Atomatix

Today firefox 3.5 was launched. The Mozilla guy’s promised  to get it out in the end of june, they did it right on time…

You might not have heard of it, but firefox 3.5 has some pretty cool changes. For starters:

• It’s faster: Since chrome got out people (incl. me) started noticing that firefox was actually quite slow. Probably due to all the add-ons I installed, but yet, chrome seemed to be more responsive and faster when rendering pages with lot’s of javascript (ajax) So, that’s fixed, not a reason to use chrome…
• Support for openvideo: What is this you might ask, well, firefox now supports the html 5.0 <video> and <audio> tag that works similar like a <img> tag. This makes showing video’s and sounds on the web much simpler for a devellopper, and no more plugins needed…
  This including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio! (see below for example)
• Location aware: You can now let the website you are visiting know where you are, f.ex. google map allows you to enter your default location, in the future they will ask your browser for that, who then again could ask your operating system, a plugin, or you… I have this feature on google map’s on my cellphone, and it rocks! (google knows where I am by looking up  what telephone mast I’m connected to or using a bluetooth gps device, firefox could do something similar.)
• Lots of add-ons: If there’s something you are missing, chances are someone wrote an add-on for it. Personally I cant live without addblock (plus). Something you might perhaps never see in chrome, since, why would google want to block it’s own adds?
• Cross platform: Really looks nice on Linux, OsX and windows, and plug-ins like flash actually work.
• Lot’s more: There’s lots of more changes, like the better performing awesome-bar, and something I just discovered: When looking at the source of a page (ctrl+u) you can now click links in the source to view the source of the link. (There’s no back button, or save as, or something to exclude binary data yet, but I’m sure it’s going to follow…)

Download it now!  Full release notes  Video Tag demo  Geo-location Example

Video Time

In my first post I said that if it was up to me, this would have been a wave.

Ok, I had some people asking me “what is google wave?” So I said, watch the video on www.whatisgooglewave.com like I did.
But they were like: “That’s 1hour 20minutes, way to long…”

Ok, people have no patience, so they were asking me, you saw it, tell me what it is.
I started:

It’s an extension to xmpp, the protocol used for google talk (also called jabber) and…

reaction: No, actually I don’t want to know what it is, I want to know what I can do with it…

So, what is it?

When I asked my younger brother what google wave was, he said: “It is google that reinvented e-mail”

Ok, that’s basically it, they sat down, asking themselves, how would e-mail have looked like now that we have things like blogs, wiki’s, commenting systems, IM (chats)…

So, they made a new sort of e-mail, that’s live, in real time, so you could also use it to chat. They added the ability for other people to reply but also change what someone said, like in a wiki.
They added some smart bot’s (since other people can change what was written, so could a bot) for spellings checking for example…

Like wikipedia states (today):

Google Wave is “a personal communication and collaboration tool” announced by Google at the Google I/O conference, on 27 May 2009.^[1][2] It is a web based service and computing platform designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking.^[3] It has a strong collaborative and real-time^[4] focus supported by robust spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between 40 languages^[2], and numerous other extensions.^[4] It is expected to be released later in 2009.^[2]“

So, it’s e-mail, wiki, chat, blog and collaboration tool (it creates a new version of the document everytime a part is changed, and keeps a time line) all put together…

So, it would have been a good choise for my blog, since I want people to interact with problems I have, and try to improve my solutions. That’s why I also have put up a wiki here…

What about privacy?

That’s the next question I got, what about privacy? Since, if this is going to be a new killer app for the internet, we don’t want all our information, communication etc. in the hands of google?

Whel, they new that ass wel, as I (they) said, it’s still like e-mail, it’s an open source protocol, so everybody that’s running a mail server right now could be running a wave server ass wel. If I put up a wave server and send a wave to jimmy@example.com it would never pass by google’s servers. Just like e-mail that doesnt go or get from a gmail account. Everybody keeps in control of his own server.

That’s why it’s so great, it’s (supossed to be) the next internet killing app, and they are creating it for us, for free!

Video time

But of course, everybody still likes a video, so here it is: the 10min version of the google wave video:

And welcome to this brand new blog.

This blog, and this entire site is dedicated to the world I want to live in. To a better future with fun for everyone, and sometimes a little argument…
I didn’t have a dream, I just got influenced by different people along the path of my life.

I’m not totally sure how that world should look like, but I know it will be a place filled with technology. The best possible solution for every problem, and freedom for all…

I’m not planning on writing about economics or politics, since I don’t really know much about it, but about technology and how it can help us living a better life…

 Who am I?

My name is Jens Timmerman, born in Waregem, Belgium on the 22th of may 1987.
I’m currently (still) a student Computer Sciences in the University of Ghent.

I’m reachable trough comments on this blog, and via the contact page.

Interests: watching films and series, programming on personal projects, experimenting with 3d rendering (blender) reading a book and going out to eat (and drink.)

Why a blog?

Good question…

I have had a personal homepage for over 2 years now, first a own made cms, then a wordpress blog, followed by a static page. I had things to share, to put online for references etc, but I couldn’t find the good format. Now I tought I’d just stick to a wiki to use for my own knowledge base, but I also discovered I wanted to blog. So, I put this up. But if it were up to me, this would have been a google wave already…