I was reading through my blogs the other day, as well as some of the pages, and it all seemed a little dry. Change with the times. So, that night, after a can of red-bull, I started re-typing the content to a lot of my pages, particularly the personal profile pages, as this is where readers should go to get to know the person behind the silhouette.

Hopefully now the site not only reads better, but is also more engaging to the customers?! After all, you’ve read to the end of this blog, haven’t you?!

In Germany the government has urged Internet users to find alternatives to Internet Explorer. In the same article (taken form BBC News) Sophos (an Internet security firm) told readers that the warning should be adhered to IE6, IE7 and even IE8 as the exploits had not only been proven to work on all these browsers but also the details of how to do so posted publicly on the Internet. Google has come under even more criticism as of late, with an open letter from security firms and lawyers asking why the security settings to enable HTTPS 100% of the time when accessing Gmail, Docs and other Google applications is so hard to find.

Google is reportedly considering it’s options regarding their operations in china. It may be that the years of strict censorship over the Chinese Internet has finally built to a head, and the recent attacks have broke the camels back. Either way, Google pulling out of China would be a devastating event for Chinese companies and civilians alike.

Not according to one company; ‘Baidu’, Chinese search engine giants recently posted the following on their blog:

“Google claims it will quit China. What it’s proved is not what the Google fans have claimed, that Google is a ‘Human Rights fighter’. Just the contrary. It’s proved that Google is a hypocrite.”

It’s a bit of a legal battle at the moment – let’s hope Google and China manage to come to some sort of agreement soon.

Should software or web apps be put under this much strain this early on in development?Although I think that pressure can add to and excel success, I do feel that in this instance Google have jumped in too early. They seem to have had a lot of negative feedback, which I would mainly associate to the way which Google discussed the concept as a revolution in Internet Messaging, yet in practise hasn’t worked out quite as expected. Twitter had a major part to play in this, with various trending topics hitting the top 10 shortly after its release.

It is good that the general public are becoming more aware and involved in beta testing, or should it be left to tech-heads?

Yes and No. Obviously it’s important for the general public to test out new software, as they often pick out different flaws or approach things in different ways to IT Professionals. However, I think it should be a confined and controlled test group of maybe 150-200? Leave the hardcore testing to the ‘Tech-Heads’, as they are the one’s who will find the deeper lying problems with BETA versions, which may require big fixes in some circumstances, in contrast to the usually smaller issues (GUI, glitches etc) which general users find.

Where would Google Wave be at without Twitter?Probably somewhere close to where Google Mail was back in 2004. Google has utilized (knowingly or otherwise) Twitter to pass around invites between parties. Without this (and other Social networking sites) there would surely be less people on Wave, consequently less general users testing out the software (as discussed in point 2). On the other hand, Social networking sites may have a bit of a negative impact on Wave, as more and more invites can be pushed out to a wider audience, consequently allowing more people to comment on the good (and more importantly bad) features.

I wanted to produce a type of blog which fell in between a micro-blog (140 characters) and some of my more heavy weight blogs (140 lines!).

Hopefully they will be insightful, interesting and full of techy goodness, while remaining concise and to the point!

If you have any requests for some more 1 minute reviews let me know and I’ll see what I can do!

All I did to set it up was go to /wp-admin/options-writing.php and tick the XML-RPC checkbox under the remote Publishing section. From there I simply put in my login details and blog URL and it quickly connected and showed me my posts From there its blogging as usual; create a post, approve comments or edit pages.

The improvements from ‘Wordpress’ to ‘Wordpress 2’ is apparently improved functionality, compatibility and a much smoother user interface. I must say, its working wonders for me! I’m currently sitting in my car waiting for Ice Hockey to begin, whoop!

The only downside (and I am being particularly fussy here) is that the app developers didn’t upgrade the original WordPress app but instead just made another. Now I realise that this could be to do with the way things were put together in the first instance, but there are rumours of a third version coming out which will be a separate app again.

Don’t get me wrong though, this is a brilliant little app, and best of all its FREE! The idea of being able to blog while I have 10 minutes before a lecture or on a train or in the park makes the idea of blogging much more appealing. Bring on version 3.0 (template / style editing, perhaps?)

I decided to (finally) make my account after a while getting to grips with some 2.0 features of the web – I’ve recently opened my eyes to the world of Blogging after years of being strongly anti-blogist! More on why to come soon (via blog, coincidently!) Yes I know I’m a computer scientist, Web Developer and IT Professional, but it’s never really appealed before tonight.

First ‘real’ blog to come soon! Keep your eyes pealed (Although I suspect no-one will be reading this until I have a somewhat more substantial archive and more importantly improved my Google page rank!!).