Un poco de historia detrás del logo de Google
La revista Wired publica esta pequeña galería con la evolución en la creación del logo de Google. Citando la introducción:
In just a few short years, Google’s logo has become as recognizable as Nike’s swoosh and NBC’s peacock. Ruth Kedar, the graphic designer who developed the now-famous logo, shows the iterations that led to the instantly recognizable primary colors and Catull typeface that define the Google brand. Kedar met Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page through a mutual friend nine years ago at Stanford University, where she was an assistant professor. Page and Brin, who were having trouble coming up with a logo for their soon-to-launch search engine, asked Kedar to come up with some prototypes. "I had no idea at the time that Google would become as ubiquitous as it is today, or that their success would be of such magnitude," Kedar says.
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/multimedia/2008/02/gallery_google_logos
Tatuaje To-Do
Jajaja, siguiendo con las “curiosidades”. Si no te es suficiente con una lista de pendientes (TO-DOs) en tu PDA o celular, tal vez este tatuaje temporal sea la solución: TO-DO Tattoos.
Formato oficial para ofrecer disculpas
Ahora es más sencillo ofrecer disculpas con este sencillo formato (clic para ver en tamaño real):
LINQ to JSON
LINQ to JSON es una extensión de la librería Json.NET (que por cierto, debo reconocer que apenas la conocí y es excelente) que permite crear y consultar objetos JSON utilizando la sintaxis y lógica de LINQ. Excelente sin lugar a dudas:
http://james.newtonking.com/archive/2008/02/11/linq-to-json-beta.aspx
LINQPad
Definitivamente una de esas pequeñas utilerías que valen oro. LINQPad es una pequeña aplicación que permite escribir, ejecutar y probar consultas LINQ (LINQtoSQL, LINQtoXML y LINQtoObjects) aisladas completamente de cualquier proyecto, o como ellos dicen “It’s a code snippet IDE”. Además, permite conectarse a una base de datos SQL Server directamente.
Lo único que se extraña es el Intellisense, pero por lo demás es una muy útil herramienta que también sirve para fines didácticos al empezar a aprender LINQ, ya que además incluye 200 ejemplos del libro C#3.0 in a Nutshell.
Link para descargar LINQPad:
http://www.linqpad.net/
Hot fixes para Visual Studio 2008 (Web Development)
Scott Guthrie publica los detalles sobre esta actualización para el ambiente de desarrollo Web de Visual Studio 2008, que sin duda resuelve varios "detallitos", sobre todo de performance en la vista de diseño, que en algunos momentos se volvía verdaderamente lenta. Sin duda una instalación obligatoria:
Hot Fix Details
You can download this hot-fix roll-up for free here (it is a 2.6MB download). Below is a list of the issues it fixes:
HTML Source view performance
- Source editor freezes for a few seconds when typing in a page with a custom control that has more than two levels of sub-properties.
- “View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects.
- Visual Studio has very slow behavior when opening large HTML documents.
- Visual Studio has responsiveness issues when working with big HTML files with certain markup.
- The Tab/Shift-Tab (Indent/Un-indent) operation is slow with large HTML selections.
Design view performance
- Slow typing in design view with certain page markup configurations.
HTML editing
- Quotes are not inserted after Class or CssClass attribute even when the option is enabled.
- Visual Studio crashes when ServiceReference element points back to the current web page.
JavaScript editing
- When opening a JavaScript file, colorization of the client script is sometimes delayed several seconds.
- JavaScript IntelliSense does not work if an empty string property is encountered before the current line of editing.
- JavaScript IntelliSense does not work when jQuery is used.
Web Site build performance
- Build is very slow when Bin folder contains large number of assemblies and .refresh files with web-site projects.
Installation Notes
For more information on how to download and install the above patch, please read this blog post here. In particular, if you are using Windows Vista with UAC enabled, make sure to extract the patch to a directory other than "c:\" (otherwise you’ll see an access denied error).
To verify that this hot-fix patch successfully installed, launch VS 2008 and select the Help->About menu item. Make sure that there is an entry that says ‘Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite – ENU (KB946581)’.
If you ever want to remove the patch, go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and select “Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – KB946581” under Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (or Visual Web Developer Express 2008) and click “Remove".
Summary
Obviously it goes without saying that we would have liked to have shipped without any bugs. Hopefully this hot-fix enables you to quickly solve them if you are encountering them. Thank you to those who helped us identify the causes of these issues, as well as to the group of customers who have helped us verify the above fixes the last few weeks.
Note: If you do encounter issues with VS 2008 features for web development in the future, I recommend always asking for help in the VS 2008 Forum on www.asp.net. The VS Web Tools team actively monitors this forum and can provide help.
Ya está listo el Service Pack 1 de Windows Vista
Ayer 4 de Febrero, se anunció que el Service Pack 1 de Windows Vista ya está en producción, es decir, ya se liberó la versión RTM (Release To Manufacturing). Las fechas estimadas de disponibilidad:
Here’s the timing for SP1 availability for current Windows Vista users:
- In mid-March, we will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update (in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese) and to the download center on microsoft.com. Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1. If Windows Update determines that the system has one of the drivers we know to be problematic, then Windows Update will not offer SP1. Since we know that some customers may want to update to SP1 anyhow, the download center will allow anyone who wants to install SP1 to do so.
- In mid-April, we will begin delivering Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Vista customers who have chosen to have updates downloaded automatically. That said, any system that Windows Update determines has a driver known to not update successfully will not get SP1 automatically. As updates for these drivers become available, they will be installed automatically by Windows Update, which will unblock these systems from getting Service Pack 1. The result is that more and more systems will automatically get SP1, but only when we are confident they will have a good experience.
- The remaining languages will RTM in April.
Aunque aquí no lo menciona, seguramente en pocos días estará disponible la descarga para los suscriptores del MSDN.
Más detalles:
Google Social Grahp API
Uno de los problemas que enfrenta una nueva red social es la construcción de su comunidad. Usualmente recurren a métodos tradicionales como envió de mails de invitación a los contactos de los usuarios ya registrados, sin embargo esto es un proceso que puede requerir mucho tiempo.
Google empieza a tomar la iniciativa con la nueva Social Graph API para crear un estándar de comunicación entre las distintas redes sociales existentes para hacer que las conexiones entre las personas sea mucho más fácil y no sea como lo es actualmente donde cada red social es una especie de universo aislado y la “socialización” se limita a ese entorno limitado. En sus propieas palabras:
Here’s how it works: we crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people’s accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships we discovered from all the XFN and FOAF. When a user signs up for your app, you can use the API to remind them who they’ve said they’re friends with on other sites and ask them if they want to be friends on your new site.
Sin duda un esfuerzo muy importante que podría llevar a la Web 2.0 al siguiente nivel, aunque aún haya temas vitales que resolver como la creación de un sistema federado de identidades digitales, asunto del que por cierto, Yahoo ya ha tomado la iniciativa con su integración a Open ID.
http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/