Photographers never stop to surprise and creativity of some of them knows no limits. At that very moment when I start to believe that there’s nothing conceptually new one could create, I immediately find the proof of the opposite. This time it’s absolutely unbelievable pictures of liquids, forming amazing breathtaking sculpture. Take a break and spend some time with a natural beauty — visit Liquid Sculpture.
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OPML Format Standard and BlogBridge
Nowdays there’s a big discussion is open about what is required to be added to the OPML standard and how it should be updated to cover most of today’s needs of feed aggregators, messangers and other OPML consumers and producers of all kinds. The community is actively discussing possible applications and required attributes to be added here and there to cover them. That is what I call “a lot of fun” when expressing my point of view on Open Standards.
Liquid Sculpture
Google: Magic Tips
Something that I always missed in Google Search was the fexibility of expressions building. Sometimes those tricks mentioned in the advanced search facility is barely enough to fulfill my immediate needs and I have to make series of searches and combine them later. That’s what always bugged me. Yesterday I was doing some collocations searches for my English classes after my working day full of coding was over and unexpectedly typed in an expression looking more like something from a programming language. To my astonishment it worked finer than fine and returned lots of useful results.
Singleton Strategies
Often, when you are developing some application you wish it to run one instance at a time. If you are writing a native application, there’s no problem because the platform you are aiming on most probably already has everything for this kind of magic. When it comes to cross-platform approach it’s vitally important to choose something neutral. This post is about my experience in this area.
BlogBridge gets forum and public bug tracker
Yesterday we started the number of forums to help our users share their thoughts and worries with others. It’s exciting to see how people reacted to this innovation. We got our first ten users in a blink of an eye and most of them have been really active since the very first moments.
Another interesting tool we made public recently is our bug tracker software we used internally. From now on you can report anything you like by simply typing it into the simple form. It’s convenient both for you and us to have it done this way. So, enjoy!
Don’t hesitate to use either forum or bug tracket to share your thought and suggestions with us. We are always trying to be as responsive as possible.
Mac Week Is Over
The first exciting week of living with Mac is over and, I guess, it’s time to share my impressions. Although, I wasn’t using it too much (you might remember that it’s Kate’s personal workbench), I had several nice moments during this week when I was granted the permission to spend several hours wandering through the system and trying various applications. Overall, I’m very positive about Mac. All the way I was using it, I had a smile on my face. It was the smile of pleasure as I was thinking how intuitive and highly integrated things could be if they are done right.
Kate’s Mac Is Here
At last, Kate’s Mac has arrived and we are celebrating! We had some Sambuka cocktails in the evening and other exciting stuff.
Pixen 2 - Pushing Pixels To The Limit
Those of us who are into graphics design sometimes complain about the complexity of graphics packages they use. While giants, like Adobe Photoshop and Corel PhotoPaint provide enormous selection of tools and features, for some applications they are definite overkill. And that’s exactly why some of my friends look for alternatives. Here’s one of them for your consideration and, I guess, it is good one for those who think on a pixel level. :) Take a quick look…
Singing F1 Engines
I’ve just stumbled across an interesting article by Stuart Waterman on Renault’s RS25 V10 engine, used in Formula One racing cars, has been taught to sing “We are the Champions” by Freddy Mercury.
It’s amazing how precisely this rendition sounds! At a glance I was slightly confused by this fact. What should be happening to the engine internals, switching RPM’s that fast? But the next moment I realized that it could be another wonderful and very artistic way of testing engine reliability and robustness. They could think of some application which takes popular or famous tunes in MIDI file format and use them to make a sound test for engines they produce. The whole factory could sing one song today and choose the other tune for tomorrow. Of course, it sounds weird and this is how it is. But it’s just fun to think about and even more riverting to imagine. :)
Anyway, the MP3 sounds totally amazing and worth listening even if you aren’t fond of Freddy Mercury’s songs. Watch it!
Weird Photoshop Math
Today I was put into a deep shock with how Photoshop calculates final color of the dot which has several semi-transparent objects on its way. Assume for a second that you have a black background and two 50% white squares on top of each other and the background. What do you think, will the resulting picture show grey square or will it be entirely white?