Touch driven computer interfaces

Someone sent me a link to this YouTube video of a touch driven computer interface.



This is seriously the coolest interface ever. I love the 3d aspects of it, and the lack of any interface devices except the display screen. An interface like this is so much more intuitive than using a standard keyboard and mouse.

Just started using LastFM. Yes, I know it's been around for a while, but sometimes I'm a little slow on getting started with these things.
Basically it's a big music statistics gathering site. It gathers data on every song you play, and allows you to categorize and tag each song. It then can build a tailored Internet radio station specifically geared towards your tastes. It will also recommend other similar artists and bands that you may not have heard of. You can post reviews, recommendations and any other info you want about the songs you listen to. All of the info you put into the system, is available to others using the system. So if I see that another user listens to a lot of the same music I listen to, I can browse his info to find new music. I can also read his reviews on new songs and see what he thinks of them. All in all, a pretty useful system. You can also specifically recommend things to other people. It has a lot of the usual social networking things that it seems every site has nowadays, but even if you don't participate in the social networking aspects, it can be pretty useful.

Pictures of Soviet Bus stops

Soviet Russia was a very strange place. Some of the things the government did were odd and really tacky. One of those things were the bus stops. From big birds, to miniature pagodas. The bus stops are just plain weird.

Polar Inertia has a bunch of pictures of some of the more bizarre ones. Check it out: Soviet Roadside Bus Stops

Coding Memory (I hate mine)

Yesterday I started working on an old project that was put on hold about four months ago. At the time I worked on it, it was a big rush that had to be done "yesterday" So I pumped out a lot of code and worked a lot of overtime hours getting that code written. This went on for about two weeks. Then suddenly, the project that was such a rush got put on hold. I haven't touched it since then, and neither has anyone else.
So Monday, another programmer and I were assigned to finish it off and deliver it to a pilot location. Again, it's a huge rush. My problem is that I can't remember much about what I did and didn't do back when I originally worked on it. The other programmer and my manager keep coming up to me asking questions about certain modules that I wrote, and I have no idea what the answer is. It's not that I didn't document, because I did. I just never finalized the documentation or cleaned up the code. The original two weeks of coding sessions were so rushed, and the decision to put it on hold at the end of those weeks, never gave me a chance to do the finalization I should have.

So far, I've been surprised to discover that some of the modules I wrote have features and capabilities that I don't remember writing. Furthermore, those features don't seem to be in the original design documents. Other modules work differently or have more parameters than the design document specifies. So all I can surmise is that those features and changes were requirements added onto the project after the design document was written, and that the document was never updated to reflect them. I don't remember adding them or why they were needed. Neither does anyone else who was attached to the project at that time.
I think the basic lesson here, is that I really should try to document more during the project development rather than leaving the bulk of the documenting for the finalization phase. I should also be more careful to update existing documentation as soon as the requirements or the code changes. Right now I've got a lot of documentation and code comments that are inaccurate or incomplete and do not reflect what the code actually does. LOL

A day without Coffee

Well today started off pretty good. I got up on time, brewed my first cup of coffee and enjoyed it all the way to work. Once I got to work things seemed to be going well. Everyone was back from vacation this week so things could get back to normal. I was even pleased to see that no urgent emails had come in over the weekend.
Then just when things were looking up, I received the bad news. My coworker, Darrell, came into my office and informed me that he couldn't get the office coffee maker to work. I left my desk and went with him to the break room to investigate the coffee maker. Both of us being programmers and smarter, at least I think we are, than the coffee maker we should be able to find out what is wrong with it. After all, it is a pretty simple device. Well, we both looked at it for a few minutes. Turned it over. Checked the plug. Flipped the switch back and forth a few times. Finally came to the conclusion that it was broke.
At that point, the day went downhill. I only had a few sips of coffee left in the mug I brought from home. I had been planning to refill it from the office pot. Now I was reduced to drinking tea or soda for the rest of the day. Don't get me wrong, I like tea and soda. I just wanted, no needed coffee. I considered making an emergency trip to Walmart to purchase a new coffee maker, but decided against it because I really had way too much work to do.
At our weekly status meeting the entire company discussed the lack of a coffee maker and what we should do about this. It was finally decided that the operations director should purchase a new one. So my hope for tomorrow is that there will be a new coffee maker when I come in.

Tuesday I purchased the new Mvix MX-760HD media player from ThinkGeek. It's supposed to arrive today. So I'm really looking forward to it.
The device plays just about every media format you can think of. And it connects easily to any standard media playback device. It sounds really great. I'll finally have a way to play all of my video and music files on my TV and stereo. You can get a detailed description of the device at the official website: Mvix USA
You can also find a user review of the device at the following blog: skippy.net

The number seven

Came across this article "Seventy-seven things you need to know about 07" Some very interesting facts about the number seven.

I liked #11.

The seventh son of a seventh son has magic powers, according to Irish folklore, but is a vampire in Romanian legend.

Kind of ironic. Most of the facts in the news article can also be found in the Wikipedia article about the number seven.

Incan rope writing

Wired has an interesting story about a researcher who is trying to decode the Incan writing system. It seems that the Incas didn't invent a written language. Rather they kept records using knots and rope. These records were called Khipu. Unfortunately, with the Spanish conquest of the Incan empire, the knowledge of how to read these records was lost. In 1923 an anthropologist named Leland Lock discovered a way to read numbers that were stored in the rope strings, but so far no one has been able to read words. Now there is a new research project, the Khipu Database Project, that is attempting to identify and read the records from the remaining Khipu that are in museums.

Here is the Wired story. Wired 15.01: Untangling the Mystery of the Inca
The official Khipu database project homepage KDBHome