The iPhone (and iPod Touch) have been hacked completely for a while now. This doesn't only allow you to install custom applications and themes, but also customize the boot logo and more. Now through a very easy application which will be distrubited very soon.
Google announced that they will launch Google Chrome, a new browser. Among the features are a powerful JavaScript enginge, V8 and (of course) tabbed browsing, but each tab is isolated from others which keeps the browser running smooth if one of the sites loaded happens to crash. According to the blog posting it should above all, be a very smooth and fast browser.
Wonder what this will do to the market share of Firefox, my currently favorite browser...
Yesterday, Google launched Knol, an expert site similar to Wikipedia. One of the differences is that with Knol, authors are not anonymous. Users can comment on articles, rate and even review them.
Wired has an in-depth article and has spoken to several people involved in the project.
So, back from a nice holiday to Egypt. What a nice country, and what a lot of great things to see and do. Absolutely recommended! (You just have to see the traffic in Cairo!)
Trapped in a ray of light
While I was gone the server seems to have had some serious hardware issues and the site was moved to a new server. Unfortunately Wordpress is a little buggy in rendering 'fancy' quotes so the License plate script was broken (thanks for telling me Michael). I've fixed it today so new images can be generated again!
Some colleagues of mine are currently attending the JavaOne conference in San Francisco. This year the theme is JAVA+YOU. You can read about a few sessions, and some interesting new technologies on the Blogging About Java site.
Creating a custom template for your own site can be fun, but to get the positioning of various parts of the page exactly right can sometimes result in a trial and error process.
Without a doubt, positioning, or the layout, is the hardest part of CSS. Not only because it ever so often varies between browsers, but also because CSS has a lot of ways to position an element, all with various (dis) advantages.
Kilian Valkhof is running a series of articles called Understanding CSS Positioning of which the first part is now available. A good read before starting the conversion of your design into XHTML and CSS.
Just got a link to this very cool movie of a robot called Big Dog, created by Boston Dynamics. Especially the reaction of the robot when it gets kicked in the side and seeing it struggling on a slippery surface is impressive. It almost seems that it's actually alive.
It's been a while since Google introduced it's 'game' Image labeler, to determine the relevance of search terms for particular images. Google scientists now published a paper describing the next generation of image search. This eliminates the need of humans describing images, and uses computers to analyze the images. It's capable to determine the similarities between images and images similar to a popular image will get a higher ranking automatically.
Might proof to be very useful, but I'm wondering whether search results delivered by this technique won't display only almost identical images. You'll probably need to be very specific in the search terms if the first results don't display the kind of image you're looking for. On the other hand, right now sometimes results don't seem to have anything in common with the terms you entered, so this may indeed be a very large step forwards in visual search.
After more than a year of hardly any updates on the site I've refreshed the design and upgraded updated the software behind the site from Joomla to Wordpress. This software is much more user friendly and has a much better code-base to accommodate extensions and changes.
Oh yeah, I've also fixed the popular license plate image script which was broken as a result of the Wordpress installation.
Updates and new articles should now occur on a more or less regular basis!
Every now and then it happens that I want to do some maintenance on the filenames of more than just a couple of files. This might happen because of a stupid renaming action by me and/or Windows XP, or simply the use of a new utility which expects filenames in a certain format. Anyway, rather than renaming hundreds of files manually, I like to use some small Perl scripting for these tasks. Read the rest of this entry »
The good thing is he paid attention to accessibility, and well formed code. It also degrades fine for browsers and/or users without CSS and/or Javascript. Needless to say it is also perfectly cross-browser compatible!
