A New Android UI

Buzz from the Google I/O Conference

Lots of buzz this week from the Google I/O conference. CNET has this nice summary post for us with links to key technologies. Some of this stuff is really taking the whole "the network is the computer" thing to a new level. As these initiatives progress, expect to see more and more applications running from your browser. Take the native client for example. Google showed off a Photo editor running in the browser. When processor intensive applications like this start to work really well, your operating system starts to become irrelavent. That is a complete game changer for how people will think about their computers.

Adding WowHead Tool Tips to Your Blog

Want to add wowhead.com tool tips to your web site or blog? I found 2 good explanations, from Wow Insider and the WowHead forums.

A quick explanation for non World of Warcraft players. WowHead is an online tool that lists all the items in the game. Many players use it to research gear for their avatars.

1. Wow Insider: Adding WowHead Tool Tips


2. WowHead Forums

Go Get Open Office 3.1 Now!

If you use Open Office on a Mac, don't wait til tomorrow, go get version 3.1 now. It looks better and it seems much much faster. It looks like quite an update from 3.0.

PHP E-Mail Verification Script

I ran across this post on e-mail verification of members on net.tutsplus.com via phpdeveloper.org. I haven't gone thru this yet, but it looks really detailed. Worth a look methinks.

HTML Color Codes

I wish I had found this site a lot sooner. The HTML Color Code and Names page on computerhope.com has a listing of all the Hex codes and names for colors in HTML. In addtion, samples of each are included. Very helpful for you CSS adventures.

Behind on Posts

Sorry I haven't posted more the last couple weeks. Was away on business working on the training plan for Java JDK 7 last week. Then on vacation after that. More on JDK 7 to come.

NIST Engineers Discover Fundamental Flaw in Transistor Theory

A reprint from The National Institute for Standards Tech Beat (May 20th, 2009):

There�s a newfound flaw in our understanding of transistor noise, a phenomenon affecting the electronic on-off switch that makes computer circuits possible. According to the engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) who discovered the problem, it will soon stand in the way of creating more efficient, lower-powered devices like cell phones and pacemakers unless we solve it.

While exploring transistor behavior, the team found evidence that a widely accepted model explaining errors caused by electronic �noise� in the switches does not fit the facts. A transistor must be made from highly purified materials to function; defects in these materials, like rocks in a stream, can divert the flow of electricity and cause the device to malfunction. This, in turn, makes it appear to fluctuate erratically between �on� and �off� states. For decades, the engineering community has largely accepted a theoretical model that identifies these defects and helps guide designers� efforts to mitigate them.

Those days are ending, says NIST�s Jason Campbell, who has studied the fluctuations between on-off states in progressively smaller transistors. The theory, known as the elastic tunneling model, predicts that as transistors shrink, the fluctuations should correspondingly increase in frequency.

However, Campbell�s group at NIST has shown that even in nanometer-sized transistors, the fluctuation frequency remains the same. �This implies that the theory explaining the effect must be wrong,� Campbell said. �The model was a good working theory when transistors were large, but our observations clearly indicate that it�s incorrect at the smaller nanoscale regimes where industry is headed.�

The findings have particular implications for the low-power transistors currently in demand in the latest high-tech consumer technology, such as laptop computers. Low-power transistors are coveted because using them on chips would allow devices to run longer on less power�think cell phones that can run for a week on a single charge or pacemakers that operate for a decade without changing the battery. But Campbell says that the fluctuations his group observed grow even more pronounced as the power decreased. �This is a real bottleneck in our development of transistors for low-power applications,� he says. �We have to understand the problem before we can fix it�and troublingly, we don�t know what�s actually happening.�

Campbell, who credits NIST colleague K.P. Cheung for first noticing the possibility of trouble with the theory, presented* some of the group�s findings at an industry conference on May 19, 2009, in Austin, Texas. Researchers from the University of Maryland College Park and Rutgers University also contributed to the study.

* J.P. Campbell, L.C. Yu, K.P. Cheung, J. Qin, J.S. Suehle, A. Oates, K. Sheng. Large Random Telegraph Noise in Sub-Threshold Operation of Nano-scale nMOSFETs. 2009 IEEE International Conference on Integrated Circuit Design and Technology. Austin, Texas. May 19, 2009; and Random Telegraph Noise in Highly Scaled nMOSFETs. 2009 IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium, Montreal, Canada, April 29, 2009.

JQuery vs Moo Tools

Ajaxian has this story comparing JQuery and Moo Tools. Looks like a good read.

Links Fixed

The links should be fixed now on blueskyworkshop.com. The following code does the trick. Essentially, it just adds a target attribute with a value of _top to all link elements. This moves the linked page to the top most frame. Thus, any container frames are removed.

17:<script src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js' type='text/javascript'/>
18:<script type='text/javascript'>
19:  function pageLoad(){
20:    $('a[href]').attr('target', '_top');
21:  }
22:
23:  $(document).ready(pageLoad);
24:</script>

Fixing Links on BlueskyWorkshop.com

I just realized yesterday that if you access this blog by my blueskyworkshop.com URL, links are captured in the Frameset I created to pull in my Blogger page. This was not my intention. Hopefully I can fix this shortly. Should be an easy fix with JQuery.

Text Markup Control

Ever notice how most of the rich text controls for HTML textareas are mostly overkill for what is needed? Every wish for something simpler? Well now you have an alternative. Check out MarkItUp!. This JQuery based control can turn any textarea into a text mark up control. MarkItUp supports HTML, Markdown, TexTile and other Wiki markup syntaxes. Looks very cool.

Using the Google Ajax Libraries API

The Google Ajax Libraries API is a caching service for popular JavaScript libraries. Essentially, instead of loading your favorite library from your own web server, you get to use a Google URL to load the library. Since Google has all sorts of caching and edge services, this should load your library and your page much faster. In addition, if other sites use the same service, chances are your lib could already be cached in the browser. So how do you use the service?

Easy Mode

The easiest way to use the server is to just update your script tag to use a Google URL. For example, to use the latest version of JQuery I would simply use this script tag.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

That is pretty much a slam dunk. Available URLs for JQuery, Dojo, etc... are listed in the documentation.

Fast Mode?

According to Google, the fastest and most flexible way to load the library is with the google.load() method. So the above script tag is replaced with a call to the Google jsapi library. Here is a sample of head section from my JQuery-Examples page.

 4:<head>
 5:  <title>JQuery Examples</title>
 6:  <meta name="keywords" content="jquery, form, val, html, validation"></meta>
 7:  <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="pages.js"></script>
 8:  <?php include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "/in/cssblip.php"); ?>
 9:  <script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
10:  <script>
11:  // Load jQuery
12:  google.load("jquery", "1.3.2", {uncompressed:true});
13:
14:  function pageLoad(){
15:    // do stuff when DOM is ready
16:
17:    $('table#mainTable tbody tr:odd').addClass('oddTable');
18:    $('table#mainTable tbody tr:even').addClass('evenTable');
19:
20:  }
21:  
22:  google.setOnLoadCallback(pageLoad);
23:  </script>
24:  
25:</head>
26:<body>

Basically, you load the jsapi libary which in turn loads JQuery. Apparently, the compressed version of the library is loaded by default, given that, I added the third parameter to the load method. Firebug tells me that the jsapi lib is 5k and JQuery is about 35k so I think I'm getting the minified version. Also, the documentation suggests I use google.setOnLoadCallback to detect page load instead of the similar JQuery function.

Summary

So to sum up. If you want simple, go with the first option. If you want fastest, go with option 2. Either way, your Ajax enabled pages are gonna load a lot faster. Thanks Google!

Microsoft Windows is *not* an Operating System

After recently contracting for an investment firm who insists on using Microsoft Windows for an 'operating system', and after having my/their developer box re-imaged several times because of the Win32.Polipos virus rampantly running across their network, it occurred to me that Micro$oft Windoze is NOT an operating system... it's a binary petri dish whose sole purpose is to create a multi-billion dollar business for the likes of Symantec and McAffe.

As for me... I'm thankful my personal computers and laptops are running FreeBSD. Long live the BSD Foundation!

Playing with Virtual Box

With my work begining on JDK 7, I went to download the latest version and realized I need to build the JDK from source. This seems like a perfect opportunity to give Virtual Box a try on OS X. I decided Ubuntu would be the best guest operating system to run, so I downloaded the software and and installed it.

To help me out I found this article on installing Ubuntu 9.04 on Virtual Box. Well everything worked great until I got to the part where I need to boot off the installer CDROM. When I tried to do that, I got this error: No Bootable Medium Found. So Googling around I found this support article which identified the fact it wasn't a problem with my boot disk. After a little sniffing around I found that you have to enable "Passthrough" for you CDROM drive for the boot disc to work. After doing that, the VM started up fine and I was installing! Yay!

The installation went very smooth. When you are done everything works, but the VM screen resolution was only 800x600. Virtual Box has a set of tools for fixing this sort of thing up like VMWare. But instead of being call the Virtual Box Tools, they are the Virtual Box Additions. Different name, same thing as VMware tools. However, the installer for this is much, much better than the VMWare tools. I just ran one script, and everything is installed. This was much easier than my last experience with VMWare and Ubuntu. Anyway, after the reboot, everything worked fine. The screen resolution is much better and the mouse no longer gets captured in the VM. The CPU utilization seems a tad higher then VMWare, but other than that, getting things up and running was pretty easy. I'm looking forward to playing around more.

Note: For full disclosure, I am an employee of Sun Microsystems which owns Virtual Box.