Alex Le’s Blog

“Microsoft is like Coke,” Howe told NewsFactor. “It”s a secret formula, all the money is from distribution, and their goal is to get Coke everywhere. Open source is like selling water. There are water companies like Perrier and Poland Spring, but you”re competing with something that”s free.
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/17137.html

Interesting analogies … I do enjoy the microsoft “coke” by the way. Mac is … err … a mac, nothing special besides the candy-ui, and Linux is …err…. hosting/server linux. Still windows is the best for-everyone.

Devilsbrigade writes “The blog MusicThing is running an interesting interview with Andy Moorer. Mr. Moorer is the man who created the sound called Deep Note, now heard in every THX-enabled movie theatre. The interview is originally from last year, but the tech-heavy discussion is still a timeless analysis of a great sound.” From the article: “The score consists of a C program of about 20,000 lines of code. The output of this program is not the sound itself, but is the sequence of parameters that drives the oscillators on the ASP. That 20,000 lines of code produce about 250,000 lines of statements of the form “set frequency of oscillator X to Y Hertz. The oscillators were not simple - they had 1-pole smoothers on both amplitude and frequency. At the beginning, they form a cluster from 200 to 400 Hz. I randomly assigned and poked the frequencies so they drifted up and down in that range.”

http://slashdot.org/articles/06/04/21/1446244.shtml

Wow, never thought of that kind of complication of a sound. Tribals made music from skulls (fast skining of the victim, quick butcher-work, and voila, a drumming-skull) for years, so are we complicating things up? Indeed.

New services like Jot Live and Meebo are built with a style of data transmission that is neither traditional nor Ajax. Their brand of low-latency data transfer to the browser is unique, and it is becoming ever-more common. Lacking a better term, I’ve taken to calling this style of event-driven, server-push data streaming “Comet”. It doesn’t stand for anything, and I’m not sure that it should. There is much confusion about how these techniques work, and so using pre-existing definitions and names is as likely to get as much wrong as it would get right.

Defining Comet

For a new term to be useful, at a minimum we need some examples of the technology, a list of the problems being solved, and properties which distinguish it from other techniques.

– from a DojoToolkit Blog at http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/?p=545 http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/?p=545

So I was looking around at Newegg.com for a camera for my girl friend. I picked out a Sony 6mp camera, which was onsale for relatively cheap. I started reading the comments and 3 out of 3 feedbacks were left by women, 2 of whom are moms with little babies. I’m not being sexist here, but normally you go to sites like Newegg, you’d expect the shoppers to be, well, geeks, nerds, or techies. Women, still, in general are regarded technology-neutral, which means they do not care so much about the hottest and newest gadgets out there. However, we now have moms go shopping for cameras and actually leave comments on a good buy! Is this the new trend of online shopping since the .com burst in 2000?

Good for Newegg for successfully bringing customers from the other half of the population! This means that women now become more open to tech products and more confident in shopping for the gadget they want. To me, what I see is actually kids of my age (22 in October) and younger , e.i. the myspace.com generation, will be alot more open to technology. I can so see that girls having profiles on myspace.com surf to a site like newegg to buy the next cool tech toys and other things. I would say the rate of women-buyers will increase with time as this myspace generation grows up and got more money.

The final question is: what do you have to sell to the wonderful half of the world population, ONLINE? If you can answer that question, I’d like to speak with you some time soon.

Just my 2 cents.

So I decided to finish up the Edit-in-Place Joomla/Mambo component enhancement. I generalized my Hammond Dealer Locator component into this little plugin that can be used in any other Joomla or Mambo component. The release has been registered on Joomla’s Plugins site and is under approval. Here is the internal link to the page, Edit-in-Place about this enhancement.

You can download it and give it a shot. Documentation on how to implement this feature is included in the zip file!

Cheers!