Four short links: 20 April 2012

Hologram Headliners, Javascript Stack, HTML to PDF, and Software Defined Networking

  1. Tupac Coachella Behind the Technology (CBS) — interesting to me is Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg were considering taking Shakur with them on tour. Just as Hobbit, Tintin, etc. are CG-ing characters to look normal, is the future of “live” spectacle to be this kind of CG show? Will new acts be competing against the Rolling Stones forever?
  2. Javascript All The Way Down (Alex Russell) — points out that we’re fixing so much like compatibility, performance, accessibility, all this stuff with Javascript. We’re moving further and further from declarative programming and more and more back to the days of writing heaps of Xlib or Motif toolkit code to implement our UIs and apps.
  3. wkhtmltopdf (Google Code) — Simple shell utility to convert html to pdf using the webkit rendering engine, and qt. My first piece of “I wrote this, now you can use it too” open source was an HTML to PS converter (this was 1994 or so) via LaTeX. It’s a useful thing, no really.
  4. Nicira (Wired) — moving network management into software so the network hardware is as dumb as possible. Interesting continuation of the End-to-End principle, whereby smarts live at the edges of the network and the conduits are dumb.
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