I got a $10 OmniTech flexible keyboard at Staples yesterday. It’s a funny little device that can be rolled up and packed away, while still being fully functional. At first glance, it’s just a regular USB keyboard with a silicone coat instead of a hard plastic shell. Further inspection through the translucent silicone confirmed that the innards were, indeed, identical to those of a regular keyboard. It consists of two flexible circuit boards overlayed over each other. Each layer has a different pattern of traces, and each keypress occurs at a unique junction to connect the circuits.

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Upstart is the new event-based *nix startup daemon that’s all the rage these days. It is also a little event-based startup manager I cooked up for Javascript applications. Basically, chunks of application are started up in an order that satisfies all dependencies.

What’s the use of an event-based startup manager if Javascript is largely linear? It’s pretty pointless at the moment, I suppose. But with the advent of multithreaded Javascript, there might be some value in controlling code execution this way.

The code can be downloaded here.

Oh, and happy July 4th to those who celebrate.

Recently, a new HAL has been released that supports this family of wireless devices. This new software should work for all platforms supported by MadWifi, including x86-64. It’s not yet in trunk, but should be soon. For now, the code is available from svn and as a tarball.

Perhaps it’s time to stop using this inelegant hack.

It’s been 15 years since its first changelog entry, and Wine is almost ready for version 1.0. The last release candidate for this landmark version was released yesterday.

Quite a few release-blocker bugs were deferred to later versions, but even these should be fixed within a few months. Wine 1.0 itself should be released in just a few days.

More information can be found at the Wine HQ.

(edited 06/17/2008)

… and here it is.

The much-anticipated Kubuntu packages for KDE 4.1 Beta 1 are now officially available!

The packages have been under testing since Saturday, and nixternal has been busy applying fixes; they should be quite polished by now. The KDE 4 PIM packages (Kontact, KMail, KOrganizer, Akregator, etc…) are included in this release, in the kdepim-kde4 package. Meanwhile, the extragear packages are right on schedule and should be ready in a couple of days.

In a nutshell, the Launchpad PPA repository containing all the goodies is

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu hardy main

… and a dist-upgrade would get you the new packages if you already have KDE 4.0 installed, after adding the repository and updating.

Please read the aforementioned blog post for more information and additional comments. Don’t forget to backup your ~/.kde4 directory, and report bugs!