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Former O'Reilly web producer Justin Watt just made a surprisingly cool video by combining still photos with a soundtrack made in Looptastic, a $5 iPhone app. (There are also free and 99-cent versions.) Justin used FFmpeg (also free) to sequence the still images, overlay the soundtrack, and render the movie.

Here's a super-easy way to play multiple movies in the same area on a webpage. No JavaScript required, and it works on iPhone too.

What does the Oracle/Sun merger mean for Java? There's been a lot of speculation and a fair amount of apocalyptic, "sky is falling" Twitter activity, but does anyone really know what Ellison has in store for Java?

I saw something the other day that I was both intrigued and bothered by in equal measure. 'Mozilla and the Khronos Group Announce Initiative to Bring Accelerated 3D to the Web'. Apparently, the working group will look at exposing OpenGL capabilities within ECMAScript. The intriguing part is that, as a fan of 3D Computer Graphics and Animation this has got to be a good sign, especially if it is exposed in this way; but the bothersome bit is how people will end up using it because it has been exposed in this way. The crux of the problem for me is the question, JavaScript - what's it good for? Absolutely...

I've always loved the MoinMoin wiki, and lately I've been using it for more and more, at work and at home. I've pined for a REST wrapper for a while, and I finally bit the bullet and wrote one, as part of the open-source Akara project, which among other things provides RESTful access to the XML processing capabilities of Amara 2.x.