Krugle.com has opened its doors. They opened shop on the 14th of this month (June 2006). This site is really cool. I’ve already put it to use a few times to get examples of how some libraries are used. The interface is amazing. Its fast, clean, and puts a whole lot of information at your finger tips. I really like the project view, where you can see all of the source code that belongs to a project. This really fills that gap of finding a bunch of examples of what you want to do, but not being able to get a hold of the glue that holds it all together. Krugle gives you that glue and more.. Eat up. :)

The only thing that I am not really digging is that the URL is fixed. Everything action you do seems to do AJAXy stuff and you never get a page reload or a hard link (URL) to what you are seeing at the moment.

Yet another Woot Off is here… and once again I am broke. I am not even going to tease myself and follow this one.

I just stumbled upon the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

This looks pretty interesting and seems like it may be a good platform for web development as long as it provides plently of flexibility. Could a development environment like this be the answer to those late nights tweaking code to obtain the same results in browser x, y, and z? Check out the kitchen sink demo.

A bit of a science whiz kid, Madiraju was browsing through the science journal Nature and happened to see something about magnetic bacteria while trying to think of a project to benefit the environment. “I knew that spinning windmills use a magnetic generator to produce electricity and wondered if I got the magnetic bacteria spinning they might generate a current and be a clean, alternative energy source,” he said.

Wow, this was one great idea. link

I just love that I am having to post this from Opera since FireFox 1.5.0.3 has been crashing on 1/6 of the sites I’ve tried to visit. Whats up with the stability of the last few releases?

According to some subjects and some nifty eye tracking an F pattern seems to emerge. So why the F pattern? Is it because of web designers like to stick relevant information in a F, visual training that started prior to computer usage, or a subconscious instinct for placing and spotting the information we desire?

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My life is finally complete. After getting sucked into google video for many a hour tonight I finally found what I was looking for, flys that can do fancy tricks.

And if you happen to get caught, staying up hours after you should be asleep, watching teenagers reviewing energy drinks don’t do it.. Just turn of the moitor before you get to those crazy flys.

More info on Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach. Just took some quick 20 seconds video clips of two things that I thought were pretty cool in the game.
The first is a spell effect that is caused by a Kobold Shaman. It is chaos sometimes. At one point there were six of these orbs of darkness all over at the bottom of a cliff and on the top of a ledge, people were falling like flies.

The second is of one of the traps in the game. Lots of different traps and I love it. There are nasty blades that cut people down, spikes, and then these contraptions. Thats not even talking about Acid, Fire, Force, and Lightning traps.

Just click on an image to download the video. Both are under 5MB and compressed using divx 6.1.1. Game settings are on the highest quality and the videos are pretty high quality as well.

Kyle MacDonald at one red paperclip has done it again.  Now he has got rid of that clunky cube van and has a flashy record contract!  At first I thought he had made a bad trade but after reading it I think there will be a good number of artists interested in a recording deal like this.

A continous piece of zoomable artwork.

Not only is this beautiful and amazing as you are moving through it, you also get the bonus of becoming dizzy and cross eyed after watching it for long enough! Try this out, get it moving at full speed and keep staring at it for a minute or so. Then stop the thing and watch the center of it warp smaller and then larger. It would be really cool to create a screensaver from this.

link

Although not available yet, this will be a very useful tool. The official beta launch will be in March. There are several similar sites out there such as Koders, but nothing that will do quite what krugle boasts:

krugle’s role

While the development world has changed, the tools that developers use haven’t kept up. Developers spend from 20-25 percent of their time looking for code and code related information – a frustrating situation for programmers, and an expensive problem for companies.

Current search engines are okay for finding web pages, but they don’t crawl or find source code, whether in open repositories or within source code control systems (SCCS). They also don’t leverage the inherent structure of code to support the types of searches programmers need.

krugle vision

Krugle answers the need for a single place to find relevant code and critical technical information. By making it easy for anyone to find, elevate and communicate, Krugle fills a critical gap in todays technology rich environment.

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At alexadex.com you can play a game of trading stock that is based on the amount of traffice that sites are getting (at least from the people who are using alexa.com’s toolbar). They use these traffic stats and a tree trunk times punpkin pi formula to determine share count and the price that it is going for . Beyond that it works pretty much like the stock market, you try to buy stocks from a site while they are cheap and then sell them when they are more expensive (when the site is getting more hits). This is a really cool idea! I am not going to spend the time to start playing, but I did buy a few shares of hypexr.org stock.

Over at internetstockblog.com they ask a interesting question: Is AlexaDex a Useful Stock-Picking Tool Or Just A Fun Game? and conclude with:

But there’s one glitch. Prices are set by current traffic data, not by supply and demand. So, unlike the stock market, prices don’t reflect future expectations.

The key factor that any hedge fund analyst will ask about a stock — What future expectations are priced in? — is missing.

I have to agree with this. Plus I haven’t heard any big news report about the best alexadex.com players getting filthy rich from their knowlege of the game.

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If your even slightly in the know about the programming language Lisp and its past “real world” endeavors you know about Viaweb, Orbitz, Naughty Dog, and most recienty reddit.com. Bill Clementson posts, Lisp is for Entrepreneurs, brings up some excellent points for using Lisp in a start up and how it seems like it is beneficial:

Paul Graham’s reasons for using lisp:

“Our hypothesis was that if we wrote our software in Lisp, we’d be able to get features done faster than our competitors, and also to do things in our software that they couldn’t do. And because Lisp was so high-level, we wouldn’t need a big development team, so our costs would be lower. If this were so, we could offer a better product for less money, and still make a profit. We would end up getting all the users, and our competitors would get none, and eventually go out of business.”

And he was right. He made his web application faster, more efficiently, and with less cost than his competitors, but where the real money came from was selling it to Yahoo. That was Pauul Graham’s goal, to make it the best so he could sell it for a lot of mula.

Naughty Dog was tearing it up making games for PS2 as Clementson says:

They developed a custom DSL using Lisp to create some of their most famous games. The company’s co-founder, Andy Gavin, “used Allegro CL to create a programming language called “GOAL” (Game Oriented Assembly Lisp), which he designed specifically for the development of Naughty Dog’s games. Using this custom dialect whose compiler and development environment was written in Allegro CL, he and his team were able to produce hundreds of different game objects with sophisticated real-time behavior and animation, and more realistic graphics. “The behaviors are faster to develop, and more compact than an equivalent C program, allowing for rapid prototyping and experimentation.”"

Thats pretty cool and interesting especially since it was commonly thought that Naughty Dog spent so much time developing GOAL and the rest of their Lisp framework that they weren’t going to get to developing the games. But they did get to developing the games and were doing it better than their competition. Everyone can turn their heads and think wow maybe there is something to this Lisp thing. Sony sure thought so and bought Naughty Dog Productions.

So both of these got bought up and both of them end up getting rewritten. No longer in Lisp!

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A couple of days ago at Dell’s Diner, Dell posts Why I Have Been Quiet which whent a little like this:

…

Now I bring you this picture that I made myself. Pretty, huh?
(And yes, that is a big ass in place of my head…)

Was it so wrong that I misstook this picture to be a cartoon bent over with a bloody ass and their head stuck in someone elses ass? Probably so. Anyways, Dell, feel better soon and if you ever need any help getting that chocolate out from between your cleavage, give me a call!

Here’s a quick guide if you’re running Ubuntu (should also work with Debian).

1. Install ruby and rubyonrails

sudo apt-get install ruby rails

2. Install RubyGems (you can install ruby apps that are not found in the Ubuntu respository)

a) Download rubygems-0.8.11.tgz (at the time of this writing) from http://docs.rubygems.org

b) Unpack it, navigate into the directory, and type the following command:

i) $ cd rubygems-0.8.11

ii) $ sudo ruby setup.rb

iii) $ sudo gem install rubygems-update

4. Install Ruport (a report generator) via RubyGems

a) $ sudo gem install ruport

b) $ ruport -v

5. Test ruby-dbi database connector (should be installed with rails)

Save the following Ruby script as test.rb:

# simple.rb - simple MySQL script using Ruby DBI module
require “dbi”
begin
# connect to the MySQL server
dbh = DBI.connect(”dbi:Mysql:mydatabasename:localhost”, “root”, “laughwithme”)
# get server version string and display it
row = dbh.select_one(”SELECT VERSION()”)
puts “Server version: ” + row[0]
rescue DBI::DatabaseError => e
puts “An error occurred”
puts “Error code: #{e.err}”
puts “Error message: #{e.errstr}”
ensure
# disconnect from server
dbh.disconnect if dbh
end

6. Execute script: $ ruby test.rb

If the dbi connector is present, the script output should output the MySQL version.

7. Execute Ruport

a) $ ruport generate test (it’ll create a directory called test and generate templates)

b) $ cd test

c) $ edit database config file by:
nano config/ruport.yaml
:driver: ‘DBI:mysql’
:database: ‘testdb:localhost’
:db_user: ‘testuser’
:db_password: ‘testuser’

8. generate report by executing the following command:

ruport templates/test.rb

As posted by abdulmueid on digg.com:

Just put anything after Prg= and it will show on the Windows Live page… This message is kinda hilarious! via: A friend on MSN

MS live error message