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We’ve been hoping that we could make a switch to the SB Nation family of blogs before the Rose Bowl on Friday night, and our wishes have been granted.

Officially, we’ll be moving to our new home sometime Wednesday.  This will not be much of an issue to you, our loyal readers, as the website’s address will be the exact same.  However, if you want to comment at our new site, you’ll need to sign up at SBNation.  You can wait until we launch and sign up directly through the BBC.

But this means a lot to us.  We’ll be able to do our Live Chat during the Rose Bowl from our new home, and we’re all excited about that.

Thanks again for your support and your love for all things Buckeye!

Jeff at The BBC

Chile, South America | Eccentric Homes

When searching for a coastal respite in Valparaíso, Pablo Neruda related the following specifications to his friend, Sara Vial,

“It may not be too high or too low. It must be solitary, but not in excess. I wish neighbors were invisible. I wish I did not see or hear them. Original but not uncomfortable. Very light, but firm. Neither too big nor too small, far from everything. But close to the stores. As well, it has to be very inexpensive. Do you think I can find a house like that in Valparaíso?”

Miraculously, “La Sebastiana” fit the vast majority of his requirements. Originally constructed by Spaniard Sebastián Collao, the structure brimmed with character. The third floor had been a birdhouse, the terrace had been created to serve as a heliport, and the house was capped by a tower. Windows with pristine views of the ocean and city resembled ships’ clerestories.

The one drawback: Neruda felt it was too large. After three years of finishing and quirkily furnishing the house, Neruda and his third wife, Matilde Urrutia, moved in with joint-owners and close friends Doctor Francisco Velasco and his wife. It was agreed that Neruda and Urrutia would occupy the top two floors and tower while Velasco and Martner would reside in the lower portion of the house. Neruda later joked that he had gotten the worse half of the bargain, “I bought nothing but stairs and terraces,” knowing full-well that these features afforded him a nearly 360-degree vista of the bay.

La Sebastiana served as the poet’s residence at the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Neruda was so greatly inspired by his dwelling that he penned a poem in her honor,

I established the house.
First I made it from air.
Then I hung the flag in the air
and left it hanging
from the sky, from the star
from clarity and from darkness…

And so it remained until Neruda’s death. However, immediately following the military coup in 1973, La Sebastiana was ransacked in retaliation for Neruda’s outspoken support of the previous regime. Thanks to private and public funding the house was returned to its original condition and an interpretive center was created in the garden area, both of which opened to the public in 1991.

Further to this morning’s news, webOS 1.3.5 is now officially available for Sprint Palm users and the full changelog has been posted on Palm’s support pages (Pixi here, Pre here). No GSM or Bell love yet, so far as your correspondent can discern. Thanks to Palm’s use of a new compression method, it weighs in at a tiny 13mb and now has a new “unpacking” step when installing.

The most interesting fixes? Posted after the break, along with the Pre changelog.

While 2009 has been the year of the API, it’s the codeless creative experiences that drive mainstream adoption. Every December, ReadWriteWeb’s writers collect up their thoughts from 2009 and make predictions for the year ahead. My first prediction was that augmented reality applications would gain popularity. Part of that prediction was informed by a recent interview with Metaio Marketing Director Lisa Murphy.

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ReadWriteWeb first covered Metaio in early November when the company was set to release its editable consumer application Junaio. While products like Layar and Wikitude offer users a chance to view location-based notes and text, Junaio is the only service that offers non-coders the opportunity to edit images and text on multiple layers.

While Junaio is certainly its most popular product, the 6-year-old Munich-based company earns revenue by working with commercial clients like Lego, Popular and GM. Often described as “augmented reality marketing”, Metaio specializes in markerless tracking for advertising clients where a printed codes prompt a 3D webcam experience.

In the same way that consumers can generate their own QR codes via sites like Kaywa, is it possible that markerless AR tracking will one day yield a codeless creative experience? Honestly, it’s fine to hold up an Ikea catalogue and see a 3D sofa, but what good is a so-called immersive environment if the user is held captive in a passive consumer experience?

Says Murphy, “We chose to focus on the social aspects of Junaio by offering image sharing, oAuth and Facebook integration.” Nevertheless, she acknowledges that the company may open up the interface for further exploration. In keeping with its commitment to the social, we’re hoping Metaio finds ways to incorporate user-generated SketchUp creations in Junaio as well as an all-purpose AR tracking generator. In other words, rather than just interacting in an immersive environment, we’re hoping non-coders can contribute more than their eyeballs.

Discuss

We already seen a handfull of videos of the upcoming customizable kart-racing title from United Front Games that shares the same concept with Sony’s Play, Create, Share line of games. From how the track editor works to

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

With Apple expected to release their tablet PC early this year publications are gearing up to develop the paradigm for what could save their very existence. Stay tuned!

Last summer, we wrote about the launch of a new service from Google called City Tours that marked the search giant’s first foray into the travel space. The service isn’t exactly flashy, but it’s quite practical: tell it what city you’re visiting, and it can generate an optimized travel itinerary featuring a number of landmarks within walking distance. Unfortunately it had a few shortcomings. For one, its directions were all based on distances “as the bird flies”. In other words, it was up to you to figure out the best way to navigate between these landmarks, because Travel Tours would sometimes direct you to walk directly across a river.

Today, Google is releasing an updated version of Travel Tours that takes advantage of the Walking Directions built into Google Maps, which means you’ll be able to rely on them even if you’re not capable of scaling a building in a single bound. You can see the difference in the images below.

Google’s blog post on the release also notes that you can now import Google ‘My Maps’ into City Tours. My Maps, which launched back in 2007, allow you to manually tag your own points of interest on a Google Map. This means you’ll now be able to build out a map of all the landmarks you’d like to see on your trip, then import those into City Tours to get an optimized itinerary.

The service remains in Google Labs.

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Following a bit of planned iTunes Connect downtime for the holidays, LinkedIn came out with the latest version of their iPhone app today. As you might expect from a 3.0 release, the app has been much improved, namely in its user experience. In fact, it looks a lot more like Facebook’s iPhone app now — which we’ll forgive, since that’s an excellent app.

As you can see, there is a new main screen that features 12 main buttons. Yes, this is just like the new Facebook app main screen that features big buttons. With LinkedIn’s you’ll get easy access to “All Updates,” “Status,” “Profiles,” “Discussions,” “Connections,” “Favorites,” “Inbox,” “Invitations,” “Recents,” “Reconnect,” “In Person,” and “Themes.” Of these, the Reconnect, In Person, and Themes areas are entirely new. Reconnect allows you to find people you likely know on LinkedIn with the click of a button. In Person lets you use the iPhone’s Bluetooth to easily swap contact information with any other LinkedIn iPhone use you happen to be nearby at a conference or event. And Themes allows you to change the color of the main screen icons — you can choose pink, orange, gold, and a bunch of other crazy colors to ugly-up your app to your heart’s content.

Previously, the app featured a more standard bottom-bar iPhone navigation where you could switch between updates, your inbox, search, and other elements. This new layout gives you access to a lot more information quickly. The updates areas (All and Status) has also been been made more Facebook-like as each now features a user profile picture next to each update. You can also now comment on each of these updates right from within the app — again, yes, just like Facebook.

It’s also now very easy to “star” any profile to mark it as a favorite, to give you easy access to it. Doing this also creates a filtering mechanism for the update streams.

Find the 3.0 version of the LinkedIn app, available for free in the App Store here.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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We’d heard webOS 1.3.5 would be coming to the Pre on Sprint today, and here we go — it’s being pushed to devices right now. The official changelog is quite long, but the big-ticket tweaks include the removal of the app storage limit, better performance, and improved battery life. We’ll let you know how our update goes — you let us know the same now, kaykay? Kay.

Sprint now pushing webOS 1.3.5 to the Pre originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Finding itself with a wealth of a additional bandwidth thanks to a new satellite going up today, DirecTV may have already decided its first big addition will be 3D. Citing the always popular unnamed sources, HD Guru says we should prepare for a CES announcement that the bird will be up and running by March beaming down a collection of movies, sports and TV shows in 3D HD, requiring only a firmware upgrade on existing set-top boxes to tune into the new stations. UK satellite provider Sky has already tipped its hand about 2010 3D plans, with a newly freshened HDMI spec expected to ease things along and nearly every manufacturer either already producing compatible displays or planning to announce them in less than a week there’s very little doubt remaining about whether broadcast 3D is coming home this year, only how and when.

DirecTV 3D broadcasts coming in early 2010? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I watched a bunch of football games on Sunday, let’s empty out the notebook.

• It’s hard to watch the Panthers over the last month and not wonder where they might be today had Matt Moore(notes) taken over for Jake Delhomme(notes) earlier in the season. After all, Delhomme was nothing more than a walking turnover machine through the first three months, while Moore has been excellent in three of his last four starts (for December he’s got a 106.8 rating, 8.0 YPA, 7 TDs, 1 pick). But the Carolina error really came in the offseason, when it decided to give Delhomme a monster extension without any major competition coming in (recall how dreadful he was against Arizona in the playoffs). Once you make that sort of emphatic commitment to a quarterback, it’s not something you can change willy-nilly. The Panthers were basically married to Delhomme for most of the 2009 season, like it or not.

I’m not convinced that Moore is a major solution down the road but at least he’s got some mobility and the ability to throw a catchable deep ball (albeit most of those long passes to Steve Smith succeeded because of No. 89’s ability and adjustments, not really because of Moore). The Panthers have to at least give Moore a chance to compete for the job next year, and if I were a player on this offense, I’d push for an open audition.

• Philip Rivers(notes) should be no worse than No. 2 on the current MVP watch list, and the Chargers offense is a nightmare for any playoff-bound defense. Antonio Gates(notes), matchup nightmare. Vincent Jackson(notes), matchup nightmare. Darren Sproles(notes), matchup nightmare. Malcom Floyd(notes), a darn good fourth option in the passing game. It’s a joke that you always see LaDainian Tomlinson(notes) featured when networks promote a San Diego game, because this is obviously the Philip Rivers show. I’ll be surprised if the Colts and Chargers don’t meet in the AFC Championship Game, and I’ll be a little disappointed too.

• Darrelle Revis(notes) should be the Defensive Player of the Year and it shouldn’t be close. He’s been asked to single-cover a host of elite receivers over four months and he’s essentially beaten everyone, including Andre Johnson(notes), Randy Moss(notes) and Steve Smith. Sunday’s match with Reggie Wayne(notes) was closer than the stats show – obviously Wayne didn’t play a full game and he should have scored on a first-half pass in the end zone – but at the end of it all, fantasy owners who steered away from Revis Island were glad that they did.

• The Patriots rolled over a Jaguars team that they match up perfectly against, but I’ll be surprised if New England goes deep in the playoffs. What can the Pats really hang their hats on? Bill Belichick, Tom Brady(notes) throwing to two elite receivers, a mediocre running game, a defense that won’t stop any good offense in the playoffs. How many 35-31 games can you win in a row? Don’t overreact to what the Pats did against a Jacksonville team that’s essentially a perfect matchup for them.

• The Saints have no confidence in their pass blocking right now and that’s why Drew Brees(notes) was throwing so many short passes for the balance of the loss to Tampa Bay.

• I don’t know anyone who saw this Carnell Williams(notes) comeback coming, and that includes the Bucs (remember they spend a lot of cash to bring in Derrick Ward(notes)). A tip of the cap to you, Caddy. I thought you were deader than disco.

• Here’s the beauty of the Jerome Harrison(notes) story – the better he looks, the more foolish Eric Mangini looks. Everybody wins. I’m still not sold on Harrison being a heavy-use back over a four-month season, but his burial in the first half of the year – behind a hobbling Jamal Lewis(notes) – was a travesty. I’m not saying this conveniently after the fact either; in a few leagues I went out of my way to stash Harrison, then played the waiting game. Unfortunately my patience had long run out by the time Week 15 rolled around.

• Washington’s offensive line has been a joke for the balance of the year, but that doesn’t excuse Jason Campbell(notes) from blame. I’ve watched just about every Campbell snap for the last two seasons and I’m convinced his absolute ceiling as a pro is "adequate quarterback" – and that’s if he gets all the right pieces around him. Sure, he’s got the size and the arm strength and he’s the type of guy who looks great in a 7-on-7 drill, but he’s never developed a shred of awareness in the pocket and that’s a critical skill for any competent NFL quarterback. Campbell’s also very poor at reading defenses and picking up on pre-snap blitz indicators; while his offensive line might set him up to fail, he’s making the situation look as bad as it possibly can look.

• Forget Darren McFadden(notes) ever being a traditional tailback, someone you can hand the ball to 15-20 times a game. He’s a handy receiver and a useful satellite player, that’s the upside here. He’ll never be a franchise guy.

• The Cowboys probably wouldn’t be in the playoffs today had Roy Williams not gotten injured at Denver in Week 4. That paved the way for the Miles Austin(notes) explosion the next week and the rest is history. Of course the Pokes should have been hip to Austin a lot sooner; the team mentions that Austin was nicked up over the summer, but this also looks like a case of a team misjudging its personnel.

• You can have power and the jumbo package at the goal line. I’ll take the spread offense, more weapons, and a quick, decisive back.

• Congratulations on your three touchdowns, Brandon Jackson(notes). Step to the podium and accept your Jerome Harrison Award for this week’s most outstanding performance that helped no one’s fantasy team.

• I concede that it’s crazy to have a Week 17 title game in fantasy if you play in the head-to-head format. But if you’re in a total-points league, by all means you need to use all the games. Figuring out the madness is what separates the winners and losers in this make-believe game.

• Get out while the getting’s good and your wits are still intact, Matt Hasselbeck(notes). It was a nice run while it lasted. It’s all over now.

I hope you won your playoff games (and championships), amigos. If you want to follow me on Twitter, head over here.

Cory Doctorow, my former EFF colleague, now novelist and all-around-inspiration, gave a stirring speech entitled “How to Destroy the Book” in November at a Canadian conference dedicated to literacy. Fittingly, it was spontaneously transcribed and posted online at The Varsity.ca. The whole thing is terrific, but the first portion, an elegy to books and what they mean to us, is stirring and highly recommended to anyone who loves books:

When I buy an audiobook on CD, it’s mine. The license agreement, such as it is, is “don’t violate copyright law,” and I can rip that CD to mp3, I can load it to my iPod or any number of devises—it’s mine; I can give it away, I can sell it; it’s mine. But when you buy an audiobook through Audible, which now controls 90 per cent of the [downloadable] audiobook market, you get a license agreement, not a property interest. The things that you can do with it are limited by DRM; the players you can play it on are limited by the license agreements with Audible. Audible doesn’t do this because the publishers ask them to. Audible and iTunes, because Audible is the sole supplier to iTunes, do this because it’s in their own interest….

Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug. We all know this. It’s time we stop pretending that the pirates of copyright are right. These people were readers before they were publishers before they were writers before they worked in the legal department before they were agents before they were salespeople and marketers. We are the people of the book, and we need to start acting like it.

As it happens, the battle over whether you “own” digital goods (like e-books, CDs, and software) or merely “license” them will be a hot issue in court in 2010, with EFF deeply involved in the fight.

I have a great project for you today, a kitchen herb garden that you can grow on your windowsill or your counter top.  All you need are a few supplies to get you started. Growing your own herbs to use while cooking is an economical way to feed your family healthy meals.

Kathy Zengolewicz

Here is what you will need to get started:

• Three 4 ½ inch terra cotta pots
• Patio Paint – Fern Green, Geranium Red, Cloud White, Wrought Iron Black, Pumpkin
• A paint brush
• Paper towels
• Foam plate or a paint palette
• Fine tip black marker
• Stencils – you can find these online for free (a chef and a chile pepper)
• Pencil eraser

First, paint all of the clay pots with Pumpkin/Orange paint and let them dry.

On the chef pot, mix Pumpkin and Cloud White to paint the face. I used a plain chef stencil. Paint the chef hat with Cloud White, the neckerchief Geranium Red and use the fine tip black marker or Wrought Iron Black to make the eyes, eyebrows, mustache and mouth. Write “Too many cooks” on the top.

On the Herb pot, Refer to the photo and write “Paprika, Garlic, Bay Leaves, Oregano, Parsley and Basil on the top and randomly on the pot, using fine tip marker or the Wrought Iron Black paint. Trace a small leaf pattern on the pot between the lettering and paint the inside of the leaves Fern Green.

For the Pepper pot, just trace small chile pepper on the pot. Paint the pepper Geranium Red and the leaves Fern Green. Make a small stem with the marker or Wrought Iron Black paint. Paint the words “hot” across the top.

You can also use a pencil eraser dipped in the Wrought Iron Black to make small black dots on the pots.

Now you have three colorful container to start your kitchen herb garden.  Enjoy!

Post from: Blisstree

Kitchen Herb Garden

The common wall socket is, despite what you may think, a very well-engineered piece of work. There’s no way to put plugs in wrong, there are no moving parts, it’s difficult to electrocute yourself, and they put through plenty of juice as well as grounding your device. Ain’t nothing wrong with that, but people seem set on fixing it anyway. The pull-out looked good, but the Node was a disaster waiting to happen.

This “Rambler” modification adds a length of extension cord to a removable wall outlet, but I’m skeptical of its compatibility with existing wiring spaces. That big spool of heavy gauge cord must take up about the space of a pop can. Also, those little clips that hold the plug in look breakable, and the spooling will probably end up uneven and weird after a few ins and outs.

Still, perhaps an industrial application is more suitable. If one doesn’t have to take children, pet rabbits, and thin walls into account, it might be a really handy addition to a workshop.

[via Dvice and Freshome]

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Our Palm Pre phones just lit up with the news: webOS 1.3.5 is now available for download. The update weighs in at just 13 MB, but that 13 MB brings a slew of bug fixes as well as the fixing of much-maligned app limit. We’re downloading it now, we’ll let you know what we find in a bit.

As a reminder to all patchers and themers: Be sure to remove all patches and themes before installing any webOS update. We don’t want you to end up with a wonky install. You do not have to uninstall Preware or any other homebrew apps – just the patches and and themes.

UPDATE [8:38]: Palm’s servers seem to be being hit pretty hard, it’s going slow here. In the meantime, Palm has posted the for both the Palm Pre and the Palm Pixi, and we’ve got it for you after the break.

Highlights:

• App limit fixed.
• App Catalog downloads continue even after leaving the app’s page.
• App purchases have been expanded to US territories (sorry Europe, Canada, etc).
• Switching between days in Calendar is now faster.
• Sprint Navigation can be launched from a Contact.
• Palm Profile app restores happen in the background, letting the user get to the phone faster.
• Future webOS updates can be downloaded over 2G wireless (1xRTT).
• Notifications now work in landscape mode (which has strangely lost the rounded corners).

UPDATE [9:06]: Cool, there’s now a progress meter on the install screen spinner doohicky. It’s slow going, but at least we can see that it’s going now.

Also, the install has added one more step in the form of ‘unpacking.’ Instead of downloading the entire OS over again, webOS updates now come in the form of binary deltas, which essentially boils down to downloading only the new code, which then must be ‘unpacked’

Additionally, the code genies over at WebOS Internals have dug into the update package and found some interesting stuff, notably opengles.ipk and opengles-omap3.ipk, which are part of the groundwork for enabling the GPU. Good times, coming right up!

UPDATE [9:27]: Preware appears to be broken in webOS 1.3.5. It’s throwing up an ‘OnFeeds Error’ and not even getting to load the feeds. Let’s hope this is a server-side fix.

UPDATE [9:45]: rem_kujawa notes that you can use WebOS Quick Install (make sure you have version 2.96) to remove both Preware and its Package Manager, reinstall, and you should be good to go.

UPDATE [11:12]: It seems that the app migration system Palm devised to move your stuff from the /var partition to the USB drive partition only moves App Catalog apps. All homebrew stuff has been left behind in /var. If you want to move homebrew apps to the new folder, you’re going to have to delete them and reinstall.

UPDATE [11:23]: It also seems that the migration utility doesn’t transfer some app data. For example, user data from Paratrooper was left behind and the game launches as if never played before with no saved scores or progress.

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Filed under: Multimedia, Software, Freeware, Open Source, Mac mini, Apple TV

Just in case the gifts you got from your family last week didn’t float your boat (no kidding, I got a Yakov Smirnoff DVD — I love my parents, but they’re not the best gift givers in the world), here’s another fun present to unwrap. The folks at XBMC released a brand new version on Christmas Eve, and it’s available as a free download right now over on their website.

XBMC is the open source app that started off as “Xbox Media Center” (designed to be run on the original Xbox hardware), but has now blossomed into a full-featured media center that is usable on your Apple TV or Mac. Thanks to an app, you can use your iPhone as a remote as well.

The new version 9.11, a.k.a. “Camelot,” has far too many new changes for us to list in their entirety here, but there’s a revamped (and good-looking) user interface with increased skinning capability, updated support for different subtitles and video formats, new movie database scrapers for picking up information, and specifically in Mac OS X, support for the very popular Logitech Harmony Universal Remote. The devs say they’re excited to get this one out the door, if only because it means they can move on to bigger and better very soon. Kudos on the release (during the holiday season!), and if you’re an XBMC fan, have at it!

[via Engadget]

TUAWXBMC “Camelot” update brings lots of new features originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Over the past couple of weeks, startup Dorthy.com quietly rolled out a major upgrade to the social network’s website, making the personal-goal site available just in time to capture your New Year’s resolutions.

The company behind Dorthy wants you to use the site to make — and keep — your personal resolutions for 2010, and more generally all of your long-terms goals.

Dorthy hosts what it calls dreampages. Members set up a sharable dreampage with an avowed personal goal, whether it’s “build wells in Africa” or “date a cougar.”

Afterwards, members add articles, photos, videos, and status updates to your page, so it becomes a bookmarkable record of your progress toward the goal. For well-understood goals such as “run a half marathon,” it’s easy to understand how a page of collected articles on training and running specifically a half-marathon, not a full one, could quickly surpass those found on the first page of a Google search.

I spoke on the phone with COO Jordan English Gross and CTO Jim Anderson. Thanks to modern sputtery phone service, I had trouble tracking who said what. So I’ll paraphrase.

Dorthy’s own goal is to create a way for Internet users to “move beyond search.” Anderson spent years doing speech recognition research for IBM before moving to About.com. If you think about it, he says, a large number of people search f0r the same things every day to see what’s new. Dorthy’s pages are designed to hopefully remove the need to re-Google a favorite topic every day. And by  finding people whose goals intersect with yours, you can quickly create a collaborative page of your collective, collected knowledge.

Search keywords are, despite their power, a limited way to find information. Human-curated pages like those at Mahalo let people use their own smarts to cluster like with like. The Dorthy team see their dreampages the same way: Because a human being associates each piece of information with a dreampage, that info needn’t match specific keywords to be added to the page’s collection of resources.

How do they make money? First, the company plans to sell market research culled from its members’ behavior and pages. Second, they plan to sell aspiration-targeted advertising onto the dreampages, which have clear potential as a place to bring people and brand advertisers together. Imagine the obvious sponsors for a page about wanting to run a half-marathon, or to do good in the Third World. Brand managers in particular like these sort of aspirational, topical pages, as opposed to trying to guess what keywords to match on Google.

Dorthy, founded in New York City in November 2008, has received at least two rounds of funding from the Coyne Group and various angel investors, most recently a Series B round of $4 million.

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Jingle Networks, the startup that operates 1-800-FREE-411, a national telephone directory service, has raised $6.75 million in new venture funding, according to an SEC filing. Based in Menlo park, Calif., the company received this recent round from undisclosed investors.

It has now raised an impressive $88.7 million to date from a group including First Round Capital, Lead Dog Ventures, Liberty Associated Partners, Rose Tech Ventures, Goldman Sachs, the Hearst Corporation, Flybridge Capital, IDG Ventures and Comcast Interactive Capital.

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As blog after blog comes out with end-of-year green IPO predictions, the same three companies have consistently been tapped: Solyndra (which filed for its $300 million public sale two weeks ago), Silver Spring Networks (the anointed Smart Grid leader) and Tesla Motors (because it makes the prettiest electric car of the bunch). But today, Codexis, maker of engineered microbes and catalysts for green fuel, chemical and pharmaceutical production has surprised us all, filing for a $100 million IPO.

The news is even more shocking considering that the company just withdrew its previous IPO filing in August, citing poor market conditions. It had originally filed in April 2008.

Codexis engineers the enzymes and microorganisms that turn feedstocks like wood chips, switchgrass, corn husk, sugar cane and others into ethanol. Miniscule changes in their DNA can speed conversion times and make processing more efficient. It’s a delicate science that has yet to be successfully scaled. But this could soon change.

Based in Redwood City (down the road from both Silver Spring and Tesla), Codexis is one ambitious company. Its CEO, Alan Shaw, has talked a big game for a while now, touting the merits of drop-in fuels (fuels that will work with existing automotive technology), especially those that are biomass-based, over electric charging infrastructure and other renewable sources of energy like solar and wind. And 2010 might just be the make-it-or-break it year for this claim.

Not only are many companies launching their plug-in vehicle models, testing the viability of electric transportation infrastructure, but several Codexis competitors are also heating up on the commercial scale, including LS9, Coskata and Synthetic Genomics. Codexis has an advantage because due to its well-developed industrial chemical and pharmaceutical products, but it may have to fight for market share when it comes to fuel.

The company, which plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol CDXS, says it will use the money brought in from the public sale for working capital, and perhaps to kick off an acquisition strategy to add to its output capacity.

While it saw an 84 percent increase in revenue this year, it still saw a loss. This shouldn’t hurt its chances too much, however. Battery-maker A123Systems, which broke the seal on IPOs in the cleantech sector in September, is still seeing heavy losses; and Solyndra, vying to be the first IPO in 2010 is no different.

On top of that, Codexis’ losses are obviously narrowing — falling from $38.8 million to $15.1 million in just a year. The company reported revenue of $13.4 million for the first three quarters of 2009, a small bump up from the $10.8 million it posted over the same period in 2008.

It already has an impressive roster of clients signed up, including Royal Dutch Shell, Pfizer and Merck & Co. And it appears to have more realistic plans to growing its business in new directions. Earlier this month, it announced a partnership with carbon capture provider CO2 Solution to work on enzymatic carbon capture technology. Basically, Codexis will try to engineer enzymes that can survive the inhospitable conditions of smokestacks to absorb carbon dioxide and converts it into a bicarbonate ion. This makes Codexis a contender in a whole new area of green.

The company has also been pretty fortunate in its funding. In March, Shell acquired a bigger stake in the Codexis for a reported $30 million. It has previously raised $133 million from Bio*One Capital, CMEA Capital, Pequot Capital, Chevron Technology Ventures, and Maxygen.

If Codexis successfully makes it to market next year, it will no doubt establish itself as the catalyst engineering firm to watch — potentially attracting even more attention from the big oil and gas interests like BP and Exxon.

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