The Pin Project

Ένα από τα πλέον ενδιαφέροντα και χρήσιμα ελληνικά έργα στο διαδίκτυο που αφορά τους περισσότερους από εμάς. Για χρόνια σκεφτόμασταν με κάποιο φίλο να φτιάξουμε κάτι παρόμοιο αλλά φαίνεται πως μας πρόλαβαν. :) Πρακτικά αποτελεί ένα web application βασισμένο στο Google Maps που επιτρέπει στους χρήστες να ορίσουν επικίνδυνα σημεία στους δρόμους της Ελλάδος. Δεν είναι πλήρες, ούτε έχει εξαντλήσει πολλές από τις ιδέες που είχαμε (π.χ. δημιουργία layers με ορθόγονη πληροφορία, π.χ. πόροι, έργα, σημεία κινδύνου κλπ., περισσότερες/πολλαπλές κατηγορίες, όπως χαλασμένα φανάρια, διπλά σήματα κ.α.) όμως είναι πολύ καλοφτιαγμένο και αξίζει την υποστήριξή σας. Αν γνωρίζετε οδικά σημεία που παρουσιάζουν επικινδυνότητα στους οδηγούς ή πεζούς 'καρφώστε' τα στον χάρτη! Ελπίζω πως εν καιρώ οι υπεύθυνοι φορείς (δήμοι, νομαρχίες, υπουργεία κλπ.) θα δώσουν τη πρέπουσα σημασία. Όπως και να έχει μια δημόσια υπηρεσία όπως αυτή ακυρώνει πολλές από τις δικαιολογίες που συχνά ακούμε.

Injury to Insult.

One of my main annoyances with OS X since 10.0 was Terminal.app. My UNIX background requires a decent terminal application and Terminal.app more or less traditionally embodied everything that can possibly be wrong with a terminal application. Up until Leopard, Apple had paid little attention to it and many people had forsaken it for applications such as iTerm. Sadly I never quite liked iTerm, I don't fancy starting X11 up just for the terminal and so I ended up tolerating Terminal.app and hoping that Apple would fix it in the future. I couldn't --- and still can't --- understand how Gnome and KDE provide so much more powerful terminal applications and Apple, the goliath of usability and design, provides such a ridiculous terminal. Or can I? In Mac OS X Leopard, Apple revamped its terminal application. Unfortunately the revamp is nothing but insulting to those people that are most probably going to be using it the most. One of the longstanding issues with the previous versions was the inability to set the ANSI colours so that coloured text could be legible under dark or light backgrounds. In 10.5 Apple has introduced several 'themes', including a number of dark themes provided by the company, (viz. 'Pro'), that use dark backgrounds. Yet actually using those themes is practically impossible with the OS X default ANSI colours and there's no way to change these colours: they are still hard-coded in the binary. The usual solutions are still there, using InputManagers, SIMBL etc. or giving up on Terminal.app and switching to another terminal application, yet so is my dislike for any of those solutions. Given the work that Apple has clearly put in providing the 'theming' functionality --- including a wholly new configuration system and theme inspector it's quite perplexing why they 'omitted' providing support for setting the ANSI colours given that it's been one of the most commented upon, criticised omissions of this application for the past six years. If anything it seems to me like Apple is taunting its users with such ridiculous 'improvements' and the completely needless attention to detail (e.g. 'live' thumbnails on the terminal inspector!), while it ignores real problems faced by those that make use of its software.

PayPal Everywhere?

I have to admit I'm not a huge fan of PayPal as it has more than its fair share of security issues, but I occasionally use it as it is convenient. Nevertheless, in the past few days I've noticed that several 'major' online stores have added PayPal as a payment option. Take for example HP or Native Instruments. Several international online retailers (e.g. Expansys or Pixmania), have had a PayPal payment option for a long time and many smaller retailers take advantage of the company's streamlined services. I am not sure what the demographics of the service's users are, but I'm quite certain that users in several European countries are not really big customers of PayPal. My personal experience with it has been generally good, with the exception of one time when I tried using it for a relatively large amount and ended up having my card deactivated for a few days --- banks don't seem to like PayPal much. Yet its adoption as a payment option in the online stores of large corporations may signify that it's becoming an accepted alternative to bank payment processors, a manifestation perhaps of the e-currency theories of the 1990s. What do you think?

dte 2007 και η μίζερη υποκουλτούρα.

Η τελευταία φορά που επισκέφθηκα ελληνική έκθεση τεχνολογίας ήταν το 1994. Τότε που η χωρητικότητα των σκληρών δίσκων μετριώνταν σε ΜΒ, η Μicrosoft δεν ήταν ακόμη ο παντοδύναμος κυρίαρχος της αγοράς των προσωπικών υπολογιστών, το λίνουξ ήταν παντελώς άγνωστο στο 99.999999% του πληθυσμού και υπήρχαν ακόμη κάποια — έστω λίγα — δείγματα πρωτοπορίας και ενθουσιασμού […]

Lucida Grandε.

This has been itching me ever since I installed Leopard. Lucida Grande, the ‘default’ font for much of OS X’s UI has been ‘upgraded’ to version 6.0. This wouldn’t be a problem (or even noticeable) if the new Lucida Grande hadn’t replaced the glyph for the hellenic character epsilon with the ugliest, most striking version […]

FakeStevey got it…wrong.

Check this post by Fake Steve Jobs. It's hilarious and not just because it nails what the real Steve Jobs probably thinks of Openness, but also because it highlights what was always wrong with his approach: whenever his companies were weak (NeXT in the late 80s and early 90s, Apple in the late 90s and early 2000s) he touted Openness, standards and formed alliances with other companies. Take Adobe's Display PostScript in NeXTSTEP, Darwin, Display PDF, OpenGL, OpenAL, CUPS, UNIX certification, gcc and a number of other standards, APIs, libraries and applications between 2001 and today in OS X or his 'agreement' with Microsoft in 1997. But just when things do well, he tries to usurp the dominant position, showing complete disregard to their partners, development community, users and sometimes even employees. In my discussions about Android with friends over the past day I compared Google with Microsoft in the 80s. Many have done the same. This comment by 'chickenface' in the linked article is, I believe, representative of how I see Android evolving and eventually dominating the market:
This is 1984, the iphone is the 128K Mac, and GPhone is the PC. Look, there's no actual consortium; there's Google and its customers. Kinda like Apple and AT&T, but they've got so many customers we're calling it a consortium. When're you gonna get this straight: Microsoft were like the Klingons - we made a sort of peace with them and held our nose. Google, they're way worse -- they're the Borg.