moebius recursive

This holiday season, I created my own little mashup by combining this web service (created by Ben Hammersley) to track a FedEx package via RSS and the Yahoo Alerts service to notify my mobile phone when the FedEx status was updated.

The combination worked pretty well (Yahoo Alerts sent several false/duplicate updates). It would be nice if all of the major shipping carriers provided this as a service. Tracking multiple packages via RSS is much simpler via RSS than having to go ping individual websites. The option to couple this with SMS notification is a big plus for critical, can’t miss shipments.

technorati tags: yahoo, rss, tracking, sms, fedex

 

Apple is making two videos available free via the iTunes Store. One is a Saturday Night Live skit and the other is special on the new Battlestar Galactica series to start in January 2006. These are the first free video offerings from Apple.

technorati tags: apple, itunes, video, ipodvideo

 

There is now an online version of the book Innovation Happens Elsewhere, which discusses using open source software as a business strategy. Even if you are developing your own ‘proprietary’ software, leveraging the sheer amount (and in most cases, quality) of open source software can provide for speedier startup and time to market.

If you are interested, the dead tree version was published in April 2005 and is available from amazon.

technorati tags: opensource, oss, books, business

 

AjaxTrans is a very nifty utility that provides a similar service to BabelFish and Google Language Tools. Namely it translates text from one language to another. The twist is that it performs that translation as each word is typed (avoiding the page refresh).

English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are supported.

technorati tags: translation, ajax, language