Sweet! Flash enthusiasts might not 100% agree to all contra Flash aspects – but overall, nice job/ summary.
See large version on littlepixr’s Flickr.
(via swissmiss)
Writing Archive
Recipe: How-to install Pandoc on OS X 10.6.x (Snow Leopard)
In case you wonder how-to install Pandoc, the “universal document converter” on OS X Snow Leopard…
… the secret sauce: go for Haskell Platform installer instead of following your standard (assumption!) installation approach using MacPorts.
The steps:
- First install Haskell Platform.
cabal updatecabal install cabal-installcabal install pandoc- Update your ~/.profile file with
export PATH=/Users/[USERNAME]/.cabal/bin:$PATHand read in withsource ~/.profile.
What is Pandoc? Great you asked! ;)
Pandoc can read markdown and (subsets of) reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX, and it can write plain text, markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, PDF, RTF, DocBook XML, OpenDocument XML, ODT, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, groff man pages, and S5 HTML slide shows. PDF output (via LaTeX) is also supported with the included markdown2pdf wrapper script.
– Source and more details: johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc
Recipe: How-to install CouchDB 0.11.0 from source on OS X
Prerequisite: MacPorts installed and SVN client at hand – I prefer a UI and therefore use Versions.
sudo port install autoconf automake libtoolsudo port install icu erlang spidermonkey curlsvn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/couchdb/tags/0.11.0 couchdb-0.11.0-srccd couchdb-0.11.0-src./bootstrap./configure>> You have configured Apache CouchDB, time to relax.make && sudo make install>> You have installed Apache CouchDB, time to relax.- Start the CouchDB server by running:
sudo -i couchdb -b>> Apache CouchDB has started, time to relax. - To check that everything has worked, point your web browser to: http://127.0.0.1:5984/_utils/index.html
Usefull resources:
CouchDB, finally relaxing!!
The other day(s) I found myself relaxing while coding away a pet project (a tiny schemaless personal project, activity and knowledge management web application) leveraging CouchDB and jQuery.
“CouchDB is a document-oriented database that can be queried and indexed in a MapReduce fashion using JavaScript [...] provides a RESTful JSON API than can be accessed from any environment that allows HTTP requests [...] is written in Erlang [...]”
(Source: couchdb.apache.org)
Check out CouchApp in order to write CouchDB applications by using just JavaScript and HTML.
“CouchApp is designed to structure standalone CouchDB application development for maximum application portability. CouchApp is a set of scripts and a jQuery plugin designed to bring clarity and order to the freedom of CouchDB’s document-based approach.”
(Source: CouchApp)
How-to Install Rails 3.0 Beta on OS 10.5.8 Leopard
While I did most of my recent web dev projects in PHP5 I still follow the development of Ruby on Rails …on it’s path to a stable version 3.0 release.
So no wonder that I had to get my hands dirty with the just recently released Rails 3.0 Beta.
While I still own a 12″ PowerBook with OS X 10.5.8 Leopard (latest OS X PPC release) I needed to get rails-3.0.0.beta running on this machine – of course ;-)
1. Upgrade to Ruby 1.8.7 with RubyGems
As at least Ruby 1.8.7 is required by Rails 3.0 I decided to use MacPorts (prerequisite!) to upgrade Ruby version 1.8.6 as shipped with OS X Leopard.
sudo port install ruby rb-rubygems
sudo gem update --system
source ~/.profile
Satellit:~ matthias$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2009-06-12 patchlevel 174) [powerpc-darwin9]
2. Install Rails 3.0 Beta (rails-3.0.0.beta) along with the required dependencies
sudo gem install i18n tzinfo builder memcache-client rack rack-test rack-mount erubis mail text-format thor bundler sqlite3-ruby
sudo gem install rails --pre
3. Create Rails app. and start the server
Satellit:~ matthias$ rails rails3beta-test
Satellit:~ matthias$ cd rails3beta-test
Satellit:~ matthias$ rails server
Inspired by Silumesii Maboshe.
Google’s Goggles (labs) – impressive…
…actually: scarily impressive!!
Google Goggles is a visual search application, available on phones that run Android 1.6+.
As simple as:
Use pictures to search the web.
“Project: CODE_RUSH”: Great Video documentation about Netscape and Mozilla
If you’re into software and the internet, enjoyed reading books like Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor (by Tim Berners-Lee), Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet or Dreaming in Code (about the Chandler project) and Mozilla‘s Open-Source Software products like the browser Firefox or the email client Thunderbird are amongst the list of your favourite computer programs then – well chances are very high that you might enjoy the movie Project: CODE_RUSH. Relax and enjoy! :-)
“Code Rush [...] is an inside look at living and working in Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com era. The film follows a group of Netscape engineers as they pursue at that time a revolutionary venture to save their company – giving away the software recipe for Netscape’s browser in exchange for integrating improvements created by outside software developers.” (Source: Project: CODE_RUSH)
(Via t3n Magazin.)
Google did it again: Google Wave Rocks!
This is truly amazingly hot stuff! … and – again – incredibly well engineered!! Honestly, I can’t wait to get my hands on Google Wave!
Actually I should say: Weaving and Surfing Waves! :-)
Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. Watch the demo video below, sign up for updates and learn more about how to develop with Google Wave.
(Source: Google Wave Preview)
Resources
- Google Wave Preview
- waveprotocol.org – the homepage for the Google Wave Federation Protocol
- Google Wave API
Update: Meanwhile I managed to “play” at least a little bit with the Wave Sandbox – using the 2nd test account of a generous colleague (thx M.!) – while still waiting for my Wave Developer Account request to be processed.
Pretty impressed by the Wave UI but also wondering what the transformation management strategy of Google will look like when Wave hits the average users, as Wave clearly requires quite some rethinking…
Why Open Web Standards matter: The Watery Web
Couldn’t agree more to the essence of the following great metaphor that I stumbled upon while reading the post Deconstructing Rich Internet Applications by Matthew Gertner:
“Think of the web, of the Internet itself, as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water. And maybe they make it better when they do.“
(Via : Anil Dash: Blackbird, Rainman, Facebook and the Watery Web.)
Introduction to the Semantic Web
I found the following short (only 5 minutes) introduction to why the Semantic Web is important on the RDFa Wiki: very well done!
So in case I failed in spreading the word about Semantic Web to YOU – go and check out this video.
In case you are curious about RDFa: you might want to check out the following video as well. It teaches the basics of RDFa (in 8 minutes) – but, is aimed more at advanced web designers.
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