This is my final entry on the Sun employee blog.  If I choose to start another blog in the future, you may learn about it here: http://ktweblog.blogspot.com/
 

Thanks to all the readers of this blog.

I blogged about this before, but if you're looking to find some cheap airline flights, you may want to check out cheap flights at dohop.com

Dell is reaching out to it's user community with the Dell IdeaStorm for ideas and feedback.  The top requests so far are all about providing open source, free, or lower cost alternatives, to Microsoft products that can, as one member points out, "shave hundreds of dollars of off the price of a new PC."

The top  requests are:

• Pre-Installed Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE)
  
• Pre-Installed OpenOffice
  
• No extra software option
  
• Linux laptop
  
• No OS Preloaded
  
• Have Firefox pre-installed as default browser
  
• Build computers not loaded with extra software

Other request have to do with similar items, such as improved driver support for Linux.  It will be interesting to see how Dell responds.  Running a Microsoft free environment is becoming more popular.  I personally haven't used Microsoft Office since May 2000, and I rarely boot up my Windows partition on my Toshiba laptop anymore.  I have a few friends, non-technical, I should add, that have switched over to Ubuntu Linux and seem quite happy with it.

I wish I had used this great travel tool, dohop, when I was making my travel plans this last holiday season.  In less than 5 seconds this search engine delivers results from over 660 airlines, including a over 100 low-cost airlines that you won't find on Expedia, Yahoo!, and Priceline.  Which means you get many more connection options than the traditional travel agencies (online and offline) can get you as these low-cost airlines are not in their system.

Try inserting some destinations in the flash image above, and submit a search. The results they give you are pretty impressive, and so is the interface. Pretty neat use of AJAX and javascript. Dohop apparently made the list of the Best of the Best Web 2.0 web sites last year, tops the list for travel website.

At MacWorld in San Francisco, Apple did announce the iPhone as expected, and has decided to fight Cisco for the name.  I personally think their legal position is questionable.  I checked out the show briefly this week, and saw the iPhone. It's one sleek machine.

Here are some photos I took:

 © 2006 Kristinn Thorleifsson, all rights reserved 

Apple is posting this graphic on their website in anticipation of MacWorld that kicks off tomorrow.

As you can see, it's an apple eclipsing the Sun. This blogger seems to be reading a little too much into this picture.  In an earlier blog, I mentioned that Sun and Apple did in fact almost merge on three occasions.  This time it's almost certainly not happening.

One of the things I checked out while in London was the Apple store on Regent Street. It's huge, and now I'm reading that it in fact is Apple's largest retail outlet in the world (beside their website of-course). I'm not surprised, but I had thought the largest Apple store was their Fifth Avenue New York store. I didn't buy anything in the London store, as the prices seemed to be about 30% higher than stateside, beside I just acquired a shiny new MBP C2D (that would be MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo).  I picked up mine in the small and cozy Apple store in downtown Palo Alto (why not buy your Mac in Steve Job's neighborhood store if you can?).  Don't expect me to post any photos of me unpacking my MBP and posting on this blog. That is way too geeky.

So you can't win when it comes to technology. I currently have the latest and greatest Apple laptop on the market, but not for long.  On January 8 Steve Jobs will take the stage at MacWorld in San Francisco, after which I likely will have a late model Apple laptop. That's the nature of the game, as Scott McNealy has pointed out: "All this technology has the shelf-life of a banana..."

Anyhow. The rumor going around in the past few days is that Apple will announce an ultra thin MacBook, with the casing possibly made out of carbon fiber.  Might look something like this after market case, but way thinner.  This is probably a long-shot.

We should also expect to see the previously announced iTV, and the iPhone. Of all these things, I have to say that I'm most interested in the iPhone. My real worry though is that they try to create a dual device that is just as much an iPod as a phone. I don't want another iPod, I already have two. What I want is a phone, not a digital swiss army knife. I don't mind my cell phone being able to play music, but please don't make that a dominant feature. We'll have to wait and see.

Since I'm blogging on Apple, I should also mention, for those of you that don't know, that Apple and Sun almost merged three times.  Snapple?

As I was updating my blog's look and feel, I found this website, Web Developer's Handbook. Includes a lot of resources for web development.