Weblog

Posted at 11:49am on 28 May 2008

Google adds common JS libraries to CDN

Google has added a number of popular JavaScript libraries such as Mootools and jQuery to its CDN (Content Delivery Network).

These files can be loaded via the Google AJAX API, or directly by including the URL in a web page, e.g.

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/dojo/1.1.1/dojo/dojo.xd.js.uncompressed.js

The advantages of this over using a local copy for each site are obvious: Not only do you save bandwidth by not hosting the files yourself, but files on the Google CDN are edge cached, meaning site visitors will experience much quicker downloads. Also, if they visit multiple sites that use the same library then they will benefit from browser caching as the files will be shared.

Posted at 11:01am on 28 May 2008

Africa objects

South Africa have launched an objection against the ratification of the OOXML standard.

We've written a number of times about the travesty that is OOXML, and whilst it comes from an unexpected quarter, South Africa's sudden outbreak of common sense is a welcome one.

Posted at 9:58am on 28 May 2008

DimP

From the department of cool, but what's the point? comes DimP, a system that allows you to fast forward or rewind video by dragging any moving objects that appear in the frame.

Posted at 10:46am on 27 May 2008

3D Canvas

More impressive technology from the guy who brought you JavaScript Mario Kart:

Javascript/Canvas Textured 3D Renderer

Hard to believe but all these amazing JavaScript graphics and game demos seem to be the work of just one person.

Posted at 10:02am on 27 May 2008

Mamma Mia!

Continuing the recent trend of ridiculously awsome things done with JavaScript, check out JavaScript Super Mario Kart.

It joins the proud ranks of JavaScript Super Mario, DHTML Lemmings, JavaScript Wolfenstein 3D, JavaScript DOOM (more of a tech demo really) and the venerable Wolfenstein 5K.

Posted at 12:31pm on 22 May 2008

PHP Sucks...

...but it doesn't matter - at least according to Jeff Atwood.

It seems that a good proportion of all the most successful web apps are written in PHP (Facebook, Digg, Wikipedia, etc.). Not bad for a language whose primary fault is that it doesn't scale well to high-load applications.

The similarities drawn between PHP and Basic have nothing to do with language structure as far as I can see, and everything to do with bloated namespace. There are a lot of built-in PHP functions, most of which have silly names and use inconsistent naming and parameter conventions. This is curse because I find myself having to look up every function, but a blessing because nine times out of ten the function I want is in there somewhere.

For what it's worth, this site is written in PHP, and it it wasn't it would probably never have been written at all.

Posted at 11:45am on 22 May 2008

SmallWorlds

An intriguing new online virtual world: SmallWorlds

Currently in closed beta, but due to be released to the public at large on Monday, SmallWorlds differs from other virtual environments such as Second Life by being based entirely within the web browser, and integrating with other social networking websites. In effect it is more like a 3D facebook than a traditional MMOG.

SmallWorlds is the first web-accessible, casual virtual world which is designed for mass market appeal ... for ages 13 to 103

One of the coolest parts about SmallWorlds is the close integration it has with other Web 2.0 services. You can buy picture frames that load up images from Flickr, radios that play stations from Last.fm, and billboards that let you post and view Twitter messages.

Posted at 3:26pm on 20 May 2008

WiiWare Hits Europe

Good news for indie game programmers and Wii owners alike, WiiWare is now available in europe.

the new WiiWare system enables videogame developers - no matter how big or small - to create exciting new downloadable games for the Nintendo Wii console.

Posted at 1:08pm on 20 May 2008

Helicockter

At a summit protesting the Putin administration, chess grandmaster and guest speaker Gary Kasparov was interupted by a flying penis.

It was noted that the incident, known in the VR world as griefing, was similar to an attack launched on a CNET interview hosted in Second Life in 2006.

Posted at 10:43am on 20 May 2008

This Will Make You Feel Better

It turns out that celebrities have wrinkles too:

Room Post Production reel

Who knew?

Seriously though, it's quite eye opening. Everyone knows that celebrity photos are airbrushed (Photoshopped), but I'd always kind of assumed that it wasn't practical to do this for full-motion video. Seems I was wrong.

Posted at 4:03pm on 19 May 2008

Hell of Sand

Amusing particle physics game: Hell of Sand

There's no goal as such, just play around with different materials, then set them on fire.

Pity it's a Java applet though. I'd like to see a pure JavaScript implementation using the canvas tag or some such.

Posted at 8:39pm on 16 May 2008

Cubescape

Nice little Flash app for creating isometric pixel art-esque images: Cubescape

Except that it's not a Flash app at all - this is all done with JavaScript and CSS. Amazing!

Posted at 12:30pm on 16 May 2008

Bat Hat

Dr. Kevin Warwick from Reading University has developed an echo location hat for blind people. Using the same principles as a bat, it allows them to navigate via utrasonic sonar.

For those not familiar with his work, Warwick is the guy who's famous for using himself as a human guinea pig for microchips implanted into the nervous system:

Kevin has carried out a series of pioneering experiments involving the neuro-surgical implantation of a device into the median nerves of his left arm in order to link his nervous system directly to a computer in order to assess the latest technology for use with the disabled

Posted at 12:17pm on 16 May 2008

Games With a Purpose

Interesting new site: gwap.com, purports to solve difficult pattern recognition problems by repackaging them as a game and getting humans to do the work.

This is similar to something Google did with their image search service: Google Image Labeler

It's also similar in concept to Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which makes micropayments to users in return for solving simple processing tasks.

This all seems like a brilliant idea - I really love the concept of seemless web services where you can't tell if a problem is being solved by a computer or a person. It's similar to a concept in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, where a girl's story book automatically outsources voiceover work to an actor via the Internet.

Posted at 6:02pm on 15 May 2008

Flat Mac

This is a pretty nice idea - a tablet conversion for the MacBook.

It's been under development for a while, but they seem to have refined the design a bit since it's inception.

People have been clamouring for Apple to make a decent tablet Mac since around the time that Jobs canned the Newton. The fact that Axiotron actually went as far as to build one suggests that the market for such a thing is a reality, not just a lot of hot air.

The only thing that puts me off getting one is the sneaking suspicion that if it's really any good, Apple will be releasing an official model any minute now, and if they don't, it's because it isn't.

Posted at 11:11pm on 14 May 2008

How to Buy a Mac

Advice on which Mac to buy from Macworld.

Aimed at old-gen Mac users looking to upgrade, but probably applicable for Windows users looking to make the switch.

The important thing to remember when buying a new Mac is that even the cheapest consumer models are now pretty powerful machines - the Macs are expensive myth seems to have sprung up because PC users are used to buying over-specced machines to compensate for all the malware, anti-malware and other crap using up processor cycles.

If you want to, you can easily blow 10 grand on a Mac, but you'll be buying a server or a supercomputer, not a home PC. The only upgrades worth buying for your machine are a bigger hard disk and more RAM, and if you're smart you'll buy the latter from Crucial, not Apple.

Follow that principle and most machines will leave you change from £1000 (~$2000).

Posted at 6:12pm on 14 May 2008

VBA's Back, Baby

The Mac Business Unit (Microsoft's internal Macintosh development team) announced today that VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) scripting would be making a return in the next revision of Office for the Mac.

This is great news. I'm not a huge fan of Office, but like Photoshop it's the dominant application in its field right now, and until something better comes along, I'd like the Mac version to continue to be the best it can be.

Posted at 10:00am on 14 May 2008

Animated Graffiti

MUTO: a wall-painted animation by BLU

This is an incredible example of stop-motion animation done on a grandiose scale. I particularly like how the creature interacts with its environment, kicking over objects and eating papers on the wall.

The artist seems to have taken his influence from John Carpenter's The Thing, as well as the "biomechanoid" works of H.R. Giger.

A shorter version was released under the title Fantoche a few months ago.

Posted at 1:12am on 10 May 2008

Pair Programming

Those who've delved into the depths of this site will have noticed that my programming language/development environment of choice over the years has been REALbasic.

REALbasic is by no means a perfect language. A crude description would be Visual Basic, only cross-platform and with more bugs - hardly a glowing review.

But the reason I use RB, apart from the ridiculous ease of creating a program and compiling it for Mac, Windows and Linux, is that it keeps extending the language with fascinating new features, borrowing not only from Java and C++, but occasionally coming up with obscure but ingenious things found only in more esoteric languages such as Ruby or Python.

The latest addition is a new feature called pairs, sometimes referred to in other languages as a tuple, but essentially a form of isolated hashkey/value pair.

I think any hardcore software engineers out their would be well served by taking a look at RB. For all its faults (and there are many), it is much more than just a buggy VB clone, and how many other languages offer the raw low-level structs and pointers of C, the classes, interfaces, introspection and automatic memory management of Java, the simple and accessible API of Visual Basic, and offer single-click cross-platform compilation from a common code base all in the same package?

Posted at 2:19pm on 06 May 2008

One for Pixel Art Fans...

An entire city created using pixel art (drawn by hand on a computer with a limited colour pallete and without antialiasing. Similar in the style to videogames from the 80s and 90s).

Posted at 4:01pm on 02 May 2008

Broken Robot

A modular robot that re-assembles itself when broken apart:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIn-sMq8-Ls&eurl

Not the most impressive demo I've ever seen; It seems to take a really long time, even with the speeded up video, and it's particularly amusing at the end when it stands up and then immediately falls over and breaks into bits again.

Still, it's one step closer to grey goo, and that's both scary and cool in equal measure.