Xeeban's Musings

Font Smoothing - Apple vs. Microsoft

A friend told me today that the Fonts on a Mac were blurry compared to Windows. I had no idea why this would be the case until I found this nifty article:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html

Das Keyboard

A keyboard for the Uber Geek. This is a totally black computer keyboard with nothing at all on the keys. The keys are all blank! The whole thing looks like some stealth ninja keyboard.

http://www.daskeyboard.com

Apparently not having the keys labeled makes one even faster and more accurate with typing after the initial training period.

Firefox and RSS

Most of you probably already love and are using Firefox, the lightweight open source browser based on Mozilla code. If you haven't, check it out, you'll love it. I won't go into it here as I'll assume you have =)

But have you checked out the new RSS features? I love RSS for keeping track of news sites and my favorite blogs. Now mozilla makes it painless and easy to use right in the browser.

When you go to a site that has an RSS feed, an orange "RSS" icon will appear at the lower right hand corner of the browser. You should see one right now, as this site has an RSS feed. (if you don't see it and are using Firefox, make sure its upgraded to the latest version!)

Click on this link and you'll get a menu to subscribe to one or more feeds. It places this feed as a folder in your bookmarks and the individual news items are links in the folder. Sweet! Simple! I love it.

Ear Training on the Web

My friend Mark and I have been enjoying a wonderful site on the web called "Ear Plane". Its a site that has many little ear training tests, both melodic and harmonic. It goes from the very simple to the extremely complicated to the impossible (well, for me anyway... heh).

If you are looking to improve your ear, this is a great place to do it! Check it out at http://www.earplane.com

Multi-client IM for OS X

I've been using and supporting Trillian on the PC for some time now and I love it, all my IM in one client. So I wanted something on the Mac that did the same thing and ran across Fire. While its nice and does all the basics, it was kind of bland.

Today I found Adium X which is also a multi-client IM client. But, wow, its totally themeable and skinable and looks great!

Exposé for Windows

I've been loving OS X and Exposé. Now I can't live without its functionality. Happily, I've found some solutions for when I have to dabble back in XP land.

Entblöß from Nipaco Enterprises
Aqua-Soft's free solution

Using the Java language for algorithmic music composition

This is a very cool article about cellular automata and music.

Take computers, mathematics, and the Java Sound API, add in some Java code, and you've got a recipe for creating some uniquely fascinating music. IBM Staff Software Engineer Paul Reiners demonstrates how to implement some basic concepts of algorithmic music composition in the Java language. He presents code examples and resulting MIDI files generated by the Automatous Monk program, which uses the open source jMusic framework to compose music based on mathematical structures called cellular automata.

Facinating stuff!

Rollercoaster Simulation

No Limits, a german website has a program that simulates rollercoasters. People from all over the world have used this program to simulate almost all of the worlds rollercoasters in every detail. Want to know what the ride in Disney's California Adventure is like? Load it up and take a ride! Its very cool, and kind of scary how much content people have produced for it.

Demo Scene

The Demo Scene (link may not work) has always facinated me. Programmers gather to produce very compact, very cool programs that show off graphics and music in as little code as possible. The stuff produced is often less than 64k in size, but has enormous amounts of content. Its mind blowing when you see it and realize that there is only 64k of code running these things.

This group has some pretty impressive demos. They have recently released a First Person Shooter (ala Quake) that runs on less than 100k of code. Damn.

MySQL clusters!

MySQL AB, developer of the world's most popular open source database, today launched MySQL Cluster, a new open source database clustering technology for applications requiring continuous availability. MySQL Cluster combines the MySQL® database with a clustering architecture to deliver 99.999 percent availability to mission-critical database applications. It is the first affordable, enterprise-scale database clustering software.

This is very cool! Five 9s reliability in an open source database. Great for those "mission-critical" hobbies =) It looks like its released under a dual license, one open source and one commercial license for software vendors and commercial MySQL customers.

Full press release here.
MySQL Cluster FAQ

Tax Time Cometh

I spent a few hours this weekend finishing up my taxes. I am always suprised each year at how much a pain in the butt the whole process is. Luckilly I've been using Turbo Tax for the web. Its saved me literally hours of frustration and hassle. Its a nifty web-based program that pretty much walks you through all the details of doing your taxes. It even checks for errors, gives suggestions for missed deductions, and is all around a very cool thing to use.

It just takes a few minutes to get all the various W2, 1099 and other forms you have, log into the website, and a while later you're all done. Highly recommended. Even better, you can then file electronically and ask that any refunds be sent via direct deposit. No fuss, no mess. We live in glorious times that even tax time is easier.

A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools

There is an interesting link via Slashdot this morning called A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools.

This essay is a manifesto about software for collaboration -- why the world's future depends on it, why the current crop of tools isn't good enough, and what programmers can and must do about it.

The article talks about the need for the evolution of collaborative software. We have blogs and wikis and instant messaging. I think that these are the first steps into true collaboration space. The article talks about backlinks and the importance of knowing who is referencing you to get a full circle of feedback. Blogs with "Trackbacks" are a good step in this direction, and a necessary feature if we want to analyze how an article or idea spreads throughout the mind space of the Internet.

I have a particular interest in making traditionally standalone applications incorporate collaborative features. One area of particular interest is programming IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) as developing one is my day job.

Largely, IDEs and development tools have reached a temporary plateau. All the leading IDEs contain largely the same features. Recent fads like refactoring and unit testing have filtered through the various IDEs and most support a rich set of features to support those concepts. The high degree of competition has propelled these products to the same pinnacle where one looks very much like the other. On top of that, IDEs are becoming more and more commoditized with Open Source projects like Eclipse effectively competing with commercial offerings. You can now have all the features for free, to the shock and horror of the commercial companies.

I believe that the next evolution of these tools is to add collaboration features. If commercial products want to stay competitive, they must differentiate and add more value than the Open Source alternatives. But will they clue in to the emerging needs of collaboration?

Programmers are rarely creating a solo project. They are more often just one member of a larger team combining their skills to produce a product. Because of this, IDEs seem to be a natural environment to implement better collaboration tools. Imbed the instant messaging to have instant communication for questions or answers to problems. Imbed document sharing so two or more developers can share files outside of the normal version control system. Imbed the shared wiki for gathering requirements and creating specs. Imbed a blog so developers can keep a running diary of their work, ideas and problems. By making these tools more collaborative, you make it easier to share information, coordinate deliverables and maintain valuable up-to-date communications.

Its a natural evolution. IDEs will become more collaborative. It will be the next race between commercial and open source products.

Google's Real Power

A lot of noise is being made about Google's new web mail service, GMail. But here is a blog entry that talks about the real power of Google and why they are going to dominate the next decade of the Web.

A quote from the blog:

Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup.

Fresh Start

Here I am with a brand spankin' new site. Why, you may ask? Well... its a painful story of how a stupid person picked the wrong hosting company and basically lost everything to a hard drive crash. My provider was doing a "routine" upgrade of hardware when there was a problem... then my web site went "black" (off-line, down, buh-bye) for 5 days without a single response to several frantic support tickets. Then on the 5th day, the bad news. Really bad news. They lost a hard drive. A score of customers were affected in some way. A handful lost everything. And, oops, sorry, we don't have any backups. Yes, I was one of those unlucky few to loose it all. Poof, digital oblivion.

So here I am. New provider (that does regular backups!), new blogging software. Let's hope that this time I stay around for a while... =)