward, but it worked. But luckily there is a Firefox extensions called "SessionManager" that does exactly that and saves your last session. It opens up firefox with all tabs that you had opened in your last session. That really helped to improve my productivity.