Planning some enhancements on the flickr-show Google Gadget:

• Background image loading: to prevent image loading interruption by slide show timer;
• Click image to go full-window inside browser.
• In full-window mode, display tool bar for show EXIF, go to original site, exit full-window mode, etc. Also, display current batch of photos in thumb nails for mouse click selection.

Further ideas for enhancement and improvement will go to this wiki page on the Google Code project site.

Google Apps is a suite of cloud computing based services from Google, including Gmail and Google Docs. A Google Apps Channel on YouTube showcases use cases of various organizations moving to Google Apps. Here is one of a financial services company.

Get a brief introduction with this Google Apps Quick Tour video.

We at 9Rivers believe that Google Apps services small businesses well and we are always at your service with your Google Apps needs.

Article by Ken Hess of the Linux Magazine. Haven't tried any of them yet. But they sure sound interesting.

Read an article by Scott Quint on JDJ with the above subject. Very well argued the point that, Java vs. C++ is simply a silly question to ask. Language is not a deciding factor in implementing a project. The nature of a project and the composition of a project team determine what language best suites a software development project.

Read the article in the Linux Magazine.

All the things that the ClearOS offer are obviously available in any flavor/distribution of Linux. But the approach of employing a web-based front end for system management makes a lot of sense.

Also, the ClearOS Web Management Interface looks a lot like Webmin.

Personally, I use Ubuntu now, on netbooks, desktop and server. Webmin is missing in Ubuntu, which is a shame. There are some reason seen somewhere on the Net but I would rather see Webmin enhanced to deal with any security concerns than to see it disappear from a popular Linux distribution. Obviously, there are people using Webmin in Ubuntu anyway.

I have been looking for a way to print Google Docs spreadsheets without the grid lines, which you would assume is a rather simple thing for Google to implement. But apparently I am not the only person who has this problem.

From that thread of discussion on Google Docs help forum, it seems that it should be possible to implement a Google Gadget to show a spreadsheet without the grid lines, which may then lead to printing without the lines.

Just saw this nice little Cyber Monday deal on NewEgg.com: a combo of ASUS TS Mini SOHO Home Server and ASUS HDP-R1 HD Media Player O!Play. The media player supports an HDMI Interface for connection to your HDTV. The server has an Intel Atom N280 1.66GHz CPU for low power consumption, with 1GB DDR2 RAM and 500GB HDD installed, a nice configuration for a home media server.

The only thing that keeps it from being perfect is that it runs Windows Home Server. Linux would make me much warmer and fuzzier.

The article «Warning: Google Docs Is NOT Safe» is an interesting and thorough discussion about the safety of using Google Docs. I actually came to the article whiling searching (googling) for Google Docs encryption. It seems that there are ways to make your documents in the Google Docs space as secure as possible.

That being said, collaboration using Google Docs is much more secure, not to mention much more convenient, than emailing documents back and forth. Unless you encrypt every piece of email message with its attachments, once you email something using any public email service, consider all bets on document security off. Period. With Google Docs, at least you can limit who may view and/or who may edit a document. It would be nice if Google adds another access right: Who may download a document.

I am going to try FireGPG, an add-on for Firefox, to see how it helps with online document encryption. Will report back later.

Drupal is a popular, well built and actively developed open source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and primarily supporting MySQL and PostgreSQL database systems. I have been using it and developing modules for it for some time now. I am familiar with Drupal but is kind of pleasantly surprised to see an ad online from Microsoft, promoting "Download, install and configure the latest version of Acquia Drupal with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer."

I guess even a monopoly as big as Microsoft has to face the reality some times.