The recent controversy over Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice app reminds me again that mobile is one of the key areas of development and therefore conflict between the major IT players.
It seems pretty clear that 90% of what people want to do with computers they would like to have on the go – email and internet are prime uses, gaming is another.
I have another post to write about the importance of migration of data and computation to the cloud, but briefly I’ll say that you can do almost everything you need to with your data and major compute power living in the cloud accessed through a relatively thin connection.
Network access is a key piece of both the mobile and cloud computing puzzles, which makes the phone companies key.
This game INSANELY TWISTED SHADOW PLANET looks incredible and the soundtrack really speeds the video along. exp(WANT,exp(NEED,exp(10,23))).
I am sitting on the train, reading my email on my iPhone, reading (nay, BUYING) a book or a paper on my Kindle, and it hits me again, harder, that I need my computer less and less, it’s essential functions decomposed and distributed into a handful of simpler objects – smaller, cheaper, specialized for a task.
I just came across the Tinkerlog store, which is selling a programmable LED. I love the minimal design – no PCB, just a few components soldered together freeform – and the photo on the shop site is beautiful too.
I read in Wikipedia the other day that LEDs can also be used as light sensors, so perhaps further design simplification is possible.
Safari 4 good:
they moved the tabs off of the window title bar
bad:
I still can’t change default search engine.
The latter is really annoying me. Since I am working in Microsoft Live Search, my opinion is not completely unbiased, but I would really like to be able to change my default search engine from google.com to bing.com. Every other search engine allows this, so why not Safari? To compound matters, Safari does not have a very widely used plugin system, and I have not found an authoritative plugin which allows me to change my search engine.
I bought this SparkFun 8×8 two color LED matrix a while ago, and am now getting to connecting it up. The pins are not labeled and it took some digging and experimentation to find out which pin did what. I have uploaded a PDF document with my findings here:
pins-led-matrix-dual-color-medium
Today, I interfaced an Arduino to a stepper motor – the hardest bit in the end was figuring out which pins of the Unipolar stepper motor do what. The motor, available as Jameco 171601, has six wires – yellow, red, orange, black, green, brown – which come out in a connector. The most useful reference I found was Tom Igoe’s Stepper Motor Control page. In the color sequence above, the wires are those numbered 1, 5, 2, 3, 6, 4 in Igoe’s diagram.
As a demonstration I wanted to turn it into a little weather toy, but it has been very difficult finding machine-readable real-time weather data on the web. The NOAA site is chaos. Eventually, I settled on this:
NOAA CA weather data.
It was easy to grep and sed the data I wanted out of its text and tables. God forbid that whoever produces this should take a more literary turn – then I would need NLP! 
Question: why are email, facebook, Twitter, chat, RSS, newspapers all separated?
I want to be able to do the same thing for all of them – which was more or less nailed by email a decade ago:
real-time update (push)
mark as read
thread
filter
spam detection
contact management
search
So why not pull all of these into an email client?
I was thinking about this this afternoon, and when I saw a Techcrunch article about Xonbi Facebook integration I had to blog.
I am sad that JG Ballard died today. I have been very influenced by his writing, and particularly loved Vermilion Sands. I was so enchanted by the book that, when I found that it was out of print, I ordered 5 copies from Amazon. 2 years later, the book was in print again and my copies arrived. Every now and again I would give a copy to a friend. Now I am back down to one copy.
Farewell, JG Ballard, you will be missed by many.
I just watched the first half of the last BSG episode, and I was disappointed.
This is a pretty weak episode, oversentimental and lacking drive.
The fact that the writers had to invent a new plot element a couple of episodes ago (The Colony) symptomizes their inability to provide interesting solutions to the many riddles we have seen in our brilliant Battlestar Galactica journey.
And so we find ourselves standing at the gateway to the end of last season with too many puzzles to solve and a number of interesting characters missing.
