Over the months I have come across little items which I would have liked to mention but which won't make a complete column.
Corduroy Mansions
The first thing that caught my eye is an online novel, which is being produced in daily instalments beginning just over a week ago, and going on for the next 19 weeks. I mightn't have paid much attention except that the novel is being written by no less a person than Alexander McCall Smith, who is also responsible for the brilliant No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series.
Anyone who hasn't read those gentle gems should get on down to the library and catch up on the adventures of Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's first lady private eye. Anyway, back to McCall Smith' latest project, in which he sets out to chronicle the doings of the inhabitants of Corduroy Mansions, a undistinguished building in Pimlico in London, which an architectural guide to the area describes as being of "no interest whatsoever".
Readers can comment on each 1000-word chapter as it appears on the web and the author has promised to take readers' plot and character suggestions into account as he writes future episodes. You can read the book online, receive it by e-mail, download it in podcast format, or you can even listen to it read by Andrew Sachs; he of the "my name is Manuel, I come from Barcelona and I know nothing" fame.
Jack Kilby
How many people on September 12, I wonder, gave a thought to a rather clever fellow called Jack Kilby who, on that day in 1958, successfully demonstrated the integrated circuit he had invented. Talk about inventions that changed the world; you'd be hard pressed to find any technological products these days which do not incorporate any of those wonder devices.
The major problem facing the electronics industry at the time was the so-called tyranny of numbers because electronic circuits, with thousands of components, were very difficult and thus very expensive, to connect together. Kilby was a new employee at Texas Instruments and, not being eligible for summer leave, turned his mind to solving the problem.
His breakthrough came when he realised that the components of an electrical circuit can be made in one piece out of semiconductor material, with all the connections already in place. Kilby was to win the Nobel prize for Physics in 2000 for his invention and would also be credited with the invention of portable electronic calculators and thermal printing.
Tevo shoX
Over the past couple of weeks, I've been playing with a little portable speaker system called the Tevo shoX which looks like a black golf ball and which can be used to listen to any device which has one of those mini-headphone jacks. I suppose that the prime use for it would be with audio players which only come with earphones, but it can also be connected to most cellphones with an optional cable.
I broke out my SANSA Clip music player to give the speaker a test run and it sounded a bit tinny to my ear until I realised that you have to twist the sides of the speaker in opposite directions until it unlocks and extends with a concertina section in the middle. It only adds a centimetre or so of height to the unit, but it improves the sound enormously.
The unit is small enough to make it feasible to carry it about in a pocket or suitable sock until its needed. It comes with a neat little retractable cable that will connect the speaker to a sound source and to a computer, via a USB plug, which recharges its on-board battery. The shoX is apparently available from major retailers for around R200 and the optional cellphone cables are around R40 a throw.
Why not leave a comment by clicking the link below?
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Saturday, September 13, 2008
All roads lead to Chrome??
One of the more surprising Internet-related launches happened very recently when Google launched a free Internet browser of its own.
The news that they had been working on a browser called Chrome broke when a web-based comic, describing the new browse,r was published earlier than planned. Not long afterwards, Google announced that a Beta version of Chrome would be available for download the next day.
According to the comic, which you can find by searching on Google for "chrome comic", Google felt that people were doing so much more on the web that a new browser was called for. One of the things that they wanted to was to create a browser that really could do more than one thing a time.
You might imagine that they could do this already but existing browsers do things one at a time, but fast enough to appear that they are not doing so. The one-at-a-time method worked very well, says Google, until the advent of today's online applications, video and audio sharing.
The more tasks the user is working on and the more complex they are, the slower the browser is likely to work, and the more unreliable it is likely to be. Chrome was designed to be able to do a number of things at a time and to work more efficiently and neatly with the computer's memory.
This improvements were supposed to make Chrome faster and more stable and so, curious to check it out, I downloaded a copy as soon as I could. I did this using the download link on the main page at www.google.com.
I don't know exactly how big the browser file is but it downloaded onto my computer pretty quickly and installed itself without any fuss. Chrome's interface is very clean and uncluttered, giving priority not to itself, but to displaying the content of the web page you're viewing.
It has the now usual tab arrangement where each site you're browsing is represented by a tab at the top of the page, and not by a host of windows in your task bar. One nice innovation is that there is one space into which you can enter the address of the website you want, or just keywords, as you would in a search engine.
I would say that my initial impressions of Chrome are pretty good and that it does seem a bit faster than either Internet Explorer or Firefox. It worked perfectly on nearly every page that I viewed with it, except Adobe's online wordprocessing package.
The thing that you have to bear in mind is that Chrome is still in its Beta version and, therefore, still on test. The public is, in fact, helping Google with the test and Chrome even has a feature which allows you to report bugs you find in it.
Chrome is still lacking a number of features including the ability to send pages or links by e-mail. Another missing feature is that, while it can import Internet Explorer bookmarks, it still cannot import from Firefox, which is what I usually use.
Its too soon to form a definitive opinion on the merits of Chrome but, knowing Google, it will be a very capable contender in the browser wars. The only niggly naggly doubt that comes into my mind is just how it will fare in the those very same wars.
It may be a slight improvement on other browsers but there is not yet, to my mind at least, a compelling reason to change to it. The fact that it is not sufficiently differentiated from the opposition may be its major problem going forward.
Please note Google developers, that if it suddenly acquired the ability to download and keep a copy of my Gmail on my computer, I'd convert in a flash.
Why not leave a comment by clicking the link below?
The news that they had been working on a browser called Chrome broke when a web-based comic, describing the new browse,r was published earlier than planned. Not long afterwards, Google announced that a Beta version of Chrome would be available for download the next day.
According to the comic, which you can find by searching on Google for "chrome comic", Google felt that people were doing so much more on the web that a new browser was called for. One of the things that they wanted to was to create a browser that really could do more than one thing a time.
You might imagine that they could do this already but existing browsers do things one at a time, but fast enough to appear that they are not doing so. The one-at-a-time method worked very well, says Google, until the advent of today's online applications, video and audio sharing.
The more tasks the user is working on and the more complex they are, the slower the browser is likely to work, and the more unreliable it is likely to be. Chrome was designed to be able to do a number of things at a time and to work more efficiently and neatly with the computer's memory.
This improvements were supposed to make Chrome faster and more stable and so, curious to check it out, I downloaded a copy as soon as I could. I did this using the download link on the main page at www.google.com.
I don't know exactly how big the browser file is but it downloaded onto my computer pretty quickly and installed itself without any fuss. Chrome's interface is very clean and uncluttered, giving priority not to itself, but to displaying the content of the web page you're viewing.
It has the now usual tab arrangement where each site you're browsing is represented by a tab at the top of the page, and not by a host of windows in your task bar. One nice innovation is that there is one space into which you can enter the address of the website you want, or just keywords, as you would in a search engine.
I would say that my initial impressions of Chrome are pretty good and that it does seem a bit faster than either Internet Explorer or Firefox. It worked perfectly on nearly every page that I viewed with it, except Adobe's online wordprocessing package.
The thing that you have to bear in mind is that Chrome is still in its Beta version and, therefore, still on test. The public is, in fact, helping Google with the test and Chrome even has a feature which allows you to report bugs you find in it.
Chrome is still lacking a number of features including the ability to send pages or links by e-mail. Another missing feature is that, while it can import Internet Explorer bookmarks, it still cannot import from Firefox, which is what I usually use.
Its too soon to form a definitive opinion on the merits of Chrome but, knowing Google, it will be a very capable contender in the browser wars. The only niggly naggly doubt that comes into my mind is just how it will fare in the those very same wars.
It may be a slight improvement on other browsers but there is not yet, to my mind at least, a compelling reason to change to it. The fact that it is not sufficiently differentiated from the opposition may be its major problem going forward.
Please note Google developers, that if it suddenly acquired the ability to download and keep a copy of my Gmail on my computer, I'd convert in a flash.
Why not leave a comment by clicking the link below?
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Making site building easier
Hetzner South Africa has been hosting local websites since 1999 and has recently launched a new tool to make it easier for people to build their own sites and to add content to them.
The browser-based SiteBuilder tool is available at an extra charge with all the Hetzner hosting packages, and I was given the opportunity to fiddle with it for a while. You’re given the option of using SiteBuilder when you log onto your website’s control panel and, when you click the button, you’re first warned that it will overwrite any website that you may have made on your own and uploaded.
Building a website with it is a pretty simple seven-step process which includes specifying the category the site will fall into; personal, business, or whatever, and then choosing a design from a fairly large range of options. The design can then be personalised with a logo and the choice of text colour and typeface.
The next step involves creating the actual pages in the website including top level pages, such as Contacts or About Us pages, and sub-pages below the main ones. SiteBuilder creates buttons on each top level page which link to the all the others and, beneath them, you can create sub-pages which link back only to their main page.
An example of this might be if you had a top-level products page and a sub-page for each product which link back to the main product page. You can create a number of different sorts of pages including ordinary pages, blogs, web forums, photo albums, search pages, and quite a few other types.
The next step is to add content to the pages and this is done by selecting the page you want to add to, clicking on sample text already on the page and pasting your text into the space. Text and pictures are contained in blocks called paragraphs and each page comes with at least two, but you can put any number of additional ones on the page, if want them.
You can adjust the settings of the website and, for example, add a description and keywords that will help people to find the site, once the search engines have classified it. The last step is publish the web pages to the live site so that they will be visible to visitors of to the site.
You can create new pages and add them to the site or edit existing pages at any time. The changes can be saved and you can continue working until you’re completely happy, but the changes are not carried over to the live website until you publish them again.
I initially had problems with SiteBuilder and experienced a couple of crashes and difficulties with uploading picture files. I was using the Firefox browser and things improved markedly when I switched over Internet Explorer.
On the plus side, I think that SiteBuilder would actually make it easier for an inexperienced person to create a website and, with the many design choices available, to make it look pretty decent. I think that most people would be able to work out how to create a site with it, but I must say that its interface could stand a lot of improvement.
It is quite powerful in many ways but is lacking some really basic amenities like the ability to adjust the size of a picture or choose whether it should be positioned left, right, or centred on the page. You can test drive the system for free by going to hetzner.co.za and clicking on the SiteBuilder link on the front page.
Previous columns at allan-fishnet.blogspot.co.za.
The browser-based SiteBuilder tool is available at an extra charge with all the Hetzner hosting packages, and I was given the opportunity to fiddle with it for a while. You’re given the option of using SiteBuilder when you log onto your website’s control panel and, when you click the button, you’re first warned that it will overwrite any website that you may have made on your own and uploaded.
Building a website with it is a pretty simple seven-step process which includes specifying the category the site will fall into; personal, business, or whatever, and then choosing a design from a fairly large range of options. The design can then be personalised with a logo and the choice of text colour and typeface.
The next step involves creating the actual pages in the website including top level pages, such as Contacts or About Us pages, and sub-pages below the main ones. SiteBuilder creates buttons on each top level page which link to the all the others and, beneath them, you can create sub-pages which link back only to their main page.
An example of this might be if you had a top-level products page and a sub-page for each product which link back to the main product page. You can create a number of different sorts of pages including ordinary pages, blogs, web forums, photo albums, search pages, and quite a few other types.
The next step is to add content to the pages and this is done by selecting the page you want to add to, clicking on sample text already on the page and pasting your text into the space. Text and pictures are contained in blocks called paragraphs and each page comes with at least two, but you can put any number of additional ones on the page, if want them.
You can adjust the settings of the website and, for example, add a description and keywords that will help people to find the site, once the search engines have classified it. The last step is publish the web pages to the live site so that they will be visible to visitors of to the site.
You can create new pages and add them to the site or edit existing pages at any time. The changes can be saved and you can continue working until you’re completely happy, but the changes are not carried over to the live website until you publish them again.
I initially had problems with SiteBuilder and experienced a couple of crashes and difficulties with uploading picture files. I was using the Firefox browser and things improved markedly when I switched over Internet Explorer.
On the plus side, I think that SiteBuilder would actually make it easier for an inexperienced person to create a website and, with the many design choices available, to make it look pretty decent. I think that most people would be able to work out how to create a site with it, but I must say that its interface could stand a lot of improvement.
It is quite powerful in many ways but is lacking some really basic amenities like the ability to adjust the size of a picture or choose whether it should be positioned left, right, or centred on the page. You can test drive the system for free by going to hetzner.co.za and clicking on the SiteBuilder link on the front page.
Previous columns at allan-fishnet.blogspot.co.za.
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