“MoboVivo is very pleased to announce compatibility with the Palm Pre device,” said MoboVivo founder and CEO, Trevor Doerksen. “Our business strategy and technology allowed us to begin distribution of premium TV shows to Pre users earlier this month.”

read more here.

Goal Zero, a subsidiary of Provo Craft and Novelty, a small business located in Spanish Fork, Utah will be honored for the 600,00th issued patent. Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property, David Kappos, and Senator  Orrin Hatch will be presenting an award to Goal Zero honoring this great achievement .  The USPTO Press Release states, “The patent is granted for the design of a battery system, which works in conjunction with a solar briefcase that recharges the system using sunlight.  This patent exemplifies the blending of green technology and appealing design.”

read more here.

Wiredprnews.com reports, “T-Mobile Sidekick users may have lost all contact and other personal information stored in their phones.”

It seems due to a server failure, T-Mobile’s servers, which is operated by Microsoft, wiped all the data on the servers.  While this happened many users thought it may be a phone issue and took out their battery to reboot their phone only to find out that it was now permanently lost due to a server wipe.

read more here.

Tuesday Google released their new Google Building Maker on Google Earth. Their press release states, “Today, we’re launching Google Building Maker, a new way to create geo-located 3D models of buildings for Google Earth. Building Maker is a tool designed to make it possible for anyone with a web-browser to make high quality, photo-textured 3D models. In many ways, Building Maker is like a very large, and very smart, collection of building blocks – if you can assemble the blocks to match the shape of your favorite building, you’ll be able to use the tool.”

View whole press release here.

Randy Pausch

Born October 23, 1960, Randy Pausch grew up in Columbia, Maryland before beginning his all too short computer engineering career at Brown University.  After earning his bachelor’s degree from Brown University, Randy went on to get his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.  He then went on to teach computer engineering at several universities including his alma mater.

In September of 2006, Mr. Pausch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is one of the worst kinds of cancer to deal with.  The prognosis is generally regarded as poor; less than 5 percent of those diagnosed are still alive five years after diagnosis.  Randy Pausch succumbed to pancreatic cancer on July 25^th, 2008.

Before his passing, he left a huge impression on computer science and the world.  He was involved in highly envied projects, such as Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts (makers of Madden Football and
The Sims).  He was also a founder of the program ALICE, Alice is a free and open source object-oriented educational programming language with an integrated development environment. It is implemented in Java. Alice uses a drag and drop environment to create computer animations using 3D models.  ALICE was originally designed help teen girls learn to program.  All in a 3D programming environment so teens could learn how to create animation to tell a story or play an interactive game while learning introductory computing.

Randy kept an online journal of his fight with cancer located here, http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/news/index.html.  A Carnegie Mellon Associate was quoted at http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/beyond/2008/summer/an-enduring-legacy.shtml, “Randy had an enormous and lasting impact on Carnegie Mellon,  a brilliant researcher and gifted teacher, he was a key member of our Human-Computer Interaction Institute and co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center. His love of teaching, his sense of fun and his brilliance came together in the Alice project, which teaches students computer programming while enabling them to do something fun – making animated movies and games. Carnegie Mellon – and the world – are better places for having had Randy Pausch in them.”

On his home page, he left his mark to do what he could as he fought the vicious disease himself.  “Pancreatic cancer is a hideous disease; I am doing everything possible to raise awareness and research funding.  You can support research into curing pancreatic cancer via the Lustgarten foundation, and/or the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN).  A friend of mine has also set up a donations page at: http://www.firstgiving.com/randypausch.”

This looks exciting!

See more here.

An article from Cnet News, Stephanie Condon wrote a piece about a student who is in a battle with Newton District Court over the seizure of his computer, iPod, and cellphone.

She wrote:

“Riccardo Calixte, a computer science student at Boston College, is petitioning the Newton District Court in Massachusetts for the immediate return of his property and is demanding that investigators be prohibited from any further searches or analysis of his digital data. The confiscation of Calixte’s property was spurred by an investigation into who sent an e-mail to a Boston College mailing list alleging that Calixte’s roommate is gay.

According to a complaint (PDF) Calixte filed April 10, the warrant issued is invalid because there was no probable cause to believe that a crime was committed. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is representing Calixte and filed a memorandum (PDF) in support of Calixte’s complaint.

Kevin Christopher, a detective for the Boston College Police Department, submitted an application (PDF) for a search warrant on March 30 and was granted the warrant (PDF) that day.”

see whole article here.

Regardless of how immature the behavior of both the roommate or Calixte, I believe there is  more useful things the police of Boston could attend too.

Recession is hitting everywhere hard. The nineties tech boom is over.  Silicone Alley reports about tech companies, “How badly has the economy whacked their business around the last three months? As you can see, Wall Street expects most companies to grow revenues much slower this year than last — and many to report that sales are down year-over-year. One exception: Netflix, which is blowing the doors off.”

Stats from their blogpost:

• Intel’s Q1 consensus: $6.98 billion, down 28% year-over-year. Last year, reported $9.67 billion, up 9% year-over-year.
• Google’s Q1 consensus: $4.08 billion, up 10% year-over-year. Last year, reported $3.70 billion, up 46% year-over-year.
• Yahoo’s Q1 consensus: $1.20 billion, down 11% year-over-year. Last year, reported $1.35 billion, up 14% year-over-year.
• Apple’s FQ2 consensus: $7.95 billion, up 6% year-over-year. Last year, reported $7.51 billion, up 43% year-over-year.
• Amazon’s Q1 consensus: $4.75 billion, up 15% year-over-year. Last year, reported $4.14 billion, up 37% year-over-year.
• eBay’s Q1 consensus: $1.95 billion, down 11% year-over-year. Last year, reported $2.19 billion, up 24% year-over-year.
• Microsoft’s FQ3 consensus: $14.14 billion, down 2% year-over-year. Last year, reported $14.45 billion, up 0.4% year-over-year.
• Netflix Q1 consensus: $390 million, up 20% year-over-year. Last year, reported $326 million, up 7% year-over-year.

Read more here.

So i spent the last 2 quarters learning how to tweek layouts and dealing ie6/mozilla differences. Thank god for css3.

CSS3.info writer Peter Gasston:

“The CSS Working Group had a face-to-face meeting in Tokyo last month and made a series of resolutions (which can be found on their blog). Most are fine technical points, but one of the more interesting is that the multi-column layout module is about to be reissued as a ‘last call’ document; after this, the module will be released as a candidate recommendation, meaning the authors are satisfied that the standard does what is needed of it, and will call for implementation.”

Read more here.

PCStats.com has posted a review of the ASUS EAH4890 HTDI/1GD5/A Radeon HD 4890 Videocard.

They wrote: “As you might have guessed, ATI’s new Radeon HD 4890 videocard is well placed to compete with enthusiast videocards like the Radeon HD 4870 1GB and Geforce GTS 260 Core 216, as well as the recently released nVidia Geforce GTX 275. In terms of performance, the Radeon HD 4890 has the potential to beat all of the above, with its most direct competition coming from the more-expensive Geforce GTX 285 videocard. These are the fastest single-GPU videocards available on the market today, and are all more than powerful to handle gaming on anything less than a 30″-wide LCD display at resolutions of 2560 x 1600. For smooth gaming at extreme resolutions like that, a multi-GPU setup is still the best option.”

Read the rest of the article here.