70 Billion Pixels Budapest: 360 degree panorama image
"The observation tower of János-hegy [the Elizabeth Lookout on János Hill is], the highest vantage point of Budapest with a 360 degree panorama, was an obvious location. It also allowed us to take on previous world records in both the 'highest definition image' and the 'largest spherical panorama' category. When contacted, the Council of District XII informed us on the upcoming anniversary of the tower. We agreed to cooperate in commemorating the September 2010 event by setting up new world records-give them our best shot if you please. ."
(360systems Ltd., 360world.eu)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Reinventing the wheel: Google announces their new programming language called 'Go'
"Go is a new programming language from Google that aims for performance that is nearly comparable to C, but with more expressive syntax and faster compilation....
Despite the large amount of enthusiasm for language design, modern mainstream programming languages don't fall far from the C tree. The best that Microsoft, Sun, and Apple have to offer are just variations on that theme, with the addition of predictable object models and conveniences like garbage collection. The slim minority of language geeks who have rebelled against bracist tyranny and stumbled over to innovative languages like Haskell and Erlang are doomed to toil in relative obscurity."
(Ryan Paul, 10 November 2009, Ars Technica)
[It's hard to dismiss the feeling that there is nothing special in Google's latest announcement about its new programming language called 'Go'. After all isn't this what manufacturers do - they produce products and develop assets. In this case the product is a language and the asset is the capacity to exert greater control over the way that users use the Internet. So if Google were really committed to creating a faster open source language why don't they contribute their substantial expertise to supporting an existing initiative. One that already has a substantial user-base and support.]
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
How Firefox Is Pushing Open Video Onto the Web
"HTML 5, the emerging standard, is that content creators will be able to embed video and audio files on web pages with the same simplicity and ease as images and links.
The tools being used to power this behavior are the Ogg Theora and Vorbis codecs maintained by the non-profit Xiph.org. Currently, most video and audio on the web is presented using either Adobe's Flash Player, Microsoft's Silverlight or Apple's QuickTime. These are proprietary technologies, which means they come with various restrictions - licenses, patents and fees - attached.
Ogg, being open-source and patent-free, has no fees and very few use restrictions. Ogg has been around for a while. It was beaten out by MP3 in the Napster days as the audio format of choice, and has remained obscure ever since. It's also gotten a bad reputation because of poor quality and large file sizes compared to competing tools like h.264, which is used by both Quicktime and Flash, and will be used in the next release of Silverlight.
However, in the past year, the quality issues dogging Ogg have been largely solved thanks to the increased interest and involvement of developers who want to see support for open video on the web become a reality.
At a recent developer conference, Google showed off how it was building Ogg support directly into its Chrome browser to handle video playback without using any plug-ins. Mozilla's Jay Sullivan was then invited on stage, where he announced the next version of Firefox would also include built-in Ogg support, all part of a grand plan among browser makers to, in Sullivan's words, free video from 'plug-in prison.'"
(Michael Calore. Webmonkey, 18 June 2009)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Microsoft's Expression Web SuperPreview
"We built SuperPreview to simplify the process of testing and debugging layout issues across different web browsers and platforms. You can view your pages in multiple browsers simultaneously or view how a page renders in a browser and compare it to a comp or mock-up image of a page.
...
SuperPreview will be included as part of a future version of Expression Web. The final feature set and its availability have not been announced. The SuperPreview demo shown at the MIX09 conference was a technology preview and not a product announcement. However, because we'd like to get feedback on this technology and on its implementation, we have announced a beta version of SuperPreview for Internet Explorer. This free download will allow you to compare renderings of IE6 with whatever other version of IE you have installed on your machine. If you have installed IE8, you'll be able to compare IE6, IE8 and IE8 running in IE7 compatibility mode, side-by-side. The final 'shipping' version of SuperPreview for Internet Explorer will continue to be available for free. The Expression Web team hopes that it will be useful in helping to make the process of developing web pages for IE (and in general), faster and easier."
(Microsoft, 2009)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Ubiquitous web font embedding just got a step closer...
"A short while ago, Mozilla announced that Firefox 3.1 will, along with Safari which already does, support the @font-face mechanism for linking to online TrueType fonts. Internet Explorer already supports (and has done so for years) @font-face font linking, but here's the catch, not to TrueType fonts - only to EOT font files. EOT, now a proposed W3C specification, incorporates anti copying technology, helping to assuage the fears of font foundries that font linking in browsers would unleash a wave of unlicensed copying of their fonts. Chris Wilson, Platform Architect for Internet Explorer has made it clear that he's strongly opposed to simple font linking
we (Microsoft) should NOT support direct TTF/OTF embedding, unless 1) there is some check that the font intended that use to be allowed, which I don't think there currently is (as it needs to refer to the license agreement), AND 2) other browsers also implement a system that actually ENABLES commercial fonts - those that are allowed to be embedded, but cannot be legally placed directly on a server - to be used
So, is this a return to the stalemate of the 1990s, when both the major browsers supported font linking, only of a completely incompatible type? From a technical point of view, no. Since the same mechanism, @font-face rules, is used to link to TrueType, EOT and other font formats, then it is quite simple to define multiple fonts, and the browser can use the font format it supports."
(John Allsopp, 19 October 2008)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
