Hack #5, “Open search bar results in new tab,” and Hack #8, “View source code in an external editor,” are the two best, as far as I’m concerned. Now, I can open up a page’s source code in Smultron, the text editor I use. Editing the file doesn’t let you test changes—as it does in Opera—but it still provides a consistent way of looking at source code.

One of the “features” that I always hated about viewing source with Firefox is that the default configuration doesn’t wrap long lines. Now, with Smultron, I get wrapped lines.

While poking around, I did find a way to wrap long lines of source code without loading it into an external editor. Search for the parameter view_source.wrap_long_lines and set it to true. That works like a charm, too.

BY DAN STOBER

Want to know how to write programs for the iPhone and iPod touch? Beginning this week, a Stanford computer science class on that buzzworthy topic will be available online to the general public for free.

The 10-week course, iPhone Application Programming, is a hot ticket. It begins today and videos of the classes will be posted at Stanford on iTunes U two days after each class meeting (http://itunes.stanford.edu). Copies of the slides shown in class will be available there as well.

The proliferation of third-party applications for Apple’s iPhone has changed the device from a popular cell phone to a miniature computer. The Apple App Store offers more than 25,000 titles, dealing with everything from maps to business tools, games, photography, fishing and restaurant recommendations based on your location.

“There’s a lot of interest in the iPhone,” said Brent Izutsu, Stanford’s project manager for Stanford on iTunes U. “This course provides an excellent opportunity for us to show the breadth and depth of our curriculum and the innovation of our students.”

There are applications that can turn your iPhone into a musical instrument and one that will measure G-forces on your body as you steer your car through a corner. Snap a photo of the cover of almost any book, CD, DVD or video game and—with the right software—get links to ratings and reviews. According to Apple, the download count from its App Store has passed the 800 million mark.

Online viewers of the Stanford course will see the same lectures as the on-campus students, but will not receive credit for the course (http://cs193p.stanford.edu). Some of the student-developed apps from the fall-quarter class, such as the Chinese-English dictionary Qingwen, are available at the iTunes store.

“For Stanford, working with Apple allowed us to focus our energy on identifying and capturing great content while Apple provided us the technology to distribute it globally,” Izutsu said.

The Department of Computer Science is part of the Stanford School of Engineering.

Related Information

• Stanford on iTunes U
• iPhone Application Programming Course
• Stanford Computer Science Department
• Apple iPhone App Store

I’ve worked with a number of them, including UBB Threads, phpBB, Phorum, and most recently, BBPress. I was hired to install BBPress on the Center for Human Systems website. As you might gather from the name, BBPress was developed by the creators of WordPress.

This heritage shows, too. Like WordPress, it installs quickly, runs fast, and is very easy to customize. It doesn’t have all of the features that some of the older BBS apps do, but that’s a good thing, if you ask me. It means that the software is a lot less “bloated” than some of those other packages.

It’s a perfect fit for this particular website, and it just might be a good fit for your website, too.

Web 3.0 Emerging
Computer (01/09) Vol. 42, No. 1, P. 88; Hendler, Jim
Web 3.0 is generally defined as Semantic Web technologies that run or are embedded within large-scale Web applications, writes Jim Hendler, assistant dean for information technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He points out that 2008 was a good year for Web 3.0, based on the healthy level of investment in Web 3.0 projects, the focus on Web 3.0 at various conferences and events, and the migration of new technologies from academia to startups. Hendler says the past year has seen a clarification of emerging Web 3.0 applications. “Key enablers are a maturing infrastructure for integrating Web data resources and the increased use of and support for the languages developed in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Semantic Web Activity,” he observes. The application of Web 3.0 technologies, in combination with the Web frameworks that run the Web 2.0 applications, are becoming the benchmark of the Web 3.0 generation, Hendler says. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) serves as the foundation of Web 3.0 applications, which links data from multiple Web sites or databases. Following the data’s rendering in RDF, the development of multisite mashups is affected by the use of uniform resource identifiers (URIs) for blending and mapping data from different resources. Relationships between data in different applications or in different parts of the same application can be deduced through the RDF Schema and the Web Ontology Language, facilitating the linkage of different datasets via direct assertions. Hendler writes that a key dissimilarity between Web 3.0 technologies and artificial intelligence knowledge representation applications resides in the Web naming scheme supplied by URIs combined with the inferencing in Web 3.0 applications, which supports the generation of large graphs that can prop up large-scale Web applications.

With the establishment of the center, whose research program begins immediately, the Media Lab and Plymouth Rock Studios will collaborate to revolutionize how we tell our stories, from major motion pictures to peer-to-peer multimedia sharing. By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, bridging the real and virtual worlds, and allowing everyone to make their own unique stories with user-generated content on the Web. Center research will also focus on ways to revolutionize imaging and display technologies, including developing next-generation cameras and programmable studios, making movie production more versatile and economic.

I’m going to be following this as I plan to start yet another website, HamRadioStoryProject.Org, that will allow ham radio operators to tell their stories about their experiences with ham radio.