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Third Time’s A Charm!

admin — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:36:04 -0500

We hosted our first DLWS Vermont in 2004 and the locals told us you need to be here two weeks later for the fall color. So, in 2006 we came two weeks later and were told “You should have been here two weeks ago.” So, this year we split the date and came right in the middle and guess what we found….Color!, Glorious color!

Vermont in the fall…there is a bite in the air, a sweet smell of the sugar shacks cooking up some delicious maple syrup and the fall color that Vermont is so famous for.

At one of our stops a curious cow with a crazy do came up to check us out. So, I photographed him. (OK, it’s a bull but that did not rhyme)

Images captured with Nikon D700, AF-S 70-300mm on Lexar digital media.

Optical Character Recognition Still Struggling With Handwriting

Soulskill — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 11:37:00 -0500

Ian Lamont recently asked Google if they planned to extend their transcription of books and other printed media to include public records, many of which were handwritten before word processors became ubiquitous. Google wouldn't talk about any potential plans, but Lamont found out a bit more about the limits of optical character recognition in the process: "Even though some CAPTCHA schemes have been cracked in the past year, a far more difficult challenge lies in using software to recognize handwritten text. Optical character recognition has been used for years to convert printed documents into text data, but the enormous variation in handwriting styles has thwarted large-scale OCR imports of handwritten public documents and historical records. Ancestry.com took a surprising approach to digitizing and converting all publicly released US census records from 1790 to 1930: It contracted the job to Chinese firms whose staff manually transcribed the names and other information. The Chinese staff are specially trained to read the cursive and other handwriting styles from digitized paper records and microfilm. The task is ongoing with other handwritten records, at a cost of approximately $10 million per year, the company's CEO says."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 10/05

Ajay — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 12:34:54 -0500

Crafty Cart

Today we are proud to release our very first freebie Crafty Cart – a free theme for your WordPress e-Commerce store. It’s a fresh flavoured retro style for selling t-shirts and handmade items, designed to be a starting point for your online shop.

daffodil

Fixed width, three columns, widget ready green and yellow theme

Desert Grass

Two column, fixed width, widget ready theme

TBs TechTips 18 - Don't do this at home

AVCampos — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 08:44:59 -0500

In fact, don’t do this anywhere.

While browsing Parax’s Brickshelf folder, I found something worth heeding for every TECHNIC inventor: examples of dead ends you won’t want to get yourself into.

There are some combinations of parts you can put together, but are nigh-impossible to take apart. Take a look at Parax’s examples (and note that he wisely didn’t use physical pieces!), to see for yourself what horrors these seemingly innocuous structures hide. As you can see, building any one of these is easy, if the axles (in grey in the first example, and red in the second) are the last pieces to be added.

But disassembling them is another story... In both examples, you would be able to disassemble the structure if somehow you could pull out the axles again. But they’re fully inserted, without any protruding bit to grab and pull, and the Angle Connectors #2 don’t allow then to be pushed to come out at the other side. Also, on the first example, if you could rotate the Axle Joiners Perpendicular free from the Pins Long with Friction, none of this would have happened. But it can’t be done without breaking either the joiners, the pins, or both.

So, if you really need to have a structure like these or similar, how can you avoid this nasty deadlock?

First of all, you can give yourself somewhere to grab and pull, by using longer axles that stick a bit out of the structure. Given the friction axleholes impose, maybe one extra stud isn’t enough, unless you use potentially damaging tools like pliers; just to be on the safe side, the best would be to use 5L axles on the first example and 4L axles on the second.

Also, on the first example you can replace the long pins with axles (properly bushed at each end), so that you can push or pull them out.

Remember “LEGO” means “I put together”, but also implies “I take apart”!

Edit:
Like it was suggested in a comment, I changed the background of all pictures to transparent for better visibility, including those made by Parax.

Chix and Chainsaws

jeff — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:02:37 -0500

It’s always a good idea to take your camera with you because you just never know when you will see chix making art with chainsaws (how often do you get to say chainsaw, chick, and art in the same sentence). This past weekend I was in Old Town Manassas for the Fall Jubilee. My son’s scout troop was set up for a fundraiser so I took the opportunity to walk around and see what was going on. What I came across was a demonstration of chainsaw carving being performed by two women. They called themselves Chix with Chainsaws and it was a lot of fun to watch them do their thing. Unfortunately the sun was high in the sky and almost in my face. There was also a barrier of police tape that kept the spectators back a safe distance but made getting tight shots pretty difficult. I shot at f-2.8 with my 200mm to try and isolate the artists. To place further emphasis on them I used the new adjustment brush in Lightroom 2 to burn in the surrounding areas. If you haven’t had the chance use this new feature, I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the possibilities it presents without ever having to take your images into Photoshop.

The Leaves Fall: A Social Icon Set For Bloggers

Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:05:30 -0500

We are always looking for creative and talented artists and designers. Once we find them, we ask them to cooperate with us and release something for free. We provide them with the full freedom to showcase their professionalism and express their creativity. You can find our previous releases in our section Freebies.

Today we are glad to release The Leaf Fall: a social icon set. This set contains 12 social icons, designed in an autumn-style. The set includes icons for Twitter, Technorati, RSS, Reddit, Facebook, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg. You can use the set for free — without any restrictions whatsoever.

The icons are available in the .png-format in various resolutions. This icon set is intended to be used by bloggers. It was designed by Templates.com, especially by Julia Agnes, especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Download Icons For Free!

You can use the icons for private and commercial projects, blogs and web-sites for free, without any restrictions whatsoever. However, you are not allowed to sell or redistribute the icons without author’s and Smashing Magazine’s permission.

preview (jpg)
PNG files + PSD sources (1.3 Mb)

Thank you, guys!

You want to showcase your work as well?

We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists. You may not know it yet, but we might feature you in one of our upcoming posts.

If you would like to release a high-quality free font, a Wordpress-theme, some wallpapers or an icon-set please contact us — we would like to support you (both financially and with the broad coverage on Smashing Magazine).

You may be interested in the following freebies as well:

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 10/06

Ajay — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:11:30 -0500

Raven’s Antispam

Raven’s antispam is a WordPress plugin, powerful and invisible fighter against comment spam.

Cronjob Control

This plugin shows you all active WP cronjobs (scheduled tasks) of your weblog in the “Site Admin” area and if you want, you can stop the cronjob(s)

FTP Plugin for WP Database Backup Plugin

This plugin adds a fourth way to save the database backup files of the WP Database Backup plugin. With the standard WP Database Backup plugin you can save the database tables of your weblog a file. This backup file can stored on the server of your weblog, send to an email account or saved (manually) to your local hard disk.

Update URLs

When you move WordPress to a new domain or directory, the permalinks are not updated. This plugin updates all permalinks. In addition, it also gives the user the option to update any links within posts and pages.

FV Community News

Allow your visitors to add articles to the sidebar or anywhere else. Complete with moderation panel and a settings page, you can sit back while you have full control about the look and articles that being posted.

Caption Disabler

Caption Disabler is a WordPress plugin that removes and disables captions feature in WordPress so that all caption shortcode is not been parsed or translated, and no and HTML entities are automatically added while editing or writing.

jQuery Reply to Comment

Add “reply” and “quote” features on each comment list.

Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have.

WP Double Opt-In List Management

This WordPress email list management plugin allows the visitors of your blog subscribe to your mailing list using a double opt-in method. The signup form (Email, Name and other fields) is placed on the WordPress blog sidebar. After a user fills in the form and clicks “Subscribe”, WP double opt-in plugin sends an email with the subscription confirmation link to the user.

TBs TechTOC 05 - Concept Car

Conchas — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:32:26 -0500

Personally, I tend to follow some discipline and logic on the way some topics get posted here at TBs . Namely, that some posts should only appear after a presentation of the subject at an initial post with generic considerations and things like these...
Or when I put in my head not publishing some kind of posts, before finishing other ones meanwhile started (yes I haven't yet finished the Off Roader (8297) review while all pictures and videos are done for weeks...).

Because the world moves faster than I can cope with, most of the times, these kind of principles tend also to jeopardize my goals with TBs and making news to not be raised while they still are really news...
This way, opportunities are sometimes lost and I decided change this as possible.

In resume, being methodical can turn to be a considerable disadvantage...

So despite not have written yet about TECHNIC supercars in general, some amazing creations from Crowkillers, or even not having raised a poll to know if there is still anybody not eagerly waiting for a new real supercar from LEGO, let me present here this... gorgeous?, amazing?, astonishing?, splendid?, magnificent? (don't know which adjective would better fit in this case) work from Nathanaël Kuipers with his 'Concept Car'.

Nathanaël Kuipers (also industrialiesigner at BS), went for a design venture at TLG some years ago and after his return, decided to present us with this supercar design announced by himself at LUGNET.
According to him, the idea of a new supercar was rejected several times at TLG and in part because of that, he wanted to present one of his own creation. Easily we can understand that it wouldn't be correct to make it while working for TLG.
But definitely and from the pictures we can see, it suggests that such TLG decision had nothing to do with designers running out of inspiration... Differently from others, this model seems to include a not too exaggerated number of parts, so it should be a very commercially viable project, IMHO.

This model benefits from a unibody structure as Nathanaël named it, on top of which several functional modules fit. Like: front suspension, rear suspension, V12 engine, standard 6 (5+1) speed gearbox, seats, etc.
Because of that, it could be 'easily' customized and it will not be a surprise if we see some new modules in the future by Nathanaël.

He applied modern techniques and parts to build a car which some may find similar or inspired on the 8448 (Super Street Sensation, Mk II) as himself referred at the LUGNET announcement.

This model modularity allows for engine placement in the car front or back, while transmission can be manually set for front or rear drive, through the driving rings that can be seen from the bottom side (click on image bellow for an enlarged view).

Look at the images bellow and admire the body smooth lines, the perfect and creative head lights design, the detailed and modern design interiors.
Loved that windshield black frame and the contrast it makes with the car in red.
More pictures at the Nathanaël's aka industrialdesign BS folder.

Loved, every single detail!

More about other Nathanaël's creations to come.

7 Ingredients Of Good Corporate Design

feketeg — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:07:20 -0500

It’s hard to define design. We have a broad range of definitions to choose from: design refers not only to graphic design, but to design strategy, too. It is used in a variety of industries, such as engineering, architecture and Web design.

This means that design is not just graphical in nature (which is a form of visual artistic representation), but also the planning of processes to achieve certain goals. Large corporations clearly understand this and incorporate every form of design into their strategy to achieve success.

For a good corporate design, we need to be aware of two main elements, which can be further broken down into a total of seven “ingredients”:

design, as in artistic representation (logo, typography, colors), and
design strategy (brand, quality, community, culture).

1. Logo

Typically, a logo is designed for immediate recognition. Users often identify a corporation by its logo. Just look at the above images: the names of the companies should immediately pop into your head.

But a logo is only one aspect of a company’s brand strategy. It helps, of course, to differentiate a company from its competitors, but a great logo doesn’t mean anything until the brand makes it worth something. If you’re given the task of creating a logo for an organization, create an abstract image that is clean, simple and carries very little meaning until the brand of the organization adds that meaning. You can read more about the importance of logo design in Seth Godin’s article.

2. Typography

A well-proportioned, clean font can make all the difference on a website or even a corporate flyer. Good typography creates that “There’s something about that” feeling in people’s consciousness.

One of the most successful fonts that can be seen everywhere (signs, buildings, planes, etc.) is Helvetica. This is the King Kong of typefaces, and it’s more than 50 years old. Helvetica changed the world of typography. It showed typographers and graphic designers that simple is good.

Large corporations tend to adopt clear sans-serif typefaces. A typeface should reflect the company’s image and beliefs. If a company is a little conservative, then it should use serif typefaces, such as Times New Roman: these typefaces reflect classical designs. With the help of large typography, an organization should enhance the motto or message delivered to its users.

All website text, not just for corporate websites, should be readable. A Web designer should take into consideration the different browser rendering engines; text fonts are not displayed the same across browsers.

With large corporate websites, usability plays an increasingly large role in typography design. A company should also care about its users with disabilities who can only read with the help of a screen reader, etc. It isn’t always a good approach to embed text in images and not include <alt> tags, because screen readers can’t read the text. Sadly, the majority of large organizations are still struggling with this issue.

Also consider the following links to resources on corporate typography:

3. Colors

A graphic designer usually should be careful when designing the visual identity of a large corporation. We should take into consideration different color combinations, color meanings and color theory.

The corporate color scheme that the designer chooses makes a strong statement about the organization and how it does business. As with all of the other seven elements, colors should emphasize the philosophy and strategy of the corporation.

Research conducted by the Institute of Color Research reveals that all human beings make a subconscious judgment about a person, environment or item within 90 seconds and that that assessment is based on color alone. This demonstrates the important role of colors in corporate graphic design.

Enter the world of color harmony and palettes. There are lots of useful online tools for creating beautiful, appealing colors, such as COLOURlovers, which showcases color trends and palettes.

One particular tool is interesting for the technological point of view behind it. Apparently, our brains did not evolve to see or appreciate the concentrated and saturated colors that are considered “basic colors.” Our eyes evolved to see natural and sophisticated colors that rarely clash with each other.

Consider the following links for more detailed color theory:

4. Brand

Brand is the definition of corporate business. The name of an organization can also serve as its brand. Brand value reflects how a company is perceived in the marketplace. Brand identity communicates an organization’s strategy in a universal way to target audiences.

Branding is not about getting a target market to choose one corporation over its competition, but about getting prospects to see the corporation as the only one that provides a solution to their problems.

A company should lay down brand objectives from the beginning. These are the organization’s characteristics, and they must reflect the organization’s philosophy, processes, image, etc. A strong brand builds credibility and motivates clients.

5. Quality

Quality is one of the most important elements. It defines a company through its policies, procedures and responsibilities to its users. A company that offers quality products or services has a great chance of bringing a user back not just once but many times over.

Quality should be reflected in every aspect of a corporation: how it does business, the kind of products or services it produces, how it handles its prospects and clients. The same is true for the corporation’s website design, too.

The following screenshots do indeed reflect quality:

And not quite so memorable designs:

6. Community

Many large corporations tend to neglect this aspect of their business. The first large company that recognized this important element was Apple. It created a dedicated, enthusiastic community around its products, which eventually paid off in the long run.

It’s not an easy task to form enthusiastic communities and to leverage that power. A company should always keep in mind that without quality products or services, it can’t project a positive image to its user base.

One way of forming a community is by recruiting company product evangelists. Evangelism is a form of word-of-mouth marketing in which a company nurtures customers who strongly believe in the company’s products, with the result that these customers actively promote them and try to convince others to buy and use them. These people often become the key influencers in the community, and because they’re not paid or affiliated with the company, they are perceived by others as being credible.

Let’s take Apple’s example and find out the three steps of creating a community:

As a first step, which is the most important one, it creates quality products that are targeted to a specific audience.
It encourages customers to meet and share, as is the case with iPods.
It focuses on specific key aspects of the product and associates them with the company’s philosophy. In Apple’s case, that aspect is a better user experience.

7. Culture

When speaking of culture, one shouldn’t take it to mean community. Culture is the tastes, manners, knowledge and values that are shared and favored by the community. If a corporation has communities formed around its products, it doesn’t necessarily mean that these communities have a healthy culture. In fact, a bad culture can ruin a company’s reputation with future prospects.

Microsoft is, sadly, a good example of bad community culture. This culture is mainly the result of the company’s policies and how it has nurtured its community. On the other hand, Apple created a relatively healthy community by enveloping its products in mystery and rumor. Think of the long lines in front of Apple stores around the US, Europe and even Asia, anxiously waiting for the iPhone. The customers even called it the iLine.

In recent years, not only have cultures formed around Apple products, but subcultures have, too. Subcultures around product rumors have resulted in many websites, such as MacRumors.com and AppleInsider.com.

About the author

György Fekete is a Web developer with 5 years of experience in Web design and development. He is the founder of Primal Skill Ltd., an established Romanian Web design and development studio. (al)

Sanyo Invents 12X High-Speed Blu-ray Laser

CmdrTaco — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:50:00 -0500

Lucas123 writes "Today Sanyo said it has created a new blue laser diode with the ability to transfer data up to 12 times as fast as previous technologies. The laser, which emits a 450 milliwatt beam — about double that of previous Blu-ray Disc systems — can read and write data on discs with up to four data layers, affording Blu-ray players the ability to store 100GB on a disc, or 8 hours of high-definition video."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Miguel de Icaza: Mono 2.0 is out!

miguel@gnome.org (Miguel de Icaza) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:05:00 -0500

Today we released Mono 2.0 to the world. You can download sources and binaries from our download page. And our official release notes are up as well. This of course would not be possible without the open source contributors that worked tirelessly on Mono sending patches, fixing bugs, helping the community, answering questions, creating test cases and supporting us all these years.

Mono 2.0 is both a runtime for application and a kit for developers for writing applications with C# and other ECMA CLI languages for a wide spectrum of uses.

Big thanks go to the fantastic Mono team at Novell that has kept the excitement and the pace over all these years (we started in 2001), the large contributions from Mainsoft, Unity3D and our users that pushed us to fix bugs, implement new features and tune Mono. Also, we very much appreciate the work of the ECMA 334 and 335 committee members that worked on the CLI and C# specifications and everyone at Microsoft that answered our questions over the years and specially those that licensed code under open source licenses.

We originally started to work on Mono, because we wanted to make developers happier and more productive on Linux. We liked C#, we liked the CIL and we wanted to have those technologies available on our platform.

Since we have been active in the Linux Desktop world, it is not a surprise that the early use of Mono was mostly on Linux desktop applications, and Mono continues to shine there. Server-side use of Mono was a natural evolution and we soon were powering ASP.NET sites on Linux.

There is one area where we under-delivered in the past, and it has been a constant source of pain. Up until now, we did not have a working debugger. This has finally changed, and Mono 2.0 includes for the first time a debugger, the time for WriteLine() debugging is now behind us.

As the project matured, developers started taking advantage of Mono's open source nature: essentially .NET on their own terms. A platform that could be adapted, morphed, ported and modified to suit many different uses. Today Mono is embedded in portable mp3 players and powers Unity3D's game engine on the Apple iPhone, the Nintendo Wii, MacOS X and Windows (And Unity3D is soon coming to Linux!).

It has also been deployed to run code on large clusters of servers for SecondLife, powers our open source Silverlight implementation (Moonlight) and powers the popular DekiWiki: a Social Collaboration Tool.

Mono is a large project and it is hard to pick one feature to talk about as there are so many, so instead I put together a quick table of the major features that are part of this release:

Compiler Support	.NET APIs	Mono APIs
Mono's Open Source Compilers: C# 3.0 compiler. LINQ to Objects. LINQ to XML. Visual Basic 8 compiler. Open Source Compilers: Boo. Cobra. GNU's GCC with the CIL backend. Microsoft's IronPython. Jeroen's IKVM (Java on .NET). Microsoft's IronRuby. Phalanger (PHP on CLI). Commercial Compilers: ISE's Eiffel. Microsoft's C#. Microsoft's F#. Microsoft's VB.NET. RemObject's Oxygene (Object Pascal). And many more.	Core API: 2.0 core APIs. System, System.Xml. 3.5 System.Core. System.Drawing. System.DirectoryServices. System.Web.Services. Windows.Forms 2.0: Win32 driver. Quartz/OSX driver. Cairo/X11 Unix driver. ASP.NET 2.0: Core ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX. Apache and FastCGI integration. ADO.NET 2.0 plus providers for: Managed drivers: Postgresql, MS SQL Server, Sybase. Semi-managed drivers: Firebird, IBM DB2, Oracle, Sqlite. MySQL provides their own drivers.	GUI APIs: Gtk# (Unix, Windows, MacOS X). Cocoa# (MacOS X). Mono Core: Mono.Addins - Extensibility Framework. Mono.Cairo - Cairo Graphics Binding. Mono.Cecil - ECMA CIL Manipulation. Xml.Relaxng. Novell.Directory.Ldap C5 - Generics Library. Linux Specific: Mono.Posix/Mono.Unix. NDesk.DBus Other Ecosystem Libraries: Bit# - Bittorrent client/server library. Mono.Fuse - User-space file systems. Mono.ZeroConf - Bonjour stack. Mono.Nat - Network Address Translation. Mono.Upnp - Universal Plug and Play. Tao Framework - OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL and Cg bindings.

Compiler Support

.NET APIs

Mono APIs

Mono's Open Source Compilers:

C# 3.0 compiler.
- LINQ to Objects.
- LINQ to XML.
Visual Basic 8 compiler.

Open Source Compilers:

Boo.
Cobra.
GNU's GCC with the CIL backend.
Microsoft's IronPython.
Jeroen's IKVM (Java on .NET).
Microsoft's IronRuby.
Phalanger (PHP on CLI).

Commercial Compilers:

ISE's Eiffel.
Microsoft's C#.
Microsoft's F#.
Microsoft's VB.NET.
RemObject's Oxygene (Object Pascal).

And many more.

Core API:

2.0 core APIs.
System, System.Xml.
3.5 System.Core.
System.Drawing.
System.DirectoryServices.
System.Web.Services.

Windows.Forms 2.0:

Win32 driver.
Quartz/OSX driver.
Cairo/X11 Unix driver.

ASP.NET 2.0:

Core ASP.NET.
ASP.NET AJAX.
Apache and FastCGI integration.

ADO.NET 2.0 plus providers for:

Managed drivers: Postgresql, MS SQL Server, Sybase.
Semi-managed drivers: Firebird, IBM DB2, Oracle, Sqlite.
MySQL provides their own drivers.

GUI APIs:

Gtk# (Unix, Windows, MacOS X).
Cocoa# (MacOS X).

Mono Core:

Mono.Addins - Extensibility Framework.
Mono.Cairo - Cairo Graphics Binding.
Mono.Cecil - ECMA CIL Manipulation.
Xml.Relaxng.
Novell.Directory.Ldap
C5 - Generics Library.

Linux Specific:

Other Ecosystem Libraries:

Bit# - Bittorrent client/server library.
Mono.Fuse - User-space file systems.
Mono.ZeroConf - Bonjour stack.
Mono.Nat - Network Address Translation.
Mono.Upnp - Universal Plug and Play.
Tao Framework - OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL and Cg bindings.

We have ported Mono to a wide variety of platforms and operating systems on this 1.0 to 2.0 cycle. These platforms include:

Linux (x86, x86-64, PowerPC32, Itanium, SPARC, ARM, s390, s390x.
Solaris (x86-64, SPARC).
MacOS X (x86, PowerPC32).
Windows (x86, support for x86-64 will come in Mono 2.2).
Nintendo's Wii.
iPhone/iPod Touch (ARM, limited functionality due to licensing requirements; I will blog later this week about this).
*BSD (x86, x86-64).

Developing with Mono

Long time Linux developers will probably continue to use Emacs and VI, but some new Linux developers might want to use an IDE. New developers can use our open source MonoDevelop IDE on Linux, or alternatively the commercial X-Develop IDE or SlickEdit.

If you are a Windows developer, you can continue using Visual Studio or your IDE of choice to write the code and compile it. Your binaries will run just fine on Linux.

To assist Windows developers in porting their applications to Unix, we have provided the Mono Migration Analysis tool.

Runtime Changes

The Mono Virtual Machine gained plenty of features since Mono 1.2 was released. We have added:

Generic Code Sharing and VTable Compression have been implemented: this significantly reduces the use consumed by generic type instantiations, while still getting the speed benefits of using generics.
AOT support: in addition to x86, we now also support ARM and x86-64.
COM interop is now complete (works on Windows with "real COM" and can be used on Unix with Mainsoft's COM or Mozilla's XPCOM).
AOT code can now AOT parts of 2.0 assemblies (assemblies that contain generics).
Full AOT support (allows code to run JIT-less, this is limited to 1.0 code).
CIL Verifier: Now Mono has a CIL verifier.
CoreCLR Security: the security system used by Moonlight.
Many optimizations that improve execution performance: New intrinsics operations (Math.Min/Max for example); various operations are now inlined by the JIT; managed allocations (no transition to unmanaged code for allocating memory); multi-array access is now tuned by the JIT; constant and block initializations are now handled by the JIT; Faster initialization and access to multi-dimensional arrays (4x faster).
The runtime went on a diet, many runtime data structures are smaller making Mono lighter.

Tools

In addition the the Mono Debugger making its debut appearance on this release, we are very proud of our code analyzer Gendarme.

Gendarme is a extensible rule-based tool to find problems in .NET applications and libraries. Gendarme inspects programs and libraries that contain code in ECMA CIL format (Mono and .NET) and looks for common problems with the code, problems that compiler do not typically check or have not historically checked.

Feedback

Mono is not perfect, but we want to improve it. Like many other open source projects, we need your bug reports to improve Mono. If you have problems with Mono, help us by filing a bug report.

Special Thanks

Special thanks to Hacker Extraordinaire Aaron Bockover who not only brings us the best media player in the world, but created the new web site design and implemented and tuned it over very long extra hours up until 7am in the morning on his weekend.

And to our packaging and QA team that spend extra hours to get all the bits and pieces in place for the release.

Virtual Fence Could Modernize the Old West

CmdrTaco — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 08:32:00 -0500

Hugh Pickens writes "For more than a century, ranchers in the West have kept cattle in place with fences of barbed wire, split wood and, more recently, electrified wires. Now, animal science researchers with the Department of Agriculture are working on a system that will allow cowboys to herd their cattle remotely via radio by singing commands and whispering into their ears and tracking movements by satellite and computer. A video of Dean Anderson, a researcher at the USDA's Jornada Experimental Range at Las Cruces, NM., shows how he has built radios that attach to an animal's head that allow a person at the other end to issue a range of commands — gentle singing, sharp commands, or a buzz like a bee or snake — to get the cattle to move where one wants them to. Anderson says it would cost $900 today to put a radio device on one head of cattle, but he says costs will fall and the entire herd wouldn't have to be outfitted, just the 'leaders.' Much of the research has focused on how cattlemen can identify which cattle in their herds are the ones that the others follow."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Adding jQuery To Visual Studio

CmdrTaco — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:14:00 -0500

Tim Anderson writes "Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, Corporate VP of the .NET developer division, announced that the open source jQuery Javascript library will be integrated into Visual Studio, the main Windows development tool. Further, Microsoft will treat jQuery as a supported product within technical support contracts, and will use jQuery to build new controls for ASP.NET, its web platform."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Speedlinks, 10/3/2008

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:00:00 -0500

First things first: I really need to do a sig photo for the speedlinks. I'm thinkin' tastily lit macro shot of two sausage links sizzling on the griddle. Got any other ideas? Comment 'em to me below.

Until then, your latest batch of artless speedlinks, after the jump:
__________

• Robert Benson blogs about an insane man named Mark J. Rebilas, who will PW-remote his cameras just about anywhere. Holy crap, would you strap your DSLR to one of those airborne BMX bikes? Company body -- yeah, maybe. Personal body -- uh, no.

• Elinchrom has debuted a new 400WS battery flash: The Ranger Quanta. (Specs here, first Photokina video grope here.)

• If you haven't seen the Rangefinder Magazine article on small-flash corporate shooter David Tejada, you can now read it via PDF.

• Would you like to see dramatic portraiture up close and personal? Are you willing to work for free (grub included) to do it? Michael Grecco is looking for an intern.

• Martin Prihoda just finished his first gazillion watt-second lighting workshop, so you have to figure there was a YouTube video coming...

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An Open Source Legal Breakthrough

kdawson — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:20:00 -0500

jammag writes "Open source advocate Bruce Perens writes in Datamation about a major court victory for open source: 'An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently, in a decision that was extremely favorable toward projects like GNU, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Linux.' The case, Jacobsen v. Katzer, revolved around free software coded by Bob Jacobsen that Katzer used in a proprietary application and then patented. When Katzer started sending invoices to Jacobsen (for what was essentially Jacobsen's own work), Jacobsen took the case to court and scored a victory that — for the first time — lays down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. The case hasn't generated as many headlines as it should."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South Korea's Free Computer Game Business Model Hits the US

Soulskill — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:01:00 -0500

Anti-Globalism writes with this excerpt from AFP via Yahoo! News: "Seoul-based 'free-to-play' computer game titan Nexon on Wednesday blasted into the US videogame arena with a 'Combat Arms' online first-person shooter title that makes its cash from optional 'micro-transactions' by players. The game makes its money from players that buy animated helmets, outfits, emblems or other virtual items to customize in-game characters. To keep the battlefield even, players earn experience or advanced weaponry by skill so people essentially can't pay for power. ... Startups and established game makers including Japanese goliath Sony are venturing into the free computer game market, according to DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole. 'It looks like it could be very big,' Cole told AFP. 'It's one of the things everybody seems to be looking at. The challenge is it is a very new model and it remains to be seen whether customers used to a free model will be tight when it comes to actually spending money on it.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Srinivasa Ragavan: Evolution 2.24 & Windows port

(author unknown) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 03:43:02 -0500

I have delayed my blog for Evolution 2.24, since I was waiting for Tor and Bharath to complete the Windows port. Yes, Evolution for Windows is available. Click here to download Evolution on Windows . Kudos to Tor (who intially ported base Evolution/friends to Windows) & Bharath for their work. They also had a equivalent windows binary for most of the intermediate dot releases. We would try hard to fix bugs reported on this build.

What’s new in Evolution 2.24?

Message Templates
WebDAV Contacts support
Google Contacts support
Custom header support while sending mails
Single Model view for Calendar
Sqlite Based message summary (aka Camel On-disk Summary)
New Bonobo-less composer for Evolution
Quota support to IMAP/POP accounts
Gtk+ Recent manager integration in Composer
Contact-list for Exchange

and 530 bugs and approximately 50 crashers fixed.

Camel/Disk summary has some regressions which I’m currently working to close it, so that 2.24.1 should be even more stable and bug-free.

Thanks a lot to every one who has contributed to Evolution.

Linux Rescues Battery Life On Vista Notebooks From Dell

timothy — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 06:28:00 -0500

nerdyH writes "Dell is preparing to ship two enterprise-oriented Windows Vista notebooks with an interesting feature — a built-in TI OMAP (smartphone) processor that can power instantly into Linux. The 'Latitude ON' feature is said to offer 'multi-day' battery life, while letting users access email, the web, contacts, calendar, and so on, using the notebook's full-size screen and keyboard. I wonder if someday we'll just be able to plug our phones into our laptops, switching to the phone's processor when we need to save battery life? Or, maybe x86 will just get a lot more power-efficient. Speaking at MontaVista's Vision event today, OLPC spokesperson and longtime kernel hacker Deepak Saxena said the project is aiming for 10-20 hours of battery life during active use, on existing hardware (AMD Geode LX800 clocked at 500MHz, with 1GB of Flash and 256MB of RAM)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 10/03

Ajay — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 07:03:20 -0500

Desk Space

Desk Space is a premium free and feature rich WordPress theme. It comes with a robust set of built in features and plugins, including the ability to switch out the background wood finish color to one you like.

Spicy Typography

Two column, widget ready, fast loading theme.

Under Water

Two column, Blue, White, Purple, Grey and Black widget, ready fixed width theme

Simply Ornate

Two column theme designed with the main focus being on patterns and typography and comes in 5 flavours.

Andrea Cimitan: Murrine Theming Contest?

(author unknown) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:58:05 -0500

To show all the possibilities given by the development versions of Murrine, and the new options it will support, I’ve thought about some kind of contest/brainstorm, where the best themes will be part of a separate package that will be out with the next release of Murrine.

The Goal

I’d like to see themes that uses all the new features, gradients shades, contrast, etc etc… to provide an original theme package, a not a simple colorscheme set

Themes should be submitted in the Murrine website, after registering. That will give access for optional voting and similar things.

Donations

Unfortunately this year will be really hard for me and I’ll have less spare time to code with the same free effort I had in the last years. So please consider donating, thinking that I’m a student and I can’t get money from my own due to the little spare time I have, that I’d like, if possible, to spend on free software: murrine, rgba stuff, gnome-do, clearlooks and much more
I really like to write a complete documentation for the development version of Murrine, as well as writing new cool themes for gnome-do!
Thanks for all your help!