ImageWell
[Original Link] Some bits of software are really elegant in their simplicity. Imagewell is brilliant - small, simple, useful, and with great online help. Congrats to Xtralean and thanks to John Naughton and John Robb for the link.
Quentin Stafford-Fraser's blog
One should always have something sensational to read on the net...
[Original Link] Some bits of software are really elegant in their simplicity. Imagewell is brilliant - small, simple, useful, and with great online help. Congrats to Xtralean and thanks to John Naughton and John Robb for the link.
[Original Link] I guess it's only a matter of time before the 'Iraq War' computer games start appearing, but this does feel a bit as if CNN is trying to get there first...
[Original Link] Got a Linux box and an OS X box? Michael Dales' handy utility may save you desk space.
[Original Link] As camera phones become more popular, lots of organisations are restricting how they can be used. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]
There are going to be some interesting socialogical issues here. Cameras will soon be common in everything from keyrings to pens to watches. What sort of new etiquette will evolve for dealing with them?
Possibly the best aspect of OpenOffice is its open file format.. Here's a very crude quick and easy way on a Unix platform to get at something close to the raw text in an OO document:
unzip -p mydocument.sxw content.xml | sed 's/<[^>]*>/ /g'This extracts the contents of the document as XML, then strips out most XML tags. Could be improved in many ways, but this is fine if you want to run the text through grep, wc etc or just want to get your paragraphs into a text editor. Is any normal user likely to do this? No, but it's important that it can be done, even on a machine which knows nothing about OpenOffice. (Here's why I think this sort of thing is important, by the way.)
[Original Link] From Robert Cringely's article:
Sun Microsystems recently sponsored a major seminar at George Washington University in the Washington area and the federal government's IT people attended. One source said that the present administration has so strangled the budgets of government agencies, especially research and education, that they're now considering dumping Microsoft's licensing schemes and transitioning to open-source Linux.
Thanks to Scott Weikart for the link.
Two related recent announcements are both welcome:
A US court decision that file-swapping is not illegal.
"The ruling means that the labels and studios cannot ban 21st century technology in defence of their inefficient and outmoded 20th century distribution model," said President of Grokster, Wayne Rosso.And Apple's very cool new music store means that people who wish to purchase music legally in a 21st-century way can do so. As long as they have a credit card with a U.S. billing address.
[Original Link] (from MacCentral)
[Original Link] John helps get RSS into the public consciousness.
[Original Link] Tim O'Reilly on a favourite quote of his by Edwin Schlossberg:
"The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think".
And would it be too cynical to say that the skill of politics is to create a context in which they can't?