Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

I don’t remember the exact context that this came up (was probably something along the lines of “Google can answer any question”), but yesterday we had some friends over and the question arose, so a quick google got me to this page:

The Swallow Question.

Except for linking to a very interesting article that actually tries to tackle the problem scientifically, John DuBois (the author of the above page) tackled the question more empirically by adding the question as part of the registration process for a new account on the service that he is running. Some of the responses are very amusing.

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There’s a lot of Wii hacks going around (mostly by this guy) – which I’ve mostly managed to ignore, but this last one is so cool. You wouldn’t think so just reading the title, but watch the video:

This is definitely cool, and as Johnny Lee says – if any Nintendo Wii developer is watching this: bring on the games!

(I’m not buying a Wii just yet, but if a game that uses this technique comes out, I’d be hard pressed not to buy one).

As reviewed in the Compiz Fusion blog, there’s a new Compiz¹ plugin that uses the accelerometer sensor available in some modern laptop (like some Lenovo, Apple, Toshiba and Dell models) to control the virtual desktop feature: smack the laptop screen and the display shifts to the the required workspace.

1. the 3D effects window manager for Linux [↩]

כמעט¹ כבר הגענו ל-web 3.0, אבל אנשים עדיין לא בטוחים מה זה web 2.0. כששואלים אותי, אני מאמץ את ההגדרה של טים אוריילי (שהרי בגדול הוא המציא את המונח), אבל הדעות חלוקות ויש חפיפה גדולה בין הגדרות שונות.

בכל מקרה, הנה סרט וידאו ישן יחסית שמצאתי מחדש שמסביר יפה מאוד את הרעיונות של web 2.0 :

1. רק עוד 10 שנים בערך [↩]

As a software developer, I used a lot of text editors in the years I’ve been using computers, and they basically fall into two categories:

• Simple text editors – which are good for the occasional text editing task and are basically a simple word processor replacement and often do not offer much more then a simple search and replace function and the ability to change the font face used for the text (see MS Windows Notepad)
• Developer editors – which are a different beast all together and are packed with features for advanced text editing (One of my favorite developer editor is EditPlus for MS Windows, which I even use occasionally now that I don’t use MS Windows at all)

The second category is definitely the more interesting one and the state of the art in this category has developed in leaps and bounds in the last few years, mostly fueled by intense competition in the IDE market since Eclipse was released. One of the neatest features that modern developer editors offer is code folding¹, which is the ability to collapse whole sections of text that are a single logical unit (for example – a class or a function in a program code) and replace it with a single short line of text. When editing many large files at the same time, hiding complex code sections, that you are not working on right now, behind simple representations is as powerful concept for text editing as variables are for programming.

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1. I can even go as far as to say that if a text editor has no support for code folding, then its not a developer editor [↩]

While working on a product I’m involved with, I came across these two guys who posted a few videos for 5min.com, about playing chess. Its cool – they demonstrate how to do simple moves in chess, and why these moves work – in incredibly Russian accented badly spoken English (well – they’re not as bad as Chinese, but are more funny 😉 ).

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