Search Engine Hype – No Words

Razorfish consolidates offices

Looks like we’re closing some of the offices, here a link to another side with the story (that way no-one accuses me of leaking internal information ;-().

More on Media Bistro.

Time Entry on iPhone

A few months ago the Razorfish IT team released the probably best iPhone app I have on my iPhone: Timeline.

Time entry has so far always been a huge pain in the a!@# at every company I’ve worked for, no matter whether Excel, automated versions, especially the horrid Oracle application we’re currently using — it’s slow, annoying, only behind the corporate firewall.

Timeline puts all that into my phone, search for the project, snap in the code, put in the hours, fill the rest of the week up with the placeholder entries and submit the entire thing at the end of the week.

The only downside is that it has to be manually installed by dragging it into iTunes — no updated via the store. Either way, major kudos to the Razorfish IT team, I finally have a totally easy way to report my time cards. They have my vote for any iPhone innovation award out there :-)

Surface Physics Engine Demo

Some of the folks I work with obviously have way to much spare time on their hands:

DaVinci (Microsoft Surface Physics Illustrator) from Razorfish – Emerging Experiences on Vimeo.

Oracle buying Sun

Oracle just announced to buy Sun for a wee bit over $7b. I think this is a brilliant move, by far better than the previous offer by IBM.

On a side note, it is almost impossible to type on an iPhone on a moving train.

Why Grails really matters for Java developers

I came across this nice article which makes yet another case for Grails. I’ve been a fan for a long time now, and there’s still my demo which I did last year in case you haven’t seen it yet.

After the success of RoR, the problems of the JEE platform became clear to everyone. Even if Grails or RoR suddenly disappear, from now on the new frameworks that will emerge will be following this “new” philosophy. And taking into consideration that Grails was developed since it’s begining focusing on the Java developer, it’s an undeniable fact that it will have a huge influence over all the new developments on this area from now on.

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Ascii Videos

This is completely insane but I love it. Who knew you can play youtube videos on a 80×25 text console. Windows could never do that ;-)

Source: Hackszine.com

Talking to an Arduino from .NET / C#

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while but got caught up with work stuff again. Thinking that talking to an Arduino from C# should be fairly easy, I spent a good hour or so fiddling with it because I could never get the Arduino to run my sketch after establishing the serial connection. Turns out, the DTR Enable line needs to be set to high for it to start executing the program.  Here’s a quick hack which interacts with the program I posted previously:

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Arduino Fun

I finally had the time to assemble my Arduino kit, which mostly took soldering the protoshield together. My first program is fairly simple and written in C (as opposed to AVR assembler, which is actually pretty easy). I attached two LEDs and one switch with a pull-up resistor to the Arduino microcontroller. The small C program toggles the red and green LEDs when the button is hit, send the current state back to the computer via the USB port and accepts commands to turn on either the red or green LED from the computer.

The full source code:

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“JCR or RDBMS” Whitepaper

One of my coworkers found this great paper by Bertil Chapuis and Day software comparing JCR and RDBMS. The paper outlines the theoretical approaches of each technology in details and provides an excellent foundation to make a more educated decision about which technology to use for a specific problem.

Day Software AG (Day) led the development of a JAVA specification which defines a uniform application programming interface (API) to manage content. This specification is called content repository API for java (JCR) and is part of the java community process. Implementations of this specification are actually provided by well known companies such as Oracle, Day or Alfresco.

JCR implementations are often used to build high level content management systems and collaborative applications. Day also provides an open source implementation of the specification which is called Jackrabbit and which is used as a shell for some of its products.

This diploma thesis takes place in this context. Day wants to clarify some points which relate to the data model promoted by their specification. The basic idea is to compare their approach to managing content with the approach promoted by competitors at different levels. The following sections will clarify the approach adopted to do this and give an overview of the content developed in this report.

As explained, the purpose is to locate JCR in the database world. This work will be done by comparing the relational model and the model promoted by JCR. The relational model defined by Codd in the 70’s is actually the most widely used data model. The unstructured or semi-structured model subtended by the JCR specification encounter a growing success in the content management area. These two models will be described and analyzed in this report.

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