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Ajax enabled PHP function reference.
Nikon to stop producing film cameras:
Following the success of our digital line-up over the last seven years, which has resulted in more than 95% of Nikon's UK business being within the digital area, Nikon Corporation has made the decision to focus management resources on digital cameras in place of film cameras. This decision will allow Nikon to continue to develop products that match the demands of an increasingly competitive market place....
[snip]
As a result of the new strategy Nikon will discontinue production of all lenses for large format cameras and enlarging lenses with sales of these products ceasing as soon as they run out of stock. This also applies to most of our film camera bodies, interchangeable manual focus lenses and related accessories. Although Nikon anticipates that the products will still be in retail distribution up to Summer 2006.
A couple of Mac things. Microsoft (bought and) released flip4mac as a quicktime plugin. This will let you play (most) .wmv files right in Quicktime. Previously I have suggested using VLC which still has advantages over Quicktime - full screen playback and no DVD region coding are the big ones - and I still recommend it, but it's nice to see this plugin. I'm guessing there will still be some issues with some wm3 encoded .wmv files but this should take care of most cases.
And Google finally released Google Earth for the Mac. Doesn't look like a Mac app, but it's so freaking cool who cares. Wow. It really wants more than an 867 mhz G4 though*.
* see next post
Wow. This is something I should have known: how google deals with underscores in URIs.
Another talk (.pdf here) about future unicode support in PHP. Nobody is making firm timeframe claims but this one says what I've heard before: maybe this year.
Unicode support will allow for PHP web apps to fully deal with non western characters. This seems pretty crucial if PHP is going to stay relevant. It's a hard problem though.
Looks like Amazon is adding author blogs linked from their bookstore pages:
The entries were part of a new program called Amazon Connect, begun late last month to enhance the connections between authors and their fans - and to sell more books - with author blogs and extended personal profile pages on the company's online bookstore site.This is the obvious commercial use of blogs. Forging relationships with people. These relationships then feed back positively into what you are trying to accomplish (changing people's minds, making money, etc...) I can't tell you how many people I have tried to talk into blogging who just can't get past the "but how will I make money off my blog?" stage. But you shouldn't think about it as a revenue generator; instead it's more like a cheaper and potentially much more effective way to advertise. It baffles me that it took Amazon this long.
And what the heck is Apple doing? They have the iTunes music store - by far the most popular way to buy music on line - and yet they let MySpace.com completely eat their lunch in the music community space. I don't get it. I think they really missed on that one.
Computer history folk music, or too much time on their hands? Maybe both. Every OS Sucks. Mildly funny if you are a geek of a certain age.
A-ha! Or, I mean, AHAH. Keith Devens describes:
The idea is, it's basically Ajax, but instead of grabbing arbitrary XML and processing it on the client-side with Javascript or XSLT and inserting things into the DOM, you just grab bits of (X)HTML from the server and inject them directly into your page. So, the client side does much less logic and merely needs to say "replace the content in the element with this ID with the (X)HTML at this USlightly longer discussion here: AJAX vs. AHAH.
This makes a lot of sense to me. Since most AJAX applications (webpages?) seem to be constructed in such a way that the client (the javascript on the web page) and server parts are both under the control of the same designers, you don't really need the layer of abstraction provided by XML (over just pulling the blobs out of a database and wrapping them in HTML.) If the server didn't know how the client would format the data then the XML steps would be necessary. But does this ever happen with in AJAX setups? I like the simplicity of AHAH.
M.I.T. has put many video lectures on line under an open Creative Commons license (I think the plan is to put *everything* on line for free, but I don't know how close they are to that goal.) Here's one that looks interesting to me: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Video Lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman:
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs has been MIT's introductory pre-professional computer science subject since 1981. It emphasizes the role of computer languages as vehicles for expressing knowledge and it presents basic principles of abstraction and modularity, together with essential techniques for designing and implementing computer languages. This course has had a worldwide impact on computer science curricula over the past two decades. The accompanying textbook by Hal Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, and Julie Sussman is available for purchase from the MIT Press, which also provides a freely available on-line version of the complete textbook.
These twenty video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman are a complete presentation of the course, given in July 1986 for Hewlett-Packard employees, and professionally produced by Hewlett-Packard Television. The videos have been used extensively in corporate training at Hewlett-Packard and other companies, as well as at several universities and in MIT short courses for industry.