Interessting excerpt revealing Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos inital reaction to the Segway. From the upcoming book "Code Name Ginger: The Story Behind Segway and Dean Kamen's Quest to Invent a New World". (sheesh)
Quote, Steve Jobs: "I think it sucks."
I knew this "build cities around it" stuff wasn't true... ;)
Just watched the first seven episodes of South Park's season seven. I think it's one of the most political, social and media critic institutions in popular culture. Matt and Trey are really good at pointing out things going wrong, without being as much "in your face" as e.g. Michael Moore. There is nothing like sane opinions expressed insanely with construction paper. (Actually they use Maya, cause that's quicker and cheaper than construction paper…)
My favorite quotes:
"Stanley, listen to me. I have SARS. There's only a 98 percent that I will live." (Randy Marsh, Episode 707)
"I believe that if we are to form a new country, we cannot be a country that appears war-hungry and violent to the rest of the world. However we also cannot be a country that appears weak and unwilling to fight to the rest of the world. So ... what if we form a country that appears to want both. [...] - It's like having your cake and eating it too. - An entire nation founded on saying one thing and doing another. - And we will call that country the united states of america." (The founding fathers, Episode 701)
Around christmas last year I sat together with some friends (fellow computer science students) thinking about what we could do as a freetime coding project to learn the inner magics of Cocoa, earn a little recognition in the macintosh community and (at this point certainly unrealistical) win some awards.
One thing was for sure: I'd had to be Rendezvous enabled. I cannot really remember if any of us was the first to have the idea of writing a collaborative texteditor, or if the idea grew, erm..., collaboratively. Working in a way too small office™, we were quite sick of digging through furniture to reach the other side of the room in order to work together on some code.
Obeying Larry Wall's law of being a programmer (The three virtues of a programmer are: laziness, impatience and hybris.) we decided to create a source code editor that would enable us to work together, without getting up and falling over chairs.
After reading papers on collaborative editing we started working on February, 3rd. In this stage of the project the editor was still codenamed XXP or X²P, meaning extreme Extreme Programming, a pun on the fact that we wanted to do multiple input foci. By the end of february we came up with "Hydra" and the claim "Seven brains are tastier smarter than one."
After on-schedule (woohoo!) release on 31.03.03 we were quite amazed by the feedback we got: Users from all around the world wrote emails, Hydra got featured on Slashdot, O'Reilly and last but not least on Apple's Mac OS X downloads website, just right to Warcraft III. <grin>
Grep'ing through hydra.globalse.org's referer_log and looking what people are blogging/writing about Hydra is fun and deeply satisfying. I think we really couldn't have asked for any better experience with our first real world software project.
In related news, Hydra 1.0.1, a minor bugfix and localization version is due for next Tuesday, while Hydra 1.1 is scheduled for a mid-june release.
I was thinking about migrating this to blosxom. However I haven't had enough time and motivation (see 1.). Furthermore I think I would miss the comfort of antville.
As of now the official language is Denglish. Posts interessting to international users will be posted in english, while other works (e.g. short stories like God's own television network) will be written in german due to a lack of witty, near-native english writing skills.
Why are you doing this?
To keep track of my life and read old stuff to amuse myself
