Facebook opening up to RSS

Well here is one less reason to hate Facebook.  It didn’t take long for this new app called Newsfeed RSS to show up, once Facebook opened it API to developers.  And having a feed is certainly is a breath of fresh air for Facebook.

In addition to the stack of good suggestions on how to make it useful given in this article at ReadWriteWeb, I’d like to add that you can grab the new feed and subscribe to it using RSS Menu on Mac OS X to get yourself Growl alerts of new Facebook activity. 

Five Things You Can Do With This New Facebook RSS App – ReadWriteWeb

Chia built a Facebook application that you can grant permission to pull your Facebook newsfeed out of the site and publish as an RSS feed. It’s called Newsfeed RSS. It’s a simple thing, but it’s an important development in the gradual opening of the walled garden that Facebook has been. Just to give you some ideas, here are five things that can now be done with the Facebook RSS feeds that Chia has set free.

AMD struggling to keep up

AMD says it will release its first 6 core chip in May, while Intel is already selling servers based on its 6 core Dunningtons like hotscakes.

These six core Istanbul chips are not equivalent to your average Intel Dunnington, however.

Here’s a cartoon

One is a real six core architecture, the other is 3 dual cores stapled together.

Which is company would you say is behind?

AMD to ship dual-core Neo, Istanbul this quarter

AMD will ship the six-core Opteron processor code-named Istanbul in May, a month earlier than expected, with servers based on the chip appearing in June. The processor will be an upgrade from AMD’s current quad-core Opteron chips code-named Shanghai. Further details about the Istanbul chip are expected at an AMD event on Wednesday.

The chips offer better performance while drawing the same amount of power as quad-core Shanghai server chips, AMD officials have said. Servers with eight Istanbul chips could offer the processing power of up to 48 cores.

Tweetmeme Live service

This service shows a lot of promise.   Its still a bit of a fire hose even at the 20 retweet setting, but you still get very good real time updates.  The other issue is that there is now way I could see to ppe the real time updates into Growl (or name your favorite alert software).

As a bonus, the article at ReadWriteWeb lists previous reviews of similar services.

Tweetmeme Live: See What’s Big on Twitter Right Now – ReadWriteWeb

Tweetmeme, a memetracker that tracks popular retweets on Twitter, just launched a real-time version of its service that displays tweets that are currently in heavy rotation on the popular microblogging service. In order to filter this constant stream of messages, Tweetmeme users can choose to only see messages that have been retweeted at least twice, though the default setting is for five retweets and can go up to twenty.

Gantt Charts anyone?

LifeHacker has posted about a new free online tool for project management that can import and export from MS Project.  As a bonus, they list some open source project management options.

Lifehacker – Gantter Does Project Management in Your Browser – Project

Web-based project management tool Gantter has an interface that looks remarkably similar to Microsoft Project—and even lets you import and export your Project files.

Google Analytics API

Finally.  Now maybe we’ll see a Mac analytics dashboard widget that actually works.  The Java gdata libraries have been updated (version 1.3.1) to include the Analytics API

Google Analytics API Now In Public Beta, Desktop Reporting Takes Stats Offline

Moments ago, Google released the public beta version of the Google Analytics API after running a private beta program with hundreds of developers for about a year.

Good analysis for the Sun/Oracle deal

This article posits that MySQL will survive, but be restricted to the Web server business.   There are a few other choice bits about Solaris, ZFS, Java, and Netbeans.  A good read.

Sun and Oracle: End of a beautiful dream • The Register

You can also finally say goodbye to NetBeans, Sun’s open-source Java-tools platform alternative to Eclipse. Oracle and Sun had a very public falling out in January 2006, when Oracle’s head of server technologies said that his company had no plans to adopt NetBeans or any of its technologies – which was contrary to statements made by Schwartz. Oracle is Eclipse and its JDeveloper integrated development down straight down the line. There is no room for NetBeans.

MySQL snapped up by Oracle

Sure, with Sun in house Oracle can serve up a unified Enterprise experience.  But what happens to MySQL?  Will it be killed to prevent competition?  Will it become a second tier, second class citizen to be sold to SMB’s that can’t cough up enough cash to buy the real thing?  Will it be the unstable testbeb for new technologies that get rolled into the pay only version once  they pan out?

Whatever happens,  if you depend on MySQL, your life just got complicated.

Oracle Buys Sun | Javalobby

After weeks of speculation of IBM buying out Sun, which failed to produce a result, today Oracle have swept in and bought Sun. The deal is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt, with Oracle buying Sun at $9.50 per share.

VMware Fusion leaks PC goodness into Mac

You always knew that it was probably risky loading Windows onto a Mac.  And you were right. 

But if you upgrade to VMWare Fusion 2.0.4 you should be OK. 

Your local IT department may be able to support that version soon.

VMware Fusion bug breaches the guest-host OS wall | Security | Working Mac | Macworld

However, a recently-discovered bug in many versions of VMware’s virtualization programs—including VMware Fusion—breaks down this protective barrier. Kostya Kortchinsky, an exploit researcher at Immunity, discovered the bug, and wrote an exploit to demonstrate the problems it can cause. Basically, the bug allows a guest operating system (that’s the OS running inside the virtual machine) to execute code on the host operating system (the OS running the actual virtualization program).

Kepler Mission First Light

Kepler first light images available at NASA’s mission site.

NASA’s Kepler mission has taken its first images of the star-rich sky where it will soon begin hunting for planets like Earth.

The new “first light” images show the mission’s target patch of sky, a vast starry field in the Cygnus-Lyra region of our Milky Way galaxy.

NASA – Kepler Images

Sharks Circling Sun

Word is that the Sun/IBM tango is still on.  The collapse of talks with IBM was all part of the waltz – or so the story goes.

Its difficult to tell what is strategy and what is miscalculation in the ongoing story of Sun Microsystems.  But one thing is certain – the market wants Sun gone in the worst way.   Walking away from IBM punished its stock price and brought the sharks faster than blood in the water does (see quote).

Sun’s market cap roughly equals its cash on hand, making it (essentially) a sinking boatload of tasty customers, free for the taking.

Sun to talk again with IBM, Cisco ruled out: reports – Computer Business Review : News

In an indication of what the market is planning should Sun fail to find a buyer, Dell today launched a marketing offensive against the company with a campaign to offer Sun customers “an immediate path from legacy data centres to more open, flexible standards-based technology.”

Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell’s Large Enterprise Group said in a statement, “Sun customers now more than ever are demanding paths from inefficient and proprietary legacy data centres, to simpler x86-based IT solutions.”