Technobabble

Over the past month, several interested parties have revealed their expressions of interest regarding the proposals for the HTTP/2.0 standard. Under consideration are primarily the SPDY and HTTP Speed+mobility proposals. The battle lines have been drawn, and as usual Microsoft wants to push their own agenda. There's also an interesting debate about whether HTTP/2.0 should always use TLS.

Some really cool demos were presented at the HTML5 Community Night event at Microsoft on April 26th 2011. Here are a smattering of the links to the demos. gameClosure Cross-platform multi-player games built using HTML5. Supports browsers as well as iPhone and Android. PowWow PowWow : A HTML5-based multiplayer game showing off WebSockets and WebGL. Vision Explorer VisionExplorer – 3D exploration of the National Museum of China. Built with JavaScript. Pacman Classic Pac-Man extended to a multi-grid Pac-Man. Built again with JavaScript. SVG Girl SVG Girl : a Japanese anime “video” implemented completely in SVG! CSS3 GRID SYSTEM IE9’s Grid System in CSS. There were many other demos but these were the URLs that I managed to snag during the presentation. Will update my post if I find links to the other demos.

Windows Live Writer was something that skipped my radar for a while since it’s a Microsoft product that I assumed was specific to Windows Live blogs. After a recent recommendation by Lifehacker , I learned that it supports multiple blogging platforms including Blogger and Wordpress . Adding support to an existing blog is a straightforward process – simply give Windows Live Writer the URL of your blog and it auto-discovers the blogging platform in use and prompts for your blog account information. Once setup, it’s a breeze to use. It provides a full featured WYSIWYG editor for your blog that has support for uploading images, a built-in spell checker  and tagging support. It even applies your blog’s themes for previews. Being a standalone Windows application, it allows offline editing of your blogs. Here’s a screenshot of Windows Live Writer in action in the construction of this very post: Definitely makes blogging a breeze. Expect more posts with this tool in a blogger’s ar...

Yahoo! Finance Quote for YHOO Earlier this morning Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT ) announced that it had placed an offer before the Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO ) board to acquire all outstanding shares of Yahoo! at $31 per share, payable in the form of $31 in cash or 0.9509 of a share of Microsoft common stock , subject to the proration that one half of Yahoo shares will be acquired for cash and the other half for Microsoft shares. Based on yesterday's closing price of Microsoft shares - $32.60 - the deal valued Yahoo! at around $44.6bn. Predictably, Yahoo! shares shot up by 48% to close at $28.38 while Microsoft shares fell around 7% to close at $30.45. Right-now, that values Yahoo! at around $43bn. Many are interpreting this a sign of Microsoft's desperation in the battle of dominance against Google (NASDAQ: GOOG ). On the Yahoo! side, it's definitely a big boost given their dismal outlook and impending layoffs , announced just three days ago. The Yahoo! co-founders will ma...