My Digital Online Diary

According to the latest news, the group behind the world’s most popular smartphone operating system – Symbian – is giving away “billions of dollars” worth of code for free. The Symbian Foundation’s announced that it would make its code open source in 2008 and has now completed the move. This means that any organization or individual can now use and modify the platform’s underlying source code “for any purpose”. “This is the largest open source migration effort ever,” Lee Williams of the Symbian Foundation stated.

They believe that the move will attract new developers to work on the system and help speed up the pace of improvements. This might increase rate of evolution and increase the rate of innovation of the platform.

Ian Fogg, principal analyst at Forrester research, said the move was about Symbian “transitioning from one business model to another” as well as trying to gain “momentum and mindshare” for software that had been overshadowed by the release of Apple’s iPhone and Google Android operating system.

According to BBC News, a new search engine and social network provider called Goojje has appeared online in China. This site contains very similar branding to Google, and the final syllable “jje” sounds similar to the Mandarin word for older sister (jiejie).

Goojje’s search results appear to be filtered for sensitive content in accordance with Chinese regulations. Google has recently objected to those restrictions, but the new site appears to be urging it to remain in China. Google said on 12 January that hackers had tried to infiltrate its software coding and the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, in a “highly sophisticated” attack.

The California-based firm – which launched in China in 2006 – said it would remain in China only if the government relaxed censorship. Goojje has a message on its site which reads: “Sister was very happy when brother gave up the thought of leaving and stayed for sister”.

While Goojje sounds like “sister”, the word Google sounds similar to the Mandarin word gege, which means “big brother”. Google has declined to comment.

The founder of Microsoft Bill Gates and his wife Melinda have said they will donate $10bn over the next 10 years to develop and deliver new vaccines. Mr Gates, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said the aim was to see 90% of children in developing countries immunized.

Over the past 10 years, the couple’s charity has committed $4.5bn to the development of vaccines. This commitment has been called by the WHO (World Health Organization) as “unprecedented”.

“The increasing immunization coverage in poorer countries to 90% it should be possible to save the lives of 7.6 million children under five between 2010 and 2019. We must make this the decade of vaccines. Vaccines already save and improve millions of lives in developing countries. Innovation will make it possible to save more children than ever before. Money was needed to make the most of new vaccines now becoming available, including ones against severe diarrhea and pneumonia,” Mr. Gates said in a statement.

Melinda Gates added: “Vaccines are a miracle. With just a few doses, they can prevent deadly diseases for a lifetime. We’ve made vaccines our number one priority at the Gates Foundation because we have seen firsthand their incredible impact on children’s lives.”

“This was really an unprecedented contribution and urged governments and private donors to add to the initiative. An additional two million deaths in children under 5 years could be prevented by 2015 through widespread use of new vaccines and a 10% increase in global vaccination coverage,”  Margaret Chan, head of the World Health Organization said.

After one week since the devastating earthquake hit Haiti, the UN says “hope persists” in finding more people alive in the ruins of buildings. The UN usually decides to call off search and rescue attempts between five and seven days after a disaster, once no-one has been saved for a day or two – but people have been known to survive for much longer, BBC news stated.

In 1995, Park Seung Hyun was pulled from the wreckage of a collapsed supermarket in Seoul, South Korea, 16 days after it collapsed and in January 2004, Shahr-Banu Mazandarani, an Iranian woman in her 90s was rescued after nine days buried in the rubble of her home after the Bam earthquake.

Julie Ryan, a co-ordinator with UK-based group International Rescue Committee (IRC), says that survival largely depends on what happens the moment the quake first hits. “The ideal situation is you have become trapped and entombed but have some sort of oxygen supply from the outside world, are not injured and also have some sort of access to water,” she told the BBC. “You have usually managed to get yourselves into some sort of void where you are enclosed by the building but it doesn’t injure you.”

She said an IRC team rescued three boys who had been buried in the ruins of their school for five days after the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005.

The star of Showtime’s “Dexter,” HBO’s “Six Feet Under” and the 2009 feature film “Gamer,” Michael C. Hall, has been diagnosed with cancer. The actor himself confirmed the news, saying the diagnosis was made very early, which allowed him to undergo treatment instantly. The disease is now in remission, Hall also says, as cited by the Los Angeles Times.

Hall has been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he says in his statement. According to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Hodgkin’s lymphoma is one of the most curable types of cancer. It is most likely to be diagnosed in people in their 20s or 30s, becoming less common in middle age and more common again after 60. This and the early diagnosis have allowed the star to have the happy chance of saying his doctors are optimistic about his condition, now that his cancer has gone into remission.

“I feel fortunate to have been diagnosed with an imminently treatable and curable condition. I thank my doctors and nurses for their expertise and care,” the 38-year-old actor says of his disease. Shortly after being diagnosed, Hall started treatment in Los Angeles. As of now, not as much as a peep of his condition has transpired in the media, which is perhaps why this particular news took many by surprise.

It has been a talk in the internet when the first photo of Kendra Wilkinson’s first baby, a boy named Hank Baskett IV, has already surfaced on the cover of the upcoming issue of OK! Magazine. Editors for the tab were invited at the hospital, where the star was recovering after giving birth, and were lucky to get her talking about how it felt to be a new mommy. Although she claims to have “labor brain” and to have forgotten everything that happened since she was taken to the hospital, Kendra can’t stop talking about her and husband Hank Baskett new bundle of joy. She feels great after the experience and the fact that she finally gets to hold little Hank is truly a dream come true. And it more than shows in the photo, with Kendra smiling wide as she’s cradling the baby in her arms.

As the former glamour model says for the magazine “The good thing about being induced is that it’s like planning a trip, just very calm. We ate a huge dinner before we came to the hospital. I ate a whole batch of brownies because I was nervous. No wonder he’s 9 pounds! I was induced early in the morning; then it was wait, wait, wait. I was experiencing contractions throughout the day, and I was anxious. I kept checking the monitor every second, like ‘Is it happening yet?’”.

As noted above, this could easily be a new record in terms of a media outlet rushing with an offer to get a celebrity’s baby photos. Tradition in showbiz makes it so that this kind of pictures can make a lot of money; with their value going up if the waiting period is longer. Never before has a star sold pictures with their 2-day old child, they say, which could also mean that demand for them was incredibly high.