Category: Geekery

SproutCore a Flash killer?

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Another week, another geeky new technology to get all excited about.

Leo Laporte was twittering about SproutCore, which caught my interest and led me to a couple of articles. The actual SproutCore website is throwin an error at the moment so I can’t get to the source, but what I’m reading is that SproutCore wants to replace Flash, Adobe AIR and Silverstream as a technology for RIA (rich internet applications).

The beauty of it is that its all written in javascript, so there’s no plug-in to download. Which gets me wondering about SproutCore vs Lively Kernel (another Javascript-based RIA platform in development). Are they in competition or do they compliment one another?

Interesting times. Anyway, here’s a couple of articles worth reading. Thanks to Leo for Twittering about this.

Apple’s open secret: SproutCore is Cocoa for the Web

Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore

Anyone using andLinux?

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I read a piece at Linux.com (Run Windows and Linux without virtualization) about andLinux.org today. It’s an Ubuntu system that is supposed to run alongside of Windows. I’m intrigued, but frankly don’t want to mess with my Windows Vista system (used primarily for gaming) any further than installing programs on it. andLinux *seems* to be non-intrusive, but I’d love to hear from someone with firsthand experience with it.

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Arcade Nostalgia

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For the old-skool gamers among us, here’s a post that’ll take you back:

Coding Horror: Rediscovering Arcade Nostalgia

I really miss the days of (relatively) easy programming languages. You could make a simple game in Atari Basic pretty easily, and I spent countless hours typing in games from magazines (not easy on the Atari 400 chiklet keyboard!) and then tweaking/customizing them. Then saving them on cassette tape. Heh, frustrating good times.

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Building your Twitter network

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WebWorkerDaily has a post with a couple of webapps that’ll find you more strangers to stalk follow on Twitter. One of them just checks who you are following, and sees who they are following, and if a bunch of them are following a particular individual, it suggests you follow that individual too. It’s a good way to expand your “Celebrity Twitterers” circle, I guess.

The other one looks at your tweets and compares them to what other people are tweeting about, and suggests matches. I actually found a guy who has been tweeting about some web stuff he’s been playing with that looks pretty interesting. This feels more useful, as this person doesn’t have a huge network or anything and its pretty unlikely I’d ever have found him through ‘normal channels.’

Anyway I don’t want to totally rip-off WWD so I’ll send you to the post to check out the apps.

Instapaper

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Here’s a neat tool I just read about: Instapaper.

The idea is actually pretty simple. You drag a bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar. Then when you hit something you want to read but don’t have time for right now, you click this bookmarklet and the url and title to that webpage gets jammed onto you Instapaper page.

Essentially it’s just a way of tracking short-term bookmarks, really. But for some reason I find the idea compelling…

BookLamp

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LifeHacker had a post about a new service called BookLamp. The 2 second pitch is that its Pandora for Books. The idea is they scan in books and parse them for various stylistic attributes. Then you tell them a book that you like, and they offer a list of books that are stylistically similar. I’m *fascinated* by this idea!

But rather than me drone on about it, why not watch this presentation by one of the guys behind the project. Get comfortable because its close to 15 minutes long, but quite interesting for book geeks.

I’m really hoping that this service becomes a reality!

Big Dog quadroped robot

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Another video that has come to my attention via Boing Boing:

I’m amazed by this video in two ways. First, the technology. I mean, if you saw a movie with a mechanical pack mule like this, you’d assume it was a special effect. Or at least you would have a few short years ago. Sci-fi to sci-fact, indeed.

But second, it freaks me out how quickly I can start feeling empathy for a machine. When the guy pushes Big Dog to try to tip it over, my immediate reaction was along the lines of “That was mean!”. And when the robot stumbles and almost loses its footing and scrabbles for purchase, I find myself feeling sorry for it.

So am I a freak? Did anyone else have that kind of reaction?