Making HackerspaceSG: The Zouk of Geekdom
The technical/geek community in Singapore has been showing some vibrant signs of life in recent times.
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geekcampsg some 80 or so people gave up their Saturday for 12 solid hours of geekdom - from robotics, to natural language processing, to android development and more -
Singapore Ruby Brigade is going from strength to strength - last Thursday's meetup at wego packed in some 30 people (I guess). They had to kick us out after 10pm and 3 hours of presentations, questions and discussions. That didn't stop most from gathering around the corner for supper that ended after midnight!
The next project is more ambitious: establish a Hackerspace in Singapore. Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects (more)
In order to get this off the ground, a pledge drive has started. Find out how to pledge a donation.
Updated 5-Sep: pledgie no longer being used for the donation drive, so remove the badge
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+0.1: Oracle Database 11g R2 now GA for Linux
Oracle has released Oracle Database 11g R2 today - currently only the Linux version, with other OS to follow.
The 11gR2 documentation is not yet available on OTN or for download yet, but I note it is already available online if you want to stay up tonight to digest all that's new. Chris Kanaracus' PCWorld review is one of the first to hit the streets.
I've yet to digest all the changes, but in general I'd call this a "refinement" release after what's been a very solid initial 11g release. It is interseting to see the cloud features creeping in though, for example backup to Amazon S3.
11g R1 has now been out for about two years, and while technically it was the "polish" needed to round out the major shift to 10g, my personal experience is that 11g adoption has been pretty slow, and mainly the result of fresh installs rather than upgrades. This is to be expected given that most customers fit into one of two camps: those still stuck on pre-10g, and those who finally got it and moved to 10g (few of whom are yet keen to regroup for a move to 11g). Apparently, Oracle estimates about 10-20% of customers have implemented 11g which sounds about right.
As fitting my tradition (going back to a very old and tired joke), this means the tardate blog gets a +0.1 increment. w00t!
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Top 10 Twitter Trending Topics in your City (or not)
Tweet: "How to Find the Top 10 Twitter Trending Topics in your City on a Google Map http://bit.ly/19rAOR #twitter"
It is actually pretty amazing - see the screenshot below for what was trending just now in Manila.
But, aren't we missing a whole lot of information? Apparently nothing has been trending recently in the whole of South East Asia. Despite the fact I just watched a bunch of tweets from friends in Singapore/Thailand/Malaysia/Indonesia just scroll by. Hmmm.
It is a nice experiment, and a good start, but big gaps like this will inevitably raise the question whether any of the information can be trusted.
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jTab 1.1: Guitar tab for the web gets an update and a mailing list
I announced jTab back in July, and there have been some nice improvements over the past month which I just tagged as a "1.1" release.
jTab is a javascript-based library that allows you to easily render arbitrary guitar chord and tabulature (tab) notation on the web. Automatically. It is open source (available on github).
I've also established a mailing list for jTab. All are welcome to join in to discuss internal development issues, usage, and ideas for enhancement.
Some of the key new features:
- All chords can be represented in any position on the fretboard e.g. Cm7 Cm7:3 Cm7:6
- Now allows shorthand tab entry of 6-string chords e.g. X02220 (A chord at nut), 8.10.10.9.8.8 (C chord at the 8th fret)
- jTab diagrams now inherit foreground and background color of the enclosing HTML element
- When entering single-string tab, can reference strings by number (1-6) or by note in standard tuning (EAGDBe)
- The chord library with fingerings has been extended to cover pretty much all common - and uncommon - chord variants (m, 6, m6, 69, 7, m7, maj7, 7b5, 7#5, m7b5, 7b9, 9, m9, maj9, add9, 13, sus2, sus4, dim, dim7, aug).
- It has been integrated with TiddlyWiki: jTabTwiki combines the guitar chord and tab notation power of jTab with the very popular TiddlyWiki single-file wiki software. Together, they allow you to instantly setup a personal guitar tab wiki/notebook. No kidding. And it's free.
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