Month August 2006

'The Damage in Lebanon, and Beyond'

"I never supported Hezbollah before," a young student at the American University of Beirut told me shortly after I arrived in the capital city. "But now they are defending us against Israel." His view of Hezbollah is quickly becoming the norm for hundreds of thousands of previously unsympathetic Lebanese as American-made Israeli bombs and missiles continue to rain down on the country.

Luxology modo 202

Luxology might be a newcomer to the 3D Modelling scene, but while the company was founded in 2004, most of its executives and a large number of engineers have a long history in the 3D industry, being the team the originally co-founded and wrote NewTek and its product Lightwave 3D. Their first 3D modelling product […]

Fair Use and EULAs

Interesting article on Ars about a recent decision of a U.S. Court on the subject.

WWDC'06: OSX Dtraced

XCode 3.0 seems nice! Graphical front-end to Dtrace included; Sun's dtrace is lauded as one of the most impressive dev/admin tools to appear in the last few years and Apple's adoption and integration into XCode is definitely well received. In related news, Apple published the intel kernel sources and introduced MacOSForge.org, a site for Mac OS X open source projects. Well done Apple!

Apple juice.

Apple CEO’s WWDC keynote was probably one of the least impressive for years, but there are one or two things that are of some importance: It’s payback time Judging from the attractive pricing of the Mac Pro (leaving aside the mediocre standard configuration Apple has presented the world with; Geforce 7300GT is surely not worthy […]

The Archimedes Palimpsest

Back in March I mentioned Google Techtalks (now split into multiple series, engEDU, authors@google etc.). Well, back then I watched a video about how a team was using technology to restore an Archimedes Palimsest, an old parchment with some of the great mathematician’s writings that had been overwritten several times throughout the previous two millenia. […]

Routebuddy

Commendable Idea. Bad Implementation. Last week the first, Mac-only vector-based GPS application was released to the public; Routebuddy. The Carbon/OpenGL application fits in with OS X’s look and feel although it failed to impress me with its bog-standard aqua interface and mediocre icons/layout (see Usability). The developers advertise its support for TeleAtlas vector maps, one […]

Cloning Biometrics.

It's not just Big Brother you should be worried about. It's those that create the security features (and holes) of the digital era. Some problems of the up and coming ePassports. Biometric chip-containing passports started being issued on the 1st of August 2006 in Hellas.

¡Felicitaciones Amigos!

The Spanish region of Extramadura, follows along the steps of many other European authorities (Paris, München among others) and switches to Linux and Open Document formats, saving many millions of Euros, promoting freedom both economic and practical terms. Compare and contrast with the blissfully ignorant Hellenic authorities that keep spending taxpayers' money on overpriced, buggy Windows software.