Cover

Coverity, a company with tools to check for programming problems that pose security risks, has found 359 of them in a scan of the Android source code.

There are 88 high-risk problems and 271 medium-risk problems in the source code underlying the Android kernel used in HTC's Incredible phone, the company said Tuesday. Android uses the Linux kernel, but the Android-specific components have a higher defect rate than mainstream Linux, Coverity said.

Some good news for Google, though, is that the defect rate is still lower than the industry average of one defect per 1,000 lines of code. … Read more

Chances are, if you've had your computer for any amount of time, you've burned a CD or DVD and needed a cover for it. UnderCoverXP makes it easy to create covers for a variety of types of digital media. It's not a design program, exactly; it's more of a utility for scaling images to the right size and printing them so that they'll fit in whatever type of case you're using. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of making covers; UnderCoverXP gets the dimensions right every time.

The program's interface is … Read more

Today's show title was originally supposed to read, "Where the manliest thing Justin Yu does is shop for a duvet cover," but since we're not prone to totally making things up for the show, we had to change it to what you see now.

This morning's episode of The 404 Podcast delves into a new antisocial networking site called Avoidr and examines a study that finally proves "older" actually means "wiser." We also pick apart the teaser for the new Facebook movie "The Social Network," and while we're … Read more

Sure, to some a record might be just a piece of plastic, but to me an LP is a beautiful object. It feels great in my hands, and looks amazing spinning on a turntable. There are dozens of LP cover art books, but just looking at light dancing on a LP's spiral groove is something I never tire of.

I own thousands of LPs and sometimes use them in my art. Of course the LP's prime attraction is its sound, so even as CD sales continue to decline, the LP looks like it will be around for the … Read more

Cover Stream is a standalone app designed to help you browse through and listen to your iTunes music, using a visual, intuitive, and unobtrusive interface that's similar to iTunes' Cover Flow.

You can use Cover Stream through your menu bar, in a separate window (which you can toggle to full screen, or to float on top), or both, and the app makes it easy to flip through albums and playlists, play music (including standard controls such as pause, shuffle, and volume, along with a host of system-wide hot keys), build a "Jukebox Mode" queue (including a shuffle … Read more

It may not seem like it now, but soon there will come a day when the sun is shining, and outside activities are but a picnic basket away. When it comes to serving certain wines, temperature makes all the difference, but it can be difficult to mix a fun day spent outdoors with a perfectly chilled wine. Advanced planning is usually essential, involving the forethought to place equipment in the freezer, such as gel packs or even bulky contrivances.

The Skybar Wine Cool Cover doesn't require you to prefreeze any equipment or freezer packs. Instead, the picnic accessory creates … Read more

A Steve Jobs keynote is technology journalism's Super Bowl equivalent. And as with the Super Bowl, they're best enjoyed in real time. Thus the healthy growth of the live-blogging platform CoverItLive, which enables journalists to file live reports that are transmitted, as they type them, to their online readers.

The company, started in 2007, has been growing well and winning the support of journalists not just in the technology realm, but in sports, politics, and other fields. It has become the largest live-blogging platform there is. The embedded CoverItLive live blog player is popping up on sites across the Web. (For a sample CoverItLive live blog, see this replay of a Google press announcement.)

But CoverItLive fell apart during the January 27 iPad announcement. Just as the event was getting started, incoming Apple fans were turned away from embedded CoverItLive live blogs on important sites like TUAW, MacWorld, and MacNN. Readers quickly abandoned many of these sites and headed to others, like Gdgt, that were using home-grown live-blogging tools. To stop readers from leaving, some sites, such TUAW, abandoned CoverItLive on the spot and began publishing frequent updates on their standard platforms. Regardless, it appeared to be a disaster for the small live-blogging company.

The Steve Jobs keynote also temporarily overwhelmed other sites, including CNET News and our sister site ZDNet (read what went wrong). CoverItLive competitors include services like Scribble Live and live video services like Qik and Justin.tv.

This was not CoverItLive's first failure during a Steve Jobs keynote. On January 15, 2008, during the MacBook Air announcement, the platform also collapsed. Since then, CoverItLive flourished nonetheless, winning over journalists in other fields, mostly in sports and politics, who started to use the product regularly. And then the tech sites started to come back.

Sites like MacNN used the service to great advantage. Publisher Monish Bhatia says that building his own live-blogging platform would have been too expensive, and that CoverItLive offered a good blend of features. MacNN used it about six times before the recent failure, he said. But, he told me, "I wish they were a paid service." He wanted a contract to fall back on with the company should anything go wrong.

Between the 2008 failure and the recent one, CoverItLive has not had a failure during a major live event. And many of these events, such as President Obama's Nobel Prize acceptance speech in December of 2009, got more live blog traffic (9 million views) than a Steve Jobs keynote had until then.

So what is it about Jobs' keynotes that is so toxic to CoverItLive? And how can the company regain the trust of tech journalists?

… Read more

Though iTunes has its own basic CD label-making tool, using a program like CoverStudio 2 gives your CDs and DVDs a lot more style. The program leads you through a step-by-step process, starting with several choices for what type of label you want to make. DVD cases, DVD booklets, slim cases, jewel cases, Blu-ray cases, and labels for the actual discs are all available. Simply check the box for what you want to make and then choose how you want to format the labels for your printer. You can grab an image you already have or choose from several images … Read more

Most businesses seek competitive advantage through some kind of change. Whether they want to beat the competition to market with a new service or introduce new product categories, disruption is the norm.

The challenge in today's IT-centric world is that every one of those disruptions requires a software change, introducing the potential for downtime and lost revenue.

Change control and the associated risk mitigation is a big problem that every large organization faces. Last year, the London Stock Exchange crashed during a software change and was down for more than seven hours, costing traders millions, if not billions of … Read more