The Vent Core

Recently, I’ve been working on LaserLine 2.0, software to view, edit and create laser light shows. It’s sort of a Final Cut Pro for lasers. It supports the industry standard .ilda file format for import and export. Personaly, I’ve been working on adding rudamentary SVG importation. I have about 80% of the basic drawing methods, with only a few things (relative path elements and eliptical curves) left to support.

On the whole, it’s interesting as my first serious Objective-C project. Although my unreleased “SystemBar Test”, an app that parsed HTML into a menu bar to display how much I’ve downloaded, was also a fun exercise it was no where near release status.

The Apple Newton is truly a revolutionary device. Just look at what you can do with it!

• Browse the Web
• Read eMail
• Chat via IRC, AIM and Jabber
• Open a PT100 session to a Terminal
• Subscribe to RSS Feeds
• Read your favorite Newsgroup
• Sync with iCal and Address Book on Mac OS X
• Control your Computer or the Newton itself via VNC
• Run a Webserver
• Have it speak text
• Play MP3s
• Fax, Print and Beam documents
• …and even Blog with it.

This very post was written and posted entirely using a newton. Not bad for ten year old hardware. People have even written software to deal with the Newton’s 2010 problem, while other software lets you edit the time zones to compensate for this years DST change. I don’t see the Newton dying until it can no longer understand the current year. This happens somewhere around 2037, so that gives a few years to write a patch.

The Newton never dies, it just gets new batteries.

I found this trailer while walking to pick up my car from the shop. Sadly the website it refers to, http://www.fun-balloon.com/, seems to be down now. But when I went to the site earlier it had information and forms on how to purchase a ride.

I also found BAGI, the Balloon Association of Greater Illinois. It appears that there are a few other commercial balloons in the Champaign-Urbana area, so I’ll have to look into them.

For those of you who don’t know, the title of this is that of the song Up-Up And Away by The 5th Dimension, or such fame as Aquarius. And no, these aren’t referral links so I don’t get a fraction of a cent if you click them.

As for why I’m posting this, my Mom always wanted to go on a balloon ride, so when I saw this trailer I had to take a picture so I could check it out later.

My air conditioner goes to eleven.

Back in January, Tauquil Atkinson posted video of a Microsoft Exec presenting the new features of Vista in what Tauquil calls Re-Introducing the Real Windows Vista. This isn’t your ordinary Vista introductory presentation, as Tauquil has replaced the video of Vista with video of Mac OS X. What results is the audio, describing Vista, matches up perfectly with features demonstrated in Mac OS X.

Hilarious.

My Newton has a case of the jaggies, so the HWR isn’t as good as it should be. Oh well, I’ll look into it.

Despite the problems, I have NPDS running, and can be accessed from http://n.phroon.net/.

I was reading the Surfin’ Safari Weblog and read that safari supports embedded pdfs!

Very interesting! It’s not a perfect implementation, as you have to force a size of the image, but otherwise it just works.

As Dvorak is a Troll, Cringely is a Loon.

That is all.

Well, not quite.

Cringely has an interesting point, however. An Apple made Darwine implementation would be very interesting. It may be a while before we see it, though.

Remember how long Marklar took? Unless they are already working on it…

Dvorak is a Troll.

That is all.

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It’s the middle of EOH and it’s Friday.

WebTunes is very interesting. I worked on the UI, well, at least the buttons and the status display. I also figured out how to control Quicktime via Javascript. Add a little ajax, Python and sqlite and you get WebTunes!

How simple could it be?