XDRTB Extremely Drug-Resistant Tubercolosis

Know more at XDRTB.org

via Joi Ito

Things I didn’t know about iPhone/iTouch 2.x User Interface

From the Inside iPhone 2.0 series: the new iPhone 3G Software on AppleInsider.

• In Safari you can touch & hold on graphic elements to bring up a Save Image dialog.
• In Safari, a double tap near the top (bottom) of the page will scroll up (down) by a page.
• Everywhere (?), hold the home button and press-release the lock button on top to take a screen capture. The image is saved in the Saved Photos album in the Photo application.

Anyone cares to share more hidden UI tips?

Using Mozilla Prism behind a proxy

Proxy settings can be changed by manually editing the configuration file all.js. In Windows this file is in the Prism\xulrunner\greprefs directory. The required changes are described in a number of places on the web, for example in a comment on the Mozilla Labs Prism page.

Mozilla Prism image

The default settings look like:

pref("network.proxy.type",        0);
pref("network.proxy.ftp",         "");
pref("network.proxy.ftp_port",    0);
pref("network.proxy.gopher",      "");
pref("network.proxy.gopher_port", 0);
pref("network.proxy.http",        "");
pref("network.proxy.http_port",   0);
pref("network.proxy.ssl",         "");
pref("network.proxy.ssl_port",    0);
pref("network.proxy.socks",       "");
pref("network.proxy.socks_port",  0);


and you want to change them to the following

pref("network.proxy.type",        1);
pref("network.proxy.ftp",         "proxy_ip_address");
pref("network.proxy.ftp_port", proxy_port);
pref("network.proxy.gopher",      "proxy_ip_address");
pref("network.proxy.gopher_port", proxy_port);
pref("network.proxy.http",        "proxy_ip_address");
pref("network.proxy.http_port", proxy_port);
pref("network.proxy.ssl",         "proxy_ip_address");
pref("network.proxy.ssl_port", proxy_port);
pref("network.proxy.socks",       "proxy_ip_address");
pref("network.proxy.socks_port", proxy_port);


where proxy_ip_address and proxy_port need to be set to the proper values for your proxy.

Note What I didn’t find explicitly mentioned is that you have to

• set the proxy values for all fields (ftp, gopher, http, ssl, and socks), and
• use the ip address of the proxy (not its name)

At least Prism didn’t work for me if I set only http or use server name instead of its ip.

Gartner Says Organizations Face Five Major Challenges Regarding Social Software

Gartner Says Organizations Face Five Major Challenges Regarding Social Software

Highlights:

social software techniques and technologies are becoming crucial in supporting and strengthening collaboration and nonroutine work in businesses and warned against dismissing them as a fad or a threat to general productivity.

The demand from workers is escalating and they can and are turning to the consumer Internet if their corporate technology provider isn’t offering a solution.

all organizations should at least be at the stage where they are investigating social software

Gartner has advised enterprises to invest the time and resources required to understand, design, grow and nurture social software implementations rather than simply installing a social software tool and expecting a community to automatically assemble and flourish.

advises organizations to balance the benefits of mass collaboration with the risks of bad behavior, including security breaches.

The traditional workday is in transition. Many organizations are not yet equipped for a virtual workplace, and virtual workday scenarios and are concerned with managing productivity in this more loosely structured work environment. Organizations will need to constantly challenge the way they evaluate employee productivity and promote work/life balance as social software becomes more pervasive in the business environment.

Meditate gente, meditate.

WordPress Prologue: Mind the Letter Case

Just installed a new WordPress with Prologue. The obvious idea is to try and use it at work as a Twitter-like communication tool for my team.

Installation from svn was flawless, but my Gravatar didn’t show up.

Gravatars are dynamically generated based on your registered email addresses. The MD5 hash of an email address is used as a unique ID for the avatar image associated with it.
The problem turned out to be that Gravatar converts emails to lower case, and so for the user accounts on your self hosted WordPress blog you must use lower case for user’s emails.
If you don’t, then you won’t get the right URI for your Gravatar’s images since the MD5 hash changes with the letter case.

At least, changing emails to lower case worked for me.

Memory Card with Wireless Connectivity

Eye-Fi is an SD memory card and a wireless card. The camera sees it as a regular SD card, but the card itself can wirelessly connect to a predefined Wi-Fi network and upload pics (JPEG only) to a folder on a computer or to a number of photo sites (not directly, but thru a gateway service provided by Eye-Fi).

The sofware bundle includes a Eye-Fi Manager which is used both for downloading pics to the computer and for the various settings.

It would be really cool to be able to use the wireless connectivity to leverage services like for example PlaceEngine, which has an API, and automatically geotag the photos.

Tags: PlaceEngine, geotagging, wireless, photography

Spreading the word: Four Eyed Monsters – full features legal film on YouTube

Though it seems it will be for 1 week only.
The authors get $1 from Spout for each new account made on Spout (but there’s an upper limit to what they can get – $200.000?).

Twitter{Vision|Flickr} 3D

“Get a sense of our planet.”

via Twitter Blog

The Twitter Matrix

A Twitter user from Japan wrote some javascript code to generate a matrix-like animation (falling letters) based on his (?) account timeline, including friends.
I made a short video of how it looks like. You can watch it below.

Update 2007.09.04: The video is featured on the Twitter Fan Wiki Mashups page :]

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0yNAqzrUMM]

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Technorati Tags: Twitter The Matrix animation javascript

World Sickness and Early Detection

Starting from about 19:00 into his talk, Larry Brilliant expresses his TED Wish: to build a global system, an early warning system to protect us against pandemics. He calls it International System for Total Early Disease Detection, and proposes to grow it from GPHIN (Global Public Health Intelligence Network) to make it a tool available to everyone in every language.

There is a web site that does something very similar: Whos is Sick?
From their about page:

“Who Is Sick was started in 2006 with a mission to provide current and local sickness information to the public – without the hassle of dealing with hospitals or doctors. With a strong belief in the power of people and a faith that user generated content can be extremely valuable, our team set out to create an entirely new system for tracking and monitoring sickness information.”

The information are displayed on a Google Maps mashup. The reports cover already all of the continents.

Inspired by all this, I have created a Twitter bot that listens to your health status reports. Think of TwitterVision and of WhoIsSick?, and imagine Morbus as a vehicle for early detection of pandemics.

Maybe Mr Brilliant can find something of his idea being implemented here.

[via information aesthetics]

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Technorati Tags: TED health maps mashup global Twitter