Cisco to buy Skype?

TechCrunch rumors that Cisco might acquire Skype right before their IPO.

If they really do, that'd make for quite interesting Linksys boxes with Skype built in... Just add your Skype Phone, or TV, ...
Skype by Cisco on Linksys by Cisco ...

Then you'd no longer need to have your PC running to place or receive Skype calls - or video calls.
Bad for the Telcos...

I like it :-)

Fantastic error message

You just have to love digg for this error message:

Facebook vs Identity - again

Well, it should read "Facebook vs Privacy - again"... but the point I want to make is, that Facebook could have been an Identity platform.
In a way they are... not only in a way, if you go and count the sites that allow you to login with your facebook account. But that only makes them an Identity provider.

An Identity platform needs more than just a secure single sign-on.
For example authorization: you should be able to finely tune who has access to what. That's why the social graph (or your address book, if you will) is so valuable. Facebook does have most of the data and means to enable proper authorization: who can see my wall-posts, who is allowed to contact me, ...

It would have been easy to extend from there.

But with Places they once again proved that they rather go the pure marketing platform way, instead.

1. Places is mostly opt out. It is somewhat (but not fully, it seems) enabled by default, until you disable it.
   Not a good default - privacy-wise.
2. Other people (your friends) can check you in at any place they want.
3. You can't control your places. Anyone can check in at your home...[1]

This is all good and fine for a geo platform (like foursquare)... but not for an identity platform

To Facebook (the company) it seems more important to publish stuff about you (and make money from the ads) than to have you properly manage your identity. That's fine, too, but that makes them a marketing platform only...

Sorry.

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[1] different issue, I know, but it still troubles me.

How to get Thunderbird attachments as read/write...

This has been bugging me for years now... ( I guess ).
When I double click e.g. an OpenOffice attachment in Thunderbird, the document is then opened as read-only in OpenOffice.

There's 1000+1 reasons on the web why this is a) intended and b) good... but I still did not like it.

Some (short) analysis revealed, that Thunderbird is actually setting the read-only attribute of the attachment, so OpenOffice was not to blame.
Easy to google from that and find a really good tip here:

One has to set the configuration value browser.helperApps.deleteTempFileOnExit to false [1]

E voila... Works fine now.
No unintended side effects so far.
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[1] you might have to create it...

ProfiMail for the E71

Thanks to the hint of a colleague, I installed ProfiMail for the E71. Well, I needed the hint, because I never intended to install yet another 3rd party app on my E71...first of all, because this never increases the stability of the phone, and secondly, I thought it would only be cumbersome...

I couldn't have been more wrong.

ProfiMail (v3, 3.28 to be more specific) has everything you want from a professional mobile email client.

• full imap/imaps support.
• "push" email... well, it's "only" IMAP IDLE but thats good enough for me[1]
• multiple accounts
• full folder support on IMAP, and it allows you to move an email message from folder to folder.
• user interface is very OK
• proper attachment support
• proper address book support

Seems like the creators actually use it themselves or have a good feedback process... it's the little things like the feature to check mail on startup and immediately go to the inbox when you start the email client...

Access to it is quite easy, if you map the application to the long-press of the Messaging one-touch-key, then it's just one (long) press on the envelope button, and there you go.

I seem to prefer it over the built-in iPod/iPhone mail client... but that's probably only because of the physical keyboard... which I stll prefer over the virtual touch keyboard.

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[1] and it's enabled on my mail server...