Mormon Community Development

Here's an article on our mobile community development efforts. My dad helped build chapels when he was young. Now people are helping build apps.

I love my job.

THANK YOU to all who have helped or will help. If you have design, development, QA or project management skills, please come join us!

Microsoft Leaves Kinect “Open”

Seven or eight years ago, Microsoft donated the source code for a project I worked on to the open source community. The game was called Allegiance and it has been amazingly and admirably kept updated and enhanced by a group of volunteer testers, developers, designers and artists at FreeAllegiance.

When Microsoft released Kinect—a new system which lets people interact with the Xbox without a controller—a hacked version of the source code was posted on the Internet within a couple of weeks. See this Inc.com article. In the past Microsoft might have screamed, threatened, sued, or all of the above. Instead, they went to NPR and lauded the effort. Rapidly, people jumped on the bandwagon and have been enhancing the product.

We'll see if the interest is sustainable, but great move on Microsoft's part. Great to see some examples of openness!

Google and Microsoft: Search Wars Heating Up

Things are getting ugly in the search wars. Google is claiming that Microsoft steals their search results. Microsoft is accusing Google of abusing the use of private data.

Intrigue. Drama. Search is so fascinating!

Egypt Cuts Off Internet to Entire Country?

If this is accurate, wow.

Cutting off the Internet to an entire country? I have a hard time believing it's actually true.

Creepy Google Gmail Security Hole

There aren't a lot of details, but apparently Gmail had a security hole where a web site could grab your email address if you were logged into Gmail at the time you went to the web site. I assume the vulnerability is a weak SSO token on the computer or maybe something stupid left behind in a cookie. Whatever they're doing, yikes!

Google has reportedly fixed the problem.

Liquid Zoom

According to Gizmag, Samsung has filed a patent for a new type of lens made of liquid. The principle is similar to that of looking at magnified images through a glass of water. Layers are created using different liquids and shapes of the layers may be changed using a small electric current. No moving parts – so faster, more efficient and less prone to break. This is particularly useful for adding optical zoom to small devices like cameras.

Is HTML 5 Killing Silverlight?

Microsoft is shifting its strategy on Silverlight. It's coming out in support of HTML 5, but maintains that it will still support Silverlight—especially it's "streaming media" capabilities.

Is HTML 5 ready for prime time? Thoughts?