Technobabble

This is a map drawn by Charles Joseph Minard depicting the losses suffered by Napolean’s army in the Russian invasion of 1912. It depicts several variables – size of the army, 2D location, direction of army’s movement and temperature on various days. It is considered one of the best statistical graphs ever drawn. Amazing!

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Safari on the iPhone OS 4.0 does much better than most browsers on the HTML5Test with a net score of 134/160. Here’s the breakup of the test results with the failures: Doctype – 4/4 Canvas – 12/12 Video – 25/30 Ogg Theora codec support - No Audio – 22/24 Ogg Vorbis codec support - No Geolocation 5/5 Storage – 8/8 Offline Web Application – 11/11 Workers – 0/6 Web Workers - No Section elements – 7/7 Grouping content elements – 2/2 Text-level semantic elements – 4/5 time element - No Forms – 22/27 autocomplete input attribute – No keygen element – No output element – No progress element – No meter element - No User Interaction – 12/19 hidden attribute – No Undo manager - No

Safari on iPhone OS 4.0 (build 8A230m) supports WebSocket. Here’s the output from the WebSocket test : Yes, the browser still reports OS 3_1_2 even though the OS is really 4.0. The AppleWebKit version is newer than the iPad. I was able to run a WebSocket test against Kaazing’s WebSocket Gateway .

James Gosling, the creator of Java has quit Oracle as of April 2nd this year. While his blog entry didn’t give any specific reasons, it is not a surprise by any means. Sun and Oracle have very different corporate cultures – one focused on employees and the other focused on the business. It was always going to be hard for Oracle to retain someone as free spirited as Gosling. I’m pretty sure he’ll be joining the rest of the Java gurus at Google. If that doesn’t go well, IBM perhaps. I hope he doesn’t even think about joining Neal Gafter.

My recent searches (see the December 2009 blog entry about the ASUS SV1TS ) for a Skype phone replacement for the Netgear SPH200D brought me to IPEVO’s S0-20 wifi Skype phone . This is an all-in-one wifi phone from Taiwanese company IPEVO . It has a form factor of a regular cell phone and is extremely light-weight – just 80g including the 3.7V Li-ion rechargeable battery (rated at 900mAh)! The phone connects to 802.11 b/g networks. After charging the battery initially for a few hours, the phone was a breeze to setup – walk through a few setup screens to choose and connect to the wifi network, and then sign-in to Skype. I was able to place my Skype test call in under one minute. The phone automatically downloads contacts as well account information. The phone charges in a cradle which comes with a 100-240V 50-60Hz charger, making it suitable for international use. The phone can also be charged via mini-USB (USB cable not included in the package). IPEVO also provides periodic firm