March 27, 2005
New Photos: Kira
I have just posted some new photos of my pet dog called Kira. Kira is a Weimaraner with a little Kelpie to add to the mix. Really this is my wife's dog but hey she is kinda cute (both my wife and dog :) ). I have posted the photos as lots of my friends have been interested to know what she looks like, which is very hard to describe over the phone as most of my friends are located all over Australia. Well here are the photos:
Links
Kira Photo Library
Photo Library Index
March 25, 2005
Handbrake 0.7.0-beta1 released: DVD encoding made easy
Handbrake 0.7.0-beta1 has been released. If you are unaware of Handbrake it is an excellent program for Mac OSX that allows you to rip and encode DVDs with an easy to user interface. This has got to be one of the easiest to use DVD Ripper/encoding programs available on both PC or Mac. To use simply select the title from the dvd, the encoding type and then click to encode button to start, it is just that simple.
Links
Handbrake Download Page
How To Kiss
Here is a great short animation about the art of kissing. Quite Funny.
Links
Hot To Kiss (Atom Films)
March 21, 2005
XQuery and Web Services
My report developed in conjunction with Andrew Barrow has finally been published as a DSTO report. The report outlines an approach to use XQuery in Web Service request to reduce the amount of traffic (data sizes) when web services have to respond with large XML documents and the client is only interested in small sections.
Links
DSTO XQuery Report
CenterStage Alpha Released
One of the Mac media projects has finally released an Alpha (actually been a very quick development cycle). This alpha only supports the display of movies in your movies folder of your home directory but does give and indication of where it is going. The menu is built as a 3D set of icons that rotate around. This release is definitely an alpha release as the menu is a little jumpy and there is no text display of what each icon means but does give a good example of what will be possible. Keep up the good work and I can not wait to see the next release.
Links
CenterStage Download
CenterStage Homepage
March 14, 2005
Multiple Computers – Single Keyboard and Mouse
At work and at home I have the annoying problem of multiple computers and little desk space for multiple keyboards and mice, well no longer. Introducing Synergy. Synergy allows you to run a service on one machine and clients on all other machines. With a little configuration it is then possible to move the mouse from one monitor to another like using multiple displays on a single machine. The software works seamlessly and it also shares your clipboard, all you need is multiple computers and a TCP/IP network connecting them together. But wait there is more, Synergy supports Mac OSX, Windows and Linux. Yes that is right you can seamlessly use one keyboard and mouse between all machine types. The OSX client and server is not as advanced as the windows version but still works very well. All that it is missing are some of the “nice to have” features. This software is up there with usefulness of QuickSilver, one of my other all time favorite programs. Download it now if you are using multiple computers, you will love it.
Links
Synergy Home Page
QuickSilver Home Page
March 12, 2005
Javascript and PHP
There has been lots of fuss about using Javascript and the XMLHTTPRequest object to communicate between the server and browser page. This communication method allows web pages to get extra data or communicate with the server quicker than refreshing the whole page just to retrieve a small amount of data. JPSPAN is an api to easily connect JavaScript with PHP scripts, have a look here.
Links
JPSPAN Home Page
March 11, 2005
Drag and Drop API for Web Pages
Want to be able to add drag and drop support to your web pages? Here is a really easy cross-browser DHTML Javascript library that allows you to do just that. This is a must for all web page developers.
Links
DHTML Library, Drag & Drop for Images and Layers
March 08, 2005
Free Madman Anime DVD
Madman Australia are giving away free DVDs with 4 episodes of a recently released Anime series. All you have to do is answer a quick (and short) survey. Sorry only open to Australians. Limited to the first 20,000 respondents and before 31/3/05 so hurry.
Links
Madman Survey for Free DVD (Australian's Only)
March 07, 2005
Where Did My CD Go?
Wonder where you CD goes when you insert it into your mac? Well now you can see it with Disctop Pro. Disctop pro listens to you computer as to when CDs are inserted or ejected and accordingly displays an animation of the CD entering and leaving the computer in the correct location on the screen. This obviously works the best for iMacs where the CD drive is behind the screen but is still a good for all other macs too. The best yet, it is FREE, yes my favorite word for software. If you did not think that this was good enough it also downloads the CD image from Amazon and pastes this to the image of the CD. But wait there's more, if it is a audio CD it can also display small play buttons to play the music. Download it now from here.
Links
Disctop Pro
Apple Mail: winmail.dat
I have been receiving a few emails lately that contained an attachment called winmail.dat that could not be opened with any application that I had. After a bit of digging around I have found that these attachments are a wonderful (read idiotic) idea of Microsoft to attach files to emails from Microsoft Outlook/Exchange. In Apple Mail the attachment appears as a winmail.dat file that is of the mime type “application/ms-tnef”. Luckily Josh Jacob has made a program that allows you to extract the files out of this TNEF file. You can download TNEF's Enough from here or here.
Links
Josh Jacob's TNEF Home Page
MacUpdate Page for TNEF's Enough
March 06, 2005
Stretchy Cat Animation
I am a big fan of Japanese Anime and this short flash animation reminds me of a few movies that I have seen, although this one has a twist.
Links
Stretch Cat Animation
The Almighty Shreder
SSI really, really like their shredders, they are so impressed with their own shredders that they have actually created videos of them shredding all sorts of materials. The videos include the shredding of cans, carpets, cd's, washing machines and yes even boats.
Links
SSI Shredding Videos
March 05, 2005
Powermac G5 Case Mod
This is not one of your normal case mods; instead of completely changing the the look and shape of the case, this mod just adds an extra feature, a digital clock. The image to the right shows the finished product. Although all the instructions in the article are not english, there are plenty of images to follow what is happening. This article is also appearing all over the Net so I am sure it will not be long before someone creates and english version.
Links
Apple G5 LED Clock Mod
March 04, 2005
Tradewind's SD card RFID reader
Tradewind Technologies has a new SD-based RFID reader works with any Palm-powered handheld and can read and write many standard and proprietary 13.56Mhz tags and labels. The company has also made a developer kit available and costs around $1k USD.
Links
Tradewind's SD card RFID reader
March 02, 2005
OASIS Announces Choreology Joining the JBoss Community
OASIS has just sent out an announcement that Choreology has joined the JBoss community which will bolster the support for Business Transaction Management. This will allow for the JBoss Application Server and JBoss jBPM (Business Process Management) to act as coordination points in distributed services deployed across heterogeneous environments.
Choreology's product is called Cohesions and implements OASIS Business Transaction Protocol and Web Services Coordination+Transaction.
Links
Choreology Home Site
JBoss Home Site
RFID Dart
Here is cool little toy that fires small darts that have an RFID tag in the head of the dart. The ID number contained in the dart can be read by a normal RFID tag and is associated to a file in a shared file system. This is one great way to share files! Go to the site as there is also a video of it in action.
Links
RFID Dart
March 01, 2005
Microsoft Releases Web Service Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 Service Pack 3
Microsoft has released its update to the web services support in .NET, for more information or download go here.
Another example of XUL
Conor Dowling has sent me a link to another application called 325 Factlog implemented using Mozilla's XUL interface definition language. This application uses RDF to store its database of facts and shows us another way of creating applications. The goal of the “325 Project” is to comprehensively document the year 325 when the west became Christian.
Have a play at http://www.the325project.org
If you are interested in the technical background or knowledge of some of the issues that have been encountered creating this XUL application then have a look at the technical blog.
Links
The 325 Project home page
Technical Blog
Direct Link to the XUL Application (requires either Mozilla or Firefox)
