Published on Tuesday, 06th June 2006 .
OpenLaszlo is mind blowing! If you don’t believe me check their demo Flash Flickr browser AND THEN check their identical DHTML Flickr browser compiled from the same code or XML as it were.
As if that wasn’t impressive enough, the concept of zero-install, or no-install, stand alone web applications (I prefer widgets) is quite a unique idea and makes it Oh-so-easy to integrate into whatever you need it for like a blog, community portal, forum, static HTML page etc.
The final clincher for me is that its Open Source. Flapping their floppies at the big boys, YEAH! We (I) here at TMI like it and award it the ‘Sh!tHot!‘ stamp of approval, look for it all good websites.
And while we’re on the Dojo subject, why not draw a picture AND THEN playback the creation process in real time! This ones just Hot!
Published on Thursday, 26th January 2006 .
I went to see this amazing act last night as part of the Syndey festival: Jamie Lidell, who is a vocalist that uses looping software (MAX/MSP) to loop his voice. He beatboxes, then loops it and then keeps adding layers on top of it mostly with just his voice. He has a sampler and adds in the odd artificial sound as well. He built up a techno track form scratch in front of us. This live aspect to his electronic music gave his performance an energy you don’t usually get with pre-programmed sets or DJ’ing.
He also did a number of straight soul numbers that were OK, he has an amazing voice and energy, but I found them to be slightly over done and a bit passé in content i.e. not adding anything new to the genre. Still, its interesting to see electronic based music side by side with more traditional styles of music. Particularly coming out of the one musician!
The only real complaint I had was that the show was a bit short (maybe just under an hour) and there wasn’t enough to dance to. Also he stopped between the more techno based tracks and this is annoying when your into the dancing.
Overall an entertaining evening and worth seeing again.
Published on Sunday, 11th September 2005 .
I’ve been using Eclipse at work for 3 months now and I’m impressed with it. It is a Java IDE but has a very flexable plugin architecture so you can get plugins for PHP (PHPEclipse) and HTML, CSS etc. The main reason I’m using it is because it comes with a Visual Source Safe (forced on us at work) plugin that makes it really easy to work with a version control system. I imagine it does even nicer for Subversion and CVS a like. Give you a panel to see a table of who has what checked out and makes it easy to checkin all your stuff in one go.
The general interface is quite nice once you get used to it. Tab panels for everything, and if you double click it makes that tab full screen. List of function in the current file. It also has a panel that lists all the warning as and errors for all the files in your whole project. If you tell it what your include path is this makes it really easy to pick up problems for large projects.
The only bitch is that its written in Java, which does mean it will run on every thing, so requires about 182megs to get going for PHP with all the extra plugin bits. Also its complicated to get it going got PHP (there is a step-by-step guild to installing that really helps, and once setup it will downlaod upgrades to all installed plugins). Also its code completion for native PHP functions is non-existent (it does do it after you have typed it in and you hover your mouse over the function name).
Overall a nice IDE. I tried to use Komodo again and found I liked Eclipse better, and it free!