Last week a court declared illegal the use of terms such as "lights" or "mild" on cigarettes packs, saying that they are misleading. So all producers have one year to remove these terms from their packaging.

Besides the news itself, I would be curious to see how Philip Morris and the other tobacco industries are scrambling to find new names for their products.

On September 10th Dave wrote on Scripting.com:

John Robb is the #5 John on Google; Tim Berners-Lee is the #1 Tim. Amazingly, Tara Sue is not the #1 Tara Sue. And sadly I am not the #1 Dave, I'm a mere #2."

At the time I was the first Paolo.

This morning everything changed, apparently Google updates the rankings about once per month.

I'm now the 4th Paolo, John Robb dropped from the first page, Tim Berners-Lee is second after the Italian cell phone operator Tim, Dave is no longer the second Dave. On the upside Tara Sue now is the first Tara Sue and my friend Simone is 6th searching only for Italian sites and 30th worldwide.

As soon as I read the news I downloaded iSync from Apple's web site. This new tool is supposed to synchronize data in all your calendars and address books between several computers, iPods, cell phones, Palms, etc.

It's about everything I always wanted from my personal information management software: besides the small gizmos (I own both an iPod and a Palm), I regulary use 3 Macs and I would *love* to have address books and calendars synchronized between these 3 machines as I always have something stored on the other Mac (I would also like to have these data syncronized on my Windows machine... but this is another story).

So I installed iSync on two, set up the .Mac account (synchronization is done trough Apple's servers, and you need a .Mac accoun), hit the sleek "stainless steel like" button and... I got a server error.

Checking the Apple's site, I noticed two things:

• iSync is a beta version
• on the discussion group I found out that everybody's having the same problem

Now... I'm sure that tomorrow everything will work again, maybe even later today, as soon as somebody find this out and fixes some script on some server.

It's not that I'm not disappointed, I am, but I have also released enough on-line services to know that Murphy rules in these cases, and it happens especially if you release stuff on week-ends, when there's not the usual staff available to fix problems if they occur.

Oh well... in the meawhile I synchronized my iPod, and now I have all my contacts and my appointments with my music. Useful? Don't know yet.

This morning I found cool topics links on Marc's blog, powered by LiveTopics.

I've been trying LiveTopics on my k-log for a while, and I must say that it's very interesting. The main reason I like it is that I'm not much a big topics fan. I mean, I think that having to organize everything I post is additional work and I didn't think it was worth the effort. With LiveTopic it's so easy that you get a topics-based organization of your work almost without efforts.

I've created an RSS newsfeed for the Google Sci/Tech news.  You can find it here.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Now, this is just what I needed, a link from John to get me blogging again! These are very hard and busy times, working 14 hours per day with hardly some time to think, and you can't blog without thinking.

Now, thinking is good, so I guess that blogging must be good, uh?

So, back on the saddle again, we've a lot of exciting thing going on such as localized versions of Radio in Italian and French now coming really soon.

I have also just rediscovered digital video, particulary mpeg4 compression that delivers impressive high quality in very small file sizes, so... more thinking, more bloggin'

Apparently it's like rinding a bicycle, once you learn you don't forget.

Except that the improvement in terms of processor speed has made things like 3D rendering going from hours (or days) to minutes, while a lot of video effects are rendered in real time. So I'm now riding a bicycle at 100mhp.

I'm still playing with Jaguar new iApps, so yesterday I downloaded iCal. 

The application saves its data using the .ics standard, which apparently belongs to the .vcs family (I need to study this a little better). Anyway the interesting thing is that iCal can automatically upload the file to an Apple server (or to any WebDav server) and create a nicely rendered version of my calendar on-line.

iCal also supports subscriptions, so I can subscribe to other people's calendars and have their appointments visualized in my calendar. Hmmm

IdeaTools' itCalendar module also supports .vcs files, and I have already set up my browser in order to proces events saved on my intranet with iCal, so all I have to do to add an appointment to from my Intranet site to my calendar is click on the vcs icon in my browser double hmmm.

It's also easy to create an .ics version of our intranet scheduler, so that iCal users could use iCal to subscribe to our intranet (btw, the itCalendar application already renders rss versions of the appointments).

I don't know exactly where we will end with all this, but what it's certain is that by sticking to standards, new opportunities are created for the software we write almost daily, and this is very exciting.

Basically, Web Services are central to personal publishing.  They are also essential to simple point and click composite Web apps that run on the desktop and for sharing data between apps that run on the desktop.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Of course, I totally agree.

After discovering iChat yesterday, today it was Sherlock day. As you might have heard, Sherlock has turned to a web-services front end, much like Watson already was.

What this means is that I can access services such as Flights schedules, translations, dictionaries, search engines and more from an optimized user interface.

Too bad Microsoft is not counting these...

Hosting service for Radio webloggers, with localized version of Radio coming soon on a server near you. Both JY and me are Pulp Fiction fans

So now that I've installed Jaguar I have all these new iApps to play with, today is the iChat day. iChat uses the AIM protocol, and I don't have many IM contacts, but I remembered that John Robb has a link with his IM nickname on his weblog. So I went to his page, copied the nickname and choosed "Add a new buddy" on iChat.

In the window that popped up, along with name and other data, there also is a "picture" field. Hey, John has a small picture on his weblog that has just the right size! So I dragged the image from the browser's window to the field and here on the right you can see how it looks like.

Ok, I agree, it's not a big deal, but it's one of those many little things that keeps me happy working on this OS

One year ago today I was in Florence. As I got on the car heading for home (it's a 5 hours drive), my wife called saying that something serious was going home in New York. I turned on the radio and listened to the news all the way home. I heard them describing the second plane smashing in the tower, then the Pentagon, then the towers collapsing... There were rumors of other highjacked planes, the air space had been closed, a lot of confusion.

I got on-line with my Palm and my cell phone and tried to get some additional info. Scripting news was reporting first hand experiences, the main news sites were unreachable.

By the time I got home, five hours later, both towers had collapsed and the attack was over. I turned on the television and I saw the images for the first time.

It's something that we'll never forget.

John Robb is the #5 John on Google; Tim Berners-Lee is the #1 Tim. Amazingly, Tara Sue is not the #1 Tara Sue. And sadly I am not the #1 Dave, I'm a mere #2. [Scripting News]

...but I'm still the first Paolo

Interesting debate between Dave and Marc about who loves me more .

As in any human environment, there's a lot of sterile "I'm right / You're wrong" in the blogosphere, but there's also a lot of love and respect.

I consider dave a friend, and Scripting.com is by far the top referrer for this site, Marc is a big friend too and he has pictures of me I had forgot about.

As I wrote earlier I have learned a lot from both of you, but I cannot say who I love more

Let's make love and respect win.

Yes, thanks to Macromedia! On the Macromedia MX Developer Resource Kit you can find a custom version of ThemeTool. It's perfectly integrated with Dreamweaver MX, and registering it you will get all updates (and a lot of other cool extension for Dreamweaver).

Oh well... I wanted to install Jaguar from scarcth anyway, so...

Ok, first don't worry, the new screen background is named "Faux Fur", no animal has been harmed in the development of MacOS X 10.2.

Right now, today's most read weblog of the UserLand's Radio Community is my friend Simone's weblog.

What happened is that opening his public blog last week he criticized an article printed on a local newspaper. He notified the author about his comments (the article was really filled with errors) and he got back first an insulting message, then a message threatening, actually promising, legal action. Simone published both messages on his site.

The story got around, and today there's an article covering the news on one of the main technology news sites in Italy.

Last night I dreamed that waking up I was back in the past, sometime in the late '40s, as I saw American jeeps and troops down on the streets in Gorizia (the Allied forces were controlling this area after WWII), there were very few cars and people was dressed differently. While my bedroom it was as it is today, also the rest of the apartment was filled with old furniture.

But in the old kitchen I found my back-pack, with my PowerBook inside. Not only I had a modern computer in the 40s, but for some incredible reason (well... it was a dream, uh?) I could get on-line, of course connecting to the 2002 web. Google was working!

I felt so excited for what I could have done with this immense power that I woke up.

I guess that the fact that after 12 days my TiBook is still somewhere in Germany to get the screen replaced it's starting to wear me off...