Since I got my PowerBook early last year I'm on the search for decent alternatives to some of the applications I was using on the PC. Thanks to a flourishing development community I found replacements for the most important stuff (and more), but one thing that is still missing is a decent multi-track audio editor suitable for music production. I've been using Samplitude on the PC for the last couple of years, which after a brief learning curve turned out to be perfect for my needs -- it offers quite elegant means of editing audio, including non-destructive filters and timestretching …

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I was searching for a fast and modern graphing framework for server-side image generation (ImageMagick == too much hassle, too many weird dependencies, bitch to set up on OS X) and found Cairo, which looks like a great alternative. It's used for the GNOME desktop environment, and Mozilla will use it for various rendering tasks in their Gecko browser engine, but it also has bindings to most important scripting languages (notably Ruby and Python), almost no dependencies, generates PNG images out-of-the box, and seems quite well-designed. Links Cairo homepage Wikipedia: Cairo (graphics) …

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A couple of days ago Chaosradio Express published another great podcast: "Programmiersprachen und Dylan", a conversation between Tim Pritlove and Andreas Bogk on the subject on the Dylan programming language, and programming languages in general. The podcast has a duration of nearly two hours, but if you speak German and are interested in topics of such an abstract nature it's well worth your time. They start off from the very beginning (programming language basics, Turing machines etc) and gradually introduce more and more concepts of the Dylan language, some of which are really fascinating. All Roads Lead to Lisp I'm …

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Via http://del.icio.us/deusx I found Pointless Waste of Time's Life After the Video Game Crash, and enjoyed it. As the rest of the site had some other great bits and commentaries I started looking for a feed, but it seems there is none. So I made this instead: Pointless Waste of Time RSS Feed. It's really just an approximation, as Feed43's limited pattern matching abilities clash badly with the handwritten (and inconsistent) pointlesswasteoftime markup. Go visit, it seems like an interesting site. I'm not much of a gamer by any measure, but I'm a sucker for pop culture references and insightul …

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By pure chance I just stumbled over a Pandora's box of weird podcasts. Starting point was a great experimental/minimal techno track by Aldo Tamarind in the de-bug podcast -- see http://www.de-bug.de/pod/archives/1197.html. The music for that episode used to be stored on http://tamarind.podspot.de/, but by the time I got there (i.e., now) all content on that page was gone. Damn! So I started googling which led to some page on podspider.de -- don't go there, the page sucks hard, but the podcasts the page referenced were amazing. Quote: "related categories: eccentric, classical, religion & spirituality". Chrchrchr. E.g. http://cba.fro.at/show.php?lang=de&sendungen_id=14 -- Recordings of …

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flOw has everything I wish from a good game -- it's simple, yet it sets a great mood; it simply feels good to play it. And although the visuals are abstract it's a very organic game. There is a learning curve, but you're flexible in your approach to playing. And if you get the download version you can also play fullscreen. The game's only flaw is that you soon reach a point where playing on makes not much sense, because you've eaten all there is to eat. Not being an active gamer I needed a couple of attempts to …

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del.icio.us apparently has just added a feature that I've been wanting for a long time: It's now very easy to see the history of bookmarks for a specific URL without having to bookmark it yourself. Here's an example of such a bookmark history page: del.icio.us bookmarks for mailfeed.org. I regularly check these URL bookmark histories on del.icio.us, because it can answer all kinds of interesting questions, e.g.: How popular is this URL? Since when have people known about this? Who bookmarked this URL first? What are their comments? I imagine this caters to a small audience, but it's a …

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I've been submitting feature requests and bug reports to the NetNewsWire forum -- Brent Simmons seems pretty responsive. I'm looking forward to an application update, it's been months since 2.01 was released, and I'm wondering what Brent's working on (probably mainly NewsGator integration, which at the moment is of little use to me.) The more I'm using the application the more I'm finding its limitations -- it's still the best aggregator for the Mac (though Vienna is getting closer and closer), but sometimes I'm a bit envious of the Windows world where FeedDemon is making great strides lately. I'm …

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Just found out how to work around a major nuisance of GMail: the inability to select the low-tech HTML view as default interface. It's probably going to be old news for a lot of people, but it was new news to me, so I'll post it here for others to see. Background I've been using GMail as a secondary email provider for a while now, and while I like that its Javascript-based interface affords you speed improvements and other nice enhancements I can't get used to a major drawback: you lose the browser's history function, at least in Safari. Others …

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I just had a couple of wonderful days of being busy deploying a new site, MailFeed.org. The site is a public service derived from the mailfeed.rb script posted earlier: you send email to an address at mailfeed.org, and it shows up in a public feed. If you don't know it yet have a look at the site, and then come back. Originally the idea for this arose of a nuisance a friend wanted to get rid of: that there still are people sending out email newsletters instead of writing feeds. But during the last couple of days I found that …

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Query By Example by Meredith Patterson was one of this year's Google Summer of Code projects, and of all the projects I've looked at it seems the most exciting. Originally I wanted to wait for some more information about the project before writing about it, but as there weren't any news save some quiet early releases, and as I really need to clear my backlog of topics, I decided to have an early look. Query By Example sets out to get rid of a current limitation of relational databases: the lack of support for fuzzy searches. Here's the short project …

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The Fahrplan (schedule) for 22C3 (the Chaos Computer Club's Chaos Communication Congress) is now online, along with the blog, Flickr pool, wiki, and podcast. So I started to browse and collect lectures I'd like to see, and then realized that like last year I have a scheduling problem... I'm still trying to find out how I can use the iCal calendar file for things beyond looking at dates in iCal. Apparently the data is imported read-only, which means I can't annotate; and it would be great to find ways where iCal can help you schedule your congress experience. There of …

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There are more and more details emerging about MIT's/Nicholas Negroponte's $100 Laptop, and the more is revealed the more exciting it sounds. Kofi Annan has just unveiled the first prototype at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, and there are a lot of other important people involved (apparently Rupert Murdoch is among the sponsors). This project is a rare (yet well-publicized) example of individuals at the right places joining force to not only develop a technology that might change the world, but also doing so openly and without financial merit for themselves. Negroponte puts it best: I'd …

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There is an interesting post on Slashdot pointing to an article by Ben Meyer, about the concept of a Type Manager as opposed to the oldschool concept of a file manager. Quote from the Slashdot introduction: In the past few years many of us have been introduced to a new type of application, the Type Manager. Most of us are familiar with iTunes, but there are many other Type Managers out there that are gaining market share and a rabid fan base of users such as digiKam and amaroK. ... After creating a list of all the traits of a …

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CollaborativeRank is an interesting service that builds on the del.icio.us database. They provide bookmark search, a ranking of popular bookmarks, and they attempt to find connections between the things people store in their del.icio.us account and their area of expertise. It's the last feature that I find the most interesting. While it disguises as a ranking of users, its main promise is that it could help you find experts on arbitrary fields. During the last couple of weeks I've been watching my rank, and while I wouldn't necessarily agree with its estimation of my expertise it's still interesting to watch. …

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Chris Zumbrunn has news in the comments of my article "RFE: Server-Side Javascript?": There is a new JavaScript execution framework called Rhinola which looks like what I asked for: a framework that enables server-side JavaScript web development! A quick search leads to an enthusiastic article ("whoa! rhinola rocks!") on the haboglabobloggin' blog (which just went offline while I was writing this...), but the author mentions that the current incarnation of the software requires quite some Linux admin-fu to get it working; I assume this will change over the next year as the product matures. Rhinola is currently based on the …

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On David Weinberger's blog: transcript of a talk and Q+A by Joshua Schachter of delicio.us. It's a bit sketchy, but has some interesting bits nevertheless. I was especially delighted by the discussion after Joshua introduces the upcoming "network" and "group" features, where groups are opt-in collaborations and networks more like the current inbox feature, in that users won't be told that you have included them in your network. Excerpt: I point out that flickr tells you. Joshua says that every time he gets a notice from some random person that he's been added as a contact "I want to rip …

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The new episode of This Week in Tech features copyright lawyer and Creative Commons-guru Lawrence Lessig, and it's a great show with lots of great clarifications and anectodes about America's current state of copyright law. Probably the best way to learn about the subject and still be entertained. The cast of this show is a pretty diverse list of characters coming from different backgrounds (most are journalists of some kind, some are also publishers, hobby musicians, or software developers, and Lessig obviously is a lawyer), and it's great to see how they interact. It seems to me that this is …

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In June this year I started looking for ways to use JavaScript as a server-side scripting language to replace Perl, PHP and others, and documented my findings in the article "RFE: Server-Side Javascript?". Although all the pieces to bring JavaScript to the server are there, nobody has actually undergone the effort to implement it yet; but it seems there are more and more people interested in trying it, and I guess by this time next year we'll have some stuff to play around with. The reason I'm posting again is that I just found another related project: TrimJunction, which is …

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After the recent Ballmer debacle I merely glanced at a screenshot of the Channel 9 interview with Bill Gates, and downloaded the interview with Marc McDonald instead. This turned out to be a good decision. Most of the Channel 9 interviews by now are product presentations, but occasionally there are real gems that should be mandatory viewing for everybody in the field. The sessions with Bill Hill about Typography, human perception and interfaces are such gems (see links below). This session with Marc McDonald is of near Bill Hill-level quality, but admittedly on a subject that is a bit more …

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A short excerpt of current news, from my perspective. First signs that the Flickr sell to Yahoo might be good for the founders, but bad for the community. A bastard-child of universal login is emerging, with all the benefits. Encapsulating almost everything. The DRM emperor gets new clothes: exchanges the old business suit for ill-fitting cargo pants. Acrobat Reader to support 3D data. Exciting stuff, if you're an Adobe manager in need for new markets. And a lot of business as usual. Welcome to the next corporate Internet boom. …

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Another wonderful podcast from Dave Winer, which starts off as a monologue about his recent Audible experiences, sidesteps into a little DRM history, and ultimately comes to the center of the problem with current media distribution: Customers are treated like thieves, there's too much distrust, and it seems as it's building up. His prediction is actually a lesson he learned as CEO of a software company in the 80ies: ultimately users will learn in how many ways DRM screws their side of the bargain, and that's when the model stops working. This is quite an emotional podcast for Dave, and …

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Just stumbled over Alex Payne's blog and was so delighted about his witty prose that I decided on a whim to do something for his Google ranking. Even if you're not interested in web development, or in his commentary on Apple consumer products, you still might want to take a look at the site for the entertainment value alone. For example: The iPod Story, and his Google "world domination" commentary Not So Evil. …

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Greg Apodaca, a photographer and digital artist, uses his online portfolio to demonstrate common image manipulations of photographs for magazine articles and advertisements. A fascinating and shocking insight into the hyperreal. Quote: "It doesn't seem natural to me to take out every curve, to airbrush out every blemish, but what the Art Director wants, the Art Director will get." Greg's Digital Retouching Portfolio Maxim Should Be Ashamed, photo manipulation gone wrong …

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"The photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture." Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades More art from Jason Salavon …

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