log4p

With the launch of Windows Vista today I was reminded of a nice video I came across a while ago:

The widget/gadget thingy kept me thinking…. I just had to look it up! Here are the definitions from the Oxford Dictionary:

widget: noun, informal, a small gadget or mechanical device.
gadget: noun, a small mechanical device or tool.

So there actually IS a difference

I’ve been following the processing framework framework for quite a while now. Processing can best be seen as a DSL to ease the task of programming interactive computer generated images and animations build on top of Java.

Most of the time examples are quite straightforward, but last time I checked a noticed this ‘invention’:

PixelRoller
(–update– I fixed the link, which pointed to the wrong site…)

It is a paint roller that paints pixels, designed as a rapid response printing tool specifically to print digital information such as imagery or text onto a great range of surfaces.

Can’t wait to use a tool like this for decorating my house!

Yesterday the 3voor12 website, architected by yours truly, won the second price in the category ‘BEST DUTCH APP’ at the Dutch web 2.0 awards.

Erwin Blom (the man with the plan) went there to collect the price. Congratulations!

Hopefully the upcoming release (don’t hold your breath, might take a couple of months), in which I’m involved as a ‘technical consultant’ will hopefully help in winning the first price next year!

Finally, I got a call about the fact that my laptop was ready for pick-up! I Jumped in my car and endured 90 minutes of traffic jams… but it’s back!
The service center managed to ’solve’ the problem by replacing the entire logic board… still don’t understand why Apple didn’t just replace the unit when I had troubles within two weeks…

So the next couple of hours I’ll probably by hanging around in Photo Booth, trying to forget all this misery:

I’ve had plenty of problems with laptops in the passed year. I’ve alway thought that the service provided by Dell was reasonably, and probably comparable to service provided by others. How wrong could I be.

My MacBook Pro was accompanied (which is company policy) by a quite expensive (440 euro) Apple Care plan. For this amount off money I expected some service. How wrong could I be.

The employee at the Apple helpdesk assured me that I could just take my MBP to a nearby service provider (nearest is 25km) and they could have a quick look. Wrong again.

The employee at the Apple Service center told me it will probably take to weeks until the had time to look at the problem. TWO weeks. And, he assured me that no other service center would do it any faster.

I’m wouldn’t it just be better for Apple to replace the item and ‘refurbish’ the malfunctioning unit, not bother customers with those repair queues? People need their computers nowadays! Maybe I should start saving for a hot-spare laptop! Luckily I still had my older laptop lying around; back to Ubuntu for a couple of weeks!

During the company meeting yesterday we where introduced to the Butterfly Works foundation. Ineke Aquarius (Stategic thinker and Social innovator) gave a short presentation on the type of projects they do.

Most projects are related to educating people in various difficult topics like personal healthcare, sex and violence. Education is mostly done using modern media like the internet and cellphones.

Next to the pilot project (build using Ruby!) which they did with Finalist there will be much more this year. In 2007 Finalist will donate 1000 man-hours to Butterfly Works! The work will probably focus at creating an application for the $100 laptop.

I think this is a great initiative and I’m glad that we as a company do this sort of projects!

Today Tibco and DWR announced the sponsorship of TIBCO of Joe Walker’s popular DWR (direct web remoting / ajax) library; from now on TIBCO’ll be sponsoring the project and they’ll start working on ‘popularizing’ TIBCO GI by proving an easier service model using DWR.

I’ve used DWR extensively on my previous project and am really charmed by the ease of use and quality of the framework. Hopefully this corporate ’sponsorship’ will end up being something good for DWR.

In his comments on the DWR mailinglist Joe explains Tibco’s views on DWR as follows:

TIBCO are not *just* interested in GI/ActiveMatrix integration. They want to see DWR succeed. So there will be stuff that TIBCO gives to DWR that isn’t directly related to GI/AM.

Maybe this means my favorite ajax framework will get even better, and Joe’ll finally get decent funding for the great work he’s been doing!

http://getahead.ltd.uk/blog/joe/2007/01/10/dwr_and_tibco.html
http://getahead.ltd.uk/dwr/tibco
http://www.tibco.com/mk/gi/?CID=DWR

They actually did it. If you go through the comments over at slashdot you’ll find tons of people explaining how Apple couldn’t possibly have a product called iPhone. Well now they have.

It’s not only a phone, it’s an WIFI enabled, widescreen video iPod and PDA as well.

The pictures of the device reveal a stunning looking, must have gadget! To bad prices are a bit steep ($499-4gb/$599-8gb)… but they’ll probably drop in the future.

Hopefully the keynote during which Steve Jobs presented the device will be available for linking to some video material.

–update–

Klik here to view the VoD of the actual keynote.

Last week I discovered a rather serious problem with my MacBook Pro: the battery doesn’t charge anymore. I’ve tried all sorts of yoga magic on my keyboard to reset the NVRAM/PRAM but nothing helped. So I called Apple for support. They decided to sent me a new battery…. which has arrived today.
I really hoped this would solve the problem… but it didn’t… which means I’ll have to be extremely careful when working on battery to not drain it completely and call apple again tomorrow… and hope they have a way of solving the problem without the need of the actual machine.

Wish me luck!