Technology

Rest in peace, Netscape. (Or at least official support for Netscape by the company that currently owns the name.) Arguably you were responsible for me doing what I do for a living. :)

Hey, I work across the hall from this guy! He’s got a window, but since he’s published I won’t begrudge him that. ;) The article is a good tutorial on the CFEclipse plugin for the Eclipse IDE, which I use for ColdFusion coding at work. (Eclipse and I have come to a pause in our struggle and are trying to normalize relations to avoid future conflict.) I had been ignoring the snippet feature for a while, since I didn’t see a lot of time savings with it, but Jim’s article convinced me to use it again. ...

Rumors have been swirling for quite a long time that Google was coming up with a hardware competitor for Apple’s iPhone. Apparently not. They’ve just announced Android, a collection of OS, UI, and applications for mobile devices that is meant to run across various hardware supplied by major mobile device makers. They’re planning to release an SDK for developers in November, with phones based on the platform showing up later in 2008. ...

LOLCats has given birth to LOLCode, which I’m pretty sure is the programming language of the future. Consider: > [I HAS A <var> ITZ ...](http://lolcode.com/keywords/i-has-a) > > Declare a variable. Note the following: > > - Every variable is an array. > - ITZ … has been reserved for future usage and should not be used (except possibly for initialization of single-element arrays) > - At present, all arrays are heterogeneous (they can have different types of values in them). This may change in the future! > > All values are typed, and the types are: > > - NUMBAR (signed integer, at least 32 bits wide) > - YARN (string) > - ARRAY (contains NUMBARs and/or YARNs and/or ARRAYs) > > Currently the interpreter and/or compiler does type checking at compile and/or runtime. This may get nailed down to one or the other in future recommendations. There is also a .NET compiler. ...

more funny pictures

And this is how you win a format war: Target Bets It All on Blu-ray. It’s not about consumer choice or minor technology advantages. It is about marketing and business development with content providers, electronics suppliers, and retailers. Microsoft hasn’t gone all out in supporting HD-DVD – leaving it out of the XBox 360 except as an add-on – even though they were among those who backed the format. Sony, on the other hand, is making sure when we see a HD disc or player, it’s Blu-ray. Blockbuster has dropped HD-DVD from its stores for now, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see others follow suit. ...

Starting at Year 0, could you help advance civilization? I like to think my Civ IV skills would help, but somehow I have a feeling I would die pretty quickly as a result of a smelter accident…or maybe just looking at someone the wrong way. This quiz thinks I might be useful, though. Quite good. Starting from the year 0, you might be able to advance civilization to the 17th or even 19th century. You are technologically useful. ...

Yeah, it’s great how the free market and competition has a good chance of sorting out any problems we have with net neutrality and Internet access. Or, at least, that’s what the Federal Trade Commission says. This report recommends that policy makers proceed with caution in the evolving, dynamic industry of broadband Internet access, which generally is moving toward more – not less – competition. In the absence of significant market failure or demonstrated consumer harm, policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area. ...

Google’s new interface is nice, and it seems like it even works a bit faster. However, I’ve seen a few blogs mentioning they replaced tags with folders – the blog I linked to isn’t one of them – and it appears they just renamed the tags as folders and put a little folder icon next to them. As I said, the new interface works great, but is there really a large part of the Internet populace that can’t be comfortable with tags unless they have a folder icon next to them? :) ...

You know that Ohio state government data storage device, containing the personal information of hundreds of thousands of people, that was stolen from an intern’s car? You ever wonder why that kind of information would be in an intern’s car? Well, the Associated Press explains: Under protocol in place since 2002, a first backup storage device is kept at a temporary work site for a state office along with the computer system that holds all the employee information, and a second backup device is given to employees on a rotating basis to take home for safekeeping, officials said. ...