10:16 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Jeffrey Veen, an established design guru and one of the creators of HotWired.com, has authored with The Art and Science of Web Design a carefully structured look into the undercurrents of Web design. Organized around the key development topics, the book is laden with a historical background of standards, features, and trends. Yet the topics are timeless and core to good Web engineering, so it's space well spent. The mix of expert opinion and historical explanation creates a well-rounded reader experience.

You can now download for free the full book (in PDF format) with illustrations from Veen's website.

10:01 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Kelly Link's short story collection Stranger Things Happen is now available as a free download in various completely open formats under a Creative Commons license.

I attached to this post an iSilo version for your reading pleasure.

Award-winning author Kelly Link's debut collection takes fairy tales and cautionary tales, dictators and extraterrestrials, amnesiacs and honeymooners, revenants and readers alike, on a voyage into new, strange, and wonderful territory. The girl detective must go to the underworld to solve the case of the tap-dancing bank robbers. A librarian falls in love with a girl whose father collects artificial noses. A dead man posts letters home to his estranged wife. Two women named Louise begin a series of consecutive love affairs with a string of cellists. A newly married couple become participants in an apocalyptic beauty pageant. Sexy blond aliens invade New York City. A young girl learns how to make herself disappear.

08:18 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The Pocket PC Magazine Best Software 2005 nominees have just been announced and are now open to public comment until July 15. Winners and Finalists will be determined by the 83 members of Pocket PC magazine's Board of Experts and will be announced in September.

More over at Pocket PC Magazine.

08:10 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

The U.S. Supreme Court voted 9-0 on Monday that movie and recording studios and artists can sue Grokster and other file-sharing services for piracy because those services encourage people to illegally download copyrighted songs and movies. I received the following response from Rachel of Laplink Software:

Laplink Software, as a pioneer in connectivity technologies, and as a developer and proponent of legitimate, peer-to-peer based technologies, believes that these technologies enhance the computing experience for many millions of users all over the world. They have the potential to transform the computing landscape for the better.
Companies such as Groove Technologies, recently acquired by Microsoft, are bringing the public simple, secure, inexpensive ways to connect with one another and share information. Laplink's ShareDirect is one of these peer-to-peer based technologies, bringing secure, private, encrypted file sharing capabilities to PC users. This product has helped numerous business clients to improve their operations and maintain a competitive edge. While Laplink does not condone the infringement of copyright law, it continues to stand behind ShareDirect and remains committed to building on the early promise of peer-to-peer networking.
Thomas Koll, Laplink CEO was recently quoted in the Seattle Times saying, "It's as if, through some of the debate, everyone doing peer-to-peer is criminalized. A lot of business-class peer-to-peer services offer a legitimate way of exchanging files that is very necessary to the world. We are all connected to the Internet, but not to each other. When businesses want to exchange data, the best way to do it is through peer-to-peer."
Laplink recently announced an investment in the company by Microsoft. This investment will be used in part to continue research and development of Laplink's technologies.

06:37 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

From PalmAddicts: "I was on Palmgear this morning and I have spotted a promo banner enticing you to win a LifeDrive bundled with Handmark Software. All you need to do is purchase software from Palmgear and enter LIFEDRIVE in the promotional text feed in the checkout and then you will be entered into the draw. It's one LifeDrive a week too for the whole of July."

07:17 PM by hacker in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

I caught an early preview of War of the Worlds last night in New York City at Loews in Times Square, and decided to kick of the weekend early for everyone else by making a custom conversion of the original H.G. Wells story to Plucker format for everyone to read.

If you find this useful, please consider donating to the Plucker project to keep quality works like this coming out.

Spiffy screenshots below...

06:39 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

PalmOne (stock symbol: PLMO) reported a better-than-anticipated profit for the fourth quarter due to heavy demand for its Treo 650 wireless device. The company also raised revenue guidance.

PalmOne earned $17.7 million in the quarter, compared with earnings of $13.3 million last year. Revenue rose 26% from a year ago to $335.8 million. The company said that it saw a "very strong sell-through" for the Treo 650 in the quarter, representing a 250% year-over-year increase, and that overall, it shipped about 1 million products in the period. For the year, shipments reached 4.5 million devices.

The company will change its name to Palm Inc. and its ticker symbol to PALM on July 14.

Read the full fourth-quarter results here.

06:08 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

Security consultant Abe Usher explores the idea how Apples iPod can pose a major security risk for enterprises. He wrote a small python tool, slurp.exe, that when it is run from an iPod, can very quickly copy data files off of a PC and on to an iPod.

Slurp searches for the "C:\Documents and Settings\" directory on local hard drives, recurses through all of the subdirectories, and copies all document files. Using slurp.exe on my iPod, it took me 65 seconds to copy all document files (*.doc, *.xls, *.htm, *.url, *.xml, *.txt, etc.) off of my computer as a logged in user. Without a username and password I was able to use a boot CDROM to bypass the login password and copy the document files from my hard drive to my iPod in about 3 minutes 15 seconds.

[via The Inquirer]