The Ruby on Rails weblog has a nice look at the Rails 2.0: Preview Release. Sadly no quick list of new stuff, nothing I can summarize easily anyway.
furries vs klingons.... a greater nerd-fest I cannot imagine.
Remember the content aware image resizing thing that I linked to a while back? Happy happy joy joy, here's the Liquid Rescale GIMP plugin which implements this technology in The GIMP on both Linux and Windows. Wh00t! Can't wait to check it out.
Some good and profound (and always amusing) advice from jwz on backups.
"OMG, three drives is so expensive! That sounds like a hassle!" Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway.
Apple's latest ("it'll brick hacked iPhones") update has garnered a re-review from Gizmodo.
It's understandable for Apple to wage a war on unlocking the iPhone, since the company shares revenue from fees with AT&T. But the truth is, if cellphone service was awesome, like it is on iTunes, there wouldn't be a need to unlock the iPhone.
The last image on the page, the chart, is the most telling I think. Hopefully Apple will change their way/tune soon to win back some of the love.
A super-sexy demo of the Fusion IO drive. 640G solid state drive, 800mb/s read, 600mb/s write.
Gimme!
Too cute to be legal: Orphaned hedgehogs adopt cleaning brush as their mother.
Sent to me by a coworker with the simple comment of "so very wrong". Hilarious Man / Woman Dog Diet. Starring the big guy from Hot Fuzz / Shaun of the Dead. Darren tells me it's days old though. Bah. Still funny though.
I've been wanting to make a list like Ten things Linux distros get right (that MS doesn’t) for a while. I use Windows at work on a daily basis, and linux at home on a daily basis, and both do things well, and both do things suckily. Here's one guys opinion of the Windows suckage.
[...] All-in-one application sources. Man, I love my apt. Finding and downloading applications for Windows is a crap-shoot in almost every way. I find this especially handy when building new systems: it takes far longer to build, update, and add needed applications on a Windows system than on most Linux systems.
Well, according to Gizmodo, the new iPhone firmware (1.1.1) won't brick your iPhone. Good thing to know, not that I have an iPhone of course... Lots of other good info in the article though, best to read the full thing through.
Apple, please bring them to Canada. Pretty please? With sugar on top?
A Unreal Tournament 3 Impressions reveals it as a "must buy". Can't wait for the PC version myself....
Forgetfoo pointed to Daily WTF's collection of Best Budweiser Advertisements. Nice find!
Hilarious picture of Opera vs. Firefox vs. Internet Explorer on the Opera Watch website via Digg.
Much as I'd love to use Opera, I've grown a bit too dependent on a few of the plugins to let it go.
Via OSNews is a look at What's new in Mandriva 2008.0. Glad to see Mandrake is still around.
Well, the Vista Ultimate Extras' Windows DreamScene has been released. These are basically animated backgrounds. From the page:
In early July, I wrote about The Ultimate Team’s intention to ship the remaining promised Ultimate Extras (DreamScene and the remaining Language Packs) by the end of the summer. Unfortunately summer never really came to Seattle this year—so we missed our cue. That being said, we are pleased to announce that Windows DreamScene is now available.
What I saw on my vista ultimate system is an update that required a reboot, and then the addition of five mpgs integrated into the desktop background control panel applet.
All but one of these was released in beta ages ago. WTF? Come on microsoft, you can do better than this. I'm not the only one who thinks this way.
Holy crap! A LEGO's Ultimate Collectors Millennium Falcon. Many pounds of lego here!
Noticed a thread on the EVMS-devel list on the status of EVMS. EVMS as you may know is the Enterprise Volume Management System for Linux, a nice system which brings partitioning, RAID, LVM, LVM2 and various other technologies under one management system, and something I use both at home and on the UFies.org system. The response to the thread was:
IBM has pulled all resources from EVMS. Some of the people previously assigned to EVMS are doing some work in their spare time, but apart from that, it's pretty much unmaintained.
That's a bit worrisome... I haven't seen any issues with EVMS, but I'd hate to upgrade the kernel and find suddenly things start breaking :( Is this the honeymoon fading for IBM's relationship with Linux, or just a project that never took off enough to keep putting resources into it?
Any replacements / alternative technologies for this stuff out there? Ubuntu seems to run plain LVM for their setup, and Ubunutu isn't (I hope) going anywhere anytime soon, so one presumes LVM will stick around. Maybe ZFS can be ported from Solaris? KTNXBAI. :)
Steven Hodson talks about why he'd use a bloated email client. Xobni certainly does look interesting.... check it out. They have a blog as well....
Anyone got any invites? :)
A good presentation on writing scalable rails apps from RailsConf in Berlin.
Dream Gallery - Your home for Animated Wallpaper - addon's for Vista Ultimate's dreamscapes.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a quick review of the new Amazon music store.
Great find by Accordion Guy.... a collection of “Simpsons” Scenes and their Reference Movies. Reference frames from the simpsons and the classic movies they reference.
Update: As per the commenter, credit goes to www.actualidadsimpson.com.
The Windwos Vista Experience Blog talks about Experiencing Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Beta and what's in there, including screenshots.
Someone told me about seeing eye ponies ages ago, and I didn't believe them. This link proved me wrong.
Quote #809280 is the funniest BASH.org quote I've seen all day today.... sort of an IRC version of rock paper scissors.
Aaron Bockover has some openSUSE 10.3 details as far as what's going to be included when it's released.
Some details of UT3 have emerged, looks like a November release and there'll be a special edition version for the PC. I was a huge UT2004 player back in the day, at least until Battlefield:2 stole my life, so I'm looking forward to UT3!
Dana passed on a Halo 3 movie snippet (RL movie). Wow, holy super-coolness batman.... not cheesy either, same weapons,vehicles, baddies....
Giving credit where due, he saw it over at Forgetfoo.
Darren pointed me to The Crossing Trailer and an interview about it. Basically a "what if the knights templar survived to post-modern day France which is tearing itself apart. Looks very interesting.
Two great links from Coding Horror:
Yup, Alicia Silverstone got naked for the crazy Peta people... here's the ad and high res pic. Yay batgirl!
Here's some more women of PETA.
How to extract songs off your iPod using iTunes. Though it probably won't work with the latest gen of players.
Well, after many months of hard work by the GNOME team, GNOME 2.20 is released and out in the wild. Ubuntu's new release (expected in just under a month) will have this, and hopefully other distros will get this new release in as well. Great work from the GNOME team... congrats!
The improvements in GNOME 2.20 include: Improved support for right-to-left languages; desktop search integrated into the file chooser dialog; convenient new features in the Evolution email and calendar client; enhanced browsing of image collections; simplified system preferences; efficient power management and incredibly accurate laptop battery monitoring. Developers receive more help with application development thanks to a new version of the GTK+ toolkit, improved tools, and a great new documentation web site.
The best new feature I see though, is this one, the mail client will warn you if you say you attached a file, and then forget to attach the file. Worth switching right then and there :)
Just saw that the Tarr Chronicles Demo is available over at FileShack. I've never heard of the game before to be honest, but the screenshots look really cool (it's a space fighting flight sim it looks like).
Hilarious video on YouTube called If YouTube Comments Met Real Life Situations. Great way to start the morning out!
Another great article from Joel on Software on the death of GMail. Basically he looks at the current state of webapps, and how things are looking a bit like they were with the "write once, run anywhere" portable C programming language and the even more run-anywhere-y Java with javascript and CSS. The suckage of developing for the 4+ major browsers for webapps is looking a lot like having to develop your app for the 80286, 80386, powerPC and RISC chipsets... (sounds a bit like my own rant about the various states of support that IE has :)
Best quote from it:
You could six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.
No one better forget that tomorrow is Talk Like a Pirate Day, so make sure you celebrate, maties! Arrrrr!!!!
Over at Shack News there are some good comments on gameplay, classes and balance in the just-launched Team Fortress 2 Beta (available to anyone who pre-ordered the Orange Box bundle).
Doing a little research on how well the Roomba works on cat hair for my place, and found a set of cute videos with pets and the roomba.
Found the GNOME 2.20 Release Notes, or at least a beta. Not sure if they'll stay there, so get 'em fast... or wait the two days to read the final ones yourself.
Looking through I'm again fairly underwhelmed :( It seems like (again) a lot of small, needed fixes are there that will make life using the GNOME desktop that much nicer (ie: the taskbar button width changing bug is now gone, GDM has a 'leave a note' function, tweaks and UI improvements in Evolution, Epiphany now has smooth scrolling and favicon support, interactive PDFs work in eVince, Tomboy Notes has a sync functionality, some control panel applets cleanup)...
None of these fixes, even taken all together, makes me go whoah!. I suppose though it took Microsoft 6 years to update Windows XP to vista (which was a "whoah"). Maybe I'll have that moment in 2.22, or maybe 3.0 should it ever arrive.
That all said, I'll wait till the newest gnome is a) released and b) installed on my system and given a fair shake before I bitch too loudly. The people working on it are working their butts off and doing it all for free and for the love of it, and the changes they are making are making the Linux desktop that much nicer to work with each and every release. Heck, where was GNOME 6 years ago? Around version 1.4 which if anyone remembers that far back, was very different to work with :)
Via Darren comes a monday morning really funny cat video. Horribly cute.
Somehow this picture reminds me of my relationship with my boss....
Hilarious Internet Safety Tips. The carebear one made me giggle.
I totally agree with this Muppet's rant about iPhones (or rather, lack thereof) in Canada.
TorrentFreak has a great article on how a bunch of MediaDefender Internal Emails Go Public. Basically a .torrent with 700mb of raw mail files from Media Defender about how they are setting up a site for the purpose of getting people to upload copyrighted material, and bust them. Great read.
Just cause I really want one of these puppies, heres some iPod Touch unpacking tour and first look pics and commentary from AppleInsider.
[...] but the Touch lacks a fourth conductor on the headphone jack, so there's no way to use the iPhone's mic, a second strike for the potential of VoIP after its lack of Bluetooth.
Ha! Sure, Fight for Kisses is a razor ad, but wow, holy crap it's funny and good.
Holy spare time batman..... check out pics of this City of toothpicks which is a city, uhmmm... built of toothpicks.
Someone came up with the idea of Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day. Definite potential to mess with people's minds and have fun (or look like a total idiot) :) Great comments if you keep reading down the thread.
You could also pretend to be from the very recent future (a la "7 Days"), maybe even only a few hours.Wear normal clothes, covered in dust. Stagger up to people, grab them and say, "you need to get out of the city now!" then run off.
The Crysis, Ice Forest Gameplay video has a bit of a taste of gameplay and graphics.
Mmm.... yummy.....
Shacknews has a nice hands on look at Crysis.
While I wasn't able to see the entire level, I certainly saw enough of Ice to be blown away, and glad to see some more variety in the game after having had plenty of hands-on time in the past with jungle environments that. Check back a week from now for more impressions of another non-jungle Crysis environment.
Microsoft selling Office 2007 Ultimate for $60 (for students) via Forever Geek. If you go to the site it says it's only for students, which means:
You must hold a valid email address at a U.S. educational institution ending in .edu (for example, leina@contoso.univeristy.edu) AND be actively enrolled with at least 0.5 course load. Also, you must be able to provide proof of enrollment status (ie, student card) upon request by Microsoft. If you are unable to provide proof of enrollment, you will be required to pay the full retail price of Office Ultimate 2007 (approximate ERP $679USD).
$700 USD for an office suite!?!?!?!?! Holy crap!
Via Reddit: pictures from the last space mission. Great shots.
Macrumors.com posted a link to the iPod Touch Manual which will be interesting to read through.
Stormtroopers blast through gender barrier! Thank god for a world where hot femtroopers have equality.
LiveSlick.com has a half decent list of the Top 10 Freeware Software Nobody Knows About. I've heard of some of them, but others(like imgburn) I haven't heard of and would make a nice addition to the list of software I "need" on a windows install.
Suddenly the decision (for me as a Canadian) to get an iPhone or an iPod Touch just got a bit murkier. The iPhone has no ETA in Canada yet, so before the rationale was it's not here, the iPod Touch is (or will be sometime, my local apple store is giving me the "1-2 weeks for the new nano and classic, no ETA given for the Touch" run-around), so the only real choice for now is the 16G iPod Touch right? Now there is a iPhone Free Software Unlock that GIzmodo has tested, which means in theory I can go down to Seattle, get myself an iPhone, and use it up here unlocked.
Grrr......
Via my buddy Fozbaca comes DisplayFusion, windows software that appears to make life with dual monitors, especially disproportionately sized dual monitors, much, much easier (for wallpaper anyway). Will have to test this when I get to work tomorrow.
Anyone interested in Team Fortress 2 should know you can get on the beta if you pre-order.
Well, looks like the Call of Duty site has been revamped for the release in November.
Sounds like a Beta for the XBox 360 is going as well.
Your dose of cuteness can be found here. You may now return to your normal programming.
OSNews pointed to a nice Compiz Fusion 0.5.2 Review, showing what you'll get with the next version(s) of Compiz and the distros using it by default (Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse).
Found via Wil Harris and TWiT is a video of Old School Dvorak, way back in the day, reviewing an IBM system in the early 80s.
Wow, a) computers get old fast and b) Dvorak hasn't changed a bit :)
Apple has the Iron Man trailer. I'm not 100% convinced, but it does look pretty cool! :)
I heard the guys on the Howard Stern show blasting on Britney for her VMA performance, so I had to see it. After a bit of ferreting I found some info and a video of her (horrible) performance. I only hope this marks the end of her "comeback".
Title basically says it all..... Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars Demo Released!
Download early! This is a single map demo of a tweaked version of Valley, which was included with Beta2.
Downloading now!
What everyone needs.... the Nabaztag Wifi Smart Rabbit. Who wouldn't want a bunny that is a wifi access point, alarm clock, will give you news and weather forecast, but will also (and I need this) tell you when to go to bed :)
In a fit of cuteness, check out this slideshow of some pics of a polar bear playing with huskies. Very trippy and cool to see, great pics. Wonder how common this is if there aren't any people nearby.
I'm not sure if I totally understand the exploding watermelons video cause I'm not that into oblivion, but damn, it's still funny :)
The Matrix Goggles allow the user to view the world in real time giving the world viewed various effects like you'd get from photoshop. Via Slashdot (I think).
Windows Vista UI design spoof video. Sadly not nearly as funny as you'd think. The spoof on 'what if microsoft did the ipod packaging' was much better.
Great video on youtube of some Hand Shadow show by Raymond Crowe.
Holy crap, this is awesome! Wish it was higher res though, I'd definitely put that on my wall.
Details of the upcoming Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars PC Demo coming this monday (Sept 10).
Yay! They finally added it! The Official Google Reader Blog has the details of the new search box in The Google Reader. Wh00t!
Rolling Stone’s Top 25 Songs With a Secret. Found while composing a playlist composed of songs about drugs. Also found:
Via Digg: Spore Screenshots (September 2007).
I so want this game!
Opera 9.5 alpha is out. That is all. Download and enjoy.
Update: Sadly a no-go for me... you can't click to change your status on Facebook :(
Funny pie chart of a Time breakdown of modern web design, showing what percentage of time is spent on what. A fantastic illustration on why I don't do web design :)
Speaking of which, anyone bored and want to design a new design for UFies.org? :)
Coding Horror has a great article on Choosing Dual or Quad Core. Nicely done because it's simple, basically a list of screenshots of the CPU meter playing various games and doing various apps, and letting you know how much improvement you get if you go from a dual core to a quad core (something I've been thinking about).
Hint: not worth it unless all you do is run either rendering software (POV-Ray) or benchmark apps. The list of apps isn't huge either, at least, it didn't include my Battlefield 2142 crack. Interesting to see that about half the the apps tested actually lost performance from 2-4 cores.
Ain't It Cool News has a preview and spoilers of Blade Runner: The Final Cut up for your perusal.
For the photographers out there, looks like there is a Capture One 4 beta out. Also some good videos displaying the new user interface and some of the new features.
Cybernet news has a look at Opera 9.5 Features. Opera is a very cool browser, don't get me wrong, but right now it just doesn't give me anything right now that Firefox doesn't give me, though some of it's features (like keyboard navigation with the 1, 2, x and z keys is very cool).
The new Opera 9.5 alpha will be available to the public tomorrow apparently, so everyone can have a look at it.
Cool video of a 360 degree light field display, showing some pretty cool stuff.
Make Blog has a great video of Stupid (yet cool) pen tricks. I learnt the first one a year or so back, finally some good instructions on how to drive myself crazy some more!
OMG. I challenge you to watch this Top That! Video (horrible 80s cheese) in it's entirety. Really. Bonus points if you're a child of the 80s.
