easter pictures

Thought I'd test out Orb's photo publishing capability to throw up a few cute Easter pictures we took of Ethan.

orb

I've been trying out a new program called Orb which I love. Install it on your home machine (or whatever machine you have that you want to serve media from), and then all you have to do is log into a the website and you'll have access to all your media from any other internet-connected computer. All your music, movies, pictures can be accessed from any computer. Heck, if you've got a TV tuner, you can even stream live TV from your home computer. Granted, the quality isn't so great if you don't have a fairly fast connection, but if I'm ever stuck here at work while my favorite show is on, I don't have to completely miss it (or BitTorrent it the next day).

ajaxy goodness

Google released the Google Web Toolkit recently, which looks like a very promising way to develop AJAX web applications. The premise is that you write standard Java code, which Google's toolkit will then take and compile/convert into Javascript. This means that you get all the benefits of Java, such as type checking and debugging instead of having to code Javascript by hand and track down lots of insidious little bugs. You also don't have to worry too much about making your app cross-browser compatible because the toolkit takes care of all of those worries for you. I'm definitely going to be looking more into this.

consolas

Microsoft has released the Consolas font as a free download. Previously, this font was only available as a part of the Windows Vista preview versions. It's aimed primarily at programmers (and is technically only licensed for users of Visual Studio 2005), but it's also great as a general purpose monospaced font as well. If you're sick of looking at Courier New for all your monospace text, you owe it to yourself to go and download this font.