OLPC Human Interface

Last night I just watched a couple of videos [here] and [here] about the new OLPC Human Interface - Sugar. While reading the article from the Washington post "Low-Cost Laptop Could Transform Learning" I couldn't stop thinking about Ender's Game and the computers that the kids all used, which was refereed to as their "desk". The laptop they are proposing is very interesting, and I would actually be tempted to purchase one for myself at some point in the future. I think this new design of the human interface, which they are calling sugar, is very interesting and does seem to be intuitive and understandable. It will be interesting to see how it actually performs and is regarded by kids who are the primary user of it. This will be one topic that I'll be keeping an eye on.

PGP is 15 years old

PGP Corporation salutes the 15th anniversary of PGP encryption technology. Developed and released in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann, Pretty Good Privacy 1.0 set the standard for safe, accessible technology to protect and share online information.

PGP is used for encryption and signing of content, but it is under utalized on the internet. For a while I used it to sign my email messages and other communications. This is a good opportunity to go look at PGP again and check out what all has been updated and is new.

From what I did digging for finding PGP software, the Authoritative source for PGP software is http://philzimmermann.com The other sites that have related information are http://www.openpgp.org and http://www.pgp.com and for the international people http://www.pgpi.org

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Timeline and Risk: How to Piss Off Your Software Developers

Today we're going to focus on a sentence that will make almost any developer, even a mild-mannered one, want to box up their red Swingline and head to Tahiti for early retirement.

This Article hit the issue squarely on the nail, and I couldn't agree More! The Classical Pyramid of Time, Cost and Quality still hold true today, and that good developers already are giving +100% of their time and effort to their job.


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Buffer Overflows and Security

Buffer overflows and security are very common topics these days and Dr Dobb's just ran an article on it Illusion of Safety. They also ran a follow up article on The Unsecured Integer. The first article presents two options which can be used to prevent buffer overflows brute force and prevention by design. Brute force requires some form of verifying that all incoming data is verified for length before copying with problematic functions. Prevention by design pushes the responsibility to verify that the data doesn't overflow to the edges of the system and has the possibilities to make applications simpler, smaller and run faster, but it requires that each data flow be traced and verified. Preventions is harder to enforce than the brute force method but provides possible efficiency improvements.

One other related article Integral Security . There are 3 variants on integer errors overflow, sign errors and trundication. They reference a special publication 500-262 from NIST as a reference for how to handle Integer Safety.

Also of interesting note they referenced Secure Coding in C and C++, by Robert C. Seacord which appears to be an interesting reference book.

Phidgets Inc. :: Unique and Easy to Use USB Interfaces

Phidgets Inc. :: Unique and Easy to Use USB Interfaces

This past week at work, I had the opportunity to work with these neat devices! They are versatile little devices which allow you to work with a TextLDC output, Analog input devices and digital input and output devices. All for very reasonable prices and what I really did like was that they have a reasonably complete software programming API which is available for most development platforms, Windows, Linux, MS VC++, Java and several other languages as well.

What I was working with was the following LCD display and a couple of other sensors


I was amazed, with only a couple of hours I had it up and working and was able to get most of the interfacing with the device done and then able to get down to actually writing the rest of the application that I needed to do.

If you are ordering from the US order from http://phidgetsusa.com/. For documentation and information or for the Forums head over to http://www.phidgets.com where the forums and documentation is slightly more up to date.

If I actually had any extra cash on me right now I'd pick up some of these for putzing around with in my spare time at home.

Endgame: Singularity

Just ran across this very interesting sounding game review by PCBurn. An I was hooked. A little more digging and I found the Python Game Programming Challenge site called PyWeek. The actual game's page is found on http://www.emhsoft.net/singularity/index.html.

Why Google OS Already Exists

OSWeekly.com - Why Google OS Already Exists

What constitutes an OS?

Consider this. Google already offers e-mail, picture editing, blogging, a personal calendar and its own brand of instant messenger. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Google OS is already alive and well. The best part is that it has gone largely unnoticed by even the most observant of us. It's called web applications and the World Wide Web.

Interesting to say the least.

Startup Connects Multiple Monitors Over USB

How cool is that?
extremetech.com article
They say it won't handle the bandwidth for playing intensive games,
but it's still awesome.

JFreak

Multi-Touch Input

A couple of months ago I saw this awesome demo of a multi-touch input screen demo on Slashdot - The Ultimate Dual-Hand Touchscreen. Needless to say I was amazed and blown away by the reality that a lot of new and innovative interfaces could actually be this close.

Remember the interface used in Minority Report, well it demonstrated a similar style interface to that.

Then I was trying to remember it this week and telling a co-worker about it, and Rembrandt how awesome it actually was and what it could actually mean for things we could see out in the next couple of years.

So I went digging and found one site that had the video and a number of tidbits that people have collected together on it at http://multi-touchscreen.com/. I sat and watched the whole video again twice tonight, in amazement and wonder of what might be reality in the next couple of years!

Now for some details that I saw in browsing and reading about it.

One person behind some of this is Jeff Han at NYU's Department of Computer Science
The other is Yann Lecon Professor of Computer Science, The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University

Multi-Touch Sensing through Frustrated Total Internal Reflection pretty cool demonstration.

This was presented in March 2006 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference during a session called The Future of Interfaces Is Multi-Touch

Blog entry at Makezine.com Multitouch interaction research
Blog entry at Makezine.com The Future of Interfaces Is Multi-Touch

A Very interesting area and I plan to keep track of it as time goes by and when I can figure out a way to justify it I'm getting one for my computer!

Just ran across a very interesting post linking to Lemur - The Multitouch Control Surface


And one last link to some continuing research on Multi-Touch Interaction Research

Enjoy the interesting Information

Interesting Technology

TrackStick GPS Data Logger

Found this interesting device in my browsing online today. It is supposed to run on 2 AAA batteries and it tracks where it's been. Then when you connect it to your computer you can retrieve where it's been. Pretty cool device

Think Geek - TrackStick GPS Data Logger
TrackStick.com


Wi-Spy
Interesting Spectrum Analyzer for the Wi-Fi spectrum. It is a USB dongle with a CD that is runnable under windows as well as software for running under Linux. The neat thing is it's only $99. It give you an interesting look at the Wi-Fi spectrum.

Think Geek - Wi-Spy
MetaGeek - Wi-Spy

Underhanded C Contest

2006 Underhanded C Contest

Ever wonder why a program just runs slow on your machine and just fine on other machines?

This Programming contest actually encourages people to make programs that run just fine and even pass light code review to be correct but take a looooooonngg time to run on another platform. Go check it out for a few chuckles.

Graphical Relationship exploration

Just had a request by a friend to see if I remembered any software that would allow you to explore relations graphically and drag them around on the screen and see the relations dynamically.

After a bit of digging I remembered where I had seen it before.

It was the old pmbrowser for exploring category research citation chains, and related documents. After a bit more digging around I ran across what looks like the core functionality at http://www.touchgraph.com.

This is useful visualization tools that are provided and available. I'll have to check this TouchGraph out some more when I get a bit of free time again. Especially going to have to explore TouchGraph Google Browser

Ruby on Rails - interesting tutorial

BobCares.com Deploying Ruby on Rails

A Gentoo Walkthrough

kdissert - interesting mind mapping tool

Marcel's Linux App of the Month : kdissert

Thomas Nagy's kdissert is an application referred to as a mind mapping tool. Its purpose is to help you create complex documents such as a thesis, or a dissertation, or a presentation. And yes, perhaps even an article or a book. You do that by creating a map of your ideas, a mind map, that allows you to structure the ideas you already have into the basis for producing a high-quality, well-ordered document.

I think I'm going to have to go investigate this further....
kdissert home page

SD West 2006

Last Week March 13-17, 2006 I was at a Software Development Conference
http://www.sdexpo.com/ or SD West 2006 Blog



I Enjoyed the conference and expo!

More thoughts and ideas to come.