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While just opening up my Google Maps Mobile on my Pocket PC, I instantly realized that something has changed with the satellite images of Shanghai. All of a sudden our compound was not just an open field anymore but I could see the building I live in. Opening up Google Earth on my laptop confirmed: Shanghai got some new shiny pimped up satellite images. It was about time since the old ones where over 4 years old. At that time the Shanghai World Financial Center (which was burning today by the way) was not even started and Lupu Bridge was only half way built across the river. The new images I would say are between 3-4 months old and cover complete downtown Shanghai and also Pudong. So go and have a look for yourself!

I just saw that Mozilla released Firefox 2.0. I am downloading it as I type. I hope it finishes loading till I am done writing this post. Lots of people are loading right now, I guess. I looked up the feature list and it looks like they put in some nice little improvements. However, to me it seems like most of the new things I already have in 1.5 by using extensions. Now they built it right in. But anyway better then MS with Internet Explorer 7 which managed to catch up to Firefox could not overtake it. Now Mozilla is another step ahead. Better luck next time, Microsoft!

Wohooooo!!!! Finally Germany is all high resulution in Google Earth. I just opened up GE and could not believe my eyes. Not just the big cities, but also little villages and countryside is finally not a big blob anymore. This might take geocaching to a whole new level in Germany. What a day!

On the weekend I payed my visit to this year’s CeBIT in Hannover. Well, let me tell you it was not very different from all the other years before, except that the companies were even more close-fisted then before. While a few years back, you normally went home with a bag filled to bursting with cool giveaways, DVDs, Software etc., this year I did not even get a free copy of the "Connect". A thing that did not change is the knowledge, or should I better say not existant knowlege, of the nice looking girls at all the stands and booths. Here a typical example of a fair-talk with a hostess at the CeBit (This is not a real situation but fictional and purely satirical and not meant to insult anyone):

Me looking at a new cell-phone. A hostess is coming towards me.
Hostess: "Hi! Do you like it?" (of course she was referring at the cell phone at my hand ;-))
Me: "Yeah, it looks quite nice…"
Hostess: "Look it even has a touch screen and it comes in lots of differen colors"
Me thinking: "Yeah, great. I hope they have them also in pink…"
Me saying: "Can you tell me something about the features?"
Hostess thinking: "Oh shit, I hate when they ask me that…"
Hostess saying: "Suuure! As you see it has a touchscreen…"
Me thinking: "Yeah, we got that already, yeah and the different colors".
Me saying: Yeah, does it have WiFi?"
Hostess (looking puzzled): "No. Sorry, It can’t make coffee, the next model certainly can do that. We show that in 07"
Me thinking: "Arrrrgghhhhh!!!".
Me saying (surpressing to ROFL): "Ok what about the internal harddrive?"
Hostess thinking: "Ugh! What does he want from me? No I am not that kinda girl!"
Hostess saying: "Sorry I cannot say anything about that, you should go to the main information and ask them."
Me: "Welllll, thank you for your kind help".
Me thinking: "Oh my goooooddddd!!!"

Now you got some idea of the mental state I was in after a couple of talks like that. Something inside my head told me "KILL KILL KILL". Well I supressed that fortunately and rather took some photos to calm down. The results you can see in the photo section. But anyway it was a nice day. Here come my personal CeBIT 06 highlights:

• The UMPC
• Samsung SCH-B600 (cellphone with 10MP camera)
• Samsung YM-P1
• Nokia E61
• Garmin GPSMap 60CSx

So see ya at the CeBIT Asia in Shanghai in September.

If you put your photos online with Flickr, you normally want the viewers to know where these photos were taken. You can do this the low-tech way by giving them a tag with the name of the City or the like. However there is also a better way to do this by assigning a georeference to the photo by latitude and longitute coordinates. This way the photos can be viewed on maps like Google Earth. To achieve this you got to "geotag" your images.

Geotagging your photos in Flickr has always been a hassle. You could manually add tags with logitude and latitude coordinates for each photo. With Google Earth and a nice little networklink from Flickrmap you can do this very easily now. Check their tutorial, how it works. Once your photos are geotagged they show up on Flickrmap and (with the right networklink) on Google Earth.

I just came across a neat service that falls under the category "visitor-maps". As you might have noticed, I already use a service called Blogflux MapStats, which uses Google Maps to display the origin of my visitors. ClustrMaps shows your visitors on a map as clusters of varying size and lets. As an aside: It seems to be quite a hype these days to omit the "e" in names, like in Flickr and now in Clustr.

The service is free for sites with less then 1000 visitors daily otherwise it costs $ 9.99 a year or $ 0.99 per month.

These days Google launches cool new projects almost on a daily basis. Their newest baby is Google Pack, a bundle of some very useful Google tools, mixed with some third party software. Certainly cool is a free version of Norton AntiVirus that comes with a free subscription for 6 month. You can customize which tools should be in your pack and then download it all together. Since I use all of these tools already, I haven’t tried it myself yet, but as I know the guys from Google it will certainly work like a charm. By default, the following apps are included:

• Google Earth
• Google Desktop
• Google Toolbar für den Internet Explorer
• Picasa
• Google Pack Screensaver
• Mozilla Firefox mit Google Toolbar
• Norton AntiVirus 2005 Special Edition
• Adobe Reader 7
• Ad-Aware SE Personal

Optionally you can also include:

• Google Talk
• RealPlayer
• Trillian
• GalleryPlayer HD Images

To learn more check the About-Page.

I am a big fan of the Trillian Instant Messenger, which is an IM client, able to handle ICQ, MSN, AIM, Yahoo! and Jabber. With plugins you can even use it for Lotus Sametime and Novell Messenger. But one thing was always missing: Skype! I mean the cool thing about Trillian is that you only need one contact list for everything. But also using Skype means two contact lists open. Now, there is the solution: SkyLlian. It is a Trillian plugin that puts your Skype contacts in your Trillian list and lets you use Trillian to chat and voice chat. The downside however is that you still need to have a Skype client installed and run in the background. Hopefully they will get rid of that in the future that you really only need a Trillian. Anyway it is a great step in the right direction.

Skyllian Website

PC Magazine released its flop 10 list of this years electronical gadgets. But not only no name brands, also Sony, Samsung or Motorolla released some major electro-garbage this year. Click here for the full article. Here are the according pictures.

The SANS institute released this years Top 20 software vulnarabilites. Surprisingly, even anti-virus tools and Firefox not 100% safe. Not a surprise, the MS software (Windows, Office, IE, etc) are top of the list. Maybe they should spend not so much time on making the new Windows more colorful, but making it safer!