13 Aug 2005
I’ve been quite busy with work and haven’t had the opportunity to blog lately. However, I’ve accumulated a fair number of items tagged as ‘to read’ and should have more material to write about soon.
To get things started, I just finished reading ‘The Hidden Boot Code of the Xbox‘ and thought it was pretty good.
It discusses some of the security mechanisms implemented in the Xbox’s (apparently not so) hidden boot code and the various vulnerabilities that are present (or were present depending on your Xbox version). If you can ignore the harshness of certain parts, it is a fairly interesting piece. It must be tough developing within the constraints of 512bytes (not to mention the timing constraints of the very competitive console industry), I wouldn’t fault the engineers.
The article’s talk back page is here.
24 Jul 2005
This just in from Om Malik, Yahoo has continued their recent buying spree with the addition of Pixoria.
Yahoo has bought, Pixoria, the company behind Konfabulator, the widget application. Widgets are small web-apps that run on your desktop and retrieve information from the Internet. These tiny apps basically use all the web technologies. Pixoria used to make widgets for the Mac, but had to switch gears and go PC after Apple introduced Dashboard in its latest version of Tiger OS. Pixoria has over 1000 third party widgets plus a great platform for people to build Yahoo-enabled mini apps using our APIs) and they are a great new desktop distribution channel for Yahoo. Yahoo will keep the app as a free product, and apparently Yahoo will refunding people who purchased it in the last couple of months). Pixoria was just 3 guys – Arlo Rose, Perry Clarke and Ed Voas. This will clearly be a way for Yahoo to spread its API (OpenYahoo) into various desktop applications.
Pretty cool. I remember seeing Konfabulator mentioned all over the web when Apple introduced Dashboard in Tiger. Now that I have a dedicated Windows machine, I can check out the widgets in all their glory.
It would be a nice touch on the part of Yahoo if they do follow through with refunds for people who recently purchased the app.
Congrats to Pixoria!