Technology

I am sure everybody has heard of Amazon's Music Store launched in the U.S. last year. With DRM free music at the same price or at lower price than the iTunes Music Store it seems really interesting to me.

Now the news is: Amazon launched a Linux version of its MP3 Downloader that allows you to buy Albums easily. Binary packages of the application for the major distributions are available here.

Until now you could only buy the music song per song on the Web page. If this store launches in Germany with a respectable amount of music, I will definately be a customer. By the way: Does anybody have more accurate information about the start date than "this year"?

I just dropped by the local computer store, Dojani & Schreiber's, and had my first test run of the Asus ultra-portable EeePC. The best way to describe it is: Wow!

This thing definitely does not look like a toy (as some of the screenshots on websites may suggest). It feels robust, and a bit heavier than expected. The next thing that impressed me was boot time: It took only around 10 seconds to have the system up and running. I asked the sales-person if the PC had just come out of sleep mode, but he assured me that it was a normal boot, and that the speed was due to the "simplicity" of the system.

Although the screen is tiny it doesn't actually feel so small. The resolution works out much better than expected. I booted Firefox, and the amount of screen space seemed feasible for most web surfing. I was again impressed by the speed it took to launch the browser. After only a few seconds Firefox was up and running. It actually seemed faster than launching Firefox on my Mac! I read reports about Firefox taking up to half a minute to launch. I launched Firefox numerous times, but it always came up very quickly.

Just wanted to let everyone know, that a new version of the Android SDK (Google mobile phone OS) is out. But boy, this is one hell of an upgrade. The GUI of the OS has been completely redesigned. Although the dock like widget was removed, other Apple-y ideas were added. For instance, you can scroll down long menus by flicking your finger (or in the emulator: the mouse) over the screen. A screenshot of the emulator running on my mac is shown below.

And to anyone developing or wanting to develop a cool app for Android, now is your chance: The developer challenge has been extended to mid-April. Unfortunately, time won't allow me to participate, but to all those who have some time on their hands: It really is very elegant to program for Android. Just download the Eclipse plugin and hack away. The demos included in the SDK show just how simple it is to make apps.

After having developed a small compiler in Java on an Ubuntu system I was curious if I could also build it seemlessly on MacOS. So I checked out the subversion project and did an "ant"... Boom! Did not build at all. The problem was that the eclipse on the Ubuntu machine had generated some @Override tags for the overridden methods in the project. Those tags are Java 6 features and do not compile in Java 5. Well... the problem is that Java 6 is not available yet on the Mac platform as I heard weeks ago. So I fired up Google to check the current status about this. According to this website Java 6 is still not included or available for Leopard. Apple removed the beta of Java 6 months ago without further comments. Now all bloggers are encouraged to put this code on there blogs to emphasize that they want Apple to care about this issue:

13949712720901ForOSX

Now with this code, you can use google to see how many blogs are caring about Java 6 on MacOS.

If you're like me, you'll be spending most of your time in Leopard in the Terminal, wondering how all the crazy new features affect people like us. Well, here I'll give you a brief overview of how I have been able to put some of Leopard's new features to use. Today, I'll focus mostly on QuickLook.

QuickLook allows (pre-)viewing a large variety of documents system wide, using a plug-in architecture. Together with CoverFlow, going through large collections of media is no longer a hassle (heck, it's fun)! It has already been mentioned that this is great for that hidden porn collection, however it also has some more "creative" advantages. For instance, I have to deal with large image collections on a daily basis. By large, I mean millions. Obviously, I need to do a lot of sorting and grep-ing. With leopard, I can now actually view my results on the fly. For this I use the new qlmanage command. So to view a large set of images with QuickLook, I can do something like

qlmanage -p $(find images -name '*pizza*.jpg') >& /dev/null

And voila, a QuickLook preview of all the images pops up. The piping into /dev/null is necessary, as qlmanage has a lot of debug output. Here you can see a screenshot:

 Great coverage can be found at http://webservices.esa.int/page.php

The Launch can be seen live on Nasa-TV ( of course on www.nasa.gov )! 

Ever since I first heard about Mac OS X Leopard's new features, I have been looking forward to Web Clip, that allows you to extract arbitrary content from a website, and wrap it in a Dashboard widget. As I planned, this would be put to good use on my University's cafeteria page.

Unfortunately though, my Uni puts up the menu for the whole week in one big screen-filling table. As my buddy Meck soon figured out, a trick is to shrink the display size in Safari (command-minus), and to then apply Web Clip. This solves the problem of fitting the large table onto a smaller screen. However, it is still not optimal. Instead of seeing the whole week, it would make much more sense to see the menu for the current day only. For this to work, Web Clip would somehow have to know today's date, and then magically extract that portion from the table that corresponds to that date. Obviously, that can't be done automatically.

If you are a student, researcher or both, you've probably come across scientific search engines before, like Google Scholar or Microsoft's Live Search Academic. Although the latter sports a spiffy interface with live previews, my favorite is Google Scholar for the simple reason that it actually works in Safari (plus, it's not from MS, which gives it those extra coolness points).

The only thing that often drove me nuts, was when all 11 or so versions of an article were found on websites, that try to make money off of them. Although it sometimes helped to disguise yourself as the Google Bot, or simply use Google's cache, many times these work-arounds did not apply. Those were then the rare cases where my local University library actually justified its existence.

So imagine my happiness when I recently found the following annotations included with my searches in Scholar:

That is just soooo typical: For the past weeks my daily 'check-MacRumors.com' routine has been rather boring. Then, after being without internet for a week, I return only to find that a billion things have happened. And my, my, have we good news!

No this, is not about World of Warcraft, I am talking about the latest and greatest software from Microsoft - Windows Vista! Today I got the DVD with the good stuff for free from my university as I am a student in computer science. With my brandnew QuadCore runing at 2,4GHz I did not expect any problems, so I slammed in the DVD and booted from it. And then... I waited while a screen showing a cursor showed up, but nothing else. I was asking myself: Where damn God is the progress bar or at least a message asking for patience?? But I could still move the mouse cursor, so I just went on waiting... until I got pleased with a dialog requiring my licence key: God I really missed that :)