Gadgetopia

The Linux Documentation Project: Lots of good resources here.

Fedora Project, sponsored by Red Hat "The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 ...

Project Ocean: Stanford University And Google: Interesting. ...Google has embarked on an ambitious secret effort known as Project Ocean, according to a person involved with the operation. With the cooperation of Stanford University, the company now plans to digitize the entire collection of the vast Stanford Library published before 1923, ...

Six Apart - Project Comet: It's vague like an Amway presentation, but the folks over there aren't dumb, so I'm sure it'll be huge. Project Comet will launch in early 2006 and will combine the publishing power of TypePad, the community aspects of LiveJournal and the years of insight garnered ...

Basecamp: Web-based Project Management...: I got a private invite to this, and I signed up for the free, single-project package. It seems solid. The interface is very clean and intuitive. Basecamp is a simple, hosted web-based service that lets you manage projects and quickly create client/project extranets. It lets you ...

Project Blackbox: This is the coolest thing in the history of the world. Ever. Expect to see one of these in my yard soon. After today, you'll never look at an ordinary shipping container quite the same way again. Project Blackbox is a prototype of the world's first virtualized datacenter--built ...

Project Rave: One reason Visual Basic has flourished like it has is because it's always been backed up by a first-rate IDE that has made programming so easy. Sun is hoping to do the same thing for Java with its new "Project Rave" line of tools. The idea is to ...

Here's something not that shocking: the same amount of time spent on different Web development activities can yield vastly different productive results. Put another way: you can spend two hours on Activity A or the same amount of time on Activity B. Does this mean they will both contribute equally ...

Basecamp: Web-based Project Management, Client Extranet, Project Site System: 39signals has finally released their online project management system. This has been in the works for years, it seems. Basecamp is a simple, hosted web-based service that lets designers manage projects and quickly create client/project extranets. It lets you and your ...

Project Aardvark: This is happening over at Fog Creek Software, the Spolsky joint in New York. I could only be so lucky. I can't wait for the film. Yes, it's true... there will be a filmmaker, Lerone Wilson of Boondoggle Films, working out of the Fog Creek office this summer ...

One of the things we constantly struggle with at Blend is capacity. I m very blessed to be able to say we have more work that we know what to do with. Every day, new deals just seem to fall from the sky. I hope that doesn t sound arrogant, but it s ...

What do you get when you mix eight surplus 15" LCD panels, two video cards, a PC, some lumber, paint and a big pile of cable? Check out the Virtual Window Project. "Where do you want to live today?" What if only your imagination limited what you could see outside ...

I've been involved with Web development work at my church for several years now. In that capacity, I've been confronted with (1) the huge need churches have for Internet development, and (2) the general inability of churches to pay for it. Good Web development is expensive, and churches have much ...

Sun Microsystems is releasing an early version of their Project Looking Glass desktop environment into the GPL. What if windows were translucent so that you could see the multiple windows you're working on at the same time? What if you could tack a note to yourself right on the Web ...

Earth's Artificial Ring: Project West Ford: I can't believe this actually happened. Harder to believe is that it worked. In May 1963, the US Air Force launched 480 million tiny copper needles that briefly created a ring encircling the entire globe. [...] The first attempt at remote communications using the ...

The Gutenberg Project: Gutenberg has been around since the Internet was very, very young the Web wasn t even born yet. It s an effort to catalog as many free books and texts as possible. Gutenberg has thousands of books from hundreds of authors; all in the public domain, all free. ...

Oceania The Atlantis Project: And it seemed so practical... The Atlantis Project, which proposed the creation of a floating sea city named Oceania, began in February '93, receiving nationwide publicity [...] The project ended due to lack of interest in April of 1994. The pictures are great.

Smooth Sailing Eludes NMCI: You think your intranet is complicated? The Navy and Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) project is three years old and has a budget of $3 billion. It was awarded to EDS of Plano, Texas. Here's how it's going... "Complicating the work has been the unexpected discovery of ...

PHP Collaboration Project: Zend has announced that they're developing a new framework and "environment" for PHP. [...] the initial focus is on two areas: the creation of an open source Zend PHP Framework and engagement with the Eclipse Foundation around PHP. Having a PHP IDE and framework will empower PHP ...

NetOffice - Online Project Management: It would appear that the excellent PHPCollab project has forked. NetOffice is a direct lift, from what I can tell. I snooped around for a while on both this site and the official PHPCollab site, but I can't find any reference to the other project ...

(No, this isn't a duplicate of the previous story different sort of Jobs). The KDE project has come up with a neat way to get new developers interested in contributing to KDE: Junior Jobs. The problem with starting to contribute to a big project like KDE is that the ...

The definitive heatmap: Click heatmaps are generally commercial and very expensive. Here's a free one using Ruby. I'd be very interested to hear how this works. It looks like it has the somewhat huge limitation of not working on sites that are center-aligned. I can see how that would be ...

The Sunbird Project - Standalone Calendar: Since they can't use "Firebird," Sunbird was the next best thing, I suppose. The Sunbird Project is a redesign of the Mozilla Calendar component. Our goal is to produce a cross platform standalone calendar application based on Mozilla's XUL user interface language. At the ...

Life at Google - The Microsoftie Perspective: Microsoft hired an ex-Google employee, pumped him for information, and is internally passing around this intel about how things really are at Google. The most depressing thing here is about Google s much-vaunted 20% Time which is the supposed 20% of your time you ...

The Drupal Association - The Drupal Project's New Non-Profit: Finally, Drupal gets a formal organization behind it. The Drupal Association exists to provide the logistical and financial foundation necessary to support the Drupal project's exponential growth and to provide the Drupal project with new possibilities regarding infrastructure, marketing and funding. ...

User Movie: 1K Project II by sMull: This video is something to behold. It's a clip of 1,000 cars racing at the same time in a game called Trackmania. It's one of the more amazing things I've ever seen on the Net. Trackmania is an interesting racing game because you ...

Donating $5,000 to .NET Open Source: Last year, Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror promised to done some money from his advertising to open-source projects. He followed through on that today with a $5,000 check to the ScrewTurn Wiki project. This is like one of those giant promotional checks you see ...

I announced The Joshua Project over two months ago, and I've been awfully quiet about it ever since. Well, I'm proud to announce that Joshua has just released its first Web site. Command Two is a prayer ministry focused on recruiting prayer supporters in community neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools. They ...

Q&A: Microsoft Accelerator Boosts Six Sigma Practices: Microsoft is pushing a set of add-ons for Office and Project that make the software play nice within a Six Sigma methodology framework. For instance: A lot of Six Sigma teams spend an inordinate amount of time creating Microsoft PowerPoint reports, such as ...

Taipei gets world's largest Wi-Fi grid: This makes that St. Louis plan look almost quaint by comparison. It's the love of this kind of connectivity that is driving Taipei city planners to build what they say will be the world's biggest "Wi-Fi" network, making cheap, wireless Internet access available almost ...

PHP-Freelancers : PHP Jobs and Projects for PHP Programmers: Go get yourself a job. Kind of like eLance for PHP developers. Post a project, bid on a project, etc.

Today, I come one step closer to realizing my dream of cruising to work in my hydrogen-powered Walking Forest Machine: "Current hydrogen storage methods are expensive and suffer from performance disadvantages but we've developed a range of magnesium alloys which has the potential to overcome these problems," said Professor Dahle. ...

Gamer buys $26,500 virtual land: At first, I thought this was the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. A 22-year-old gamer has spent $26,500 on an island that exists only in a computer role-playing game. [...] The land exists within the game Project Entropia, an RPG which allows thousands of ...

Unfolding Microsoft's secret site: It's not like Microsoft to be all secretive like Apple. A cryptic Web site that was set up by Microsoft but does not bear its name appears to hint that the company will reveal information about a new consumer product on Thursday. The site caused a ...

Interview - James Atkinson , Founder of phpBB: An interesting interview with the guy who started the phpBB project. It's a good look into how a successful open-source project is run. The biggest thing is to listen to your users. They drive your product forward and they help you support ...

Given the growing success of Firefox, a new Mozilla-based project code-named 'Lightning' may be worth keeping an eye on. Lightning is the working project name for an extension to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird. [...] Q. Is Lightning meant as a competitor to Outlook? A. With ...

The Cool Cam: This is a really fascinating story the development of European Air War by Microprose back in the late 90s. The project was doomed, until a developer ignored pressing bugs and built a new feature that saved the project. It almost seemed as though the execs were only ...

Making a video screen out of thin air: I've been waiting for someone to invent this for 20 years. "...in Hermosa Beach, California, a graduate student passes his hand through an image of a DNA strand produced apparently out of thin air by a modified video projector. 'This ...

I've recently become involved with a Wiki project. It's still under wraps but I have to say that I'm awfully smitten with the whole Wiki theory. Worth doing some research on this. I'll announce here when the project is released.

Google at work on desktop Linux: Is it just me, or is this mega wicked huge news? Google + Desktop OS = ?? Google has confirmed it is working on a desktop linux project called Goobuntu, but declined to supply further details, including what the project is for.

Baseline: Case Studies, Tools and Best Practices for Better Project and Process Management: I had never heard of Baseline before, but they seem to do a good job covering enterprise IT project management. Great content, and it appears to be 100% free (though ad-heavy).

The Blog Twinning Project: I shudder to think what Rob and Keith will twin this blog with. "The Blog Twinning Project asks people to tell it which blogs they consider to be similar, and tallies results. Pairs of blogs with lots of mutual votes are declared 'twinned.'"

In this world of remote teams and outsourcing, does face-to-face contact matter anymore? Does a face-to-face meeting with your team members or client increase your ability to work together and your effectiveness as a team? A few different things have gotten me thinking about this First, I m traveling to ...

An Australian company, EnviroMission Limited, is blasting forward with plans to build a totally new type of clean power generating facility. Their concept consists of a monstrous tube that reaches 1000 meters (that's 3280.84 feet) into the sky and is surrounded by a huge glass solar collector. The idea ...

5 Years of Distributed Proofreaders: Some good information from Teleread on the fifth anniverysary of Distributed Proofreading over at Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg now hosts more than 16,000 ebooks, but until recently that amount numbered in the hundreds. Part of the enormous growth was caused by a web application written by ...

The Muppet Matrix: This was the final project for a group of college students in a 3D modeling class. Kermit as Neo, Gonzo as Agent Smith, etc. The animation quality is about what you'd expect from a college project, but the whole idea is just a blast. Did you know ...

Boston s $14.8B Big Dig finally complete: I can t believe it s finally coming to an end. All that s left now are the lawsuits. Officially, Dec. 31 marks the end of the joint venture that teamed megaproject contractor Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff with the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority to build the dizzying array of underground ...

Project Gotham Racing 4: I am eagerly awaiting the release of Project Gotham Racing 4 for the XBox 360. In reading about it today, I found out about this feature. If logged on to Xbox Live, weather from The Weather Channel will be downloaded, allowing users to set in-game conditions ...

Password protect your blog: Good documentation on a long overdue hack. I've got a new project, let's call it Project X, and one of the things I needed to do was set up a password-protected blog on an existing installation of Movable Type. Everyone that has a user account in ...

China to promote own alternative to DVDs: Well, at least they're not disposable. Looking to compete on its own terms in the lucrative entertainment industry, China announced a government-funded project Tuesday to promote an alternative to DVDs and "attack the market share" of the increasingly global video format. The rollout ...

The ReactOS project released the first screenshot today of its Windows NT-compatible GUI that runs off of entirely open-source code. ReactOS is an Open Source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with Windows NT applications and drivers. If this project ever creates a system that's even ...

ogo: Home: I think this project is admirable and necessary, but I think they'll have a tough time getting any traction. I really wish them the best. The ogo project aims to clean up PHP, starting with fixing the inconsistent (and difficult to remember) function names. PHP needs clear naming ...

Wiki: Posted here three years ago today. How quaint. I've recently become involved with a Wiki project. It's still under wraps but I have to say that I'm awfully smitten with the whole Wiki theory. A lot has been said since then. The project, incidentally, was the Movable Type Wiki, ...

RadRails - A Ruby on Rails IDE: Looks interesting. I couldn't find much in the way of screenshots, though. There's a video, but it's about how to import a project, not about actually using the app. RadRails is an integrated development environment for the Ruby on Rails framework. The goal ...

Sun Embraces Open-Source Database: The only experience that I have with Berkeley DB is thought Movable Type, which uses it as its default data storage system. Odd that suddenly they would get a big contract with Sun. Good for them. "Sleepycat Software Inc. will announce on Wednesday that Sun, of ...

Waterfall 2006 - International Conference on Sequential Development: I'm totally going to this. Totally. You've always known a good waterfall-based process is the right way to develop software projects. Come to the Waterfall 2006 conference and see how a sequential development process can benefit your next project. Learn how slow, ...

Has 'haven' for questionable sites sunk?: There appears to be trouble in Sealand with the founders arguing about whether it's still...afloat (sorry, sorry). "A widely publicized project to transform a man-made platform in the English Channel into a 'safe haven' for controversial Web businesses has failed due to political, technical ...

While searching for a script today, I stumbled across an interesting site called Rent a Coder. The site serves as a meeting point between software buyers and software coders. Buyers place requests on the site for programming projects which they need done. Coders who are registered through the site can ...

Paramount/MTV Taking a Napster: What's stranger, that there's a Napster film in the works, or that it's going to be written by Alex Winter -- who you may remember as Bill (or "not Keanu"), From Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Paramount and MTV Films have given the greenlight to ...

Open Source Receives Royalties Boost: This is an awfully cool thing. Most of Packt's books are on open-source stuff, and a lot of them are on projects for which no other books have been written. Good to see them support the projects which provide them with subjects for their books. ...

iRobot - Robots for the Real World: iRobot is the company that makes the PackBot. Their site is interesting everything from the Roomba vacuum cleaner to the R-Gator (watch the video). Swarm, an R & D project, sounds scary: The goal of the project is to develop distributed algorithms ...

Werner Aisslinger - Loft Cube: Dumbest site navigation I've ever seen, but still a very cool little house project.

To celebrate the upcoming Winter Solstice, all VR photographers are invited to take part in Sanctuary - A World Wide Panorama. The World Wide Panorama events are sponsored by the Geography Computing Facility at the University of California Berkeley. This site is hosted by The Geo-Images Project. This is a ...

Publishers Grudgingly Cooperate With Amazon Database Effort: Amazon wants all publishers to provide digital copies of all their nonfiction titles so customers can search for a term anywhere in the text when shopping. Publishers have issues. "Publishers cite three major concerns about the project, dubbed Look Inside the Book II. ...

As many people who have worked with me over the years know, I m obsessed with naming projects. I think it all started when I found out that the new version of Windows (then Windows 95) was code-named Chicago. I thought this was so cloak-and-dagger. I love Chicago (the city), first of ...

My sister-in-law sent an e-mail to us today with photos & stats about a scale model church building made entirely out of LEGO's (even populated with 622 LEGO people.) I did a quick Google search & found a lot more photos of that project. If you've ever messed around with ...

Raymond Chen of Microsoft's Windows team has written up an interesting article on the history of the Windows PowerToys: During the development of Windows 95, as with the development of any project, the people working on the project write side programs to test the features they are adding or to ...

Homeland Security Survey Takes First Pass at LAMP: Some good news, though I think the bug density would skyrocket once they moved passed the top 1% of projects and into the second and third-tier of open source stuff. First results are in for the Department of Homeland Security's vulnerability survey ...

GroupOrg - Features: Yesterday I mentioned that the PHPCollab project had forked. Today, I find out that my very own open source project, InfoCentral, which I handed off to someone else two years ago, has forked. There has been quite a bit of drama surrounding InfoCentral lately, with the guy ...

Day One was busy The Next Content Wave: Hypersyndication We started off with a keynote talk from Dick Costolo, who is the guy who created and sold FeedBurner and now works for Google. He talked about how far syndication has come. If you went to CNN or Gannett even ...

Building a Search Engine: Interesting backstory behind the Mozdex project. This is an open source search engine that they're going to try and use to index the entire Web. ...we have a network of two db servers using the Lucene Index system (Jakarta Project) with two terabytes of disk space ...

GPLFlash - Flash decoder, player and plugin: Someone pointed this out in a comment to my previous post from today. This is the homepage of the redesigned GPLFlash. GPLFlash is based on Olivier Debon's original work, which hasn't had a release since June 2000. This project is an endeavour to ...

Distributed computing cracks Enigma code: This is very cool. More than 60 years after the end of World War II, a distributed computing project has managed to crack a previously uncracked message that was encrypted using the Enigma machine. [...] In breaking the first message, the project organizers used so-called ...

One of the things I dislike doing as a developer is trying to solve a problem that I know has been tackled a million times. Most developers have jobs because not every software need is met by off-the-shelf software, but there are certain problems that are common enough, and have ...

We talked about this film way back when Project Aardvark was announced. Fog Creek Software had an idea for a piece of software, and they recruited four college students over the course of one summer to build it. And they filmed them doing it. (They may claim to have made ...

A research team at the University of South Australia has created an augmented reality system that runs Quake. Our task at the moment is to take all the monsters and the guns etc. out of the quake game and to make them roam around a real environment. We also required ...

Agile Development is an emerging theory of software development management that rebels against over-management of the development process. Agile Development says that our goal is to meet the customer needs, and we should welcome changing requirements because this means the end product will better do what the customer wants it ...

the business value of web standards: This is a good article about how to write good, solid HTML, and the author hits on something I discovered as well when re-assessing how to teach HTML for The Joshua Project. "For years, the standards community has been extolling the virtues of keeping ...

Prototyping: Here's an awfully good point that's lurked in the back of my head for a long time, but has never really been vocalized. A major point I think needs to happen when prototyping (or even just generally mapping out any project) with a client is to discuss what will ...

We ve started using Continuous Integration testing on a project I m working on. Had you asked me yesterday, when I was setting the #@$! thing up for my project, I wouldn t have had much nice to say about it. But now, whenever I merge my code up to the integration branch, ...

GotDotNet Workspaces: This is Microsoft's version of SourceForge: "GotDotNet Workspaces is an online collaborative development environment where .NET developers can create, host and manage projects throughout the project lifecycle."

WriteTheWeb - What is a k-log?: John Robb is one of the founders of UserLand (I still think I'm missing out). This is an article from last year where he discusses "K-logs" essentially the use of blogs for knowledge management: "...K-Log features like subscriptions let you as an employee ...

Slashdot has posted an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. In the usual SlashDot style, the ten highest-rated questions from the community were the ones they asked. Good stuff. It is my intention to get a copy of Wikipedia to every single person on the planet in their own language. ...

Gadgetopia is four today. We kicked things off on August 12, 2002 with this post about The Gutenberg Project. (Check out that URL.) Thanks to everyone for hanging around all these years.

Ektron.com :: Web Image Editor : Ektron WebImageFX: I haven't seen an embedded, Web-based image editor before. Have I just not been looking hard enough? Are there others I'm not aware of? If not for the IE-only problem, this seems like a good one. There are some Flash demos here. ...

Harry Potter and the Internet Pirates: This is an interesting look at the pirating of the new Harry Potter book. For all the care taken to protect this version, the publisher failed to understanding one thing: readers can simply transcribe the text. And that's what they did. Apparently you can ...

Over the years, I've learned a big secret about building information-focused Web sites. This big secret is the single most important thing you can do for your Web site. It is the absolute make-or-break characteristic of successful Web sites. Without this, you really don't have much. With it, it doesn't ...

WSYP Project: leverage customer feedback for software quality: Proof that Microsoft has a sense of humor. (I mean more proof than just the existence of PhotoDraw.) (It's a movie. Link to launch is in the right column.)

A Load of Bollocks: Film Director Uwe Boll sets the web ablaze: Here's a great Metafilter post with a collection of links about Uwe Boll, who is the first film director to specialize in video game adaptions. He apparently buys the rights and produces the films himself. Dr. Uwe Boll ...

I've written before about Project Gutenberg. It's a massive archive of free books that they simply give away online. They have several thousand books which are in the public domain, and the number is increasing steadily. It's probably going to increase a little more rapidly due to the new Distributed ...

Programming is a mostly paperless endeavour, but I still wind up attending meetings where I'm bound to take some paper notes. For a couple of years I tried to handle this on a PDA, but it doesn't work very well. Even if you avoid the problems with handwriting recognition, the ...

This is a quote from a post one year ago today. Do you suppose the guys at Ansari X-Prize might be able to provide some incentive to speed this project up a bit? Gas was at $1.94 today.

Gallina: This programmer from Mexico turned his Gmail account into a blogging platform. Uses GMail messages as "entries" (the message star is the publish status), Replies to conversations are the "entry comments", Uses libgmailer (gmail-lite project) to connect to GMail

Another CAPTCHA project: It seems to me that this would be brutally effective. It raises the bar in terms of the difficulty that it imposes to robots, as the actual text is never completely displayed in each of the animated image frames.

I've been looking for a small project to test out the Rails framework, so I've decided to combine that with exploring ways to reduce the time and complexity involved in creating a blog entry. This will be an ongoing series of articles, but this is a low-priority project, so each ...

Water Tunnel No 3 IN NEW YORK CITY: Here's an interesting article on the construction of Water Tunnel Three underneath New York City. Not surprisingly, it's a tunnel that carries water. This seems a little elementary, but how else do you get water to 9 million people every day? New ...

isbndb.com - free ISBN database: A thing of beauty underway here: The goal of the project is to create a multilingual database of books with well defined remote access protocols and free individual access. Think Amazon API for every book ever written. Database. Books. My two favorite words. Via ResearchBuzz.

Hack 4 Dean :: MX-System: How can you lose when you have a bunch of computer geeks pulling for you? "Hack4Dean working group community of developers creating content sharing web community tools to unify and empower Dr. Howard Dean's internet campaign for the presidency in 2004." They have an ambitious ...

Java is the SUV of programming tools: You may not be able to get to this link because Harvard is getting hammered by people trying to read this. "After researching how to do bind variables in Java, which turns out to be much harder and more error-prone than in 20-year-old ...

"Teaching robots the stuff we all know." Act quickly to submit suggestions of common sense knowledge that robots ought to also know. Last deadline (for now anyway) is Aug. 26. "Think of Open Mind as a young child, learning from everyone on the Web." Kind of a scary thought when ...

The gang at Slashdot posted a nostalgia-inducing link to an old page that showed off the hardware that Google used to run on back when it was still a research project at Stanford. My favorite part is the drive array case built from plastic and random bits of LEGO. Via ...

SourceForge.net: Project Info - Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset: Apparently Microsoft posted this source over at SourceForge. The Windows Installer XML (WiX) is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. The toolset supports a command line environment that developers may integrate into their build processes to ...

PWNtcha - captcha decoder: Just because you use a captcha, doesn't mean you're always dealing with a human. PWNtcha stands for "Pretend We're Not a Turing Computer but a Human Antagonist", as well as PWN capTCHAs. This project's goal is to demonstrate the inefficiency of many captcha implementations. Via Kalsey.

My buddy Rob and I were talking the other day about top-down vs. bottom-up entrerprise architectures. My last company attempted to implement a top-down architecture, where every system was planned out as to where it fit in the grand scheme and everything was on one big server under one language, ...

Project details for phpMMORPG: Cool. Check out the screencap. phpMMORPG is a Web interface that can be used to create an MMORPG with a back-end which permits users of the interface to create their own games. It features real-time chat, a map editor, a template system, a quest box, PVP, ...

Heavy: Einstein@home is a program that uses your computer's idle time to search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors. Einstein@home is a World Year of Physics 2005 project supported by the American Physical Society (APS) and by a number ...

silverorange pitches in with Firefox: Two great tastes that taste better together. ...I’ve been working with a collection of designers from around the world (literally - we span at least five times zones) on the visual identity of the Mozilla projects. The first big project by the team was the ...

World Cup 2006 'abused for mega-surveillance project': The 2006 World Cup is going to put RFIDs in all the tickets. [...] you receive a fully personalized ticket containing an RFID chip; this enables authorities to check the ticket against your passport. Very little information resides on the chip: the identity ...

OpenUsability:Welcome: This is good to see, since usability has always been the big problem with open source stuff. Usability always plays second fiddle to writing code. OpenUsability.org is a project that brings open source developers and usability experts together. The idea behind is simple: There are many Usability Experts who ...

Microsoft Codenames: Here's a list of Microsoft software project codenames. EVeryone knows about "Longhorn," there days. And a lot of people know that Windows XP was called "Whistler." Goign further back, a handful know that Windows 95 was code-named "Chicago." But "Impala"? "Starfighter"? "Airstream"? As anyone who had worked with ...

Virginia Tech recently announced their intentions to build a new supercomputer using dual 2GHz G5 Macs. Yesterday they presented some of the details of the project. Of particular interest is that it will cost $5.2 million and they want it in place by October in order to qualify for the ...

Boot Windows XP on an Intel Duo Core Mac and Make Money: Someone has won the contest, and took home the bounty of about $14,000. I can't find many details, other than this: Contest has been won - updates to follow shortly. All further donations will go into an account ...

Apache group aims at J2EE applications: No more handing off stuff to JBoss or Tomcat Apache's doing Java natively. "Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, announced in an open letter this week the formation of the Geronimo project, which will work to create Apache-compatible software for delivering ...

Accessibility Internet Rally: 2003 Training: Here's a fantastically comprehensive tutorial on making Web sites accessible from Knowability. The thing about making your site accessible is that it tends to improve the site immensely for non-imparied users as well. In the end, this is just a bunch of really good guidelines ...

DeanSpace: Howard Dean's presidential campaign has resulted in an open-source app to organize "grassroots" movements. "DeanSpace is based on Drupal, an open source project that makes content management and community building on the web easy. The DeanSpace team has customized Drupal to make it work even better for building online ...

Rhode Island wants statewide Wi-Fi: The true testament to how small Rhode Island is: $20 million gets you wi-fi across the entire state. America's smallest state is seeking to become its first to offer a wireless broadband network from border to border. Backers of Rhode Island's $20 million project say ...

Trivia for Fight Club (1999): I found this in the trivia to the IMDb entry on "Fight Club." One of Project Mayhem's acts of vandalism is the destruction of a display of Apple Macintosh computers. The explosion occurs at exactly 84 minutes into the film, an ironic reference to Apple's ...

Hunt for 'Napster of good causes': mySociety.org is a project that is looking for internet-based ideas that use the technology to make a real-world impact. "Tom Steinberg, MySociety founder, said he wanted to try to find Napsters of civil life that, like the music-sharing system, prove enormously useful to people ...

Mozilla - Wikipedia: After uncovering the truth about ping, I was determined to unearth the mystery of another engimatic Internet name: Mozilla. Wikipedia took all the fun out of it. The name Mozilla had been used internally for the Netscape Navigator web browser from its beginning. It was a contraction ...

World-Wide Media eXchange: WWMX: Doesn't appear to be any photos of Sioux Falls. "The WWMX, short for the World-Wide Media eXchange, is an experimental research project run by the Interactive Visual Media Group at Microsoft Research. Our goal is to explore what we can do with a gazillion photos on ...

Technophilia: Get a free college education online: Here's a great little article detailing some of the free college courses you can find online. This one on "Causal and Statistical Reasoning" from Carnegie Mellon looks interesting. So does this course on World War II from the University of Washington. And I've ...

I have a new rule of thumb for Web development: the 90-50 rule. This rule comes into effect when you get 90% done with a project...and only have 50% left to do. The details are what kill you, and they trail on forever, it seems. So, when you're 90% done, ...

Let the Terminator jokes begin! An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched on Monday. The "Blue Brain" project, a collaboration between IBM and a Swiss university team, will involve building a custom-made supercomputer based on IBM's ...

blueprintcss - Google Code: Why am I so shocked at the notion of a CSS framework? We have server-side frameworks, javascript frameworks, etc. But when I saw the phrase CSS framework, I thought of course, what a great idea Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on ...

Wired News: Pentagon Alters LifeLog Project: Why would anyone want to develop or expose themselves to this? "Researchers who receive LifeLog grants will be required to test the system on themselves. Cameras will record everything they do during a trip to Washington, D.C., and global-positioning satellite locators will track where ...

Advanced Installer: Here's a great free Windows installer tool. If you need to distribute software, this is a great way to bundle to up and send it. This package contains the complete Advanced Installer application, including the freeware and non-freeware features. The former can be accessed at any time by ...

Eyetrack III is a project designed to study where a user's eyes look when they are reading a web page. The results are then used to improve the layout and usability of news websites. Pretty cool stuff. The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, ...

vs. Linux GUI: Owen found an interview that really, really hits the nail on the head about a big problem with Linux. Right now, the Linux community values "diversity" too highly to ever get a single, consistent GUI, let alone a good one. At the same time, it holds on ...

Liquid Web Project Streamer - r0t0r00t3r: For the record, this hack works exactly as they display here. Anyone can effectively open a Windows shell (explorer.exe) as the SYSTEM account. I don't know the specifics of what this allows you to do, but it sure looks scary. This could probably come ...

Admit it: whenever some group like 37 Signals or Six Apart comes out with a new software product, you secretly think, "I could of done that." How many of us developers thing we could build something just as good if we only put in the time? I do. Yes, I ...

The Web Empowered Church: This is a system to power your church Web site that's built on Typo3 -- the founder of which proclaims his faith directly in the license agreement. The WEC is a ministry of The Foundation for Evangelism designed to help churches around the world apply Internet ...

Picasa: Google has released a beta version of Picasa for Linux. Apparently they had to hack up Wine to make it go. To allow Picasa to run well on Linux, Google made a few improvements to Wine. Some of the changes were Picasa-specific and simply added a bit of polish. ...

Surftp - Web Based FTP: A free, Web-based FTP client. It'd make me very nervous entering credentials in here, though they swear nothing is logged. Might do in a life-or-death emergency pinch, however. Surftp is the perfect solution for using your ftp server when you can't install a full ftp ...

Wikimedia Commons: The last few days have shown me that I'm really out of touch with everything that's available over at Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Commons [...] is a repository of free images, sound and other multimedia files. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Files uploaded to this repository ...

And here we are folks: in just over a year, we somehow found 1,000 things to talk about. We've come a long way from our first post about The Gutenberg Project (way back when the site was called DeaneBarker.net). Nine-hundred ninety-nine entries later, Gadgetopia seems to be a hit (okay, ...

Calendar - Standards Based Calendar Client Project: Want to switch to Mozilla but can't leave behind Outlook's calendar and task list? Follow this link, and you have one less excuse. I spent five minutes with it, and I think this is another nail in Outlook's coffin. A bonus is that ...

www.oreilly.com -- O'Reilly Open Books Project: Did you know O'Rielly publishes some free books? Man, I love free books. Over the years, O'Reilly & Associates has published a number of "Open Books" books with various forms of "open" copyright. The reasons for "opening" copyright, as well as the specific ...

How Good Are You With Your Mouse?: Our reverse-mouse game link was a hit, so this is the next progression. There are mazes, and you have to navigate them with your mouse without it being visible. The pointer disappears and you just have to project where you think it ...

Mac OS Forge: According to this article, this site is endorsed by Apple itself. Mac OS X includes a wide variety of open source software from FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, the GNU Project, and many more projects each its own vibrant developer community. Mac OS Forge is dedicated to supporting the ...

Denmark's crown prince engaged to Australian commoner: First he buys schools, then he arranges a marriage to infiltrate Microsoft into the royal family of a European country? "A former project consultant for a Danish division of Microsoft is about to marry a prince. Denmark's future king, Crown Prince Frederik, and ...

Here's something I believe to be true: intranet adoption is more a function of personal and corporate psychology than of technology. Put another way, the greatest technology in the world won't help if your employees aren't interested in using your intranet for whatever reason. I'm involved, to some extent, in ...

A Maryland couple has plans to build their own Hobbit Hole dwelling, and has set up a website to raise funds for it and to share progress updates. The floorplan sketch that Rob has provided on his info page doesn't quite follow my interpretation of Tolkien's description of Bilbo Baggins' ...

Philly schools get Microsoft brotherly love: Bill Gates just bought his first school. (Sorry, Dave :-) "Microsoft is teaming with the School District of Philadelphia to design and build a new high school wired with the latest in educational computing tools. The District and Microsoft announced plans on Friday to ...

Versioning web services: This is a good article on how to change a Web API without breaking things. I have this same problem right now -- I have a REST API on a project, and I need to consider versioning. When I add a new feature to Tagyu's web service ...

'Lie group E8' math puzzle solved : Crazy. An international team of mathematicians says it has cracked a 120-year-old puzzle that researchers say is so complicated that its handwritten solution would cover the island of Manhattan. [...] The problem's proof, announced Monday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took the ...

At Wikipedia, Illustrators May Be Paid: Wikipedia will pay artists who create illustrations for a specific list of articles that need them. I wonder if this is the start of a trend. The woman running the project for Wikipedia, Brianna Laugher, says the plan is to create a list of ...

The Building of Basecamp: A 1-day workshop on the building of a real-world web-based application: Joe and I are heading to Chicago to attend this workshop next week. We'll report on it after the fact and tell you how it went. Immerse yourself in the hectic process of concepting, designing, ...

Project Aardvark: What a fun gig this would be, just to check out the legendary Fog Creek offices. I want to go. Do you live anywhere near Manhattan? Do you want to meet Joel, check out the Fog Creek Office, try out Fog Creek Copilot, and get paid $30 for ...

uclick Tests Selling Subscriptions to Comics and Puzzles on the Web: Results Revealed: This is a good case study of how uClick converted from a free to fee model. "More than 10,000 people switched to the paid My Comics Page offer immediately in September, and more join daily. The combined ...

David Heinemeier Hansson has published the first release of Rails, his MVC implementation for Ruby. Rails is the system David developed to power BaseCamp, the 37 Signals project management app. David had previously released Active Record, his O-R mapping layer for Rails, which is the slickest method of database access ...

CirculaFloor is a fascinating project being demonstrated at Siggraph that provides an innovative way to walk forever while going nowhere. CirculaFloor is a locomotion interface using a group of movable tiles. The movable tiles employ holonomic mechanism that achieves omni-directional motion. Circulation of the tiles enables the user to walk ...

I'm working on an ASP.Net project and I'm desparately trying to avoid buy