Am I alone having trouble staying away from the RSS reader? With the number of subscriptions I have there is always something interesting to read. This absolutely kills productivity when you try to use the 1 hour free time per day you have when you are on parental leave. Must. Stop. Reading. And who cares about the recommended refresh rate property anyway? I want to update NOW! I need some sort of time lock on all things RSS. ...
Chief Executive Anders Dahlvig in an interview with Reuters said IKEA aimed to put a “bigger focus” on the living room in the next year, adding accessories for TV and videogames alongside new sofas and storage ranges. When asked if that could lead to electricals being sold in its iconic blue and yellow stores, he replied: Maybe. It depends on the stores. They are big, but they are still crowded; there are lots of products we would like to have in there. ...
Via PR 2.0 (in swedish) I found the recently published TeliaSonera report on communication trends in Sweden (PDF in swedish). 10,000 people were interviewed about their online media use and expectations. Most of their findings were not surprising; people expect wifi in hotel rooms, want to be able to watch TV on their cell phone and so on. One thing did stand out though: 25% of the population regularly reads one or more blogs. Among persons 26 and younger the figure goes up to 50% but for the group 60 or older it is still close to 25%. ...
Having played with the Digital Invisible Ink Toolkit (DIIT) lately it was interesting to see how big the logo file for the camping framework would become if the camping framework itself was embedded in it. The original logo file (stolen from Why’s site) is a 73 Kb PNG file. Embedding camping.rb in it creates a 101 Kb file visible to the right. Maybe this is the future of software distribution? Programmers and photographers can work together to distribute software and pretty pics? Is the porn industry in on this? What type of image would it take to distribute Oracle 9? Remember where you heard it first…
If you need to capture an image of a full web page without having to do the scroll-cut-paste-repeat dance you should have a look at Paparazzi. Paparazzi uses the WebKit framework to create nice full length captures of web pages. If you need to do this programmatically for a large number of sites there is a nice library called webkit2png by Paul Hammond. It is a Python script utilizing the PyObjC bridge . Update: There is also a cheap commercial alternative to Paparazzi called Red Snapper. For $8 you get a button directly in Safari to do a capture. Worth checking out if you don’t want an extra app on your system.
I have been seeing more and more information on how bigger screens increase productivity of software developers (or professional computer users in general). The latest entry is by Martin Fowler in “How do you improve the productivity of software developers?”: I used to raise eyebrows fifteen years ago by recommending that every developer should work on a 21 inch screen. These days I say that everyone should have at least two 20 inch screens. ...
“Error: division by zero” is a commonly seen error for inexperienced programmers. The BBC reports that Dr. James Anderson, of the University of Reading, has finally conquered the problem of dividing by zero. His new number, which he calls “nullity” solves the 1200 year old problem that niether Newton nor Pythagoras could solve, the problem of zero to the zero power.
My colleague Niklas nagged me for not having disabled the caps lock key on my MacBook Pro. I was a bit disoriented at first but coming to think of it, I haven’t used the caps lock key since I got the MBP back in April. This made me think about which keys I actually use. Being a recent VIM convert I wonder if Apple’s designers hate VIM. Efficient editing in VIM require you to use the escape key a lot. On the MBP the escape key is one of the smallest keys on the keyboard for some reason. ...
Google’s Code search is a great way to spend an evening. Indexing a hefty amount of source code reveals anger, frustration and hate. Some favourites: I hate Java Java sucks Python sucks I hate Microsoft I hate DTDs (that is REXML by the way…) Interestingly, searching for “Ruby sucks” does not return any matching documents…
My colleague Niklas Lindström has put together a list of programming languages for cineasts. Ruby is Jackie Chan which, I guess, is a pretty much spot on: asian, agile, get things done but with poor support for european languages. Java is Richard Gere which pretty much says it all. His complexion is in decay from being in the Sun for too long…