Here’s another time-killer for your consideration - Bubblewrap.
Personally, I’m not addicted to this kind of entertainment, but I know several companies where the job stopped for couple of days, thanks to flying penguins. Let me know if you need a link. :)
Sometimes the ideas are floating on the surface, but for some unknown reason no one sees them. This time is no exception.
Some of you may know Gnome Evolution project which is a complete Outlook-like solution for Linux with contacts, calendars, mail client and God knows what else. I kind of like it as it has some indexing features allowing me to search through the years of letters in a reasonable time. It basically performs well, but recently I found that it started to slow down.
Have you ever heard Microtechno music? Everyone heard about Techno, Trance, Acid, Jazz, Classics etc etc, but I bet there are very few listeners aware of Microtechno, Microhouse and the whole family of micro-styles.
What’s the difference? The difference is in approach. While those traditional styles are mainly fighting for making music more powerful and rich with special effects, their Micro siblings are aimed to bring simplicity of sound and structure to the final listener, avoiding false complexity of representation. They keep it simple and that attracts. The simplicity of their world is somewhat different from what we are used to deal with. It lives, evolves and behaves as a living creature. The simplicity which absorbs you entirely, giving you a new sense, new motives to live and percept. OK, that was probably too deep, but it is what I actually think when listening to this amazing stuff.
I wouldn’t pretend to be your guide in this complex world of Micro-sound. What pushed me forward writing this small post was an unexpected discovery of one extremely typical and very tallented artist — AcidRain — and his album “Maridia”.
Have a good listening time!
Yesterday Kate asked me whether it’s possible to connect her professional Sony display to her iBook G4 to get a better picture and color representation or no. I answered, yes, without any hesitation and… it’s where the tricky part started.
Two days ago one good friend of mine showed me a link to another rendition of the famous ID’s Quake 2 — Jake2. What makes this reproduction stand out of a crowd is that it’s rewritten entirely in Java. An exciting side is that its last version is very close to the original in terms of performance. You can find their benchmarking reports amusing to look at. And now some spectacular moments…
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.
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.
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.
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.