My ASUS eee pad Transformer Prime finally arrived, and wow, am I ever disappointed. Not in the hardware mind you, the device itself is absolutely gorgeous. My disappointment is in Android. Prior to the TFP, the only Android device I’ve owned is my Kindle Fire. Granted, I’ve played with plenty of my friend’s Android devices, …
Read More »ASUS eee pad Transformer Prime 0
Seeing as I seem to perpetually be evolving my gear, I figured I’d give this tablet a go as my primary machine for a while. Unfortunately, they’re so hard to come by that only my keyboard dock has managed to arrive so far, but once the tablet itself actually shows up and I’ve had a …
Read More »Siri as a service 0
An earlier post commenting on the iPhone 4S and Siri mentioned the fact that most of the heavy lifting of the Siri feature is done on the server side. Well, as a result of that fact, things like this are possible It’s a nice job of turning Siri into a service. I grabbed the code …
Read More »Fire it up, Kindle that is… 0
My Kindle Fire arrived yesterday afternoon, and so far, it’s exactly what I was hoping for. Why did I sell my iPad 2 ? I sold my iPad 2 because: it was too big, the screen resolution is crappy, and I didn’t and wouldn’t use it to create content of any kind, ever. After trying …
Read More »iPhone 4S, and promising future for Siri 0
My iPhone4 went through quite the sequence of unfortunate events prompting an upgrade to a 4S, which I wasn’t originally planning on doing… My Apple devices have rarely had any concerns of loss or damage at my hands, until the ip4 that is. The original 4 went with me to, and helped me navigate Moscow …
Read More »Notational Velocity… kicks ass! 0
I’ve been using my own auto-hide drawer note thingies for years, and while they never evolved to what I’d envisioned, I never came across something that worked better for me. Until now. I recently came across Notational Velocity, and ever since it has displaced my own jpeekaboo app Syncs via DropBox, keyboard driven, brilliant! I …
Read More »software creativity vs. escaping poverty = similar psychologies ? 0
I read this article today, and saw similarities between the psychology described with that of the creative aspects in software development. Specifically, that in relation to common practices at a wide range of companies that enforce specific technologies and structure architectural review around the “how” instead of the “what, and why it’s important”, these practices …
Read More »bit.ly and 1.usa.gov, thanks bit.ly! 0
Wow. Just… Wow. Very rarely do companies surprise me in good ways anymore, but bit.ly surprised me in an amazing and positive way this week that I felt compelled to share. I recently read that bit.ly had started shortening .gov domains to 1.usa.gov/foo, and I just happened to be in the middle of attempting to …
Read More »Joli OS/Cloud => buh bye family sys admin duties 0
If you’re tired of administering a family members Windows PC, or just happen to have an old computer lying around that you’d like to do something with, JoliOS is definitely worth checking out JoliCloud In terms of building a low-maintenance-required computer for anyone, including kids or the elderly, Joli OS works a treat. As you …
Read More »JavaScript RIA frameworks. Building a GUI for the web… 0
Last fall for the annual AGU (American Geophysical Union) conference, myself and my NOAA and Russian Academy of Science (RAS) colleagues put together a web UI to show what was possible using some of our data and web services. The culmination of that effort was the Auroral Resources Toolkit (ART) The RAS folks focused on …
Read More »CubeSat nano-satellite embedded software fun 0
It’s been a while since my last post… The reason for the absence is that I’m nearing completion of my Computer Science Master’s degree, and have been buried by work between my full time job and a project I’m working on for my degree. This project is in collaboration with a number of other students …
Read More »limera1n + Cydia, get more from your iOS device. 0
It’s been quite some time since I mentioned or discussed iOS related jailbreaking. The relatively recent release of limera1n and availability of some truly useful applications on Cydia compelled me to say a few words. Cydia, for those who don’t know, is essentially an unofficial App store that you get access to by jailbreaking your …
Read More »Magic Trackpad ? Indeed… 0
One of my earlier posts was about modifying an MBP trackpad for use on the desktop, and despite going to all the trouble of creating a DIY trackpad from an MBP case top, I have to say I’m very pleased with Apple’s recent Magic Trackpad. Everything about the device is perfect for me. I’m using …
Read More »iPhone 4 antenna histeria 0
I’ll start by saying that I got my iP4 on 6/23, a day early. I’ve been using it exclusively since, and have terrible reception at home (nothing new for me). Even with the latest 4.0.1 I drop lots of calls, and have periods during almost every call where the call fades in and out but …
Read More »Gov 2.0 Expo/Conference 0
I attended the gov 2.0 expo last week, and thought that it was a great conference. There was a wide variety of keynote speakers, including Tim O’reilly, Tim Berners-Lee, Gary Vaynerchuck, and Linda Curetan. In addition to hearing from so many influential people, I was there to cherry pick the cloud and web service conferences …
Read More »“Perfect Software” 0
I just finished “Perfect Software” by Gerald Weinberg, the author of “The Psychology of Computer Programming”. It was a very short, but good read. It focuses mainly on software testing, and has a number of interesting perspectives on this all too often under represented area of the software industry. It’s a valuable book not only …
Read More »Death March ? Indeed… 0
I recently finished Edward Yourdon’s “Death March”, and felt like commenting on a few of the things that stuck with me. First, he supposes that most, if not all, software projects are death march projects to varying degrees. I absolutely agree, from the point of view that we still lack comprehensive enough means and processes …
Read More »and so the un-freeing of former Sun products begins… 0
OpenSolaris powers my home brew NAS, because ZFS, DTrace, and a number of other key items it provides simply rock, and allow me to do things more quickly and easily (with less grief) than alternatives I’m willing to consider. Yesterday, I saw Ben Rockwood’s blog post regarding a license change to Solaris proper, and it …
Read More »The Tablet Device Rush 0
There has been a deluge of tablet devices recently, so much so that the iPad feels ever more late to the game by the day. Lesser known brands such as Archos have 5″, 7″ and even 9″ parts these days, while the major manufacturers are just jumping into the game (HP Slate?). Microsoft has it’s …
Read More »If you build it (web services), will they come ? 0
A recurring thought came to me again last August while attending a conference called CSIG (Cyber-infrastructure Summer Institute for Geo-scientists), that there seems to be a rush to use new technologies whenever possible, commonly without considering why or how they’ll be used. I’ve experienced this first hand not only in technology companies, but research centric …
Read More »Waltzing with Bears, review and opinion 0
I finally finished Waltzing with Bears this week, after nursing it for a few months. It’s a book about “managing risks on software projects” from the authors of Peopleware. Peopleware is one of my all time favorites, so I had high hopes going in. As you may have gathered from my previous comment, that it …
Read More »WorldWideTelescope 0
TFP (last post) is already introducing me to new things… I came across Microsoft’s WorldWideTelescope project in the book, and decided to check it out. It runs painfully slowly (even on my 2.93GHz C2D MBP), but I can still use it, and determined that it’s extremely cool. That said, I should point out that being …
Read More »It’s the data stupid (“The Fourth Paradigm”) 0
I stumbled across this New York Times article in my RSS feeds this AM regarding a Microsoft research endeavor/book titled “The Fourth Paradigm”. I’ve skimmed TFP so far, and have highlighted a few sections I want to read in depth, and it looks quite good. Essentially, it explores today’s data volumes in the science realm …
Read More »DIY desktop glass multitouch/touchpad from a unibody Macbook 0
~6 months or so ago, I purchased a top case from a parted out 13″ unibody Macbook from eBay, with the intent to strip off the touchpad and make a DIY desktop touchpad USB device out of it. Similar things have been done before, albeit not for these glass touchpads. I thought it would be …
Read More »Google LiquidGalaxy, would be even better with multitouch :) 0
I came across this rather awesome Google project in my RSS feeds today, LiquidGalaxy Essentially, it’s 8 large screens integrated as a single Google Earth UI, complete with a gazebo for the user to stand in. After reading this, I had a thought. This would be even better if the screens incorporated multitouch!, perhaps using …
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