Yojinbo

Take a bunch of pictures of something (a fountain for example) with people walking by and load the snapshots in to Photoshop.  Photoshop can look at the differences in your pictures and remove the people from your pics, leaving an unubstructed view of the fountain.  This is really cool, I had no idea Photoshop could do this.

Here’s the short video that shows how to do this.

Two weirdos from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia perform a tribute

I didn’t know they had AM:PM stores in Isreal, but the CEO was just fired for letting Jewish people there work on Yom Kippur.  Is this the same convenience store chain that’s all over Japan, or is it a different chain with the same name?

via Ynetnews

Charlie Day is the funniest character on the TV show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  Here’s a short he did a while back that I found on YouTube where he tries to quit smoking.

Maglev trains, as the name suggests, levitate on powerful magnetic fields above the tracks. The lack of friction means they can reach extremely high speeds.

Rather astonishingly for anyone used to most Western trains, the Japanese technology has been in the pipeline since the 1960s, with a major publically viewable 20km test track to the west of Tokyo since 1997.

The top speed reached so far at the Yamanashi test facility is 581kph (361mph). If that’s hard to picture, imagine a commercial jet aircraft flying past at full throttle at ground level – that’s in the same ballpark.

via Digital World Tokyo

Obama says he’s going to introduce a cabinet-level CTO who will make decisions on how the U.S. uses technology in government, building out broadband in rural areas, and creating hi-tech jobs.  Who will that person be?  Will that person come from a commercial or academic background?

According to this article in Business Week the shortlist includes the following people.

Vint Cerf

He works for Google.  People call him the father of the Internet.  He has a cool beard.

Ed Felton

From Princeton University, apparently a smart guy.  In 2006 he hacked a Diebold voting machine to prove it could be done.

Jeff Bezos

He started Amazon. He knows technology and he knows business.

Steve Balmer

He is responsible for Windows Vista.  And he’s a Dick.

Obama has so far shown that he’s an intelligent person with sound judgement.  Therefore I think that it’s safe to say that Steve Balmer’s job is safe at Microsoft.  I’d like to see Vint Cerf in the Whitehouse.  I like that beard.

MacRuby is coming along nicely.  I like the way you communicate with Interface Builder using MacRuby moreso than with standard ruby + RubyCocoa.  They both use a similar notation but setting outlets is a little more natural with MacRuby.  There are hopes that Ruby will eventually serve as a native scripting language for OS X, I would definitely welcome that.

Ruby is a dynamic programming language that, over the last few years, has enjoyed enormous popularity, thanks in part to the Rails web framework. Now with MacRuby, you can create Mac OS X applications with Ruby while maintaining the peformance benefits of a fully fledged Cocoa application. This article will show you how to get started with MacRuby and build your first sample application.

Developing Cocoa Applications Using MacRuby

Gotta keep an eye on Nitrogen, which promises a Rails-lke framework for the highly concurrent Erlang programming laguage.

An event-driven web framework for Erlang

Hmm.

There’s a surprise near the end of this clip.