Month: October 2007

Eye-Fi Releases Wireless SD Memory Card

Eye-Fi Releases Digital Camera Wireless SD Memory Card | Laughing Squid: Eye-Fi has just announced the release of their new wireless SD memory card for digital cameras. The card, which they have been beta testing over the last year and a half, connects your local wi-fi network and automatically uploads photos stored on the card to your computer or to one of 17 online photo sharing services and social networks. The 2GB SD card is now available and is priced at $99.99.[Nice. I’ve been waiting over a year for this product to be released… now to see if they got the details right…]
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The joy of refactoring

Sooo you might remember that I happily refactored a site to use Seth’s custom javascript events. (I believe they have since been wound into prototype core, if you’re going to implement them now.) Anyway, recently we had a number of changes that needed to tie into various user actions, and since they were already custom events from back in February, creating the new classes and having them listen to the events, or in one case adding a new event to a pre-existing class and it’s subclasses took almost no time. I love when that happens. Thanks Seth!

MicroPlace Launches

MicroPlace Launches: MicroPlace, a site that lets you make small loans to workers in developing countries and receive a return, just recently launched. Josh Susser, one of the contractors that worked on it, wrote a great introduction to the project.

“As far as I am aware, MicroPlace is the first SEC-registered online brokerage implemented in Ruby on Rails. We had to go through an extensive security audit, and there were a lot of regulatory requirements for us to meet… But the bottom line is that we didn’t have any significant problems with either Ruby or Rails in passing those hurdles.”

Josh also mentioned that MicroPlace is owned by eBay, making this the first Rails project at an otherwise all-Java shop. Awesome, high-fives all around guys. I hope to see more posts about the development aspect of the site.

[Nice idea!]
Source: Riding Rails

Falling in love with material things.

frontLeft.jpgIf I were buying a violin…(or viola, or cello) I would buy it from David. I was once on a list to buy a guitar from him, but things got screwed up and I never did. At the moment it makes no sense for me to sink that kind of money into an instrument. Anyway, his sense of style, and sculpture is what lures me in, and the attention and study of qualities of sound keep me there.

Gestures, the iPhone, and Standards: A Developer’s Questions

Gestures, the iPhone, and Standards: A Developer’s Questions: Who will step forward with that leadership and be followed? Will Apple try to maintain a sole position as a platform or will it encourage the whole industry to follow its lead? Will Microsoft go the Open route, and follow its previous examples evangelizing XML and other very open standards, or will it try to create its own proprietary following? Will some members of the academic or FOSS community do the legal legwork, interface design, and initial coding to mimic the success of the Berners-Lee and later the W3C vs. proprietary systems such as those from AOL, CompuServe, and Microsoft? Who will fund that? Google? Nokia? Will there be inward-looking greed or industry leadership? [Good stuff.]
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