A little /dev/random this evening, as I’ve decided to give the Dashcode Beta a try out. This is mainly because I’d like a little desktop widget to show me the current snow conditions around Zermatt, and it should be easy to cycle through the cameras available at sites around the glaciers.
You can grab the Beta release of Dashcode from the Apple Developer Connection. The code is set to time out on July 17th 2007. For all the Mac rumour-mongers out there, perhaps there’s a good pointer there for when Leopard will get released 
— or not, as the case now is <sigh>
Tags: beta, dashcode, OS X
There have been a couple of instances where LaTeX has dropped in to conversation recently, specifically related to research (oddly enough). The questions have generally followed the form of:
- Why don’t we provide training in TeX to Early Stage Researchers?
- Are the new Collaborative Tools going to cope with TeX?
The first is something that I think should be provided as standard training fodder for numerate-types when reaching the lofty heights of Posgraduatedom. I think the problem comes with providing an easy-to-use and easy-to-manage distributed TeX environment.
Tags: LaTeX, LyX, OS X, TeX
Shameless plug time. I’m sat at work looking for a specific chapter from Martin Fowler at the moment [the ThoughtWorks guy, not the ridiculous BBC soap character]. Quick check of the library catalogue shows that the book I want isn’t available in our collection and so the usual recourse would be to head over to Amazon or some other volume seller to get a copy.
However, for the fairly pauperish sum of $99 a year I have access to both O’Reilly’s Safari Enterprise Library and Books 24×7 through membership of The ACM, and through that - access to the Fowler book in question. If you’re going to spend £50 on something, then might I suggest you spend it on ACM membership for a year?
Tags: ACM, books 24x7, good stuff, Professional Development, safari
Mwwwwhahahahaha. All I need now are 3 servers to get started with an installation and I’ll have a beta environment setup that will mean saying ttfn to Roller @ work (before it even gets anywhere).
Tags: connections, lotus, released
IBM have finally released the portlet for consuming Google Gadgets and services within Websphere that I mentioned way back at Lotusphere.
IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets is a JSR 168 portlet that allows enterprise portal users to integrate Google Gadgets for web pages with their portal pages. Google Gadgets for web pages are remotely accessible services that provide access to online content and applications designed to be aggregated into the context of a web page. These include language translators, maps, YouTube videos, and Wikipedia.
Using IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets with appropriate access rights, users can search and select a Google Gadget from the available set of thousands of Google Gadgets for their portal pages and modify the settings of the selected gadget as per their preferences. Additionally, users can specify the number of gadgets to be displayed per page while selecting a gadget.
Reasons we may want to use it in the near future:
User-owned integration of stuff like: Facebook; MySpace; Digg; Del.icio.us etc.
Might save reading the Facebook API documentation for a while.
Tags: facebook, gadgets, Google, jsr 168, saviour, websphere