Thursday, 12th April 2007
San Diego, tell me more
You should totally go to Horton Plaza. It’s a shopping mall, but it’s also basically one big architectural joke. Everything is at funny angles, and stairs and ramps never take you where they think you will. I usually have no interest in visiting malls at all but I totally loved it.
[... 64 words]quakr. Uses Flickr machine tags to add tilt/pan/direction information to photos, then displays them in the correct orientation in a 3D Flash viewer. Presented at last night’s Oxford Geek Night.
Quakr 7d Tiltometer. How the Quakr team built their own seven dimensional metadata camera using sellotape, protractors and a ball of string.
Extending a WiFi network with two Macs and a FireWire cable
Last night’s Oxford Geek Night went really well, despite more than the usual flurry of problems. It’s definitely true that the more geeks there are in a room the less likely it is that the projector will work! Thankfully we got everything up and running in time for the talks to start, although it was a pretty close call.
[... 595 words]What the heck is HTML 5? Slides from my five minute HTML 5 talk at Oxford Geek Night 2.
None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.
— Alex Payne, Twitter
We declined to participate in the XHTML2 Working Group because we think XHTML2 is not an appropriate technology for the web.
— Maciej Stachowiak, Apple
HTML5, XHTML2, and the Future of the Web. Covers similar topics to my talk, but in much more detail.
Quercus: PHP in Java (via) A “fast, open-source, 100% Java implementation of the PHP language”, built to run on top of Resin. Claims to be compatibly with MediaWiki, Drupal, Wordpress, Gallery2 and DocuWiki.
Discourse DB. A collaborative effort to collect the opinions of the world’s journalists and commentators about ongoing political events and issues, powered by Semantic MediaWiki so there’s metadata coming out of its ears.