Status-Q

Here's a lovely demonstration and description of some excellent image-processing algorithms:

Fun today at BarCamb. For those not familiar with the Bar Camp model, it has nothing to do with mixing drinks. Usually. It's basically a conference where you turn up prepared to give a talk but where the agenda is unknown until you arrive. The first activity of the day is that everybody who wants to then signs up for what they're going to talk about.

It was a one-day event on a much smaller scale than Tim O'Reilly's Foo Camp, which I was lucky enough to go to a couple of years back. But it was good fun and I'm looking forward to the next one.

InfoWorld is reporting a survey suggesting that Apple's laptop sales are growing fast while Dell's have fallen to an historic low.

This made me wonder whether the announcement 18 months ago that Apple was, for a while, worth more than Dell, still held true now. I headed over to NASDAQ and, to my astonishment, not only is Apple worth more, it's worth nearly twice as much. Wow.

I saw this at a local supermarket today. I wasn't entirely convinced by the logic...

Shortly after VMware's amazing IPO, XenSource, a spin-out from the Cambridge Computer Lab, have been bought by Citrix in a deal worth $500M. And not all of the money is virtual - there's a good chunk of cash there too.

Many congratulations to my pals there, who will now definitely be buying the drinks next time we meet at the pub.

But this is also a nice challenge to those who don't believe you can make money from Open Source...

One of the pictures that didn't get used in the recent Guardian article:

Many thanks to John Robertson, who owns the copyright, for permission to post it.

Suppose you're a successful UK high-tech company with an interesting loudspeaker technology. Who would you naturally partner with?

Why, Hallmark greeting cards, of course.

This is an interesting site: TheFunded.com allows people who have received VC or similar investment to review and rate their investors. An intriguing idea.

At CamVine, we're starting to experiment with using an AppleTV as a server component of our CODA architecture. Being engineers, the first thing we had to do was take this beautiful piece of kit and dismantle it. Michael has a great photo on his blog.

Just starting to get to grips with the new features in iWork.

Keynote has a nice one: When you select the fill/outline characteristics for an object such as a photo, one of the stroke types is 'picture frame' which puts a fancy border around the thing you've selected.

This is very cute, but there aren't many frame types available. Over at KeynoteUser, however, they've discovered that there are many more hidden away inside Keynote, which can be enabled with a quick hack.

Oh, and it works in Pages too, with a minor modification.