I have tried everything from all of the nightly builds of the supported browsers, to using a software renderer to no avail. My graphics card just flat out refuses to run WebGL, and thus by implication, the new O3D. This is a little bit of a bother for me, as up to now, it has been working rather well as a browser plug-in.

One other thing I have noticed, is that particularly since the announcement, the amount of traffic to my blog to my O3D posts has dropped rather significantly – I am now getting on average a quarter of the hits than a month ago.

This can be due to a number of factors, one of which may be my lack of new posts as of late, but more likely it has to do with O3D itself. Since the WebGL version has been released, I have not been able to write up much about it, since I have not managed to get it to work, so either people are finding other sources which ARE writing about WebGL instead of coming to my blog, or else people have just given up interest in O3D in general, or, like me, are struggling to get the new version to work.

It would be really sad if O3D was becoming irrelevant, but I am hoping that progress will be made in getting O3D (and WebGL) to a decent level where it is supported in standard browsers again, and on most hardware platforms as I do want to see this technology fly…

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XDA-Developers have released a version of Google Android that works on the Xperia X1. It is still missing a few features, such as the GPS functionality, but it works well.

Also from XDA-Developers is a port of Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 which gives you full-on Linux functionality on the X1.

It seems these days that we are fast heading to the days of being able to choose whichever OS we like to use on our phones, and that does make the future exciting…

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In terms of look and feel, it closely copies Stackoverflow, although with enough differences that you not likely to get confused.

The reason the team that put up Shapado put it up, is that they feel that they do not want to work with a non-free platform, which to me sounds a bit odd, since, even though Stackoverflow is not quite open-source, anybody is free to register and use the site. There is very little restriction surrounding that. Although, in their favour, it does make sense if you want a local knowledgebase type system based on this format.

The second reason they state is that they feel that Stackoverflow is restricted, in that it only caters for programming, whereas they have made Shapado cater for pretty much anything.

The biggest problem of all though is not really technology related, but rather more social. Stackoverflow has significant traffic, with thousands of users asking – and answering – thousands of questions.

Shapado has very, very few of both questions and users. Maybe it is because the site is still new, or it might be that nobody cares. Only time will tell…

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It is an opensource endeavour and works in Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari. Unsurprisingly, I did not see Internet Explorer in the list.

There are a few demos on the site with an Asteroids clone and a few more.

One surprising feature is that it seems capable of creating games which wourk with the Nintendo Wii.

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Internet Explorer, besides just being a Microsoft product, doesn’t always render pages nicely, and flash is often a problem.

Opera, which was my favourite browser on my previous phone, the Sony Ericsson P990i, does not work half as well on the Xperia as it did on my old phone, and in fact tend to favour Internet Explorer over it.

Both of these browsers have been thrown aside now, however, as I now have a new favourite browser. Skyfire is by far the best phone for mobiles.

For one thing, this blog never rendered correctly on either IE or Opera on my mobile, without using a mobile-friendly theme. Skyfire, on the other hand, shows the blog EXACTLY as it would appear on a normal pc browser, and it is readable too.

Skyfire also offers good flash support, and audio and video streaming to boot, and that is not even mentioning the very apparent speed of rendering.

Skyfire simply outshines the competition on all fronts.

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A normal-sighted person sees colours as they are using 3 different colour receptors in the eye, detecting red, blue and green light respectively. The eye also has receptors which see in shades of grey, which is used in low light levels (which is why you lose colour vision when it is dark).

Do you see a number 74 in here?

Many people aren’t aware that colourblindness comes in several different forms and severity, the most common being red-green colourblindness, where the person sees red and green as the same colour. Colourblindness occurs when one or more of the colour receptors does not work as it should, or does not function at all. So for example, in red-green colourblindness, the red and green receptors incorrectly react to the same frequencies of light, or you may find that the receptor does not work at all, in which case that colour will appear black.

Now how does this affect computers? Well, for one thing, often green is used to indicate that all is ok, and red that an error occurred. A red-green colourblind person would not notice a difference. I was just reading that in games too the enemies are often tagged in red and the good guys in green – so then who do you shoot?

A more subtle problem is when the programmer or web designer themselves is colourblind. For example, it is a rather bad idea to trust my opinion on colour. I have a blue-green colourblindness which means that my colours would probably appear slightly off to a normal sighted person. I once painted our bathroom an avocado green colour because I thought it looked nice, much to the horror of my family who thought I had gone mad.

Implied in the problem about choosing colours for computer applications and webpages is also the problem of sites and applications that look great for a normal sighted person, but become useless for a colourblind person. It is often a good idea to either let the colours be configurable or else choose safe colours.

And before I end, a little interesting fact – most colourblind people will not realise they see the world differently until it is pointed out to them. For us, the world just looks normal.

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This library will plot data supplied in CSV format using a line graph, using time as the x axis. This makes it very useful for drawing graphs of things such as temperature variance of a city throughout the year for example, or something like stocks or exchange rates.

Other features of the library include moving averages to flatten out spikes in the graph, as well as error bars.

But, best of all, the library is only a 45kB Javascript file, which must be included in the page, and a few lines of Javascript, and you got yourself a graph.

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The best part of all though is that Pootle is a home-grown, South African project, which just adds one more to the good software projects to come out of deepest darkest Africa. It was created by Translate.org.za.

Pootle 2.0 is out now, and is written using Django, and is looking really good.

You can check out the offical Pootle server at http://pootle.locamotion.org.

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For those of you who do not know what CMIS is, it stands for Content Management Interoperability Services, which is a specification for a standard model for webservices for within use by content management systems.

Put into similar language, CMIS allows different content management systems to easily communicate with each other. So, for example, You could have a document stored in a KnowledgeTree repository, and then be able to access that document using an aplication such as Al Fresco or any other application that is able to communicate using CMIS.

The latest release of KnowledgeTree 3.7, which the company I worked for released last week, has built-in support for CMIS 0.62. It is therefore exciting to see the specification moving toward a formal release of the CMIS specification.

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This site is aimed at Computer Science students and educators and discusses important material usually covered in computer courses. So things like programming algorithms, AJAX, Web security and that sort of thing are covered.

The content on the site is licensed under the Creative Commons license, and therefore is freely usable by the academic world.

The amount of content is still a little light though, but I am sure that this will change, since it is easy for anybody to contribute to the site, and certainly looks like a good site to watch for trying to find resources on those sometimes used, but easily forgotten, topics that academics love so much, but only interest programmers in the real world when they are needed. It is perfect for a bit of a refresher for those of us out in the field.

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