Blogmarks
Linus's Law Applied to Standards Review
And even more weird stuff found in Microsoft's OOXML document specifications. It seems it would be really bad when this version is made official because it contradicts existing standards.
Drink The Lemonade: building a *fast* mobile email client
That all said, once it's started, it connects to the mailserver over GPRS in about 10 seconds and pulls up the summary listing in 15, with a mailbox size of 2,882 messages. With a mailbox with 33,732 messages in, it's a little slower at around 25 seconds. That's still way faster than a desktop client on a LAN, of course, unless that desktop client is Polymer - in which case it'll seem remarkably slow.
Ubuntu studio - Linux for multimedia creation
Hm, finally some nice multimedia authoring suite for Linux. Of course there are already some nice audio editors [Audacious, Sweep etc] and samplers [LMMS, Hydrogen], but this looks promising!
Instapundit: Vista DRM may crap up commercial HD video, but...
Sooo... amateur material will look better than professional [Holywood] material on a high-dev Vista machina.
So perhaps all the fancy HDTVs people are buying will be showing homemade video because it looks better. Maybe this is all a clever Microsoft plan to take Hollywood down, all while appearing to do its bidding.
Ten lies about microprocessors
Interesting piece about microprocessors [for embedded systems]
The Ångström Distribution | Embedded power
Ångström was started by a small group of people who worked on the OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus and OpenSimpad projects to unify their effort to make a stable and userfriendly distribution for embedded devices like handhelds,set top boxes and network-attached storage devices.
Peek through the Looking Glass with LG3D-LiveCD
Try it yourself without having to install anything
RIP Zaurus :(
Noooos! Another pda manufacturer quits... OK, their software solution wasn't all that special, but that's where those OpenZaurus and other projects kicked in. Besides, it would've been nice to have a decent wifi and bluetooth chip in those clamshell models. Oh well, let's hope Access' Linux Platform [with PalmOS compatibility layer!] will turn out awesome. They have to build some really decent PDA's and smartphones around it though. 2007 hopefully is going to be an interesting smartphone year...
Self-tuning portable RF jammer disguised as menthol cigs
Nice piece of hardware. By a girl hacker :)
The Printable CEO VI.1: Emergent Task Planning
Interesting piece of paper, with which you can plan your days even when tasks pop up out of the blue. But she's a girl takes it for a spin and finds it quite educating. But... it's paper! :P
RIAA strategy originates with 17th Century button-makers
Insanity is from every age
Stop the PERFORM Act, save the ability to record radio
Fight for your rights and freedom of information/art/music/whatever
Vista "suicide note" researcher interview on Security Now
Good stuff. Wondering why it's better to skip Windows Vista and look ahead to alternatives? Read this piece, and the original article.
Vista is a disaster. Microsoft is so desperate to get the entertainment industry locked into its platform that they'll destroy themselves to get there. This is an operating system that, when idle, will have to check itself every 30 microseconds to make sure nothing is still happening, and no hackers are attacking it. It acts like an unmedicated paranoid. If Vista catches on, hundreds of millions of computers will be burning heptillions of cycles and tons of coal just making sure that no one is putting a voltmeter on the traces on its motherboard.
Also, if you thinker with your hardware frequently [swapping out hard drives for larger ones, upgrading your videocard once in a while etc], Vista and Microsoft get paranoid on you [like I blogmarked before].
Broken Windows and the Ghost of Keynes
So far for "Windows Vista is going to be really good for our economies!"-talk. I'd rather spend my money on something else than the N-th iteration of some OS that still manages to get in my way when trying to do my work [not even talking about the level of security of this well-known platform and the high-powered computer with hot video card I would have to buy then]. Companies and people would have spend their money anyway, only on other things. Maybe even real goods, which may be an even better way to spend money on, considering the larger view of an economy. Or maybe they would have spend it on software that actually made their life/business processes better. Or on free coffee and soft drinks, which is also quite nice ;)
How to hire Guillaume Portes [or, the non-openness of the OOXML file formats]
How is specifying a file format in an over 6000 pages large document to the tiniest details going to result in a document format that's going to be implementable by any other vendor? It's not a specification, it's a DNA sequence. Please read the whole article to see what I mean, it's worth it.
The Formats of Excel 2007
Sooo... not only is "the" new format Excel uses not entirely open [known for a while: binary blobs in XML can't really be called "open", now can they?], there are several binary formats it can save in, including an *entirely new, non-compatible binary one*. How's that for plain weird and non-open?
Real world to virtual world
A small piece about Apple's iPhone, and using a GUI that acts like the way we handle objects in real life also: no blinking in and out of existence, no need to show a little text with a status update when you can show visually what's happening [e.g., resizing an image for mailing it off]. This is the way computers should work :)
I don't think I'll be buying a phone from Apple, at least not for now, but Apple setting a trend in this kind of interfaces would be really, really nice. I even wrote a little paper about this kind of GUI behaviour for my university :)
Physics problem: Poof and Foop
Hm, will it go right to fill up the lesser pressure field it creates by sucking up the air along with the air from the rest of the directions?
Second Life Safari - The Bushmen of Buka on Something Awful
Quite funny; read it all :)
Brighthand's Predictions for 2007
About the PDA and smartphone world in 2007
Subverting Subversion
How to setup SVN to ignore certain files. Also handy is the auto-mimetyping of files:
the following bits from my ~/.subversion/config file will automatically set the mime-type for new images being added, so that they can be properly viewed from the web interface:
[miscellany] enable-auto-props = yes [auto-props] *.png = svn:mime-type=image/png *.jpg = svn:mime-type=image/jpeg *.svg = svn:mime-type=image/svg+xml *.svgz = svn:mime-type=image/svg+xml *.xcf = svn:mime-type=image/x-xcf *.xcf.gz = svn:mime-type=image/x-compressed-xcf *.xcf.bz2 = svn:mime-type=image/x-compressed-xcf *.ico = svn:mime-type=image/x-ico
Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it.
Another nice [old] piece from Joel on Software
Vermyndax's Lair - Vista is still not an option
And here's a microsoft professional speaking [earning his gadgets administrating large Exchange deployments]. Fun times ahead :)
Microsoft Vista is not an option
Another techie switching away from the windows platform [to Linux even :)]. If this trend continues, the future could become very interesting in Operating System land. I completely switched to a Free platform a year ago when my laptop's hard disk broke and I couldn't think of a reason to put back Windows XP in a dual boot configuration [which was the last installed windows copy on one of my machines; not that I used it often anymore even then]. Never looked back.
Blogmarks by month
2007
- December (28)
- November (19)
- October (32)
- September (44)
- August (38)
- July (46)
- June (12)
- May (29)
- April (10)
- March (29)
- February (20)
- January (31)
