For all fancy web developers in the globe, Adobe has announced Dreamweaver CS4 beta which is now available for public testing. If you are a Dreamweaver fan or you are a programmer geek race then you might want to grab this software.
Sitepoint and 99designs are offering a free complete book, The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques. This book is aimed for web developers looking forward to add Photoshop in their technique basket. It is available for a limited time. Hurry and grab it now!
As for me, I have a week off between summer and fall semester. I’m going to get my hands dirty with books and programming! This book should be a good start. Long live fall break…
Ajaxian has posted a book for Adobe AIR developers called “Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers”. The book is under Creative Commons license so it is free. The book has been out for sometime but this one is updated for AIR 1.0. You can get it here.
Of the top ten winners at the 2008 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM ICPC) competing to be the best computer programmers in the world, four teams were from Russian universities, one was from Ukraine, a former member of the USSR, and three were teams representing universities in North America, including Canada and the United States. First place went to St. Petersburg University of Information Technology, Mechanics and Optics (Russia), followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (U.S.), Izhevsk State Technical University (Russia), Lviv National University (Ukraine), and Moscow State University (Russia). Also among the top ten finishers were teams from Tsinghua University (China), Stanford University (U.S.), University of Zagreb (Croatia), University of Waterloo (Canada), and Petrozavodsk State University (Russia). This international competition, now in its 32nd year, is hosted by ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery), a society of 88,000 computing educators, researchers, and professionals worldwide.
You can see videos and photos of the event available here. You’ll notice that the interface of the web site has changed 🙂
Dr. Craig R. Barret, Intel’s CEO, has visited Kuwait University last Thursday April 10th, 2008. He was hosted in a Q&A session arranged by CS Club and Computer Science Department in Kuwait University.
In his talk he focused in how to establish a good education system that can be compared to education systems around the world, not only in the Middle-East. Three characteristics have to be available to create an excellent education system which are: smart people, smart ideas, and good universities to provide a good environment for smart people to look for smart ideas.
Smart ideas can be found when doing basic researches, not in developing ideas. Companies like Intel spends millions of dollars in developing, however, Intel cooperates with universities to conduct basic researches. Stanford University in Silicon Valley is a good example of a university that spends millions in basic research. Intel spends 6 billion dollars in research yearly, but only 200 million in basic research.
We do not need a huge research budget to create a good idea, what we need is passion, training, and good universities.
Dr. Craig Barret will continue his trip to visiting Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and Abu Dhabi. His goal on the trip is to see what’s happening in the ground with his own eyes and visit some technology professionals in universities in the Middle-East.
The session was so informative, and I am so happy to attend it. I also have to say that not even 1 instructor from our department, computer engineering, was there, how pathetic! That’s not like it wasn’t expected. However, a faculty member from electrical engineering has been sighted there!
I’m also glad that some of my friends had shown up.
Sydeny, Chicago, Manila and many other cities have turned its light off at March 29th, 8pm. But Google in unexpected move has turned off its light at Google.co.uk homepage.
Google users in the United Kingdom will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.co.uk homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don’t do this permanently – it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.
Google, Yahoo, and MySpace announced today the formation of OpenSocial Foundation. It is a move to help web developers build better social applications using OpenSocial API.
In my opinion, I think this is a big step towards Web 3.0 as some predicts that the World Wide Web will be seen as a single database in the web 3.0 era.
While doing my daily shifts in the World Wide Web and buzzering out of world class music with my surrounding sound system dancing all around my desk, I cracked out of my seat – again while still in music mood – with great news from Google jumping of my screen. That thing that came out my screen, that tiny little piece of text, that title is “Google Releases Language Translation API”.
The language API supports many languages such as Arabic, Chinese, France, Russian, and Korean and of course English. As clearly as their announcement is, it support 12 languages and cover 29 translation pairs and it is extremely easy to use for programmers.
For more information on how to use the API, you can check out the official documentation here. Be advised, it is made for Javascripters.
Last time Microsoft developers were dancing like crazy because of the large penetration of IE7. Now the party will even get further with the Silverlight download rate hits the 1.5 Million downloads a day and increasing… Hell, now they gonna host a strip party in their offices! What’s next?!
