I’ve been busy hacking around with Kinect, the Xbox 360 “controllerless controller” I’ve been writing a lot about recently.

Yesterday I got it up and running under Ubuntu, and after that I got a very simple “nearest object” algorithm running on it. Check out the videos below! Also – the code.

You may have seen my recent rant about the University of Reading’s e-mail software. I got so fed up, in fact, that I decided to do something about it.

That something was to “migrate” my University e-mail to Google Mail. With a release a few months ago, Google gave Mail the complete toolset you need to get it to act as a mail client for your Uni account – seamlessly. This wasn’t the only reason, though – with a Google account, the mail and contacts sync much better with my Nexus One.

Here’s how I migrated so you can too – in about 15 minutes.

We all know how big and how quickly Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter and the like had to scale. To do so, they had to think outside the box, and make not only wide use, but also many upgrades and contributions to countless open source software projects.

It’s something we sadly something we hear very little about – corporate secrecy keeps much of the juicy details at bay – but these next generation services are not only using these projects, but also making significant contributions to open-source projects and even open sourcing entire chunks of their codebase.

I’d like to sit back for a minute, take a look at what these web powerhouses have been building, and appreciate their contributions to everyone’s development.

Team Foundation Server is a product that Microsoft have been selling to work with Visual Studio for many years now. Over time it has evolved, and with the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2010, I thought now would be a great time to check out Team Foundation Server in more detail; specifically how it can help students get their projects done faster and better.

Team Foundation Server used to be the companion to Visual Studio Team System (which acted as the client). With VS 2010, Team System has been integrated into the core of Visual Studio. This provides two benefits – better support as it’s baked right in, and more students can get access to it for free!

There are 3 main targets of Team System:

So now that Windows 7 has been out and about a bit in the wild, security firms that previously made millions from selling their wares to naive users are finding their revenues dropping.

That is the only reason, I can guess, for them to be going to the harsh marketing that they have been up to recently. It basically amounted to them saying that Windows 7 was insufficiently secure and you “needed” another level of protection.

Of course, any extra protection is recommended; but in this case I think there is something that can outdo AVG and their irresponsible advertising campaign.