mobrec

My Personal Infocloud

So
I am not surprised that Oslo, Norway has taken over first place as the most expensive city in the world (knocking Tokyo out of first place). We vacationed in Norway a few summers ago. While Norway was quite beautiful, it was easily the most expensive place that we have traveled to. I remember sitting in a restaurant in Bergen after having just ordered a hamburger. I calculated in my head that the burger was going to cost me over $20USD (probably even more expensive now). Oh, well, it costs what is costs. All in all I enjoyed Norway much more than Alaska (Alaska being a very poor value for the money) and would return to Norway before Alaska any day.

Of the other cities on the list, I found Copenhagen to be the most 'affordable' of the Scandinavian cities I have visited, London is certainly expensive (an not a great value, either). I don't recall Geneva being overly expensive, just cold, rainy and desperately boring (it was December, granted). Commentary on Paris will be reserved until we return from a short trip there mid-February. Tokyo and Reykjavik both remain on our 'someday' travel list, expense aside.

Here is the list from the Guardian:

Most expensive cities (Last year in brackets)

1 (3) Oslo 2 (1) Tokyo 3 (8) Reykjavik 4 (2) Osaka Kobe 4 (4) Paris 6 (5) Copenhagen 7 (7) London 8 (6) Zurich 9 (8) Geneva 10 (10) Helsinki

technorati tags: travel, expenses, world

So
This Mac application really takes me back to when tubes were hot technology. Back in the day, when I was learning programming in college, I had the patience-building experience of programming on a hard copy terminal (the DecWriter) for the first year or so. Round about the beginning of my second year, they began to introduce VT-52 and VT-100 terminals with manual dialup acoustic couplers at a blazing 300 baud. There was one terminal that ran at 1200 baud that people would literally fight over (or come in when the lab opened and stay on it all day).

Anyway, back to the app: this is an emulation of an old tube terminal, including screen buldge/warp and variable brightness of pixels. Apparently, it even simulates cursor studder. Really makes one appreciate the state of computing these days!

technorati tags: mac, terminal, nostalgia, fun

So
I think that using technology in humorous ways is a noble task, especially when it has the effect of humanizing things. At least thats the way that a posting over at BoingBoing struck me — its about a “watch that displays cheeky 'approximate time' messages”.

I was a teen back when LED-based digital watches first became affordable and thus, widely available. I always had to chuckle whenever anyone with one of these watches was asked the time; they would quite earnestly respond “10:42” or “3:28” not “quarter to eleven” or “three thirty” — no siree, they knew exactly what time it was, because that's what their watch displayed.

Of course the matter of the exact time depended on what source they used to set their watch by and the not insignificant matter of how well the watch actually kept time. Of course you can now buy a watch that synchornizes itself with Naval Observatory time, but I still like to keep 'human' time — “half past eight” instead of “8:29” for me.

And for what it's worth, my timepiece of choice is an analog watch with a manual movement (no batteries).

technorati tags: watch, time, analog

So
Over at Ajaxian, there is a discussion on Kavascript which is an attempt to make javascript a bit more like Ruby and Perl.

The general consensus seems to be that this is a very, very, bad idea (pre-compilation = debugging nightmare).

technorati tags: ajax, ruby, javascript

So
Edd Dumbill has some commentary on the apparently appalling state of the underlying code in the new apple offerings.

Like sushi and folding paper? Then download and fold some PDF sushi.

Interested in web API mashups and curious who has mashed up what, then have a look at the Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix.

Finally, some thoughts about ruby as a scripting language in the browser.

technorati tags: ruby, ajax, sushi, apple, mashups

So
tuaw is reporting that there are several ports of the Newton OS to Linux based devices that support X Windows, including the too-hip Nokia 770. Very cool.

The Newton was way ahead of its time and for me, was the first and last truly usable PDA. I've still got mine knocking around here somewhere...

technorati tags: newton, linux, apple, nokia

So
TheServerSide has a long and heated discussion on the value of using JavaServer Faces for web application development. This was sparked by a blog post with the somewhat incendiary title of “JSF: The 7-Layer Burrito I Won't Eat Again”.

My question is: why does every discussion about JSF usually end with someone bringing up Tapestry rather than dealing with the merits and liabilities of JSF?

technorati tags: jsf, webdev

So
Someone actually when to the trouble of using the magic of IMDB to create a list of the non Star Wars movies that have the most Star Wars actors in them. Tied for the top? Flash Gordon and Labyrinth.

This makes me think about earlier in the week when my wife and I were watching a detective show on BBCAmerica called Touching Evil. One of the characters in that episode was the same actor that plays Chancellor Palpatine/Emperor in the Star Wars movies. This caused my wife to exclaim, 'of course he did it, he's the Emperor!' Turns out, he did.

uh, hope that didn't spoil it for anybody.

technorati tags: starwars, fun, imdb, trivia

So
information aesthetics has a pointer to two fun tools for exploring the growing Flickr tagspace: tagnautica and flickr tag browser.

Both use a similar visualization paradigm with the 'keyword' in the middle and related tags in a formation around the keyword. You can explore the related tags (and thus change it to the current keyword) by clicking on the bubble of your choice.

Shameless plug: I am an avid Flickr user; a random sample of some of my photos can be seen in the right gutter of this blog or directly at Flickr.

technorati tags: flickr, visualization, tags, tagging

So
I really enjoyed Malcom Gladwell's book Blink and noticed that a recent article in Nature provides further evidence that all it takes is a 'blink' to decide if a web site is worthy of attention or not.

Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.

technorati tags: blink, webdev, cognition