December 28, 2004
AKG K240 Headphones
One of the best presents was given to me for christmas by my family, new AKG K240 Stereo Headphones. The sound quality of these headphones is absolutely brilliant with crisp reproduction of high a low sounds. Bass response is superb the best I have head from a pair of headphones. These are semi open headphones which means that people around you can hear your music but it creates for a more complete and rich sound.
AKG is a Harman company from the more well known Harman Kardon brand name. AKG headphones, microphones and other audio gear are some of the best pro equipment on the market. After hearing the quality of these headphones I started to have a look around the AKG website and found these HEARO 999 Audiosphere II headphones. Maybe these will be the next headphones that I will purchase myself!
Links
AKG K240 Page
AKG Web Site
Minor Delay
Sorry for no news, blogs, entries, info or anything else as I have a few minor problems at the moment. One is that my laptop that I do everything on at the moment is a little sick, it went buzz pffttt and smelt like burning electronics and is now in the local Apple store being fixed. The next problems is that it is christmas period so I am pretty busy with family and friends, which also means that it will take longer for my laptop to be fixed.
I hope to be back in action sometime next week.
December 19, 2004
Google Suggest Ripped Apart
Since Google Suggest first appeared on the Internet everyone in the web development community has been beside themselves in how well it works. I have always been a big advocate of developing “light weight” user interfaces (ie not using applets or plugins and just using JavaScript and DOM) to create interactive and fast user interfaces to sights and web tools. Google is achieving these light weight web interface more often now, first with GMail and now with their Google Suggest feature.
For all you developers out there Chris Justus has extracted the JavaScript from Google Suggest and has gone through and commented everything so it is easy to understand. This will allow many others to use similar functionality in their own web development projects. Have a read here.
Links
Google Suggest
Google Suggest Dissected Blog Article
Google Suggest Dissected JavaScript (for the impatient people)
Previous Google Suggest Blog
December 17, 2004
iPod Flash Rumor Getting Out of Hand
Ok it seems that the rumor about Apple releasing a new flash based iPod early in 2005 is getting kinda out of hand. I have seen numerous articles on the web with people talking about this so called iPod Micro. iPodLounge even have a gallery of mockup designs created by Apple fans.
I am very interested to know if Apple does bring out something like this as I would along with others be very interested in purchasing such a device. I am especially interested in the mockup designs that use SD cards for memory, which would allow you to expand the memory capacity and create different selections of music on different SD cards.
Links
iPodLounge iPod Micro Photo Gallery
December 16, 2004
Pierced Nose Glasses
Like many of my friends I wear glasses and without them I am as blind as a bat. To start with I do not have any piercing but if I happened to have one through the nose or willing to go through the pain to get one (which I am not) then I too could have a pair of piercing glasses. No I am not kidding, some guy has thought up and actually made a pair of glasses that don't have arms and stay on your face by being attached to a piercing through the nose. The site has a complete transcript of an interview with the maker and lots of photos.
Links
Pierced Eyeglasses
December 14, 2004
Command Line Encryption (BORK)
One of my friends has created his first sourceforge project called Bork. Bork is a command line encryption tool written in Java that has been designed to be small and self contained so that it can be included with the encrypted data. This is great for storing encrypted data on CDs, DVDs or USB Drives.
Links
Bork SourceForge Page
December 12, 2004
PalmOS to go Linux
In this TheFeature article PalmOS announces that it will change direction with the development of its operating system for organisers and other mobile devices. This is a very interesting move and could either spell the death of PalmSource (organisation in charge of developing PalmOS) or its rebirth. The key is to develop this new operating system so that existing applications can either be run directly on the new platform or are easily recompiled.
I am very interested in seeing PalmOS stay alive as it is a more elegant operating system for mobile devices than Microsoft PocketPC that requires a great deal more processing power and memory just to run. Also being a mac fan I have always like PalmOS as it fits cleaner in my whole computer ethos.
Links
PalmOS to become Linux based Article
PalmSource Site
JBoss Formally Enters Middleware Market
JBoss is formally announcing its move to expand its capabilities into the middleware market. By expanding its capabilities JBoss will start to compete against the BEA and IBM giants. One capability that interests me is support for a Business Process Engine developed by Tom Baeyens called jBpm (Java Business Process Management). This expands JBoss' components to include:
- JBoss Application Server
- EJB 3.0
- Hibernate (Object/Relational Java Persistence and Query Service)
- Javassist (Java class library for editing Java bytecode in Java)
- JBoss AOP (Aspect Oriented Framework)
- JBoss Cache (Replicated and transactional Cache)
- JBoss IDE (Development Environment built inside Eclipse)
- JBoss jBPM (Process Engine)
- JBoss Mail (email server)
- JBoss Portal (Portal implementation)
- JGroups (Reliable multicast communication)
- Tomcat (JSP and Servlet Engine)
It will be interesting to see how tight a package is created and whether it works easily without too much hair pulling.
Links
ComputerWorld Article
JBoss Site
JBpm Site
Google Suggest
Google has released its new Google Suggest capability that tries to automatically complete your search string based on what others have previously searched for. The suggest happens quickly with it updating suggestions in realtime as you type in your search string. It also works on any browser (above screen capture was on Camino). I love google and the new stuff that they keep coming up with, keep up the good work google.
Links
Google Suggest
December 11, 2004
Firefox and Thunderbird Extensions
With the recent 1.0 release of both Firefox and Thunderbird many new extensions are being created for both applications. You can always access these extensions from the Mozilla site but the Extensions Mirror site has the same extensions plus many more in a more user friendly site design. You can even subscribe to their RSS feed to be notified when new extensions are created or existing ones updated.
Links
Extensions Mirror Site
RSS Feed Page
Mozilla Extensions Site
Searching for Open Source CMS Implementations by Feature
If you are looking for an open source content management system you might have been confused by the sheer number of choices out there. I have previously blogged the opensourcecms.com site that contains running demos of most open source CMS implementations. However this needs you to browse through each CMS one by one looking for the implementation that meets you needs. CMS Matrix is another site that keeps track of the open source CMS implementations but provides search facilities to find the right solution based on required features.
Links
CMS Matrix Site
December 10, 2004
Kudos for Me :)
I received an email today from an editor at the Biz/ed site informing me that they have used one of my photos on their site (click here). They found the image from the Stock.xchng site where I have a few images uploaded. Stock.xchng is a great site that allows people to share stock quality photos for others to use for free. Many photographers only ask for notification of people who use their photos. This is the second notification of people using my photos within a week and I am pretty happy.
Links
Biz/ed Site
Stock.xchng
My Page on Stock.xchng
Digital Sundial
This is absolutely amazing. Someone has successfully designed a sundial that displays the time in digital (ie. with actual changing numbers). The only way to really understand is go to the website and have a read.
Links
Digital Sundial
December 05, 2004
Where is IBM WebSphere for OSX?
I have been using Apple Macs for the past three years since OSX operating system was first released. Since my switch from PC to Mac I have been very happy. My day to day work mainly involves the use of email and office-based applications, however my other part of work is the development of middleware solutions using enterprise-grade application servers. The problem that I have is that many application servers available run on windows, linux or Solaris (plus other mainframe environments) but not OSX which makes it very painful for me to try out ideas, especially while traveling and using an Apple Powerbook.
Currently I am using IBM WebSphere on a windows platform and it made me start to think about IBM and the way it is marketing its products. IBM is the manufacturer of the G5 PowerPC chips as used in G5 PowerMac and in G5 XServes. IBM also develops the WebSphere application server. You would think that if it wants to sell more G5 processors it would allow its premier application server software to also run on their own hardware (namely Apple XServes). I realise that IBM makes its own server class machines (zSeries) and in the latest version of WebSphere 6.0 also contains support for a new processor on the zSeries machines to run WebSphere even faster, but why miss the XServe market. I would love to be able to move my development environment over to OSX so that I could use either Eclipse or IBM's development IDE and run WebSphere all on my Powerbook or on an XServe (for deployment). I have even queried local Apple representatives about this and had no reply.
So why doesn't IBM provide an OSX version of its application server as this will truly boost Apple's profile to create an enterprise grade application server. I hear you say that Apple does support JBoss, but this application server is not really recognised in corporate and government circles. It makes sense to me for this fusion as Apple wins by having a truly enterprise class application server, IBM wins by selling more of their PowerPC processors and application server products and mac developers out there also win by not having to mix their development environment with those evil windows machines.
