Song of this week (well, it has been a bit longer than that) is “Angel” by Sarah McLachlan.
Spend all your time waiting
For that second chance
For a break that would make it okay
There's always one reason
To feel not good enough
And it's hard at the end of the day
I need some distraction
Oh beautiful release
Memory seeps from my veins
Let me be empty
And weightless and maybe
I'll find some peace tonight
In the arms of an angel
Fly away from here
From this dark cold hotel room
And the endlessness that you fear
You are pulled from the wreckage
Of your silent reverie
You're in the arms of the angel
May you find some comfort there
So tired of the straight line
And everywhere you turn
There's vultures and thieves at your back
And the storm keeps on twisting
You keep on building the lie
That you make up for all that you lack
It don't make no difference
Escaping one last time
It's easier to believe in this sweet madness oh
This glorious sadness that brings me to my knees
In the arms of an angel
Fly away from here
From this dark cold hotel room
And the endlessness that you fear
You are pulled from the wreckage
Of your silent reverie
You're in the arms of the angel
May you find some comfort there
You're in the arms of the angel
May you find some comfort here
x-Desktop: “This exciting project is designed to unify different operating system desktop interfaces into a browser only application interface. It helps users to feel comfortable with any application using the interface they are used to. It helps companies to unify their intranet applications into one desktop interface - built on existing interfaces or one which incorporates their own CI. It helps to design the same interface for all types of devices using browsers like PDA and other mobile devices, Notebooks, Desktops, Tablett Computers and any other future devices which may come up.
- 100% Browser based & no plugins required
- Supports all Operating Systems providing a DOM2 / Javascript Support Browser
- Simple Object Interface
- Customizable desktop & window skins
“
Check out the online demo here. It works amazingly well (in Mozilla at least).
Erik Meijer (who appears to be Dutch, I already found the name sound awfully Dutch) published a paper entitled “Programming with Circles, Triangles and Rectangles” which is about adding native programming language support for XML into an existing OO language such as C# or Java. By doing that you can get this kind of code:
public class card {
sequence{
string name;
string title;
string email;
string? phone;
logo? logo;
};
}
public class logo {
attribute string url;
}
public class Test {
static void Main() {
card c = <card>
<name>John Doe</name>
<title>CEO, Widget Inc.</title>
<email>john.doe@widget.com</email>
<phone>(202) 456-1414</phone>
<logo url="widget.gif"/>
</card>;
c.*.{ Console.WriteLine(it); };
}
}
The paper can be found here and sadly can only be viewed from Internet Explorer (due to a client-side XSLT transformation which appears to be implemented in an IE-only fashion).
People from the Microsoft world are finally discovering what has happened in the Java world in the meantime, so it seems.
autoCode(my_dotnet_baby); about IntelliJ IDEA: “I love this stuff. This IDEA editor truly looks amazing. I know that MS will catch up, they always clone other people’s good ideas! To be brutally honest, though, I think it’s fairly shameful that MS (with their resources and all!) haven’t done these things first. Some of them are just so obvious, like having the editor tell you about superfluous using or Import statements, for instance.
[..]
Software development, and specifically the programmer-editor interaction, really is the cliff-face of our technological evolution; look here, for a long to come, for the firsts in interface and usability innovations and breakthroughs. It’s here where frail and error-prone human creative thought-processes clash with the machinstic and rigid rules of the logical languages and systems that we work with. It’s because of this battle for expression that we developers face every day, that we’ll also develop better editors, better expressions of our intent and creativity.
[..]
Microsoft must do better in this regard. For the biggest & best software co. in the world not to sell the best software editor in the world, should simply not be acceptable.”
The creators of Google (Page and Brin) have their own weblog. And these guys are actually really funny (and that’s non-ironic).
I’ve wanted to do a blog for ages but Sergey couldn’t manage to set up MovableType. Apparently it’s “Just too difficult”.
Anyway, the other day he suggested that it would be a thousand times easier to just buy Blogger.com.
So we did.
We told them their new terms of employment and only one person disagreed.
