It’s great to see that the VortexDNA guys are finally getting some coverage:
At a home nestled in the heart of Christchurch surburbia five men have mapped the structure of the human consciousness.
It allows predictions to be made about people and who they are, which could have huge ramifications for the insurance and advertising industries, says VortexDNA director Branton Kenton-Dau.
Listening to: EXPOSÉ on the Journal: Chemicals in Food and Jeffrey Toobin - Bill Moyers Journal
Here you go… It’s a gnat’s fart away from Spook Country - you’ve just gotta replace the ubiquitous Google Maps with you’re own massive data overlay system.
One of my personal favorite features of the new Ponoko showroom is that we’re enabled RSS feeds all over the show. Handy when tracking the progress of a competition (RSS) for instance. Implementing this was one of those ‘damn i enjoy programming in Rails’ moments - super powerful and super easy.
I’m out to San Francisco for a week and as usual I forgot something in my packing. This time it was my iPod Touch - in my case this is a big deal because it is a sanity saver. Thankfully I had my phone with me (it’s an iPhone (*) but I never listen to music on it)… and here is the taste of the future - software gadgets rock! I just loaded it up with music and sanity was saved. The whole experience had a delightful maliability to it. A device that I used for one task instantly took on the role of another device. ‘Today you’re going to play music! Make it so.’ I know it’s a bit of a false test but it was a delightful little taste of the near future.
(*) As bad as it looks… I am not a gadget freak - I swear. UPDATE: The missus has notified me that I only just get a way with that claim.
I turned off Spaces this morning and life is a bunch better. While I initially felt that it made my computer a bunch bigger I eventually found that it just pissed me off. If you spend a lot of time using many apps to do your job - IDE, command line, browser(s), virutalisation space - Spaces is just plain broken. The core reason is that you naturally start to accrete your windows around where you’re working - you don’t leave them where they were instantiated. The problem is that “Apple-Tab” assumes exactly the opposite - so you end up staring at blank screens.
Google App Engine… This has the potential to do for the web what VB and Delphi did for programming Windows Apps.
While I prefer the Amazon approach of decoupled services this service is an in important offer - because of and in spite of it’s limitations. It’s a platform that asks a programmer to provide code in return for massive scalability without worrying about the plumbing. Awesome… I’ll stick with my arrangement of virtual servers, S3 and web services for the mean time thou
The Mindscape guys kicked off just as I was leaving Provoke (happy birthday guys) and as it has turned out they are doing some seriously cool work in the .Net world. Check out the feature highlights for their 2.0 release:
1. LINQ everywhere – LINQ to LightSpeed means .Net 3.5 users can leverage the power of LINQ when writing their queries but still use the performance features that we are known for (like Named Aggregates)
2. Designer support – Full modeling support for your domain models directly from Visual Studio 2008. Drag and drop your tables onto the design surface, have associations automatically set up, easily setup validation attributes on model properties and much more.
3. Database support – SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite are all supported. This means that LightSpeed 2.0 will be one of the first data access frameworks that provides LINQ to Oracle, LINQ to PostgreSQL, LINQ to MySQL and LINQ to SQLite!
4. Command line tools – Some folks prefer using command line tools to generate simple model classes so we have included this as well as the Visual Studio integrated designer support.
5. The simplest, fastest and most lightweight O/RM for .NET – The right balance of power vs. complexity has always been our focus with LightSpeed and this hasn’t changed for version 2.0. There has been considerable work done to tweak, optimize and enhance much of LightSpeed
As I was waving au revoir to the Microsoft world LINQ emerged - a seriously cool concept. The Mindscape team is onto a real winner by providing that facility over the leading open source database systems. Nice work!
I think the real difference between Windows and OS X is that the rumors of Windows and it’s new feature set are ALWAYS better than what is delivered. I read that article and think. “Hey cool! Windows could rock again!” But I have been down that road once too many times
