Web-based calendar in the Open Source Horde project

NE of the more ingenious technologies around involves user interfaces that are embedded in Web pages. Taking full advantage of powerful, modern Web browsers, it is possible to build fully-blown applications that are operable from merely any platform. One of the latest packages as such achieves all of this without any JavaScript. Have a look at the project summary.

ZK is an open-source Ajax Web framework that enables rich UI for Web applications with no JavaScript and little programming. With event-driven feature-rich components, developing becomes as simple as programming desktops. With a markup language, designing becomes as simple as authoring HTML.

Screen-shot of Metisse for FVWM

MAGINE to yourself a world (or a desktop environment rather) where everything lies in 3-D space. Imagine interaction with objects, which takes into account the ‘depth’ Z of one’s arm, rather than just the (X,Y) coordinates — those that are delivered from the conventional mouse.

Croquet is an intersting project that provides an SDK for 3-D environment. It could potentially make it all a reality. Pseudo-3d (stereo imaging) displays exist already.

have this sick habit, which is my tendency to keep track of bug reports I have submitted to projects. As uninteresting as it may be, here is my latest report to WordPress:

Leak’ Outside Bounding Border

[Latest nightly in use]

The appearance of the dashboard is inarguably impressive, so call it a pet peeve perhaps: I find the following box spillover somewhat of an eye sore, which should be trivial to fix. The “Write post” box is extended when the items on the left are expanded, but what about those the reside on the right-hand-side?

Local Screenshots

I sometimes feel like a bug report which is not recognised or awarded for (if not financially, then at least on a personal level), there is little or no incentive to intervene and assist further.

I must admit that I lost a fair bit of passion for WordPress development. I have been less willing to help once it began to drift onto a commercial agenda (Automattic). But as I digress, I may continue to contribute to a project whose code is GPL‘d; a project that has impact on many sites and enriches people’s on-line experience. I still feel discouraged to do more debugging when somebody else out there gets paid for it. The forum mavens have expressed similar sentiments before.

HE head of the Apache project — the project which runs about two-thirds of the world’s Web sites — suggests that free software will rein. He predicts the end of commercial software to be only a decade away.

Apache’s Greg Stein says commercial software’s days are numbered. Instead, we’ll be paying for software support in the years ahead, he says

So on the face of it, commercial software already fights a losing battle.

Related items:

• The Waning Commercial Platform
• Unisys Predicts Death of Proprietary Software
• Open Source – A Positive Turning Point
• The Death of Commercial Software
• Microsoft to Drop Shrink-wrapped Software?

My pause/resume demonstrative program

ARLIER this afternoon noticed that my MATLAB profile had gone past the 30,000 count milstone. That count corresponds to the number of downloads of my code and programs over at MATLAB Central. I keep track of these numbers three times a week using HTML syndication. After some hesitance, I thought it was worth raving about; just because I rarely get the chance! [smile /]

Related item: A short write-up on an honourable highest position: first world-wide. This was my greatest moment of excitement, for which my grandfather popped some champagne.

After some shallow exploration, I have found a template/example for poster preparation in L^AT_EX. It is only one among many, but I pressed on with that particular one almost blindly. I am currently in the process of preparing one poster for a conference I will attend in Arlington, Virginia within a couple of weeks (there will be no blogging in that period).

Ironically perhaps, the author of this ‘T_EX forgery’ is currently working at Microsoft. He has been quite a successful researcher and I even exchanged a few E-mails with him. Nonetheless, the scenario is rather odd. Employment in Microsoft lies in complete disagreement to intentions of such contribution to to our L^AT_EX community. T_EX often obviates the need for commercial, proprietary software such as Adobe Illustrator.

Upon closer inspection, I discovered that another poster template produces visually-richer results. Yet, I have no experience with this L^AT_EX kit. If you have experience with other such packages and can also comment on them, please post them below for others to benefit from.

Previously, in my younger days of naive existence, I actually created a poster by handling a 6,000×4,000-pixel image in the GIMP. It was rather convenient, to be honest, but making subsequent changes was a tough task. You can find the amateur outcome on this site as a shrunk-down and down-sampled JPEG, as well as a lossy full-sized version. On my hard-drive I retain a ZIP archive which contains the 70-megabyte original bitmap. What a pixelated beast!

O anyone who is interested: I have put together a page that enables content spam to be reported to several search engines in tandem. The purpose of this little ‘utility’ is to centralise various pages of interest, which motivates spam reports that reach more than just a single company. The ‘meat’ of the report can be conveniently copied and pasted from one frame to another. Report spammy sites that violate ethics.