Space's largest window is built

Grok Headline matches for Space's largest window is built

Built to Last

Built to Last 03/14/2005 06:01 PM

« It's not your father's fortran, it's your grandfather's. :) »

The recent news about the problems plaguing Leica are somewhat disconcerting as it leaves the future of the company in question. It is likely that someone will buy them, probably Nikon or Canon, but ultimately the company and their products will change, possibly not for the better. Erwin Putz offers his observations and some speculation on the future. I appreciate and understand his remarks about the Leica's real purpose in life is to be a tool, rather than an object of desire for collectors and nouveau riche scene whores who find the Hermes MP a fashion accessory only surpassed by earrings from Tiffany. I have been regularly surprised at how many people recognise the camera and either want to fondle it in awe or think I'm crazy for dragging it around town with me everywhere I go. Cameras don't take pictures by themselves; they are meant to be used. I didn't buy it to keep in a box on the shelf. It is, perhaps, this perceived exclusivity of Leica that has created the mystique which protected it from becoming a cheap commodity.

It is, to be sure, an amazing instrument of satisfying heft in a small package which continues to impress me. Desire most often builds up expectations which then lead to disappointment. I was a little reluctant to buy a Leica having experienced this cycle of want and rejection so many times in life, but I saw an auction on eBay where a man who had purchased a Leica only months before had died and his son was dumping it on eBay which made me think that I shouldn't wait as long as his father did. Digital photography has made buying film cameras very affordable as I bid rather low and won the auction. I have not been even remotely disappointed since it arrived. I enjoy the signs of wear and tear as it only makes the camera more beautiful and uniquely mine.

Leica will move more into the digital realm, especially if they decide to sell out to one of the larger camera companies, where the technology just hasn't reached the point of matching the quality or creative flexibility that their analogue cameras with film have had for decades. If you've always wanted a Leica, an M6 or an M7 or an MP, now is the time to surf eBay and used camera shops for a decent deal since it's likely that as scarcity increases [if Leica sells to Canon, et. al] the prices will skyrocket as I've already seen them start to creep up. The new Voigtländer Bessa R2A and R3A are very tempting cameras [I highly recommend the CameraQuest dealer, too], especially the 1:1 finder, and sell at 1/5th the price of a new M7. It's a good time to be interested in film photography since the cameras you've always wanted are much more affordable and often cheaper than the 'prosumer' digital cameras which will be headed for the big magnet in the sky in three years or less. I suspect that my Leica will outlive me. :)

As an amusement for Ignatz who gives us such gems like the magic cone [NSFW] I'm using the magic of digital instant gratification to create the gripping, edge of your seat, journalistic series I have titled, Watching the [Easter] Grass Grow. Even more enthralling than a chia pet. Tune in tomorrow and every day to see if I managed to remember to water the seeds or see if anything has managed to turn any other colour than brown.

And, a couple of local photo sites that I've noticed recently; 365.fi which is a photo-a-day from a group of photojournalism students in Finland [and could someone who knows them encourage them to set-up an RSS feed of some sort?], Seppo's Photoblog is a random and entertaining photoblog and DiDaRoom which offers a nicely done view into the past and present of life in Finland in small vignettes. Ooops, I forgot to add Snapshot Asthetics as my RSS reader doesn't sort by country. :)

New VIA Mini-ITX has Built-in 12V DC-DC

New VIA Mini-ITX has Built-in 12V DC-DC 11/10/2003 10:56 PM
VIA Technologies has announced a new Mini-ITX form factor motherboard that seems even more suited to mobile robot use than the EPIA M10000 we recently reviewed. The new board is the EPIA TC and includes a built-in 12V DC-DC power converter, allowing the board to be easily used with any 12VDC battery. The board comes in two flavors, one with a 600MHz EDEN ESP CPU for those who want to go totally fanless and one with a 1GHz C3 CPU for those who need more processing power.

e-DMS Workflow built on .Net

e-DMS Workflow built on .Net 09/07/2004 08:48 AM
ZDNet Sep 7 2004 12:52PM GMT

Built to Swim

Built to Swim 08/08/2004 02:01 PM
Michael Phelps's mission is not just to match Mark Spitz's seemingly untouchable record of seven gold medals in one Olympics, but also to better his own seemingly untouchable greatness.

The Greatest Car Ever Built

The Greatest Car Ever Built 12/18/2003 05:03 PM
The Greatest Car Ever Built O mighty Slant-6 engine, most magnificent creation of the coal-steel industrial heart of America at the zenith of her manufacturing genius! (NY Times, req required).

Built Into Eudora

Built Into Eudora 04/09/2004 03:54 PM
Morrbus Iff writes that Eudora now has Google searching built-in: you can highlight some text, right-click, and be sent to &ip=xx.yyy.xxx.yyy&adtest=off&q=search%20term%here">a page like this....

Built-in web services

Built-in web services 06/09/2004 05:53 AM

I'm actually kind of terrified with the prospect of what will happen when blogging tools like Blogware, TypePad and Blogger discover built-in web services.

Oh my god - AdSense is bad enough!

They'll be too much money to go around - for everyone - and another 50M people will get blogs.

But 100M will be writing reviews and recommendations.

:-)

Google Adsense.

I added an Adsense banner to the top bar of the blog.

This is a data gathering exercise. I'll definitely share results when I have some. In the meantime, let me know what you think.

[Random Bytes]

Built NEC Tough

Built NEC Tough 08/30/2004 06:26 AM

LIAM "THE INTERN" MCNULTY -- NEC announced a new notebook PC last week that can seemingly take quite a beating. It may cost around $4,000 and weigh 6 pounds, but who cares when it can survive a 3 foot drop and withstand up to 131 degrees Fahrenheit? While they were at it, NEC went ahead and made the thing "dust and waterdrop" resistant too.

Besides that, it looks pretty cool. Another feature is the convenient handle, so when you're uhh...fighting off Siberian tigers with a toothpick in the Himalayas, you can rest assured your laptop is close at hand. (What are Siberian...fine - Ed.)

Read - Press Release [NEC]

You built it, now implement it

You built it, now implement it 02/21/2003 02:11 AM
CNET Feb 21 2003 1:25AM ET

Is This Company Built to Last?

Is This Company Built to Last? 05/27/2004 10:54 AM
Black & Decker has a lot going for it, but it faces some challenges, too.

7E7 to be built in Everett?

7E7 to be built in Everett? 12/08/2003 03:28 AM

Oh, also on the news over the weekend is a report that the 7E7 will be built in Everett (about 45 minutes from my house).

This is good news for this area because it'll keep thousands of jobs here. Yes, the politicians here gave up billions in a tax deal. Isn't that called "corporate welfare?" Yes it is. But, the politicians did the right thing. Keep the jobs here. Maryam's finding the job situation here very tight.

SQL Server's built-in bug hunter

SQL Server's built-in bug hunter 01/03/2003 02:50 AM
CNET Jan 3 2003 1:02AM ET

Using the Built-in Functions of IE to
Block Pop-up Ads

Using the Built-in Functions of IE to
Block Pop-up Ads 08/09/2004 06:48 PM

Cal Henderson on "How We Built
Flickr"...

Cal Henderson on "How We Built
Flickr"... 06/22/2005 02:24 AM

So Day Three of my weirdest ever holiday finds me at a one-day workshop called Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget - How We Built Flickr. Right up front I should probably say that it's presented by my mate Cal and I'm here courtesy of Ryan Carson and Carson Workshops, so I'm probably biased or bought or both. Nonetheless, I need you to believe that I'm enjoying it enormously. It's very much from a software engineering / architecture kind of perspective rather than the more conceptual / design / user-facing perspective that comes more naturally to me, so it's difficult for me to assess how accurate it is, but it certainly appears an intensely practical and rapid way of building and developing web apps (and I trust Cal enormously). The practice that he describes - interestingly - is also completely alien to the practice that I've observed in large organisations, which either means that one or other party are 'doing it wrong' to a greater or lesser extent or that certain types of organisations by necessity have to operate in different ways. I'm going to be banal and insipid and say that it's probably a bit of both.

The day's about two-thirds of the way through, so I don't have a complete sense of the day, but so far I can very much recommend it. My immediate gut-reaction is that I just miss working with Cal. But since not everyone in the world is going to get that opportunity, I guess it's not an enormously useful insight to share with the world. So instead I'm going to pick out a few of the comments / phrases that he's said that have struck a chord with me directly.

One of the most interesting parts of the whole enterprise for me was his articulation of some clear levels of abstraction between database work, business logic, page logic, page mark-up and the presentation layer. It's not an enormously novel set of distinctions I guess, but the level of clarity about each area really appeals to me. It's an architecture that really supports the rapidly iterative way of operating that I enjoy and think is core to developing great online applications.

One particularly interesting chunk was about the relationships between various people operating at different layers - with the developers able to easily create page logic-level functionality that allow the designers to take it away and build user-facing features around them. This relationship is phrased as a negotiation, with the designers coming back and asking for page logic level functionality as they see a need for it (and then being completely responsible for the building of the front-end elements of the site, and for checking it before launch). The whole enterprise is around continual development and improvement and reaction, which probably explains another fairly jaw-dropping moment of the morning - when Cal revealed that on 'good days', Flickr releases a new version every half an hour. In order to support this kind of working, they've built structures that 'supports rapid iteration but enforce at least a little rigour'. Stunning. Although clearly not right for everyone...

A lot of this stuff really fits with my aesthetics of developing products effectively for the web, because - I guess - it's actually a very responsive and very web-native way of building. This process cycle of rapidly building, creating structures that support future iteration, being connected to the users on your site and being able to react and redevelop your proposition almost on the fly - these all seem to me to be the way that most of my peers worked before moving to large organisations that attempted to enforce standard software development methodologies on a completely different medium. And of course, it all hooks in with elegant ways of writing and producing web pages in ways that allow rapid change and evolution, making design about interactions and services and components and design swatches and aesthetics and change rather than about .psd files, yearly redesigns and distant heavy-handed top-down management (and sign-off) from a distance. I've had a post around this area bubbling away for a while now. I'll probably have to write the damn thing now...

I might write more later when we hit the section about APIs, which is the area that I've been waiting for pretty much all day. But in the meantime, I'm going to end with a few quotes from the piece that I've noted down through the day that seemed kind of core to me.

'We should listen to Donald Knuth when he said, "We should forget about small efficiencies, about 97% of the time. Premature optimisation is the root of all evil." This is the most important thing that you'll ever hear as a software developer.'

'In a rapid environment, we're going to want to make a lot of releases.'

'It's more important for people on a team to agree to a single coding style than it is to find the perfect style'

PS. I believe that these workshops are coming to London later in the year and I can definitely recommend that people look out for them.

Skype.com: Built with TopStyle

Skype.com: Built with TopStyle 09/17/2004 12:31 PM

Erki Esken, Web Developer for Skype Technologies, just sent me the following:

"I'm happy to say that almost all the code on new www.skype.com was built with TopStyle. And I must say writing valid XHTML and CSS in TopStyle is a breeze :) Thanks again for a great program."

Built For Active People

Built For Active People 08/19/2004 05:48 AM
With its small stature, impeccable build-quality, understated styling and wonderful user interface, the iPod mini is one of the most likeable and portable MP3 players around. By Chris Chong, Malaysia Star (via MyAppleMenu)

10.3: Enable the built-in PHP module

10.3: Enable the built-in PHP module 11/13/2003 12:32 PM
If you did a fresh install of 10.3 you do not need to install PHP - it is installed by default! To enable it you just need to uncomment the following lines in the /etc -> httpd -> httpd.conf file: LoadModule php4_module ...

Router Built for Gamers

Router Built for Gamers 04/11/2005 10:19 AM

PS2 graphics chips to be built into TVs

PS2 graphics chips to be built into TVs 08/11/2004 02:44 AM
Sony has announced plans to use PlayStation 2 chips to speed up the graphics processing in new flat-panel TVs:

The new TVs will be equipped with chips used in the company's PlayStation 2 home-use game consoles and PSX DVD recorder/game consoles. Sony fabricates these chips at a group plant in Nagasaki Prefecture.

The chips' ability to handle detailed computer graphics will improve the TV's image-processing capacity, leading to faster on-screen control for selecting the type of TV broadcasts or viewing image data stored on digital or video cameras, for example.

Sony says the chips, which are already widely used in its game consoles, will enable it to boost the functions of its TVs at little cost.

Link (via Gizmodo)

OS X 10.3 Has Built-in File
Defragmentation

OS X 10.3 Has Built-in File
Defragmentation 10/29/2003 09:19 PM

Las Vegas wasn't built in a day, but
this playground will be

Las Vegas wasn't built in a day, but
this playground will be 05/31/2004 11:28 PM
Sunday Times South Africa Jun 1 2004 2:45AM GMT

Second toll motorway to be built

Second toll motorway to be built 07/05/2004 07:12 PM
The government is set to announce plans to build a new M6 toll road linking Birmingham to Manchester.

CellPhone With Built-in Projector

CellPhone With Built-in Projector 03/29/2005 09:03 AM
Technology Review Mar 29 2005 1:24PM GMT

PCs of Tomorrow To Contain Built-In
Diamonds

PCs of Tomorrow To Contain Built-In
Diamonds 12/27/2004 05:42 PM
Addict3d.org Dec 27 2004 9:42PM GMT

10.3: Take advantage of built-in UPS
functionality

10.3: Take advantage of built-in UPS
functionality 02/10/2004 12:01 PM
I've just bought a new APC UPS for my PowerMac G4. It ships with PowerChute software, but versiontracker.com comments suggest it is not yet Panther compatible. It seems, however that Apple has included UPS software in Mac O...

Nanowires with built-in transistors

Nanowires with built-in transistors 07/01/2004 12:27 PM
For several years now, researchers around the world have fashioned tiny nanowires from carbon nanotubes. Now though, Harvard University nanotech pioneer Charles Lieber and his team have made a nanowire--10,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper--that contains a string of transistors. While traditional nanowires are notoriously difficult to connect with each other or conventional silicon electronics, Lieber's nanocircuits are essentially pre-wired. The work was reported in the journal Nature and summarized in an article on the magazine's Web site:

"At this stage the chain does not actually do anything useful. 'But it's an important proof of principle,' says Lieber. He says that by applying a more elaborate mask to a woven network of silicon nanowires it should be possible to create complex circuits in one go.

To prove his point, he hopes to make a much more sophisticated structure that can perform complex calculations. 'We're trying to make a programmable series of literally thousands of these transistors.'

Link

In New York, a bicycle built for Wi-Fi

In New York, a bicycle built for Wi-Fi 05/06/2004 02:21 PM
On a two-wheeler outfitted with wireless equipment, Yury Gitman pedals around the city streets in a cloud of high-speed Internet access.

The House that Levine Built

The House that Levine Built 04/16/2005 02:55 PM
Goo dbye Yankee Stadium. At least the Red Sox get it.

New Browser With Built-in RSS Support

New Browser With Built-in RSS Support 02/14/2004 09:31 AM
Opera's upcoming browser will have RSS capabilities, according to this announcement of Opera 7.50 Preview 1 for Windows:

Opera now has experimental support for RSS Newsfeeds (RSS 0.9x, 1.0, and 2.0)--a syndication format often used on weblogs and news services--as part of Opera Mail. You can choose from a selection of pre-installed feeds by choosing "Newsfeeds" from the Mail menu. Newsfeeds are shown in the Mail panel under the Newfeeds access point.

Sharp's built-in MP3 Headphones

Sharp's built-in MP3 Headphones 07/14/2004 08:09 AM
TechTree Jul 14 2004 12:18PM GMT

YourTotalSite: built with TopStyle

YourTotalSite: built with TopStyle 09/16/2004 01:37 PM

Just got an email from Garrett Dimon of YourTotalSite.com stating that "every line of code was written in TopStyle, and we can't imagine life without it." The site is nicely done, and contains a number of articles of interest to web developers.

built a virus from scratch in only two
weeks

built a virus from scratch in only two
weeks 11/17/2003 09:14 AM
building .. Nature .. wrote

nature.com/nsu/031110/031110-17.html
track this site | 4 links

New Novell Linux built on 2.6 kernel

New Novell Linux built on 2.6 kernel 08/02/2004 06:52 AM

Cisco: We built CRS-1 to change our IT
image

Cisco: We built CRS-1 to change our IT
image 05/26/2004 09:18 PM
ITBusiness.ca May 27 2004 0:54AM GMT

New photo host built on Macs

New photo host built on Macs 07/20/2004 02:37 PM
New photo host with many image processing tools built 100% on Mac's. The OnClickPix.com(OCP) system allows you to edit your photo's in so many ways its almost like having a professional photo editing application installed on your computer! We have spent several months developing the tools you need to resize and touch-up your photos though an online interface. You can resize, manipulate RGB colors, adjust quality, rotate/flip, enhance, adjust brightness/contrast, adjust Hue/Saturation/Luminesence, add your own watermarks, add text with transparency, and add borders.

PC built into beautiful vintage Philco
TV

PC built into beautiful vintage Philco
TV 08/09/2004 04:48 PM
This casemod, a PC built into a vintage Philco Predicta TV, is simply wonderful. Link (via Gizmodo)

Md. School to Be Built Around Rare Toad
(AP)

Md. School to Be Built Around Rare Toad
(AP) 07/16/2004 08:24 PM
AP - It has a green snout, bleats like a sheep and is rarely seen in St. Mary's County. Despite its elusiveness, county planners have agreed to build an elementary school in a way that will accommodate the mating habits of the eastern narrow-mouthed toad that state naturalists say lives in the surrounding marshes.

The House That Music Fans Built

The House That Music Fans Built 07/07/2004 04:43 AM
Gracenote, maker of the leading tool for identifying music tracks, has become a powerhouse in the digital music biz and is building its reach in consumer electronics. The firm's humble origins, however, began with the sweat of music fans worldwide. By Katie Dean.

HP to launch built-to-order gaming PC

HP to launch built-to-order gaming PC 05/10/2004 10:17 AM
CNET May 10 2004 2:14PM GMT
Grok Description matches for Space's largest window is built
GrokA matches for Space's largest window is built

Space's largest window is built

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