Kerberos' Web

I found this on a friend’s twitter posting:

An Interview With Wolfram|Alpha.

In case you live under a rock, Wolfram|Alpha is

[...] a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.

So basically you ask it normal questions and it tries to give you a real answer (unlike a search engine that just spits links to other Web pages at you). The above ‘conversation’ is amusing and a little frightening. Is Wolfram|Alpha turning into an intelligent computer? Probably not. For me, however, it raises the question what intelligence is &emdash; isn’t it the ability to process a wide variety of knowledge? I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years it can successfully pass the Turing Test.

Taken together with my post about augmented reality, I am sure we are in for a very exciting decade.

Augmented Reality – for now it’s mostly a buzzword – but I believe in a few years augmented reality will fundamentally alter the way we interact with almost every aspect of our lives: restaurants (image ordering off an interactive menu), shopping, evaluating businesses, furniture assembly, repairs, military operations, games and entertainment, and probably even sexuality (we all know that pornography leads more technology revolutions).

I recently was made aware of this interesting article and compilation of YouTube Videos about augmented reality: 16 Top Augmented Reality Business Models. Most of this stuff ranges from amazing (if you are geeky like me) to pretty silly – the last video is particularly frightening.

Microsoft in particular has taken up the idea in the entertainment world with it’s upcoming Project Natal. Microsoft describes it like this:

Introducing Project Natal, a revolutionary new way to play: no controller required. See a ball? Kick it, hit it, trap it or catch it. If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips or speak you and your friends can jump into the fun — the only experience needed is life experience.

That description barely does it justice; the promotional videos are truly mind blowing. Of course they are just that – promotional videos. The first generation augmented experience on XBox 360 will certainly be far less glamorous. Nonetheless, this will shape our lives in the next decades in ways we cannot even imagine.

Augmented reality is also coming to the iPhone, with capabilities provided to apps by the Layar reality browser platform. I presume Yelp’s iPhone app uses Layar’s API for its augmented reality implementation.

P.S. Another interesting article about augmented reality and Yelp’s iPhone app: Augmented Reality Is Both a Fad and the Future — Here’s Why

Very interesting post, describing how to use color replacement to get favicons appear more readable at tiny sizes (in particular the favicon size of 16 x 16 pixels):

Modern pixel art //case: YouTube

Here is a list of some useful design tools:

Typography

• 14 Best Online Typography Tools for Web Designers

In-browser debugging

Besides the obvious reference to Firebug for Firefox, these can be useful:

• XRay bookmarklet

Color

• ColorBlender
• ColourLovers
• ColorSchemer

As part of my work, I have looked at various ways to do Web templates. Here is the overview of some and my observations:

RapidWeaver

RapidWeaver has been around for a long time. It’s Mac only and not a bad tool overall. We use it for some of our internal pages that we had to put up quickly. It certainly has some oddities but is overall pretty nice. It comes with a decent number of templates but most of them are uninspired. But at least it’s not very bloated and the HTML is overall fairly clean and works (for the most part) in IE 6. Its templates can be modified with a little effort and new ones created from them. It creates some odd URL structures with its folders though.

Sandvox

Boy is Karelia unlucky. Anyone remember Watson and how Apple came after them with Sherlock? Well, it happened again with Sandvox. Overall it’s a nice tool. Probably the easiest to use of the bunch. I don’t remember how hard the templates were to modify, but it wasn’t as flexible as RapidWeaver for what we wanted, so we had to pass.

Apple iWeb ‘09

Apple’s iWeb is the prettiest of the software tools and has some gorgeous templates. It’s also really flexible in positioning and darn easy to use. Those are the good points. However, templates are limited. If you want to modify them or create new ones, be warned. It’s about as difficult as it gets – down to editing .plist files. It has nice plugins but the add some horrible JavaScript all over your site. The sites also choke a lot in IE 6 (sadly still a popular browser).

Artisteer

Artisteer is a fascinating piece of software. A Windows application that lets you create Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal templates. We use Drupal extensively, so we wanted to give it a try. It’s fairly powerful and allows you to quickly build some pretty fancy designs. However, the code is sometimes a bit bloated (to be expected from an automated tool) and we had some issues with IE 6. As of the day of this post, the design of one of our sites, Ataxi.ro, was inspired by an Artisteer template.

RV Sitebuilder

It’s a f****** piece of ****. A relic of old times, I have nothing good to say about it. Difficult to use, ugly templates, horrid results. Use at your own risk. Of course, that’s just my opinion.

Dream Template

We tried a lot of their templates and were not happy with them. Most templates are completely table based, no <div> to be found. Small modifications break the table layout; flash templates often don’t come with the sources, so they cannot be changed: you can just change the html pages the flash menus point to. Overall we were not satisfied.

Template World

We liked this site better than Dream Template. They still have a lot of table based template, but also a good number of <div>-based ones as well. Flash templates come with sources, so they can be modified fairly well. Still not ideal but the best we found so far for the limited amount of money.

A useful tool for programmers, designers and power users alike that I came across the other day (credit goes to Mark Boulton in his booklet Five Simple Steps – A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web) is DropBox.
In their own words, “Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they’ll be instantly available on any of your other computers that you’ve installed Dropbox on (Windows, Mac, and Linux too!) Because a copy of your files are stored on Dropbox’s secure servers, you can also access them from any computer or mobile device using the Dropbox website.”

It’s a simple yet immensely useful tool. Forget about emailing or IMing files around. No more FTP. Setup the dropbox on all the computers you want to share the files and they instantly sync between them, with basic version control (it’s not SVN but should be good for most casual use) and backup (via Amazon S3). It works native in your file browser, just as if it were a local folder. Changes sync in the background automatically — it works pretty quickly. The easiest way to share files that I have found to date.

Welcome to my blog!  Yes, it’s time.

I had been fighting it until now but I finally jumped on the bandwagon.  I mostly hope you find what I have to say useful and occasionally entertaining.  This blog focuses mostly on technology, with a strong emphasis on Web development.  I may occasionally rant about some personal pet peeves of mine as well.

So sit back, relax and enjoy the show!