Less Pain More Gain
My back pain is straightening out a bit with the assistance of drugs, which I hate to take for any reason. And so my thoughts are coming faster and clearer for whatever that's worth.
Be All End All Demo Platform
Oracle has an entire suite of demonstrable programs available to registered partners via web. So there's one dream of mine checked off. If you've ever been in the business of registering laptops and ghosting drives en-masse at sales conferences, you know how valuable an online demo library can be. Navigating through and mastering that collection is the task of the month. Lots to do.
But Is It MIDI?
Somewhere there is a cool SDK for taking a song and rendering it into four instruments for Rockband and also one for Guitar Hero. I have to believe that the one for Rockband is more well thought-out as I compare the two considering the fingering of the basslines for Steely Dan tunes. But I have a feeling that the Guitar Hero guys are more serious about drums.
Big Data Gets Visualzed By..Who?
It turns out that there is a connection between Obama's CTO and the fine folks over at Tableau Software. Who knows how tight it is, but the race to front-end data.gov is on. At least it's on in my head. Winner take all.
From CTU to Swordfish
This week I am initiating a discipline as a part time hobby of translating slick interfaces that only work for the production guys on the TV and movie high tech scenes I am so fond of into some sort of matrix for UI selection / controls. Most are pretty goofy but I've seen some that look useful. I'm thinking of this in the context of multitouch gestures and tabletop computing.
Mesh & Cloud Seeding
There's a new gadget called a Pogoplug that raises the idea of mesh computing once again, which is to say privately owned and maintained clouds. I haven't really thought about this much since Hamachi debuted. MobileMe has been somewhat useful to share somewhat large files. Dropbox has the ability too, but all that needs to be shuffled out to the cloud, and that is something of a large hurdle. Let's call it cloud seeding.
In my own project to get all of my media available to me it has taken quite some time to get my clouds seeded. FIOS is not slow but there's a big bottleneck in uploading the hundreds of GBs I want to send. I've been reading some of the sites and whitepapers on big data cloud based analytic engines and apps, so I see that some heads have recognized that as well and many customers of those services have resorted to burning DVDs and physically shipping them rather than getting a box onsite and uplinking.
So on the small end, meshing may be all about pogoplugging up a virtual SAN on your own hardware - the point of meshing being allowing shared remote access to web artifacts on the go. I meet you in the supermarket and share my discount price database with you, or I see you as an old friend and share not from Flickr but my own library, a set of video and stills. I think of a mesh as disintermediating yahoo, google applications et al.
IRL Hacking
I have begun geocaching with the kids in earnest. It's not so easy and quite an interesting challenge. Having gotten my first submission audited, I have a feeling these guys are more than a little serious. This is the social low end of everything that ends up geospatial, and the very beginning of what Gibson was describing in Spook Country. You know the old joke about asking a fat person for directions, '..you head towards the donut shop then make a left at McDonald's and it's three blocks past Baskin Robbins...'. Social GPS mapping of cities can be that sort of art. Urban birding.
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