If you’re still reading this you’re one of those people that use old fashioned tools such as “their memory” and “bookmarks”. Part of me feels I should maybe just let you be and not wake you up. You may have noticed zefhemel.com has been rather quiet lately. The reason is that I have a much cooler website now: zef.me. At zefhemel.com I occasionally attempted to be insightful in the traditional way everybody does it: the boring way. At Zef.me I try to do it slightly differently. Sounds good? Alright then, head over to Zef.me. And change your bookmarks! Or remember the URL, it’s easy.
To be honest I thought was so 90’s, but I think that after what they showed at CES, we can agree that Palm is back. My dad (who owns a Palm and loves it a lot) will be pleased. Palm presented a new new phone, called the Pre, which runs a new operating system: WebOS. The phone looks beautiful, it has al the usual smartphone features (Wifi, GPS, bluetooth etc.) and a slide out physical keyboard.
What makes it really interesting is its new operating system, however. WebOS, on which applications are built using… HTML, CSS and Javascript. That’s right folks. Access to device specific features is obtained through a “JSON service bus”. The OS looks very pretty and telling from this video:
I would almost admit it looks prettier and seems better throught out than the iPhone. Yes people, it is possible.
As many of you know, I have been losing weight throughout 2008. The reason has been a mystery to me and my doctors. A few weeks ago, I decided that getting to the root cause of this and reversing it needed to become my #1 priority.
Fortunately, after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause—a hormone imbalance that has been “robbing” me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis.
The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward, and I’ve already begun treatment. But, just like I didn’t lose this much weight and body mass in a week or a month, my doctors expect it will take me until late this Spring to regain it. I will continue as Apple’s CEO during my recovery.
I have given more than my all to Apple for the past 11 years now. I will be the first one to step up and tell our Board of Directors if I can no longer continue to fulfill my duties as Apple’s CEO. I hope the Apple community will support me in my recovery and know that I will always put what is best for Apple first.
C++ is a horrible language. It’s made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it’s much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.
In other words: the choice of C is the only sane choice. I know Miles Bader jokingly said “to piss you off”, but it’s actually true. I’ve come to the conclusion that any programmer that would prefer the project to be in C++ over C is likely a programmer that I really *would* prefer to piss off, so that he doesn’t come and screw up any project I’m involved with.
Just a little thing I just found and I’m sure many others are looking for, especially those who use Google Calendar: an over-the-air synchronization service.
Nuavasync is a free service that acts like a Microsoft Exchange server but talks with Google Calendar and Google Contacts on the backend. iPhones and iPod touches can sync over the air with microsoft exchange, so this a great solution.
To my surprise, when I checked the feeds of one of the podcasts I listen to (Software Engineering Radio), I noticed that they posted an interview with my Ph.D. supervisor yesterday, Eelco Visser. Eelco did his Ph.D. on scannerless parsing. If you care to find out something about what parsing is, how it works and so on, you can have a listen.
Yeah, they killed the Seinfeld and Bill Gates ads. Which, according to Microsoft, was the plan all along. Right. I read somewhere that a third commercial with Seinfeld was already produced and ready to air, but was pulled. Apparently because the responses were not very positive to the other ones. Personally I enjoyed them a lot.
Anyway, this is the ad that they aired instead:
It’s not bad, actually. It’s just… not that funny.
