World: r3wp

My spelling was better when I was a kid, but I think the older you 
get, your brain gets filled with all sorts of junk, diminishing your 
capacity to see the right answer in simplistic matters like spelling, 
or perhaps you care less about it, because you realize how important 
or non-important it is to get right, saving brain power.

I'm a way better programmer now, more thanks to various thinking 
techniques, than to specific learning about algorithms. I'm better 
at leaving a problem alone when I know it will take days to solve, 
if I bruteforce it. "Wiser birds" and such.

I think if I went back to university and took the same courses again 
that I did back then (but have forgotten all about), I would do a 
lot better in them.

Today in my 30's, I feel my brain is developing a whole lot more 
than in my 20's. Even my short-term memory is improving.

Perosnally, I'm not convinced by these brain shrinking theories. 
I quote from Tony Buzan (The Mind Mapping Man) :


Recent research has shown that in a normal, healthy brain (that is, 
one in a healthy, aerobically fit body in which the brain is used 
well) there is no apparent loss of brain cells; only a growth in 
the interconnections, and therefore multiple intelligences of  that 
brain!


As the 20th Century ended, biologists at Princeton University came 
up witht the discovery ... that parts of the human brain can generate 
thousands of new brain cells, everyday


I can't find the original scientific reference - Google only guided 
me to http://biology.about.com/library/weekly/aa102199.htm

Yes, that's the recent stuff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP-0Nce5oTQ&eurl=http://www.youtube.com/my_videos_edit&feature=player_embedded


the recently deceased crunchpad ... a browser OS touch driven tablet.

Browser OS touch driven tablet .. now deceased due to internal faults.

http://www.techcrunch.com/

Sorry ... http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/30/crunchpad-end/


Still this does give us a glimpse on how we might use a browser OS 
...

Sad...I had hopes for this device

Same here - was planning on getting one.

Very sad, and more sad, this is the most common reality of technology 
(esp. hardware).

Could probably use my tablet like this :)

http://llvm.org/devmtg/2009-10/

Lots of new information from a developer meeting about LLVM.

So, FreeBSD and Cray are using LLVM too. It seems more and more interesting.

for me LLVM support for REBOL is usefull marketing.  even if cyphre's 
compiler is better.  :-)

http://www.grace.de/

Nice, but 6000Û is quite a lot.

Google Public DNS: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

Thanks, Ashley! Are there any concerns using Google public DNS?

Privacy, I guess

Yes, they admit that. The only protection is that Google promises 
not to do anything with it, but who knows.

Also: "Note, however, that because nameservers geolocate according 
to the resolver's IP address rather than the user's, Google Public 
DNS has the same limitations as other open DNS services: that is, 
the server to which a user is referred might be farther away than 
one to which a local DNS provider would have referred. This could 
cause a slower browsing experience for certain sites."

Well, I will try it for a while and see, how it goes. Thanks for 
explanations.

opendns is quite slow for us in the pacific ... wonder if this will 
be better.

8.8.8.8 .. Chinese lucky numbers :)

http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2009/11/30/daily69.html

No more Crunchpad, or marketing ploy?

same information as on tuesday above ?

This one states that the device will be launched anyway by the tech 
partner who ran off with the device.

That seemed to be pretty much their plan. We're in for another good 
legal soap opera

http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=10008&tag=nl.e540

techcrunch's tablet ... law suits already flying around.

aahhh this once was "Tech News"  those where the good days of internet. 
 :-D

http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/outerspace/internet-article.html

a few funny exerpts:

Some video clips - and at least one full-length video movies - are 
already available on the network.


it was still a marxist entity:   "It does not take kindly to unsolicited 
advertisements; use electronic mail to promote your product and you 
are likely to be inundated with hate mail "


a different scale... that of thousands:    "There are no TV Guides 
to sort through the 5,000 discussion groups or the 2,5OO electronic 
newsletters or the tens of thousands of computers with files to share."

And people didn't know 0 from o on a keyboard :-)

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18272-google-demonstrates-quantum-computer-image-search.html

Another platform to port R3 to.

http://etherpad.com/

Etherpad going to be released as open source.

Hey, that's quite nice. Easier to use than Google Wave.

it has been released already afaik.

http://code.google.com/p/etherpad/

but maybe, they just created the space for the project and files 
are not there yet?

well, they say you can just hg clone https://etherpad.googlecode.com/hg/
etherpad

If you use Wikipedia sometimes (or are interesting in ClimateGate), 
read this:

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/12/23/lawrence-solomon-wikipedia-s-hockey-stick-wars.aspx

And "Top 10 Reasons Not to Donate to Wikipedia"

http://www.mywikibiz.com/Top_10_Reasons_Not_to_Donate_to_Wikipedia

Wikipedia: Interesting... I'm going to cross-check if local chapters 
a better suited for a donation

John, good stuff...  I have always had strong issues with Wikipedia... 
 the same listed here, and a few more as well.

It works "well enough" for most things, but yeah, it is corrupt...

nVidia Tegra 2 introduction - well done, nVidia + ARM! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iikt3GgJJXc

That's what I've been waiting for..

A technical preview of Kodu for PCs is available from Microsoft Labs. 

http://fuse.microsoft.com/kodu/


This is a really nice game creation application for kids. It's completely 
graphical and requires good 3D hardware for best effects (I'm using 
it with an embedded Intel 945G chipset and it's almost acceptable 
at a 1280x720 res, though I don't get the nice shaders, glow, etc.). 
If you've got kids of around 8+, I would really recommend you check 
this out. I've been looking at what's available out there and there 
aren't too many really nice environments.


Part of the problem with most development environments is that the 
little guys expect quite a lot in terms of whizzbang from the exposure 
to all the latest games and it's quite a lot of work to do anything 
approaching this in most kid friendly tools. Kodu seems to be an 
exception.  


I'd also recommend StarLogo TNG from MIT, Scratch (and the enhanced 
version BYOB -build your own blocks) from MIT, as well as the newsest 
version of Alice (3.0 beta) from Carnegie Mellon.


It would be a good little project to create REBOL tools for content 
creation/edition for Kodu. Later, when Maxim's 3D and other UI candy 
is in place, maybe REBOL could be used to create the best kids' programming 
tool ever.

Is that really what we want ?
REBOL - The best Kid programming tool
:-)

Another one handicap after the unfamous:
REBOL - The "attracts Frenchies" programming tool

c'mon Steeve - you know I wasn't referring to the language itself 
as being the best kids' programming tool

Seems to contradict what I thought about asterix and plug pc http://www.plugpbx.org/

kodu looks cool

I've tried it out for a little bit - it's pretty deep despite the 
kid centered approach. Just got a Radeon 5770 card so that it can 
run much better. If you search on youtube, you can see some of the 
kinds of things people have done with it and the glow and particle 
effects, etc.