If you want to use the Atom publishing protocol, you now need to install a plugin in WordPress 3.5 because it has been removed from the core. Of course, the WordPress developers didn't bother to include a corrected version of the Atom Publishing Protocol server in the plugin; it still contains the over 2-year-old bug with media uploads. Fortunately, my patch still works, but now it needs to be applied to a different file. Quite a mess, what they're doing there. And when I see how the bug in the WordPress core was ignored, my hope that someone will take the trouble to fix the plugin is pretty close to zero.
Linkblog - 1.10.2012 - 9.1.2013
Polaroids interchangeable lens camera is awful hands-on | The Verge. Well, that's probably it then. The first prototypes and images are definitely different from what actually appears at CES, and that doesn't sound good at all. Sure, things could still balance out by the release, but I wouldn't bet my money on it. There are other, better cameras at comparable prices (e.g., the V1 sale, which is currently floating around for 310 euros with the 10-30 on Amazon). Update: this is probably a different camera; Polaroid seems to have released two different models with interchangeable lenses, only one of which has Android. But that the other one is actually good, well, my hopes are rather low there ...
[[[CES 2013]] Bring On The Influx Of Android-Powered Photography Machines: Polaroid Announces The iM1836 Mirrorless Camera With Jelly Bean](http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/01/07/ces-2013-bring-on-the-influx-of-android-powered-photography-machines-polaroid-announces-the-im1836-mirrorless-camera-with-jelly-bean/). Could be interesting to hack. And the system really looks suspiciously like the Nikon J1 as the basis - which would be even more interesting because you could also get other lenses (and in the long run other bodies). Of course, the question remains whether Android is messed up or quite open and if it is open, whether you can also easily put your own apps on it.
Use Your iPhone, Android, Or Windows Phone To Lock And Unlock Your Mac Using Bluetooth | Redmond Pie. Nice little hack - only needs a small open source program and two Apple scripts and you can trigger actions when, for example, a smartphone comes close to a computer or moves away from a computer - here using the example of the screen lock.
Blaze — Blaze 0.1-dev documentation. Hmm, I could have sworn I already had that, but never mind. Blaze is essentially a compiler that transforms numpy-like code and passes it to runtimes for evaluation. Specifically, it also supports many parallel runtimes and parallelization of evaluations. The data types are also significantly more developed than in numpy - the authors themselves consider Blaze to be the natural evolution of numpy. What fascinates me about it is the integration of a quite extensively developed array programming library into Python - since I've been playing around with J, I find array languages fascinating.
IOIO for Android - SparkFun Electronics. Also an interesting project, a friend pointed me to it today: an IO board for Android smartphones. It simply plugs in via USB and is accessed through a simple Java library. It has various analog and digital inputs and outputs, I2C and other goodies. You can even get a Bluetooth kit for it if you don't want to communicate via radio. Pricier perhaps than what you're used to in the Arduino environment, but still, sounds cool. I'll wait for my Smartduino first, though, which also has Android support.
Run Mobile Apps on Mac with BlueStacks :: Mobile Apps on Mac :: Mobile App Player for Mac | BlueStacks. Hey, the beta can now run any Android apps. I should definitely check it out. So one or the other Android tool would also be practical on the desktop, especially if there are not really good desktop versions available.
MariaMole | dalpix.com. If the normal Arduino IDE is too simple for you (although I would say that the simplicity is the great bonus), you can check out this project. This is a rather classic IDE with which you can build Arduino programs.
Java 3D Engine | Learn Java Programming in 3D. Looks very interesting, especially because it has a close integration into an IDE (BlueJ) with a focus on learning to program. And meanwhile, you can also directly generate Android applications from it and, for example, build your own games or toys.
several methods to find interesting areas of an image - and for example interesting for overview galleries where images are brought into fixed formats jd where you want to apply more intelligent cropping and scaling.
imwilsonxu/fbone · GitHub. Not so uncool at all. I'm actually a Djangonaut, but Flask has always interested me a bit, as it's quite a good basis for more compact projects. With the integration of HTML5 Boilerplate and CSS Bootstrap, this could also be interesting for small web projects with frontend. Although Flask offers enough room to grow to realize larger things - it's just that for larger things I often still reach for Django. But especially for the typical web service with additional HTML presentation of the data, this can really be practical.
Cubes 0.10.1 Released – Multiple Hierarchies Data Brewery. I think I've mentioned this before, but hey, TV repeats things all the time. And it looks even better, what you can do with it. I really need to take a closer look, there's a project where I think I could use it. I need to check how to integrate it, though, because my project uses Django and its ORM, and Cubes uses SQLAlchemy. It could be interesting to mix them.
The Ruggeduino. Might be interesting when I actually fry my upcoming toys ... (which, given my electrical knowledge, can happen faster than I would like)
The SQLite RTree Module. And another extension for SQLite, this one a standard extension. R-Trees are tree structures optimized for range queries - that is, range queries such as "is this given rectangle contained in the list of rectangles".
The Gaia-SINS federated project home-page. Just quickly bookmarked in case I need it - spatial data (GIS data) can be efficiently indexed and queried in SQLite with an extension. Since I am a declared fan of SQLite, this is quite interesting. And it is implemented as a dynamically loadable extension (of course, this only works if the SQLite you are using is also enabled for extensions - unfortunately this is often not the case, installation might require a recompilation of SQLite, but it's not that terrible).
plan 9 was the system that took the ideas of Unix even further and, building on that, enabled a distributed system with distributed resources and seamless networking as early as the late 80s. Just think about where we would be today if it had become mainstream. Tablets that directly use network resources, that directly use complex applications on CPU servers in the network and that the developer can directly access for debugging from his workstation, without any hacks.
F-Droid. Quite interesting - an app store for open source applications for Android. So you don't have to constantly check yourself for news. Of course, some of the apps are also in the normal Google Play Store, but not every open source project wants to jump through Google's hoops.
The iDroid Project - Where it presently stands - 0xDEADFA11. On the topic of Android on iPad - it doesn't look good, iDroid was probably the most active project that wanted to provide a complete solution, but the status from July and the project status overview do not look like something will come soon. Too bad.
Ipad optimization - xSellize. I think I'll take a closer look at this - on my iPad 1, I now have the problem that apps constantly crash due to lack of memory (e.g. the official Twitter client). Based on experiences with other systems with Flash, the swap to Flash shouldn't be too bad in terms of performance - and if the battery consumption is also kept within limits, it might be a temporary solution. Even though it annoys me that you can only use your system with jailbreak and system hacks after such a short time. Ideally, someone would port Android to the old iPads ...
ActiveAndroid | Active record style SQLite persistence for Android. Hmm, let's take a look - another ORM for Android, but one with quite interesting syntax. The source also promises a few more things like e.g. Joins. If migrations are also reasonably implemented (this is often lacking), the project could definitely motivate me to switch my little tinkering project.
Official Website | FreeBASIC Programming Language. Just stumbled upon it (don't ask), a free Basic compiler that is oriented towards QuickBasic.
The ElfData Plugin. For future use, more efficient string classes and structures than the standard ones in RealBasic. And basic structures for parsers and tokenizers. Eventually, I want to build my own Markdown processor for my Desktopwiki instead of constantly calling external tools.
Cloud Storage Programming Interface - Store everything. This looks quite interesting - a C# library for accessing various cloud storage. It also supports Dropbox and, most importantly, it supports Mono for Android and MonoTouch, which I could use as a basis to rewrite my small Android project in C# for testing.
F# and MonoGame on the Mac. If you want to build games on the Mac, you have an interesting option with MonoGames. This is a reimplementation of the Microsoft XNA APIs. So basically, it's just the continuation of Mono into the gaming area. Pretty cool stuff - and because a cool thing alone isn't enough, the linked article provides the whole thing with integration in F#, the functional language for .NET from Microsoft. Unfortunately, for iOS, MonoTouch and for Android, MonoDroid are required, which means there is a slight hurdle to overcome in terms of acquisition (the licenses are not exactly cheap, so maybe not quite the knockout for hobbyists).
git-annex. Definitely worth a look or two. In principle, it's something like a manually operated Dropbox - you can link folders with other folders and define sync relationships. But you can also define redundancies, ensuring that there are enough copies of files - if you delete a file, you get a warning if it was the last copy (and it is restored). Many commands for efficient management of various scenarios are added, and there are various backends for the data - for example, you can integrate Amazon S3 and include it as a backup repository with suitable means, or reference URLs from the web and make files always reconstructable (with this you can also integrate your own file server with an http interface). Or even use something like Google Mail as a backend and store your data in file attachments. Or use all the means of git to exclude temporary results of synchronizations, for example. Unlike Sparkleshare - which is also based on git - only the metadata is versioned in git here, not the files themselves. This of course has the disadvantage that file changes cannot be undone via it - for this you would need a versioning backend such as bup, which is then used as a data backup with versioning and definition of backup cycles. The advantage of the git-annex method, however, is that the data does not grow as gigantic as with Sparkleshare if you want to sync large files such as videos or digital images - only at the defined backup interface would the versions occur and you can explicitly determine which data goes there. Not for mouse pushers, but great for command line fetishists.
couchbase/Android-Couchbase. Might be interesting as an alternative to SQLite - especially if you work less with structured data and more with documents. Because CouchDB offers real advantages there. Additionally, you get a sync infrastructure for automatic replication of database changes to a central server. And without having to build text exports with Dropbox-Sync like with SQLite solutions. Although the latter works surprisingly well in the situations where I need it.
Processing on iOS. Just stumbled upon it. What it says - processing.js in a spartan but usable mini-IDE. Nice for in between. And somehow fits well with the tablet. Ending sketches is a bit awkward, you have to tap or press on a bar at the top or something, which nobody tells you. But otherwise everything is clear. There are two more that I found, one costs 89 cents and delivers an interface analogous to PDE and the other is pr0c0d1n6 - it's quite expensive at forty-five, but it has a really usable IDE.
OpenXION. For the sake of completeness: an open-source implementation of an xTalk language (the family to which HyperTalk - the language of HyperCard - belongs) in Java. You could, for example, incorporate it into your own projects as a scripting language.
uliwitness/Stacksmith. And since we're talking about HyperCard again - Stacksmith wants to build a clone for OSX. Although I wonder why they exactly follow the (pure black-and-white) original in the graphical representation.
NovoCard. Wow, I've been waiting for something like this for a long time. Unfortunately, it's not for Android yet, but for the iPad, but it could revive my old iPad for a while - a Hypercard clone for iOS that comes with a scripting language based on JavaScript in this case. Everything onboard on the iPad, making it ideal for tinkering on the go. And in general, I think the Hypercard structure fits tablet computers pretty brilliantly. I'll probably play around with it.
Travis Shrugged: The creepy, dangerous ideology behind Silicon Valley’s Cult of Disruption. "Almost seven decades in fact, since Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” first put her on the radar of every spoiled trust fund brat looking for an excuse to embrace his or her inner asshole." - how so-called "disruptive startups" are influenced by bullshit Rand. Also explains such great ideas as the many approaches in which one is already being used data-wise in a service, even if one is not a member (Klout, for example). Far too many translate "disruptive" for themselves as "be an egotistical asshole," which may fit well with Rand, but not so well with reality - even in the USA.
Arduino Due with 32-bit ARM Microcontroller - Pro-Linux. Wow, 32bit embedded boards. Somehow already cool. Only with the 84 MHz clock frequency almost nostalgic feelings come up.
mono/xwt. Maybe I should take a look at this high-level GUI toolkit for Mono, which, in addition to a GTK backend on the Mac, also has a Cocoa backend. With this, you can program across platforms without having to pay the look-and-feel penalty of GTK (which is simply ugly on OSX).
misfo/Shell-Turtlestein. If you work with Sublime Text 2 and use many command line tools, this plugin is very helpful - you can execute commands directly from ST2 and get the results displayed directly there. Commands run directly in the directory of the current window or you can also start a terminal there immediately. Very practical for alternative build systems, or to quickly search for something in the directory with grep.
Turning to the past to power Windows’ future: An in-depth look at WinRT. Nice overview of the history of Windows APIs and then a detailed look at WinRT and why it's not as new and independent as Microsoft claims and how it's really integrated into the system environment (TL;DR WinRT is modernized COM based on Win32 with automatic wrappers for .NET and JavaScript).
wilhelmtell/dis. If anyone gets the idea of building something like a distributed Twitter based on git: someone has already done it, source is available here. Just with bash, git and the linux coreutils.
jq. A very cool tool for someone who has to deal with JSON a lot, especially in the Unix shell. The tool can process JSON data with functions that are inspired by sed, awk, and grep. And you can pipe jq in a Unix-typical way or even use internal pipes in transformation expressions Ă la awk. And it all comes as a single-executable without runtime libraries except for libc - so it should even work as a static binary and thus be trivially installable with scp.
XKCD plots in d3. And this in JavaScript and directly in the browser. Would be something for the math fans out there who always think they have to post plots.
IBM Worklight - Mobile application platform. Eclipse-based and presumably Java-infested in a typical IBM fashion, but still perhaps worth a look: an IDE for mobile applications that a) includes both client and server and b) supports multiple target systems (iOS, Android, web applications). So basically something like Titanium Appcelerator or Phonegap, but with server infrastructure and management tools included. And you can choose how portable you want to be and integrate native extensions if you need them (and of course sacrifice parts of portability in the process).
Lomography Belair X 6-12. Awesome - Lomography actually has an interesting product. Medium format 6x12/6x9/6x6 with interchangeable lenses (two come with it) and all at an extremely moderate price (starting at under 200 US$) - ok, the lenses will probably be Lomo-typical more like bottle bottoms, but hey, who cares - they are interchangeable optics! Someone will eventually find a way to make lenses out of glass. The only drawback is the processing of 120 film rolls - this has now become an adventure (or a shipping frenzy). Still, it's the first time that the "preorder" button on a Lomography page makes my fingers itch.
BBC News - Apple loses UK tablet design appeal versus Samsung. And the ruling is also quite creative: Apple must run ads stating that Samsung did not copy. Especially in light of the ongoing other proceedings, the judge said only a prominent action can correct consumer perception. I think this really hurts Apple now.
Moby is a package for Racket with which you can create Android programs. Integrated in DrRacket, you also have a suitable IDE in which most things can be tested. So much to try out, so little time.
PharoDroid is an implementation of Pharo that runs on Android tablets - but really like on the desktop, so no special touch support. Therefore rather cumbersome to use, but it's a start.
ownCloud’s Latest Community Edition Adds Video Streaming, and Easy Mounting of Third-Party Storage. Sounds nice, especially the mounting of cloud storage. I wonder if it only resides in the cloud and is passed through, or if it is also additionally downloaded to the server. But I could maybe play around with my small installation. The improved sync also sounds good, as the previous one is really a bit strange with its regular timestamp file check.
Streak - CRM in your Inbox. Strange - that thing completely passed me by. Ok, maybe that's because they call it a CRM and that's boring by definition for me. But in reality, it's not a CRM at all, but rather a kind of spreadsheet with mail integration and filters - you can define rules and sort mails into boxes and evaluate, filter, sort all these things according to various criteria, whatever. And the whole thing is integrated into GMail, directly into the web platform (which of course means it only works there and not, for example, in the mobile clients). And suddenly the whole thing is interesting again, because if you deal with larger quantities of email-controlled workflows, you can use something like this well. At least if you have your emails in GMail. Their architecture is also not uninteresting, as they use pretty much everything Google has to offer.
LLJS : Low-Level JavaScript. I don't understand what the point is of compiling a low-level language (a JavaScript dialect with C-like type definitions and constructs) to JavaScript, which is not exactly low-level in its execution model. But in case of doubt, the standard argument applies: because it can be done! However, this is probably more of a project that I only link to because it's weird, but I probably won't use it myself anytime soon.
Comtypes: How Dropbox learned to stop worrying and love the COM. Filed for future use. Accessing COM APIs in Windows from Python with fairly lean means. Could be interesting for one or the other admin tool in the company.
DataNitro. If you want to program your Excel spreadsheet in Python, this is the place to go. Might be interesting for one or the other number cruncher who uses Excel as a frontend.
Android-x86 - Porting Android to x86. Hmm, could this be a fun toy for my old eeeBook? I mean, it would be a pretty fat tablet with an integrated keyboard and an incompatible processor, what could possibly go wrong?
Pyjnius: Accessing Java classes from Python | Txzone. Very interesting side project of Kivy - with this you can quite easily integrate and use Java classes in Python without having to switch to Jython. It is based on Cython and JNI and integrates directly into native Python. Kivy is slowly becoming a real alternative for Android development that I should take a closer look at.