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Your activity on Yahoo can soon begin appearing on Facebook, courtesy of the online media pioneer’s support for Facebook Connect.

Yahoo will let users of its e-mail, photo-sharing and other online products link their content and activities directly into Facebook, the world’s No. 1 Internet social network.

Yahoo’s support of the Facebook Connect service, which it said it expects to begin in the first half of 2010, represents an important move in Yahoo’s efforts to tap the popularity of social networking and underscores the growing clout of Facebook, which now counts more than 350 million worldwide users.

Earlier this year, Yahoo allowed users to preview messages from their Facebook friends directly on the Yahoo homepage, as part of a broad revamping of the Yahoo front page.

Wednesday’s announcement takes the integration between Yahoo and Facebook a step further, by automatically pushing activities performed on Yahoo sites, such as photos shared on Yahoo’s Flickr, into the Facebook news feed.

Yahoo said it expects that the content that consumers share on Facebook will drive visitors back to Yahoo. Facebook Connect, which was introduced last year, provides a universal ID that lets people automatically log on to participating sites with their Facebook credentials. It also allows people to notify their Facebook friends about their activities on third-party Web sites.

Yahoo’s move comes as the company seeks to revive its growth under the leadership of CEO Carol Bartz, who took the reins in January and announced a controversial deal to hand off the operation of its Internet search technology to Microsoft in July.



Although I don’t consider 2009 as the year of the Linux desktop, most of you will probably agree with me that this is the year of the Linux-powered smartphones. We can mainly thank Android for this as its popularity and market share has been growing at a rapid pace.

Motorola Droid

Google Nexus One (rumored)

The future is bright for Linux on the smartphone, and I won’t be surprised that the desktop will be conquered soon.

Most of us still rely on CD/DVD writing software applications for file backup, data transfer and distribution, and for ripping audio and video content among other things.

If you are using Linux, there are plenty of optical disc-authoring programs to choose from. Here are some of those that I like:

Brasero
Brasero is the default CD/DVD disc-burning program for the GNOME Desktop. It has a simple GUI and is very easy to use. The application supports drag and drop as well as cut and paste from the Nautilus file manager.

Here are some of the main features of Brasero:

* ca burn data and audio CD on the fly
* supports multiple backends: cdrtools, growisofs and libburn(optional).
* supports joliet extension
* can write the image to the hard drive
* supports the edition of CD-TEXT information
* can use all audio files handled by Gstreamer local installation (ogg, flac, mp3, …)
* can copy a CD/DVD to the hard drive
* can erase CD/DVD
* can burn CD/DVD images and cue files
* song, image and video previewer

K3b
K3b (KDE Burn Baby Burn) is a full-featured CD/DVD authoring software for the KDE desktop environment. It has a graphical user interface for most of its CD/DVD burning tasks like creating an Audio CD from a set of audio files or copying a CD/DVD, as well as more advanced tasks such as burning eMoviX CD/DVDs. The actual disc recording in K3b is done by the command line utilities cdrecord or cdrkit, cdrdao, and growisofs. The program has many default settings which can be customized by more experienced users.

Other features of K3b:

* CD Text support
* CD-R/CD-RW, DVD-R/DVD+R/DVD-RW/DVD+RW support
* Mixed Mode CD (Audio and Data on one disk)
* Multisession CD
* Disk to Disk CD and DVD copy
* Erasing CD-RW/DVD-RW/DVD+RW
* ISO image support
* Ripping Audio CDs, Video CDs, Video DVDs

ISO Master
ISO Master is a program that specializes in creating and modifying ISO files (ISO images).
It can read .ISO files (ISO9660, Joliet, RockRidge, and El Torito), most .NRG (Nero) files, and some single-track .MDF files.

Main features of ISO Master:

* Create an ISO image from scratch
* Add or remove files and directories to/from a CD image
* Create bootable CDs using various boot record types: no-emulation (isolinux, Microsoft Windows), 1.2, 1.44 and 2.88 floppy disk emulation

GnomeBaker
GnomeBaker is another GNOME-based CD/DVD authoring application that offers many features for authoring CDs that surpass the basic Nautilus CD/DVD burning capabilities.

Some of its capabilities are:

* Create data CDs
* Burn DVDs
* Copy data CDs
* Copy audio CDs
* Support multisession burning.
* Record to and burn from existing CD ISO images.
* Can burn via SCSI and ATAPI on Linux kernels 2.4 and 2.6. Basically if cdrecord works, then GnomeBaker will work.
* Drag and drop to create data CDs (including drag and drop to/from the Nautilus file manager).
* Create audio CDs from existing WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg files.
* Integrate with GConf for storage of application settings.

AcetoneISO
AcetoneISO is a program that is specifically made for mounting and managing image files, but it can do a lot of other things as well. It has a goal of being simple, intuitive and stable. Written in Qt 4, this software is meant for all those people looking for a sort of Daemon Tools for Linux.

Some of the many features of AcetoneISO:

* Mount automatically ISO, BIN, MDF, and NRG without the need to insert admin password. Only single-track images are supported for the moment.
* A native utility to blank your CD-RW, DVD-RW and DVD-RW discs
* A nice display that shows current images mounted and possibility to click on it to quickly reopen mounted image
* Convert 2 ISO all image types: bin mdf nrg img daa dmg cdi b5i bwi pdi and much more
* Extract images content to a folder: bin mdf nrg img daa dmg cdi b5i bwi pdi and much more
* Encrypt / Decrypt an image
* Convert Mac OS *.dmg to a mountable image
* Extract the Boot Image file of a CD/DVD or ISO
* Extract audio from a video file
* Extract a *.rar archive that has a password