I was sad to read that the National lighthouse museum in Penzance appears to have closed.
It was an interesting place to visit and it had lots of real exhibits including light house lamps, optics and models. It was also in a building which had been used to prepare stone work for the Wolf Rock lighthouse construction, so there was a sense of history about the place.
Hopefully the exhibits will get put on display somewhere else, but it’s still a shame.
Since I got confused by this one the other day:
http://unicode.org/faq/basic_q.html#14
Q: What is the difference between UCS-2 and UTF-16?
A: UCS-2 is what a Unicode implementation was up to Unicode 1.1, before surrogate code points and UTF-16 were added as concepts to Version 2.0 of the standard. This term should be now be avoided.
When interpreting what people have meant by “UCS-2” in past usage, it is best thought of as not a data format, but as an indication that an implementation does not interpret any supplementary characters. In particular, for the purposes of data exchange, UCS-2 and UTF-16 are identical formats. Both are 16-bit, and have exactly the same code unit representation.
The effective difference between UCS-2 and UTF-16 lies at a different level, when one is interpreting a sequence code units as code points or as characters. In that case, a UCS-2 implementation would not handle processing like character properties, codepoint boundaries, collation, etc. for supplementary characters.
The Google Chrome comic is a work of art, it’s both functional and artistic, and it manages to explain so many really important points in a way that is easy to understand.
If you haven’t read it, and you’re interested in browsers at all, you should go and read it. 🙂
The people at 280 North have released the The Cappuccino framework as open source. The Cappuccino framework is the system that powers the 280 slides web app, which is sort of Keynote in a browser.
I’ve been playing around with the framework today a bit and it looks really great. The interesting thing is how many AppKit features have made it across. It wasn’t hard to modify the sample app to use a CPURLConnection object to fetch data asynchronously and then display it in a suitable text view.
My test app for this btw was an ajax clock. I built a simple php script that displays the output of the php date method and then used ajax calls to update the clock in the browser. It’s not exactly useful but it worked really quite nicely and the coding is relatively easy too.
I’m now wondering what else can be built using these tools, because it seems a really nice way of doing web apps (if you have a desktop software background)
I’m very impressed. 🙂
It’s been a little while since I wrote about the release of SQLEditor so it’s time to write about what’s been happening with SQLEditor since then.
SQLEditor 1.4.1.b2 (available now)
There is a new bug fix release of SQLEditor available in beta right now. If the “Check for beta versions” box in the preferences window is checked then you’ll get the offer of the upgrade to 1.4.1b2.
This is a minor bug fix release that fixes a few bugs that have been reported since the 1.4 release
SQLEditor 1.4.1b3 (available soon)
This release is going to fix a stupid bug that makes the file type selection in the export as image box not work correctly. The file types got mixed up in the code so the labels don’t match the output. It missed the b2 release, but it will be corrected in beta 3
SQLEditor 1.5
This is the next big release of SQLEditor. It’s going to have an entirely new SQL parser (written in ANTLR 3) and a major rewrite of the codebase (which moves almost all of the Java code to C or Objective C)
The new parser replaces to the old Java based parser (written in Javacc) with a new one that runs entirely in C and Objective C. Although I have found JavaCC to be an excellent tool, this replacement reduces the amount of Java code in the application substantially.
Plugins
The new code will also offer a much better api for plugins. The current api, which isn’t public, is used for the Rails import and export, but it’s annoying to work with, because the architecture wasn’t really built for it. The new codebase is much better for writing plugins.
JDBC / JNI Library for Cocoa
SQLEditor 1.5 also uses a new Java JNI and JDBC library for Cocoa which I’m hoping to be able to make Open Source soon. It allows you to access a database using JDBC rather than ODBC. This may not be as efficient, but it’s much easier to install drivers. If you would like to try these new libraries in your own application please send me an email and I’ll send you some code to try out. The final libraries are probably going to be BSD licensed, but it’s still being worked out exactly how it will work.
Media Temple are running a beta programme for virtualized Mac OS X server hosting (Using Parallels Server)
This sounds really interesting, it would be nice to be able to rent a Mac OS X box and run services on it.
It might even be useful for things like running a build system or even as a testing server.
The question is how much will it cost. That isn’t entirely clear yet, apparently because they’re not entirely sure how much each instance will need in the way of resources.
How it compares to SliceHost and Bytemark will remain to be seen.
(It must surely be more expensive, but how much more?)
Because I can never remember where this list is kept:
A parody on the origins of the star wars story…
Wired has an interesting article about Engineers without borders, a group that is trying to develop cheap technology solutions for developing parts of the world. The latest idea is a low cost wind turbine to generate electricity for lighting.
Best of all the design is intended to be produced by local manufacturers in the destination country, so it encourages local industry too.
Wired: Engineers Without Borders Bring Tech to Villages Without Power