Scott Walters Exploring Stuff

Google has signed a deal with NSW Department of Education to provide gmail accounts for 1.3 million users.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/google-enrolled-for-schools-email-deal/2008/07/29/1217097241055.html

Daniel Emerson (July 24th) in th Sydney Morning Herald writes an interesting little story about the lack of Mac compatibility of its etax software.

See: SMH: Mac attack on Taxmans bad fo

Interesting that the ATO doesn’t know how many of its customers use Macs since that sort of information is collected in web site log files. My company attempts to meet an open standards approach for general compatibility with all platforms and performs tests on all platforms that account for greater than 1% of our web traffic.

Just a bit of fun but also interesting in showing off a web 2.0 terminal style interface to Google.

Read the article: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9958211-2.html?tag=nl.e501

See the website: http://www.goosh.org/

Apparently now Google can search into Flash files.  No news on other search engines being able to get under the hood in flash but it seems to be an indication of good news.

http://mashable.com/2008/07/01/google-adobe-flash-search/

Starting to think about what the new Intranet is going to be. Initially the concept of a Wiki seems appropriate with broadly the following areas:

1. Corporate. The “official version” type information, ie published policies, procedures, news etc which is published from “the company”

2. myTeam. While you may be a member of many teams this sort of content is ment to be user generated/updateable.

3. myStuff. Information published for you by you.

The one problem with Wiki is it isn’t really how lots of people use the web, for that you need more of the social networking stuff and here is a list of open source social networking platforms that could play into the intranet space. Key strength is that its the information you / your collegues believe is important and may include information from outside the corporation.

Have a look at this article from 2007. http://mashable.com/2007/07/25/open-source-social-platforms/
and this comparison on wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_social_networking_software

Here’s some good news. Alfresco (open source enterprise level CMS) are offering a 5 day training course in Sydney.

http://www.alfresco.com/services/training/sessions/2008/08/20080818-2190-tetralogyx/

D will be a declarative language aimed at non-developers, and will be based on eXtensible Application Markup Language (XAML), sources, who asked not to be named, said.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1159&tag=nl.e622

Dion Hinchcliffe gives predictions for update of enterprise web 2.0 in the enterprise. States that we’ll see increased social networking, unstructured information through wiki’s and blogs etc.

Interesting comment “New rich user experience platforms such as Adobe AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight” where Ajax is seen as too complex for anything more than eye candy.

Posted by David December 07, 2007 @ 03:03 PM

Rails 2.0 is finally finished after about a year in the making. This is a fantastic release that’s absolutely stuffed with great new features, loads of fixes, and an incredible amount of polish. We’ve even taken a fair bit of cruft out to make the whole package more coherent and lean.

So you’re sitting there on Saturday morning, sipping on a nice warm cup of coffee or tea. You smell the freshness of the morning, and whipping up some html, CSS and trying out some new AJAX programming. You’re stuck on something! You wish you had a quick cheat sheet to get you back on track. Look no further if you’re a web developer! This is the Ultimate Web Development Cheat Sheet Guide!

http://www.realsoftwaredevelopment.com/2007/08/ultimate-web-de.html