That didn't take long did it? Lifehacker has the Chrome OS Virtual Machine Build links ready for download in both Virtual Box and VMware formats.
I'm of two minds about this story about Steve Jobs' Personal, Terse Reply to an Apple Developer. On one hand, big companies that create an eco-system around themselves of small developers creating great software, and then slapping them down for legal stuff, pisses me right off. Remember the debacle a few years ago with Mike Rowe vs. Microsoft? See it here if you don't.
On the other hand, Jobs' reply (which is both awesome and horrible IMHO), is true, and looking at the product page, it looks like his suggestion has already been done, and other than a no doubt feverish night rebuilding software and resource strings, no harm no foul. Still a crappy thing to do to a small company though.
You have to love the hacking/modding community. Seems they have a Workaround to Restores Mac OS X 10.6.2 Compatibility With Intel Atom Processors to get the functionality back that was removed in the last update.
Engadget has a nice rundown of Chrome OS: Chrome OS is what I want, but not what I need.
Now this is an incredible beard, from a 1991 competition. You really want to wait for the second guy though.
The Google Chrome OS announcement is under an hour away,(10AM PST). Are you ready? Gearlog will Live Blog going, and Google will be streaming it (realplayer is an option? Really?!). Anyone else know of any sites covering it Apple Keynote style?
Anyway, looking forward to it, though I expect to be disappointed. Fingers crossed :)
Cool wired article on how to Do Speedy Math in Your Head. Reminds me a bit of the Mathamagician at TED a couple of years back.
Not that I'm advocating useless use of technology, but the Scroll Clock is pretty damn cool!
BoingBoing has a great story about a Leopard seal teaching photographer how to catch penguins, told by a National Geographic photographer who went to get some shots in the arctic.
Scoble does a great interview with the guys from Seesmic on the perfect Facebook and Twitter client. Very interesting, cool to see @loic and the team.
No doubt part of the ongoing PDC show, Office 2010 Beta is now available.
If you do get it, just be careful about creating or editing documents in it, to make sure you don't end up with a bunch of word docs you can't open anymore because they were created with a beta or RC :)
I hear through the grapevine (read: RSS reader) that Google is Holding Chrome OS Event Thursday. Complete Overview And Launch Plans To Be Revealed. Guess we'll get to see what's going on there finally. I'm hoping it's not just a skinned linux running Chrome browser. Should be interesting though.
Very cool video on the Making of the Computer Graphics for Star Wars (Episode IV) by the original artist. Pretty damn cool for something done in 1977, 32 years ago.
Speaking of interesting PDC news, it seems that Seesmic is Moving to Windows Platform. Seesmic is a twitter/facebook client similar to tweetdeck and they announced on the blog that they're moving to the Windows platform.
This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, are they abandoning the cross platform goodness of Adobe AIR (which incidentally announced AIR 2.0 beta this morning) and abandoning their Mac and Linux users? True, native apps are better than AIR/Java/etc apps, but both Seesmic and Tweetdeck were actually excellent apps for being non-native. Also I wonder what prompted the move. Being touted at PDC is a pretty big deal, I'm wondering if MS is looking to jump into the "social network" world and is going to use Seesmic as their champion?
Either way, it'll be interesting to see how this pans out, and if the move is beneficial to them.
Paul has some details on the Microsoft PDC 2009: Day 1. There's also a live stream going if you want to watch live.
Having just tuned in, lets say the talk is very.... "business" oriented so far. IE: Probably best to just read the crib notes when it's over :)
CIO.com.au has a feature on the as-yet-unreleased (but to be released in 2010) KDE 4.4. KDE took some critique when it released version 4.0 a few years back and basically called it a beta. Well, it's gotten much better since then, and the new 4.4 has some very interesting looking stuff coming to it.
Well, as predicted when The Pirate Bay was first "bought" by a gaming company a while back (and I only put that in "air quotes" because there seems to have been some dispute about stock fraud, etc in the deal) it's as good as dead. Slashdot notes that it's Tracker has shut down and switched To Distributed Hash Table.
In Coding Horror's Parsing Html The Cthulhu Way, you really get the idea that parsing HTML with regexes is a bad idea. From the article:
Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living.
9-5 Mac brings us the video from the Microsoft Store and the attempts to do a spontaneous "improve anywhere" like dance in the middle of the store.
Remember yesterday I said that they were trying too hard with the Dolly Parton IE8 thing? I think I spoke too soon...
That said they should be commended for convincing (ordering?) their staff to do it and have them all (mostly) show enthusiasm, I can only assume that Bill Gates himself had their families tied up at gunpoint though (I keed, I keed)...
Probably the best part of the whole thing is the "more info" button on the youtube page, which is either a masterful stroke of sarcasm, an unabashed Microsoft shill, or someone completely deluded.
The Blackeyed Peas compel the employees at the Microsoft Store in Mission Viejo, California to break out in dance, let their hair down and have some fun. [...]
Darren rightly corrected me that the term is "Astroturfing".