Many thanks to Olivier and Peter for putting in the efforts to translate the book to English.
The book is now available via Lulu.com
http://www.lulu.com/content/5382304
If you are interested to find out why I still have high hopes for REBOL, read the book and find out for yourself why REBOL makes things easier.
I will be ordering a paperback for myself.
I am still on my 2 trusted machines. The T41 Thinkpad and the PowerBook G4.
I have been thinking of getting replacements for them; maybe a T61 or a SL series for Thinkpad or the new MacBook. In fact, I may not even get a Thinkpad replacement if BootCamp on the Mac works well enough for me to support my Accounting package on Windows.
One of the key issues I face when getting the new machines is that all these latest OS are also resource hungry.
Let’s not pretend that the latest Microsoft Vista needs more RAM or the wonderful Time Machine or nice eye candy from the Mac requires RAM.
Henrik, from the REBOL Community, alerted me of this article frm MacRumours about the new MacBook Pro ability to support 8Gb RAM.
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/10/24/new-macbook-pro-does-not-support-8gb-ram-for-now/
Apparently, while the new chipset is able to detect 8Gb of RAM, it seems that the Mac OS X is only ‘capable’ of using up to 4Gb effectively.
This is where my concern is. Is the MacBook Pro with 4Gb of RAM able to run BootCamp fast enough?
If you have been encountering an ‘endless loop’ while trying to install Drupal 6.4, you are not alone.
I encounter the same issue while trying to install Drupal 6.4 on my local machine.
At the database setting (or configuration) screen, it goes into an infinite loop without any error message.
The easy way to solve it is to just edit the ‘settings.php’ file and change the following to the correct setting.
$db_url = ‘mysql://username:password@localhost/databasename’;
The more lengthy possibility is to look at the write permission on the file and apply the correct setting accordingly.
Hope this helps others who may face the same issue.
Note to Drupal developers: Perhaps, an extra error message may be necessary for the above scenario. Eg. Is the file permission correct? Why is it going into an infinite loop without error messages? I believe, having that little extra message, will help others new to Drupal to find their way around much more easily.
Google will be launching its new browser sometime today.
Based on webkit, one of the benefits includes using it as an application platform rather than the general browser.
I think this is the right direction. Web based applications is getting more complex. And the current state of browsers has its limitations.
Rather than having me go into the guts of what the current browser lacks, my suggestion, head over to Blogoscoped and read the comic to find out what is planned for
http://blogoscoped.com/google-chrome/
You can also head over to Google’s blog and find out their views
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html
Note: I will probably post a follow-up to this once I have a chance to review it and determine how existing legacy applications can take advantage of it.
I was thinking through about the design of a software that I am working on.
One of the objective that I would want it to achieve is, Simplicity.
Consider this. How many of the built-in features that comes with your mobile phone do you use on a regular basis ?
3-5 maybe. Phone, SMS, Camera ? What else?
If that is the case, are companies like Nokia, Motorola makng their products more complicated than it should be?
Creative used to own the MP3 market until Apple decided that they want a piece of it as well. Apple’s answer to Creative is not by giving more features or a bigger storage space.
It is simplicity.
iPod’s ‘Click Wheel’ hide all the buttons and give you one single interface to use. It reduces your interface points and organise everything behind the ‘Click Wheel’.
Another good example is car’s dashboard. I manage to find one doing a comparison between Volvo’s dashboard against Citroen.
I have previously touch on great designs by Richard Sapper. BusinessWeek also has an article, Fifty Years at the Drawing Board, on Richard Sapper as well . Iconic designs from Richard Sapper is really timeless. Look at Thinkpad, Lamy Dialog-1, and the Tizio Lamp.
How would one go about deciding what to add or remove?
This is where John Maeda’s book comes in. In the Laws of Simplicity, John oulines 10 laws as guidelines.
You can read more at his site: http://lawsofsimplicity.com/?cat=5&order=ASC
A quick glance, one will easily find that products from Apple, Richard Sapper and other notable great designers share some of these laws.
What does this means to software designers? I think simplicity would be an interesting topic to discuss.
A common request I got from users are, ‘Can we have more columns for the table?’.Well, technically, yes. We can do it. But, do you really want that number of columns? I have observed that most users need only up to 5 columns to use the system and be productive.
I will leave it to readers to decide.
What is the impact of simplicity on the success of a business?
NOTE: One side-effects that Richard Sapper probably never foresee is that the Lamy Dialog-1 is considered a dangerous weapon when you put it under the X-Ray scanner in airports. Believe it or not, I have been question more than once, asking me what is it? And even when I tell them it is a pen, the officers would still check and confirm.