Beyond the mainstream

I just saw a nice operating system completely coded in assembler. Multitasking, graphical desktop, TCP/IP, USB and many other features on one 1.44MB floppy disk. Very impressive to see what is possible with extreme coding. Feel free to check out the KolibriOS 0.7.7.0 operating system.

Google mobile phone

It looks like it become more and more official, Google plan to release a mobile phone next year in cooperation with HTC. This was reported by the Wall Street Journal today. First spy shot pictures could be found here. This definitely help me with my decision when to buy the next mobile phone.

Using SAP Netweaver in Google wave

I found a nice video on YouTube showing a proof of concept to connect SAP to Google wave. Check out here!

Google calendar week numbers

One thing I really missed in my Google calendar are week numbers. Fortunatelly this is no longer the case if you follow the instructions here.

Xmarks alpha for Chrome available

One of my personal killer extensions for Firefox is now also as an alpha version available for Google Chrome, Xmarks. Check out the Xmarks blog here. Btw., it's also working with the Google Chrome version for Linux, very nice!

Check mails in Gmail from command line

If you want to check new mails on your Gmail account from the command line, here is the how to:

curl -u username --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | perl -ne 'print "\t" if //; print "$2\n" if /<(title|name)>(.*)<\/\1>/;'

You will be prompted for a password before the informations are gathered. Please notice that you need to change username to your Gmail user name before executing.

Fly to the moon

Ever thought it might be cool to fly to the moon once in a lifetime? If so, the first parts of the code used by the Apollo program is released as open source. Check out here and have a good flight :).

Google OS is comming

According to the Google blog, Chrome OS will come in the second half of 2010. So what a lot of people already supposed, Google will now directly attack Microsoft in there core business, the operating system market. Let's see how this develop, competition was never bad in the software business.

Google Wave is on the way

Google announced a new way of communication which should be ready later this year. The product is called wave and will be a combination of mail, chat and documents as well as some other features. Google created two YouTube videos explaining the concept behind wave. You can check it out here and here. A more detailed explanation about what wave is can be found here.

portsnap database corrupted

Today I noticed a problem on one of my FreeBSD machines. After running /usr/sbin/portsnap I got an error telling that one file didn't exist. After playing a little bit around to get the error fixed I simply cleared the portsnap directory and now it is working again:

cd /var/db/portsnap
rm -rf *
portsnap fetch && portsnap update

Easier then expected :).

Web check with curl

From time to time I need to trace HTTP connections without having Firefox up and running with the correct plugins installed. So here is a way to do basic tracing using curl from the command line:

curl -b /tmp/curl-cookies -c /tmp/curl-cookies -s -v -o/dev/null http://test.address.tld/

Maybe I will extend this post with other combinations when I have time.

Pocket sized server

Why isn't that one already available in germany??? A server with that size for less than 100$, look like a must have!

Debian on Android

A guy at AndroidFanatic get it done to install Debian on an Android G1 phone. See here how they've done it. My dreams become more and more true :).

Android on netbooks

Developer from mobile-facts.com posted a success story about Android running on a netbook, in this case on an Asus EEEPC 1000H. They were able to get Android up and running in less than four hours. This could be interpreted as an indication, that the Android Alliance don't focus on mobile phones only.

Songbird power user mode

Just saw a nice page in the Songbird Wiki which guide you to enable some useful functions in Songbird. Check out here.

A small webserver

You have a shell, netcat and some standard Unix tools available? Try out this:

:;while [ $? -eq 0 ];do nc -vlp 8080 -c'(r=read;e=echo;$r a b c;z=$r;while [ ${#z} -gt 2 ];do $r z;done;f=`$e $b|sed 's/[^a-z0-9_.-]//gi'`;h="HTTP/1.0";o="$h 200 OK\r\n";c="Content";if [ -z $f ];then($e $o;ls|(while $r n;do if [ -f "$n" ]; then $e "<a href="\">`ls -gh $n`";fi;done););elif [ -f $f ];then $e "$o$c-Type: `file -ib $f`\n$c-Length: `stat -c%s $f`";$e;cat $f;else $e -e "$h 404 Not Found\n\n404\n";fi)';done

This is a small webserver listening on port 8080 (so could be run as a normal user) which serves the files in the current directory. Pretty cool, isn't it? The original post could be found here.

Themes for Gmail

Just discovered that Gmail now supports themes. Some of them really hurts your eyes but some are quite nice. So check it out, maybe there is something for you as well.

Video chat with Google mail

Google offers a new plugin to use Google mail as a video chat tool. The only thing you need is a webcam and a headset. I didn't try it yet but this is on top of my todo list. I"ll keep you informed!

Android is now open source

The step is done, Android is now fully open source, check out here.

Extend chrome

I just found a nice resource to customize chrome:

http://www.chromeplugins.org/

Currently it look like a bit BETA like the browser itself, but there are already some nice tips and tricks on the site and specially this one is really interessting:

http://www.chromeplugins.org/tips-tricks/google-chrome-shortcuts/

A nice collection of themes for chrome could be found under:

http://www.freechromethemes.com/