Some work on Multi-touch interaction by Jeff Han, Yann LeCun and friends. Very pretty videos; well worth watching.
Category Archives: General
Undercover salesmen
On the latest TWiT programme they mention a job advertisement… a company looking for somebody to establish a good reputation in online forums and then promote their products. We all suspect that this happens, but it’s starting to get more blatant.
Don’t believe what you read on the net, guys. And remember the user reviews and comments may be much more suspect than the page content they’re commenting on…
VMware server now free
As of tomorrow, there will be a free version of VMware server available.
This is good news – VMware have a great product – and it’s particularly interesting for us at Ndiyo. We’ve been starting to plan some experiments using a single machine to serve terminals with a mix of Linux and Windows – an organisation where one user really has to stay on Windows software could then still make a switch to a predominantly Linux system. Another option is that somebody with a Windows machine might be able to run a virtual Ndiyo server, and support multiple Nivo-based users, without having to pay any more licence fees.
It’ll be interesting to see whether any of this is viable on a modestly-priced PC.
Jose, can you see, by the dawn’s early light?
I have happy memories of a small backpacking hostel in Indonesia, where, in the evening, the owner and some friends sat around strumming guitars.
I joined in, in my amateurish way. We played variations on the greatest hits of Eric Clapton – the variations coming from the fact that they, without much knowledge of English, often misheard the original lyrics and were very keen to check with me that they were getting them right. They knew the basic sounds, and I remember one guy earnestly singing, “Snog, snog, snogging on the seventh floor”, where I think Clapton had intended to convey the concept of knocking on heaven’s door.
But I’ve been guilty of some of these, too. I remember being puzzled, in my youth, by the Toto song ‘Africa’ which stated that “there’s nothing that a hundred men on Mars could ever do”. (It’s actually ‘a hundred men or more’.) And, at a rather earlier age, my somewhat parochial horizons could be deduced from my belief that the Abba lyrics, “I was sick and tired of everything / When I called you last night, Francesco” actually referred to somebody calling ‘last night, from Tesco’ (a big supermarket chain here in the UK). Rose thought it was nice that Paul Simon could report that “Rene and Georgia agreed with their dog after the war”.
Anyway, I discovered today that such mis-hearings have a name. They’re called Mondegreens. Rose found a nice section on this page entitled “The ants are my friends, they’re blowing in the wind” which explains the name, and, of course, there are quite a few on Wikipedia.
But, go on – add your own favourites in the comments. The original ones are the best…
Mysterious
What’s this?
It’s my attempt to photgraph this chap using a cheap camera and a cheap pair of binoculars:
I actually got some rather more successful shots, but they weren’t so pleasingly mysterious 🙂
Any colour, so long as it’s Windows
Some recommended weekend reading for you:
Why the net should stay neutral by Bill Thompson:
A canal has no idea what is being carried in the narrow boats, and it doesn’t really care.
and John’s column in The Observer highlights what happens when market forces go wrong.
iPhoto Keywords
I like iPhoto, but I haven’t really used the keyword facility much. Creating and assigning keywords is just a bit too much hassle.
So I was pleased to discover Ken Ferry’s Keyword Assistant. Much easier.
Update: Keyword Assistant doesn’t work on the more recent versions of iPhoto, but there are some tips here which can get it going again.
Go Digital
I was interviewed on the BBC’s Go Digital programme about Ndiyo a few days ago. More info on the Ndiyo site if you’re interested!
Diamond, in the rough
Barcelona has some of the most beautiful architecture in the world, often right next door to some of the ugliest.
The outskirts of the city seem to be mile upon mile of dull apartment blocks, and reminded me of nowhere so much as Moscow, though admittedly these ones looked a bit better kept!
But the centre of the city is a real jewel. I loved it. I spent ages burrowing my way into these little medieval streets and getting pretty lost and then I’d suddenly come around the corner and find a cathedral or an archway or a plaza which took my breath away.
Ndiyo in Bangladesh
Ndiyo has just installed its first system in Bangladesh.
You can read about it on our news page. And there’s a movie, too. I wonder if our server will cope…!
Apple ahead of Dell again
A couple of weeks ago we had the interesting news that Apple’s market cap. exceeded Dell’s.
They’ve crept ahead in another way too. According to this MacWorld UK article, Apple now has more of the education market in western Europe, at just over 15%.
In Switzerland, they have 54%!
Frameworks and Libraries
Benji Smith wrote a nice piece on Why I Hate Frameworks. Recommended reading for any coders out there, if only for amusement.
He has a follow-up amongst the comments, too, so it’s worth scrolling down a bit.
The problem with his argument, I think, is that programming always tends to move towards higher-level constructs. Assembly-language programming with macros was a great framework for those who had previously had to flick switches on the front of their PDP-8. And C offered greater productivity again, but is now considered pretty low-level. The scripting languages of yesterday become the programming languages of tomorrow.
But he draws a distinction between libraries and frameworks.
A library is something *contained* in my code. A framework is a *container* for my application.
And it’s true to say that many frameworks have come and gone which try to exert too much control over the code. (Anyone remember CASE tools?) Many frameworks put the programmer in a box and say, “Here’s where you can put your little bit of contribution to my mighty machine”. And programmers don’t like that. They like to know what’s happening when and feel that they’re in control of it.
This is the nice thing about software libraries: they’re servants which do your bidding and then return power to you. Frameworks are like big companies in which you must first find your office, and then work out what you are allowed to do in it. Both have their role. But I suspect that today’s libraries will become tomorrow’s programming languages.
Thanks to Frazer for the link. Oh, and P.S. Apple has a tendency to package up its libraries nicely and call them frameworks, but they’re still libraries in the sense of this article.
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