In Gnome 2.6 there has been a fairly major change to the Nautilus file manager: it now sports a new spatial interface. This means that each folder is treated as its own object; it remembers its position on screen, its view and layout, any colours you might associate with it and so on. This does mean that each folder opens in a “new” window. I place the new in inverted commas because, in actual fact, it is not opening in a new window at all; it is opening in its own window.
Blogger has redesigned. I did decide not to mention it because it is being talked about by all the usual suspects. However, I thought I would mention it for the following reason.
One of my flatmates has every so often noticed my weblog and wanted to be able to write mindless drivel himself. I was going to set up some space at dx13 for this purpose. I never got around to it because it is just too much work for me to do right now. The new Blogger news came and went. Then I suddenly had a brainwave: Blogger is free, so why not let my flatmate use that. A few minutes later the first post went live. It's still in its infancy at the moment, but you can [have a read](http://mephistosays.blogspot.com/). I wonder if the posting will continue or whether they will fade after a while, like many new weblogs...
The new design is fully XHTML/CSS excellence with new templates designed by those mentioned above as well as some other very talented designers. If you’ve wanted a weblog, I’d recommend trying them out. The process seems much easier than it used to be; what have you to lose but your spare time and sanity?
I like this one: Amazon tell you how to hack your new DVD player to play any region’s DVDs. How glad I am to live in the UK where we are allowed to do such things, rather than living some kind of Crazy Draconian country (a.k.a the USA). The big record companies have way too much power over the US government.
Song of the Week
**Two days late, but, that's the way it is. If we were all regimented souls tied down by schedules, what would life be like? Let dx13 introduce you to disorder! =)**
This week’s SotW is from a favourite artist of mine, Aimee Mann. I’ve been listening to Aimee for around a year now. The song I’ve chosen is from her third album, it’s called Backfire. I chose it because I think it combines some of Mann’s best qualities: a fairly happy sounding song but with darker undertones. It’s also one of my favourite songs she has written, so it seemed a good choice.
For a group project at university we chose to use Java and Java3D. Java3D is one of the implementations of 3D graphics available for Java. It works through OpenGL and is around 25% slower than pure C via OGL. This means that speed isn’t a problem; we are only using it for a university project and polygon counts are low. Java3D, however, has a much more insidious problem: it leaks memory like hell.