I saw this on the back of a gun turret on HMS Belfast. It reminded me of various people I've worked with who "may train without warning". Ivan, Richard, Rachel, Nick, Ian, Dan - Hi, still thankful for the things you taught me.
I had to check the date, to make sure it wasn't posted yesterday, but this is awesome news. I might even start using iTunes.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/02/emi-apple-are-announcing-sale-of-non-drm-music/
We're letting people have a play with some of the platform services we've been building, and asking for open, honest feedback. Ross Singer has been playing with Bigfoot on the Talis Platform.
He's written bigfoot-ruby, a ruby library for accessing some of the services. Both bigfoot-ruby and our platform are works in progress, so please excuse the noise as we dig around.
Warning: Emotional rant follows.
For about a year now I've been hanging out on #code4lib, an IRC channel for coders working in the library/archives/learning/lms space. I'm not a salesperson and I've never tried to sell anything.
Guest Article: Our Dirty Little Secret - Worse Than Failure
__the dirty little secret of our profession: __we all write bad code.
Over at The Wonderful World of Mr C my colleague Ian Corns keeps track of gaming technologies. He's into PS3s, Wiis and stuff like that - serious business, not childish toys these days.
He's written a great piece around this abridged video of the Sony GDC 2007 Keynote which shows a fully dynamic gaming environment, with a realistic physics engine. Let's unpack that a bit... In most games objects are coded in some kind of programming language and run directly in code - they can only be altered or maintained by altering the game's source and re-compiling. In this model from Sony the objects are declared by anyone and run within the game - so anyone can create games using this model. Ian's piece is here: What Web2.0 Developer Networks Should Be...
Electronic Paper. I don't mean the kind of rubbish we see today from Sony, the iRex iLiad or even the Amazon Kindle. I mean sheets of paper, that require no power, where you turn the pages with your hands. Like real paper, but you can replace the content.
Xerox Parc were working on it, along with 3M, but closed it down in 2005 and have been seeking partners to license the technology. Philips were working on on it too, and early this year spun a company off from its research labs - Polymer Vision. Readius is their shiny little display, but how long before they produce a USB compatible book?
http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=j_han
This is the same kind of stuff we've seen from Jeff Han before, but it's great to hear giving a rapid summary of the uses.
I was at EUSIDIC in Roskilde, Denmark last week. The conference was held in a large lecture theatre at the university with great facilities, but the contrast with Code4Lib was extreme. I was the only person wearing jeans and I had to tuck my shirt in and do up another button just to feel adequately dressed!
I spent the last few weeks with a Twitter account. What an annoying piece of crap. I struggled to find any motivation to update mine - to twitter.