Category Archives: notes

Quick notes that might come in handy in the future, for me or others. Not necessarily written in full detail.

How were smilies =] invented?

Posted on by
Reply

Who invented the original emoticon, :-)? A quick Google search on “emoticon invention” revealed Smiley Lore, written by Scott E. Fahlman, the original inventor of the smiley.

On September 19, 1982, the idea was first suggested on an online bulletin board, or “bboard,” at Carnegie Mellon University. This original post was lost over the many following years.

Twenty years later, Mike Jones of Microsoft sponsored an “archeological dig,” to search through CMU’s old tape backups for the initial suggestion of the sequence :-). And guess what? They found it.

Mac OS X coming to x86!

Posted on by
2

Well, if you haven’t heard, Apple is going to use Intel x86 chips in its future computers. They’re going to release a developer build of Mac OS X which works on off-the-shelf Intel PCs. It’s definitely going to spread all over the Internet, but according to this article, Apple may be planning this.

The Shape of Days: Mac OS X on Intel: Try before you buy?

Given Apple’s experiences with software piracy, particularly the rampant software piracy that spread developer builds of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger all over the Internet this past spring, Apple’s management from the top down knows full well that this developer preview will be in the hands of every kid with a cable modem within days of its release. Most of them will be able to install it on their own computers and run it and the full suite of iLife ’05 applications at full speed, and run most existing Mac software in translation.

As a result, Apple will give thousands, possibly millions, of people a taste of Mac OS X running full speed on their own PCs.

Apple’s giving their potential future customers a free taste, that’s what they’re doing. It’s a try-before-you-buy deal.

Yes…I want a copy! :-)

FCKeditor

Posted on by
2

FCKeditor is the most feature-filled web-based rich text editor I have encountered so far. It requires no installation on the user’s computer, just JavaScript. Being an XHTML-compliant editor with compatibility for Internet Explorer 5.5+ and Gecko browsers (Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape), it beats the would-be competitors by a mile. It has the features of a fully-fledged word processor, so many that an entire CMS could be based around this editor.

The best part of all is that FCKeditor is open source, i.e. free! Needless to say, FCKeditor will definitely find its way into my future web applications.