Steven's Weblog

Interesting: news bit about Alonovo.

This is one of the beauties of the web and the aggregation capabilities that more sites are starting to expose. You can create a specialized front end to someone else’s services, without having to build the whole world yourself, and everybody wins (Amazon gets the sales, Alonovo gets their cut, anyone who wants the service can use it, and anyone who doesn’t can just use Amazon directly).

It seems a bit odd, when I think about it, that I am praising the fact that middlemen can thrive on the web :-), given that I’m usually not a big fan of middlemen. I guess the middlemen I’m not a big fan of are the ones who insinuate themselves inextricably and/or don’t provide very visible value. That’s a dying breed in the webbed world anyway…

My oldest DVD-ROM drive now refuses to open the tray. I might be able to fix it, but I’ll probably just retire it and get a new one. Too bad I don’t have a DVD-burner-burner.

Since I’m taking a course in image analysis and computer vision, I’m becoming more aware of uses of these technologies in daily life. They’re all over. For example, I watched an episode of Modern Marvels (kickin’ show, BTW) about agricultural harvesting, and there were at least four processes in modern agriculture mentioned that make use of image analysis/computer vision (analyzing satellite maps of vegetation density, sorting fruits by ripeness, identifying fruits for robotic picking, and helping drive unmanned tractors).

So I suppose this course will have some nice applications for me; I’m bound to run into projects with an image processing component if I’m watching for them.

In thinking about software and quality as I was walking home just now, I thought of the phrase “solid oak software”. I figured I’d see if that was a somewhat original phrase, but a Google search turns up a little hornet’s nest of stuff related to a company by that name. Having little interest in the web filtering market, I probably wouldn’t have noticed this company otherwise. But now I’m pissed that my funny little phrase is all used up…

I like DSLs. Here’s a paper about one, “Experience with a Language for Writing Coherence Protocols”

It’s slightly amazing to me that coherence protocols are a rich and complex enough subject to merit developing a DSL. Reading the article points out why such is true, though.

Ever tried to play an exciting video game, one that would normally make you tense and boost your adrenaline, while trying to remain as calm as possible (and trying not to mash your controller/keyboard)? Wonder what effects one might be able to get by practicing that… Seems like it could be another way to go at meditation, as well as a way to get better at the game…

I only wish the corporations had made the effort to improve _my_ education like this. These darn young’ns don’t know how good they’ve got it.

THE ABOVE IS A SATIRICAL COMMENT. Just so you know.

OnTheCommons.org | Advertising Invades Textbooks

Interesting idea over at CleverCS: Software Development as a Spectator Sport. I know that as a developer, I like to learn about how other developers work, or the decisions that led them to their implementations, etc. Making those sort of things accessible to a wider audience has some merit.

Of course, there are ‘popular’ books on topics in hardware and software development, and they do sometimes do a good job of making the content interesting to non-geeks.

I have also pondered the idea of ‘real-time development’, some sort of system that can let software development occur in a more continuous fashion than the typical edit-compile-debug cycle. That sort of system would possibly make for some interesting spectating too…

(I think there are a few projects out there in the world trying to create a real-time development system, but I haven’t researched them too much…)

Hey, remember that TV show where you watched people compete in arcade video games? I very vaguely do… And that vague memory is vaguely related to this post.