As I had lately to do more, let’s call it, web development as usual I really appreciated that I have found (and tried) Eclipse. Before I was just happy using a text editor with syntax coloring, sufficient for my projects, since they never went too big.
Once you’ve started using AJAX libraries like MochiKit (as I did) you’ll notice the efficiency boost when Eclipse and the fantastic JavaScript IDE Aptana enter the game and replace your beloved text editor. I simply can’t imagine how extensive JavaScript development is possible without an environment like Aptana.
Besides syntax coloring, code validation, HTML/CSS support, it finds all objects, functions, variables, methods etc. in your JavaScript libraries and provides you with overviews, documentations and auto-completion. Considering all the functionality a large library like MochiKit offers, it either takes you a week to go through the documentation or you let Aptana do the work for you and start coding right away. I never have been a big documentation reader, always preferred the trial-and-error method, so Aptana made my life a lot easier.
Everyone who ever had to debug JavaScript knows that this task can drive you mad. Firefox and its Web Developer Toolbar are very helpful in that case. But the extension Firebug is just priceless when it comes to tracking down errors in your JavaScript code.
Still the best of it: all open source software.
What I certainly do love about SVG is the fact that you can put nice looking interactive maps in a very simple and quick way together.
Today I wrote this small SVG map module (in German language and just a small part of an information system) and set it on top of a database containing various regional indicators. Main purpose of the database is to arrange user-defined indicators to customized tables together. The map is kind of a little bonus addition and should help to get a better picture about spatial distribution of certain indicators.
But the point is that this can be done in a day without the need of setting up and configuring a mapserver or web-GIS. Developing 2 or 3 days longer there even would be some more layers, features, colors, etc. and perhaps a cleaner coding style.
Especially when it comes to thematic maps, SVG is IMHO the best choice. Whenever you want to change some thresholds in your legend, or load some new statistical data into your existing regional units, a mapserver has to refresh the whole image. It’s pretty annoying compared to SVG which lets you simply load or reclassify data on-the-fly without the need of reloading any element of the user interface – AJAX, to name a buzzword.
Of course, since most of the work is done on the client-side, map performance is limited there and not on the server-side. But if you look at office machines running at 3GHz, this shouldn’t cause too much headache.
However, SVG enables simple and straight interfaces. Many of our clients get confused by most mapserver interfaces and highly appreciate those simple systems. That’s why we were asked for an easy solution this time. Just to quickly view some regional indicators on the map, without any fancy features.
My first Paprazzi-like shot: this afternoon, when we went another time to Roboexotica, I caught the Geek Entertainment TV team with Violet Blue doing a report about the event. Working for GETV seems to be a very hard job!
Some might call Vienna a cold town. Actually it is, Vienna’s citizens tend to be in an endless bad mood, always a bit unfriendly and they don’t like talking to strangers.
People like monochrom teach us that stereotypes never apply for 100%. Luckily.
Last Tuesday we went to the opening of Roböexotica 2006, a festival for robotics, cocktail robotics to be precise. There even traveled people from San Francisco to Vienna to participate and show us their cocktail mixing robots. It was such a weird and exciting evening, with fire spitting machines, ice cube destroying machines, smoking machines, beautiful lime squeezing machines. One of the best screwdrivers I ever had was mixed by a robot!
I’m glad living in a city were events like Roböexotica are possible.
Yeah, and then, last night I decided to come with a friend to a party at Almdudler headquarters (yes, the ginger ale like soft drink!) were she was going to record some DJs for PLAY.FM. We didn’t expect anything, just wanted to go there, record the set, have a few drinks and leave early. Expect the unexpected: Mr DSL and especially Frau Bass transformed Almdudler headquarters into a boiling pot!
The venue actually is quite interesting. Apparently Almudler is sponsoring Vienna’s street art scene and let 8 crews work on (spraying) the building, 8 rooms inside and parts of the building outside. A clever marketing move from Almdudler (way better than Nokia!) and an exhibition venue for street artists.
I’ve never been a big Red Hot Chili Peppers fan. Well, I liked their music and used to listen to them in the early nineties, but never too much and at some point I completely lost their track. The new songs I only know from the radio. They’re not bad, but they didn’t made me buy any newer album either.
However, we went to the concert here in Vienna, to one of the two sold out (20k people each!) concerts. A good concert, I really enjoyed it. The audience was great, the atmosphere was great, the band, well, the band are 4 men in their mid-forties behaving a bit like a teenage surf band, which was sometimes kind of strange to watch. But in the end it was a good show and I thought they’d do a great job being the ambassadors of California. Listening to their songs and watching them live on stage they somehow reminded me of this wonderful place on earth.
[googlevideo -6989585264928642782]
Interesting: Sean Carruthers did some tests and found out that Adobe Creative Suite 2 running in Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop (aff link) partly performs better than running in Apple’s own PowerPC emulation environment named Rosetta.
Not surprising, since Boot Camp and Parallels can access more or less directly the Intel core while Rosetta must emulate a PowerPC before starting any other tasks. I’m no hardware engineer, but for me it sounds like Rosetta has some more work to do than Parallels or Boot Camp.
However, it leads another time to the question if, along with increasing popularity of emulation environments on the Mac, Mac OS X versions of applications are needed any more
Why not just get your copy of Parallels Desktop, Boot Camp, etc. and run Windows versions on your Mac? Why waiting years for applications to be ported to Mac OS X when you can simply run them in an emulation environment (e.g. OpenOffice)? Perhaps even without any major drawbacks.
Thanks to the latest Parallels update, a combined workflow (coherence mode, drag and drop items) between Windows and Mac OS X has improved significantly. Parallels has done an amazing job during the last months and I guess some major upgrades (e.g. hardware acceleration) can be expected for the near future.
…my vote for the new James Bond Casino Royale! Surely one of the best Bond movies ever!
A rough and human Bond. He fails, he bleeds, he sweats, he falls in love, he gives a shit about his Vodka Martini. He breaks many Bond clichés, a fabulous episode!
I guess it’s the strong script, not so much the new actor Daniel Craig. I mean he is not bad at all, not a smart guy like James Bond characters used to be. Sometimes he even looks pretty dumb and behaves more like a raging bull than a British secret agent, so that I felt more in Die Hard IX than in a James Bond movie. Maybe it’s just because somebody told Daniel Craig to work out and put some more muscles on. He didn’t have such a monster neck in his movies before, no?
I still would like to see Clive Owen in the role of James Bond. I think he would be a great choice.
[googlevideo 9078135433851233052]
At the moment Interpol is one of my favorite bands, Antics is such a fantastic album. But what I don’t get or what is kind of irritating, is the NAZI-like outfit of Carlos D. Even if it’s just a fashion detail, but it should be considered that many have suffered and were murdered by people wearing very similar accessories. It’s a bit more than just fashion.
[youtube FktYzdDJdqQ]
Found this morning in my news reader: 3D effects by animated multiple lens photographs.
Simple but fascinating.
If I remember my biology class, or was it physics, correctly, the animation demonstrates how the human eye and brain work or why we are able to see our world in 3D.
I didn’t know, until this morning, that the new subway trains in Vienna do have names, known from airplanes and hurricanes. So this morning I had the pleasure to ride with Andrea, a good and comfortable ride. Except the strange feeling of being watched (the new trains are all equipped with surveillance cameras).
I’m wondering if the names follow a specific schema. Oh, probably it’s that simple: female names in alphabetical order. Wiener Linien, what else.