Flash based, allowing create simple structures like graphs, org-charts, system diagrams. Diagrams can be exported to XML and saved locally - or converted to JPG or PNG on-line. Nice Web2-ish look and feel.
See bubbl.us for more.
Wonderful thing about Firefox extensions is the autoupdate feature. Go to Tools->Extensions, select Find update and for all installed extensions you get the latest and greatest .... usually.
One extension where the update did not work was the Del.icio.us button for Firefox. I was happily using version 1.2 of the plugin and would never found out about the update, if I had not set the new workstation. The latest version 1.5.29 did not show in the updates. Which is too bad, because it is so much better ...
DHH is (obviously) David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Rails) and RIA (in this context) means Rich Internet Applications. And here is the quote:
I think there's always room for new ideas, but I don't think that the whole fuss that's currently going on about RIA, rich Internet applications, is justified. I think we've been through this cycle so many times before that it in some ways amazes me how history seems to be ignored. We went through this with Java applets, they were going to rule the Web. Everything was going to be in a Java applet. HTML and CSS is history. And Flash came around, and Flash started focusing on applications. Now Flash is going to rule the Web and HTML and so on is yesterday. Now, Silverlight, Apollo, JavaFX, they're all bidding to take over the JavaScript, HTML and CSS [spaces], and I just don't buy it. I don't buy that developers by and large are going to jump into a proprietary technology and replace what HTML and CSS has given them.
Found by accident - as usually - while searching for something completely different.
Visuwords - visual dictionary, showing semantic relations between words.
Universe by Jonathan Harris.
Wikisky - detailed online sky map, showing the positions & basic characteristics of space objects using a Google Maps like interface.
And two great videos: the 4 minutes video summary on what Web2 actually means and very funny presentation about PowerPoint presentations.
I found a handy T-SQL trick that helped to solve the following problem: during datawarehouse creation, we needed to consolidate multiple data sources from databases belonging to two generations of system: older one using int identity keys, the newer one, designed for replication and distributed data scenarios using GUID's as primary keys.
In the consolidated database, we needed to create single representation that would allow to store both new GUID based identities as well as old int-based keys. Direct conversion between UNIQUEIDENTIFIER type and int is not allowed. The following one liner will do the trick:
Even with having Wiki as the main documentation repository, not all documentation ends up in a Wiki. Some documentation needs to be managed as part of the source tree - e.g. Readme's, compilation instructions and similar. This information is usually either plain text or in some form of text processor format, mostly Microsoft Word compatible. Both have their selection of problems. Word documents are large, bloated, harder to version controlled and not readable in shell environment (try to cat or tail Word document :-)). The plain text format lacks visual structure and without headlines, bold/italic, font sizes etc is harder read.
"If it works, leave it alone — there's no need to understand it.
If it fails, try to fix it — there's no time to understand it."
"A one-question geek test. If you get the joke, you're a geek:
Seen on a California license plate on a VW Beetle: 'FEATURE'..."
— Joshua D. Wachs, Natural Intelligence Inc.
"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live." — Martin Golding.
After Adobe's Apollo and Microsoft's Silverlight, Sun has addes own version of scriptable, interactive platform named JavaFX. Unlike the previous three (Flash included), this is going to be Open Sourced - under the Microsoft's most hated license - GPL.
Now the race to replace Flash really becomes really interesting ...
I am working on the BI modules for automotive data-analytics application these days. Which means that I am doing quite a bit coding and using T-SQL and in addition to Visual Studio 2005, I use quite often the Sql Server Management Studio for SQL Server 2005. In theory, both tools should be based on the Visual Studio IDE code base. Which is maybe true, but there are many quite annoying differences.
Since I got through "Rails immersion", I keep seeing the implementations of the same idea everywhere. Latest find is Subsonic, which implements Active Records in .NET space. Rather than writing more, see this screencast.