Two fun eighties movies

Over the weekend, I watched the following two movies from the eighties:

• “The secret of my success” (1987) with Michael J. Fox and Helen Slater. Plot: Young man uses a trick to make it from mail boy to the top of his company.
• “Working girl” (1988) with Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford, and Sigourney Weaver. Plot: Very similar to above. This time it is Melanie Griffith as a creative secretary. She finds a way to realize one of her ideas after it almost got stolen.

Both movies are still fun, including the occasional laugh about the hair.

New York City in an alternate universe (photo)

Source: “Other Roads Taken”, click to enlarge

The TV show “Fringe” partly takes place in an alternate universe. One thing that is intriguing about that universe is how the skyline of New York City looks. The still-present Twin Towers are an obvious choice, but the domed skyscraper is especially intriguing. Turns out that this building had been planned for NYC in 1908 by Gaudi. Imagine that. It is called the Grand American Hotel. Fringepedia lists more differences between the universes. Amusing: Alternate universes tend to have Zeppelins in them.

Update 2011-02-22: All posts on Fringe.

Hyena 2: public alpha

There is now a public alpha of the next version of Hyena. Check it out.

Facebook adopts RDFa

This is a big deal. RDFa allows one to search web pages as if they were databases. Think Google, but with additional options such as: “Show me movies that ...” or “Show me books written by ...” or even “Show me opinions on books written by ...”. With Facebook’s weight behind it, we will hopefully see wider adoption. Publishers that initially support Facebook’s Open Graph standard are IMDb, Microsoft, NHL, Posterous, Rotten Tomatoes, TIME, and Yelp. That already includes quite a bit of useful data. Well, at least as far as movies are concerned.

Running a WAR as a desktop application

If you have written a web application, the next logical step is to make it available offline. The long-term solution is clear: You give your web application an offline mode, which will hopefully be complemented by explicit application management in web browsers. Short- to mid-term, though, that is often not feasible, because the server provides crucial functionality to the client. Thus, I was looking for a different solution.