Scott Ferris

I think I need to get myself some userpics. Besides an actual picture of me, I'm not yet sure what I'd want to use for a userpic, but my posts look rather plain without them, at least by comparison to everyone else's posts. I figure tux the penguin will work well for computer geeking. Various people seem to have used some sort of caricature generator, or some program that adds text to photos (Joss Whedon's characters, comic book characters, etc). Anybody got a link to a useful userpic generator or other source for good userpics?

Since yesterday was optical sensor day, today can be acoustic sensor day. It's also a neat idea, though at the moment I think optical sensors are in the lead, since there are already optical systems that can track an arbitrary number of points, and it sounds like acoustic sensors haven't reached that point yet. Hopefully the acoustic sensors can catch up in that respect. It sounds like acoustic sensors could be used on a much wider range of materials than optical sensors. Ultimately, I don't really care whether it's optical or acoustic, as long as I can get a large multi-touch panel someday soon.

http://www.newscientisttech.com/ar…

http://www.taichi.cf.ac.uk/files/S…
http://www.taichi.cf.ac.uk/files/P…
http://www.taichi.cf.ac.uk/files/d…

"Tai-Chi uses tiny piezoelectric sensors to sense surface
vibrations. The sensors are connected to a desktop computer loaded
with software developed by the team and the system can track up to two
objects at once, in one of two ways.

One method involves measuring differences in the amount of time
vibrations take to arrive at two or three different sensors – a
similar approach to sonar. Using this method any surface can be made
touch sensitive simply by attaching the sensors.

The other method requires just one sensor and can actually be more
accurate – to within just a few millimetres. But this method requires
the calibration of the system beforehand, so that it recognises the
vibrations caused by contact at different points on the surface. It
then uses a database of vibration "fingerprints" to identify the point
of contact."

This should be the default user interface device for all computers. It's such an amazing improvement over keyboards and mice. Watch the video. If you're rich, fund the man's research, or better yet, throw money at this and build a commercial product. I want one. Very badly. I would pay a ridiculous amount of money to own one of these. I'm sure many other computer geeks would too.

http://ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalkspl…

Same video also on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLh…

http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/
http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirsense/

I talked my employer into buying a new video card for one of the old P4 systems I have for desktop machines, since you can get an nvidia GeForce 6200 for about $40-50 these days. It arrived yesterday, and today I got everything installed and configured. I can now have both the CRT and the LCD monitor attached to my linux box, leave my windows box headless, and only login to windows using rdesktop. rdesktop rocks.

synergy, which I used to use, also rocks, but rocks less. Synergy passes keyboard and mouse events over the network, so that you can use just one keyboard and mouse for multiple systems, each of which has it's own monitor attached. It's much faster than VNC or TightVNC, since no graphics need to be transferred, but it's not true dual-head either, since you can't move windows between monitors.

Since the only reason I do anything on Windows is because of the corporate mandate to use Outlook for calender/email and Groove for nothing particularly useful, using the Remote Desktop feature of windows to login from Linux is much more convenient. Remote Desktop transfers the actual high-level graphics operations, instead of various kinds of compressed bitmaps like VNC does, so it's actually fast enough to be usable.

If you're ever looking for gift ideas for me, and have more money that you know what to do with, a Tesla Roadster would in fact be looked upon quite favorably.

http://www.teslamotors.com/

The description of software development at Google was quite interesting. The rant against XP, less so.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/20…

I can see myself enjoying working at Google, assuming they'd be willing to hire me. :)

Insomnia sucks. In fact, it's been sucking since about 2am. Actually, it's been sucking since long before then, but I am most accutely aware of it sucking since about 2am. All of the previous times it has sucked seem less important than the fact that it's sucking right now, and has been since 2am.

I'm new to LJ, and haven't had time to explore the configuration options much. Does anyone have recommendations for configuration items to change? There was something about an S1 or S2 style system, though I don't know what the differences are.

So, I have to ask, is anyone actually interested in reading about my life? I'm mainly on LJ because so many of my friends are using it that I think I may be missing out on a lot of social communication by not being here. The prospect of writing about my life in a public archived forum triggers both my paranoia, and my tendency to assume that my life just isn't that interesting to other people. So, I'll put it to a vote. How many people actually want to know more about what's going on in my life? If nobody is going to read my journal entries, then I figure I can optimize out the step of actually writing them.