Nvu WYSIWYG web editor
I noticed on MacNN today a new "website creation suite" named Nvu. The application started life as Composer, the web-editing portion of the Netscape Communicator suite, but along with the rest of Communicator has since gone open-source (resulting in, among other things, Firefox). However when MacNN say "suite" it appears that they simply mean a WYSIWYG editor with FTP built in. Pffft.
Downloading the 11.7MB disk image and opening it displays the Nvu app and a text file named MUST_README_FIRST.txt, which contains this rather gloomy text:
Nvu 1.0 IMPORTANT WARNINGCan we all say 'a sense of foreboding'?
=================
Do **not** run Nvu directly from the disk image (the *.dmg file you just opened) or you will experience a never-ending loop. Please copy the Nvu icon in that disk image to your /Applications directory and run Nvu from there. Thanks.
Moving the app to my Applications folder and launching it resulted in a fairly slow start-up where the icon bounces a few times before disappearing - twice! - before finally launching. My next step was to open up one of this site's pages. Whoops - you cannot drag .php pages onto the dock icon. No problem, use the 'Open' menu item. Uhhhhh. Attempting to open a .php file using Nvu's open dialog box causes the file to open in Dreamweaver! Despite further efforts I was unable to open any .php documents in Nvu.
Thus endeth what was supposed to be a slightly longer mini-review :D
Posted on 30 June 2005, to Bereft of Reason | News | Web Design
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Too ugly to be the iPhone?
Could this be the much-discussed iTunes-enabled phone from Motorola? AppleInsider, Slashdot and Engadget all have coverage, while one Engadget reader points out the (somewhat superficial 
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Comment subscription
After some research into the subject, including a fruitless attempt to get EZ Subscribe to Comments working, I have installed MT-Notify. Installation is easy, but modifying the existing template to match this site was tricky due to the single massive unified template it uses for each and every dynamically-generated page.
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Buy up your competitors' product suppliers, and then axe those products which your competitors relied on. Sounds unlikely you say? Not if you are Microsoft. Further discussion on Slashdot.
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Growing up in Hong Kong I was lucky enough to spend a few minutes every day walking past a massive bronze sculpture on the promenade of Exchange Square. The sculpture is a massive blocklike representation of a man practicing Tai Chi. A few years later while watching a TV documentary on Chris Patten - the last governor of Hong Kong - I saw the very same sculpture, in miniature, on Patten's desk. I've always admired the sculpture, but knew nothing about it.Today I decided to find out more about it in the hope of obtaining a mini replica. I would absolutely love one of these, but searches on the net aren't helping. Where are the online miniature sculpture shops when you need them? :)
What I have found out is that the sculpture in Exchange Square is one of Taiwanese sculptor Ju Ming's "Tai Chi series". Amidst a rash of useless tourism pages which only mentioned the sculpture in passing, I found these two pages: a very interesting interview with Ju Ming, and an overview of Ju Ming's style.
Still no luck on the miniature replica - although I've found someone's homepage which mentions a Hong Kong Standard report of 3 of Ju Ming's sculptures selling for HK$240,000 - HK$780,000 each. That's a top figure of US$100,000 or about £60,000! Slightly out of my league ...
Posted on 17 June 2005, to Entertainment
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Apparently this means that each downloader will be recombining already-downloaded chunks into brand-new chunks. All other downloaders will be able to utilise parts of these 'mixed' chunks to recreate the original chunks they may be missing. The original research paper is here.
Comment
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Update: I was reading more reactions to this news over at TUAW, where reader Michael Ströck points out that the BIG news here is that Macs in 2006/2007 will be able to run Windows natively! Now that would be, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, "insanely great" - imagine all the elegance and security of OS X with the ability to run Windows programs when necessary ... at full speed.
Dragon FliX
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