// 14.Feb.2009

Pipe Viewer

Pipe Viewer is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline. It can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion.

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// 24.Dec.2008

VirtualBox

A family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

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// 23.Nov.2008

The MacBook Hybrid

In which Windows Vista is faster running in a virtual machine on a Macintosh than it is running natively on a high-end Lenova laptop.

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// 02.Nov.2008

Context Free Art

I must confess that I am an addict. I have become addicted to creating computer-generated images. Having recently posted about Processing and Oxidizer, I have found another image generator called “Context Free.”

Context Free “is a program that generates images from written instructions called a grammar. The program follows the instructions in a few seconds to create images that can contain millions of shapes.”

Creating images with the software is a piece of cake. One can download from a gallery of “grammar” files or create your own scripts. Downloaded scripts can have their output modified by entering a three-character code into the Context Free application, leading to millions of permutations of the work.

It’s a fascinating program to play around with and some of the output is simply stunning.

Best of all — the software is free, open-source and is available for Windows, OS X and various flavours of Unix.

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// 18.Oct.2008

stitcho.com

An Internet notification platform that works on both Windows and Mac (including support for Growl). “Using Stitcho, your website can send real-time notifcations directly to a user’s desktop, even when their web browser is closed.”

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// 07.Sep.2008

Processing: A New Art Form

I am becoming increasingly impressed and intrigued by the multimedia produced with the Processing framework. There are some stunning artworks and videos emerging and it’s all serving to make me ever more curious about the capabilities of the system.

A lot of the work produced reminds me of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST demo scene of the eighties and I find myself feeling terribly nostalgic.

But Processing isn’t just about art — the framework is also used for some very serious data visualisation too.

It’s all very impressive.

Further Reading:

The History of Visual Communication
Visualisations and Infographics
Information Aesthetics

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// 07.Sep.2008

Inkscape

An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

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// 22.Jun.2008

TrueCrypt

Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux.

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