A really cool looking design. Apparently the goal was to create stuff that traditional craftsmen using sustainable materials to create high value products. Singgih Kartono came up with the Areaware Mango Wooden Radio . I like the idea but I thing a clock design would have carried over better. I have trouble dedicating that much space to an object I rarely need to look at from afar. By the way why someone needs to mix a cool wall clock with an mp3 player. Now that would rock.
Excellent news. Sun acquires Mysql.
Three Reasons why Sun bought MySQL
First: Sun has seen its technology base crumble with the rise of Microsoft on the enterprise site and Linux on the Anti-Microsoft side. They’re getting their ass kicked. Java has helped them slow their decline but even there they are not the only Java tool shop in town. Now with MySQL they have a chance. A while back they did a deal with Oracle where they sold a DB appliance with Oracle being the DB. I never saw one being used but it seemed like a great concept. The problem with these DBs is that they are a pain in the ass to tune to your hardware. With the appliance the DB will already be tuned to the hardware.
Second Sun gets to capitalize on its enterprise good name. MySQL is an excellent product but risk averse companies do not consider it an option. With sun’s name behind MySQL it will get an air of legitimacy. So Sun gets to add value to MySQL with very little effort and gets to reap the rewards of the legitimacy with little effort.
Last of all
Sun gets it sales force back in the Web based companies contact list. All these companies trying to be corporate citizens are sending Sun their $500 to pay for MySQL and while they are on the phone they get to hear about Sun’s new hardware lineup. Really when was the last time you went to Sun instead of Dell for your web server needs.
ChRoMicro – Cheap Robotic Microhelicopter HOWTO
A good essay on how to find a good programmer.
Inter-Sections » Blog Archive » How to recognise a good programmer
Found an interesting blog called Google blogscoped . Looks like its all about the google statistics.
I just got this book a few days ago and I’m not really that impressed. It seems it is focusing on a Java tool called ‘Processing’ that. He spends more time on how to write code for this tool than on designing data visualization interfaces.
This is unfortunate, I was hoping for a Tufte type book updated to the interactive environment we have today. That would be something useful. Instead I get a tool manual. I still have 2/3 of the book left. Hopefully it improves.
I just read Zed’s rant. (Zed is the developer of Mongrel, a recent & popular web server written in Ruby) Interesting stuff. Not just because he obviously has an Axe to grind but he does give a look at all the stuff going on behind the scenes with Ruby and Rails.
One item that caught my interest was the assertion that Japanese developers ignoring patch submissions from developers. Ruby does have some major performance issues. There is a reason there are at least 2 virtual machines (Rubinus and JRuby) being developed to compete with the current Ruby. And I do wonder if part of the problem is the (spoken) language barrier between the core team and a good chunk of the user market.
Maybe it is time for the language to branch.
One of the fringe benefits of married life is having someone to get you those Christmas gifts you can’t bring your self to buy. And for me those gifts are books. And the week between Christmas and New Year is the best time to read them.
One of my books is “The Elements of Online Journalism” by Rey G. Rosales. Its a nice little overpriced pamphlet of a book topping off at 50 pages. Its targeted to existing journalist who are interested in online journalism. Rosales suggests that there is more to online journalism than just reprinting new paper articles and photos. He talks a lot about flash animations that allow the reader to view and explore data.
This is the type of stuff I’m interested in. Why aren’t there more examples of this out there. There are a few apps out there that do a good job of this. For the last presidential election one newspaper generate a flash animation that let you play what if scenarios with the electoral college. The app would categorize states in to 5 groups depending on how likely Bush or Kerry was to win the state with an undecided group right in the middle. The user could assign electoral votes to one president or another and see how close the candidate was winning. A use could get a much better understanding of the race than any news paper article could give them.
So why are there not more of these animations. Where is the animation showing the time line of the Iraq and Afghanistan war. Or showing how the housing boom busted. Why is there not a company that all it does is generate these animations and then rent or sell them to newspapers and other media outlets. A few mentions on Slashdot or digg should pay for the operating cost of a couple of Indian programmers and a couple of guys in the states designing and selling the ideas.
I have two more books to read “Flash Journalism” by Mindy McAdams and Visualizing Data by Ben Fry. Flash Journalism gives more examples of the journalistic flash animations mentioned above. Visualizing data is about communicating data with graphs. Another excellent read.
Lately I’ve been reading a lot of development blogs to get the hang of some of the ruby on rails features. I decided I wanted to try and document some of the stuff I’ve been working on. Unfortunately it appears that my beloved bloxsom has been abandoned and I just didnt want to write my own blog software. So I’ve installed a popular package and in the process removed all the old crud that had accumulated on my web server in the last 10 years. Well here’s to a new start.