Listening to: Lovers In Japan - Coldplay

Dan forwarded me this:

Listening to: Why Can’t I Be You? - The Cure

Another piece of design awesomeness by a Ponoko user - NotAClock by Kevin Byrd.

Listening to: Dissolution - Micronism

seal boy
Originally uploaded by mandaburms.

That popping sound is your brain exploding because of the cuteness.

Listening to: Where Do You Think You’re Going? - Dire Straits

Listening to: Basement Home - Jesse Malin

Toyota announced their PT device the Winglet. It is, apparently, the love child of their usual fare and the recent acquisition of the Sony Robotics division (all praise what ever deity that enabled that match to occur - I was gutted to see Sony axe that group and I am glad that it went to such a good home). Anyways, for your viewing pleasure:

And then this video sums up my thoughts:

Listening to: Love Rain - Jill Scott

So MIT announced some kick ass new catalysts for making electrolysis more efficient… which is cool from a fuel production point of view. But what i wonder is whether or not we can use the O₂ part of the equation to make artificial gills? Maybe creating a honey comb of the catalyst… your time under water would then be limited by your battery. I suspect a tank of compressed air is probably a more efficient way of spending an hour under the waves. But actually swimming like a fish, that’d be cool.

Listening to: The Number of the Beast - Iron Maiden

Well I spent the arvo bingeing on SVG renders. I have been pottering around with ImageMagick for a few months - but it doesn’t play nice (out of the box) with SVG text - and text is a BIG DEAL for what I am doing.

While trying to find if I could use the SVG renderer in Webkit I happened upon librsvg and ksvg2. I used darwinports to install rsvg on my mac and then clue’d up and simply flashed up my ubuntu VirtualBox (hattip to Nahum for pointing me at the sweet little Parallels replacement). Note for future reference - if you’ve got a virtual Linux machine apt-get will save you hours and, given how hot my poor little Mac got, a few watts.

An informal shoot out points in the direction of librsvg (rsvg being the command line app) rather than ksvg (with it’s associated ksvgtopng command line app). It seems that I can recompile ImageMagick to use librsvg (and thus get access to it via RMagick)… but I might just run with calls to the commandline to get something out the door. This result surprised me a little as Safari renders SVG beautifully and that uses ksvg2.

PS. If this post seems like a bit of SEO baiting exercise… I hope it works and that I am able to save others the hours of research :-).

PPS. In my wanderings I found this research project at Sun - I’m not too sure what it is, but someone is going nuts with SVG over there.

PPPS. I know that if you’re an Ubuntu user you’ve probably got a good case of “rolls eyes” going on right about now… I can live with that

Listening to: The missus phaffing about

Doing something right

Listening to: King Of Pain - The Police

The very first language I ever used for web apps was Perl (I use the word “used” in the same way a 3 year old uses the phrase “i do fine art”). I haven’t touched it for 10 years and I am now back up to my eye balls with it. My brain hurts. I have really rapidly reached that “f**kit I’m going to do this in [current language of high proficiency]” stage … where you know the effort will pay off and the ACTUAL value of going back is not as high as you want it to be.

I am hoping to cure my hatred of RegEx at the end of this exercise…

Listening to: Belfast Child - Simple Minds