the life and times of a code monkey
I like…
I’ve heard some great things about the tiny little eeePC, but this is the best thing I’ve heard so far: it can be a Mac. Twitterer Gregory Cohen has pictures on Picasa of his completed eeeMac, an eeePC transformed (perhaps in similar fashion to this previous attempt — details please, Gregory) into an OS X-running ultraportable, complete with a tiny little lit Apple logo on the back.
via TUAW
I’ve only done user-agent string sniffing once and I remember it gave me a headache… This post explains why it gave me a headache! 
And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded.
via Daring Fireball
Looks like KDE apps just got a whole lot more appealing to Gnome users. I like a lot of KDE apps (Kate being a particularly cool editor when I’m on the Linux box), but I just never used to use them much as they looked too out of place with the rest of my Gnome desktop (yeah, I guess I’m a GUI snob…) - this will most likely change that!
QGtkStyle made it’s way into the Qt snapshots this week, meaning it will become part of the Qt 4.5 release. Technical users can already compile and use it on their own desktop, but once Qt 4.5 is out it will simply replace Cleanlooks as the default application style Qt uses on GNOME desktops.
An interesting article over at Wired discussing a recent study into how kids are using their brains and scientific reasoning to beat video games…
One of the reasons kids get bored by science is that too many teachers present it as a fusty collection of facts for memorization. This is precisely wrong. Science isn’t about facts. It’s about the quest for facts — the scientific method, the process by which we hash through confusing thickets of ignorance. It’s dynamic, argumentative, collaborative, competitive, filled with flashes of crazy excitement and hours of drudgework, and driven by ego: Our desire to be the one who figures it out, at least for now. It’s dramatic and nutty and fun.
And it’s pretty much how kids already approach the games they love. They’re already scientists; they already know the value of the scientific method. Teachers just need to talk to them in their language, so that the kids can begin to understand the joy of puzzling through the offline, “real” world too.
via Daring Fireball
It’s got friggin’ Unity for Linux!!! This looks good…
The VMWare team has just released the second beta for VMWare Fusion 2.0, the company’s popular virtualization program for the Mac.
The new beta adds a TON of new features, as the video above demonstrates. I got a chance to talk to VMWare today about the new beta and it is HOT. I’ll be posting a more in-depth overview tomorrow, but until then, here are some of the highlights:
- Unity 2.0 - The newest version of Fusion is really focused on better Windows-Mac integration. You can now launch Windows programs from the dock or access Mac programs from within your virtual machine. You can also link folders like Documents, Pictures and Music on your virtual machine with those folders on your Mac.
- Multiple Snapshots VMWare has worked really hard to bring a Time Machine-like ease to backing up and protecting your virtual machine. You can now designate how often you want to take full system snapshots of your VM, whether once an hour, once a day or once a week, and how many copies you want to keep.
- Better Video and Graphics Graphics and shading support has been improved for Macs that have higher-end graphics cards, and even integrated Macs can now play 1080p HD video in virtual machines with considerably less CPU overhead.
- Support for more client OSs, including Leopard Server You can now run Leopard Server as a VM in OS X 10.4 and 10.5, even on client machines (virtualizing Mac OS X client is blocked by Apple’s license terms). Support for the latest version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) is also available right out of the box with Unity integration. Power users can now designate up to four virtual CPUs per virtual machine, which is great for anyone wanting to take an XServe or Mac Pro to the next level.
VMWare Fusion 2.0 beta 2 is available for Intel Macs running OS X 10.4 or OS X 10.5. New users can try the beta for free and the upgrade path (including future betas and the full version of Fusion 2.0) is free for all existing Fusion 1.0 customers.
via TUAW
Looks like people better get playing the original Gears leading up to November!!! (I know I will be… 
)
Gears of War 2 will feature ‘linked Achievements,’ meaning that Achievements earned in the original Gears will help unlock bonuses in the sequel.
Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski took the stage at Comic-Con to demonstrate to a live audience the E3 Sinkhole level and describe a new “linked achievements” feature for Gears 2 where achievements unlocked in the first Gears game would open features in the upcoming sequel.
He offered three examples of how the system would work:
- Complete Act One in Gears Of War and receive a playable Anthony Carmine in Gears of War 2
- Find 10 COG tags in Gears Of War and get Minh Young Kim in Gears of War 2
- Kill Raam in Gears Of War and earn a playable Raam in Gears of War 2
Questions such as whether all Gears of Wars achievements will be linked to the sequel and what other goodies can be grabbed besides characters won’t be answered until closer to the game’s November 7 release.
via The Escapist
The BBC has announced that it is working on a successor to Tomorrow’s World. This was always one of my favourite shows as a child, (yeah, I know I’m a nerd ), and I’m glad to see something like this making a return. We need some form of popular science show on TV, otherwise the vast majority of people will become ignorant of even the basics of science - but that’s a rant for another day…
Just a month after Sir David Attenborough said it was “very, very sad” that Tomorrow’s World had been axed - five years ago - the BBC has today revealed it is making a “new popular science format for the early evening” on BBC1.
A new science show is one of the BBC’s top priorities for BBC1 over the next year, according to its annual statements of programme policy for all its TV, radio and online services, published today. The SOPPs lay out the corporation’s programming plans for the year to the end of March 2009.
via The Guardian
A great little command-line tool for Leopard:
osx-trashmanipulates the Mac OS X trash from the command line, just like the Finder does. It uses AppleScript via Scripting Bridge on top of to communicate with the Finder. You can move files to the trash, empty the trash, and list items currently in the trash.
That’s it, I REALLY want an iPhone now…
You don’t need Steve Jobs’ permission to watch TV on your iPhone any more. And you don’t need to pay the cable company twice. A native Orb client for the iPhone and iPod Touch popped up on the installer networks overnight, and Orb confirms that it’s official.
The client software allows you to watch live TV on an iPhone or Touch wherever you are, in addition to your music. You’ll need a TV card or adaptor for your PC, of course, to get the live TV. So provided you have an internet connection, there’s no need to perform DIY transcoding using software such as Visual Hub. The client will even transcode the video stream nicely for 2.75G Edge networks. Orb does in software what Sling Media does in hardware.
Very good…
