Category Technology

Bletchley Park, by Google.

I've written before about Bletchley Park, when, in 2008, closure seemed imminent and the UK government seemed unable and unwilling to do much to keep it alive. Now Google has offered to help restore Bletchley Park --- an admirable endeavour that is very welcome, given the site's significance in World War II history. As a sidenote, it is a real shame that we have now come to depend on multinational corporations in order to preserve our monuments.

Unbiased.

Recent developments on physically accurate, unbiased raytracers --- and more to the point, GPU powered raytracers that provide near real-time, interactive manipulation of fully textured and shaded models and environment --- promise an unmatched workflow that makes the creation of super-realistic images and animations very easy. I won't write much about the technologies behind them, but I think the video below is a great example of some of the things that become possible for a single person using commodity technology and hardware --- in this case Blender and Octane Render (one such raytracer), especially given how much of the lighting setup and performance trickery, that would otherwise be absolutely necessary, are 'handled for free' by the renderer.

A PC Emulator in Javascript.

You read this right: this is a 'full-fledged' PC emulator written in pure Javascript. It can boot linux. Amazing stuff, let's hope we get 'readable' source code sometime soon.

Some thoughts on Ubuntu Unity

A lot has been said and written about Ubuntu Unity, the new ‘shell’ that’s replaced the ‘classic’ default GNOME desktop in Ubuntu 11.04. Despised by many that interpreted Canonical’s break from the ‘open-source’ norm of restricting modifications to upstream platforms to a bare minimum, as a threat to the upstream projects’ existence (a valid point […]

Location and Privacy

Yesterday a story about Apple’s unauthorised logging of timestamped location data on iPhones running iOS 4.x versions of the system software was published in several articles in technical and mainstream media worldwide. This is important, not only because of the ubiquity of location-based services available to consumers worldwide and the significance of location in safeguarding […]

Javaless Guardian

Guardian.co.uk is switching from Java to Scala. I'm surprised it took so long and that other Java shops are not following en masse --- it could be because of how different and esoteric Scala can be, especially to Java programmers. The linked infoQ article contains an interesting discussion with the Guardian folks. Programming enterprise web applications (or anything, for that matter) in Java is painful for anyone mature enough to have experienced the wealth and breadth of tools out there, given how primitive, verbose and unproductive it is, and how much it caters for the lowest common denominator of a programmer. That's not to say that Scala is the best choice for everyone, let alone those not starting from scratch, but given the Guardian's existing infrastructure and systems, I guess that it's the best choice they could've made.

My Ten Years With Mac OS X.

Ten years ago, on March 24th, 2001, Mac OS X came out. A first, publicly available, one point oh unpolished version of Apple’s ‘next’ (pun intended) operating system. An operating system that Apple had been trying, in one way or another, to create for more than ten years. Remember Pink? Taligent? Copland? Gershwin? Mythical codenames […]

Palm's Comeback

Jon Rubinstein is no stranger to success. He was the engineer that architected the iPod, Apple’s single most successful product for years, until the iPhone was released in 2007. After more than fifteen years working with Steve Jobs, Jon Rubinstein left Apple in 2006. Around ten years earlier he had returned to the company with […]

Google Art Project

Amazing work by Google, I hope it expands to other great museums all over the globe.

What about {Angle,Diamond} gradients?

In this draft CSS3 spec, preliminary support for gradients is defined. Where are diamond and angle gradients? They may not be used as much as the others, but I find it weird that they are not added to a newly spec'd standard, given that it's not that hard to implement them.