I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented. This is the black and white edition.
I have uploaded new pictures to Google+ and/or Flickr. Here they are - unsorted and uncommented.
couchbase/Android-Couchbase. Might be interesting as an alternative to SQLite - especially if you work less with structured data and more with documents. Because CouchDB offers real advantages there. Additionally, you get a sync infrastructure for automatic replication of database changes to a central server. And without having to build text exports with Dropbox-Sync like with SQLite solutions. Although the latter works surprisingly well in the situations where I need it.
Processing on iOS. Just stumbled upon it. What it says - processing.js in a spartan but usable mini-IDE. Nice for in between. And somehow fits well with the tablet. Ending sketches is a bit awkward, you have to tap or press on a bar at the top or something, which nobody tells you. But otherwise everything is clear. There are two more that I found, one costs 89 cents and delivers an interface analogous to PDE and the other is pr0c0d1n6 - it's quite expensive at forty-five, but it has a really usable IDE.
... and without the baked potatoes (they didn't turn out right and were demoted to salad). Somehow, Juliana and I got the idea to make fish, and I thought, a nice trout, that would be something. So, we bought it at the market and got trout and parsnips. These were the ingredients:
Preparation wasn't really complicated, and it didn't take very long until everything was ready.
The whole thing was super delicious. As indicated above, baked potatoes were actually supposed to be included, and then a dip, but neither turned out quite right for us - the dip was too thin, more like a salad dressing, and the baked potatoes weren't done in time. But with the amount of fish, it was enough as it was.
OpenXION. For the sake of completeness: an open-source implementation of an xTalk language (the family to which HyperTalk - the language of HyperCard - belongs) in Java. You could, for example, incorporate it into your own projects as a scripting language.
uliwitness/Stacksmith. And since we're talking about HyperCard again - Stacksmith wants to build a clone for OSX. Although I wonder why they exactly follow the (pure black-and-white) original in the graphical representation.
NovoCard. Wow, I've been waiting for something like this for a long time. Unfortunately, it's not for Android yet, but for the iPad, but it could revive my old iPad for a while - a Hypercard clone for iOS that comes with a scripting language based on JavaScript in this case. Everything onboard on the iPad, making it ideal for tinkering on the go. And in general, I think the Hypercard structure fits tablet computers pretty brilliantly. I'll probably play around with it.
Travis Shrugged: The creepy, dangerous ideology behind Silicon Valley’s Cult of Disruption. "Almost seven decades in fact, since Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” first put her on the radar of every spoiled trust fund brat looking for an excuse to embrace his or her inner asshole." - how so-called "disruptive startups" are influenced by bullshit Rand. Also explains such great ideas as the many approaches in which one is already being used data-wise in a service, even if one is not a member (Klout, for example). Far too many translate "disruptive" for themselves as "be an egotistical asshole," which may fit well with Rand, but not so well with reality - even in the USA.
Arduino Due with 32-bit ARM Microcontroller - Pro-Linux. Wow, 32bit embedded boards. Somehow already cool. Only with the 84 MHz clock frequency almost nostalgic feelings come up.
mono/xwt. Maybe I should take a look at this high-level GUI toolkit for Mono, which, in addition to a GTK backend on the Mac, also has a Cocoa backend. With this, you can program across platforms without having to pay the look-and-feel penalty of GTK (which is simply ugly on OSX).
misfo/Shell-Turtlestein. If you work with Sublime Text 2 and use many command line tools, this plugin is very helpful - you can execute commands directly from ST2 and get the results displayed directly there. Commands run directly in the directory of the current window or you can also start a terminal there immediately. Very practical for alternative build systems, or to quickly search for something in the directory with grep.
Turning to the past to power Windows’ future: An in-depth look at WinRT. Nice overview of the history of Windows APIs and then a detailed look at WinRT and why it's not as new and independent as Microsoft claims and how it's really integrated into the system environment (TL;DR WinRT is modernized COM based on Win32 with automatic wrappers for .NET and JavaScript).
wilhelmtell/dis. If anyone gets the idea of building something like a distributed Twitter based on git: someone has already done it, source is available here. Just with bash, git and the linux coreutils.
jq. A very cool tool for someone who has to deal with JSON a lot, especially in the Unix shell. The tool can process JSON data with functions that are inspired by sed, awk, and grep. And you can pipe jq in a Unix-typical way or even use internal pipes in transformation expressions Ă la awk. And it all comes as a single-executable without runtime libraries except for libc - so it should even work as a static binary and thus be trivially installable with scp.
Today, Juliana and I took the train to Coesfeld and then hiked to Billerbeck, and then took the train back home. A very beautiful autumn hike, with many colorful impressions. We stopped at Kloster Gerleve for coffee and cake. We planned the tour using Komoot - created it there and then used the voice navigation. Amazingly practical, such a pedestrian navigation. And it really led us on hiking trails, field paths, and side roads, only the last stretch to Billerbeck was along a country road, but at least one with a footpath. If you want to check out the tour, I made it public on Komoot. The colors - it really had something of an Indian Summer.
Today we had two rather exotic salads for our standards. Actually, it was just by chance because I got the idea for one salad (the lentil salad) while shopping for tomorrow and accidentally saw the ingredients for the other salad (Jerusalem artichoke) and got curious. Both salads are easy to prepare. Both require some cooking, but nothing complicated.
For the Jerusalem artichoke salad you need the following:
For the preparation, simply bring the Jerusalem artichokes to a boil covered with salted water and cook for 15 minutes until they are nice and soft. It's better not to take pieces of very different thicknesses like we did, but rather pay attention to the sizes of all roots being similar, just like with potatoes, then it works better. While the Jerusalem artichokes are cooking, chop the tomatoes. After cooking, rinse the Jerusalem artichokes with cold water. Chop and mix with the tomatoes. Add lemon juice, pepper, salt, basil, and oregano for seasoning. Mix well, add olive oil, and mix briefly again, then simply let it stand. It should marinate for a while (in our case it was about 2-3 hours).
For the lentil salad you need the following:
For the preparation, simply bring the lentils to a boil in vegetable broth and then cook for 30 minutes. We just used half a vegetable broth cube. While the lentils are cooking, chop the tomatoes and green onions. Make a vinaigrette from oil, vinegar, lemon juice, and spices. Additionally, add spices to the tomatoes and green onions. Our vinaigrette also contained regular onions. Mix the cooked lentils with the tomatoes and mix well. Then add the vinaigrette and mix again. Let it stand, here too it was 2-3 hours. Before eating, chop and distribute fresh coriander on the lentil salad.
Then serve with baguette. Juliana liked the Jerusalem artichoke salad better, I liked the lentil salad better, but both tasted good. Bon appétit!
XKCD plots in d3. And this in JavaScript and directly in the browser. Would be something for the math fans out there who always think they have to post plots.
IBM Worklight - Mobile application platform. Eclipse-based and presumably Java-infested in a typical IBM fashion, but still perhaps worth a look: an IDE for mobile applications that a) includes both client and server and b) supports multiple target systems (iOS, Android, web applications). So basically something like Titanium Appcelerator or Phonegap, but with server infrastructure and management tools included. And you can choose how portable you want to be and integrate native extensions if you need them (and of course sacrifice parts of portability in the process).
Lomography Belair X 6-12. Awesome - Lomography actually has an interesting product. Medium format 6x12/6x9/6x6 with interchangeable lenses (two come with it) and all at an extremely moderate price (starting at under 200 US$) - ok, the lenses will probably be Lomo-typical more like bottle bottoms, but hey, who cares - they are interchangeable optics! Someone will eventually find a way to make lenses out of glass. The only drawback is the processing of 120 film rolls - this has now become an adventure (or a shipping frenzy). Still, it's the first time that the "preorder" button on a Lomography page makes my fingers itch.
BBC News - Apple loses UK tablet design appeal versus Samsung. And the ruling is also quite creative: Apple must run ads stating that Samsung did not copy. Especially in light of the ongoing other proceedings, the judge said only a prominent action can correct consumer perception. I think this really hurts Apple now.
Another episode of "Cooking with rfc1437" - this time Juliana was the cook and I was just the photographer and assistant. And there was a salad with wild mushrooms, in our case porcini mushrooms, after all it is the right season for it. Our ingredients:
For the preparation, we took a lot of pictures again, so the points here are based on the pictures above.
The result was very tasty, but for next time we plan to have a larger amount of lettuce and I think making the salad dressing with part of the lemon juice instead of vinegar would also be a good idea. But it was a very tasty salad that also fits perfectly with the season.
Moby is a package for Racket with which you can create Android programs. Integrated in DrRacket, you also have a suitable IDE in which most things can be tested. So much to try out, so little time.
PharoDroid is an implementation of Pharo that runs on Android tablets - but really like on the desktop, so no special touch support. Therefore rather cumbersome to use, but it's a start.
ownCloud’s Latest Community Edition Adds Video Streaming, and Easy Mounting of Third-Party Storage. Sounds nice, especially the mounting of cloud storage. I wonder if it only resides in the cloud and is passed through, or if it is also additionally downloaded to the server. But I could maybe play around with my small installation. The improved sync also sounds good, as the previous one is really a bit strange with its regular timestamp file check.
Streak - CRM in your Inbox. Strange - that thing completely passed me by. Ok, maybe that's because they call it a CRM and that's boring by definition for me. But in reality, it's not a CRM at all, but rather a kind of spreadsheet with mail integration and filters - you can define rules and sort mails into boxes and evaluate, filter, sort all these things according to various criteria, whatever. And the whole thing is integrated into GMail, directly into the web platform (which of course means it only works there and not, for example, in the mobile clients). And suddenly the whole thing is interesting again, because if you deal with larger quantities of email-controlled workflows, you can use something like this well. At least if you have your emails in GMail. Their architecture is also not uninteresting, as they use pretty much everything Google has to offer.
LLJS : Low-Level JavaScript. I don't understand what the point is of compiling a low-level language (a JavaScript dialect with C-like type definitions and constructs) to JavaScript, which is not exactly low-level in its execution model. But in case of doubt, the standard argument applies: because it can be done! However, this is probably more of a project that I only link to because it's weird, but I probably won't use it myself anytime soon.
Comtypes: How Dropbox learned to stop worrying and love the COM. Filed for future use. Accessing COM APIs in Windows from Python with fairly lean means. Could be interesting for one or the other admin tool in the company.
DataNitro. If you want to program your Excel spreadsheet in Python, this is the place to go. Might be interesting for one or the other number cruncher who uses Excel as a frontend.
Android-x86 - Porting Android to x86. Hmm, could this be a fun toy for my old eeeBook? I mean, it would be a pretty fat tablet with an integrated keyboard and an incompatible processor, what could possibly go wrong?
Pyjnius: Accessing Java classes from Python | Txzone. Very interesting side project of Kivy - with this you can quite easily integrate and use Java classes in Python without having to switch to Jython. It is based on Cython and JNI and integrates directly into native Python. Kivy is slowly becoming a real alternative for Android development that I should take a closer look at.