Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Saturday, November 9, 2002

-- Comment()
The last posting on the first day of keeping this weblog was about Matlab 6.5 on Mac OS X. After several other postings I edited the texts into a review of Matlab. Much later a received a copy of Mathematica 4.2, and wrote a review of it as well. Writing about Matlab was a nice start for this weblog, because that writing task combined the professional (easier for me) with the informal. It has been interesting to write a public notebook, and this has helped me to maintain my English.

-- Comment()
Community and specifications (XML.com): "In this week's column I return to pick up a bit more of the community's debate about XML 1.1 before reviewing several other matters, including XInclude security and what processes or methodologies make for good XML specifications." [IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News]

-- Comment()
There is a new blogging application for the Mac OS X, called iBlog: "iBlog is an elegant desktop blogging application that makes authoring and publishing your personal blogs a breeze. Unlike other blogging sytems, You don't have to be an expert database administrator or a perl programmer to setup and use iBlog. You can preview and publish your blogs to your iDisk with a single click of a button."

-- Comment()
busy is as busy does. "In my freer moments, I am again tackling my writing. I've been working with a friend of mine, creating fictional national geographic style stories. It has been fun, using a map with made-up names on it, trying to figure out the weather pattern as well as the history of geological data." [Private Ink]

Tuning the weblog theme -- Comment()
I have made quite a few modifications to the weblog theme, and there still remains a lot to be done. However, I think this theme will do for the moment. The colormap is not quite what I like, and the fonts need some tuneup, but the basic layout is about the way I want. However, I have to check the result with some other browsers besides OmniWeb and Mozilla-based Chimera.

-- Comment()
Scripting News points to iBlog sites: "Ryan Schroeder, Alwin Hawkins, Adam Curry."

-- Comment()
Apple Ahead Of Pack In Eliminating Spam: "The strength of OS X's spam-filtering ability is proprietary technology, something called "adaptive latent semantic analysis" that comes out of Apple's research group." (Seattle Times via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

-- Comment()
NASA revises 2003 budget: "The US space agency NASA announced it is reorganising its fiscal 2003 budget to concentrate more money on modernising the Space Shuttle and finishing the International Space Station." [Google Technology News]

-- Comment()
Laser destroys shell: "Weapons that travel far faster than a speeding bullet are as little as five years from use in combat, said US defence officials who used a laser to shoot an artillery shell out of the sky this week in a first-of-its-kind feat." [Google Technology News]

-- Comment()
Minolta DiMAGE 7Hi review: "Finally catching up with work after our big move I've posted our full in-depth review of Minolta's five megapixel DiMAGE 7Hi." [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]

-- Comment()
Computer Programming as an Art: "Donald Knuth's 1974 Turing Award lecture. It's good!" [Lambda the Ultimate]

-- Comment()
Boing Boing writes about Teeny-tiny Tetris:

A real-life implementation of the evergreen arcade game Tetris was obtained by optically trapping 42 glass microspheres (1 μm diameter) in a 25 μm x 20 μm sized field under a microscope. Their positions are then steered with a computer. The generation of multiple traps, as well as the computer-steering, is accomplished by the use of acousto-optic deflectors: devices that tune the deflection of a laser beam that have very fast response.

-- Comment()
Gene pattern makes it harder for smokers to quit: "People who carry a form of a particular gene appear to have more trouble than others quitting cigarettes for good, researchers report." [Reuters Health eLine]

-- Comment()
Web services standardization advances: " The official, Dave Hollander, chairman of the W3C Web Services Architecture and XML Schemas working groups, stressed that standardization is needed to avoid a situation similar to what happened with the Web browser face-off between Microsoft and Netscape of a few years ago." [IDG InfoWorld]

-- Comment()
Distributed Proofreaders: "This site provides a web-based method of easing the proofreading work associated with the creation of Project Gutenberg E-Texts. By breaking the work into individual pages many proofreaders can be working on the same book at the same time. This significantly speeds up the proofreading/E-Text creation process." [Privacy Digest]

-- Comment()
Small firms warned over hackers: "Smaller businesses must guard themselves against the increasing risk of hacking by terrorists[cedilla] says the British Chambers of Commerce." [BBC News | TECHNOLOGY]

-- Comment()
Major Improvements Needed For Mac OS X's Mail Application: "Mail has some rather major annoyances, as well as more minor flaws that get in the way of my computing activities and goals." (Applelust.com via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

-- Comment()
Nokia licenses BlackBerry software: "Phone maker looks to make messaging easier for corporate users." [InfoWorld: Top News]

-- Comment()
John Robb's Radio Weblog writes: "Ken is making the case that I should switch to Apple for all of my business needs. It really does look slick."

-- Comment()
Chimera 0.6 Released: "Chimera is a simple, small and fast browser for Mac OS X that has a Cocoa user interface, and embeds the Gecko layout engine. Version 0.6, released on Nov. 4, has many stability improvements; upgrading from 0.5 is strongly recommended. The main new feature in this version is the saving of website passwords in Keychain." [MacMegasite]