While President Obama and several million of his fellow Americans were shivering on the National Mall this morning, Macon Phillips and his team were swapping out files and posting the all-new whitehouse.gov.

Phillips is the Director of New Media for the White House and had the signal honor of f1srt p0st!!!1 on the new White House blog.

The Web's usual gridlock spots appear to have had a busy but smooth day. Twitter, which said it would double its capacity for the day, had no Fail Whale incidents. And the CNN/Facebook streaming-video partnership announced some numbers today too. As reported by Mashable, CNN served up 13.9 million video streams by noon EST, shattering its previous one-day record of 5.3 million (set on Election Day). At one point, Facebook users made over 3,000 comments per minute on the feed, and over 200,000 status updates were posted over the course of the morning.

There are days when the attitude of a nation is reflected by the one in charge, and this day -- like so many others, even recently -- is one of them.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted -- for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

Processor giant AMD's continued restructuring has helped wireless specialist Qualcomm increase its intellectual property portfolio today with the acquisition of AMD's former handheld business for $65 million.

Many of the technologies Qualcomm will acquire are ones the company already licenses from AMD, including graphics, audio/video, display, and architecture-related products. As part of the acquisition, design and development teams working under AMD have been offered jobs under Qualcomm.

Telenav, which introduced its Shotgun connected PND in November has unveiled new mileage tracking and business review features which can be downloaded directly to the device over its wireless connection.

The Shotgun quickly found a home in the automobiles of business travelers, and as such, the ability to track mileage is a crucial feature upgrade. Tracking can be turned on and off mid-trip so only billable miles are recorded, and the data can then be attributed to a client, job, or other title and then be exported as Excel or .PDF files through the My Telenav portal or toolbar.

As the PC market continues to slide, it's carrying the peripherals market downhill, too, with major accessibility components maker Logitech reporting a 70% drop in net income for the quarter ending December 31.

In posting its dismal financial results, Logitech pointed to sales slumps in PC speakers and keyboards as well. It announced intentions to cut 550 to 600 salaried positions -- apparently the company's most extensive job cuts since the mid-1990s, when it moved production facilities from Asia to Ireland.

In RIAA v. Tenenbaum last week, Massachusetts District Court Judge Nancy Gertner approved the motion to allow the January 22 hearing to be webcast live this upcoming Thursday, against recent objections by the record labels.

The labels participating in the suit -- Sony BMG, Warner, Atlantic, Arista, and Universal Music Group -- elevated the affair to the US Court of Appeals (PDF available here) seeking a writ of mandamus against the District Court's allowance. Mandamus is the use of a higher court's discretion to block a lower court's action.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made "candid" comments in November that Windows Mobile 6.5 would be available in the first half of 2009, and reports are speculating that the update will be rolled out at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain on February 16-19.

Ballmer is scheduled to give a keynote speech at the conference, where the revamped Mobile OS and associated services are expected to be unveiled.

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What is most likely the first stand-alone anti-adware program in the business is celebrating its tenth anniversary this week with the unveiling of a new set of rollouts this morning. Added to Lavasoft's Ad-Aware Anniversary Edition are new features that the company claims will detect malware not just by its signature but by its behavior.

Yesterday, we mentioned that we've been noticing recent versions of Firefox, including 3.0.5, have exhibited the memory leak problems that used to plague Firefox 2. We are noticing this on both Windows XP SP3 and Vista SP1.

We'd also noticed that systems where the add-on Tab Mix Plus was installed, did not appear to exhibit the same memory leak. Today, we uninstalled Tab Mix Plus (reluctantly, because we like it) from one system. On that system, the memory use pattern has changed, perhaps moderated, though we're not sure the leak has gone away. It now appears to be slower than in our tests yesterday, and from time to time, something in Firefox does clean up parts of memory from time to time. In one test, we had two Firefox windows open with seven tabs open in one of them, a dozen in the other -- a pretty full slate. Task Manager is showing us that Firefox grabs memory in one-megabyte chunks per second, for about a minute at a time, and then leveling back out to about 300,000 KB.

All of a sudden, iDEN is showing a surge in activity with the rollout of a $50-per-month unlimited calling plan from Sprint-owned Boost Mobile and the revelation of a $2 billion US government funding bid by Sprint.

First developed by Motorola back in the mid-1990s, later supported by Nextel, and then inherited by Sprint, iDEN is still used by emergency responders, along with dwindling numbers of other subscribers. The technology combines cell phones with trunked radios.

Well, as soon as we start publicizing our RSS feeds -- and we have one new one just for Betanews Alpha -- we get reports of problems with them. I'm able to corroborate some of what many Firefox users are reporting: With some Firefox installations, our RSS feeds have been coming up blank. Some, though not all.

One thing we noticed: On systems where Firefox is installed along with a separate RSS news reader, our RSS feed pages do not turn up blank in Firefox. In fact, they look fine. On systems where no separate RSS reader is installed, our feed pages do turn up blank.

In the past few weeks, I've seen evidence that the memory leak that has plagued Firefox in previous versions, appears to have returned. But it's returned only in localized conditions, which leads me to believe that not the browser, but a browser plug-in may be to blame.

Unfortunately, the one I'm suspecting right now is the latest Tab Mix Plus version 0.3.7.3, which we reviewed glowingly last October when it was first re-released for Firefox 3. On browsers where this add-on has not been installed, even when we open a slew of pages (and I am a heavy page consumer), I don't see evidence of the same leak. I'll keep you apprised as to what I find in later tests.

While still viewed by IDC as a "bright spot" in the overall information technology landscape, the Asia-Pacific region outside of Japan has just shown its first decline in PC sales in the past ten years.

Sales of desktop and notebook PCs in the region amounted to 17.2 million units in the last quarter of 2008, a drop of five percent from the same quarter the previous year and 14 percent from the third quarter of 2008, IDC said, in preliminary numbers released today.

Here's a situation that's affecting more and more beta testers as the shift in operating system generations continues: You have the latest beta of Windows Server 2008 R2, a product which may ship next year but could conceivably ship sooner if Microsoft keeps it in sync with the Windows 7 roadmap. And you're used to using Virtual Server 2005 R2 (Microsoft's fond of that little add-on phrase, "R2") for testing new builds of Windows Server...but now you can't. You see, Virtual Server only works with 32-bit guest OSes, and there's no such thing as 32-bit Windows Server any more -- not with R2. What's more, you may only be running a 32-bit OS on the physical host platform.

How do you test WS2K8 R2 without installing it on a physical 64-bit platform all to itself? As of just a few weeks ago, Sun endowed its VirtualBox 2.1.0 host environment with a way to host 64-bit guests in a 32-bit system. This weekend, I put that feature to the test, with some surprisingly good results. As the photo shows above, I can run WS2K8 R2 very smoothly, without slowing down the rest of my testbed system.