ICT-CLOUD

Well - some time has passed since my last post. But never the less, here is a new interesting solution, I came across my daily work:

The task is quite easy:
In a PowerPoint Presentation (Office 2007) there are a certain number of Designs and Layouts (see here for explanation). And there as well some other slides, which do not conform to any design or layout.
But all of them contain a footer in which a date (the actual year) is contained.

To enhance usability I want to program an Office 2007 Add-In with VSTO 3.0, which updates all the footers of a presentation when a button is clicked.

No big problem I thought. Until I came to the footer. It took me quite some time to find a solution for this problem, since I am a beginner in VB.NET.

Finally I found the post on the MSDN-Blogs about HeaderFooter (unknown member)", which was actually the error raised.

Yesterday I stumbled upon a post on Uncrate.com about the Casio g'zOne Brigade and was fascinated.

I like this robust look and the many options for connecting to the internet this device has. Some more reports can be found on Gizmodo or on the Casio Site .

Unfortunately the phone is at the moment only available in the USA with a Verizon subscription. Let's hope it comes over to Europe as well.

I got this week the link to the following clip from a friend. And I was surprised about how social environments (in this case it is Zürich Main Station in Switzerland) can be included in a nice ad clip.

When you have seen the clip you see, that it is from Swisscom and there is a game going on under www.swisscom.ch/fanbuch .
Maybe you want to participate as well... I wish you good luck.

Image by Adam Pieniazek via Flickr

Implications

What is interesting about this case, is the fact that Apple cooperates with a company like AT&T that does not meet in any way the quality requirements of the product sold. Now it becomes clear that the customers are not willing to take this situation any longer and a similar case like the one with "Dell Hell" (see blog entry about Jeff Jarvis) where the customer's "revolution" is taking place on the web and having significant impact on the reputation of the concerned companies.
In my opinion it is now time that AT&T is doing something proactively about this issue. If they don't I expect Apple to get out of the exclusive contracts with AT&T.

However, we will see if there is any noticeable impact on the AT&T network during friday when Operation Chokehold may become true.

Well this is rare: As Golem.de has reported today in this post, Microsoft offers the book Visual Basic 2008 - Das Entwicklerbuch written by Klaus Löffelmann published under Microsoft Press free for download.

In the spirit of Christmas, as it seems, have they decided to give you, for a registration, the bonus and additional material, which includes the source code examples, for free.
The book itself (unfortunately for all English speaking readers in German) is available for free and without registration.

Image via Wikipedia

Today I have seen this interesting post from TechCrunch about Google with the title Achtung! Google Analytics is illegal, say German Government officials. The article summarises what the German news portal "Die Zeit Online" (online version of the famous newspaper "Die Zeit") has written in its article.

Of course did I read the original article on "Die Zeit Online" with the title Datenschützer wollen Einsatz von Google verhindern (in good old English: Privacy advocates want to prohibit Google Analytics).

Well this is an old discussion in good old Germany, which is overcautious regarding the data privacy regulation. I would say (and this a friend of mine has confirmed recently) that it is the country with the hardest regulations concerning data privacy in the web (e.g. for online shops, forums, blogs and whatever else there is on the web). So far this article was not surprising.

What was surprising indeed, was the fact, that the original article from "Die Zeit Online" was not accurate and really bad researched.

The fact, that Google is pushing its new Chrome OS into the market respectively it is only beginning to push it, is reason enough to think about the current and future situation of "traditional" operating systems.

TechCrunch has just published a comment from MG Siedler where he is talking about the squeezing of Microsoft

Basically this supports my thesis put in the earlier post about Windows 7

So we'll be excited about what the future (or Google) will bring us.

Today I have watched some TV before going to the office. And there has been an interesting report about Steampunk in the German IT-Broadcast "Neues" (Click here for the homepage of Neues)

I was really fascinated by the look of the machines from Rich Nagy and had to write a post immediately.

I am happy to hear from other artists in the IT-Area. Just drop a comment here.

Just discovered that there is another resource for ideas here at Brass Googles from the UK.