Category Software

How Microsoft lost control of VC-1

A two page article on The Register on how excitement over VC-1 waned and H.264 ended up ruling the current generation of video codecs. While I am not keen on trusting Microsoft with any additional power over computer technology and I am quite happy that H.264 seems to have won the battle, what's really interesting here is how patent law, as ludicrous as it is, can even backfire on the mightiest players of the industry.

Why I stopped using Skype. Kind of.

I was one of the early adopters of Skype, the, now ubiquitous voice over IP application/platform created by Niklas Zennström of Kazaa’s fame and now owned by eBay. But, truth be told I never really warmed up to it. You could say it was imposed on me when its simplicitly stood there laughing at my […]

Two-finger scrolling For The Rest of Us

This is iScroll2, a modified ADB trackpad driver (based on the Darwin sources) that adds two-finger scrolling capability to those of us with older {i,Power}Books. Good stuff.

Surflinks Redux.

It's been about two months since I started providing sidebar links (and an Atom 1.0 feed) to interesting pages I found while surfing, in a section I called 'Surflinks'. I did this for two reasons: 1. to avoid cluttering the blog (and main feed) with numerous miniposts that did not necessarily merit accompanying text or comment, and 2. to still have a way to provide numerous links for those that care. I think some of you --- clearly --- liked it as I've had enough (non bot) hits on the feed. The problem was that I was only informed a few days ago that the plug-in I was using to process the feed was not functioning properly anymore and that the links did not point anywhere. This is now fixed. Apologies to any of you who had trouble accessing the linked pages from the sidfebar or SL feed.

Objective-C 2.0: The Garbage Collector

Before Java was conceived (let alone used), before C++ became the de facto application development language — certainly before it got STL and compilers worthy of mention — NeXT Inc. licensed Objective-C, a Smalltalk resembling, object oriented true C-superset, as the main language for its NeXTSTEP operating system. Objective-C and the (typically) accompanying APIs built […]

HOL eVoice. Τρομερή ιδέα, ελλιπής υλοποίηση

Εδώ και αρκετούς μήνες έχω αποκτήσει έναν λογαριασμό VoIP τηλεφωνίας από την Ηellas On Line, και συγκεκριμένα από την υπηρεσία της eVoice. Η ιδέα είναι πρωτοποριακή για τα ελληνικά δεδομένα: η HOL σου παρέχει αριθμό τηλεφώνου στην Ελλάδα εντελώς δωρεάν, χωρίς πάγιο ή άλλο κόστος εγγραφής, και από εκεί και πέρα πληρώνεις τα τηλεφωνήματα αν […]

Google SoC 2007 and the projects that I care about.

It’s the third year that Google sponsors students to work on Open Source projects during their summer vacation. The programme is called ‘Google Summer of Code‘ or GSoC and attracts the attention of many of the most prominent open source projects around; projects that are typically non-commercial and that would otherwise have little chance of […]

SciGen: Automated CS Paper Generation

Getting a research paper accepted at a conference or journal can be a very funny process, if you don't take it seriously. Politics, abused-postgraduates forced to review papers they don't understand, senior academics who don't care and who are obliged to review papers they don't understand and so on, make modern academia the surreal experience it is. Some of us at Imperial, have been joking about having an automated paper generator for many years. Well, it seems some guys at MIT did it and one of their 'generated' papers was accepted as a 'non-reviewed paper' at a conference. :)

Your Data, The Digital Era and The Future

Greetings person of the digital era! Let’s see how you store your knowledge, your wisdom, your data. Your (very very early) ancestors had word of mouth. Then came drawings and hieroglyphics and then written language and tools let words be inscribed on stone. Scrolls, books and analogue storage of text, audio and video followed. And […]

Blender 2.43 is out.

BlenderThe latest version of the premier open source 3d modelling application is here. Read the release notes, watch the feature videos and get it from blender.org! This version adds several interesting new features, such as Mesh Sculpting and Retopo tools. It also has numerous improvements in the renderer, particle system, animation system and compositing. Finally it seems so much faster on my PowerPC G5 hardware.