abstractplain

Halfbakery: bio alarm clock, at the halfbakery. Not half-baked at all. An idea that occurs to most people who have a problem getting up in the morning. The idea is that your alarm clock monitors you to judge how dreadful your’re going to feel if you wake up at the present moment, and tries to pick a good moment. Perhaps it is monitoring if you are in REM sleep, for example.

Don’t know why such a device is not on the market yet, especially, as a comment on a similar idea points out, as someone already has a device for measuring rem sleep that is faily non instrusive, fits over your wrist and clips to two fingers!. Here’s google on that device, called Watch PAT 100.

Perhaps there’s still a pc on the other end of the line. If the alarm clock has to get a little smart, it may as well export the patterns for analysis.

metafilter: a visitor to rio takes a bunch of disposable cameras and hands them out to children in the favela of Rocinha to take pictures of their lives. (via metafilter)

example

The comments on metafilter are worth reading, as usual. They point out the Rwanda Project, and note that the latter had photos carefully selected and heavily edited.

Great idea! But like any such experiment you worry about the possible repercussions - a kid gets mugged or killed for the camera.

A little more on the rwanda project.

From surfing around and beyond the “IT Conversations” site with streaming and downloadable interviews come the following:

Book: Software Engineering for Internet Applications by Philip Greenspun.

Conversations: IT Paul Graham - Great Hackers [text]: “If you’re worried that your current job is rotting your brain, it probably is.”

“If the goal of security is to protect against yesterday’s attacks, we’re really good at it.” - Conversations: Bruce Schneier goes beyond cryptography and network security to challenge post-9/11 national security practices.

Plenty of others.

Flickr API

Project Gutenberg Catalog in RDF/XML Format (1 meg).

Glass Dog: What’s wrong with feed readers?

Introducing the Microcontent Client (2002) Popular Science Magazine

Pavel Hruby’s Visio Stencil for UML via martin fowler’s bliki.

see also Allen Holub’s UML Templates for Visio.

many other visio add-ons listed here.

CruiseControl vs AntHill Pro… and revisited.

Rails for Ruby: “Everything needed to build real-world applications in less lines of code than other frameworks spend setting up their XML configuration files.”

10 minute setup movie (22MB)

tutorial

New Scientist Lastword:

What causes the noise when you crack your knuckles or any other joint?

What’s the basis for the claim that the key or pitch of a piece can have a profound bearing on the mood conveyed?

Why tapping a shaken soft-drink can may prevent a soaking.

Wired: Designing Like They Give a Damn “The 5-year-old group hosts Web-based competitions in which architects and designers submit plan proposals for sites around the world affected by war, disease or natural disaster — an attempt to harness the Net’s networking power to tackle humanitarian crises.” The current one, a health care facility and football pitch for AIDS-affected Somkhele, South Africa. (Construction cost not to exceed 5000 USD. Competition entry fee 20USD (waived for developing countries)).

Could apply the same competition idea to get pretty designs for websites for organisations that don’t have the cash, though the design process for usable, tailored sites would be much more involved.

An IMDB article. “In January 1996, Needham launched IMDB.com as a commercial Web site. He put his first Web server on a credit card. Within a couple of weeks, he sold the first advertising campaign. (“We’d never sold any ads before. And the people who we sold to had never bought any ads before.â€?) He was able to pay off the credit card before the bill was even due and use other ad’s money to buy even more servers.”

California’s SUV Ban - The Golden State has outlawed big SUVs on many of its roads but doesn’t seem to know it. By Andy Bowers.

However, some comments on monkeyfilter.com point out that the author has confused vehicle weight with GVWR - “GVWR is the maximum load for which the manufacturer certifies its vehicle”, and not the normal weight of the vehicle.

Still a fun article, and some SUVs are normally heavier than 3000Lbs, any how.

“[…] some proponents of heavy SUVs will argue that these weight limits are outdated or that they should apply only to registered commercial vehicles. Nonsense.
Six-thousand pounds does the same damage to roads (not to mention pedestrians) that it did before the SUV craze.
[…] And frankly, a lot of these heavy SUVs are commercial vehicles by any fair definition. Remember that those owners who take the federal and state tax breaks are declaring they use their vehicles mostly or entirely for work.”

We the Media - Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People. Full text now online, from O’Reilly.