Software, Business, and Life
Mar 31 2006
For a project we have going at Oasis Digital, we have explored various libraries for creating video DVDs from computer-generated content until program/script control. There are quite a few ways to do this; one that is appealing for a command-line junkie is the combination of ffmpeg, dvdauthor, and mkisofs. It took considerable research to figure [...]
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Mar 29 2006
Last night at StlRuby.org the question came up of how to contruct GUIs with Ruby. I mentioned that I think there is a lot to be gained by using the high performance graphics hardware APIs, which are mostly used for games, in business applications. This of course is not all that remarkable, since Java Swing [...]
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Mar 27 2006
Jonathan Goodyear‘s ASPSOFT just announced Email2Face, a public database mapping email addresses to photos. This strikes me as a good and useful idea. If it gets some traction, it would be nice to have an email client plugin to automatically retrieve them. http://www.email2face.com/ What I would really like to see is something with a similar [...]
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Mar 24 2006
We discovered today that by default, Rhino (the Mozilla project’s Java-based JavaScript interpreter) does not work inside of a Web-Start-launched application; it fails with a permission error due to loading of dynamically created classes. After a few minutes of furious searching, it seems that there are surprisingly few mentions of this issue, which affects lots [...]
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Mar 23 2006
I just read today (wow, where have I been?) about the issue with Win32 binaries under the (delayed) Vista version of Windows – most notably, that Win32 binaries will need to be signed, otherwise they will provide a, er, “downlevel” user experience. A proposed workaround is to code to another runtime environment (.NET, Java, Ruby, [...]
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Mar 21 2006
Yesterday I mentioned a talk by Mike Feathers about API design. One of the topic of API wrapping, which we do frequently here at Oasis Digital, for a variety of reasons. By coincidence, today the question came up of whether we should wrap the API of Jemmy, a Swing GUI testing tool. Our natural inclination [...]
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