Lavonardo

NVidia has announced a $3500 graphics card.

That’s right, a single peripheral card that sells for more than two top of the line laptops, and has more memory than any computer I’ve ever owned.

Probably, just probably, there’s an industry that benefits from the technology for real, but I still think there will be a couple of gamers with more money than sense that feel this is the ultimate weapon in assaulting the steep hardware requirements of Crysis.

Back in 1985, a laser printer had just broken the 7000$ barrier and become affordable even in small offices and homes.

Right now the the first sub-5K three-dimensional printer has been announced.

The laser printer ushered in the postscript age of non-boring documents and desktop publishing, there’s no bets on what the upcoming printing revolution will bring about, but it ought to be something vastly cooler than the ability to exercise bad taste by including seventeen fonts in a three page document.

[ via O'Reilly Radar. ]

A couple of blogs that popped up and piqued my interest enough to keep reading:

• Uusi Renessanssi - Alex Nieminen blogs again (and provides a couple of nifty insights in the very first entries already).
• Tane.li - Just because the term “finnish serial entrepreneur” sounds so much like an oxymoron.
• Wil Shipley’s ramblings are interesting to read (even if I am not a big fan of delicious library).
• Russell Beattie blogs again. This time employed by Nokia.
• Jouni Nieminen has begun a very verbose blog on NHL, neatly coinciding with the first games of the season.

Stanford’s Computer Science and Electronic Engineering departments have begun to offer courses free. The first ten classes are now available, with more to come. The courses initially offered range from elementary computer science to robotics and natural language processing.

Obviously the Palo Alto university is not the first one in the game, MIT begun its own open courseware campaign in the beginning of the decade.

Meh. Chrome, Google’s new browser is a windows-only release for the time being.

Time to play with it tomorrow at work, then.

Looks nifty in the promotional materials, but most things do. But very few of them are actually accompanied by an informative comic by Scott McCloud, the foremost theorist of the field.

Fortunately the versions for the operating systems following in popularity are very much in development. But release dates, have wisely not been given.

Do not attempt to locate a hidden message in the selection.

There isn’t any.

• Color-shifting tiles, just the thing for the upgraded bathroom.
• Let no internet meme be uninvited to this party.
• Origami CD case. Probably a bit more difficult than the garden variety crane.
• When did Star Wars jump the shark? What about Star Trek? And bad things in science fiction in general… Certainly the have been named and numbered already. You bet they have.
• Vector Magic, surprisingly effective tool to convert bitmap images into vectorized format.
• Largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an …
• A collection of Kindle links.
• Shredz64, a game for the Guitar Hero-controller on the commodore 64. Respect.

Everybody need some time, and with these links it’s easily spent.

• The release of Amazon’s electronic book draws close, if Steven Levy’s Newsweek article is to be believed (and yeah, hopefully it’s the lead article of the international edition as well).
• Jesper Juul has written a thorough history of matching tile games. Doesn’t sound too exciting, until the list is perused: Tetris, Bejeweled, Puzzle Bobble, and many others whose addictive qualities would be cause for banning in most european states.
• History of digital tampering is much longer than expected - beginning with an overlaid image of Abraham Lincoln back in 1860s.
• Somehow the feature wishlist for next Windows release (codenamed “7″) is more than a little bit underwhelming.
• Not being allowed to die in the house of parliament has justifiably been voted to be the most ludicrous law in Britain.
• Cost of the Iraq War? About 1.3 trillion dollars. So far.
• Domo Arigato, Battleship Legoto.
• An eponymous site lists the recognized biodiversity hotspots of the world.
• freerice.com = charity and vocabulary enhancement. I so need to establish a firm presence above level 40.

Three big numbers, all courtesy of slashdot.

The english wikipedia has hit two million, that much has been established. But the indentity of the two millionth article has not (mediawiki does not number individual articles).

Firefox has hit 400 million downloads. The estimated market share is 17.4%, of the hits to this blog 35.6% (down from the >50% figures on account of masses of image searches via google, it would appear).

Bioshock has hit 1.5 million shipped units. And probably singlehandedly rescued the publisher from the low pressure front generated by the delays of GTA IV (coding issues) and Manhunt 2 (ratings issues).

Also from the site:
Music industry to introduce “ringle”, a CD single with an on-board ringtone.
And a very good exposé on the writing methods of Bioware.

The blog misrendered something fierce on IE (at least on 5.5 and 6) for a long while.

Finally sought out the culprit today. And noted that when it comes to debugging web pages, IE does not provide much assistance. Firefox, on the other hand, especially when boosted with the likes of Web Developer extension is a far more agreeable tool.

It turned out that tnternet explorer did not like my use of identifiers, and thus failed to render any of the divisions tagged with an identifier. Which pretty much meant this whole blog.

Proper browsers (Firefox and Safari to list just two obvious choices) never had any issue with the previous definitions, and they continue to work well.

The root cause? I hear you asking, with a quavering voice.

Simple: Internet Explorer does not like identifiers that begin with an underscore (that is one of these guys: ‘_’).

According to the XHTML definition (as well as the XML definition referred to in that) this is a completely legal construct:

Names and Tokens    [4]   	NameChar   ::=   	Letter | Digit | '.' | '-' | '_' | ...   [5]   	Name	   ::=   	(Letter | '_' | ':') (NameChar)*   [6]   	Names	   ::=   	Name (#x20 Name)*   [7]   	Nmtoken	   ::=   	(NameChar)+   [8]   	Nmtokens   ::=   	Nmtoken (#x20 Nmtoken)* 

Mr. Underscore is there, in good company.

Funky.

At least when color output from a laser printer is concerned.

Why, certainly!

• One more great map from strangemaps, this one showing which US state matches with which country size- and GDP-wise. Finland = Colorado, which ain’t bad at all.
• Photographs of speed. Some seriously great snaps.
• The end is nigh: multicore programming is hard.
• With candidates like these, the seven new wonders are bound to be boring. Where’s teh internet from the list?
• Been a happy google reader user for quite a while, but with their recent data loss issues, having another RSS-reader might be worthwhile. Or not. Anyway, seems that there’s quite a selection of the tools available.
• Sushi books.
• Editing CSS isn’t exactly the best fun available, a good editor makes it less of a chore.
• Airlinemeals, just the thing to check before a transatlantic crossing in the cattle section of a 757.
• The 65 million dollar pants-case makes it to the court. By the description the session was high on surreal, and fortunately low on understanding the accuser.

[ image nabbed from goopymart's photoset on flickr. ]

April fool’s is gone again - wikipedia again collected the tricks, the links below are pure - no fooling of readers here.

• Jeff Minter, the last of the bedroom coders, has a blog.
• Cute Animals, part x: two sea otters holding hands. Video taken in Vancouver Aquarium - visited it back in 2003, and found these playful critters pleasant to watch.
• Bagophily, for the barf bag fanciers.
• Web typography is limited, that’s a fact. A SXSW presentation explains how to make it suck less.
• Supermarket2.0.
• Firefox OS - is a cross-platform browser really rendering conventional applications obsolete. No, definitely not, even for casual desktop users.

No rhyme or reason, just things to poke and click.

• What would the world map look like if the countries were sized according to named criteria.
• Presentation files from O’Reilly’s recent Emerging Telephony 07 are available.
• Economist, the next generation? That’s what Project Red Stripe attempts to be.
• Amazing kids’ book on typographic animals.
• Evolution of blogging.
• Dance Dance Immolation, for those among us that are really confident in their steps.
• Over a million free stock photos at everystockphoto.com.

[ Abba the Hutt image from studio muscle. ]

No less than three long-form artifacts made it to bookmarks recently.

Web usability is a subject that never gets old, and Jacob Nielsen is just the man to explain what the deadly sins of the designers have been, are, and will still likely be in the future.

Kari Hintikka’s report on web 2.0, on the other hand, has picked snide comments on its translations. Haven’t finished it yet, and some of the terms do rub the wrong way.

Community Created Content is written by three finnish lawyers. It provides a neatly-wrapped, but brief introduction to commonly used licenses and their applications in business. Nothing earth-shattering, but an easy read nonetheless.

In two weeks and some change, the world shall attempt not to use a computer for a whole day.

Scary concept. I will attempt to participate - there ought not be anything demaning access to a glorified difference engine on that day.

(And yeah, the last I checked, shutdown does not take arguments as specified above, it accepts only the number of seconds. But it’s been a while, might have evolutionized. Then again, having less than complex shutdown CLI was never actually the sorest spot in Linux.)

Woo. Jamie Zawinski’s legendary xscreensaver has been ported to OS X. As a native application. And originally released on my birthday.

Mindless graphical trickery for the whole family.

I’m sure there are flashier screensavers available, but this is cannot be outdone on originality or variety.

Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft head honcho, has been making noises about “Linux violating Microsoft’s intellectual property” for a long time. The pace of claims has only intensified after the Microsoft-Novell deal.

Showusthecode.com dares the Redmondians to come out with the facts. By may 1st. This year.

So in a few months’ time we’ll see whether Microsoft can back these claims, or whether they are full of hot air like SCO.

Randomly selected surfing destinations for the selective traveller.

• An amazing collection of geographically alternate earths. A lot of science, very little fiction, pretty maps. Worth a peep.
• If nothing else, Joel Kotkin launches half a dozen new words in his article on superstar cities.
• A nice selection of textbook disclaimers (yes, this is an anti-intelligent design page).
• Kickassclassical, for those awkward moments when you cannot recognize a piece if classical music featured in media (odds are 2.21 to 1 that it’s Carmina Burana anyway).
• JPG magazine, looks like best-of-flickr on paper. Which is not a bad thing at all.
• Angry Alien produly presents: 30 second editions of popular movies, as acted by animated bunnies. The hotel room wrestling scene of Borat is deeply disturbing even in this format,
• Boo hoo, bad microsoft, allegedly turning e-mail back five years by replacing the HTML-renderer in Outlook. Here’s a clue: no HTML in e-mail. Have two, actually, they’re pretty small.

Recent pickups or changes on the blogroll.

• Katuoja attempts to move into daily article mode.
• AC/OS, semi-interesting open source-related discussion.
• Emily Short has converted her wide-encompassing pages on interactive fiction to blog format.
• Juha Ylitalo is an old schoolmate - his blog concentrates on photography.
• Original Signal, a cleanly designed aggregator of dozens of other blogs.