Wenn ihr dachtet, Euer Auto wäre dreckig, dann seht euch getrost mal dieses Gebäude in New York City an, das jüngst unter die Dusche durfte und dabei von Trevor Little abgelichtet wurde.
Heute erst gestorbenâ¦
... morgen schon auf YouTube.
Wonderful AJAX Office Tools
Ajax 13, a very young startup from San Diego, has developed an impressive collection of very, very sweet AJAX Office applications:
There are a write app as well as a spreadsheet tool which, if they want it to be successful, will surely have to try hard competing with Google's recently "hyped" Docs & Spreadsheets.
However in addition to that they also have a presentation tool (ajaxPresents) that -- judging from my first impression -- looks and feels pretty much like the big standalone applications, Powerpoint and OpenOffice. It can also export and import these two file formats, which makes it a brilliant tool to edit presentation slides on a computer where you happen not to have an office suite installed.
But there are even two more on the list: A drawing tool called ajaxSketch (conveniently exportable to SVG) and an online MP3 player called ajaxTunes (if I see it right, it's Flash, not AJAX, but ah well).
All in all this seems to be a very interesting company to keep an eye on; and I would not be surprised if they made it on the list of Google acquisitions some time soon -- just like Upstartle, the company which produced the tool Writely, now part of the aforementioned Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
Google Code: Wiki and Download Features
Yesterday the Google Code project hosting was updated for the first time (as far as I can tell) after its release in July 2006. Two of the major "flaws" in Google's simplistic approach to Open Source project hosting have been fixed:
- We were unable to provide downloads of binary releases and similar
- Projects could not have a documentation webpage or similar
These two issues made Google Code hosting -- while being a nice, new thing -- overall inferior to the well-established services of sourceforge. And while Google made clear they didn't "want to hurt SourceForge", an important decision a young Open Source project faces when it starts is where to put the code and what is best for the project.
Not having any website or possibility to download a precompiled package is not one of the best things for projects, for sure.
With the new features, Google Code has become a real alternative to SourceForge and I imagine in the time to come, Google's code hosting will steadily grow and get more projects that did not go there before for lack of these features.
A nice thing to mention about the Google Code hosting Wiki is that it apparently keeps its version history in SVN. So going back in time when checking out the source tree will also give you the Wiki status at that point in time. Very neat, if you ask me.
Adding downloads, however, sounds to me like a no-brainer and I am confused why they didn't have this feature from the beginning. Allegedly, project owners helped themselves by just uploading the release files to the SVN source tree and pointing their download links directly to the HTTP interface of the SVN server. Not too surprising -- and that can put quite some load on a repository server. This "feature" is therefore not so much a new invention as it is closing a hole that shouldn't have been there in the first place.
In any case I am eager to see how the open source community (and sourceforge) react.
Wiirscheinlichkeiten
Bei amazon.com hat man gegenwärtig die Möglichkeit, zum Kauf einer Nintendo Wii ausgelost zu werden. Sprich: Man meldet sich an, und wenn man gezogen wird, bekommt man die beliebte Spielekonsole zum Listenpreis von 250 US-Dollar statt um die 600 auf Ebay.
Schrei! :)
Google gratuliert dem Maler Edvard Munch zu seinem 143. Geburtstag, mit einem, wie ich finde, sehr gelungenen Sonder-Logo:
Teile des neuen Hufbeschlaggesetzes vorläufig gestoppt
Oh nein, wie konnte das der Weltpresse entgehen?
Wii vs. Playstation 3
Wo ist eigentlich der Unterschied zwischen Wii und Playstation 3? Naja, seht selbst...:
Indianerstamm kauft Rockercafés
Skurril, skurril: Wie ich heute morgen im Internet lese, hat ein Indianerstamm aus Florida für fast eine Milliarde Dollar die britische Restaurantkette Hard Rock Cafe gekauft.
Fun with universal binaries
Yesterday I had to debug a Mac OSX program and therefore I had to learn about how Mac Universal Binaries work.
Universal Binaries contain (most of the time) PowerPC code and Intel x86 code as well. While they could easily also feature code for other architectures, like your toaster or microwave, it usually looks somewhat like this: [Header|PowerPC|Intel]. The operating system decides which code it needs and executes the part of the file suitable for its architecture.
Now in order to see what kind of binary information is "sandwiched" in the file, there is a header, very nicely described in the Mac OS X ABI Mach-O File Format Reference.
It starts off with a "magical number", that funnily reads 0xCAFEBABE in hexadecimal. -- Cafe babe? Yup.
Looks like the programmers had some fun coming up with a readable magic number. :)
For a more in-depth explanation of how universal binaries look like, I recommend this blog post.
(thanks to the t-shirt model ;) )