ChromeOS Notebook Cr-48

Yesterday (This is now some days ago ;)) I got the chance to take a quick look at the Google Chrome OS Notebook, and I gotta say I’m really impressed. Even though I could not take a look at the OS itself really, thanks to no available wifi, on first glance it looks quite nice. It mainly is a Chrome browser running fullscreen so I don’t expect much of a difference from the experience than running it on my Macbook. To me, at the right price, this would be an awesome machine. When I take a look at the apps I use most of the time, almost all are browser based anyway, and through my Palm offering a wifi hotspot everywhere there is a cell signal, I can live with that. The power of HTML5 will also increase the usability even without connectivity in the near future. But the OS is really not what I’m lusting for… Sell me the hardware!

The hardware

I know that the machine will most likely not be available to a broad audience, but really this is a machine I would buy. The design is simple yet functional, the keyboard has a good touch to it at first glance, while the touchpad feels right as well. The machine is light, but feels sturdy and the outer shell has an almost leather like touch, similar to my Palm Pixi. There are no annoying stickers, or crazy amount of LEDs bagging for attention. The battery life is supposed to be close to 8h which is enough even for a long meeting-, or travel-day. So please manufactures take a good look at this! I bet I’m not the only one looking for such a machine. Currently there seems to be no PC manufacturer left offering at least a decent design, bundled with a nice machine, the only one coming close is Lenovo I guess.

I still got some hope left that maybe I’ll be able to beta test the machine, but I guess there a probably 1.000.000 people hoping the same. So to the guys who build the machine, just build more an sell them, kthxbye.

Growling from Node … or why is Array.pack missing from Javascript?

Since it came out I’ve been really interessed in Node. So I decided to do something with it, and to get me started I hacked together a little module to allow me to do what every good programming environment should allow: Sent me some Growl notifications :D…

This involved some rather low level UDP packet construction, but for now it works. Maybe somebody will find it useful, I put the code up on Github.

While writing the module I realized I was missing one piece coming from network coding using ruby, Array.pack(format) why is this missing? Is there an alternative? How do I turn an Array into a buffer following some custom format? Well for now I solved this by a little hacked function extending Array, this is neither clean nor well tested but it works for me while looking for a way to this right. For anyone interested here it is, and don’t kill me cause it’s ugly

https://gist.github.com/734947.js

Enjoy.

Coding for the caffeinatedcoders

A couple weeks ago me and a friend decided to get our projects together and from
now on publish under the caffeinatedcoders. From now on I can focus on doing what I love, develop web applications using the bleeding edge of technologies. This will include my love for Ruby (on Rails), as well as Javascript coding. Stay tuned our first project in on it’s way, the code is just flowing from my fingers right now ;). I can say so much the web apps we build follow the Unix way, do one thing and do it right!