Helmut-Blog

The last years, IKEA became too popular. Once, IKEA furniture was sleek and stylish, elegant and affordable. The modest time is over. The furniture looks obtrusive and shakes more than ever. Ok, I could live with that.

But why do I have to wonder why IKEA stops being Futura? Futura represented always the most elegant, modern, and modest typeface. IKEA used a modified version of that. The official reason to drop the font: saving money, by not extending the font to more languages.

The real reason might be: IKEA now moves to a lower standard. A big company trying hard to reach even more people.

IKEA, thank you for the past years. However, you seem to be busy now. Busy with setting up a new image, busy bathing fumed fans, busy with finding your new way. I hope I will like it.

JPEG 2000 is the official successor to JPEG. The still picture standard developed by the Joint Photographic Expert Group inherits newest compression developments. The file format offers several improvements to enable its use in even more applications.

The JPEG 2000 still image format offers several improvements. The image quality is superior at the same compression rate. The discrete wavelet transformation is the main technological reason for the high performance of the standard. The JPEG 2000 container also offers good error resilience, selective decompression, lossless compression.

This explained in detail in my JPEG 2000 seminar paper at the Ulm University. The presentation slides are also provided.

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This is great. A monitor arm that is clamped on the back of the table. It makes my flat screen fly over the table. I can move it easily, using one or both hands. That allows me to adjust the screen to a lot of positions.

When working on the PC, I move the screen in front of me, slightly reclined. Sometimes I even turn it by 90 degrees and my wide screen becomes a narrow screen. This eases reading long text passages.

When doing paperwork, I simply push back the keyboard. Because there is no monitor stand, I have enough room for both keyboard and a large folder. I can even continue to look on the screen, because it’s flying above the desktop.

I really enjoy having more space on my work table and the ergonomic comfort of a monitor arm. I recommend the Ergotron MX Desk Mount LCD Arm, it is robust and flexible. I assume it will survive a while, because its specifications allow me to upgrade to a larger screen later.

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If you are regularly mounting a sshfs volume on your Mac, you can automate this by using autofs. The goal is to mount the filesystem transparently.

Update: This how-to does not work. But you could use these notes as a starting point to resolve the remaining issues. The automounting feature is not correctly implemented in the current Macfuse&sshfs stack.
Luckily, it is possible to get a similar behavior by mounting sshfs with the option “reconnect”.

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The Google Chrome v8 Engine looks promising. Fast and lean, easy embeddable. It implements the ECMA-262 3rd edition, also known as JavaScript 1.5.

The next killer web application language might indeed be JavaScript. This is already seen by Helma, a framework that runs server side JavaScript on Rhino in a JVM.

A promising first v8 fastcgi module (new name: llv8call) is already in the making, written in C++. Most cannot afford running a complete JVM on a server like needed by Helma. Using v8 also opens the possibility of shared hosting plans like done by PHP, as one fastcgi process can execute several projects simultaneously. This is hard to do with Helma, and similarly hard with Ruby on Rails. Why is it easier with v8? It is designed for short startup time when reading in new code. Therefore the code does not have to be held in memory all the time, and that is a requirement for shared hosting.

To be better as PHP for server side scripting, we need at least:

• a library. Ports from PHP might be quick and easy, as PHP is written in C.
• modules for the popular web servers like Apache and Lighttpd.

I would really like to see JavaScript in favor of PHP, as I like the language more. For this, I would appreciate v8 to adopt the useful features of JavaScript 1.7 or 1.8 standards. Rhino is at 1.7, and Mozilla’s Tracemonkey already executes JavaScript 1.8.

The future development is yet open, however JavaScript could give a substantial performance gain to web scripting languages. First, the v8 engine is very fast compared to ruby in this very simple benchmark. Whether JavaScript drags Ruby and Python in Webapps or not – the now open sourced techniques of v8 are likely to be reused in other interpreters.

Update: jslibs is another JavaScript library providing fcgi bindings. IO and various native modules like SQLite are accessible. They base it on the new Tracemonkey engine, which has a good performance, and supports more JavaScript language features (JS1.8).

Update 2: K7JS provides a library for V8. Like llv8call, they thrive to create a standard library for V8. (thanks, Sébastien)