Friday, May 16, 2008

OpenSource Jam & Literate Programming






I gave a short talk yesterday about LP at the OpenSource Jam (bi-mensual open source meeting, at the Google London Office). So, here is the pdf of the presentation (just click on the above image to get it). People seemed to like the talk, and there was some interesting comments about the lack of good documentation tools (particularly, the need for multi-level documentations), the similarity with DSL, and some in-house LP tools used by some companies.

update: A blog post describing the event and pictures have been posted by the open source team...





Saturday, May 10, 2008

iLiad iRex pictures

As there's some interest in the iliad and other ebook readers, and as a follow-up to my previous post describing my general impressions of the iliad, I thought that posting some pictures would be interesting... Clicking on the images shows the original image size (note that the grain is in fact due to the iso setting rather than the iliad !)






This first picture shows an A4 PDF, not resized, and perfectly readable. As you can see, no problems either with the viewing angle.






The 16 gray levels work well enough for reading some comics :)






Another comic, close up.






One of the great thing with a reasonable resolution and antialiasing: you CAN put A4 scans of partitions, and IT IS readable :) -- here the Turkish March, from a freely available document scanned by the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (thanks!).






As you can see, the poor quality of the pictures (and the not-so-great white balance) are due to the actual lightning conditions :) -- and you can also see how well an e-ink device reacts to a direct spot lamp...


Finally, as it's one of the main use of my iliad and one of the main reasons I actually bought one, an A4 research paper:






As you can see, it's readable (albeit a bit small), with the PDF reader I use simply set in fullscreen mode.






Zooming on the same document with the camera (ie without touching the iliad) -- you can see how such A4 PDF documents are actually readable, without any kind of resizing (apart the fullscreen mode). The PDF reader application can also zoom the document if it's really necessary (using a simple gesture with the stylus), but I rarely use this feature (usually only for some diagrams if they are too small, not for the text itself).

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Thesis







Feels good :)