July 30, 2005
Egg Time
This is a great idea, however, that is all that it is. It is called the egg and is a physical extension to a collaboration project that uses a community calendar. The egg glows and as it gets closer to an appointment the light slowly diminishes. If you turn the egg upside down it resets the glow and notifies other meeting attendees that you are going to be late. This is a great idea if you have lots of meetings with fellow researchers, in my case, who are notorious for being late to meetings. If they are going to be late then you automatically know this and therefore you can spend a little more time working rather than sitting around waiting for your colleague. The only problem that I can see is that this may breed a bad habit of always being late to meetings, which will become very annoying for all around you; therefore, this should be coupled with a penalty system of some kind.
Links
Jennifer Bove's Egg
Video Display for your Glasses/Sunnies
I love these little screens that mount on glasses. I have seen a few over the last 4 years and none of them have really looked like they could actually work. This one looks like it will be coming to the commercial market soon and it small enough to not be cumbersome, however still looks a little on the heavy side. As I am one of those typical geeks that wears glasses I would love to be able to augment my current glasses with video capabilities. What I am really interested is a display that is less obtrusive but still can display a reasonable high resolution in colour. If possible I would also be interested to have the ability to turn it on and off or even an intermediary mode that allows me to see through it so that I can see the real world at the same time as the screen itself. I do not ask for much :) Maybe another few more years as the technology is getting smaller, which means it is lighter and pack more and more in. This product is aimed at the the Japanese commuter market that have powerful mobile phones that can store and play small Mpeg4 video files or display SMS messages without dragging out their mobile phones.
Links
Teleglass by Scalar
Furgles CD Holder
These guys have to be the cutest CD cases I have seen for a while.
Links
Furgles CD Cases
July 24, 2005
Rich Internet Applications: OpenLaszlo
It looks like IBM is getting involved with OpenLaszlo to compete with Macromedia in the Rich Internet Application environment. If you have been reading this blog for a while you would know that I am a big proponent for this enhanced method of delivering applications to users rather than the traditional HTML sites that do not provide much client interaction expected in standard desktop applications. Unlike Macromedia's offering of Flex OpenLaszlo seems to be an open source and freely available platform; however, you will require a J2EE platform to run the server's Java Servlet.
If you are interested in the new way of delivering applications to users then have a closer look at OpenLaszlo.
Links
Article about IBM and Laszlo Connection
Macromedia Flex
OpenLaszlo.org
XMLTV for Adelaide, Australia
I have been using a program called TVxb to download TV Guides and create XMLTV compatible XML files for use in a number of other programs. Until recently this has been working although my source provider changed so I have to recreate the settings file. This new file can be found here and works for all free to air TV channels for Adelaide, Australia.
Links
TVxb.ini - TVxb INI file for Adelaide, Australia
TVxb Home Page
July 16, 2005
Video Keyboard
Ok this has to be one of the coolest keyboards (and also very expensive) as it sports multiple OLED colour displays. Where do you ask? Well in the keys silly. Every key on this keyboard has a small full colour OLED screen allowing each of the buttons to display an image. This allows for different applications to actually display a small image on the button. Click on the link below and have a look for yourself. Unfortunately only prototype design.
Links
Optimus Keyboard
July 12, 2005
No more Java Apple Applications!
It looks like Apple is dropping the Java-Cocoa bridge that allows developers to use Java to develop OSX applications. I personally am not surprised at this as it is a large effort for Apple to maintain both Java and Cocoa APIs. This is effort better directed to other cool applications and hardware.
Links
Cocoa-Java Integration Guide (with note about ongoing support)
July 10, 2005
Server Consolidation
At work we have just started using VMWare to consolidate the number of servers that we are running as much of the software can not run in the same operating system but does not utilise the full amount of resources provided by the server. By running Virtual Machines with our software also allows us to easily run multiple versions of the software and easily roll back to older versions when a research direction proves not to be fruitfull. While reading around on Slashdot there was an article about Xen, which is an open source virtualisation software. Currently Xen requires the guest operating systems to be compiled specially for Xen and therefore only select Linux distributions work. However, support has recently been announced by AMD and Intel to support Xen at the hardware level to enable any operating system to take full advantage of the Xen platform. Maybe in the future I will be able to use Xen rather than VMWare, it will be very interesting to compare the performance and features.
Links
Xen Source Wiki
Xen Source
Slashdot
July 06, 2005
Aerial Photos.... on a carpet
Ok this is really cool, an Artist has decided to create a carpet with Aerial photos as the pattern for a Sacramento Airport. Probably not the best place to have it as I know I would be walking slower than normal looking at the floor, which would slow pedestrian traffic flow and create the hazard of walking into things. This is still sooo cool.
Links
Artist prints “flying carpet” for airport
Mac Sudoku
A few of my friends absolutely love trying to work out the sudoku puzzles. If you are unfamiliar with this puzzle it is essentially a grid with 3x3 squares and each of these squares contains another grid of 3x3 squares. in each of the small squares is a number and the puzzle starts with only a few of these completed. The idea is to fill in every square with a number with the following constraints:
- A row or column must contain on one instance of each number from 1 to 9.
- Each of the large 9 squares must have one instance of each number from 1 to 9.
Well now you can play these games on your mac with MacSudoku. I personally can not see the fascination in the game but I know lots of people love it, some are even creating their own programs to solve them automatically.
Links
MacSudoku Home Page
July 03, 2005
NicePlayer: Good, small, free OSX Video Player
Like always I was trawling through some of the my favourite download sites to see what cool programs developers have been busy created when I came across NicePlayer. With the recent release of Quicktime Player 7.0.1 that no longer accepts my previous Quicktime Pro serial number I now can no longer play Quicktime movies in full screen. With NicePlayer, which is free, you can once again play movies in full screen. This player also has a number of other great features like smooth fading screen controls the ability to support all Quicktime Codecs installed in your system, playlists and borderless display. Go on give it a go, you will love it.
Links
NicePlayer Homepage
July 02, 2005
Experimental Flash Animations
If you think that Flash can not do anything interesting or that is can only be used for the millions of animations out there well you should have a look at this site. This guy has used the embedded programming language in Flash called Action Script to create some amazing examples of what can be done. Includes real time warping of images, bezier curves that react to the mouse and much more.
Links
Lifaros Experimental Flash Gallery
