Flash, for me, is not something that I miss or want on the iPhone platform. Sure, there are some sites, for movies and maybe the occasional awesome reinvention of a classic game that I wouldn’t mind being able to see on my mobile platform of choice, but overall it’s not something I’m losing sleep over.

If you are losing sleep over it, or if you’re just curious about what Flash on an iDevice would even look and feel like, there’s a couple ways to try it out, one of which is available right now as an app that doesn’t require jailbreaking. The other, which is actually much cooler, is only in preview release right now, but  runs in your Safari browser natively without any extra steps required on a user’s part.

Cloud Browse is your first option. It’s an app that connects you to a remote computer running on servers maintained by the Cloud Browse developers, AlwaysOn. The app lets you then control the browsing on the remote computer from your iDevice, and see any type of web content, including Flash. The sites you visit are streamed to your phone, but there is some trade off as you might expect.

Video framerate is quite slow, and if you’re not a paying subscriber, you only have a limited number of spots to connect. Free users can also get bumped by paying customers, as in unceremoniously disconnected mid-session. You can get a paid account for $9.99 a month that would give you 30 FPS video and 1GB of storage for saving offline data. Plus you can only use it in the U.S. and Canada, and it only works over Wi-Fi. Finally, playing Flash games with the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard is absolutely no fun.

The other alternative is Smokescreen, which is a web-end tech that developers and designers could use to make their Flash content visible on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. That means that it’s currently far more limited (you can only see it in action in some demos released by the original developer), but that it has much more potential in terms of long-term usability.

Smokescreen operates by a workaround process that isn’t actually a plugin, so it there’s really nothing Apple can do to stop it. Here’s how the process works, as described by its creator Simon Willison:

It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio and turns them in to base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG.

The experience so far is somewhat hit or miss, with simple animations like those found in Flash banners working very well, but with more advanced things (like a Strongbad email animation) it runs rather slow. Also there was no sound when I tested it on my iPhone 3GS, which I assume is a limitation of the method used.

Smokescreen is definitely off to an impressive start, though, and things will probably improve since it will soon be open sourced. It’s compiled in JavaScript, and works perfectly in non-mobile browsers as well, which means you could be viewing Flash-based content on your computer without ever having to install the actual Flash plugin. I have a feeling that this tech will catch on far faster with advertisers looking to cut corners rather than redesign their ads from the ground up for iPhone OS consumption. You can view all the demos currently available here.

Both these workarounds are a prime example of how if people really want their device to do something, they’ll figure out a way.

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Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in 'Cleopatra.' (1963)

Elizabeth Taylor reveals never-before-seen letters from her husband Richard Burton in the July issue of Vanity Fair magazine.

One letter is the last Burton ever sent her, one she received after she had attended his memorial service following his sudden death from a brain hemorrhage in 1984.

She said she keeps it by her bed, and read it to the magazine.

According to a press release publicizing the July issue, in the letter Burton said he had been his happiest when with her, and wondered “Was it possible? Could there be another chance? For him? For them?”

SLIDESHOW: Elizabeth Taylor’s Eight “I Do’s.”

It was not to be as Burton mailed the letter on August 2, 1984, and then died on August 5. The letter was “waiting for Taylor when she returned from London, after attending his memorial service. She unfolded the letter and read it with trembling hands.”

“Richard was magnificent in every sense of the word,” Taylor tells the magazine. “And in everything he ever did…. He was the kindest, funniest, and most gentle father. All my kids worshipped him. Attentive, loving, that was Richard … from those first moments in Rome we were always madly and powerfully in love. We had more time but not enough.”

Burton and Taylor were married twice, first in 1964, and again in 1975, 16 months after their first divorce. Their second marriage lasted less than a year.

According to the article, Taylor’s still unfinished memoir has a harrowing account of her then-husband Eddie Fisher finding out about her affair with Richard Burton on the set of “Cleopatra.” Taylor said she woke to find Fisher pointing the gun at her head. “Don’t worry, Elizabeth,” she claims she heard him say. “I’m not going to kill you. You’re too beautiful.”

When asked about Taylor’s account of the incident, the 81-year-old Fisher said, “The past is one son of a bitch.”

Here are some more highlights from Burton’s letters:

On love: “One of these days I will wake up–which I think I have done already–and realize to myself that I really do love. I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself. There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such thing as the idiocy of love. Who invented that concept? I have wracked my shabby brains and can find no answer.”

On acting: “I have never quite got over the fact that I thought and I’m afraid I still do think, that ‘acting’ for a man–a really proper man–is sissified and faintly ridiculous. I will do this film with Ponti and Loren out of sheer cupidity–desire for money. I will unques­tionably do many more. But my heart, unlike yours, is not in it.”

On their relationship: “You must know, of course, how much I love you. You must know, of course, how badly I treat you. But the fundamental and most vicious, swinish, murderous, and unchangeable fact is that we totally misunderstand each other … we operate on alien wave­lengths. You are as distant as Venus–planet, I mean–and I am tone-deaf to the music of the spheres. But how-so-be-it nevertheless. (A cliché among Welsh politicians.) I love you and I always will. Come back to me as soon as you can … “

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(File picture of a refugee camp in Bagram district)

Returning to Bagram, the massive U.S. and NATO base north of the Afghan capital, after an interval of two years is an instructive experience. The first thing that hits you as you drive through the dusty Shomali plains, framed by snowcapped mountains, is the war economy. All along the road out of Kabul are huge container depots and trucks — either on their way to Bagram or returning — lined up by the road. Most of the trucks are from Pakistan, marked by brightly decorated exteriors that have become an art form which lightens life on the road.

The U.S. military transports everything from the gum that soldiers chew almost incessantly to the armoured vehciles they use to fight the war — there is virtually nothing the military can source from here yet. For all the troubles in Pakistan, anything up to 80 percent of the military supplies into landlocked Afghanistan are routed through there. That’s the geographical reality with supplies shipped to the warm water port of Karachi and then driven up through Pakistan and into Afghanistan most of it through the northwest, but also the crossing in Baluchistan, further south.

“Everything comes from Pakistan; the Taliban also come from Pakistan,” a U.S. army soldier assigned to escort us into the base says only half in jest as we wait for a long line of trucks to enter in a cloud of dust.  The logistical tail has certainly grown bigger with the surge announced by U.S. President Barack Obama in December to stabilise Afghanistan before a gradual military withdrawal slated to begin mid-2011.  More troops means more food to keep them going, more  temporary structures to house them, more split air conditioners to beat the heat, and so on. Transporting supplies is a mega business, and a large part of it is clearly being done by the Pakistanis.

The heightened  security around the base is another change from the last time around. It was tough then too, but the walls seem to have gone higher — like elsewhere in the country, including the capital Kabul. You don’t even enter the base from  what used to be the main gate facing a a local bazaar. Now you get in from the another  side through a maze of blast walls,   transferred from one vehicle to the other,  checked and rec-checked several times before you can get anywhere near where the soldiers are.  There are more walls inside so you can’t even see the planes taking off from the runway.  Base security is such that even a simple visit can take hours to conclude.

You have to wonder if this is an army looking over its shoulder even more than when it first got  here in 2001.

Early this month Taliban suicide  bombers carrying rockets and grenades launched a complex  attack on Bagram, which also served as the main base for the Soviets during their disastrous occupation of the country.  Apache helicopters took off from the base to hunt down the militants, one of who apparently lost his way and was being followed by children until he simply blew himself up in a nearby orchard. An American contractor was killed and six U.S. army soldiers wounded in the attack, which was then followed by a raid on the Kandahar airbase, although that assault was smaller in scale and sophistication.

The other thing that has changed is that you no longer see the mine warnings that were placed all along the road to Bagram in what was one the heaviest-mined parts of the country, first by the Russians,  then the mujahideen fighting them,  then by the war lords during the civil war and even in some cases by farmers trying to protect  their homes and land. There used to stones marked with red, warning you not to walk in that direction. Somebody could just as easily turn the stone the wrong way and you could be heading straight into a minefield  in a rather grotesque game.

Mine clearing is painstaking work and that stretch at least appeared to have been completed. A large part of the country, though, remains mined and a large part of the problem is that there are no records kept. So you just have to probe inch by inch every bit of the unfortunate country.

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The F1 fanatics were treated with a race of their lives as Lewis Hamilton managed to win the seventh edition of the 2010 GP in Istanbul. It was a dramatic finish to a race where team Red Bull almost managed to clinch both the top spots, but sadly a clash between Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel saw Hamilton take the advantage.

Mark Webber who appeared to be the culprit behind the collision managed to finish third, as he left his team-mate Vettel in a furious state after the race. Even team boss Christian Horner was angry at both drivers as he stressed on the need of the drivers giving each other room and none of the two sadly yielded.

Lewis was followed by team-mate Button on the podium and Mercedes GP driver Michael Schumacher grabbed the fourth spot.

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Apple’s billion dollar data center being constructed on a 225 acre site near Highway 321 and Startown Road in Maiden, North Carolina could play host to a number of services. So, what are the likely candidates for what Apple will be doing with this new facility? With WWDC just one week away, Apple staffing of the new facility, and given the fact that all of the hype about what everyone already knows that Steve is going to introduce before he has a chance to introduce it, there are six very likely candidates for what Apple will announce as to what their intentions are in North Carolina.

Free MobileMe for Everyone! Well, Almost Everyone

When Apple first launched iTools back in 2000, the service was free to users of Mac OS 9. Then in 2002 it became a subscription based service and was renamed as .Mac. The trend continued and the online service now known as MobileMe continued as a subscription based service. Just recently Apple opened up a Beta program to show off some of the new features of this service. In order to compete with several of the online services that come bundled with many of the Google supported Android devices, Apple my in fact return this to a free service for its customers.

MapKit replacement for Google Maps

Not much has been said about Apple’s 2009 acquisition of online mapping service PlaceBace. At the time, rumors ran rampant that Apple would be replacing Google Maps on the iPhone, iPod and now the iPad with this service. This shouldn’t be too terribly difficult to do in the iPhone’s SDK and the MapKit has abstracted such low-level services into an easy to use API.

iTunes in the Cloud

Recently Apple decided to shut down Lala, an online music service it acquired in 2009. Having a commanding lead in the iPod marketplace has not made Apple complacent in the least. Apple has continued to innovate its devices as well as its iTunes marketplace over the years. Perhaps its latest enhancement of the service was not as Genius as previously thought, and Apple is looking to continue its competitive edge by hosting its customers purchases in the cloud. Having iTunes in the cloud would make all purchases, past, present and future, all available to all devices from anywhere in the connected world.

iWork Beta

Almost two years in beta, and with the release of the now best-selling collection of iWork apps for the iPad, the future of iWork has never been brighter. The question remains, how long will this beta last? With some of the enhancements going on in the MobielMe space with the mail beta that is underway, and given the fact that successful services like DropBox are nipping at Apple’s iDisk heals, there is likely to be something announced, soon. It would not take much to best Google’s online document service, and shut Microsoft out of this market for good by enabling even a halfway decent solution for the growing number of mobile customers that Apple has earned.

iAd

Let’s not forget the purchase of Quattro Wireless. This may have helped Google out here in the short-term, but Apple needs to make a long term investment in this endeavor. With the premiums that Apple is allegedly ready to charge companies that sign up for ad space on this service, that price tag had better include complementary hosting of the ads themselves. With one-hundred million devices likely to be in the hands of consumers when this service goes live, it will need some serious cloud power to handle the storm that is brewing come launch day.

Sync

Just recently, it has been discovered that Apple is interested in investing in sync capabilities with the cloud. Breaking away from the USB sync paradigm is something that all iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users would enjoy. This could be full sync, or be limited to its investment with Lala, or iWork, or both.

For those interested in cloud computing or data centers, check out our Structure conference in June.

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Colombia’s presidential election had been painted like an establishment versus anti-establishment contest between Juan Manuel Santos – a former government minister and son of a wealthy family – and Antanas Mockus, who once dressed up as a superhero while mayor of Bogota and sent mimes into the streets to shame residents into obeying the laws. With a strong party machinery and the rural popularity of President Alvaro Uribe, Santos cruised to victory on Sunday when nearly 15 million Colombians caste their ballots, 47 percent for Santos – not enough to bypass a June 20 run-off but enough to send a strong signal of support for the former defense and finance minister. Opinion polls in the lead up to the vote showed Mockus and Santos deadlocked with no clear winner; the surveys said the same thing about the second round in June. But looking at a map of who won each province, Colombia is orange – the color of Santos. Only a single province was colored green for Mockus, trapped in the ginger sea. Alliances will be key for the run-off, but after securing only a fifth of votes, Mockus might find himself all but friendless. How would the country be different if Santos won versus if Mockus were elected?

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There is good news for the lovers of the benchmark MINI as there is further scope for the expansion of the lineage as the Beachcomber concept that was showcased at the 2010 North American International Auto Show might be headed to the production facility. For the records, the concept was a preview of the Countryman Crossover and it featured removable doors and a canvas roof. While the production isn’t a 100% certainty at the moment, the enthusiast are still hopeful as MINI’s Global Brand Manager Dr. Wolfgang Armbrecht has mentioned that they need to assess the business basis for this specific MINI model.

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