Government sues Streetdirectory.com who sued so many people!

Virtual Map, the owner of streetdirectory.com , has made quite a good living enforcing their intellectual property rights against large and small companies in Singapore - when these companies used the unprotected jpg maps from streetdirectory.com, boom! they got threatened with a suit, and they'd settle out of court. And their licensing fees and `penalties' were not cheap. They succeeded against several parties, including the most famous case of all, NTUC! The fees were quite outrageous as I recall.

All the map data was licensed from SLA. They were trading in the license.

And SLA has started an action against Virtual Map, as reported by TODAY here. SLA states that it terminated their licensing to Virtual Map in July 2004.

Well, let's just see what happens. Virtual Map has only gotten hate from what I read in the papers the past few years, with their victims claiming entrapment, inducement, `making a living outta suing people', etc. Nothing flattering coming from the victims of course.

Well, let's see whether the SLA succeeds. If the SLA wins, Virtual Map might have to pay back all the license fees it collected from its clients since July 2004, with interest. Facts from the case and rulings might also put holes in Virtual Map's license even before July 2004, and the payback may extend even before July 2004.

After everything, their victims might hope that somebody might have the bright idea to allege that Virtual Map KNOWINGLY licensed their maps without having valid title.

Let the Discovery process reveal interesting internal emails! This will be fun to watch.

more blogs on this: Cnet Gin's Tonic

Finally, Picasa can post to Blogger Beta

Since I upgraded my blogs to blogger beta in August, I've had nothing but problems when I try to post pictures to the blogs using Picasa. But I saw others with utterly no problems after the October Picasa patch which enabled dual logins to either Blogger or Blogger Beta.

Why? Because of this obscure point: If Backlinks are enabled in your Blogger beta blog (how's that for a tongue twister???), Picasa cannot post pictures there. Thanks to http://knownissues.blogspot.com/search/label/picasa :

You cannot post from Picasa to Blogger in beta if you have backlinks turned on.

OK now that I've turned off the backlinks to my baby's blogs, the pictures come alive again!

Goosync syncs your cellphone with Google Calendar

Goosync has made me the happiest man in the world today. The happiest! Really! How happy am I? Well, for the first time in my life, I've put an image at the centre of my blogpost! That's how happy I am.

The DREAM of synchronizing my cellphone with Google Calendar has almost been forgotten until today. I tried various ways of doing it, using the iCal specification, using various MAPI hacks with Outlook, sharing here and sharing there, and all of these either don't work or work with so much resource overhead, or have serious deficiencies.

FORGET ALL THAT NOW!

GOOSYNC ENABLES YOU TO SYNC YOUR CELLPHONE OVER THE AIR WITH GOOGLE CALENDAR!

Here's how it does it.

1. Register at Goosync.
2. Enter the normal crap, and then, they will want your google password. If you're afraid, do this.... make another google account (new google account), just for this, empty of everything, and share this new google account calendar with your normal google account or google hosted account. Then share your google hosted or normal google account with this new google account's calendar. So now it reads and writes both ways. This way, you'll protect your normal google account and any hacker who gets the new google account password is only limited to seeing your calendar, so that limits the damage. [Edit: Shared events don't seem to update anymore. Also, you can use your google hosted account by entering myname@domain.com at the username under Google Credentials.]
   
3. Goosync will send you a SMS message with autoconfiguration code. Enter the password Goosync gives you and Accept the changes it contains.
4. Then go to your cellphone's remote sync function, and run the goosync code, and you're synched both ways via GPRS, 3G GPRS or any damn internet connection your phone has.
   

Now this fulfils my dream in more ways than I anticipated. Now I can sync without my computer. I don't need the cable and all the problems which come with USB synchronization.

Now, Google, please go buy Goosync. They've earned it. Just 5 million bucks. They've made me happier than you have. Goosync, I love you. I love you. I love you.

Soon: Synthetize a 3D environment using your pictures (and others')

Microsoft Photosynth is going to revolutionize the way you sort pictures. Right now you sort pictures according to your own tags, labels, or folders. Photosynth synthetizes a 3D environment based on the images in your pictures. Example: if you go to India, take pictures all around the Taj Mahal, Photosynth can arrange your images according to WHERE you took it around the Taj, in a 3D space, presumably merging with data available from the pictures of other people all around the Internet.

And this would add a further dimension to your pictures, much more than GPS geotagging. It will augment reality, give you a much more powerful view, and from a human point of view, evoke more intimate emotions about your pictures.

Check out the video here:

Thatcher's Advisor Debunks Assertions of Global Warming

Read here.

I've recently been greatly influenced by reports of global warming, not that I'm an expert, but it sure is intuitive that with all the heat pumped from our cars, factories etc. to the atmosphere, something bad's gonna happen. And Climate Change has become such an all-pervasive religion that I've scarcely heard any authoritative source.

So when a Thatcher fanboy like myself read Christopher Monckton's pop-science article at the Telegraph, it was something I wanted to spend a few minutes on. Read it yourself and judge.