I love how everyone and their brother has an opinion, and it always stops there. I’d like to take a moment to rant, and point out that opinions do not a curriculum make.
Archive for September, 2005
What is Computer Science?
Sunday, September 18th, 2005eBay acquires Skype
Thursday, September 15th, 2005eBay to acquire Skype for over 2 billion (euros or USD). That is a lot of biscuits. I think you have to take this as a sign that war is about to erupt in the VoIP market, given Google’s recent entry. Now, who’s left for Yahoo to buy?
The Birmingham Course: OpenLaszlo to the Rescue!
Thursday, September 15th, 2005We needed to deliver a prototype on-line exam quickly. Despite their simple appearance, on-line exams can have some complex interaction modes that are annoying to deal with in a client/server model. OpenLaszlo provided an excellent framework for quickly going from idea to solution.
Firefox 1.5 Beta 1
Monday, September 12th, 2005Firefox 1.5 beta 1 is out. I’ve been tracking Deer Park (the pre-beta releases of Firefox) for a while now so I’m excited to see this new release. I’m particularly enthusiastic about the canvas support as I’m having fun playing around with vector graphics. The Firefox canvas is much more complete, though slower, than Apple’s buggy implementation in Safari. The other new features don’t excite me as much, as the web applications I develop run on the general Internet. If you have a closed environment they will be more useful. In such an environment, XULRunner becomes very interesting.
New Apple Products
Monday, September 12th, 2005While I was away on holiday Apple released two new products, the iPod Nano, and a iTunes equipped phone in collaboration with Motorola. Apple is currently the biggest innovator in hardware design so it is worth looking at what they come up with.