Yet Another Blog

Had a concerned email from a reader today:

"Dear Sven, Why are all your excellent new articles coming up with no
title. You rock. – Simon"

Ok – he may not have written that, but the sentiment was the same. 🙂

Well – the Blogger API (which is what this thing runs on) doesn’t normally
support the Title field. So I’ve now had to create a hack that adds the
<title> tag at the top with the subject line.

… and the reason it’s only just started happening is because I’ve
switched to a home-grown email->weblog client too. Much better!

– Sven

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994932

Robotic traffic cones swarm onto highways

“Herds of robotic traffic cones could soon be swarming onto a highway,
closing down lanes and slowing the traffic.”

Genius! Somebody put their thinking cap on for this. Of course, they’ll
all be pinched by drunken student who’ll then go home and race them 🙂

A few links I must check out at some point:

http://llt.msu.edu/vol8num1/emerging/default.html
…talks about Dom and DAV (sounds like a crusty 80s radio DJ pair)

http://www.criticalmethods.org/collab/v.mv?d=1_34
…quite a bit on Wikis

– Sven

http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/floats.htm

What a great game. You draw shapes to capture bubbles of the same colour,
which combines any bubbles within that shape. The aim is to combine all
bubbles of the same colour. Lovely and addictive, and very nice
entertainment on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

From http://www.1do3.com/weblog/

– Sven

http://humane.sourceforge.net/the/

Jef Raskin, creator of the Apple Macintosh project, is working on a
project called The Humane Environment (THE).

I’m curious to know whether his approach really is any good. I’m
disappointed there isn’t more of an example of what Jef is trying to
achieve, but he gives a download link – for OS 9/X only.

I found this link through another reference to Raskin, where he apparantly
suggests in his book ‘The Humane Interface’ that having three standard
English words for passwords is as secure as having one cryptic 10-digit
PIN – interesting in itself.

– Sven

http://www.oqo.com/hardware/video/

Video is a bit tedious & long, but gives a good impression of this little
laptop.

Quite a quirky little thing. I like the idea of the device + docking
stations, but the on-board keyboard and mouse look a bit disappointing.

Will be interesting to see how the batteries will perform, and how much
this is priced at.

– Sven

Accepted papers were put online today – my name wasn’t on the list. Still keen to go though – and I now have the paper submitting bug.

Turns out my post in January about Google sporting a new look was based on reality after all. My spotter Nick wasn’t just tripping 🙂

If you check out Google.com today, it looks slightly different!

Also, have a look at Google labs. They have two brand new features there that look like they have huge potential. I’m particularly interested in the personalised search tool.

Never mind the longer days, the daisies in the park, the slightly warmer weather, the impending doom of British Summer Time, or anything like that. I just heard the first ice cream van drive by. It’s officially Summer.

Simon has a damning review of OnMatrix. Unfortunately it looks like he isn’t able to get $204 refunded, under their 30-day money back guarantee. The lack of customer support, particularly with hosting companies, is sometimes quite dire. This is usually the consequence of cheap hosting prices though, but surely they can’t be doing their company image any good?