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You would remember that several weeks ago I was asking if Juice will ever support Atom feeds because internally in IBM we have a huge repository of podcasts, videos, webcasts, presentations, etc., for which Atom feeds are provided to subscribe with a podcatcher.

So I tried to use iTunes to subscribe to the podcasts and at least when I was subscribed to just one feed it was working, not completely good but was working. Then I decided to add a couple more and that’s where things started to go wrong. When I added the third feed, iTunes was not able to retrieve anything about it. Well, it looks like it retrieved the name of the feed but it assigned it as the name for the first podcast I subscribed to. Yep, you read it right, it overwrote the original (and good) name of the first podcast with the name of the third I added.

To make things worse, since the date I added the third feed, it doesn’t retrieves any new file from any of the podcasts.

Could someone please do me a favor and send the Apple developers this link to the specification of the Atom format? I’ll appreciate if they can at least implement the basic stuff that is retrieve the files from where the enclosures point to. Well, no, I’ll really appreciate it if they also do not install, along with iTunes, ‘Bonjour’ nor the MobileMe thing that I don’t need at all.

Anybody knows if Juice will ever support Atom feeds? It has been sleeping for several years now that I’m sure there are not developers left doing anything with it.

Anyone knows how can I get the source code? I would like to take a look and see if I can add the Atom support.

With great excitement I can tell you now that IBM Lotus Symphony 1.0 is available for everyone to download for free!

It has good support for ODF, OpenOffice, MS Office and Lotus SmartSuite documents, so you can get rid of all of those other office applications and have just one installed (as I’m gonna do next!).

Some months ago I read a magazine that I would rather call Software Newbie due to the basic nature of its articles, it comes with some translated articles from some other sources but anyways I don’t recommend it much.

What was interesting, but not surprising, was the survey that they made last year on their website which gives some numbers related to salaries in the IT sector in México.

I’ll mention briefly few of the figures that were interesting to me. Depending on the type of job, the job functions that are better paid than “Development” are: Quality, Security, Consultant, Sales, Project Management, Architecture, and Directors (managers, I believe) at the top.

Salaries are also subject to age and degree of studies. This is obvious, right?

By programming language I’ll just mention that the best paid are those who do Cobol. In the Platform arena, the ones at the top are Mainframe, Unix and AS/400. Around databases the two at the top are DB2 and Informix as second place.

The last interesting figure is the one by certification. If you have a Project Management Institute certification then you’re at the top, then come IBM WebSphere, Security, SAP and IBM DB2.

I just read the article “Some Viruses Come Pre-Installed” by the Associated Press in ABC News and the fact that any type of gadget (hardware) coming from China could contain several viruses and infect your computers is very bad.

Not only gadgets come with several viruses each like iPods, digital picture frames, the TomTom navigation gear, external hard drives, etc., but there’s toxic toothpaste, poisonous pet food and toy trains coated in lead paint.

Be sure to check that your computer has the latest antivirus signatures before plugging in whatever gadget you buy. Almost always, the cheap stuff turns out to be more expensive.

I just installed iTunes 7.6.1.9, the one that also contains Quicktime, but at the end of the installation my firewall software told me that a mDNSResponder.exe was trying to access the Internet so obviously what I did is to block it. Since it was in a Bonjour directory over the %ProgramFiles% directory I first went to it and checked a .rtf file where I saw that it was something from Apple, and then went to the Add and Remove Programs where I found it too.

I hate when software is installed without my consent. It may be useful for apple software but nonetheless could be dangerous, right? I uninstalled it.

Looks like effectively Apple is turning Evil.

We already knew that Vista’s a fiasco, but I have to say that the information in some Microsoft emails is quite interesting!

Things are not going right lately. In the last 2 or 3 weeks Firefox is freezing when I’m trying to log into Gmail or when clicking the ‘Spam’ folder (to do manual cleanup).

I’m now more careful when I have more tabs opened in Firefox. I don’t lose them if a freeze happens because I have the Session Manager add-on, but it’s annoying anyways.

Haven’t really researched about this. Any pointer will be welcome!

Today I disabled completely the Windows XP Automatic Updates from my home PC, since looks like it’s crap these days. Patch Tuesday happened several days ago and it keeps telling that it has updates to install. The System Tray icon disappears after accepting to install the updates and then you don’t see it again. When shutting it down it displays an option that says something like “Install updates and shutdown” (the other machine is in spanish so I’m not sure which is the actual sentence in english). That has happened like 4 times already. This just gives a bad impression, several hours and it cannot install 5 updates?!

I’m going to remove the red shield icon also.

The Firewall software installed on the ThinkPad is telling me that the mscorsvw.exe is attempting to access the Internet. I searched on the Web and I can see that it “precompiles .NET assemblies in the background”. But why the heck it has to connect to the IP address 131.107.115.28 through HTTP (port 80)?

I’ll block it forever unless I see a good reason why it should be calling home.