Year 2010

The Document Foundation

The greatest news for the project-formerly-known-as OpenOffice.org, since it became free software a decade ago. Let's hope that the new maintainers/leaders of the project and the commercial 'supporters' listed on the web site will make LibreOffice a worthy competitor in the age of cloud computing, SaaS and Google's impending dominance (viz. Google Apps) of the market.

Το θέμα των φαρμακείων.

Τον τελευταίο καιρό συζητείται το ‘άνοιγμα’ των κλειστών επαγγελμάτων. Οι ‘φασαρία’ που έχει προκαλέσει η επαναλαμβανόμενη απεργιακή κινητοποίηση των μεταφορεών, ιδιοκτητών φορτηγών δημοσίας χρήσης και λοιπών επαγγελματιών/επιχειρηματιών του κλάδου μπορεί να έχει, στο μυαλό των περισσοτέρων, ταυτίσει το ‘άνοιγμα’ των κλειστών επαγγελμάτων με αυτήν την κοινωνική/οικονομική ομάδα, όμως τα επαγγέλματα είναι πολλά και ποικίλα και […]

Blender 3D. Professional 3D graphics commoditisation in progress.

I’ve mentioned blender before; it’s one of the open source projects that I’ve followed for years, a project that I love and one that’s has consistently impressed me since I spent a weekend learning the basics of its operation in 2002. At Cosmical Technology, we’ve been using blender for quite a while; some of the […]

Yes, Prime Minister.

No, this is not --- exactly --- about the legendary and much loved 1980s series by Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay, but the new play by the same writers. While I am quite uncertain anyone could portray Jim Hacker like Paul Eddington did, or Humphrey Appleby like Nigel Hawthorne (who both died in the past fifteen years), or even the pedantic and often whimsical Bernard Whooley, originally played by Derek Fowlds, these are moments I wish I were still in London. Yes, Prime Minister, the play, will be showing this year, for a limited season, at the Gielgud Theatre in London.

On Feeds and Fads

In 2004 ‘web feeds’ were becoming extremely popular in the tech community. People were keen to label ‘web pages’ as old, obsolete, clumsy and resource ‘heavy’. It was the time of ‘Web 2.0’, the time when web ‘surfers’ were gradually getting rid of Internet Explorer 6, when Ajax was starting to make its appearance on […]

Inception (2010)

The Thirteenth Floor. Existenz. The Matrix. Movies that more or less, in their respective segments, defined a time, set a trend. That was 1999 and while the first two movies became ‘cult’, mostly due to their lower budgets and respective promotion, the latter ended up being a megahit that drew praise from geeks, critics and […]

What's wrong with this?

Check out this table. A bunch of modern, high-quality, high-performing codecs. AAC+, AAC LC, enhanced AAC+, MP3. All decodable by Android, on all devices. Sadly, Android devices can only encode on AMR-NB at the sad sampling rate of 8KHz. At the miserable bitrate of 4.75 to 12.2kbps. At qualities unheard of since the early days of the telegraph (ok, I'm kidding --- AMR-NB is the voice codec most GSM and UMTS phonecalls are carried over). Now, you may be asking: Couldn't the manufacturer add encoding support for more audio codecs? Sure, and some do. Others, like HTC for example, don't. Even on high-end devices like the Desire. Devices with Qualcomm Snapdragon CPUs clocked at 1GHz. With hardware support for stereo AAC encoding. No, really, what on earth is wrong with these people. At the same time, HTC went into the hassle of adding encoding support for h.264 and 720p (using MPEG4). And it makes me wonder: that they added h.264 encoding support means they are at least clued up with respect to paying royalties, adding the codec to the system and making use of it. That they introduced 720p using MPEG4 on the other hand makes no sense: how useful is 720p video recording --- recently introduced with HTC's Froyo build for the Desire --- or the capability to record audio as a whole come to think of it, when the recorded audio on this phone sounds like a wax record from the 1880s, not least because of the totally backwards codec they use throughout, while one of the most powerful mobile device CPUs in the market today just sits there idling. Idiots.

Νοσταλγώντας τα €0.85/λίτρο.

Θυμάμαι σαν εχθές τη στιγμή που κατέφθασα στην Πάτρα, τον Ιούνιο του 2005. Είχα μπροστά μου έναν γεμάτο μήνα: μετά από επτά χρόνια διαμονής στο Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο, έπρεπε να μαζέψω και να αποστείλλω τα πράγματά μου — ένα ολόκληρο σπίτι — στην Ελλάδα, να χαιρετήσω τους φίλους και γνωστούς μου, να απολαύσω το Λονδίνο μαζί […]

Κλιματιστικό = "Δωρεάν" Quasi-απεσταγμένο Νερό*

Μια split air-conditioning ‘οικιακής χρήσης’ μονάδα κλιματισμού της τάξεως των 8K BTU μπορεί να αποδώσει μέχρι και 10 λίτρα ημερισίως! Σε μεγαλύτερες εγκαταστάσεις (βλ. κεντρικός κλιματισμός σε κτήρια γραφείων) τα κλιματιστικά αποδίδουν μέχρι και 40 λίτρα ανά 100 τ.μ. Σαράντα λίτρα νερού που συχνά πάει χαμένο. Αρκετό νερό για να ποτιστούν αρκετά μεγάλες εκτάσεις των […]

Bing and OpenStreetMap

Bing, Microsoft’s portal/search/mapping service has announced that they will start providing OpenStreetMap (OSM) data, as an optional layer, in Bing Maps. OSM data will be downloaded from Microsoft’s fast Azure CDN, as opposed to OSM’s ‘slow’ servers. Now, there’s nothing wrong with Microsoft using OpenStreetMap data. That’s why it’s Open. But then again, I am […]