One of my friends just sent me this and I felt I had to share it! I think it’s actually scarily accurate:
Archive for December, 2007
Merry Christmas to all! For those of you who do not recognise the holiday - happy holidays! International Talk Like A Pirate Day was a few months ago so we Pastafarians have got our celebrating out of the way already.
Some good news from browser makers today to put a cap on a great year for browser development and innovation.
CouchDB is a (relatively) new database option for development that focuses on documents, rather than generic relational systems like most databases do. I think the concept is appealing and support for things like automatic versioning and distributed processing and storage could mean a lot fewer headaches that trying to get a custom system going yourself. Also interesting is the JSON storage format, which would make this ideal to use in many asynchronous web applications as the data returned can be used straight away on the browser.
I haven’t had any cause to use this system yet but I’ll be sure to write a review when I do. Anyone else taken this for a spin?
If anyone has attempted to watch H.264 video on an older PC you know what a frustrating experience it can be due to the ridiculous amount of CPU the decoding eats up. CoreAVC is a Windows codec that dramatically reduces that load. Being a Windows codec we Linux users are left in the cold (we’re getting used to it) - but I just discovered a project that rectifies that situation! The aptly named CoreAVC for Linux is a set of patches for mplayer, etc to allow them to load the CoreAVC codec through DirectShow emulation. Or something.
I haven’t tried it out myself as I watch all my videos on my desktop, which is more than capable of handling HD H.264 videos, even with inefficient decoding. Someone give it a go and let me know if it works!
I’ve recently been developing a web-based application (a RIA one might say) and, after initially trying to get it working right in jQuery, I decided to have a go at using ExtJS, a JavaScript library I’ve been meaning to try for a while. Basically, it is a JavaScript library that includes a ton of things for building web application other libraries don’t - not surprising considering it started life as an add-on to YUI. Here is my initial impressions of it, most of which are direct comparisons to jQuery.