• the entire screen: Command-Shift-3
• region of the screen: Command-Shift-4; Then click and drag the cursor to mark the area you want to capture.

The files are normally saved as Picture-* on the Desktop.

Further reading: MacDevCenter about more fancy capturing using timers, etc.

In the next few years, venture capital funds will find themselves squeezed from four directions. They’re already stuck with a seller’s market, because of the huge amounts they raised at the end of the Bubble and still haven’t invested. This by itself is not the end of the world. In fact, it’s just a more extreme version of the norm in the VC business: too much money chasing too few deals.

Unfortunately, those few deals now want less and less money, because it’s getting so cheap to start a startup. The four causes: open source, which makes software free; Moore’s law, which makes hardware geometrically closer to free; the Web, which makes promotion free if you’re good; and better languages, which make development a lot cheaper.

To get from the local max to the big max one has to have the guts to go through the pain of point C.

GoboLinux is an alternative Linux distribution which redefines the entire filesystem hierarchy.

GoboLinux is a Linux distribution that breaks with the historical Unix directory hierarchy. Basically, this means that there are no directories such as /usr and /etc. The main idea of the alternative hierarchy is to store all files belonging to an application in its own separate subtree; therefore we have directories such as /Programs/GCC/2.95.3/lib.

To allow the system to find these files, they are logically grouped in directories such as /System/Links/Executables, which, you guessed it, contains symbolic links to all executable files inside the Programs hierarchy.

To maintain backwards compatibility with traditional Unix/Linux apps, there are symbolic links that mimic the Unix tree, such as "/usr/bin -> /System/Links/Executables", and "/sbin -> /System/Links/Executables" (this example shows that arbitrary differentiations between files of the same category were also removed).

They smoke and nobody cares whether an allergic or asthmatic person is near. They do not even have mercy to their own babies!

Berlin was a good surprise sofar. Some of the biggest restaurants offer non smoking areas. Today at the Reichstag they had these nice logos plastered on the way to roof.

 Road Engine

 Patent No. 549,160

 Inventor: George Selden, Rochester, New York

 Issued: November 5, 1895

This patent represents a forgotten episode in the history of the automobile. The question of who invented the motor car is an open one - Ford, Daimler, Duryea, Cugnot all lay claim to the title of "Father of the Automobile" - but you will seldom hear the name of patent attorney George Selden of Rochester, New York, mentioned.

Selden squeezed the fledgling industry for royalties on every car produced until he was stopped. Who stopped him? Henry Ford. How? A court patent fight that made newspaper headlines nationwide. The outcome hinged on a curious court interpretation. The result was the greatest boon to industrial production the world had ever seen — the US automobile industry.

Note: This patent has a witnessing signature by George Eastman of Eastman Kodak.

Full story

Predicting the future!

After a long night of coding we are proud to announce Futurometer version 0. Now you can select for which keyword you want to see the plot.

To the birdflu page we added H5N1.

Stay tuned, more to come soon.

Announcing the birth of a bouncing plugin baby boy:

rails-engines.rubyforge.org/

… at which you can digest all manner of propaganda and rdoc.… well, docs. You might particularly want to watch the demo movie:

rails-engines.rubyforge.org/movies/engines_intro.mov

Any mirrors of this would be greatly appreciated! Below is the hype:

What are Rails Engines? Rails Engines are a way of dropping in whole chunks of functionality into your existing application without affecting any of your existing code. The could also be described as mini-applications, or vertical application slices - top-to-bottom units which provide full MVC coverage for a certain, specific application function.

Why do I want this? Rails Engines are advantageous over normal generators because the do not insert any code into the /app directory, but remain isolated within the plugins directory of your application. Furthermore, you can override individual controller actions and views/partials within your application as needed, whilst leaving the original Engine files intact.

OK, I need an example As an example, the Login Engine (heavily based on the Salted Login Generator, all kudos to those guys) provides a full user login subsystem, including:

• controllers to manage user accounts;
• helpers for you to interact with account information from other

parts of your application;

• the model objects and schemas to create the required tables;
• stylesheets and javascript files to enhance the views;
• and any other library files required.

How do I get such devilry? Engines can be distributed using the same mechanisms as regular Rails lugins (since to the Rails plugin system they appear to be almost the same thing). If you are developing engines yourself for use across multiple projects, linking them as svn externals allows seamless pdating of bugfixes across multiple applications.

The Rails Engines plugin and all other engines should be listed on the Plugins page in the wiki, so that the bleeding-edge script/plugin command can be used to install them painlessly.

Currently they are hosted on the OpenSVN servers at opensvn.csie.org/rails_engines/plugins, although a more permanent home would be make me very very happy.… </beg>

wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/Plugins

AJAX SUPPORT

Ajax is the term that describes a set of web development techniques for creating interactive web applications. One of the key ingredients is the JavaScript object XmlHttpRequest. Rico provides a very simple interface for registering Ajax request handlers as well as HTML elements or JavaScript objects as Ajax response objects. Multiple elements and/or objects may be updated as the result of one Ajax request. DRAG AND DROP

Desktop applications have long used drag and drop in their interfaces to simplify user interaction. Rico provides one of the simplest interfaces for enabling your web application to support drag and drop. Just register any HTML element or JavaScript object as a draggable and any other HTML element or JavaScript object as a drop zone and Rico handles the rest. CINEMATIC EFFECTS

When actions are no longer occurring just at the page level but within the page itself, more clues are required to clue the user on what has transpired. Cinematic effects such as scaling and smooth sliding transitions can communicate change in richer ways than traditional web applications have explored before. Rico provides several cinematic effects as well as some simple visual style effects in a very simple interface.

BEHAVIORS

Take some raw HTML and sprinkle in some behaviors and what do you get? Well in Rico you can get an Accordion component like those found in Macromedia Flex and Laszlo. Just nest some DIVs and with one line of JavaScript turn your div panels into an accordion. And the latest behavior is the LiveGrid. LiveGrid allows you to connect an Html table up to a stream of Ajax responses. Ajax requests are automatically called during table scrolling. The result is now Html tables can hold an unlimited amount of data scrolled into view on the fly as needed! More behaviors are planned!

I especially liked the quote of the week:

 |> Hmm, how many of you have had Matz in your car? :D
 |> Myself, Eric, some others...

 |Does a rental count?

 Where was rental Matz available?  I'd like one.

                                                         matz.

     Euruko Video Productions

     proudly present

     the European blockbuster

     of this year's

     Halloween night:

     http://futurometer.com/320x240x15fps/

link

I have seldom seen common sense strategy. Most companies rely on luck and have close to no strategy, or they go for the lunatic strategy.

Looks like Oracle is feeling the pressure from the free DBs like Postgres and MySQL.

From the Oracle webpage: Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) is an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base that’s free to develop, deploy, and distribute.

Link.

Looks like the maximum DB size is 4GB and it uses only one processor and at most one GB RAM.

Having a free Oracle DB is good for the projects where one is forced to use an Oracle DB.

Enjoy the humor :-)

 ---- Forwarded Usenet-message ----
 From: "Pascal Costanza" <pc@p-cos.net>
 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
 Subject: Re: Lisp Logo Madness!
 Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 00:21:40 +0200
 URL: news://<3sfmjlFnv7dfU1@individual.net>

 drewc wrote:
 > Alan Crowe wrote:
 >
 >> drcode@gmail.com writes:
 >>
 >>> I have built a logo set that I hope can fill this void.
 >>> There's several logos in different shapes and styles all built around a
 >>> central design.
 >>>
 >>> http://www.lisperati.com/logo.html
 >>
 >> The creature is very cute, but I think he should have a
 >> fifth leg, to match having five eyes.
 >>
 >> Alan Crowe
 >> small rock
 >> 93 million miles out
 >  This is a popular newbie request. In Common Life is is trivial add such a
 leg, and if you look around it has been done before. While i might agree
 that it is a useful feature, it's not worth revising the standard simply
 because the legs and eyes don't match.

 It's actually an advantage that the numbers of eyes and legs don't match
 because this allows you to infer from just partial information what you
 are dealing with. So, say, you see the number 4 mentioned in your
 program source, you will immediately realize that this is about the
 legs. Vice versa, if you see the number 5, you know that this is about
 the eyes.

 Schemers think that it is an advantage that their language has exactly
 one leg and exactly one eye, and they claim that a hygienic organ system
 can help you disambiguate the possible confusions arising from this. So
 when you see a 1 mentioned, the organ system can infer from the lexical
 scope whether it is a leg or an eye. However, I think this just appeals
 to some weird mathematical aesthetics. The 4-legs-5-eyes system has been
 around for nearly half a decade now, and noone in the Lisp community
 really has ever had any problems with that.

 > You must be a troll.

 Don't be so harsh. There is a whole chapter in Peter Seibel's "Practical
 Common Life" in which the 4-legs-5-eyes system is explained, so it seems
 to be a real problem for newbies - at least for those coming from other
 languages.

  Pascal

 But now executives at Scientigo, a small software maker based in
 Charlotte, NC, say the company owns two U.S. patents (No. 5,842,213 and
 No. 6,393,426), that cover one of the fundamental concepts behind XML: the
 idea of packaging data in a self-defining format that allows it to be
 correctly displayed wherever it travels.

The newest on-line resource for serious Ruby information has gone live.

Ruby Code & Style, an on-line magazine from Artima, has just published issue #1.

Check out the names on the advisory board. It’s a Who’s Who of everybody who’s anybody in the Ruby world.

The premiere issue has three outstanding articles:

First up, Jack Herrington, author of Code Generation in Action (Manning, 2002) and Podcasting Hacks (O’Reilly, 2005), has written Modular Architectures with Ruby

Next, Austin Ziegler gives us Creating Printable Documents with Ruby

And there’s a reprint of Ara Howard’s article, Linux Clustering with Ruby Queue: Small is Beautiful, which first appeared in Linux Journal but deserves repeat attention

A big thanks to the advisory board, and especial to Bill Venners for starting this whole thing.