A new digital-signage software is borning: spectaKle. Open source. Built on the grounds of KDE, Network Multimedia Middleware, PostgreSQL and Ruby.
There’s few information for now and no code to download, but visit us in a few months and you’ll see.
I am packaging Jahshaka for Debian unstable. I think the package will work with Ubuntu, I will try it tomorrow.
Jahshaka is a realtime editing and effects system.
I still have several things to mend (create a jahshaka-plugins package and proper listing when dpkg’ing -L), but the package works OK right now.
I will be at the aKademy 2005, the KDE Developers and Users Conference. This year it will be held in Málaga (Spain) and I will be there from Thursday (26th) to Sunday (29th).
Every two or three days, I receive an e-mail from someone asking when the next version of the Javascript Browser Sniffer will be released and it’s beginning to be annoying, because it makes me feel lazy or something like.
So what am I going to do?
I am developing jsbrwsniff in my free time. Sure, it began as a project for the company I work for, but later it was released as open source and since then I work on it only in my free time. Yes, I know, it’s already been almost one year since the latest version. The explanation is very simple: my free time is scarce and I have lots of interests.
Now the good news: the next version is almost here, most probably at the end of May. What’s new? Well, a lot of things! Here comes a sneak preview of the “what’s new”:
- New browsers (making a total of around 40)
- New bots (excuse me, I cannot remember the number now)
- Lots of new plugins are detected (Acrobat Reader, Windows Media, Real Player, QuickTime, Java, SVG…)
- Will be enclosed in an object to avoid namespace conflicts (per request)
- PHP script to create your own jsbrwsniff, supporting exactly the browsers you want, the bots you want and the plugins you want. This is still under development, but I think it will be ready very soon.
The rationale here is very simple: either just wait for me to have some free time to implement all this stuff, or pay me (my company) to do it. I will be very pleased.
Today they arrived, after two weeks crossing the ocean: Code Complete, 2nd Edition and Programming Ruby, The Pragmatic Programmers Guide 2nd Edition.
I have really big expectations from Code Complete, everybody keeps saying it’s a wonderful book and McConnell is a genius of software development management. Hope to learn at least 10% what he knows 🙂
I also have big expectations from Ruby, but not because of the language per se but because of Ruby on Rails. If everything goes fine, in a few weeks I will be leading a very big project where I will need to develop a web application really fast, and RoR seems to be the right choice here. I tried Subway (it uses Python, a language I am more familiar with), but it just does not compare to RoR, maybe in a few years.
These books didn’t came alone, they were in good company: What do you care what other people think? by Richard P. Feynman, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track: The Letters Of Richard P. Feynman and The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene (yes, I know it’s in Spanish, but it’s soooo expensive in Spanish!)
My first contribution to the KDE project, specifically, to KOffice
CVS commit by mlaurent:
Apply patch from Pau Garcia i Quiles <pgquiles AT elpauer DOT org> (Improve create html slideshow)
Just add a special text when time between slide == 0 (Disable)
CCMAIL: Pau Garcia i Quiles <pgquiles AT elpauer DOT org>
M +200 -83 webpresentation.cc
M +23 -6 webpresentation.h
ed on March 18th, 2005. I don’t know why it doesn’t show in the KDE CVS Digest
Javascript Browser Sniffer 0.5 released
The Javascript Browser Sniffer is a Javascript library for identifying which browser and operating system is the visitor using, including the version number. It also detects bots and the Flash plugin.
Currently, jsbrwsniff identifies 30 browsers, 14 browser engines, 25 operating sytems and 6 bots, comprising more than 99% of the visits to any site and making it far more powerful than the Mozilla javascript sniffer.
Most remarkable hits in this new version 0.5 are working at server-side (with ASP, for instance) and the long-awaited Flash plugin detection.
You can download it at http://jsbrwsniff.sf.net. It’s free under the LGPL license.
There’s a truly interesting discussion about off-shoring software development at Joel Spolsky‘s site: Ask Joel: Offshoring
JavaScript Browser Sniffer, or simply jsbrwsniff, is a browser identifier written in JavaScript (EcmaScript) and released under the LGPL license.
It will tell which browser, version and operating system you (the visitor) are using (it’s like phpsniff, but in JavaScript.
It’s developed by me (Pau Garcia i Quiles).
Do you know what DotNet is? Well, it was hard to me, but I finally cope with the idea.
But, do you know what Dotnet is useful for? What’s new in DotNet? What does DotNet have that I couldn’t have done with existing technologies?
This is a great question, and here is the answer: NOTHING. DotNet brings nothing new to the Internet. I’ll post here an (extensive) collection of links when I have time to. For now, read what Joel Spolsky (a former Microsoft employee, responsible for Visual BASIC for Applications and part of the Excel team) thinks. There’s also the answer of an anonymous Microsoft employee (part a of the actual Passport team).
Yep, even MS doesn’t know what DotNet is and does.