Christie's is conducting another interesting auction a week later: The Year of the Rabbit: The Playboy Collection. This online auction catalog is NSFW.
Not long ago, paperback books often contained intrusive ads for products such as cigarettes.
For example, Ace Double #16640 contains a Kent ad between pages 96 and 97 of Jack Vance's The Dragon Masters. Oddly, the ad is upside-down. Perhaps it was intended to appear in The Five Gold Bands, the novel that begins on the reverse side of the Double.
These ads were intrusive because they were printed in color on stiffer, glossy stock that was bound into the middle of the book. It was hard to read nearby pages without having the book flip open to the ad.
Squeak looks like a simple paint program, but painted objects can have properties and behaviors. The Drive a Car tutorial shows the basics of Squeak. Squeak.org provides much more detail about how Squeak extends Smalltalk. Squeak is free and supported by a large user community.
ToonTalk presents a 2 1/2 dimension cartoon world with animated tools and characters that can learn activities. Very weird. ToonTalk 2 costs $25 and has promised version 3 for over a year.
When I entered "Spot" as my pet's name, the system told me that my answer had to have at least six characters. I asked my boss if the company would pay for a larger dog.
Long before Trac for Subversion, there was CVSTrac for CVS. It's a little more austere, but offers the same features: integrated wiki, CVS change tracker, CVS browser, and trouble tickets. CVSTrac now can be compiled to support Subversion.
FitNesse combines a Wiki with an acceptance testing tool. Tables on Wiki pages hold test data and expected outputs; click the "test" button and FitNesse runs your application with the test data and checks the results against the expected values (similar to JUnit and others). Although written in Java, FitNesse also can test Python, Ruby, C++,.NET, Smalltalk, and Perl applications. FitNesse builds on Fit, the Framework for Integrated Testing by Ward Cunningham, the creator of the original Wiki.
Ward also was the first person to integrate source code into a Wiki. In his WikiBase, Ward presents the source code for his original Wiki on Wiki pages containing HyperPerl, a Perl implementation of Literate Programming. This may not suit current development needs, but it is fascinating.
Retro-Gram provides the style and class of vintage telegrams with the speed and convenience of e-mail. Their free service will format your message as PDF in any of a half dozen vintage telegram formats and send it by email. For a fee, they will print your Retro-Gram and send it by snail mail.
That reliable classroom news source for third graders, Scholastic News Edition 3, reported in their April 18, 2005 edition (not archived on-line) that a Long Island (New York, USA) firm converted discarded turkey bones, feathers, and guts into fuel. A quick Google Search led to the Wikipedia description of thermal depolymerization, a process for rendering complex organic material, typically waste, into light crude oil. Turkey parts are more readily available than dead cats.
I nominate early word processors as the first killer apps--applications so compelling that the related hardware purchase was an afterthought.
Michael Shrayer released Electric Pencil (Google HTML cache of a defunct PDF file) in 1976. An architect friend and I saw Electric Pencil demonstrated on an Altair in a Washington, DC computer store in 1977; he was sold on the idea. A poster on the wall showed a man hugging a giant pencil. The slogan: I love my Electric Pencil.
MicroPro released WordStar for CP/M in 1978, a year before VisiCalc was available. Typists of that era will remember some Wordstar's many control key commands, particularly the e-s-d-x diamond (^e for up, ^s for left, ^d for right, and ^x for down). Preface those with ^q to move to the top, side, or bottom of the screen. WordStar was too large to fit into the 16 KB RAM available, so many commands loaded overlays from floppy disk. Fortunately, WordStar buffered keystrokes, so experienced users kept typing at full speed.
Electric Pencil and WordStar sold many computers and Centronics printers long before VisiCalc was born.
The development guide (1 MB PDF) explains the technology: The paper is printed with a pattern of 100 um dots on a 3 mm grid. Each dot is slightly offset either up, down, left, or right, thus encoding two bits. The pen detects a 6 x 6 grid of dots, representing a 72-bit number. By varying the displacement of the dots, a large pattern space is created.
According to the pattern license, "The theoretical size of the Anoto Pattern Space is 60,000,000 km2, which is about the size of Europe and Asia combined. This area is subdivided into regions, each enabling its unique functionality. From each region, or segment, you may obtain a Pattern License for one or several pages."
Want to try it? Among the development tools, you will find a demo kit for 399 Euros. You can print your own business form on the supplied preprinted Anoto paper. The demo application captures pen strokes and merges them with your form image. A log file captures the pen id, pattern license number, pen stroke coordinates, and start time for every pen stroke.
A few years ago, Radio Shack sold Tomy's DustBot for about $10 to $15. Although it was only five inches tall, it exhibited many of the Roomba's capabilities:
Two C cells powered its traction motor
It would turn quickly to the right to avoid obstacle it struck
It would turn quickly to the right to avoid dropping off a table edge
It swept a broom back and forth to loosen dirt
It had a small vacuum to suck up the loosened dirt
This prediction mirrors the plot of Allan W. Eckert's novel, The HAB Theory. In his amazon.com customer review, Samson Moy from Hong Kong nicely summarizes the HAB theory:
In a nutshell, the HAB Theory presented the fact that because of the eccentricity of the North and South Poles to the magnetic poles, it created an imbalance in the rotation of the earth. When this imbalance reached a stage where it overcame the gyroscopic effect of the earth's rotation, the earth would see a near 90 degree shift of its axis of rotation. The result of which would mean that the poles ended up in the equator and the result would be catastrophic to any life form. This phenomenon occured once every 3000 to 7000 years in the past. The last roll over occurred more than 7000 years ago.
When the poles shift in the novel, the best chance for survival is at the pivot points--locations halfway between the old and new poles.
Annoyance Filter is another "paulgrahamian" mail filter written by John Walker, founder of Autodesk, co-author of AutoCAD, and creator of the Hacker's Diet*.
Annoyance filter has many tuning and reporting options. It can plot a histogram of junk words. In addition to scanning the message header and body, Annoyance Filter can pull text out of Flash, PDF, and other attachments.
It includes a 180-page PDF manual, mostly the source code presented in literate programming style. The TEX typesetting is beautiful, so turn to page 17 to see Paul Graham's LISP function presented in readable mathematics notation.
* Walker's Hacker's Diet has been discussed on Slashdot here, here, and here.
The University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab offers two photo management programs designed for ease of use:
PhotoFinder allows individuals or groups to annotate, edit, and organize large collections of photos. You can layout thumbnails in the usual grid or plot them in two dimensions (e.g., number of people vs. photo quality). Drag a person's name from a list onto their photo to annotate.
PhotoMesa displays thumbnails of many directories of photos. You can zoom in on any thumbnail (or group) by mouse manipulation.
Slashdot Mirror
A tornado knocked down an Amazon warehouse wall on November 2, killing two contractors. There was no tornado warning from the weather service.
Two weeks later, the Washington Post reported on Amazon Prime delays in the region. Limited Prime Now service resumed about a week before Christmas.
And Regional Sports Network Fee
It's time to reread Statistician's Day by James Blish.
Such facilities are (were?) common in Paris and elsewhere: Wikipedia and Google Images
Une vespasienne est un urinoir public pour hommes ...
A vespasienne is a public urinal for men ...
The 2009 records by Inspiration were the first beat the 1906 record of 127 mph (204 km/hr) set by Fred Marriott driving a modified Stanley Steamer.
Put everything on Comcast, which will refuse the excess DDoS traffic unless someone pays.
The online auction catalog is beautiful.
Christie's is conducting another interesting auction a week later: The Year of the Rabbit: The Playboy Collection. This online auction catalog is NSFW.
Perhaps they are working on an entry for the 1k Javascript demo contest.
Not long ago, paperback books often contained intrusive ads for products such as cigarettes.
For example, Ace Double #16640 contains a Kent ad between pages 96 and 97 of Jack Vance's The Dragon Masters. Oddly, the ad is upside-down. Perhaps it was intended to appear in The Five Gold Bands, the novel that begins on the reverse side of the Double.
These ads were intrusive because they were printed in color on stiffer, glossy stock that was bound into the middle of the book. It was hard to read nearby pages without having the book flip open to the ad.
Sprint offers this Web 2.0 dashboard after a brief animation.
Squeak looks like a simple paint program, but painted objects can have properties and behaviors. The Drive a Car tutorial shows the basics of Squeak. Squeak.org provides much more detail about how Squeak extends Smalltalk. Squeak is free and supported by a large user community.
ToonTalk presents a 2 1/2 dimension cartoon world with animated tools and characters that can learn activities. Very weird. ToonTalk 2 costs $25 and has promised version 3 for over a year.
When I entered "Spot" as my pet's name, the system told me that my answer had to have at least six characters. I asked my boss if the company would pay for a larger dog.
Which "su" program from systinternals are you using? The closest functionality I could find was PsExec.
Long before Trac for Subversion, there was CVSTrac for CVS. It's a little more austere, but offers the same features: integrated wiki, CVS change tracker, CVS browser, and trouble tickets. CVSTrac now can be compiled to support Subversion.
FitNesse combines a Wiki with an acceptance testing tool. Tables on Wiki pages hold test data and expected outputs; click the "test" button and FitNesse runs your application with the test data and checks the results against the expected values (similar to JUnit and others). Although written in Java, FitNesse also can test Python, Ruby, C++, .NET, Smalltalk, and Perl applications. FitNesse builds on Fit, the Framework for Integrated Testing by Ward Cunningham, the creator of the original Wiki.
Ward also was the first person to integrate source code into a Wiki. In his WikiBase , Ward presents the source code for his original Wiki on Wiki pages containing HyperPerl, a Perl implementation of Literate Programming. This may not suit current development needs, but it is fascinating.
Retro-Gram provides the style and class of vintage telegrams with the speed and convenience of e-mail. Their free service will format your message as PDF in any of a half dozen vintage telegram formats and send it by email. For a fee, they will print your Retro-Gram and send it by snail mail.
That reliable classroom news source for third graders, Scholastic News Edition 3, reported in their April 18, 2005 edition (not archived on-line) that a Long Island (New York, USA) firm converted discarded turkey bones, feathers, and guts into fuel. A quick Google Search led to the Wikipedia description of thermal depolymerization, a process for rendering complex organic material, typically waste, into light crude oil. Turkey parts are more readily available than dead cats.
Michael Shrayer released Electric Pencil (Google HTML cache of a defunct PDF file) in 1976. An architect friend and I saw Electric Pencil demonstrated on an Altair in a Washington, DC computer store in 1977; he was sold on the idea. A poster on the wall showed a man hugging a giant pencil. The slogan: I love my Electric Pencil.
MicroPro released WordStar for CP/M in 1978, a year before VisiCalc was available. Typists of that era will remember some Wordstar's many control key commands, particularly the e-s-d-x diamond (^e for up, ^s for left, ^d for right, and ^x for down). Preface those with ^q to move to the top, side, or bottom of the screen. WordStar was too large to fit into the 16 KB RAM available, so many commands loaded overlays from floppy disk. Fortunately, WordStar buffered keystrokes, so experienced users kept typing at full speed.
Electric Pencil and WordStar sold many computers and Centronics printers long before VisiCalc was born.
Anoto functionality underlies the Logitech io Pen (and probably Leapfrog's Fly pen).
The development guide (1 MB PDF) explains the technology: The paper is printed with a pattern of 100 um dots on a 3 mm grid. Each dot is slightly offset either up, down, left, or right, thus encoding two bits. The pen detects a 6 x 6 grid of dots, representing a 72-bit number. By varying the displacement of the dots, a large pattern space is created.
According to the pattern license, "The theoretical size of the Anoto Pattern Space is 60,000,000 km2, which is about the size of Europe and Asia combined. This area is subdivided into regions, each enabling its unique functionality. From each region, or segment, you may obtain a Pattern License for one or several pages."
Want to try it? Among the development tools, you will find a demo kit for 399 Euros. You can print your own business form on the supplied preprinted Anoto paper. The demo application captures pen strokes and merges them with your form image. A log file captures the pen id, pattern license number, pen stroke coordinates, and start time for every pen stroke.
Like many Tomy toys, Dustbot achieved its goals with minimal, marvelous mechanical mechanisms. See photos at Lee's Robo Gallery and Gwen's Corndog Festival. Radio Shack still provides support information.
When the poles shift in the novel, the best chance for survival is at the pivot points--locations halfway between the old and new poles.
Annoyance filter has many tuning and reporting options. It can plot a histogram of junk words. In addition to scanning the message header and body, Annoyance Filter can pull text out of Flash, PDF, and other attachments.
It includes a 180-page PDF manual, mostly the source code presented in literate programming style. The TEX typesetting is beautiful, so turn to page 17 to see Paul Graham's LISP function presented in readable mathematics notation.
* Walker's Hacker's Diet has been discussed on Slashdot here, here, and here.
The bottommost blue button, Images, at the top of the patent's web page, links to page images of the figures and text of the patent.