For the moment I’ve added jspart to Ohloh, SourceKibitzer and CIA, if you use any of these instruments you can find me there.

I’ve seen this video and even though as features go this doesn’t have anything in particular, I’m amazed how you can create a clone of a real device in such a short period of time.

Non che il nostro sito fa tanta pubblicità ma visto che è per una buona causa (se mio cugino sta bene è una buona causa) lo facciamo. Dunque, se per caso decidete a fare vacanza a Pola (Croazia), vi piacciono gli sport estremi e volete divertirvi con i vostri amici vi faccio presente che mio cugino (Jasen) ha un paintball club e si trova lì. Sul loro sito trovate un enigmatico link Kontakt sotto quale trovate un paio di numeri telefonici e una email. In generale i ragazzi parlano inglese ma usando le mani e piedi forse si riesce anche in italiano

PS. E’ vero che il paintball è vietato in Italia a differenza del airsoft?

A couple of months ago I’ve discovered JQuery’s Interface widgets and I must say it’s a very nice set of extensions even though it does have issues with certain browsers (the homepage crashes IE7 for example). That said, I’ve quickly tried to do stuff I needed for my project. For instance, I had a div on one page that I dynamically refill with some data periodically. As it needed to be in a limited space what I did at the time is something like this:

<div style="overflow:auto;height:200px;">
This of course had the disadvantage to be completely fixed in height, but still provided the possibility to scroll around the data in the layer. So, I decided to use Interface in order to give the div the ability to resize. As the main Interface page offered only two examples of a resizable textbox and a selection over an image I’ve decided to publish this example where I show how to do the same thing but with a div (layer).

You’ll notice the expander widget on the bottom looks very much like the YUI-ext handle, that’s because it is the same image and background pattern behind. Also there are two html’s, one that uses a fixed width of the div and the other is 90% width. The problem with the % one is that under IE7 the layer collapses in width and gets around 50px in width (as by the min width param in the javascript). I’ll appreciate if anyone that can figure out a workaround so that this doesn’t happen and it’ll get noted here.

This example uses Interface 1.2 and jQuery 1.1.2. I can’t wait for Interface 2.

Code archive

Come ci informa punto informatico e arstechnica migliaia di siti italiani sono stati contaggiati con del malware che sfrutta le debolezze di Internet Explorer, QuickTime, Windows 2000, Firefox, WinZip, e Opera non protetti e prova a installare del malware sul PC della vittima. I criminali che stanno diffondendo questi virus sono riusciti a modificare i siti inserendo un tag IFRAME che porta il codice infettato che provvede a portare gli navigatori su siti pieni di malware di ogni genere. Si ipotizza che un vettore d’attacco è stato IIS ma per adesso non ci sono maggiori dettagli sul chi o come è riuscito a eseguire questa operazione di così grande portata.

Sigmalab vi consiglia di tenere il vostro PC Windows sempre aggiornato e con strumenti di sicurezza attivi (firewall, antivirus, anti-spyware). Abbiamo voci abbastanza sicure che Linux è abbastanza immune a molti tipi di exploit.

Couple of days ago I’ve attended a nice db2 seminar on my campus. Mr Raul Chong was the speaker and did a two part presentation. The first part focused on some basic aspects of db2 and then passed over to it’s use in Web 2.0 applications. The first part was nice and I’ve picked up a couple of tips, I had issues with the Web 2.0 presentation. Basically it was a flash presentation of a pre-baked Ruby on Rails application that makes very little sense to me, if you do a demo of RoR you must do the full CRUD code generation and all. How can you figure out what is RoR good for out of a done site if you don’t even know what Ruby is (like 90% of the attendees)?

As far as pointing out the opportunity in getting to know db2 the whole presentation kicks off with showing that db2 DBA’s get an average of 77K salary (like MS SqlServer), then follow Oracle and Postgres with 70K (good for me then ) while MySql averages around 64K.

One thing I didn’t find an answer is whether we’ll see a JDBC 4.0 compliant driver soon. Raul hopes it’ll be out with the Viper 2 release but he was not sure. Also useful tip about db2, the Express-C version has no size limitation, the limits are on CPU (2 dual cores) and RAM (4GB). Pretty reasonable I’d say. Also nice to know IBM is paying attention to PHP, Zend, RoR and giving back some love.

Out of the technical aspects I’ve appreciated most the technical aspects of how is the XML data type implemented in a separate hierarchical data store that can be indexed and traversed nicely, Raul said competitors used more traditional approaches so I’ll need to investigate that, I personally hope it’s just FUD but it could be true. SQL extensions so you can do xpath and xquery queries was also very nice (but short). The other thing that I liked is how he demoed row contention between updates, and also the timer that checks for deadlocks periodically.

So all in all, I’d give it a 100-150 beginner level (although I have some db and db2 experience so I could be immune to some stuff), if it’s up to me I’d go with more advanced stuff, especially because we were on a Engineering faculty. Also, for me, PHP/Ruby are cool but I don’t see the point of presenting them without actually doing some rapid prototyping live on stage. IBM will re-brand it’s database offering and make it less db2′ish as they have bought another db so they will ditch the db2 from many commands.

One thing to notice as well is that IBM is trying to spread the word on db2 on campuses and encourages students to participate with a Student Ambassador program for which they will give certain benefits.

If it was up to me I would have featured JEE

I’ve picked up this blog aggregator on db2 news planetdb2.com.

This is an older news but it’s still worth to mention. Google pushed an early release of Google Gears (beta), a plugin for your browser that will allow your web applications to work offline. It features an embedded SQLight database which is directly accessible via javascript. Dojo already integrated it’s offline storage to work with Gears. The Google Developer Podcast #3 featured Mike Tsao of the Google Gears team and one of the things mentioned was that there is no support for synchronization. As I just discovered the SDO specification something tells me that using SDO’s to sync up with the server side could be a possibility. As SDO’s are xml, the problem (of how you should create the SDO in order to sync up) I think with this approach is that you would need to manipulate a lot of XML in the browser which could be done either with a JS library, E4X (maybe) or another browser plugin. Do you think using SDO’s could be a viable approach? Classic web services are also a possibility. Any other ideas? Google Gears is available both as a IE ActiveX plugin or a Firefox extension. Developer site here.

Apple launched it’s developers conference at San Francisco.  As always the keynote is a must.

It starts as always with numbers about the conference. It then features a big personal thanks to Intel’s Paul Otellini and then goes off to developer stories. At first we see some great gaming stuff coming form EA and ID with some featured products by EA and a spectacular demo presented by Carmack.

Next we have a presentation of some features in Leopard. The desktop has been revamped, we have a new 3d dock, stacks to keep stuff organized, consistent feel between the apps, a new menu bar and a prominent active window. Finder has some nice features like cover flow view, searching other macs on the network and even over the .Mac internet service, plus a revamped and programmable sidebar (there’s a background crash of WoW during the presentation). Next follows Quick View, an extensible preview system that allows you to quickly preview files without starting the full apps. Leopard will be 64-bit only, Cocoa is fully 64-bit now and it will run 32 and 64-bit apps side by side (but will it run on 32-bit hardware?). A really cool stuff analogue with .Net’s WPF is Core Animation and I think we’ll see great stuff coming really quickly. Boot Camp will be part of Leopard. A virtual desktop support they call Spaces with a great exposè like overview and it seems the possibility to mute other desktops (really sweet touch, attention to details is these guys specialty). The Web Clip instant widget maker got much better with some sweet browser integration and container highlighting, it was a tool that was demoed last year as well but it looks just much more polished. iChat also got some really nice upgrades as well like backdrops, documents sharing, effects etc. Time machine was presented already so I won’t go into details.

The joke on MS on having too many SKU’s really hit the spot.

On an ending note, Steve also announced Safari for the Windows and perhaps more important developing on the iPhone. Basically they advocate use of web applications on the phone. Although that’s good for me as I work in that sector having a counterpart to JavaME and .Net CF is a must. I hope Apple reconsiders the NO SDK decision.

There was no mention of ZFS during the speech. Times are interesting.