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Spores of life

R. sent me a link to a transcript of Will Wright’s presentation of Spore, an evolutionary game, a couple of months ago. I was stunned by the descriptions. Today I found a link to a video of the actual presentation and demo of Spore. While I sat and watched in amazement, my wife and our female co-worker watched too and commented on it. Interestingly enough, both of them weren’t that compelled. They commented on the strange creatures, the way they walked, etc. They didn’t see the beauty of the procedural way of doing things, the way the game evolves from single-cell creatures to “war of the worlds” ...

Jens-Christian Fischer
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A CSS microscope

If you are sometimes looking at a wonderful CSS design and wonder, how this was achieved, you could look at the HTML and the CSS code and start to figure out how to achieve things. This could take quite some time. Enter Xylo Scope. Xylo Scope loads all CSS files, and displays the relationship between the different tags and styles. It sports something similar to the DOM explorer that browsers like Firefox have but is geared more towards the CSS aspects. ...

Jens-Christian Fischer
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More trays?

Our office got a new HP LaserJet 2420dn printer yesterday to replace an old LJ6 (that was woefully inadequate for office use). Installation of the printer drives went fine (as long as you call a 67% success rate in the first round fine - now we are at 100%) Today the additional 500-page tray arrived and was installed. On Windows it was a snap to tell the printer driver, that there is another tray to be served from. On OS X (the Tiger variant) - no such luck. I can print no problem, but the drivers insists on only having 2 trays. And the place where I can select memory and duplex option has no little checkbox for selecting the additional tray. What is the wisdom out there for these kind of problems? Google is no help. Can it be, that Windows is better than Mac OS X? ...

Jens-Christian Fischer
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Ruby on Rails Article in Infoweek.ch

Last week my article on Ruby on Rails came out in Infoweek.ch. It briefly describes Rails, Ruby and gives a very high-level overview over the development and the advantages of Rails over other development frameworks. Thanks to the guys at Infoweek, I’m allowed to give you a PDF version of the article. Enjoy (and beware: it’s in german): Technorati Tags: [ruby on rails](https://technorati.com/tag/ruby on rails) **UPDATE: ** The PDF has disappeared from my server, but the original article is still available online. ...

Jens-Christian Fischer