captsolo weblog

More than 50% of “Second Life” inhabitants are from Europe

From a report by comScore, dated 4 May 2007, titled “comScore Finds that ‘Second Life’ Has a Rapidly Growing and Global Base of Active Residents". Also by them: “Social Networking Goes Global” - shows growth dynamics of a number of most popular social networking sites.

Linden Labs to Eurpoean Union Residents: It’s a Tax Time

“Second Life” EU residents now have to pay VAT (~20%). That’s what many learned from direct emails sent to premium subscribers.

Gallery of Adobe remedies

eBooks are often distributed as PDFs with a bitter taste of DRM added. This means that an ebook you’ve bought may be locked to a particular device and most probably you won’t be able to use it with Linux. Don’t we have a right to use the eBooks purchased on any device we own? This gallery lists some remedies to Adobe PDF encryption and DRM.

If you can print PDF to a PostScript file then these links can also be useful for converting it back to a DRM-free PDF (did not succeed applying these suggestions in my case though, let me know if they work for you):
Anon: Adobe eBooks to PDF (anon-ebook-to-pdf.txt)
Making protected PS files distillable (convertable back to PDF) (200610_pdf_ps_hacking.html)

Programming Digital Media - Making and modifying digital media by writing custom software for Mac OS X

Education materials. Found via stumbling upon An Introduction to PostScript, a part of this course.

Scripting Tools for Scientific Computing

Course materials from Dept. of Informatics, Univ. of Oslo - Simula Research Laboratory - April 2003

Python module that parses palm files

Date: 04/08/2004 - Version: 0.5.It has been a while since I last used a Palm PDA. But those 10k+ applications built for PalmOS, mostly free- and share-ware, were something many other platforms could wish for. One of my favourites is DateBk4 (and follow-up versions).

LateX Parser for MoinMoin Wiki

Lets you write wiki pages in LateX.
Might be handy to use a wiki for writing publications.

Design by Wiki

Using a Wiki for Enterprise Architecture Development

Skinning del.icio.us with Firefox and URIid

How to skin del.icio.us in Firefox using URIid extension and custom userContent.css

TiVo Community - letting users customize how TCF looks to them:

More on skinning the sites. Tries to make this a cross-browser functionality

Skining Apollo + Parotaļāsimies ar Laacz.lv stiliem?

Articles in Latvian about using URIid and userContent.css

And something for free:

CamStudio - freeware program to record screen activity in video

CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using it's built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).

Collection of links to remember:

Preocuupations - a weblog by David Smith. Interesting content, found this while looking for info related to IBM Glass Engine.

GridCosm - Gridcosm is a collaborative art project in which artists from around the world contribute images to a compounding series of graphical squares. ...
This process creates an ever expanding tunnel of images, the newest level a direct result of the previous level which is a result of the previous level... and so on.

God's Little Toys - "Confessions of a cut & paste artist" by William Gibson.

The Animé Café site features "A Parent's Guide to Anime". It is a comprehensive list of anime movies sorted by parental guidance suggestions.

The films are arranged into 4 categories:

• G rated - for ages 3 and up
• PG rated - for ages 13 and up
• M rated - for mature audiences
• X rated - for adult audiences

Critical note:

As with any subjective judgement (and all judgement is subjective in its nature) there are flaws. Most of the best animes I've seen are in the M-rated section. And quite often it is unclear why animes are placed in one or another category.

E.g., why "Cowboy Be-Bop" is M-rated, but "Trigun" is PG-rated? They are quite similar in terms of maturity of content. Then both "Princess Mononoke" and "Hellsing" are classified as M-rated, though it is hard to mentally fit them both within the same category - "Hellsing" would require much more mature audiences.

And if a review of "Trigun" ends with the text 'However, the series does teach good moral values, nothing that'll really corrupt the kids, since Vash and co. are inherently idealistic.', is this not what all Hayao Miyazaki's films (including "Princess Mononoke") are about - good moral values?

You would also notice that the X-rated category is hidden - while it is listed on the left-hand side menu, it does not appear in the list of categories on the main part of the guide. Is this omission on purpose?

While, as noted above, the guide has its flaws, it is a good checklist to see what films you have seen and what are yet to be seen. I'd go for M-rated category first.

Updates: I've heard that Japanese have their own classification of anime - with detailed gradations of age and sex of the target audience. It would be interesting to see what are the relations between this calssification and the "Parent's Guide to Anime".

More: Search 'anime' on captsolo.net

A blog by Grady Booch - one of the original authors of UML.
Also interesting is the books link - a list of books in his library.

A blog by Alasdair Allan - as he phrases it - much involved with Web & Grid Services and mucking around with Intelligent Agents for a living. Interesting articles.

Rajesh Jain's Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Enterprises and Markets. Interesting - but many posts seem to be hit by undeleted comment spam. Good thing is the urls in comments don't become links.