Quote

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
- Krishnamurti

Google discriminating - Google only wants girl geeks?

Official Google Australia Blog: Calling all geek girls
I noticed, when searching for job opportunities with Google recently, that two scholarships are available in Australia - but they are both for women only. There is the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship, which was established "to honour the legacy of Anita Borg and her efforts to encourage women to pursue careers in computer science and technology," and the Global Community Scholarship for the Grace Hopper Conference.

Now I don't have anything against helping women into technology, and I think it is important to have women in key positions in this industry, but it is dissapointing for me to see that any men who might need some help are left stranded. Today we're seeing too much "reverse-discrimination", where not only are the women given a "fair go", but they're even given more of a go than the men. I think it's time to level the field a bit, and give everyone an equal oppurtunity. Helping girls get into IT is a great idea, and we should see more of it, but without ignoring the guys either.

KDE 4.1 looking promising

KDE 4.1 alpha 1 was released yesterday. The adoption of Qt 4.4 will bring some significant new features to the Plasma desktop shell, but the bumpy transition has made this release very fragile. Ars looks at alpha 1 and the impressive feature set that is being developed for the final 4.1 release, scheduled for July.

Adobe’s Open Screen Project: Write Once, Flash Everywhere

Adobe is making a big play to make Flash the de facto viewing environment not only for Web apps on your PC, but also on your mobile phone, your TV, and any other screen you can think of. It is announcing the Open Screen Project to make it easier to develop applications across devices—using Flash, of course.

In many ways this effort is a counterweight to what we are seeing with Adobe Air or Google Gears, which are efforts to take browser-based apps offline. With Mesh, Microsoft is in effect reasserting the primacy of client-based applications. . . . Developers can customize their apps for whatever device they originally reside on—whether it is a PC, a smartphone, or a set-top box—and then Webify them by syncing them to other applications across the Web. The more competition we get for ways to bridge applications across devices and screens, the more likely that we'll actually start to see some of our favorite Web apps on something other than our laptops.

Source: TechCrunch

Can we rescue OLPC from Windows?

FSF president Richard Stallman calls on Negroponte and the OLPC project leadership to reject overtures by Microsoft and recognize the importance of free software to its core educational mission. RMS has just started using one as his main machine.

New Project

I'm currently working on a big project, which has the potential to grow into a very profitable free service if given enought time. I'm working in conjunction with affiliatejunction to offer...... well, I won't spoil the surprise by telling you now! You'll have to wait and see. :) Hopefully the "beta" will be ready by next week, so keep posted for updates soon.

AppEngine Apps

I've made my first AppEngine apps now. I plan to do a few more, but for now, here are the URLs:

pi.appspot.com
http-get.appspot.com

I've got a Google AppEngine Account!

Yes, I've finally got it. After waiting 40 minutes, I got my first Google AppEngine Account. But unfortunately I don't have any time to test it here and now. All I had time to do first up was find their first broken link: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/tools/configuringanapp.html. Try it - they seem to have made at least one mistake!

What languages are supported by Google App Engine?

What languages are supported by Google App Engine?

Currently, Google App Engine allows you to write your applications with Python 2.5. For security reasons, some Python modules written in C are disabled in our system. Also, since Google App Engine doesn't support writing to disk, some libraries that support this and other functionalities are only partially enabled. Our developer documentation gives a good overview of the Python runtime environment. A description and full reference of Python libraries that are disabled or partially disabled can be found here.

Additionally, your website templates can include Javascript along with your HTML. Among other things, this allows you to write webservices that make use of Ajax web development techniques.

From the Google FAQ

Google AppEngine

What is Google AppEngine?
How to get a Google AppEngine Account
Google AppEngine Accounts giveaways
Free Google AppEngine Account
Account details: username and password for a Google AppEngine Account
Date and Time of Google AppEngine release account register

Do these words make you excited? They do for me. Here's why.

Google just launched a new service, Google AppEngine. Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users.
Here is the official announcement:

Today we’re announcing a preview release of Google App Engine, an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure. The goal is to make it easier for web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance.

Leveraging Google App Engine, developers can:

• Write code once and deploy. Provisioning and configuring multiple machines for web serving and data storage can be expensive and time consuming. Google App Engine makes it easier to deploy web applications by dynamically providing computing resources as they are needed. Developers write the code, and Google App Engine takes care of the rest.
• Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves rearchitecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google’s scalable infrastructure.
• Easily integrate with other Google services. It’s unnecessary and inefficient for developers to write components like authentication and e-mail from scratch for each new application. Developers using Google App Engine can make use of built-in components and Google’s broader library of APIs that provide plug-and-play functionality for simple but important features.

I'm still waiting - it's apparently not release time in America yet, so I've been put on the waiting list. I can't believe that 10K accounts have gone in such a short time, so I'll still hope that it's not release time yet!

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008: First Impressions

Well, I tried out VS 9 today. Microsoft just released this new tool, with over 250 new features including inline SQL queries. But I didn't have a very good first impression: it crashed upon creating a WPF project! I'm running it on Vista, so there really shouldn't be any reason. Well, back to my comfortable MonoDevelop!

Blogger in Draft: New feature: Scheduled Posts

Blogger in Draft: New feature: Scheduled Posts

Finally! This is exactly what I have been waiting for. Now I can schedule posts like in Wordpress. This is what Blogger needed to keep me!

KDE4 Released!

Well, I'm a bit late with this one, but KDE 4.0.0 has now been officially released. Right now I'm trying to get it installed, but it seems that the openSuSE download mirrors are down or something. I can't download the ISO.

Anyway, I'm trying to download KDE4 from an FTP repo, so hopefully I'll get to see it soon..... :)

KDE 4.0.0 Tagged Ready for Release!

Today KDE 4.0 was officially tagged for release. Now the tarballs will be prepared, and pre-released to the big distros. In about a week (next Friday to be precise) the announcement will be made to the public and the tarballs and packages will be released. But I'm going to see if I can get hold of the svn version first...... ;)

Goodbye, Netscape.

AOL is officially discontinuing Netscape. I'm sad to see it go, as I was one of the oldies who used it before Firefox and Mozilla, but it's the logical move as it's hardly ever used now.

Here's hailing the original web browser, from the ashes of which emerged Firefox!