A Saratoga High School senior, frustrated with the sluggishness of the Internet, has invented his own algorithm to compress data, an accomplishment that won him top honors this weekend in the Western region of the Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science and Technology.
[via Chris Gulker]
The Quicktime movie of the day has got to be the Canada Switch ad.
“Canada’s money doesn’t stink. US money… the green stuff… it stinks”
Ask pointed to it, he got it from Boing Boing:
Really funny new switch parody. Switch to Canada (original). ~8MB Quicktime.
Scott Hanselman pointed out Thinking in C#, which I ordered as a $5 Acrobat version. I can’t wait to check it out.
Update: It looks like I can’t print it, but it’s definately worth fifty bucks and a monkey, so I’ll cope.
TheServerSide notes that IntelliJ IDEA 3.0 is out:
JetBrains has announced the immediate release and availability of IntelliJ IDEA 3.0 java IDE. The new release has tons of new features including new refactorings; built-in support for JSP, XML, and EJB; open API’s for third-party plugins; Starbase Starteam integration; local version control; and more.
Check out IntelliJ IDEA 3
I peeked over Steve Loughran’s shoulder Web Services DevCon (East) while he was playing with IntelliJ IDEA. It’s extremely slick. I haven’t looked at it, as Eclipse handles pretty much anything I can throw at it.
It looks like Jeremy and Keith are both skeptical about the Plaxo thing.
Heh. I visited Plaxo to do some consulting. We just focused on the technical stuff I was there to talk about. But over lunch, I asked the “how will you make money” question. I got similarly evasive answers.
I just got one of the update e-mails from one of my friends today before I had ever heard about it. Also read Matt’s comments. I agree with Doc’s quote too, it does feel like spam… there’ll have to be a culture change for it not to feel like spam.
And here’s what Keith’s friend has to say:
I really need to think of a cool idea and implement it quickly! I must give props to Parker this time around– Plaxo seems really neat and useful. Do you think this thing is gonna take off?
Scott Hanselman has today’s lesson:
Gary Klimowicz’s First Law of Organizational Development
Most business meetings do not progress beyond the average High School Student Council meeting.
Kenneth Hunt points out that AthlonXP prices are falling:
XP 2400+ $195
XP 2200+ $145
XP 2100+ $91
XP 2000+ $81
XP 1900+ $74
XP 1800+ $66
Crap, is it time to build a new box already?
My Hasselblad sales Rep just stopped by the store. She had the new Hasselblad H1 with her. It is an abosultely wicked camera. They spent their time on it, it was supposed to be out 2 years ago. Now it is ready. It’s auto focus, 6×4.5cm, with a built-in AE prism and all kinds of wonderful stuff. It will hit the streets mid December for a kit price (Body, 80mm lens, back, prism) for just under US$6000.
It’s designed to work with both the Kodak and Phase One digital backs.
When I first heard of the announcement at Photokina, I was skeptical. Hasselblad, 645, and auto focus in the same sentance? You really have to hold the camera to realize how much sense it makes. It’s still a Hasselblad.
Oh yeah, it’s bluetooh-enabled. The hack of the century would be using your Erricson or otherwise bluetooth-enabled cel phone to remotely trigger the H1. That. Would. Rule.
Russell Beattie is searching for the next KILLER app:
The question that just popped into my mind is, can you find the next killer app by looking? Am I doomed to wander the technical world searching for this digital holy grail forever?
I think killer apps are stumbled upon more than planned out. Having said that, you can’t write that next KILLER app if you don’t write any apps at all.
If you code it, they will come.
Diego Doval has released a new version of spaces with seveal tweaks.
Itamar Shtull-Trauring attended the Lightweight Languages Workshop at MIT over the weekend. He has notes from some of the talks.
On a similar note, the aggregation of recent advogato diary entries has more code snippets per square blog entry than most.
Wired News has a story about a new venture by Napster co-founder Sean Parker:
Here’s how it works: A Plaxo user sends plain-text e-mails to friends and colleagues requesting contact information updates. Recipients can reply to the request by updating their info in the template provided or by e-mailing free-form text, which Plaxo parses using natural language processing technology.
The key to Plaxo’s success appears to lie in its virus-like nature.
It sounds like a cool idea, but I do have to agree with what Doc is quoted as saying in the article:
“If they won’t explain how they intend to make money, one can only assume they intend to spend it,” Searls said. “The product looks like a new way to hire a company to annoy your friends. It feels like spam. It’s annoying, and I don’t think there’s a viable plan here.”
I’ll have to file this under “interesting” and see what happens.
San Ruby reminds us:
Joel on Software: “learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time.”
The Register is covering an interesting story about journalling file systems on Mac OS X Server.
Apple has added journaling capabilities to its HFS+ Extended file system in a point.point update to the OS X Server software.
Journaling is a convenience feature for system administrators: it improves restart times after a crash on large volumes, as the system only needs to check the journal rather than every block on the disk. Linux users can take advantage of three journal file systems: ext3, ReiserFS and Silicon Graphics’ XFS.
Journalling == good.
Brent Simmons will be adding outlining support in the new version of NewNewsWire Pro. Very cool stuff:
This screen shot of NetNewsWire Pro’s Notepad should be fairly self-explanatory.
Today Rael announced O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference for 2003. It is April 22-25, 2003 in Santa Clara, CA. Details can be found here and proposals are here.
