stuart test blog

Link: Ballmer just opened the Second Envelope

You know the business lore joke. The departing CEO meets his successor and hands him three envelopes to be opened in the prescribed order when trouble strikes. First crisis, the message in envelope #1 says: Blame your predecessor. Easy enough. Another storm, the the CEO opens the second envelope: Reorganize. Good idea. And when calamity strikes yet again, he reaches for the third: Get three envelopes…

Link: Huawei TDD LTE demo aboard the Shanghai MagLev train

I’m not sure what is more impressive: the wireless download speed, or the levitating train’s speed.

Link: ignore the code: Gestures

Link: Android Market by doubleTwist

Link: Chrome Extensions for web development

The Chrome Developer Tools are great for debugging HTML, JavaScript and CSS in Chrome. If you’re writing a webpage or even a web app for the Chrome Web Store, you can inspect elements in the DOM, debug live JavaScript, and edit CSS styles directly in the current page. Extensions can make Google Chrome an even better web development environment by providing additional features that you can easily access in your browser. To help developers like you, we created a page that features extensions for web development. We hope you’ll find them useful in creating applications and sites for the web.

Link: On-demand movies coming to NZ PS3 owners

Thanks to a couple of serendipitously timed announcements, PS3 owners in Australia, New Zealand and far-flung corners of Europe will soon have a couple of new options for bringing digital movies to their television via their favorite Sony-branded game console.

Link: jQuery for Designers

Learn how easy it is to apply web interaction using jQuery

Link: Microsoft Files Patent Infringement Action Against Salesforce.com

Big News:

Microsoft Corp. today filed a patent infringement action against Salesforce.com, and issued the following statement from Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing:
“Microsoft has filed an action today, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, against Salesforce.com for infringement of nine Microsoft patents by their CRM product.”

Link: Google To Launch Amazon S3 Competitor ‘Google Storage’ At I/O

Amazon’s cloud storage services are going to be getting another major competitor this week: Google. We hear that this week during its I/O conference, Google will be announcing a new service that is a direct competitor with Amazon’s S3 cloud storage. Google’s service will be called Google Storage for Developers, or ‘GS’.

Link: Australian Wikileak founder’s passport confiscated

This is probably the most sensationalist story I’ve read in a long time:

Julian Assange, the Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks, says he had his passport taken away from him at Melbourne Airport and was later told by customs officials that it was about to be cancelled.

Hmmm… seems to imply they cancelled his passport because of his connection to the Wikileaks website.

Last year Wikileaks published a confidential Australian blacklist of websites to be banned under the government’s proposed internet filter.

I wonder if there’s any other reason why they would take his passport from him?

Assange told The Age his passport was taken from him by customs officials at Melbourne Airport when he entered the country last week after he was told ”it was looking worn”.

Ah – maybe because it was looking worn?

Passports are routinely taken from travellers for short periods by immigration officials if they are damaged.

So he had a worn passport? That sounds like a valid reason, is there anything else we need to know about this story?

Assange said half an hour after his passport was returned to him, he was approached by an Australian Federal Police officer who searched one of his bags and asked him about his criminal record relating to computer hacking offences in 1991.

So he was travelling with a worn passport and has a criminal record? Those seem like valid enough reasons to receive a bit of extra attention at the border. Is there more to this story? Maybe, but this article doesn’t show it.