Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Geekitude

71% Geek

Sorry but my daughter made me do it.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

The real history of the personal computer

A friend sent me a link to an excellent recounting of the real roots of the personal computer in an article on the Computer World site. In the article, Forgotten PC history: The true origins of the personal computer, Lamont Woods recounts the creation in San Antonio of the CPU that would eventually become the Intel 8008, the primordial ancestor of the hearts of the vast majority of today's personal computers. The similarities between what happened with CTC/Datapoint -- Intel interaction related to computer hardware and the Digital Research -- Microsoft interaction related to software struck me as I read this piece. It even continues with a couple of the people involved with these creations, Tim Patterson and Federico Faggin, although Faggin got the far shorter end of the stick from Intel than Patterson did from Microsoft.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Roll your own tag clouds on Wordle

Here's a little something my daughter turned me onto from her blog. I guess most people would recognize a "tag cloud" if they saw one but they might not know it by name. There's a web site called Wordle that will let you easily create your own custom tag cloud directly using the text in the RSS feed from your web site. The result for this blog looks like so:

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Links to miscellanious interesting stuff

This is a little cubby hole where I'll squirrel away links to things that look like they may be handier tomorrow than they are today.
stackoverflow
Stack Overflow is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers — regardless of platform or language.

Pencil
About all I can say is WOW! With the power of the underlying Mozilla Gecko engine, Pencil turns your excellent Firefox 3 browser into a sketching tool with just a 400-kilobyte installation package.

Jackcess
Jackcess is a pure Java library for reading from and writing to MS Access databases. It is part of the OpenHMS project from Health Market Science, Inc..

Processing.js
John Riesig has ported the Processing visualization language to JavaScript, using the Canvas element and the demos on his blog are quite remarkable.

JNode.free(your Mind)
Open source, free, Java-based operating system. I've wondered about the utility of such a thing in the past but I'm still not sure that, outside of use on smart phones, this is anything more than a chess-playing dog. The big problem with the concept is that regardless of the portability of the application layer you still have to have a native code kernel that locks you into a specific processor familiy -- in this case Intel. Sure you can move it around by porting the nano-kernel but that doesn't totally free up your choices if you want complete portability on a USB stick.

BeanKeeper
Yet another object persistence layer. This one claims to be extremely easy to use with only three classes to learn.

CorneliOS
CorneliOS is an easy-to-use and cross-browser "Web Desktop Environment", "Web Operating System" or "Web Office" and comes with a set of cool applications.

Apache Roller
A full featured blog done in Java

Vayala (Google Code)
Vayala is a multipurpose chat client for developers. It offers a platform and an easy to use Eclipse plugin. Based on multicast technology each client is automatically connected to one network of chat client without a central server or much configuration or installation effort. You add the Eclipse view and you are connected to your colleagues. In addition to basic chat functionality you can also exchange files, graphics and much more.

JSmooth - Java Executable Wrapper
JSmooth is a Java Executable Wrapper. It creates native Windows launchers (standard .exe) for your java applications. It makes java deployment much smoother and user-friendly, as it is able to find any installed Java VM by itself.

walterzorn.com
Some very nice looking Javascript libraries for drawing images and doing DHTML stuff

Smashing Magazine
A great gathering of web and graphics resources, converters, tutorials and stuff

Cheap Silk Screen Tutorial
Cool, cheap and easy to do.

Streamripper
Record streaming media off the Internet

Using PHP with Tomcat

Notepad++
One of my favorite editors is SciTE. This uses the same editing engine.

Geany
Another cool editor based on the Scintilla editing engine like SciTE and Notepad++

Wiki on a Stick
Amazing little one page fits all wiki

Roma
Create a full working application in short time writing only POJOs! Roma will render your POJOs as Ajaxed Web Pages, will store your business POJOs in the database, etc.

Saturday, May 24, 2008

I Will Derive

One of the funniest things I've ever seen in the way of geek music satire!

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Ok, the top of the wish list


So if anyone's looking for that perfect "get on his good side" thing for me then here it goes. A little while back ASUS created a very small PC called the Eee. Well they're back with the upgraded version and this review of it says, "Bring it on." For the same price you can either get less storage and Windows XP or 20 Gig of storage and Linux. I'll take the latter.