Developer

The National Codes Center at Blentchley Bletchley north of London, has unveiled a WWII Computer replica that was once used to go sort through encrypted German messages during World War II. The replica model which was built by more than 60 volunteers using original blueprints took over 10 years to complete. The Turing Bombe computer was developed by Alan Turing, who is otherwise quite commonly knows as the father of the modern computer. The computers main job was to decrypt messages from German machines. I’m sure Mr. Turing would be proud that everyone is sitting on their computers right now, surfing YouTube, and reading Download Squad.

Venerable open source text editor Vim has reached a new milestone today with the release of Vim 7. New in version 7 are as-you-type spellcheck, document tabs, intelligent tab completion, branching undo/redo, and more. Linux.com has a nice overview of some of the new features, or you can head straight to the Vim web site to download it for just about every platform.

[Via Slashdot]

I’m not able to get this to work
completely, and the connection is a little strange, but Google has apparently
begun tying together the loose strands of services it provides. In this case, imagine a combination of Maps and Base to
divine the housing market. Try typing in "homes for sale" as a search, and a new option appears atop the
search results: Search Housing. You can further refine the search by location and type (rent, sale, or
whatever). Once you’ve narrowed those items down, you get a list of housing results, but with another, more advanced
refine above the results. Above each listing is a link called Location, which will take you to a Google Map. If you
look at the URL you’ve landed on in this search, it’s google.com/base/etc… Pretty nifty, although who knows when
they’ll do more with this. Right now those search results do indeed take you to the listing, not some special Google
holding tank. Anyone else find any tricks to this?

UPDATE: As usual, this found its way
onto digg several days ago. And
yes, I know it’s not a mashup.

It could be a simple answer. A few months ago I inquired
about the disappearance of the domain the5k.org. Someone from the previous team
emailed me back saying something about their domain getting hijacked, and they were getting it back. The domain was
then briefly a Godaddy parking space, and now it’s just blank. Odd. This just a couple of years after SIGGRAPH supposedly absorbed the 5k competition…

What is the 5k competition? You can read the full story thanks to the Web Archive here, but this was the stated purpose:
"The idea behind the contest is that the rigid constraints of designing for the web are what force us to get
truly creative. Between servers and bandwidth, clients and users, HTML and the DOM, browsers and platforms, our
conscience and our ego, we’re left in a very small space to find highly optimal solutions. Since the space we have to
explore is so small, we have to look harder, get more creative; and that’s what makes it all interesting. Just
celebrating that is all."In other words, you can enter any program you like, as long as it’s under 5 kilobytes.
Which is very cool, and the winners of each year’s competition have been quite impressive, but maybe I should have
said, what was the 5k competition, because there appears to be no signs of life on the site or elsewhere… Anyone have an answer to this riddle?

It’s a pretty simple idea, and not unique. According to Hamachi’s site: "With Hamachi you can organize two or more computers with an Internet connection into their
own virtual network for direct secure communication." But the devil is in the details… And the details are good.
Hamachi is very, very slick. Available right now for Windows and Linux (OS X promised "soon"), Hamachi sets
up a VPN between to machines lickety-split. Just as advertised, it’s a zero-configuration VPN. What’s more, it can
simulate up to 5 network cards, and gives you an IP starting with 5— allowing you to pass through a firewall.
It’s like your LAN on the internet, all with as little fuss as possible. Take it for a spin and let us know what you
think in the comments.

[Thanks to Fred for the tip]

Here’s another
handy tool for web developers and for the curious: MetaTags
Panel. It’s an extension for Firefox that will show you the information that’s hidden away in the source code of
most web pages, especially the stuff between the <head> tags like description, keywords, and links. It also shows
much of the information usually shown in Firefox’s Page Info dialog. It’s not the prettiest extension by any means, but
it is handy.

O’Reilly’s Jeremy Jones is
reporting that Guido van Rossum, creator and lead developer of the Python programming language, is now working for Google. Googler Alex Martelli confirms it in this thread on
comp.lang.python, saying "I don’t think there was any official announcement, but it’s true—he sits about
15 meters away from me." Python is used in many of Google’s projects, but It’s unknown what van Rossum’s role at
Google will be, nor what Google’s role in the development of Python will be.

One of the important things that most of us neglect to do when we install software (and we install a LOT of software here at Download Squad) is to completely read the End User License Agreement page of the install wizard. Admit it, you scroll to the bottom and hit Next without batting an eye, right? Well JavaCool Software, the folks that brought us the excellent SpywareBlaster, have released a new tool they call the EULAlyzer. This is a cool concept; essentially, you feed the text of an EULA you are curious about (but not curious enough to actually read), and it analyzes the text for any potentially noteworthy words and phrases. It then allows you to browse only those statements that may be cause for alarm. Brilliant. Of course, this is not intended as a replacement for actually reading EULAs, but it really is better than nothing if you find you most often just skip them. Now there’s no excuse.

Note that Ed Bott has noticed some stability issues with the current release, however JavaCool Software have a great track record, and we can expect any problematic behavior to be fixed very soon.

Just like SpywareBlaster, EULAlyzer offers full functionality for free, but there is also a Pro version you can purchase. The Pro version’s most interesting feature is called EULA-Watch, which will watch for anything that looks like an EULA and immediately provide analysis for it. It’s nice to have options, though the free version suits me just fine.

Forget hotspots like San Jose or Palo Alto. This September 28th through 30th, the place to be if you’re an open source developer will be Koper-Capodistria, Slovenia, where OpenOffice.org will be holding their annual conference. Okay; I really don’t know how many people will show up — especially since it’s usually kind of difficult to expense trips to open-source conferences (not to mention trips to Slovenia). However, in keeping with the OOo spirit, admission is free, so if you happen to be in Koper-Capodistria anyhow, be sure to stop in and find out how you can help the team.

As you can probably guess, I was a big HyperCard nerd back in the day. Since then I’ve learned a number of programming languages and platforms, but none had that simple, almost zenlike feel of HyperCard. So I stumbled upon a sort of clone in HyperNext from TigaByte.

HyperNext 2.0 was recently released, so there’s now a Windows and Mac (OS X and 9 for those who care) authoring tool and player.

HyperNext is a very simple drag-and-drop style application builder. We call it an IDE in the "biz" (whatever that is). Anyway, it’s designed for ease-of-use so you won’t find the dizzying array of objects in Visual Studio or RealBasic. Still, for some purposes it’s a nice tool. Read on for ideas…
What purposes? We used HyperCard to make games, business applications,

and mini databases. Later I saw it used to make limited "expert

systems," or quasi-intelligent repositories of knowledge. You can

easily use HyperNext to do the same. The stacks metaphor in HyperNext

makes it easy to place and manage controls and facilitate

interactivity. Naturally there is a scripting language included with math operations, looping and decision structures, etc.

As an added bonus, TigaByte makes a plugin for HyperNext called Neural Creator. While it doesn’t make entire brains, it will make nifty neural networks. Nice, huh?

What use is a neural network? Neural networks are great for analyzing certain types of data, especially when fuzzy logic (not discrete) is required. What route to travel for a vacuum salesman, or pattern recognition— those sorts of things. There’s an example at TigaByte’s site, so go make some software!