I tried to access my magazine subscriptions on Zinio from the iPhone. It turns out that Zinio has a special website for iPhone users, and the website does display the content in a manner which is suitable for viewing from an iPhone.

But the actual text is horrendous. The displayed text is a compressed bitmapped image, rather than vector based text as in a PDF. This is a problem because once you zoom into the text you start seeing a lot of "noise" surrounding the text, and when you zoom out you don't see the noise, but you don't see the text clearly as well, as shown in the screenshots.

As a general rule, you should only use bitmapped based formats for static displays ie. an image sized at only 1024x780. However if some scaling maybe involved, one should always go for vector based formats, because it is redrawn at every size.

The advise was to generate a strong password and have your keychain manager remember it! Now, if you do follow that advise, and set up complex passwords, and have your keychain manager remember it, what happens if your keychain becomes corrupted due to any reason (or your hard disk crashes and you don't have a backup), you would be completely locked out of your accounts, because the password was too complex to remember. Or imagine your traveling and get your laptop stolen (happened to a friend recently), there is no way you can login into any service, because you don't remember the passwords any more. So are strong random passwords really a good idea??

I rather think, that phrases, you remember are better as passwords. Or if possible try to use openssl keys for identification. The best methods I've seen so far, and I think its pretty secure from keyloggers as well, is method used by my bank.

The site does not prompt for the entire password, rather, you have to type in certain characters in the password, for instance:

And every time you login the character a different set of characters is asked. This method is secure from keyloggers for sure, because no one will have an idea what character was asked.

Today I ordered a Digital subscription of MacWorld, in order to be environmentally friendly, preemptively remove a lot of mess in my room and make the content searchable. The MacWorld site took me to Zinio, where I discovered what a treasure trove it is.

Zinio makes a lot of magazines accessible to the casual reader. It offers a wide range of popular magazines from MacWorld to Playboy to Jane's Defense Weekly. Subscription are cheap. For a whole year subscription like costs $20 for a single magazine.

The only downside of ZInio is the DRM'd format in which the digital magazines are delivered. The content is not indexable by spotlight. I have to use their own search utility to search through the magazines. They have a client for Mac, which downloads new magazines available to you.

Fluid allows you to create a 'desktop type' application of any web applications, for example, I used it to create desktop client applications for tada lists, my mail, facebook and some other sites.

Fluid can also support various client application modes. For example

This is a standard client application of tada lists.

And this is another mode, this is a Digg Application, where you can access it form the system menu bar.

1. Feed Item browsing shortcuts

The keyboard shortcuts J and K, can be used to browse feed items, while viewing a feed, you can tag it by pressing T, and by pressing V you can view the original item in a popup, S is for staring and shift-S for sharing. Another highly useful keyboard shortcut is U, with which you can view feed items in full screen mode.

2. Browsing Feed Subscriptions

This is my favorite part, you can use old school keyboard shortcuts like shift-p/n to move to the next or previous subscription, however, I have some favorite feeds which I always read first, hence manually traversing is a time-consuming operation. However Google Reader has something to offer here aswell: By pressing 'g followed by u' you can see all your subscriptions in a popup panel, this popup panel implements a incremental search feature, which is extremely time saving when looking for a specific feed.

The full list

After pressing W we get this:

I haven't covered all of Google Reader's shortcuts exhaustively, you can view them by pressing '?'.

From my RSS feeds I stumbled across this article in ZDnet "Can Microsoft change "gears" for the sea-change ahead?". The title was attractive so I started reading it, however early on in the article I came across this:

"During that time, I have drawn attention to the work being done with JavaDB and Derby as examples of how the offline problem might get solved. But, ultimately, I have routinely said that when the problem gets solved, it will get solved by Google. Last week, with Google's announcement of Google Gears, that day came."

Once I read this I stopped reading why? Because Google Gears is NOT the first offline web application toolkit. The first on to my knowledge is Dojo Offline. Dojo is a popular AJAX framework, and Dojo Offline extends basic Dojo's capabilities by allowing Dojo applications to be used while you're offline.

Another related news, is the launch of the Apple iPhone. I've seen Blogs dubbing it as revolutionary because it has a pure touchscreen interface etc. But is it the first smart phone with a pure touch screen interface? Certainly not! I've been using the Motorola e680i since 1 year, and it was released in 2005, and it too has full touchscreen interface with minimal buttons and no keyboard. Surely it would be an improvement over those Palm Treo and Motorola Q type devices with mini keyboards, but the iPhone is not as revolutionary as people think.

So why is it that the IT industry does not recognize achievement and give credit where it's due?

According to the Infrastructure Survey 2007 carried out by Pingdom a web infrastructure company the role of Open Source software in driving the infrastructure of the Internet has been confirmed. Out of the 7 sites surveyed, based on massive amounts of traffic these sites service 6 of them run exclusively on Open Source software.

What brings open source software to such a coveted position?

• Most Open Source software is scalable, unlike many of their proprietary counterparts, this does not mean the proprietary software can not be scalable, rather this is a consequence of free source distribution which allows the programmers from around the world contribute and improve the source of their favorite software.
• Their are no licensing charges! Open Source companies they charge only for support not for the actual software itself. Hence many webservers are run by professional sysadmins who do not require to get commercial support hence can get the software and use it for free!
• Open Source software is more resource efficient! This one is harder to claim, but many Linux distributions especially server distributions hardly come with any X Server or any window manager since everything can be handled from the strong shell Linux/Unix has, individual services can be easily disabled/enabled, hence the resource footprint of the actual software is very low.
• Open Source doesn't require the latest and greatest hardware!

There are tons of other reasons, but these are the main reasons why I believe Open Source has been so successful in being the de-facto internet infrastructure software. Many people would also add security, but really I think, Microsoft has improved security greatly after SP2 and in Vista that its no more just an Open Source advantage anymore

• Its EASY: Flex2 application have a very simple model: The application, including the GUI, are defined in standards compliant XML format (MXML), the application logic is defined in ActionScript 3.0, a language which is similar to Javascript but object oriented. You can relate this to AJAX applications, where the GUI is defined in HTML and the application logic is in Javascript, however Flex2 applications contain gui controls which are not found in HTML, and with the help of the Flex2 Builder, which is an IDE based on Eclipse, building Flex 2 applications is very easy and you can create a more richer interface experience.
• Its Extensible: Flex2 doesn't do everything, for example it can not connect to data services directly, rather you have to set up a data provider source which provides data in XML format for Flex2 applications to use. Flex2 supports various mechanism to communicate with other frameworks, it supports RPC for example, and it is very simple to link php with Flex2, so one can get a powerful backend in php, with an appealing GUI in Flex2.
• There are no cross-platform/browser issues: AJAX would be the best model if all browsers supported the same javascript or everyone would be using the same browser and you could never disable javascript. There are varying levels of support for DHTML and JavaScript in different browsers on different platform. With Flex2 applications you don't have this problem. You can get the latest Flash player from a single source, supporting a single API. The Flash Player runs on multiple platforms, which means (borrowing the standard Java phrase): Write once, run everywhere.

However there are some drawbacks to Flex2 aswell, Flex2 Builder is proprietary and not cheap (Its way more cheaper than it previously used to be), where as majority of AJAX frameworks are open source. However you can still develop Flex2 application for free by making use of the free Flex2 SDK

Having raved about Flex2, I dont think deploying flex2 for all types of web application is a good idea. I love to use AJAX enabled web application such as Google Maps and GMail, however I hate to use AJAX based desktop-type applications such as Google Docs. I think Flex2 is viable only for the development of desktop like applications for the web.

At least for me! And with MS Office I mean any desktop office software ie. OpenOffice.org
Why do I say this? Precisely because I find Google Apps to be completely useless for me. I tried to compile an article on it to check its functionality, I find numerous problems:

• Docs is just like some formatting toolbar with a huge text box, and it is extremely dificult to navigate in lengthy documents, whereas desktop office software you can easily switch between pages, this limits productivity.
• I mostly write articles/papers which are peer reviewed by my friends who highlight and comment on portions of text. You can't do that in Google Apps, although you can add comments, but they are inserted inline to the text, which can be confusing. In MS Office comments, and changes are shown in a sidebar. I also see that footnotes are missing.
• Google Apps is slow compared to desktop software. There are numerous other web application such as Gliffy, which is a charting and diagramming software in Flex, which for me can replace MS Visio easily, and the response is good aswell.
• Because its webbased there are numerous distractions, one may get an instant message notification, a new mail, check a slashdot/reddit/digg out etc, and what happens when the internet when the internet is disconnected, or my google account gets hacked, Google Apps I believe will be a hot target for h/crackers.
• Google Docs is awful for formatting, like the one required for research publications. I tried formatting according to IEEE 2 column format, and it was hell!

Google Apps as it stands now is far from replacing anything. Its excellent for blog posts like this and short articles or 'to-do' lists, however its not a serious danger to any of the desktop office software, and they are to remain for a loooong time.