I read this kind of funny story about a kid who got himself into a little trouble reading and writing barcodes by hand. After reading it, I figured if he's going through the trouble of getting graph paper and markers to write Code 39, I can certainly provide the code to doing it with DotImage. Code 39 is a simple barcode format -- it supports ...

Google's underground army of PhDs is secretly cranking out huge numbers of really useful and interesting libraries and tools. Within the next few years, these tools are going to drastically change the landscape of much of the software industry. The reason: Most of these tools are available as open source with very non-restrictive licenses. Things ...

Not to keep dumping on Flash, but these stories keep popping up:I recently upgraded from Kubuntu Feisty to Gutsy, and all went well apart from one thing. Konqueror began putting up a crash dialog everytime it accessed a site with Flash, making it pretty much unusable. [...] Until this experience I had a very high regard for Adobe, technologies ...

I'm not 100% sure how Steve Jobs can stop Flash on the iPhone once there's an SDK, but this is a little surprising:  Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs said the iPhone won't be using Adobe Systems' Inc.'s popular Flash media player any time soon, saying the technology doesn't meet his company's performance standards for video. Speaking at a ...

Just got the notification from Google that JotSpot (acquired in 2006) has been relaunched as Sites inside of Google Apps. With Sites, Google Docs, GMail, and Calendar, Google Apps now has most of the features of SharePoint and has to be considered an ECM choice, particularly for small to mid-size businesses or businesses with remote users or ...

A Chinese newspaper got caught altering a photograph: It all started in 2006 when China neared completion of its massive, high-altitude, $4 billion Qinghai-Xizang railway that connects Tibet with ''China proper.'' Environmentalists had protested loudly against the railway as its launch drew closer because it threatened the native habitat of an ...

I've been seeing a lot of recent announcements for Flash-based document viewing. For example, Scribd just announced iPaper, a document viewer plus what appears to be a new format for documents. Today, Scribd released a vastly improved upgrade to its document viewer, which it is now calling iPaper. Scribd streams the converted PDF ...

Joel Spolsky explains why Office formats are so complicated (and why that makes sense):A lot of the complexities in these file formats reflect features that are old, complicated, unloved, and rarely used. They’re still in the file format for backwards compatibility, and because it doesn’t cost anything for Microsoft to leave the code around. ...

This is good news: The Word, Excel and PowerPoint file format specifications, which were previously only available from Microsoft by request, were published on Friday, together with details of an open-source Office binary-to-Office Open XML (OOXML) translator project. The binaries were published in response to concerns among national bodies ...

Part II of this series talks about how there's an impedence mismatch between how images are used on the web and what might be convenient for the database.  Part I was about what to store in a database when you are using it as an image store.  If you were implementing any fat-client application that needed to operate on ...