Danny's Tech: Where West and East Intersect

Thursday, December 29, 2005

Reinventing the Wheels

"As I May Think... How the Read/Write Web was Lost" is a good reminder of how new ideas (ability to read/write a web page by default) isn't practical at first so things have to be scaled down (like read only browsers) before the ideas gain wide spread tractions, and then the original idea is rediscovered (like wiki and blogs) but in a weaker form.

It's sad to see that at least with technologies, ideas have to be reinvented over and over back to sort of square one. Sigh. There really is nothing new under the sun...

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Game on for the gamers

With gamers like fatal1ty and vo0 making 6 figures in a single game winning, it is turning into serious business. With sponsors starting to pitch in serious money (from game SW makers to various computer HW companies and then related news and support companies like MTV), I believe the gaming player industry will explode over the next few years. It'll be like the sports industry or more like poker with people throwing in money to get winnings. I guess a lot can happen since game playing industry is still immature. It'll be interesting to see how things will shake out over the next few years....

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Simulator as screen saver

IBM has a cool article "Linux screensaver for Windows" explaining how to run QEMU simulator in Windows to boot Linux LiveCD and running it as a screen saver -- since CPU usage is least of your worries when running a screensaver, it makes sense to use the "free" CPU cycles for running Linux.

Hmm, almost kind of related to some of my patents I have applied for....

Ruby on Rails and Maintainability

/. asks "Is Ruby on Rails Maintainable?" and found lots of interesting comments about RoR and other programming and scripting languages. The conclusion seems to be "depends" and made me think about how we have so many different languages and I'm not happy with any (Smalltalk seems like the best of the lot still).

Easy to write and easy to test and maintain are hard to reconcile with today's language and environment.

UI failure: where GPS can steer you wrong

Here's an example of GPS (navigation system) turning sour: "Navigation nightmare on a desert road". The driver used GPS before and seemed reliable but when real help was needed out in the desert, GPS guided the driver to a dangerous location during a thunderstorm and one of the tires blew out on the backroads! You trust the system a little bit and when the rubber meets the road it can severely go wrong. Ouch.

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

PC vs People: who's the boss

news.com has "PC or People -- who's the boss" interviewing the new MSFT researcher Bill Buxton and has few tidbits of interesting ideas but I'm not satisfied with the way things work today.

I want more seamless interactions with computers and the data in it. For example, my wife and I enter data into Money Matters (personal finance software) but use two different computers. It's up to me to enter the data either on my wife's computer or copy it to mine and tell her: don't use it until I'm done. Sometimes I get busy and forget to update her computer and the next thing I know I have to reenter my data (or hers)! I wish there was a more seamless CM (configuration management or the ability to check in and out files in turn and keep track of changes) software that is distributed across the household computers. I'm thinking of turning everyone's computers into a wireless based notebook with one central server (to do printing and some sort of backup) but without easy backups and data sharing, my sysadmin "duties" will increase significantly. Sigh.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

One pound LED Projector (battery included)

There were many companies talking about LED projectors over the past few years, but Toshiba will start selling their TDP-FF1A next month (Jan 23) in Japan for 98,800 yen (US$847.34 at 117.78yen/$). It is only 565 grams (that's about one pound).

Specs are: 800x600 (VGA), 400 Lux, contrast of ratio of 1500:1, throw distance of 0.4 to 2.5 meters. And it also includes a mono speaker (0.5 watts). [For lux vs lumens, check out wikipedia.]

It includes a battery that weighs 250 grams and can power the projector for 2 hours! And it also comes with a 23" projector screen. Not a bad deal for $900!

Samsung has DLP Pocket Imager (to be out sometime 2006?).

Update 12/25: as Russ pointed out, Mitsubishi with PK10 is out on cdw. Merry Christmas!

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Games: The Movies, part 2

Lionhead decided to put out press release on their game "The Movies" and the movie getting attention called "The French Democracy."

updates:

Here's Gamespot game guide.

Some links to related blog/fan sites:
  1. Gamespy's PlanetTheMovies.
  2. TheMoviesPlus.

Mastering Ajax

IBM is running Mastering Ajax series, starting with "Introduction to Ajax"

Game: The Movies

I read "Video Games Go to the Movies" and wanted to try out "The Movies" and when I saw it at Costco last night, I went ahead and bought it and started playing with it. I just want to see it's moving making ability but there is no easy way to do so off the bat. I haven't googled hard on the quickest way so I'll look around for now.

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Ajax Sucks

I found "Ajax Sucks most of the time" to be very good article pointing out the weaknesses of Ajax.

Monday, December 05, 2005

Wikipedia problems

As much as I rely on and enjoy Wikipedia, it's been going under some heat and need for changes: "Growing Pains for Wikipedia" -- free and open can lead to all kinds of abuse (why we have so much spam in email and elsewhere). Can this ever be resolved? I don't know...

Saturday, December 03, 2005

TelaDoc Medical Services: moving one step closer

"Phone doctor service worries medical experts" and rightly so. Outsourcing is the inevitable trend and once phone and web based diagnostics become common, the analysis and interpretations will be done in India and China.

Friday, December 02, 2005

remote assistance

Things like Fog Creek "Copilot" gets at the problem of computers today: all too often someone has to maintain or unstuck a computer and usually someone you know remotely (by phone of course). Copilot allows control remotely but what if all the smarts were packaged in a program in a CD which can boot by itself and connect to a server? What if this software also did backups and restores to a server? And what if the data (and program) can be transparently be copied to a new machine? Or on a remote location? With virtualization technology, being able to run and restore portions of old environment would be easy to do.

[Some of the ideas above was shared to me by a coworker but I doubt if anything above is really new...]

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SlingDot: online gaming community

Vox Day is promoting SlingDot and I had to peak at it. I guess it's not really up since at this time I cannot click on anything in my firefox 1.5 browser.

Still not what I'm looking for: game programmer community (GDU) for all students (6 year olds and up?).

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Telemedicine

"'Telemedicine' just what the doctor ordered" is great: using technology to reduce time of doctors and allow remote diagnosis (between doctors). In Japan, there are movement to allow a chian of pharmacies to be open 24x7 with the pharmacist available via videophone to consult with patients. This way, several sites during the late night hours can be handled by one pharmacist. These trends get to what I've mentioned yesterday: taking medicine all the way home (remotely).

Beauty in simplicity

"The beauty of Simplicity" hits at why Google is so popular: simple yet functional. Same with iPod: clean interace for handling thousands if not millions of music in one box.

I believe the same about programming: if things can be made simple (like Stagecast) while being very powerful like C/C++, I believe that programming would become as common as googlers and podcasters. I think Smalltalk is a good start but by being pure VM based (like Java), it has some limits which can done better if it was more like Forth with machine code level access to the hardware. Security issues can be mitigated by using the hypervisor or virtualization technologies to isolate programmers from corrupting other partitions (LPAR or logical partition is what IBM likes to call the individual instance of virtualized "machine" -- not to be confused with virtual machine or VM of Smalltalk and Java).

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