July 2004 Blog Posts
Here's a little rant by the Editorial Director of IBM's developersWorks about Microsoft either adopting Open Standards or dying. I have to disagree.
First, if you read the latest Microsoft financial results, they're not hurting by any means. It's worth downloading the PowerPoint slides for FY2004 Q4 results and flipping through them. Growth of 15% is quite amazing although I bet the plummeting US dollar helped a lot here.
Second, Microsoft does support open standards. It's just very selective about what standards it does support. It's only going to support standards that fit into their whole business strategy. For example, Microsoft is big...
I would love to see a class action lawsuit against BlazeFind! I just spend a couple of hours trying to remove the Search Assistant that they installed on my taskbar. What a royale pain! Ad-aware, Spybot, TrojanHunter and HiJackThis! weren't able to do a complete job. I found various articles using Google (like this one) that helped discover more bits and pieces of it but it was still haunting my taskbar.
I finally used the systools process explorer to go through all the dll's that the Windows Explorer process had loaded and discovered that omniband.dll was the culprit. All that was required was...
Interesting directory targeted at government IT officials. It's my theory that government will be the most influencial force behind adopting Open Source solutions - particularly Asian governments. They don't want to pay big license fee's to foreign software companies.
Doesn't it also make sense that all the software the government pays to be created should be made available as open source? It's been paid for using the taxpayers money so doesn't everyone own it? Of course, I doubt anyone would really want to look at it but there could be some interesting bits.
It's a "lexical database for the English language".
"English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets."
The lastest issue of ERCIM News has a special theme of Automated Software Engineering. Looks like a good selection of articles.
Machinima is a film that's made with computer-generated 3D graphics. But unlike animation, it's not created frame by frame. Instead, you define how the character moves and responds, define the terrain and then direct lines of movement for your actors and camera. The rendering is done in real-time. It's more akin to film making but in a virtual environment.
The technology is in it's infancy but will be interesting to watch how it progresses. It's right at the intersection of film making and gaming. I suspect children's shows is where you'll see it applied the most. More info and examples at the...
Just read this overview of SQL Server Express.
I'm impressed. It's a great move by Microsoft to provide a free version of the SQL Server 2005 programming model. The killer feature is the easy deployment of the database server and x-copy deployment of databases.
According to the article, this version is being targetted at:
Non-professional developers building Web applications
ISVs redistributing SQL Server Express as a low-end server or client data store
Hobbyists building basic client/server applications
I think it's insulting to say Non-professional developers and hobbyists. The truth is that SQL Server Express just won't scale but it will be perfect for many professionals building...
Excellent website with a directory of free 3D application tutorials. These 3D programs are non-trivial and it really takes some time to get your head around them. The tutorials can be a bit old but better than nothing.
I've always been interested in 3D modelling, animation and graphics software. Once in a while, I look around the net to find something to play with.
Check out the demo of particleIllusion. Wicked, as they say. It's a standalone particle effects application. You can see examples of what it can do on the main web page. These effects can be composited into video but I haven't tried it yet. Best of all, it seems to run fine on modest hardware.
There are more resources on using particleIllusion over at shockingtales including a fantastic tutorial on adding a lightsabre to a video. Of course, all...